Dylan Nice's debut collection Other Kinds is out this month from Hobart's Short Flight / Long Drive Books. His stories and essays have appeared in NOON, Indiana Review, MAKE, Hobart, Brevity, and Quick Fiction, among others. He lives in Iowa and is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.
His story "Flat Land" appears in Issue Thirty-Nine of The Collagist.
Here, Dylan Nice speaks with interviewer David Bachmann about beautifully tainted landscapes, characters without borders, and self-discovery.
1. The “foul-smelling mist” of “brown floodwater” and waters that run “ran orange with iron” lend a perversely wonderful substance to the places these characters inhabit. Are you shooting for such descriptors to act as flaws or as assets of the environment(s) of your piece?
I think of them as flaws and as assets. I have these vivid memories of my childhood in rural Pennsylvania, ones in which I’m alone and standing beside a bright orange river, or on top of a mound of slate, or walking far into the woods on a rail bed whose ties are piled and rotting in the weeds, and feeling a kind of privilege, nigh on elitism that I was allowed to be near something so ruined, and that the beautiful things I found there I didn’t have to share with anyone else. It was a deep and private love. I remember figuring out early, on trips to beaches or state parks, that places regarded as beautiful by other people where usually crowded and noisy, and that the people who went there were after an easy beauty. This might be a flaw of mine, but I often deny myself joy which comes easily. I find myself fighting for free gifts.
So I love the ugly places, because loving them feels like something earned.
2. How are you hoping the reader interprets a character like Jason who has fallen “in love with hardship?” (Is this admirable? How does the speaker feel about his brother’s apparent calling to live a hard life?)
I do have an older brother who still lives back home and who is pretty accurately described in circumstances of Jason. But the sentiment of being in love with hardship is a former sentiment of mine that I ascribed to Jason. When I first left home for the Midwest, I thought a love of hardship was probably the most admirable philosophy a person could live out. I was certain keeping yourself near the earth, close to death, in a constant state of palpable struggle, would guard you against dilution, corruption, and ultimately, cowardice.
It’s a sentiment I’ve since abandoned out of necessity. Something in the idea still excites me, still feels true, but I’m prone to zealotry. If I’m not careful, I become a little lopsided, a little grotesque with the weight of a certain truth.
The Midwest ended up being a good place in which to dismantle my zealotry. It is a landscape and culture which seems to absorb violent intent: you can lie to it or plow its grasses over, and it’s not keen to argue. Eventually, everything you have escapes into its size and it’s you who are ready to be cultivated.
3. There is something comforting, constraint-lifting, and therefore liberating, about having “nothing on the horizon, nothing farther in the distance to mark time.” There is also the potential that such is the position of someone who has given up, for whom aspiration is no longer an option. What is your take on your speaker’s having gotten used to having nothing on the horizon?
I think you described the complication well. I would say the objects formerly on the horizon—the mountains, the wilderness—in addition to being symbols of home and comfort, are also symbols of antipathy for the speaker: a battle against the limitation which once defined him. Driving out of his steep history and into the flat land, he is at once liberated and destroyed.
One caveat: I don’t think of his position as a loss of aspiration, but instead as a necessary submission to a freefall which is not yet finished.
4. The speaker states that he “left to sort out what was me and wasn't.” Do you want the reader to believe that he either successfully sorted himself out or that he will? Is it important either way?
The speaker is a little misguided in the notion that he’s going to sort himself out. What’s more important than that idea, or at least requisite to a more complete sense of self, is the realization of meaninglessness. That’s not to say I think meaninglessness is a complete construct for the way things are, but it is part of it. It might be that once the speaker confronts meaninglessness, exhausts himself against it, he and it will become better friends. He’ll learn to allow meaning—love, wholeness—to pass over him and dissipate in its own frustrating and rapturous cycles. I can say he’s not there yet, though. I think of the story as a description of the space which is not being there yet.
5. Is it impossible for the speaker to live in one place? If so, does this qualify him as a man without a country? Or is it simply that no place is willing to accommodate him?
I think the story and the collection it’s in are more concerned with the internal than the external. The narrators and characters aren’t so much as men searching for places as they are men searching for selves. You might say this lack of identity does echo out into the political in certain regards. It rules out the kind of strongly believed self-narrative needed to attach one’s self to a reassuring collective narrative. But the land and political system in which these stories take place, while not without significance, is ultimately coincidental. The problem of living in a place is preempted by the problem of living within the self.
6. What are you reading these days?
Lately, since I spend so much time on the computer, I’ve been reading almost exclusively things I come across online. A lot of stories, essays, and articles friends link to on facebook or twitter and which secure my interest in the first couple sentences. I think the internet is good for readers and reading. Instead of making time to read at night when I’m tired and impatient, I’m reading in bursts all day.
When I do sit down to read, I find myself usually reading old books: books by writers who have already had their careers. I’m comforted by history. I want things which are of a time, and I’m more relaxed if that time’s not right now. I’m working on a thick anthology of Norman Mailer’s essays, completely stunned by the breadth and aliveness of his sentences. I return to Didion’s essays weekly. I just finished David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and was dizzied by pretty much everything he’s able to do.
7. What are you writing these days?
I draft new work very rarely. I spend much more time fiddling with drafts I’ve had for years, mining them for something vital, an essential and pressing feeling that might lend me the energy and vision to finish them. Right now, I have two longer short stories I’m trying to beat the truth out of. I used to draft more often and give up on them more easily, but I think I felt more rushed then. Now, I’m more comfortable with the idea of the process taking a long, long time.