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Mini-Interview with Jean Thompson

Is the short story the form of first impulse for you? You’ve written several novels, of course, but many of your most faithful readers seem most excited when you have a new story collection. People are excited about Do Not Deny Me.
Stories and novels are actually different and quite separate impulses for me. And it’s true that my first love is stories. Maybe it comes from growing up in the early days of television and its many dramas packed into thirty minute spots. I have a clear memory of turning off an episode of “Captain Midnight” when the action got too suspenseful, and rocking and whimpering in my little chair. I was probably about three years old. In any case, I love the compression of the form, the chance to begin and complete an entire dramatic cycle within a finite space. It can be a little like solving a puzzle to fit all the apparatus of a story (conflict, characterization, resolution, etc.) into a more or less finite space.

How does a certain group of stories become a book for you? What are your thoughts as you try to shape a collection?
I was most conscious of shaping a collection in the case of Throw Like a Girl, which had a particular thematic identity—stories about girls and women. I wanted some variety within that framework, and so tried to find stories about girls and women of different ages, circumstances, etc. With Do Not Deny Me, I felt the need to stretch myself a little further, and write in different forms and tones, not to mention genders. More of a grab bag.

Do your novels begin as stories? Many authors talk about how their novels were stories that just kept growing.
No, as mentioned, novels seem to come from a different part of my brain. Most often, when the tale I want to tell will stray over greater periods of time, or greater geographical distance, or perhaps a multitude of characters who must be given voice, then a larger canvas seems called for.

Finally, please share a few authors —story writers, in particular —who you feel should be more widely read today.
Such an embarrassment of riches. Out recently: Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, Antonya Nelson’s Nothing Right, and Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Also very fond of last year’s National Book Award nominee, [Jim Shepard’s] Like You’d Understand, Anyway. All of these are short story collections, but let me also mention Pete Rock’s terrific novel, My Abandonment.

Mini-Interview with Suzanne Burns

Misfits and Other Heroes is your debut collection. How long has it been in the works, and what did you learn about writing—and shaping a collection—during the process?
I started Misfits about four years ago. It took a year to get the basic ideas of the story structure outlined in my head. I pitched the first two stories to Dzanc as a collection before I’d written the collection. By the time I heard the good news from them (an offer of publication) I had finished the collection. I learned that a strong collection ties together, whether it be theme or tone or something more abstract. I learned that writing is damn, damn hard, not always rewarding, but worth it in the end, each and every time.

I wrote this entire collection by hand in a spiral notebook in bed late at night while my husband snored beside me. Our happiness at being together is what enabled me to write such dark and distraught and somewhat disturbing characters and plots. I felt safe playing this game of pretend, dealing with the overwrought female archetype in new ways. One of my friends recently told me I should market myself as “Hemingway for women.” I like that.

You also write poetry. How soon do you know when a certain impulse—an image, maybe, or a remembered bit of language—will become either a poem or story?
Poetry is a stone bitch to get right, first of all. I try and try, but I think fiction is so much more rewarding because I can have these flashes of story ideas and mill them over in my brain for awhile. Poetry strikes fast and furious and you better get those lines down before they disappear in the ether.

Do you think of an specific audience for your work? Who is your ideal reader?
My ideal reader is the ghost of Shirley Jackson. I try not to think of audience. Thinking of an audience feels too much like auditioning for a play without being told which part you’re up for.

Who are your influences? What writers make you excited about the future of literature?
Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Kafka, Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the authors of Betty Crocker cookbooks. Oh, and Rod Serling, the underrated father of Americana magic realism. (And damn handsome, too.)

I am excited about up and coming authors like Kevin Sampsell, Matt Bell, Riley Michael Parker, Barry Graham and c.vance.

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Indie Pick, July 2009

Dzanc Books and its imprints have published many compelling debut short-story collections in the last year or two: Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory, Michael Czyzniejewski’s Elephants in Our Bedroom, and Allison Amend’s Things That Pass for Love, just to name three. To this growing and impressive list, add one more: Misfits and Other Heroes by Suzanne Burns.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Suzanne Burns has previously published two collections of poetry: Blight and The Flesh Procession. Her writing has been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and she is the recipient of two poetry fellowships. She is a freelance editor who is currently working on a new novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“This is no ordinary collection. In Misfits and Other Heroes Burns writes of disproportion, excess, reinvention, and lack as a means of magnifying outward physical irregularities to better reveal the inner irregularities of her characters. Burns is unafraid to explore the dark territory of human heart where love and hate are twins for desire and dread. The many brilliant moments of character, language, and startling observations indicate Burns is a keen observer of the wretched and wonderful human creature. In Burns’ capable hands the grotesque becomes achingly familiar: the misfits she writes about are us.”
—Gina Oschner, author of People I Wanted to Be

“Suzanne Burns’s “heroes” in Misfits and Other Heroes may at first seem just the other side of real, but in their obsessions with food and love and their stories’ perfectly odd specificity, they’re as real and credible as Americans can be, whether they’re a tiny husband carried around in a bird cage by his wife or a woman who prefers to eat glass rather than dumplings or a couple attached to a dollhouse. Who would have thought that Oregon’s misfits could be as deluded and cruel as Flannery O’Connor’s Southerners and even more bizarre?”
—Tom Whalen, author of Winter Coat

WHERE TO BUY:
Your local independent bookstore
The publisher, Dzanc Books
Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

Big House Pick, July 2009

Jean Thompson, heralded as “America’s Alice Munro…one of the best contemporary short-story writers” by Kirkus, delivers twelve exquisite new stories that combine her beloved trademarks of dark humor, seductively sharp wit, and uncanny observations on human nature. Do Not Deny Me is a fictional primer on how Americans live day to day: Thompson’s characters—a middle manager in the midst of midlife crisis, an urban single visiting her best friend turned suburban mother, a grieving woman looking for guidance—are instantly recognizable in their predicaments, foibles, and sensibilities.

A brilliantly wrought exploration of the myriad circumstances that Americans are experiencing right now, this superlative collection perfectly captures the joys and amusements, trials and sorrows of its fictional inhabitants. Do Not Deny Me should be savored, word by word.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jean Thompson is the author of Throw Like a Girl as well as the novel City Boy; the short story collection Who Do You Love, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction; and the novel Wide Blue Yonder, a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection for 2002. Her short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, and been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Jean’s work has been praised by Elle as “bracing and wildly intelligent writing that explores the nature of love in all its hidden and manifest dimensions.”

Jean’s other books include the short story collections The Gasoline Wars and Little Face, and the novels My Wisdom and The Woman Driver. She has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and taught creative writing at the University of Illinois, Reed College, Northwestern University, and many other colleges and universities.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
“If there are ‘Jean Thompson characters,’ they’re us, and never have we been so articulate and worthy of compassion. These stories confirm that no one is beneath her interest, or beyond her sure and seemingly limitless reach.”
—David Sedaris, author of When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“Her stories linger and seep into your dreams.”
—Bernard Cooper, author of The Bill from My Father

WHERE TO BUY:
Your local independent bookstore
Powell’s [buy new, even if used is available]
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble