Display Interview

Conducted by Dan Wickett on 4/18/2005
The following is an interview with Charlie D’Ambrosio, author of the short story collection, The Point, as well as the essay collection, Orphans.  Charlie was born and raised in Seattle.  He is scheduled to have a second collection of stories published by Knopf next year.


Dan:

Hello Charlie, thank you for taking a bit of time to answer some questions.

Charlie:

My pleasure.

Dan:

Born and raised in Seattle, and then moving to Iowa in the late 80’s / early 90’s to attend the MFA program.  What kind of cultural shock was that?

Charlie:

Hardly any shock at all, at least as a move.  By the time I took off for the workshop I'd gone to college in Ohio and Chicago, lived in Paris and then half a dozen places in and around New York. I had become an expert in boxing up apartments.  My mother taught me to slice the strapping tape with a razorblade and store the flattened boxes beneath my bed, ready for the next move. Moving to Iowa was a snap.  I was sick of the east coast and I remember walking the quiet streets of Iowa City the night I arrived and feeling tremendous relief.

Dan:

In terms of your writing – how did attending Iowa’s MFA program help you?  I know you’ve had an essay reprinted in The Eleventh Draft:  Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop which was edited by Frank Conroy.  With his unfortunate passing last week, any specific memories involving him?

Charlie:

Iowa is all about the time to work and the excellent way the Workshop facilitates and makes possible a very intense conversation about writing. I always tell people the program does precious little teaching, and yet somehow, along the way, a good enough writer discovers a lot and finds himself, mysteriously, on his way.  At least that was my experience.  The conversation matters most of all.  No one else does it quite like Iowa, 
And half the trick, I think, is that almost from the get-go the Workshop treats you as if you were a writer, and at some point that you can't quite plot on a timeline you come to believe it yourself. The culture of the place kind of does it to you, once you're ready, that is. The teachers don't matter that much, at least they didn't to me, except for Frank Conroy. I even stopped going to one workshop because I couldn't stand the atmosphere. But the conversation outside of class, the talk, that was wonderful --my friend Tom
Grimes was a revelation: the guy talked like a writer and it was a miracle for me to hear. He talked about Conrad or Fitzgerald or whoever like they were neighbors down the street. Again, the culture of the place –the people, the conversation-- encourages this kind of thing. I used to fish every afternoon for bass and bluegill with Chris Offutt and one day he turned to me an said, We're doing it.  This is it.  He was already out of the program but I knew exactly what he meant. Nothing particularly startling or momentous had occurred, but things were changed anyway, and we were writers --that is, people who wrote-- and we felt it in our bones, and we were doomed.

My favorite Frank memory?  Man, it breaks my heart just thinking about him --a great teacher, a great writer, a great man. What struck me right off was that he was remarkably handsome in a very cool way, but that's not exactly relevant. Here's a small memory that's probably my favorite, just because (to use a Frank-like word) it redounds so nicely back to me (Frank of course did not like things to redound to him, and he was often charmingly hesitant to tell stories in which he'd figure as the featured, heroic player).
Anyway, I brought a story to our workshop that had this image about eyes swimming behind thick glasses like tropical fish in aquarium, and in his critique he mentioned that he'd just written a similar line, using more or less the same image, in his novel.  He talked about my image and offered a way to simplify the sentence by removing a little clutter and then someone in the workshop asked, well, who gets to use the image, me or Frank. 
Frank just smiled his great mischievous smile.  We both got to use it, of course --and Frank's line is one of my favorites in Body & Soul.  In fact, I think I read the entire book, hunting for that single line.

Dan:

Your story collection, The Point, was a NYT Notable book of the year.  Did you notice any type of a sales bump after that came out, or weren’t you paying attention anymore by that point?

Charlie:

I don't pay attention to sales; I prefer readers.  And I think, at least in the world of short stories, there's a difference.

Dan:

The collection was also a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award and the L.A. Times Book Award.  Which of these was most exciting to you?

Charlie:

And similarly, I don't have much feeling for awards. If you write and write well you inevitably get a few of them but they don't mean much or guide you into the next day, the next sentence.  I honestly have no feelings about them. 

Dan:

That book has also been published in England, France, Germany, Holland, Spain and Japan.  Do you have copies of the foreign versions?  Did you have the same types of approvals over covers and author photos that you had with your American publisher?

Charlie:

And you can add Italy to that list now too --finally!  I always wanted to be translated into Italian.  Yes, I have copies of the foreign editions, but no, I wasn't very much involved in the actual production details.  Now and then there'd be some unanswerable query from the translator but other than that I had no part in the foreign publication, except in Germany, where I went on tour and did interviews and press and etc.

Dan:

Congratulations on Italy then.  Did you get many letters or emails from readers in any of the countries mentioned above?

Charlie:

Not many, but some, always very interesting, because it is such an unlikely journey, from the vague beginnings of a story to book to translation to letter with a strange foreign stamp from far away.

Dan:

How often does somebody send you some form of letter or email in regards to appreciating, or not, your work?

Charlie:

I used to receive quite a few letters but now with email and the internet people have mostly stopped sending things in the regular mail. Now people just hunt you down and satisfy their curiosity using errors that exist permanently in cyberspace or they boldly fire off an email and ask their question directly. People just expect to be able to get a hold of you now and for the most part they can, no problem. I miss receiving actual mail,
particularly for the human traces that are so evident in a letter –the color of ink, the style of penmanship, the choice of stationery, the cancelled postmark, the return address that marks a real place in the world. I always respond to letters, writing back, while I really have to think twice about replying to random email, because I'm afraid of getting 
hooked into a lengthy and hectic exchange. An email isn't quite the same sensual
experience since no matter who it comes from it pretty much resembles all the others I received that week. I like hearing from people, of course, but I miss the letters, all of which I save.  It makes me want to ditch the computer sometimes but probably no one would bother scaring up a stamp these days.

Dan:

Six of the seven stories from The Point had previously been published, including two by The Paris Review and another by the New Yorker.  Do you feel any difference in receiving word that your story has been accepted by The New Yorker or The Paris Review than other journals?

Charlie:

Yes, no question.  Part of this has to do with the practical facts of short-story writing.  No one pays squat for short stories except the NY'er, so it's unbelievably nice to publish with them and make decent money for my work; and for me the NY'er represents, along with the annual best-of anthologies, my greatest chance of being read widely. The NY'er reaches everywhere, and their readers are avid, they're topnotch. When I published a story called Screenwriter in the NY'er the first person I heard from other than my mother was a guy in South Africa.  To me that's fantastic. That  same story in a quarterly with a print-run of a thousand and maybe 200 folks (optimistically) who actually sit down and read the thing front to back obviously won't have the same reach. The Paris Review doesn't pay much but you get the same smart readers and both publications care deeply about 
the work they publish. I love my editor at the NY'er, I love working with her, and now it's got to the point where I eagerly anticipate that last, collegial stage in the writing process. At the Paris Review, I worked with George Plimpton , and he was incredible, and I'll never forget his enthusiasm and generosity.  I still keep the Western Union telegram (a
telegram!!!) George sent me when he accepted my story (Her Real Name) --it's framed and sits above my desk.

Dan:

You’ve had a story win a Pushcart Prize, you’ve won the Aga Khan Fiction Prize, the Henfield/TransAtlantic Review Award, and a James Michener Fellowship.  Do awards like this help out a young writer more in the getting your name out there in the literary community, or in the monetary earnings?

Charlie:

Again, I don't have much feeling for awards beyond the standard ones –you feel validated briefly, and the money (if there is any) helps briefly, and if an award calls attention to the work, however briefly, that's good.

Dan:

Orphans, your collection of essays, aside from maybe one or two efforts, seems to be written about various topics you were really interested in, and not just assigned.  Was that the case, or did you do a great job of hiding your lack of interest?

Charlie:

I won't write about anything that doesn't interest me --why bother?  Fortunately, lots of things interest me, plus with a little digging you can always find a depth that suits your imagination, so even the dullest material can eventually excite you. Many of these essays came from my own ideas, but some are occasional pieces, prompted by others, and with 
those I think I managed, for the most part, to find something vivid inside each subject. With the essays it was very important to me that they'd exist first and foremost as essays --not journalism-- so that the main event in each piece would be language or writing.  The subject was only the occasion --often a thin pretext-- for the prose. This was something of a risk because frequently the venues I was writing for were looking for journalism but 
I'm just not interested in spending my days that way. I was lucky in that I've worked with the some great and generous editors who saw the value in what I was doing and went ahead and published me. Orphans is a book of essays, and a very good and peculiar one, if I have to say so myself; but it's not a miscellany of journalistic writing, and the subjects are of only secondary importance. 

Dan:

You’ve written essays about whales and Eskimos, manufactured homes, a Pentecostal haunted house, Russian orphanages, the pre-Starbucks/Seattle of your childhood, the poetry of Richard Hugo, and the Mary Kay Letourneau trial, among other things.  Which did you enjoy researching and writing about the most?

Charlie:

I liked the Russian Orphanage simply because I spent a week in an isolated place north of St. Petersburg living with 117 children, immersed in this complete, very intense atmosphere of love.  It was beautiful. It was stunning. 

Dan:

The collection was published by Cold Cut Press, a small publisher based out of Astoria, OR.  Can you explain why you decided to go with them?

Charlie:

I don't know --the publishers are friends of mine, but going with them has turned out to be something of a mistake.  Originally I was under the impression that my book would be part of subscription book series, that people would sign up and receive a series of six or eight elegantly designed books, that it would be this boutique operation, etc. --so I said yes.  At the same time I signed a contract with Knopf, who would publish essentially
the same collection in hardback and get it into bookstores and into the hands of reviewers.  But then Clear Cut changed their model, or something, and crossed over into traditional publishing terrain; and as soon as Publishers Weekly reviewed their edition of the book, I realized that I would have to pull my contract at Knopf. I'm a little heartsick at this moment, heartsick and pissed off. Things have been a little frosty between me and Clear Cut. Had I known the full story, I would never have published with them.  It just wasn't smart for me --I lost money, the books won't ever be on the shelves at book stores, and Clear Cut just can't reach the readers Knopf would have reached.  Plus, Knopf is publishing my next collection of stories, and it would have meant a lot to me to have both books at the same house.  I'll regret this move for a long time. I lost a lot, publishing 
with a small press.  I thought I was doing them a favor, I thought I was being nice, but really I was just being stupid.

Dan:

Do you prefer writing essays over stories, or vice versa?

Charlie:

They're very different, and I like them both.  With essays I have a sense of playing around and leaving things in a somewhat raw state; with stories I favor the artful construction and I push them toward something a whole lot more polished. The nice thing about essays is that they get me out of the house, investigating the world, snooping around, and also I'm fairly sure of getting paid a fixed sum at the end of the process. I live entirely off my writing, so these things matter.  Stories strike a more resonant chord in my soul and wrestling with them I usually come out the other end feeling renewed; essays leave me feeling a little ragged.

Dan:

Has writing an essay ever led specifically to a story?  I know that in some cases you’ve brought in some aspects of an essay into a story – say the Makah from the essay Whaling into the story Her Real Name.

Charlie:

Actually, I wrote Her Real Name long before the Whaling essay and way before the Makah ever thought of whaling again.  I'm from the Northwest and have spent a lot of time on the Peninsula, so that's where the stuff for Her Real Name came from, just living in the region. I've never had a story grow out of an essay but it might happen. I did use some of the material from the Russian Orphanage essay in a story.  This kid told me a joke and the minute he finished I knew it was going into my story; but I also used the joke in the essay.  In general I sort of look at the essays as rough material that may, one day, show up in fiction.  At least I reserve the right to steal from myself.

Dan:

The story Her Real Name was first published in The Paris Review, and then collected in The Point.  How did it end up getting on The Barcelona Review website after that?

Charlie:

They contacted me, but I forget how.  It was a new venture at the time.

Dan:

In October 2003, you were involved in the Hugo House 6th Annual Inquiry Games – what in the world are Inquiry Games?

Charlie:

I don't really know --I never knew.  I taught a class on writing dialogue.  Sometimes I just agree to do stuff because I believe generally in the sponsoring institution.  I like what Hugo House does and what they mean to Seattle and I've liked all the people involved, particularly Frances McCue, the director, and various of the writers-in-residence, including Matthew Stadler, Charlie Mudede, Emily White, and Grant Cogswell.

Dan:

You also have written an introduction to the Tin House non-fiction reader, Cooking and Stealing.  Do you know how you were chosen to do that?  Did you read all of the inclusions before writing the introduction?  When writing such an introduction, do you feel it’s necessary for the author to reference the works within the book?

Charlie:

I did read all the pieces, although writing an introduction, I discovered, was a logistical drag, and I think I'd do it differently in the future.  I mean that for every essay mentioned in the introduction you realize you're neglecting five others and that you're drawing an inherently flawed, false map through a book that should, ideally, be the reader's to discover.  Perhaps it can't be avoided, but in the case of the Tin House anthology it
might have been better to write about the essay in general, as a form, and leave it at that.

Dan:

I’d be remiss not to mention your story, The Screenwriter, was included in the BASS 2004.  As it’s been a while since The Point was published (1995), do you believe this inclusion, along with Orphans, will help keep your name on minds for the release of that story collection next year?

Charlie:

I don't know how any of this works.  I just hope each thing I write is good in and of itself. Orphans is a strong idiosyncratic book, but I'm not sure it will bring readers to a collection of stories --more likely is the reverse, where the stories might point an interested reader to the essays. I have a story in next year's BASS too and maybe that will draw attention to the collection but who knows --maybe people will read it and decide 
against buying the book. That's just as likely. Stories are rough --you put seven, eight, nine of them in a collection, and each one of them gets reviewed, yea or nay, whereas a good novel can hide a couple of unbearably dull stretches and no one pays much attention. Stories can be a little harrowing, taking a huge risk each time out.

Dan:

Lastly, if you were a character in “Fahrenheit 451,” what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Charlie:

Keats' Odes, Moby Dick, Gatsby, a couple of Frank O'Connor short stories, some of my little brother's letters.

Dan:

Thanks again for taking the time – I look forward to The Dead Fish Museum (if Knopf and you decide to keep the proposed title) next year.

Charlie:

Thanking you for providing this excellent forum --and I've decided to go with The Dead Fish Museum, so that will be the title.