Red Cedar Review

On December 3, 2007, the editors of the Red Cedar Review, Lindsey Sloan and Jill Kolongowski, sat down with former RCR editor and writer Tom Bissell. Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974, and attended Michigan State University. In his time at MSU Tom majored in English and coedited the Red Cedar Review with Laura Klynstra. His relationship with RCR began in 1994, when his short story "Bars," the first story he ever published, appeared in volume 30 number 2. He then went on to edit RCR from 1994 to 1996 (vols. 31, 32, and 33).

Tom won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his short story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg, and spent most of 2007 living in Rome. His first book, Chasing the Sea, was recently selected (August 2007) by Condé Nast Traveler as one of the 86 best travel books of all time. Salon.com named The Father of All Things one of the ten best books of 2007.

He is currently living and working in Las Vegas, where he is a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada. His current projects are a novel set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and a nonfiction book provisionally titled Bones That Shine Like Fire: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve Apostles.

His essays, fiction, and journalism have appeared in Agni, the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, Best American Science Writing 2004, Best American Short Stories 2005, Best American Travel Writing 2003, 2005, and 2006, BOMB, the Boston Review, Esquire, Granta, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, Men's Journal, New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, Salon, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

He has published the books Chasing the Sea (Pantheon 2003); Speak, Commentary (co-authored with Jeff Alexander; McSweeney's 2003); God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories (Pantheon 2005); and The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon 2007). [End Page 69]

Sloan: In your book God Lives in St. Petersburg, how did you choose the order of your stories in the manuscript? And did the publisher retain this order when it was published?

Bissell: They did retain the order that I suggested. There's a real art to arranging stories in a collection and I'm afraid to say that the artistic parts of that process were pretty scrambled when I did it. I really didn't have a good order. The first story in the collection is a long story, so really the only question to me was what starts it. The long story first or the long story last? Those are really the only two options for a 60-page story, first or last. And I realized I probably didn't want to end the collection on a story that ends with the protagonist getting his leg blown off, so really the only option was for it to start the book. And then, for the other ones, it was maybe an afternoon of moving them around, and then I kind of hit on the combination that seemed to make the most sense to me. I've since realized that I should've swapped the order of a couple of them, because two of them deal with missionaries right in a row, and that was not what I wanted, in retrospect.

Sloan: For Red Cedar this year I had a really hard time—but my concern was: "What should I end it with?" and then, "What should I start it with?"

Kolongowski: I know they say to end with a strong piece, but I'm almost inclined to say you want to start with an equally strong one, too, to keep people reading, you know—when they pick it up they go to the front.

In the same vein, did you already have the stories for God Lives in St. Petersburg written and then decide to make a collection, or did you write them specifically for the book as a whole?

Bissell: I had another collection prior to this. It was half stories set in Central Asia, half stories that weren't. And when I tried to sell the collection, it didn't sell. One editor said, "You need all the stories about one thing," which is an example of the crappy publishing logic that goes into such decisions. I didn't really think much about it at the time; I never thought I had more Central Asia stories in me, and then the war in [End Page 70] Afghanistan began and I was lucky enough, if that's the phrase, to get to report on it as a journalist. The journalistic story I wrote about my experience in Afghanistan may have set a record. I was given 6,000 words, which is about 25 pages; I wrote a 235-page first draft of the article. Obviously, the version that got published was considerably shorter than that. It was about a 30-page story. So I had literally 200 pages of stuff that I never used. And so, I thought, "Well, here's something—I could write a short story just using a lot of the material, stuff that I wrote that didn't find its way into the journalism." And so I tried to imagine a character and a series of events to hang a story around all this observational stuff. And so when I wrote that story, I realized I had enough for a Central Asia-themed collection; but there was an odd man out, which was the last story in the collection, which is called "Animals in Our Lives," and that did not have a Central Asia sub-text. So I basically created one. I then had this Central Asia collection. My publisher still wasn't crazy about the idea of a collection. My sense was that they didn't want me to do a collection of fiction, for whatever reason. I suppose because they're hard, and I was, in their minds, a nonfiction writer. But, they did it. I'm not saying any of this to badmouth Pantheon at all, they're wonderful—but it is hard to publish story collections. Were I a college student looking at myself now, I would think, "Well, this is a writer who obviously can do what he wants, and isn't that wonderful and lucky?" But I can tell you that it doesn't feel that way when you're there. You still feel constantly frustrated, constantly blockaded, constantly flummoxed, constantly thwarted in what you're looking to do. I don't think you ever—I don't think any writer, and no matter what level of achievement they hit, even if you're Stephen King—gets beyond feeling frustrated. There's just something weirdly and cruelly endemic to writing that makes you feel like you're not getting, not achieving, what you want. The story collection was not originally a Central Asia story collection and it became one, and now I'm really thrilled, obviously, but at the time it just felt like I was being sort of twisted to do something I wasn't sure I wanted to—

Kolongowski: Being forced a little bit.

Bissell: Yeah, but now it seems totally wonderful, and what a gift for someone to have given me that piece of advice, but at the time I got the advice it was different. [End Page 71]

Sloan: My next question is about titles. Do you have a process for titling your work, or do the titles just come to you? Do you ever model your titles off of other titles, or reference other works in your titles? And do you find it useful to do this? I'm thinking about the Eggers reference in your essay Up the Mountain, Slowly, Very Slowly (New York Times, October 28, 2007). That is one of my favorite Dave Eggers stories. [The story being referenced is "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," in How We Are Hungry (McSweeney's 2004 ).]

Bissell: It's an amazing story. When I climbed Kilimanjaro, he was the person I asked for advice before I left. And he gave me good advice, which was, "Enjoy yourself." But only later did I realize that when you're throwing up at 16,000 feet and you feel like you're going to die, you realize, "Hey, I'm supposed to be doing this because it's fun." Anyway, titles. Titles to me are very, very, very important. I put a lot of thought into titles. And the first-draft title is very rarely what winds up being the final-draft title—and what happens almost always is after I write the thing, I have the crap title that I gave it—

Sloan: Your working title.

Bissell: The working title. Slightly more elegant phrase than "crap title."

Sloan: That's what I call them. It means crap.

Bissell: Let's go with "crap title." I have a crap title, and then I'll literally go title-hunting and look for a title-ish phrase that sort of jumps out at me. For my first book Chasing the Sea, oh my God, we had literally 20 titles for that book. And the title that we ultimately came up with is in the book, five pages from the end. "Chasing the sea" is a phrase that they use in Central Asia to describe the process by which fisherman chased the receding Aral Sea as it was shrinking.

Sloan: It's a good title.

Bissell: It wasn't my idea, funnily enough. We had some titles that were just abominable. My editor and I still make fun of each other for our respective [End Page 72] titles. I had one that was called Dust and Russians, Cotton and Khans; he had one that was called In Tamerlane's Shadow. I mean, these are just abysmal titles. And literally the day before the title was due, the final working title was A Hole in the Heart of the World. Not a great title, but not a terrible title.

Anyway, the day before the title was due, I was describing some of the book to an editor friend and he asked about the sea shrinking; he's like, "What do the fisherman do?" And I said, "Oh, that's funny, they called it 'chasing the sea' as they moved their boats closer and closer to the receding sea." And he said, "Well, that's the title." And I was like, "Oh snap." I went and called my editor and said, "Chasing the sea, chasing the sea!" and he said, "Yeah, that's it." And so there's an example of a title resulting from a chance conversation I had with someone the day before the final title was due.

For God Lives in St. Petersburg, the story and what became the title of the collection—that wasn't the crap title. It wasn't even the second-draft title, which was "A Great and Motionless Light." That is a phrase on the last page, but it just seemed a little pretentious to me. And then I was rereading the story, and one character says "God lives for Russians only in St. Petersburg." It's a weird phrase; I don't even know if Russians think that, you know, it's just something I made up. And I've since had some Russians tell me that no Russian would ever say that God lives in St. Petersburg. Well, it's still a good title, so what the hell. Nonetheless, the process through which you find titles is to me really exciting. You're hunting through your own work. How strange, isn't it? The title's in there somewhere and you can't find it, and yet you wrote it.

Kolongowski: I have heard of some authors who write a title first, and then write the story after. I could never do that. It's always the very last thing that I do.

Bissell: I've done that a couple times, but usually the title comes at the end.With the book I'm working on now, I had no title, and I just found a title a couple months ago; it just jumped out of something I was reading. The title is Bones that Shine like Fire; it's from a piece of legendary material associated with the apostles. And I think it's a wonderful title, really evocative. You know, Steinbeck and Hemingway and all these great 1920s and '30s modernist writers used to page through the King James Bible for titles. [End Page 73]

Sloan: That's a good idea.

Bissell:Well, there are vastly worse ways to do it. I never understand people who title their stories or books "Walking" or "Sunshine" or "Rain." I think a title has to do a lot of work—a lot of work.

Sloan: In a poem, the title is another line. That's a chance that you're missing if you don't do it right.

Bissell: Exactly.

Sloan: Just on a quick related note—I keep reading these interviews and reviews of your books where you're being compared to Hemingway, and you're being compared to Eggers. How do you feel about those comparisons? Not only being compared to anyone in general, but also who you're being compared to. And do you have a favorite—would you rather be compared to Eggers than Hemingway?

Bissell: You know, the Hemingway comparison troubles me for a couple of reasons. One, because not even Hemingway could survive that comparison, as it turned out. Two, because I'm not a huge Hemingway fan. I love his stories. I love his early stories in particular, and I love The Sun Also Rises. Once you get beyond that, I have a really hard time with Hemingway. I've read several biographies of him; I'm fascinated by the guy, but, I mean, the stuff you read about him reveals a guy that, at his best, was insufferable. But there's obviously something in his mode of working that I find very seductive. One of the stories in my collection is a straight rewrite of a Hemingway story, and why would I do that if I don't feel some strange magnetic pull to him? But it's not necessarily from a deep admiration, it's more from a fascination with who he is, not necessarily the writer he is. And Eggers. Well, Dave is a wonderful writer and a terrific guy, and if you're going to be compared to a writer around your own age, you could do a lot worse than that. I was compared to Graham Greene once, and that was the most delightful thing ever, because I love Graham Greene. It's nice being compared to writers you love; I won't deny that, but at the same time, the minute you start—here's the thing—getting compared to Graham Greene in a review, you feel good for ten minutes. Then you sit [End Page 74] at your computer and your screen's blank and all the Graham Greene or Hemingway comparisons in the world do not fill up that screen, so it's a nice thing that ultimately doesn't do much for you as a writer. But it's a nice thing to have happen. Sometimes you get compared to writers that you haven't really read that much of. Paul Bowles is another writer I've been compared to, and I've only read one thing by Bowles, and I barely remember reading it; so sometimes I think reviewers are just reaching for the simplest associative connections they can make.

Sloan: Do you know who Carolyn Forché is?

Bissell: Yeah, of course.

Sloan: I met her a few weeks ago—she was talking about how she no longer submits to small journals because they'll publish anything that she writes, and this is very scary to her because she doesn't want bad poems published. Do you still submit to small journals?

Bissell: I wish I had that problem. No, no, people are not publishing anything I write. I've written a couple short stories in the last few months, the first stories that I've written really in five years, and they've all been roundly rejected multiple times now, so . . . no, would that I were in the position that Carolyn Forché is in. I submit my stuff to magazines I like to read.

Sloan: That's a good rule.

Kolongowski: And then you know what they're looking for.

Bissell: Yeah, and I think it's part of being a good literary citizen, supporting magazines you like to read, buying them or getting subscriptions to them, and trying to be a part of their conversation. And I did this, you know, when I was starting out too, so I'm certainly not saying this is the worst thing in the world, but, you know, napalming the entire small journal world with your stories in the hopes that someone takes one, that's a necessary part of the process, but ideally one will winnow one's focus down eventually. [End Page 75]

I've had a lot more luck with my nonfiction than I've had with my fiction. My collection won a couple prizes, but all the stories came out in tiny little magazines. I've had no luck publishing my fiction in the bigger venues, but my nonfiction gets consistently published in sort of the big, glossy magazines, so it's kind of weird and sometimes frustrating.

Sloan: Do you consider yourself a fiction writer?

Bissell: I just consider myself a writer. I struggled with that—am I a fiction writer? Am I a nonfiction writer? And now I think I'm just a writer—sometimes I write fiction, sometimes I write nonfiction.

Kolongowski: Have you ever considered publishing poetry, or do you work with it at all?

Bissell: I read a fair amount of poetry; I like a lot of poets, but I'm not a poet, you know? The same way I'm not a screenwriter. Poetry's not a form I feel any competitive impulse to engage in. It's something I can consume with pleasure, but I can't hope to contribute to in that way. It's just—I'm not a poet. I tried to be; when I was here at MSU I wrote a lot of poems for Diane Wakoski, and never got much beyond "pretty good."

Kolongowski: In your fiction, do you have any favorite or returning characters that you write?

Bissell: No, I've never really done that. I have a returning place, which is called Flatrock, Michigan, which is the literal translation from Ojibwa of Escanaba, Michigan, my hometown. Flatrock comes up in a few stories that I've written. I wrote a whole novel set in Flatrock. The new novel I'm writing is set in Flatrock. Here's the funny thing: I'm talking about all the appearances of Flatrock in my fiction, but you'd have to search pretty hard for them in the published stuff, since virtually none of my Flatrock stories have been published. I can assure you that Flatrock occupies a very big place in here [gesturing toward his heart], but not so much in the books yet. So, no recurring characters, but one thing I do is I give characters the same last or first name a lot, but they're not necessarily the same person. I got addicted to the name "Teddy." When I first started writing I was naming everyone Teddy. [End Page 76]

Sloan: Salinger has a story named "Teddy." Many of his stories are inter-connected; you'll find the connections if you read Nine Stories a few times.

Bissell: Yeah, I like when other writers do it—and there's actually a couple places in my collection where I realized I could've done things like that, way after the fact. There's one moment where a character is writing a letter, and after the book came out I realized that I wish I would've made the letter to a character in another story. And then I would've gotten that nice, shiny, postmodern veneer, but I blew it.

Kolongowski: You still had the thought, though.

Bissell: I still had the thought which, you know, counts for something. Something I can talk about in an interview.

Sloan: Do you have any recurring themes in your work, or important issues that you try to highlight in your stories? Other than Flatrock?

Bissell: A lot of my stories tend to be about people who are in over their heads, relationships coming to grief, the modes of thinking in which our culture has trapped us, other cultures, and the inevitable disconnect between what you'd like to believe about yourself and what you actually are. I seem to not be able to get too far beyond any of those themes in my stuff, and I'm not complaining. They're fun themes; they're pretty rich themes to revolve around.

Kolongowski: You can go a lot of different ways.

Bissell: I haven't written a lot of fiction lately about this country; it's usually about Americans outside of this country. I like writing about that. There are not a lot of people doing that right now, and for me it's been great. I think, because I'm a traveler myself, I feel these things; I feel lost and confused, like the protagonists in my stories, and so I feel like art is, as someone said to me today, "describing something common in a way that is surprising." I think that's a great description of it, and I try to express the shock of the "other," from both sides of that exchange. When you take two people from different places, they're both the "other." Or we're all the [End Page 77] "other," I guess. Even when you're very intimate with someone and you know them well, they're still the "other," and taking that very basic human problem and expanding it, particularly in a time that's as politically fraught as this one, is interesting. I hope I never work this theme out completely because that would probably mean my career is over.

Kolongowski: You touched on this a little bit, but who are some of your favorite authors and what stories have inspired you, and why?

Bissell: My favorite novel of all time is absolutely George Eliot's Middlemarch. I don't know if you guys have read it. If you haven't, read it. Tomorrow. Start it tonight. It was published in 1872 by a woman who took a man's nom de plume. She was probably the most brilliant woman in the nineteenth century. She wrote nineteenth-century fiction with a sort of early-twentieth-century sensibility—parts of it are so contemporary feeling that your breath is taken away. She sort of foresaw everything a novel could do. Moby Dick is that way too, even though parts of Moby Dick are absolutely interminable. I mean, there's stuff that he's doing in Moby Dick that didn't really seem to be on the nineteenth-century menu when it came to novels. And Middlemarch is like that, but it's not a sea story, it's a domestic story; it's a relationship story. It's about a town in England, and it's just a perfect novel. I could literally read the book over and over again, it's so good. It's so funny and beautiful, and the characters are amazing.

George Eliot, for all of her brilliance, was possibly one of the homeliest human beings to have ever walked the planet Earth. I mean, she was truly homely, in the most tragic sense of that word. And her main character, Dorothea, is this really beautiful girl, but no one knows it yet. And so, amidst all the awesomeness and intellectual brilliance of the novel is this incredibly human story, which is the pure authorial projection of the author—what she feels inside herself—onto this character, Dorothea. And it's totally heartbreaking. When you can be as wonderful and brilliant as George Eliot was, and still feel as she felt about herself—crippled by this thing completely beyond her control—what this does is create a tension in the text of someone who is gifted in every imaginable way but feels cosmically slighted in this one way. To me, Middlemarch is the book that ends all books. [End Page 78]

Contemporary novelists that I love are Thomas McGuane, an MSU writer who's one of the funniest writers I've ever read. Zadie Smith's great.

Sloan: She's fantastic.

Bissell: Zadie Smith's On Beauty is the book that just knocked my socks off. I love Martin Amis, even though lately his politics have taken an alarmingly right-wing turn. I love Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist—do you know him? He sort of changed the way I felt about what nonfiction could do and sort of awakened me to its possibilities. I love David Foster Wallace's work. I also love Laurie Moore because she's so funny. To me, as I get older, I lose my patience for things that aren't funny. To me, if it's funny, it's automatically good, you know? Particularly when we live in such a grim, humorless time, the necessity for writing stuff that actually makes people laugh seems to be more important.

Kolongowski: Definitely.

Sloan: Do you read David Sedaris?

Bissell: You know, I read him when he's in the New Yorker, and he always makes me laugh, but I can't say I'm a huge fan of his.

Sloan: Have you read "Six to Eight Black Men?" It's probably the funniest David Sedaris story.

Bissell: I read a story about him being asked to move, on a plane. Did you read that one? A woman wanted David Sedaris to switch seats with her husband. And in arguing with her, he coughed up a cough drop onto her. That's pretty freakin' funny. So, yeah, I like David Sedaris—I owe him for life because when I was a book editor, I published a book called The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, and he—totally on his own volition—went around the country talking about how great the book was, and who knows how many copies it sold because of David Sedaris backing it, so I feel an immense fondness toward him for that. He's one of the good guys.

Sloan: Do you ever read Amy Hempel? [End Page 79]

Bissell: Yeah, I teach with Amy in Bennington's MFA program.

Sloan: I love Amy Hempel.

Bissell: She's great. She's a great story writer.

Sloan: They're just perfect, every single story is just—it's perfect.

Bissell: It's hard to find a writer who does more with less than she does. I mean, she's extraordinary in that way.

Sloan: I read—it was in the Believer—that she writes the last line of every story first. When she was cleaning out her apartment, she found this box of last lines of stories. It's fantastic. Which I thought was really interesting, because it's not what I do at all.

Bissell: Yeah, that's—wow. I'm going to ask her if that's really true. It probably is.

Sloan: Do you outline your novels prior to writing them, or do they just come to you as you write? I know that you've written multiple novels.

Bissell: Sadly, none of them are any good.

Sloan: No, not that they're not good, but that no one—

Bissell: No, they're not good. Trust me, they're not good. Parts of them, ahem, are excellent. As a whole, they don't work as novels. Anyway, I outline stuff, but not in a dogmatic way. And if I ever want to abandon the outline for a while, I'll try that. To me, when you're writing something that's long, you're basically in a boat and you're in the middle of the ocean, and you have no clue where you're going. And only an idiot would turn down the possibility to look at a map occasionally in that situation. So I think stuff like that is just smart preparation. You need a map. It doesn't mean that the map is going to be right all the time; maybe it's a bad map or it's an outdated map, but I think it helps to have a map. [End Page 80]

I try to be as undoctrinaire as possible when talking about writing because everyone has a different way of doing things, but I do think that, for the most part, it's probably a good idea to have some idea of what you're doing as you're doing it—with the complete freedom to abandon it at any moment.

Kolongowski: I read in an interview that you didn't originally intend to become a travel writer. I was wondering what made you decide to start doing that—obviously all the traveling you did with the Peace Corps, but—what made you decide to write about those experiences?

Bissell: Well, a gentleman named George W. Bush really helped me become a travel writer in that I had a contract to write this book about Central Asia before the awful, tragic events of September 11. Suddenly this thing happened and, as a result, a part of the world that I was deeply invested in was on the front page of every newspaper, and the American military was headed there and everyone knew it. And so I went to Afghanistan and began my, sort of, career as someone who would go to a place and write about it in that kind of a way, and from that I kind of spun out into writing pieces about places that your average person would not be crazy about going to. And I've really loved it.

I never had any plans to be a travel writer; it's all just circumstance and being at the right place at the right time, or wrong time, as it were, I don't even know, wrong place at the right time, right place at the wrong time, I couldn't tell you—but it was never anything I planned. One of the travel writers I like is a guy named Redmond O'Hanlon. He's a British travel writer who writes about really messed-up places like Borneo, and the Congo, Sumatra, and he made me think, when I was fresh out of college, "This seems like a really cool thing to do." But I never for a minute imagined myself falling into that way of doing things.

I really love travel writing. I think it's a wonderful thing to actually go to these places and try to rip out of your experience a story that can maybe broaden people's understanding of a place, or maybe whet someone's interest. The nicest letters I've ever gotten from people—that doesn't happen that often—but I've gotten a couple letters from people who've told me: "After I read your book I went to Uzbekistan and had a great time." And that to me is the most awesome thing imaginable—that I actually made someone want [End Page 81] to go to this place. I mean, what more could you ask for? It's just wonderful. So I think of travel writing as kind a kind of holy endeavor in that way. Take my mom, who imagines there's a terrorist in every city outside the United States, waiting to kidnap her son. I keep going to these places and I keep writing about them, and my mom reads about these places. That my mom's come around and kind of recognized that there may be some pretty good, friendly people out there in the world has also been nice. These are old-fashioned liberal ideas, like the brotherhood of man, or something like that. I certainly don't mind trying to write stuff that could be reasonably construed as falling into that tradition: how are we alike, how are we different.

Kolongowski: Have you read, or heard of, Three Cups of Tea? It's about Greg Mortenson, a man who traveled—I believe it was to Pakistan, but to other places in the Middle East too—building schools for all students, but also for women specifically, and it's really uplifting.

Bissell: Three cups of tea is the number of cups they pour for you in that part of the world before you have to leave the house.

Kolongowski: Yes. It's really great. He came across this village named Korphe and you see, from the people he meets there, that the stereotypes are just so wrong that people have about those societies.

Bissell: Yeah. There are some horrid people out in the world but the vast majority of them are—even people who have politics and personal beliefs that in many cases I find, you know, alarming to loathsome—even those people treat you with respect and hospitality, most of the time. And it just makes you realize how transitory all the crap that we associate with these judgments truly is. We come from our culture and we project onto theirs. I'm not saying this as a cultural relativist. I do not like that women in a lot of these places have essentially zero rights and get treated like bullshit, but the fact of the matter remains that we're all trapped within our own cultural precepts and it takes a heroic imagination to imagine your way out of that. It really does. It took heroic people to imagine their way out of slavery in this country. Heroic people turned the tide against this, and it's going to take the same kind of imaginative heroism to transform those societies. And you can't hold it against the society that it does not yet have [End Page 82] the requisite heroes to transform it, as much as we all wish that could be the case. It's not now, but maybe we'll live to see it. But, you know, to get off-topic, the methods in which we've been engaging lately to change these societies are probably not the ticket either.

So I guess I consider travel writing as a middle ground between something really awful and bellicose and something really awful and wishy-washy, which is to say the kind of milque-toast liberalism that believes, "Oh, every culture is equally worthy." I mean, some cultures engage in practices that I think any of us sitting at this table would just be horrified to see enacted. You see what I'm saying: travel writing's a way to go right up between one unacceptable response, which is war, and another, which is nihilistic relativism. It tries to mediate a place where we can all recognize our shared humanity, I guess.

Sloan: Does the strain of using international encounter as a primary narrative motivation reflect a dissatisfaction with American domestic experience or with American fiction, which often has little concern for experience outside of its borders?*

Bissell: A lot of the reviews that my collection got when it came out, because it came out in 2005, were reading the stories as allegories about George Bush's America. But I wrote most of these stories before anyone knew that George Bush was going to lead our great nation into infernal fires of . . . George Bush's America. So, obviously the stories being published when they were created this electricity around them that otherwise would not have been quite so evident. I have a personal dissatisfaction with the American domestic experience, and maybe that comes out in my fiction, but it's never anything political. It's never that I don't like domestic American fiction. In fact, I imagined I would be a fiction writer who wrote about primarily domestic themes, and it's only the caprice of my own life that has led me down a completely different path. There's no value judgment there. I would happily read a novel about a woman washing dishes, thinking about feeding her cat, if it were brilliantly written. I have no thematic prejudice in that sense.

Sloan: I think there are those brilliant domestic works like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. [End Page 83]

Bissell: You can write great stuff about almost anything. Almost anything. I primarily read American fiction. I have very little dissatisfaction with American fiction in general. I think it may not be a good time to be a writer, but it's certainly a pretty good time to be a reader. There's an awful lot of good books out there. I walk into a decent bookstore, particularly one that has a lot of contemporary fiction, and I both want to cry for joy and just cry out of sheer horror that there's all this stuff that exists that's totally superlative and I'll get to read so little of it.

Sloan: You published your first story in Red Cedar.

Bissell: I did. God bless Red Cedar.

Sloan: Do you ever look back at your earlier writings—you were talking about this a little bit—and want to make changes, or are you proud of everything that you've published? Because I read the story in Red Cedar and I liked it.

Bissell: Early, early stuff that I've written I basically read like I have no idea who wrote it, because, you know, we all are narcissists, essentially, and you go back and read something you wrote and occasionally you think, "Oh, how clever. Wow, I didn't know I was that smart." But usually you're reading older stuff and thinking, "Gah! Oh, no!" And you really can't believe what you're reading. Chasing the Sea is my first book—that just came out four years ago, right? And I have a hard time reading parts of that now, because I just think there's something about it that missed the mark, you know?

Kolongowski: Well, how many times have you looked at it, too?

Bissell: Hundreds, hundreds of times. You're never finished with anything. I'm not the first person to say this: you're not finished with anything, you just stop working on it. There are a few things that I've written that I'm objectively proud of, that I wouldn't change a word in, but very few, very few. Most of the things are stuff I just gave up on because they were due, I needed the money, someone was saying, "This needs to be turned in now." [End Page 84]

Actually, I don't think enough thought goes into this aspect of how books are actually written. Dickens, for instance, was someone who was constantly writing under the gun. A lot of the great literature from the nineteenth century was so market-driven. Like Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad—which was one of the first American travel books—and which was serialized. In the book Twain goes to Gibraltar, and he goes to Italy, and he goes to Jerusalem, and he goes to Egypt, and he comes back. It's one of the funniest books I've ever read. It also has such a bad case of literary elephantism because he was writing it for a company that was selling subscriptions to the book chapter by chapter, as it was being written. So he was being encouraged to overwrite by hundreds of pages. And reading it, you can really tell that this is a guy who is just riffing for the sake of riffing. And it's kind of awesome because it's Mark Twain, and who wouldn't want to hear Mark Twain riff? But at the same time, it forces you into realizing that even great writing—even great classic writing by undisputed geniuses—have had their work compromised by all these extraliterary things. If I hadn't read the introduction to Innocents Abroad, I never would have known any of this. I only would have thought, "Why the hell is this book so long?" But then when you read about the creation of the book, you realize, Mark Twain was actually selling out, you know? He was doing the bidding of his corporate masters!

Kolongowski: It's very human, too.

Bissell: It's very human. I hate books that are sort of airlessly perfect. I like books that have some kind of tragic flaw in them.

Kolongowski: Yeah. You know, he wasn't writing completely from the motivation of "This is what I want to be doing."

Bissell: Exactly! He was like, "I need to send my kids to private school."

Sloan: How do you feel about authors who—so I'm thinking of A Heart-breaking Work of Staggering Genius—but authors who—I guess he did it for a purpose, and I really loved his book—but there's like this one section where he's talking about playing Frisbee with his brother— [End Page 85]

Bissell: Yeah, I know the part you're talking about.

Sloan:—and he's just describing and describing and describing, and it was great, but . . . it was a lot of description.

Bissell: Well, he was trying to do something . . . different, I guess. He was obviously thinking, "I want to describe a 20-page Frisbee scene," and he did it. And he can do it because he's so talented.

Sloan: Right.

Bissell: There's a scene in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, I don't know if you've ever read that, I think it's like an 80-page section—I love that book; it's a great book—but there's an 80-page section where these kids are playing this game called Eschaton, from eschatology, from eschatological, the end of the world, and it's this nuclear-warfare simulation game where these kids are playing it, and it's like a full body role-playing game, and it's like 80 pages of absolute agony of this game that Wallace invented and is clearly loving describing all the intricate rules of. And reading it I could not stop thinking, "Dude, no one cares."

Kolongowski: It's like Dungeons and Dragons.

Bissell: Dungeons and Dragons with nuclear weapons. And I was complaining about that section of the book to a friend, who also loves Wallace, and he said something very wise, which is, "Not everything in a great book can be the best part." That's something I've taken with me. If the book is great, the book is great. And some parts are going to not be great. And like I said, books that have some sort of big flaw in them, I'm just instantly warmed to them, because it means they were made by someone who is a human being. And there's something about books that have flaws, just like people who have flaws. You know how when you feel attracted to someone or when you love someone, you often find yourself thinking about their imperfections, and the ways you find them kind of cute? Well, I think it's the same thing with books and writers that you like. You're drawn to the things that are vulnerable. And I really think that that is very analogous to how we read, because when you're reading, you are forming an [End Page 86] intense emotional attachment to something—at least I am. And so it's no surprise that a lot of those attachments work themselves out in weirdly similar ways to the way you forge friendships with people.

Kolongowski: In light of the whole James Frey debacle, I want to know what your take is on the issue of "truth" in nonfiction writing and how you define truth.

Bissell: Here's what I think. Obviously, the stuff Frey did was unacceptable. He created events that did not happen. And the book is not good enough to be good without thinking it's true. And that's a very subjective, weird process, when a book's value is based on the fact that it happened.

Kolongowski: If he hadn't labeled it a memoir, it wouldn't have been a problem.

Bissell: But it wouldn't be a very good book if he said it was fiction. It's a reductive, hectoring, emotionally dictatorial, preachy book about a not very likable guy who hangs his whole story on the precept that this is the unvarnished, noble truth, and you have to be a real fucking moron or a con man to sell your book on that kind of a hook when it's filled with fabrication. I mean, that's all I can say.

Kolongowski: And when you get Oprah involved . . .

Bissell: When Oprah had him on, that was one of the most disgraceful things I've ever seen. She should've been ashamed of herself. I mean, at no point in that discussion did anyone acknowledge that many great, beloved classics of nonfiction have tons of invention in them.

Kolongowski: I mean, aren't quotations technically invention? Can you remember exactly what was said?

Bissell: If you didn't record it, no. You're right. All representation in story form is an invention, because there's no such thing as a story in real life. We're all going to tell different stories about our interview today. For me, maybe it begins earlier this afternoon. For you, maybe it begins when you [End Page 87] leave and go to your playwriting class. You see what I mean? There's no such thing as a story unless there's a presiding consciousness deciding what the story is—that is a creation that is an invention that is an imposition of an artificial sense of order upon events that have no intrinsic or natural order. So to me, telling a story is itself an abandonment of the truth. It doesn't mean that I think all truths are equally valuable. I'm not trying to be a theoretician here, but I do think that people think way too simplistically about this. My first book, Chasing the Sea, has nothing in it that's made up, but it does have chronological things that did not happen in quite the order that I say they did. There are events that are transposed; there are characters that are renamed.

Sloan: But they're events that happened.

Bissell: Nothing in it is made up, but there's stuff that I think would not pass the same kind of reading that the Smoking Gun gave James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. I admit this in another essay that I published elsewhere about one of my favorite travel books, The Road to Oxiana, which is a book about a British journalist who traveled from Beirut to Kabul in the 1930s, which is absolutely hysterical, and which I read while I was in Afghanistan, all the while thinking, "God, this is so like what I'm experiencing now," and then I later found out that large parts of it are essentially invented. But it's representationally accurate. And he didn't make anything up either, he really took the trip. And he's clearly writing stuff that has some rough echo of felt experience, but he's adumbrating it, he's elaborating on it; he's doing what writers do. And so to me it seems like this is a spectrum. On one side there's clearly stuff that's acceptable, and then on one side there's clearly stuff that's not acceptable, and then there's stuff in the middle that can kind of go either way. It seems to me that when talking about this, you really, really, really have to think hard about where your own personal Geiger counter is.

I have talked to newspaper journalists in particular about this, and they're always saying something along the lines of, "But if you allow yourself to do one thing, how do you know when to stop?" And that's the stupidest question in the world. I mean, how do you know when to keep from punching someone in the face when you're having an argument with them? I mean, you just know! You just know. In this country in particular, [End Page 88] it seems to me kind of willfully childish the way we talk about nonfiction, fiction, and the difference. I brought up this example in a class I visited today: I've written journalism that is entirely about other peoples' experience, and I've written short stories that are very thinly veiled autobiographical fiction. So here you get into a very interesting area. One is labeled as fiction, and yet it has a lot more direct relationship to my own experience than this "nonfiction" about someone's reported experience to me, on which I am then just putting my own interpretation. These two examples alone just let you see how completely inadequate "fiction" and "nonfiction" are as artistic labels for something.

Kolongowski: Well then you have "creative nonfiction"; how does that fit in? How do you define "creative"?

Bissell: I like "narrative journalism"; I like "writerly nonfiction," which is like nonfiction by people who care about what sentences sound like.

Sloan: That's always nice.

Bissell: I consider myself someone who writes "writerly nonfiction," and fiction. Obviously, I'm fascinated by this question, and I think about it a lot. And I tell you, as I've gotten older, I'm a lot less willing to monkey around than I was when I wrote Chasing the Sea. I'm more careful because I do see now how losing track of where these lines are can become a problem and I never, ever, ever would want my career to implode because of, you know, stupid indiscretions that you make when you're a young writer. But at the same time, I think that the way that the whole Frey thing got talked about with Oprah just revealed to me how people are so willing to be outraged about completely stupid things, you know? How's that for eloquence, completely stupid things?

Kolongowski: Well, it was stupid.

Sloan: I read this book called Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir by Lauren Slater, and this whole book is about how she has epilepsy, and then you get to the end of the book and she doesn't have epilepsy. It was really interesting to deal with that—well, because she calls the book Lying is it ok that, [End Page 89] you know, she makes up her doctor, she makes up her diagnosis, she makes up her epileptic fits—

Bissell: And she's been accused of making up stuff in her more straight nonfiction. Probably because of that memoir.

Sloan: Yeah. I had a hard time dealing with that book.

Bissell: Well, you can become a zealot so easily on this question. Something doesn't have to be absolutely literally true, but it can be true to the spirit of what you the writer experienced, without distorting. As long as you're not telling lies about people and trying to hurt them—I think you have some leeway about how you choose to represent things. That's my view.

Kolongowski: I wrote an essay where I combined—it was nonfiction—and I combined two people; they kind of served the same purpose in the story, so I combined them—

Bissell: A composite character.

Kolongowski: Yes. And used dialogue that they had both said for one person, and a lot of people were upset about that. I was surprised, because I felt it would have been tedious to have essentially this person who—they were just duplicates of each other, at least in the story—

Bissell: If it doesn't damage the truth about the person, if you're not distorting anything people said, it's totally, to me, it's a legitimate form of nonfiction.

Kolongowski: Exactly.

Bissell: Like Michael Finkel. He was a hugely talented, hot young journalist for a while. He was writing pieces about everywhere, about the most awful places imaginable; he was braver than hell—he would go anywhere, write anything. He wrote a piece about kids in Africa who were being sold into slavery and he took three of these kids and turned them into one kid—took three sets of experiences and turned them into one, and as soon [End Page 90] as some aid groups tried to find this kid, they quickly realized that he'd done this. They reported it to New York Times Magazine; Finkel got fired and called a liar. But here's the thing: in doing that—

Sloan: Those were the experiences.

Bissell: Those were the experiences of actual human beings. The point wasn't that this kid existed. The point was that this situation was happening.

Kolongowski: And I'm sure he had—if it was necessary, wouldn't he have had the information anyway, to find them?

Bissell: Yeah. I think each case in which an author does this—I think they should all be judged on the merits of what the author is trying to do and to what purpose. And if none of this is obvious to you, then maybe you shouldn't be reading, because obviously subtleties are beyond you.

Sloan: I know a lot of people were taking issue with What Is the What by Dave Eggers, and it's presented as fiction; it's very up front about what it's doing, he's true to his story.

Bissell: And people attacked it.

Sloan: And people attacked it. People are just ripping this book apart and it's—I think it's great what he's doing.

Bissell: It's stupidity. The attacks, that is.

Sloan: I mean, he's helping someone get a voice and getting his story out there.

Bissell: The kid's not a writer, he's not a professional writer, probably never thought about being a writer . . .

Sloan: And—didn't he spend months interviewing him? These are his experiences. [End Page 91]

Kolongowski: If he's up front about it, what's the problem?

Sloan: It's presented as fiction. And people are taking issue with this, I mean—

Bissell: People accused him of . . .

Sloan: Capitalizing on the story.

Bissell: Yeah.

Sloan: Though he's donating the profits . . .

Bissell: It's just pure jealously. There are certain kinds of folks who you can never please, particularly if you're a young, famous writer like Dave is. You can't win. No matter what he does, he'll be attacked by some idiot, so God bless him for doing what he does. It's just hard to know we live a world in which you can tell the wrenching story of the Lost Boys of Sudan in an unbelievably successful, completely moving, utterly absorbing way, and still find these vampire bats attached to yourself, you know, sucking your blood, complaining about it. I don't get it, but it just goes to show you that people don't really necessarily believe in the morality of their argument; they're just looking for outrage. And there's a lot of that in the world and a lot of that in the literary world, unfortunately. But luckily my books have not nearly been successful enough to attract any of that attention.

Sloan: As an author who writes both fiction and nonfiction, how would you describe your approach to each genre? And do you often find yourself blurring lines as much in your fiction, would you say, as in your non-fiction?

Bissell: Since I started writing magazine journalism, I never write fiction in the first person anymore. Because when I write in the first person, I find myself going into the voice of Tom Bissell, the magazine writer. And it's very limiting, because I find it very hard to abandon my own consciousness in the first person and try to imagine my way into another [End Page 92] person's, whereas when I'm writing in the third person, I don't feel myself in my head as much. So one thing writing nonfiction has done is completely vanquished the impulse to write fiction in the first person for me. And it's kind of weird that first-person writing for me is, now, associated with what I do when I'm writing magazine journalism, whereas fiction I'm always writing in the third person. Not that this is of much interest to anyone but me and my mom, but . . .

I think having a fiction background made me conscious that I liked to write sentences that are beautiful. In my experience, a lot of journalistic-type folks think that's pansy stuff—they just want to go write the "story."

Sloan: MSU (Michigan State University) journalism students taking English courses are famous for that.

Bissell: You need to actually have some opinions. And you need to write well.

Sloan: This isn't an objective paper.

Bissell: I know I wouldn't be a nonfiction writer if it weren't for the fiction stuff—it just wouldn't have happened. I've never had a journalism class in my life. I couldn't tell you the first thing about journalism. I don't know how to write nonfiction; all I know how to do is tell stories and that's because of the fiction. So I didn't have to reconsider myself at all. I did have to reconsider the genre of nonfiction, though, as being a much richer and more open thing than I had previously imagined it to be.

Sloan: Is there a difference between doing justice to factual events and people in nonfiction and doing justice to emotional events or characters in fiction?*

Bissell: Yes, there is a difference in that the actual people you're writing about in nonfiction tend to call you afterwards whereas imaginary people don't tend to complain if you somehow get it wrong. But in the long run there's no difference at all. In the short term there's a huge difference. [End Page 93]

Sloan: Have your jobs in editing affected the way you write? And do you find yourself more critical of your own writing, or are you able to separate that?

Bissell: It made me a much better self-editor. It made me a lot more willing to cut myself. The biggest impact being an editor has had on my work is that it's made me a lot less freaked out and panic-stricken during the publication process than a lot of my writer friends who've not had that background. I think that's because it's given me a sense of what publishers can or really can't do during the publication process. The people who don't have the publishing background assume that publishers are incompetent fools who, if they really want a book to sell, just have to snap their fingers and it'll sell. It's not the case. Publishers can take the ball up to about the 15-yard line, but gaining those last 15 yards are complicated by a set of completely unpredictable factors. And I feel like my publisher has gotten me up the field pretty far, and those last few yards have just not happened, not because of anything anyone's done, just because that's the way it goes. So it's made me a lot more understanding about the process of what actually happens when a book is published and I'm very grateful to my work in publishing for that, and I think it's made me a lot less of a basket case than I may have been had I not had that experience going into it. I mean, I just, I feel for editors. They're in an impossible situation.

Sloan: For me, editing for the MSU Press has taught me about the constraints editors deal with, such as deadlines and contractual obligations. I don't think that's a lesson I would have learned as an author. What are you reading right now?

Bissell:From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries for my current book project, and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which just won the National Book Award. I just read John Updike's Couples—I reread it for like the first time since eighth grade, and it has just as much sex in it as I remember. One thing I'm dying to read is Zadie Smith's introduction to Middlemarch—she's writing the introduction to the new edition that is coming out in 2008. That's the thing I'm most keenly anticipating reading right now. I'm reading The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk: a history of the Western and Muslim worlds' collisions through time. The last novel that [End Page 94] I read that I really loved is What Is the What—I thought that was great. It made me so crushingly sad when I finished it. And On Beauty, too, I read both those last spring.

Sloan: How would you compare your writing process for articles versus fiction and nonfiction?

Bissell: I used to think that writing fiction was a lot harder, but as you write and publish more your bag of tricks becomes ever smaller. You find yourself not wanting to repeat yourself, or not wanting to resort to the same kind of structural stuff. The last few nonfiction pieces I've written have been a real struggle, and I've had the kinds of difficulties I've associated with writing fiction. At this point the process is horrifying because—this unfortunately is very true—you never really have any idea what you're doing. I don't, at least. Writers that I think have some idea what they're doing are like James Michener, Anne Rice—I think she knows what she's doing. I think actually knowing what you're doing may be artistic suicide.

Sloan: Because that's all that you do.

Bissell: There's something really exciting about not fully knowing what any piece of writing is. And this is the objection I have to critics of traditional writing. For me just creating a believable situation with imaginary people is enough of a trick.

Sloan: Are you still with the Virginia Quarterly Review? What is your position there?

Bissell: I still write for them and I always suggest things to them. I'm a contributing editor which means . . .

Sloan: You're on the masthead.

Bissell: Right, and that the editor, Ted Genoways, returns my phone calls. But it's a great magazine and I've loved everything I've gotten to do with them. It's really weird that a literary quarterly has made the splash that it has. And I feel very fortunate; I met Ted at a writing conference and he [End Page 95] said, "Can I put you on the masthead of this magazine that I've just become editor of?" and I said, "Yeah, all right"—I had no idea the stuff he had planned for this magazine. It's been really amazing watching him work his magic; he's really extraordinary.

Sloan: Do you think it is helpful for authors to be involved with the production of literary journals?

Bissell: Sure, just in the sense of . . .

Sloan: Being a good literary citizen?

Bissell: Yeah, and if you're interested in the magazine, and you care about what you read, and you want the magazines you're associated with to do well. This notion where the writer is this individual solitary genius is totally bullshit. There's no historical precedent for it. Almost every kind of solitary lone-wolf writer you can think of had a little school around him. Writers like other writers, they do; it always has been the case; it always will be the case. I like to think of myself as someone who is enthusiastic about things and I like meeting other people who are enthusiastic and want to do things. Rapport of this sort is a great thing. Any time you can find yourself attached to something that looks really fulfilling and interesting you should do it.

Sloan: How did your work with the Red Cedar Review play a role in shaping your future?

Bissell: It made me interested in what an editor does, how an editor works, and how an editor interacts with writers. It gave me immense empathy for people who send their stuff in, and it made me a little less snooty about my own work landing in slush piles. It made me realize that it's really hard to publish a magazine. It made me realize that I love being on that side of things. So, yeah, as far as I can tell, Red Cedar had a determinative impact on my life.

When I wanted to do it, it was just Laura [Klynstra] and one other person, and the other person graduated, so then it was just Laura, and I said, "Can I help you?" And she let me do the fiction editing. It was just us, [End Page 96] we didn't have any readers. It was just the two of us for the first year we did it together.

Sloan: Did you get a lot of submissions?

Bissell: We got a lot of submissions. When I went to Harper's as an intern I was the only intern there who was really into, say, literary things. The other interns were kind of hard news, journalism people. And I was the literary one, and I just liked reading the slush pile. I found it very beautiful just looking through it. It's very rare that you find anything that just jumps out at you, but almost always you find stuff that have parts that are excellent and I remember writing those people letters. I remember getting letters, too—and I still get rejection letters—that say something nice about something, and it makes a big difference. Very few people should be discouraged; very few people should be really encouraged. Everyone in the middle deserves something a little better than complete dismissal, and I think editing the RCR made me a better human being in general.

When you're young and you want to be a writer you tend to think of anyone else as the enemy, really. I did, at least, because you think that only a limited number of people get to be writers.

In the class I spoke to today, I said: "In this classroom about five people are good enough to be professional writers, and get paid for it, but the fact is the most talented person in this room probably won't be one of them unless he or she is also the most demonically driven person." It really takes just an insane, crazy amount of drive. I'm not saying this to cast myself as a martyr, but I can remember all the New Year's Eves I've spent at home writing my novel that never got published. And I remember feeling both really happy and crushingly miserable that this was my lot in life. It's New Year's Eve and I'm writing this novel—writing is a lot of nights like that, a lot of nights that you're just utterly alone, totally within your own head trying to create something beautiful or something moving or something awful. That's the kind of drive you have to feel, otherwise I don't think you have a shot. At least that's what I did, and every writer I know, literally every writer I know, would tell you the same thing. And I don't think that's a coincidence. I think you just have to be nuts about it.

Sloan: You have to feel like there's nothing else you can do. [End Page 97]

Bissell: That's how writers feel. There's nothing else they could do. You're utterly unemployable in some basic sense. So you need to just find something to do while you're waiting, while you're writing. Just looking for that thing to fill up time.