An Interview with Dorene O’Brien

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Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based writer and teacher whose stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the Wind Fiction Prize. Baobab Press is honored to publish her latest short story collection this February, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, which considers the infinitely powerful, and equally naïve and damning force that is human hope. We recently asked Dorene to share a behind-the-scenes look at her writing process, inspiration, and creative horizons.

Baobab Press: Many of the characters in this collection grapple with depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. But despite their darkness, these stories are deeply funny. How do you tend to think about the ways that humor and darkness work together in your fiction?

Dorene O’Brien: I think my stories reflect life in all of its darkness and absurdity. My grandmother used to say that when offered a shit sandwich you either laugh or cry, and she chose to laugh. My characters are offered lots of shit sandwiches but, like we all do, they often use humor to cope with the latest event that threatens to break them. I don’t set out to write humorous stories (except for “Eight Blind Dates Later,” which I knew would be a comedy as whenever your mother sets you up on eight blind dates you must laugh through the tears). But bleakness and gravity should be balanced with humor not only to keep readers tuned in to a tough message but to keep them entertained.

BP: What draws you to the short-story form? What do you think it can accomplish that the novel perhaps can’t?

DO: When I was a younger and more impatient writer the short story was something I could “finish” and feel that sense of accomplishment before moving on to the next one to feel it once more. Now I am interested in the form as a challenge in brevity, which demands authors create entire worlds and character histories in a very small space. We must use just the right words while also withholding just the right information so that readers are seduced into colluding with us to make meaning. If the “white space” is as charged with clues as the words printed on the page, the story will emerge in a way that is more gratifying to readers, who have used their insights and perceptions to help craft the tale. There is simply no room in stories for devices used frequently in novels, such as lengthy digressions, false leads, casts of thousands.

BP: Who are some of your most important literary influences?

DO: The first “great novel” I read was Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and it broke open my mind. I was stunned by Twain’s ability to juggle so many literary balls simultaneously: weaving a rich, authentic setting that encapsulated the tumultuous racial history of the country, drawing captivating, sympathetic characters through dialect and arresting backstories, and delivering a confrontational message about a subject that tore the country apart using humor. Twain taught me that fiction more effectively influences people than most other forms. Winning the Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction many years later remains one of my most gratifying achievements. Joyce Carol Oates was an early influence because she is fearless in her style, content and delivery. That is, nothing is taboo; if it happens in life, it can happen in fiction, which is of course a reflection of reality. Andrea Barrett, who was trained as a scientist, was also an early influence who showed me that getting your geek on in fiction is acceptable. I would not likely have written “The Turn of the Wind,” a story seated in crystallography, had I not read her Ship Fever story collection.

BP: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Was there a point in your life when you decided to take your craft seriously?

DO: I started writing—and reading—when I was very young as an escapist activity. My childhood was not an easy one (ask any writer and they will more often than not have grown up in difficult circumstances), so reading about worlds that were like mine made me feel less alone and reading about worlds that were much better gave me hope for something more. But creating my own plots and settings allowed me a form of control I never felt at home, and this was a salvation of sorts. Over the years I collected many notebooks with stories and poems, but this was more therapy than writing. I knew I wanted to be a writer but was afraid to chase that dream as it was the only one I had and if I failed what else was there? In fact, I even majored in journalism so that I could land a “real” job, and when I applied for graduation my advisor said that I had taken so many creative writing classes I was only two away from a second major in English. So I stayed on to double major and continued to write stories without telling anyone, submitting them to small literary journals. I was taking my craft very seriously then, reading and writing voraciously, developing the acumen to determine the difference between a successful and a mediocre story. Slowly the acceptances rolled in, building my confidence to enter contests, which I slowly started to win. I still don’t call myself a writer, a title I’m not sure I’ve yet earned. The apprenticeship is long, and I am still growing and learning.

BP: What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?

DO: I just finished reading Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Kate Moore’s Radium Girls. I am watching Black Mirror, the Great British Baking Show and Vikings (I have a Vikings obsession. I once tried to write a serious historical fiction story about the final Viking voyage but the characters took over and turned it into a comedy). I typically listen to classic rock and jazz. I go back to old favorites—Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello—but I also like Radiohead, the Beastie Boys and the Arctic Monkeys.

BP: What’s your writing process like?

DO: I tend to work on two projects simultaneously, staying with one until I hit a wall and then turning to the other; I have fallen into the trap of not writing at all until I had a breakthrough with a stalled work and that is no way to be a writer. I am currently finishing a novel and, while writing it, I finished another story collection! I am more energetic in the evening, so my writing hours are late, though I have started writing during the day as well, something I forced myself to do during a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I am also interested in many disparate things and so I write about them rather than writing to current trends or contest themes.

BP: Where do you turn for creative inspiration?

DO: Books, because reading riveting literature motivates and teaches me. And my fishbowl. Whenever I have an idea for a story when I’m out and about, I jot it down on scrap paper before the concept flees my ever-filling brain. When I get home, I throw the paper into my fishbowl, which is now about half full (and does not contain fish!). When I need a new story I idea I reach in and grab a paper and am immediately taken back to the moment of the idea’s inception, that original spark reanimating me. Where I do not seek inspiration is from people who tell me that they have a great story idea I should write. Most often their vision is unique to them and only they can relay it. Imagine being responsible for someone else’s brilliant plan! It’s like trying to raise their child as they look over your shoulder.

BP: You also teach creative writing. What are some of the most important things you want to impart on your students, and how has teaching this craft impacted your own work?

DO: Be patient with your ideas, investing the time and effort they need to grow and thrive. New writers have a surplus of concepts so that when one does not flow effortlessly into a story, they ditch it and move on to the next. I encourage them to consider the work required to mold a nebulous thought into a world replete with characters, setting, conflict and resolution that must work together to deliver a message and a full experience to readers. I also encourage them to be kinder to themselves, to quit beating themselves up when the work on the page does not look like the narrative they had envisioned. Thinking and writing are very different things—thoughts arc and snap in our heads, often concurrently, whereas every story is linear, delivered one word at a time. I tell them that I would be shocked if the mental plan and story were the same because evolution occurs naturally in the creation and that this is a good and necessary thing.

My students inspire me every day, so teaching creative writing has augmented my skill and my investment in my own writing.

BP: You identify as a Detroit-based writer. Can you talk about the ways this city has shaped your work and your voice? Do you think it’s important for writers to have a strong connection to place?

DO: My writing, particularly my first story collection, is gritty and was definitely inspired by my experiences in and knowledge of Detroit. “Way Past Taggin’” is about a graffiti artist living and tagging in the city, and it’s a story I could never have written if I lived elsewhere. “Honesty above All Else,” which is in the forthcoming collection, is set in Corktown in Detroit and was inspired by my visits to O’Leary’s Tea Room there before it closed in the 90s. But the story also pays homage to many metropolitan landmarks: Cobo Hall, Tiger Stadium, The Fisher Building, the UA Theater Building, Hudson’s, the Seven Sisters, etc.

I actually don’t think writers need a strong connection to place as it’s our job to imagine landscapes and settings, but I do think place is important in fiction as every story is set somewhere! Even if location is less important than, say, conflict or characterization in a story, readers will be distracted if the smallest allusions to setting feel wrong.

BP: Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re working on now?

DO: I just finished a story collection called A Coterie of Uncommon Women and I am working on the second draft of a hybrid literary/sci-fi novel. Following that will be a story collection focusing on natural and historical oddities, such as the Loch Ness Monster and the Great Red Spot above Jupiter.

Craft Talk: Poets Allison Pitinii Davis and Ryan Walsh

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Baobab Press’s new literary imprint, Red Ochre, is devoted to elevating voices that rescript our conceptions of identity and place. The imprint launched with Allison Pitinii Davis’s 2017 poetry collection, Line Study of a Motel Clerk, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award’s Berru Award for Poetry and the Ohioana Book Award. The collection examines a family’s century-long effort to make a home in a changing world, with all the grit, beauty and truth of the working-class immigrant struggle. This February, we’ll release Reckonings, the debut poetry collection by Ryan Walsh that interrogates the dissolution of American industry and rural community.

Since these collections share interesting thematic intersections, we recently asked Pitinii Davis and Walsh to sit down for a craft talk. They asked each other about place-specific poetry, about artistic inspiration, about the ethical implications surrounding their work, about the capacious power of poetry, and much more.

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An Interview with Bernard Schopen

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Bernard Schopen’s latest work, The Last Centurion, is a gripping, perceptive account of a misfit struggling to hold fast to ancient values of loyalty and duty in a world where little is as it seems and only the past can be trusted. The author recently shared some insight with us about the novel’s thematic ambitions and what readers can expect from his next project.

Bernard Schopen

Baobab Press: The novel’s main character, Tad, is fixated on Marcus Aurelius. Can you talk about how Aurelius made his way into the novel and what drew you to write about this historical figure?

Bernard Schopen: Tad is an odd, even strange young man.  Since boyhood he has admired the Romans, their achievements and discipline, and, although wounds have taken him from the battlefield, he understands himself to be, still, a soldier.  Martial values like duty and honor and loyalty give meaning to his life, the stern consolations of stoicism appeal to him. Meditations, by the Warrior-Emperor Marcus Aurelius, is a sort of sacred text for Tad.  He reads it as some read the Bible.  The quotations from it reinforce for the reader Tad’s view of himself and the world he finds himself in.  My favorite, by the way, is “Soon you will forget everything; soon everything will forget you.”

BP: Where did the inspiration for The Last Centurion come from?

BS: I’m not really sure.  I’ve visited England a couple of times, and there’s always an excavation going on somewhere, but I don’t know, specifically, what got this story started.  I just found myself imagining a young man at an archeological dig day-dreaming about being a Roman soldier stationed in a wilderness outpost in a foreign land.  From there it was muse and manipulate, one thing suggesting another, characters popping up and saying things, images appearing, everything shifting, notions nudging in.  This went on even after I started writing.  I remember feeling, as I wrote, that I was not so much telling as discovering the story.

BP: Tad is emotionally and physically wounded from his experience in the Afghanistan war. How did you portray his experiences so authentically?

BS: I’d read several accounts, both fiction and memoir, of the experiences of young Americans in Vietnam and home again, as well as a couple of good books on the Afghanistan conflict.   Fortunately, I have a good friend, a Vietnam vet, who was able to tell me when I got it about right.

BP: How would you describe some of the underlying themes at play in this novel?

BS: The novel has three basic, related concerns.  The most obvious, I suppose, is the issue of empire building past and present, its consequences for cultures as well as for individuals who are victims of or complicit in it.  Another is the question of the human impulse to violence.  And the third is the difficulty for thoughtful people in finding an acceptable set of values to live by.   But while these themes are important, I would stress that The Last Centurion is first and foremost the story of a wounded young American, of his struggle to find an honorable way to live and to love among people who, one by one, betray him.  It answers none of the questions it raises.  It offers the reader not a lesson but an experience.

BP: Fans of your earlier work (the Jack Ross detective novels and Calamity Jane) have fallen in love with your depictions of the American West. Do you see any correlations between the world you’ve created in The Last Centurion and the territory you’ve explored in your earlier novels in terms of moral concerns, landscapes, scope or themes?

BS: The problem of finding a set of values to live by is, I think, central to all my fiction.  My detective, Jack Ross is a man tugged at by dichotomous attitudes, those perhaps over-simplified as liberal and conservative. Calamity Jane relates a direct conflict between these views, in the encounter of Jane and Ione. A similar contest centers this new book. In the earlier novels, I was concerned with the effect of place, of the environment, on people who live in the American desert—thus, the careful descriptions; but in The Last Centurion, while Cambridge and environs get a close look, my interest is not so much in the physical landscape as in the history embedded in it.

BP: Can you describe your writing process for this novel?

BS: It was pretty much the same for all my novels.  I think and take a few notes.  Then, when I know where I want to start, more-or-less and where I want to end, probably, and how I’m going to get, sort of, from one to the other, I start writing.  I revise constantly along the way, so that by the time I get to the final sentence I’ve got something like a coherent whole.  Then I revise some more.  I might say here that the revision of The Last Centurion was helped significantly by the efforts of Christine Kelley, the publisher of Baobab Press, as well as Wes Reid and Curtis Vickers and, especially, Margaret Dalrymple.

BP: Who are some of your major literary influences?

BS: For the detective novels, Ross Macdonald, obviously.  But probably also John Updike, whose “Yes, but” attitude toward moral dilemmas informs my fiction, which is why readers won’t find in it any absolute moral assertions, only questions, problems, and complexities.  Other than that, I have been encouraged by and tried to learn from writers who carefully choose the words they use and attend to the way they arrange these words in their sentences.

BP: What’s the last great book you’ve read?

BS: I’m a little uneasy with “great.”  Let me name the novels I’ve read or reread recently that I think highly of:  Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen; Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson; The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro; Felicia’s Journey, by William Trevor; The Spire, by William Golding, and Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.

BP: What’s next for you? Can you tell us about your next project?

BS: Soon I’ll begin, with the Baobab staff, preparing for publication in 2019 a new Jack Ross detective novel.  And I’m polishing a story set in London, which I’ve been working on for years.  Beyond that, I muse . . .

Echoes

An Interview with Roger Arthur Smith

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Roger Arthur Smith’s captivating debut novel, Echoes, which hits bookshelves in March of 2018, melds the supernatural with 1950s noir. We recently caught up with the author to learn more about the inspiration behind the novel, his writing process, and the real story behind one of literature’s most compelling crows.

Roger Arthur Smith

 

Baobab Press: Where did the inspiration for Echoes come from?

Roger Arthur Smith: The story begins with libraries. I love them–and book stores. I had already written a couple of essays about them and wanted to try one about the first library I ever went to on my own. I had some notion of compiling a book-place memoir.

My first library was the Mineral County Library in Hawthorne. I wrote a draft about my visit: gritty desert wind buffeting me on the way there, a pretty young librarian, my clueless wonder, my first library book (Dr. Suess’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish), and my pride in getting a library card. It was a personal essay, and when I read it through, it seemed awkward, flat. First-person point of view does not suit me. So I wrote another draft from a disembodied point of view. No good. The problem, I decided, was me, an average little kid. So I wrote a third draft from the point of view of the librarian, and I made the boy not me but a kid who is eerie and slightly unnerving to the librarian, who oversees the small building all alone on the desert’s edge.

That was more interesting. But why is this eldritch boy there? After several tries to answer that, I wrote the prologue about a girl who is kidnapped, abused, and killed. A victim of the worst human depravity. So I added another kid to the mystery, which suggested a sequence, which piqued a fantasy. If only there were more justice in the world than we humans can mete out on our own, something to stop monsters when we fail. A supernatural agency, for instance. A mystery requires an investigator. I introduced Will Dubykky. A supernatural mystery suggested a supernatural investigator, and so I made him one. Then I sent him on his way to figure out what was going on.

BP: Echoes has such a strong sense of place. What’s your relationship with the Nevada desert, and why was it important for this book to take place in this unique setting?

RAS: My family moved from a small town in Montana to Hawthorne in 1958. I was five. Hawthorne was like an outpost in a barrenness that was a shock to my parents, less so to my older sister, who made friends easily, and a wonder to me. It was the first time that I looked at things not just right in front of me or in the middle distance but as far as the horizon. It shaped my idea of landscape: long vistas, hulking mountain ranges, sunlight like an invasion, colors that ran from drab to crazed.

The Great Basin was not like anything I had seen, not even in horse operas: a vast, grooved saucer where not even the rivers escape. Hawthorne was not like other towns. It was almost surrounded by naval ammunition bunkers. Kids at school sometimes bragged (falsely) that they could spot mushroom clouds from the Nevada Test Site. Uranium prospectors hung around. A Korean war veteran sliced up his wife and daughter, who fled across the street to bleed in our living room while my father went to talk him down. In the sheriff’s office a deputy was examining a confiscated rifle when it went off; the bullet traveled across the street and killed a woman in her house. There were no speed limits; single-car crashes were more common than collisions. A minor earthquake. Hunting Easter eggs under a blinding sun on frozen ground. A flash flood that neatly sliced a highway. A dust storm approaching like some Old Testament plague. An prehistoric serpent that was said to lurk in Walker Lake. Going to school with Native Americans and African Americans, the first I ever met. Playing marbles with ball bearings. Catching lizards and horned toads among cast-off ammunition crates. Bouncing over dirt roads, my father driving his ’51 Ford pickup, to ghost towns on the hunt for treasure. Whacking cones out of piñon pines for their nuts.

The list could go on, but the point is that I accepted it all as normal. I’ve lived elsewhere in Nevada–Carlin, Yerington, Carson City, Reno–and those places expanded my view, but I was already primed to regard the state as a place of singular dangers, adventure, dehydrating beauty, mesmerizing distances, uneasy communities, precarious industries, fierce love of sports, contradictory weather, gambling (as well other vices, incomprehensible to a boy), and heedless freedom. I reveled in it.

Now, when a story idea comes, it arises from those circumstances. No other setting suits so well.

BP: What was your writing process like for this novel?

RAS: I wrote Echoes, as my wife’s uncle liked to say, for my own amazement. Definitely an amateur’s indulgence. So–I can’t recall now whether I was more astonished or more pleased–when Christine Kelly called to say that Baobab Press might publish it, I had a job of work before me to make it actually publishable. Many drafts followed, many comments, suggestions, and doubt from others. Whole sections that I had fun writing were ejected, such as a long excursus on the number 4 and another about crow behavior. Chapters did a square dance with each other. Characters’ names changed. Scenes appeared and disappeared until, I believe, the story began to hide from me, scared about what strangeness I might inflict upon it next. But with the steady care of my editors and a measure of useful skepticism from family, the story found a course that did not depend wholly upon my whims.

BP: Can you talk about creating the character of Jurgen the crow? Was he based on a relationship you have with a specific animal?

Although I have kept dogs and cats, I am not innately a pet person. I prefer wild critters, especially birds. Watching them has captivated me since childhood. The episode in which Dubykky meets Jurgen after he tumbles from a tree derives from something I witnessed. I wish I could claim that I struck up a friendship with that crow, but I was at my family cabin and left soon after. (The crow, a fledgling, might have been too embarrassed for overtures anyhow.) I wrote up a description and thought about how to use it in a fiction. This was while I was just beginning Echoes.

As a supernatural being, Dubykky has to have at least one endearing, human-like trait that does not involve people. Otherwise, he would seem a mere parasite, or maybe symbiont. So, as a pirate has his parrot, I thought, Dubykky should have his crow, and I arranged the meeting. Then Junior comes along, and the poor kid needs a companion, and Dubykky shows a laudable compassion in lending him Jurgen.

Every morning I feed crows on the parking strip outside my kitchen. Jurgen and Yuki (see Rogues). They are namesakes.

BP: How would you describe some of the underlying thematic issues at play in this novel?

RAS: Echoes deifies evil while casting it as an exclusively human failing. It is an offense to homo sapiens and nature. The more narcissistic a person is allowed to become, the more likely he or she is to turn into a predator, and predators derange community.

William Dubykky personifies the fantasy component of the novel. Nature dispatches echoes to kill predators and prevent further damage to society, and he acts something like their job performance monitor. Beginning before Echoes opens, however, and continuing through the series, Dubykky finds himself drawn into human-like relationships and thereby comes to act more human. So the novels propose this as a corollary to the evil-is-antisocial theme: the opposite of evil is not an abstract good; good emerges from engagement with others for common benefit.

In this light the courtship of Milton Cledge and Mildred Warden exemplifies a kind of goodness, while that of Matt and Misty Gans depicts its perversion. Hans Berger’s withdrawal from society has resulted from war, the great failure of social interchange, and is pathetic. Junior’s ironic tragedy is that he could never offer his gifts to benefit society: his sweetness, lack of guile, concern for those under threat, and wonderment.

Dubykky’s belief that he has a duty to kill surviving echoes conflicts with his growing attachment to them, Junior in particular. He follows supernatural rules that he comes to dislike and doubt. This tension runs through the series.

BP: Echoes is the first installment of a trilogy. Without any plot spoilers, can you give readers a sense of what they can expect in the books to come?

RAS: Dubykky grows more human despite himself. He has to. The long era during which beings like him wreaked vengeance on aberrant humans is drawing to a close. Human society has become so complex, so interconnected, so lacking in privacy, that by and large its institutions can perform the task that echoes are created for. Although he remains steadfast in tracking down the last new echoes, Dubykky is becoming redundant.

Reconceiving his role entails unforeseen obligations to both echoes and non-echoes. His days as a lone wolf end. I think I’d better leave it at that, or else where is the fun in watching Dubykky/Devlin/Dantlyng succumb to what have been impossibilities for half a millennium? Among them, commitment, even an abrasive love.

BP: Who are some of your major literary influences?

If influence is calculated based on how many times one reads something, then for me Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice place first and second by a healthy margin. I have also, as I aged, been a fan of Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain, Robert Heinlein, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Steinbeck, V.S. Naipaul, Roberto Bolaño, Tim O’Brien, John Connolly, and Pat Barker. They’re in addition to other Great Tradition authors that I read in college, but how deeply does stuff that you parse out for class dig its claws into you?

RAS: What are you reading right now?

Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and John Daniel’s Gifted. That’s beside background reading for a writing project, such as The Roadside Geology of Nevada (Frank DeCourten/Norma Biggar) and Turn this Water into Gold (John M. Townley).