ALSO BY DAN CHAON.
Await Your Reply.
You Remind Me of Me.
Fitting Ends.
Among the Missing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR.
DAN CHAON is the acclaimed author of Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; You Remind Me of Me, which was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications; and Await Your Reply, which was a New York Times Notable Book and appeared on more than a dozen "Best of the Year" lists. Chaon"s fiction has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction, and he was the recipient of the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and teaches at Oberlin College, where he is the Pauline M. Delaney Professor of Creative Writing.
Stay Awake.
Stories Dan Chaon.
A READER"S GUIDE.
A Conversation Between.
Dan Chaon and Emma Straub.
I was lucky enough to have Dan Chaon as my professor at Oberlin College-we first met shortly before his second collection of short stories, Among the Missing, was nominated for a National Book Award in 2001. Dan is one of my favorite contemporary story writers, in part because he believes in the genre itself, in its strengths and its quirks. Stay Awake, Dan"s third collection, includes stories written between 2002 and 2012, and shows a true master at work. The book is dark without a moment of gloom, hilarious without the need for a punch line. Dan"s work is as rich as it comes, and I was delighted to be asked to talk to him about Stay Awake, one of the best books of the year, and his stunning return to the short story form.
Emma Straub: Many of these stories first appeared elsewhere, as long as ten years ago. How does it feel to have them all together in one volume? Were you surprised at how some of the older and newer stories-I"m thinking specifically of "The Bees" and "Stay Awake"-fit together?
Dan Chaon: I was a little surprised at how constant my obsessions have been over the past ten years. "The Bees" was written in 2002, I think, and the first few paragraphs of that story are even older than that. I was asked to write a story for McSweeney"s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon. Chabon"s project was to combine so-called literary writing with pulp and genre storytelling elements, and I was very much inspired by what he had to say. I felt like "The Bees," was a breakthrough for me, and after that I set out to explore that ghostly/horror story element. I learned a lot from writers like Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, George Saunders, Kevin Brockmeier-and many others-who were doing interesting work with genrebending. It opened me up to the idea that "literary" didn"t necessarily mean "realism." And I started looking at the ghost stories written during the modernist period by people such as Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson. It seemed to me that these stories really spoke to the contemporary condition. I thought: Maybe we need the uncanny to find a way to express the way it feels to be alive right now.
ES: I like your use of the word "uncanny"-I think that gets at a certain unsettling feeling present in many of the stories in Stay Awake. How important do you think cohesion is in a story collection? I a.s.sume you"ve written more stories than you"ve included here-did you pull some out that didn"t quite fit?
DC: To me, there are two types of story collections. One type shows off the author"s range, and in that kind of story collection the pieces are really meant to be separate little cookies. Then there"s the other type, which shows off the author"s variations on a single theme. This collection, I knew from the beginning, was going to be the latter type. I really wanted it to hold together as a reading experience that felt like it was a holistic experience-the way watching a lot of Twilight Zone episodes or reading a lot of Hardy Boys books is kind of a c.u.mulative thing.
I originally had about twenty stories, and my agent, Noah Lukeman, and my editor, Susanna Porter, and I all spent a lot of time trying to figure out which ones fit together and which didn"t. And how to organize them so that they built on one another.
One of the weird things was how many times images repeated from story to story. That wasn"t planned. My first instinct was to change the details to make these echoes less noticeable. Then, after thinking about it, I began to like the idea that they had a kind of deja vu quality, that they were forming and re-forming around the same knot of feeling. In the end, as I was revising the collection, I ended up adding even more of these echoes and connections from story to story. The final story, "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.," contains elements of all the previous stories-it"s like a mash-up of everything I was thinking about over the course of writing these. As a former DJ, this made me really happy.
ES: One of my favorite aspects of Stay Awake is the sense of layering that accrues with each story-what you"ve just described as deja vu-after reading the stories back to back, the reader is left with a sense of so much built-up weight. What do you think it is about those motifs-relationships between parents and children, feelings of loss and grief, sibling relationships, in particular-that keeps you circling back around to them?
DC: Of course, all of those themes are very personal, and the stories allow me to explore them and obsess over them in a kind of contained way.
It makes me think of my favorite music. I love the way that certain artists seem to be working out something over the course of a recording, and you can "read" the alb.u.m in the way that you can read a cohesive story collection. Think, for example, of Joni Mitch.e.l.l"s Blue, or Tom Waits" Frank"s Wild Years, or Beck"s Sea Change, or The Mountain Goats" Tallaha.s.see, or Page France"s h.e.l.lo, Dear Wind, or Modest Mouse"s The Moon and Antarctica-all of which are big influences on me. I"m inspired by the way the acc.u.mulation of different songs transports you into a single mood but shows you how it has layers and levels and many rooms. That was my goal here.
The t.i.tle "Stay Awake" is a lullaby from the musical Disney film Mary Poppins. In 1988, a few years after I finished college, Hal Willner put out a compilation of covers of Disney songs on A&M Records called Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films. The alb.u.m contained an incredible and haunting version of "Stay Awake" sung by Suzanne Vega, which stuck with me for years and years. Even as a young man, I knew that I wanted to write about the feeling that the song had evoked in me. So, in any case, whatever autobiographical elements exist, they are trumped by a particular mood, which has been with me for my whole adult life.
ES: Are there other stories in the collection that have musical a.s.sociations? You mentioned your past life as a DJ, and I happen to know that you often find out about cool new bands one to three years before the rest of us.
DC: There are a lot. I love all kinds of music, from disco to jazz to folk, but I have to admit that I have a particular affection for sad songs. My sons sometimes tease me about my taste; they call the stuff I listen to "suicide music." Artists like Red House Painters, Idaho, Jennifer O"Connor, Cat Power. But the thing I love about it is that it"s cathartic power, the way that it takes you so fully right inside a strong feeling. And I know that"s my ride. There is something about listening to these songs that gets in deep and moves around in a way that is so dark but makes me know I am not alone, there is someone else who is sometimes filled with cold black eels. And, wow, that"s an important thing to be able to do. I don"t think it"s that you set out to make people feel crummy. Instead, it"s a certain kind of life preserver you are sending out to the people who are listening. You. Were. There.
ES: This book is full of flailing adults, sensitive and overgrown men, and other characters who don"t seem, at first or second glance, terribly heroic. And yet, like Critter in "To Psychic Underworld:," they are the heroes of the story. Do you feel that it"s important to shine a light on characters who have been otherwise marginalized? What is it that really interests you about a character?
DC: I don"t really like the word "marginalized" because it suggests that I"m writing about people who are oppressed by some societal force. And that"s not really where my interest lies, though it may be marginally true for some of my characters. But most of them are "marginalized" by themselves, rather than by The Man.
I"m interested in people who screw up. I like people who have the capacity to misbehave and do wrong things because that seems to have more dramatic potential for me, as a reader and as a writer. People who have done something that they regret in one way or another. I"m curious about people who might be considered "unsympathetic"-in some deep unconscious way, I feel that I am part of their tribe.
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else"s eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven"t actually experienced. People write fiction in their minds all the time-every time we read a "human interest" news story, or a true-crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we"re trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become. Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.
I"m certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I"m always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. For some reason, thinking about the extreme incidents and trying to filter them through my own understanding of the world is a very satisfying way to process my own (much less dramatic) personal experience.
In particular, I"m curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I"m also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years. I think it"s about the ways in which we remain connected even when we"re separated by distance. And about the ways in which mistakes will travel through time, and the little choices that you make will travel through time. I guess it"s sort of about the presence of the uncanny in daily life, too.
Why should something that happened twenty years ago matter now? Why do I keep thinking about that thing? And what if I had done this or that differently, how would my life be different? Those are ghost questions, you know? Because they"re abstract, but they also have this power to rise up in your life. The people that you might have been, or the things that you might have done, or the things that happened that you wish didn"t happen-those are the real ghosts.
ES: In "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted," the t.i.tle character writes notes on his own skin. In "To Psychic Underworld:," a young widower becomes obsessed with sc.r.a.ps of messages that strangers have left behind. What role does language play in Stay Awake?
DC: I started out as a poet-a quite bad poet; nevertheless, I"ve always been interested in the sound of words and in the power of chants and memes and earworms and those little phrases that circle around in your head for no reason. These interest me in the way that the world of ghosts interests me.
I"m also interested in collage. I like the way fragments work together to create a mysterious and resonant whole. I learned a lot about fragments and collage when I was a DJ back when I was young, and working with sampling and remixing and discovering the ways in which a mash-up could transform and mutate a song. I also learned a lot from my friend Lynda Barry, the novelist and cartoonist, who discovered amazing things with collage in her books What It Is and Picture This.
There are aspects of our world-our subconscious, our secret image-world-that can"t be told as a narrative, but can be accessed through little glimpses of language and fragments. That"s fascinating to me.
ES: I love thinking of those sc.r.a.ps of paper as collage, or earworms, tiny little pieces of the outside world that find their way into your brain. Does that idea also factor into the "contemporary headline horror" you mentioned, with abstract images and story lines entering into your work from the media? Are there particular stories that began as tiny kernels that way, ripped from the headlines, as it were?
DC: Almost all the stories started out as small observations that I keep in a notebook that I carry around with me-the kernel was just things I noticed while going about my daily life, or anecdotes that someone told me, or something that I happened to read. If I went through each story I could probably pick out particular parts that were originally just little fragments, like the notes that Critter finds in "To Psychic Underworld:."
But here"s one example, from the story "Stay Awake," which is a story that I worked on for a long time. As I mentioned above, the t.i.tle comes from a song, but the original impetus comes from a real news item. Historically, there have been only ten doc.u.mented cases of craniopagus parasiticus as it is described in the story. Two of the cases were fairly recent, in 2003 and 2005, including a little girl who was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and who gave me the original idea. Many of the elements of the story including "The Two-Headed Boy of Bengal," and the research done by Dr. Robert White on rhesus monkeys, are based in fact.
Around the same time, I knew a few couples who were having a difficult time conceiving a baby, and I had a couple of conversations with them about that process, and some of the technical details, which stuck with me. By the way, I do hope that the story doesn"t come across as a critique of people who are struggling to conceive, because I understand the longing and desire to have "children of your own" very well, and I hope the story is a sympathetic portrayal.
I have a very particular and personal point of view on this, since I myself was adopted as an infant, and that has certainly made me more cognizant of the ways in which that deep desire for a baby can warp and skew relationships; the ways in which "babies" are much more than just small human mammals, but also containers for these enormous projected emotions and hopes and fears.
So in any case, there were a number of different fragments-from both personal and impersonal sources-which seemed to come together as I was trying to write that story. And I think that in general that"s the way most of the stories in the collection were written. They are an acc.u.mulation of different kinds of data that are then somehow sown together into something that manages to come alive. Like Frankenstein"s monster, I guess.
ES: Children, and young people, are often in peril in these stories-"St. Dismas," for example. That said, there are also hilarious moments here. Do you think that some people miss your humor? How do you feel your sense of humor diffuses the darkness inherent in the stories? Can one really separate the two, or are we just sickos for laughing?
DC: There"s a famous essay by the nineteenth-century critic William Hazlett where he a.s.serts that comedy and tragedy, like love and hate, are really two sides of the same coin, and that"s something that has stuck with me.
For example, I remember as a kid being very upset by the Warner Bros. Road Runner cartoons, because for some reason I identified with Wile E. Coyote. Those cartoons are truly painful and tragic if you look at them from the coyote"s perspective. My G.o.d, they are so dark! Or was I just a sicko for not laughing?
I don"t know. There is a certain kind of laughter that I don"t like, in which the good are rewarded and the evil are punished and ha ha, they deserved it. There"s another type of humor that comes from being thwarted and disappointed and recognizing a kind of cosmic joke in it. That"s often the kind of comedy I indulge in, and it"s fairly subjective, so I don"t blame people if they miss it.
I often find that people will come up to me after a reading and say, "Oh, I didn"t realize that story was so funny!"-maybe because of the way I present it, or my tone of voice, or whatever, people feel like they are allowed to laugh whereas maybe when they are reading to themselves the voice they hear is more grim. Because, yeah, of course the subject matter is grim, most of the time.
But I was always aware that the situations I was writing about had their funny side, and there are some stories in the collection that I thought of as straight-up humorous, like "Long Delayed, Always Expected," and "Slowly We Open Our Eyes," and "Shepherdess."
ES: "Shepherdess" is the funniest Dead Mother story I"ve ever read, for sure.
DC: Reviewers often mention how bleak the stories are, and yes, that"s true, but it"s the humor in the face of bleakness that has kept me going. Even if it"s gallows humor.
I admired Cormac McCarthy"s apocalyptic novel, The Road, but I think there are a few things he got wrong. I think the end of the world will include a lot of great jokes. And singing. Laughter and music are probably the last human thing that will be taken away from us.
ES: That brings me to the idea of genre. I feel like you have deftly avoided getting pigeonholed as a genre writer, but in many ways, these are horror stories. Perhaps with the exception of "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.," which I read as a ghost story, these are not in any way supernatural, but there is an inky, murderous glee running throughout. Have you ever been tempted to go full-throttle on the other side of the fence? Or is there no longer a fence at all?
DC: I think there was a certain period of American Literature-maybe about fifty years, 1950a2000, let"s say-where "realism" and "literary" were more or less synonymous, and that had to do with the rise of genre as a commercial category as much as anything. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of our canonized writers had no qualms about working with the fantastic-from Hawthorne and Poe to James and Wharton-and my sense is that a lot of the prejudice against fantasy, horror, etc. started with the New Critics in the 1930s and "40s. There"s probably a long essay in that, which I won"t write.
If there has been a change, a lot of it, I think, was borne of frustration and boredom. By the mid-1990s, the domestic mode was starting to feel like a prison to a lot of younger writers. Many of us had grown up during the heyday of commercial SF and horror in the 1970s, and that was what we read as kids. Personally, I started out as a straight-up horror writer, and it was only when my creative writing teachers told me that they didn"t accept "genre fiction" that I began to work in a more realist mode. I would say that the restrictions were good for me, and that I really needed to broaden my emotional range and explore character more fully. At the same time, I think that a lot of the creative energy and impetus in my work comes from the fantastic, the supernatural, etc. I think there"s a little glimmer of it even in my most realistic pieces-and when it"s not there, the piece doesn"t feel as alive to me. But I also don"t think I"m exactly in the genre camp, either. I"m sort of caught in-between.
But anyway, it"s hard to make sweeping statements about literary culture. Whether we "re in a new era, I don"t know, but I do think that the fence is easier to cross.
ES: I"m curious if you feel like there is a midwestern sensibility in literature. Are things darker in the middle, like an inverted Oreo cookie, with brittle, light edges and a dark, rich center? What do you think living in Ohio, and growing up in the Midwest, has added to your work? Or do you feel so yoked to place that it"s not even a question of adding a layer, that it"s simply a part of your worldview?
DC: Part of it has to do with the intensity of feeling you have for any place you grew up. Any place you grew up in is, to some extent, haunted because you"re always looking back at the child that you were and there is a sense that that child is kind of a ghost in your life anyway. That"s one of the reasons I write about Nebraska and the Midwest so much. Western Nebraska, especially, has a hold on my mood as writer. The landscape is very desolate and it"s got a beauty to it, and yet there"s a sense that it wasn"t really meant to be inhabited. People shouldn"t be there. There"s a hostility about the landscape that"s really appealing to me. Settlers came and made these little elevator towns, but if you look at a 1930s map of Cheyenne County (where I grew up) you"ll see all these towns on the map that don"t exist anymore. They are nothing but foundation. There"s a quality about western Nebraska similar to the famous colony of Roanoke where they disappeared and n.o.body knew what happened to them. Something about the landscape can swallow people up.
Still, I"m not entirely sure what the terms "midwestern" and "regional" mean. Cleveland, where I live now, and which appears in some of the stories, is entirely different from western Nebraska. Other stories take place in Los Angeles, Portland, Boston, etc. I keep trying to expand my range.
But I do have a particular affinity for characters who have grown up in the middle of the country, and I think that it has to do with a certain kind of sense of being separate from the deciders and the trendsetters and the "center" of culture, which seems to be located somewhere on the coasts. I"ve always felt like an outsider, and my sympathies have always been with the folks who, for one reason or another, have been forgotten or ignored. Which is not to say that there aren"t plenty of forgotten and ignored folks in NYC and LA-only that the blanket seems heavier and perhaps more permanently suffocating as you approach the Heartland.
I can think of two or three stories in the collection that address this issue directly. The story "Shepherdess" is about a man who has found a degree of success in Los Angeles, but who is pulled back, maybe dragged down, by his own midwesterness. Meanwhile, "Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow" is about the way that a small town can become a weight and anchor, a paralyzing force. It"s funny, because even in the stories that take place outside the Midwest, the region exerts some kind of strange gravitational pull ES: This is your first story collection since Among the Missing, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Did you feel pressure returning to the genre, or do stories feel like a more comfortable zone for you?
DC: As you noted, these stories represent work that I"ve done in the short story form over the past ten years, since the publication of Among the Missing. So it"s not exactly like I"m "returning" to the form-I"ve been working in it all along. It"s been acc.u.mulating steadily, quietly, over the last decade, in between working on my novels.
Novels, it seems to me, require an exploration of a larger universe-a novel requires a certain kind of world building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn"t see. I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.
Short stories are a single glimpse into that larger novel world. They give you that thrill of peeping through a keyhole or catching a scene through a pa.s.sing window. The glimpse becomes larger than the sum of its parts, and it lingers in your imagination; as a reader, you are an active partic.i.p.ant in creating the world that exists beyond that brief glimpse, and to me that is an exciting thing. There is a sense that the reader and the writer are collaborating, and that the reader can imagine and create so much beyond the edges of the narrative.
You might say that, metaphorically, short stories are photographs, whereas novels are films or TV series.
And I am attracted to photography. I like the ways that it remains, always, open to interpretation and suggests s.p.a.ces that you can only imagine, never see. I feel like stories can really possess you, that they can feel like waking dreams, and you don"t necessarily know what"s going to emerge from them. You just can"t do a novel like that. I"ve tried, and believe me-it just turns into a huge mess.
ES: Your novels have both veered into the same dark, knotty places as the stories. When you have an idea and begin writing, is it clear to you whether that idea will be a story or a piece of a longer work?
DC: It"s funny, because most of the time I have no idea what form a piece will eventually take. Both of my novels started out as short stories. And there are three pieces here-"Stay Awake," "I Wake Up," and "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.," which I worked on for a while thinking that they might be novels.
I probably wrote fifty to a hundred pages on each of those before I gave up. For example, there are a few chapters of "Stay Awake" from Rosalie"s perspective, as a child and as a teenaged girl, when I imagined the story as a kind of ghostly Middles.e.x sort of book; and there is a long section from "I Wake Up" in which the narrator goes on a quest to meet his long-lost siblings; and there is practically another hundred pages of junk about the three sisters in "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.," from when it was going to be a novel called Three Sisters, and each woman lived in an alternate universe.
I ultimately gave up on all three books, and it"s hard to explain why they got stuck. The simple answer is that I was more interested in those stories as mystery. The novels all required me to explain things, and the explanations seemed to sap the energy out of the original idea.
ES: Well, luckily, the resulting stories are full of energy. I read Stay Awake on the subway, and missed my stop more than once. I know I"m speaking for many other readers when I say that whatever pages had to die to make this book, it was all worth it. I think the stories are mysterious, in both heart-quickening and very sympathetic ways. The world may be a dark and scary place, Dan, but it"s less so with these stories in it. It may still be dark, but at least we"re not alone.
Emma Straub is from New York City. Her story collection, Other People We Married, was published in February 2012 by Riverhead Books. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Slate, and The New York Times. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. Emma lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband.
Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. In the interview, Chaon talks about the stories in this collection as "ghost stories." Did you read them this way? In what ways are the events of the stories "supernatural"? Or does a ghost story have to have a literal ghost? What is a ghost?
2. Chaon mentions his love of sad music in his interview and says, "The thing I love about it is that it"s cathartic power." Do you find that to be true for yourself? Chaon"s stories often submerge the reader into a dark situation and then end without an easily resolved solution for the characters. Does this have the same cathartic power as a sad song? Or is the effect different?
3. Chaon speaks of his interest in people who "screw up," and the book is full of characters whose choices lead to trouble. How sympathetic are they? For example, how awful is January"s decision to sleep with her brain-damaged ex-husband in "Long Delayed, Always Expected"? How do we feel about the narrator"s decision to run out on his baby"s funeral in "Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow"? Which characters in the book were most sympathetic to you? Which characters do you most relate to? How would you react in a similar situation?
4. The loss of a child in handled in different ways in the stories "The Bees," "Stay Awake," and "Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow." How do these varying facets of grief intersect with each other, and in what ways do they present vastly altered experiences?
5. In some of these stories-"The Bees," "St. Dismas"-characters are trying to change. In others-"To Psychic Underworld:"-change has been thrust upon them. Does either scenario seem to imply that change is indeed possible? Can any of the characters in these stories escape from their situations and transform themselves?
6. Many of the main characters in the book seem to be "stuck" in some way-Robert in "I Wake Up," for example, or Brandon in "Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted." Is being "stuck" a situation of their own making? What prevents the characters from moving on in their lives?
7. In "Shepherdess," the author uses humor to further explore a character"s feelings about his mother"s death. Where else is such dark humor used in the collection? Were there points where you found the stories funny?
8. "Slowly We Open Our Eyes" presents a sequence of events featuring Smokey and O"Sullivan, two brothers, but the dramatic action in the story is obscured. Why do you think that is? What exactly happens to them?
9. The main characters in both "Take This, Brother, May It Serve You Well" and "To Psychic Underworld:" are widowers. In what way do you think that informs their actions and behaviors in the stories?
10. What is the meaning of the last section of the story "The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.": "Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?" What does this question mean in the context of the story? What does it mean in the context of the collection as whole?
MORE GREAT FICTION FROM DAN CHAON.
AWAIT YOUR REPLY.
"A riveting thriller chock full of plot twists, and a sober meditation on the erosion of ident.i.ty in the age of technology."
-Los Angeles Times YOU REMIND ME OF ME.
"Remarkable ... weaves the threads into a whole that is not only satisfying but devastating."
-Entertainment Weekly AMONG THE MISSING.