Nathan Blake's writing has appeared in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Word Riot, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and kill author, among others. He is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech and a managing editor of Mixed Fruit Magazine.
His story "Going Down Like Little Jesus in Sun Hole" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.
Here, Nathan Blake speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about fire, first sentences, and the inclination to squirt around.
1. Did this piece start with fire, with voice, with Spunk, with Spunk running out the door? A piece like this feels like it’s running out the door itself fast as he is : those first two bullet-quick sentence-graphs. How did you know to start that way?
At the risk of sounding coy, I'll admit this story, like all the rest, began with the first sentence. Those words on the page had implications and avenues, a few of which I tried to exploit later on, after I'd read the first sentence over and over looking for an inroad into the real thing. But even the image of Spunk on fire was ancillary to the sentence itself and not the other way around. A good first sentence will contain all the energy the rest of the story's going to cannibalize. I felt lucky to find energy there in the opening that I could ply without having to build up to it. I was invested in crawling or, in this case, sprinting my way out toward an ending; that's how I knew the first line wasn't another throwaway. Then came the second line, the third, and so on, very smoothly. I am not subtle, nor am I capable of juggling numerous entanglements at once in writing. I am no sculptor in the vein of your great deliberating storytellers wielding mind, heart, patience, and prudence. I may, with luck, have one of those, or more likely half of one. I do know if I'm going to ask of a reader's time, to make the promise of interest, I'd better say what I need to say damn quick and well, with kick, and honestly, or else I've failed. Those first two lines were my best attempt to push the reader into the situation, hoping they'd want to see it through to the end.
2. Can we talk a little bit more about this fire motif? Fire is such a classic/terrific image to employ for its relation to desire, demise, purification, all-consuming-ness, heat – did you choose it for its multi-faceted-ness? (Did you ‘choose’ it at all?) How does it relate to the heart (of the character/of the piece), “which believes everything. These people to me are like so much plastic creek-mouth flotsam you hit with a match and which burns and keeps on burning down the river for hours in dead noon heat to be picked apart by snakes”?
I like the finality of fire. It does one thing but so well. I wish I could say I chose fire for all those great reasons you listed; I'd sound more intelligent than I am that way. But truthfully, I am fascinated with fire for similar reasons that some writers work a murder into every story—it raises the stakes for the reader, as so well done in Flannery O'Connor's “A Circle in the Fire.” Just to mention the word is a legitimate violence. I grew up in a very rural, Protestant crease of Virginia, so fire contains many loaded associations for me, something that was my worst nightmare as a kid—by which I mean eternal damnation. It continues bullying even now.
I don't have a very nuanced vocabulary when discussing my work or the work of others, but I suppose the speaker in this story feels things too much. His heart is too direct, and because of that he's discomfited. Fire is like that. There's no such thing as a subtle fire. We try our best to control it, to keep it hemmed, but all fire can do is consume and consume. Fire's job is to be never satisfied, even to the point of its own extinction. That's the person I like writing about and the type of stories that come to me. That's the person I am. Someone who feels life to a fault. A story that makes me feel something, anything, is worth the time to read or write it.
3. How do you get into (and maintain) an incredible voice like this – “I’m between two water oaks deeply hammocked,” “Spunk bangs out the house like he has been caught fire to,” “get him good and extinguished,” “something school paste orange fizzles out”? Can you imagine the voice of this piece ‘regularized’ (‘I’m lying in a hammock,’ ‘I extinguish him’)? What would die?
Getting into a voice is like method acting for me. It doesn't so much matter what I say but how I say it true to the self who's speaking. Anything interests me so long as the person telling is earnest, requiring me to find a hard grip on where the obsessions and pride of a character reside if I'm the one telling. There's something attractive about pretending you're someone else. I can remember as early as age seven walking around the grocery store with a fake limp, or speaking a crack language into the telephone, to see if I could get away with the lie—if I would, by playing my part, be accepted as true. Didn't Oscar Wilde say something like the first duty in life is to assume a pose? My stories all begin with a pose I must justify with the rest of the story. My one aim is that the lie must convince and be interesting to hear. Maintaining a voice is little more than an act of endurance, stubbornly so.
Many, too many, times, I'll have several pages when suddenly the voice falls flat. After that, there's rarely a way to invite myself back into the story. It becomes a false show. A great big voice is natural to my writing, but I sometimes wonder if, were I to strip the language down and smooth the dents, the stories would still hold similar or any merit, or be more well-received. Language and story have a symbiotic relationship in my mind. You neglect one and the other's heart will give out trying to carry the dead weight. I tend to lose all drive and interest when my writing sounds generic, and I find myself slogging through a story when I shouldn't. I might as well do something I enjoy. I don't believe I'll ever earn wide appeal, but at least I'll have fun during the short time I've been given to write.
I grew up listening to people talk, and rarely about things that mattered to me, yet I listened just the same. And why? My uncle would tell us his jokes dozens of times, even though the punchlines had become old hat. Yet we were enraptured. It was his delivery that was funnier than the actual joke, I found out, more anarchic. You never knew if he was going to rearrange the set-up or what. When the sweet anarchy of not knowing where the next word comes from dies, I'll find another hobby.
4. Your particular brand of deadpan lyricism (I’m thinking of lines like, “I don’t know what to tell you. It looks like somebody went up there with a ladder and put a bullet between the sky’s ears”) is stunning, memorable, electric. Do you ever receive resistance to this voice (in the MFA workshop, elsewhere) and how do you maintain balance between the wildness of this lyric and control of the story?
I recently finished my first-ever workshop this past December, which was a very nurturing but challenging experience for me, as I'm without a formal background in English. But my classmates and Fred D'Aguiar were so gracious with their advice and encouragement all semester long. Any resistance I received was well-deserved—sentences that rang false came back to me underlined, dialogue was held up to the voice of the speaker, etc. They knew when I really believed in a sentence and when I was just squirting around. I tend to get lost in the language. Sometimes I'll write a line that sings a little bit but does nothing else, that drives no signal post into the ground of the story. Grace Paley called them lies, showing off. The brilliant faculty and writers of my program are helping me see those lies and do away with them. Literary magazines, however, have not been so kind. I have found the words “grating” and “showy” in rejections. Too much “tell”. I got one once that said the story was “fun, but to what end?”
And any success I had controlling this story was dumb luck. It came out in one shot, and I needed things to fit together, or I'd miss my deadline. Desperation provided results. An easy gauge I use to keep the story from falling off a cliff is to ask myself what every word does and might do. Every word needs to stand its ground within the sentence, the sentence within the paragraph, the paragraph within the story. A line having only flash in its favor was not enough to survive in this piece. I suppose that pulled in the reins a bit.
5. Does this story fit somewhere in a collection, or are there other projects in the works?
I don't think I'm at the point where I can pretend to have any aspirations to work on a collection or projects in general. I feel that sort of agenda might cut my inclination to squirt around, where the high adventure stays. I still have so much to learn and try. I would take less risks if I knew this piece had to play nice alongside several others. For now I'm just writing stories, trying to get enough material to look at what ideas keep bobbing the surface. Maybe that's how my thesis will be. But I have been coming back to the area referenced in this piece, Rangtang Road, which exists, but not anything like it does in the story.
6. Anything fabulous you’ve been reading fiction-wise, or writing-about-fiction-wise?
Right now I'm caught between course readings and teaching a section of composition, but I do sneak in some pleasure every few days. Recently I've been enjoying Noëlle Revaz's With the Animals, Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love, David Ohle's Motorman, and Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex. I just finished Jean Toomer's Cane, which was assigned by Matthew Vollmer, and it does so many wonderful things with the novel.