I am pleased to have the opportunity to address the 5 questions below regarding the story "Histories of the Undead" in the Anchor Book of the Short Story.

 

Q:How did you know when this story was finished? How did you feel about it while writing it, and then how did your feelings change once it was finished, or when you read it once it was published?

Kate: I was astonished and delighted when Ben Marcus picked it. I re-read it for the first time since its publication last night. It's a pause that has a certain loitering grit in it. I always know when a story
was written by the age of the "daughter." Since mine is now in law
school, and the "daughter" is in 4th grade, it must be 15 years old.
I knew when the story was finished when a moment of crisis/drama
appeared and was resolved. A choice is an end. A yes or no. An
action taken. A gesture. A thought. With novels, I say you know it's over when you are in the hospital. 2 of my novels were sold from intensive care. My body ended a few of them. In general, I end with landscape or internal
landscape epiphanies. I let that speak. But walking out the door was
as definitive as this Erica was going to get. She's so fragile that
any action could have served. But there was a moment when, despite
her walking nervous breakdown, she defines herself and has the
abillity to make this an action. Since I'm allergic to plot, I'm an
anti-plot writer (plots are boring to me. I also don't have plot as
a skill. No writer has all the writing repretoire. For instance, if
you put a Glock to Roth's head and say give me a landscape, he'd
have to die. If you said to Garcia Marquez, give me a plausible line
of dialogue, he'd be shot. The fallacy is that a writer has to do it
all. I realized I could do language and emotion and ideas and,
amazingly, dialogue. So I just go with what I have.) Thus this
story, as many of my works, has to proceed by the heat generated by
the language, my foremost skill. I believe that language of a
certain order forms its own morphology. Language of a certain order has its own destiny and with skill, this can pass as plot. It was an
experiment in how close to actually being me I could get away with.

Writing and crime are similiar.

Writing is also a lot like hunting or ocean fishing. You go out,when
it's cold and wet and dark, armed and alert, and most of the time,
you get nothing. Sometimes, as in "Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta"
(most college anthologies) you get something monumental, like a
bear. Those are fantastic stories. It's like you have an enormous
hide or pelt and all you have to do is punch in arm holes and a neck
hole and you're covered. Often, you have to make due with mouse or
chipmonk pelts, stitched together. This story has more thread in it
then pelt.

Reading it 15 years later (I think it's 13 years old, actually,maybe
12 years, because I see I'm married brings back the apartment I lived in with an emotional clarity time has erased. I believe that story was written in 1992. I'm taken with the technical effects and remember, with stark clarity, a period of my real life. I carried that story by will and still find her
thoughts striking, some images I could write today. I find it an
interesting story.

Q: Are your characters based on real people? If they are, how does
an author escape the fear of offending friends and acquaintances who
are the basis of characters?

Kate: All my characters are versions of myself and people I know
very well, or people that just struck me, and could be imagined and
techniqued into something. I'm of the use yourself as the laboratory
school. I was asked in an interview if I my work was autobiographical. I said, no. All my ideas are faxed to me from a woman I met once in the Cleveland Grayhound Bus terminal. I mean, who else will you ever know like you know yourself? If I'm human, then if it interests me, it will interest others. But you need the skill of language to do that.

Ah, the fear of offending question. Simple. Real life and the page
are entirely separate entitites. The page is not real life but the
illusion of real life. The simple answer is that by the time you
publish the thing, the people you're really writing about will be
dead. Between the first draft and publication falls the shadow of
decades. Or, if you told me the real story of one day in your life,
all your thoughts, associations, just brushing your teeth would take
hundreds of pages. Writing is an evolution with natural selection.
By the time you bring technique into play, by the time you begin
deleting "Is the bus on time" "Yeah, I think so." stuff and
elongating and embellishing other aspects, you're engaged in acts of
fiction. In real life, she wore a stained terry cloth robe liberated
from a Holiday Inn. In the ficition, she wears something more
interesting, depending on the circumstances. Like a silk kimino
embossed with red peonies bought in a village along the Perfume
River in China. To further free the writer from the fear of
"offending" I say let a few people be offended. A writer writes for
history and God. I have written quite a bit about my daughter and mother, for example. There are stories where my mother is not the mother, but
very much her with another name, and she didn't recognize herself.
I've written stories based on other people and called them Mother
and my mother was appalled, even though it had nothing to do with
her. A writer is an outlaw. You steal (consciously or unconsciously)
you lie (my husband is always saying, at dinner parties, now dear.
that isn't really true. You know Kate. She'd rather go for the good
line than the accurate answer....)you engage in acts of fraud. The
page is its own kingdom and the rules of conduct are entirely
different. Finally, once you apply technical skills to real life,
the real becomes transformed into an other. Never fear trespass. The
page is your kingdom where you along set the boundaries, climates,
dialects, hierarchies, etc.

**For more on all these questions, my "contributors notes" in Best
American 1991 and 1995 and my Oct. 1990 interview in "Poetry Flash"
are excellent.

Q: Throughout this story Erica seems determined to refuse the conventionalwomen's role of wife and mother, to the point of
battling her way out...This determination is channeled through other
characters too, like Babette. How to you go about deciding how much
weight eachcharacter has in a story? The reader learns a lot about Erica by
what's happening to other characters -- is this a conscious move?

Kate: This question is like asking a karate black belt if they
planned a certain thrust or turn. Once you marry the page and enter
into a sacred pact with it, AND determine what you do well and what
youdon't (polish your strengths and avoid your weaknesses) AND develop
your technical skills, AND surrender to the page as your world, it's
all instinctual. I am a feminist. I am a mother. I am a wife. This
is the DNA of my women. You must know your characters DNA. Then you
genetically engineer it, with technique. I think in the real world I
was "adjusting" (not possible) to the multiple full time jobs I
found myself with, writing being the most important. I was also a
Professor of Creative Writing at the time and had friends dying. The
"Lillian" is taken directly from life. She was a friend of my
mother's. There are scenes I wish I had put in that actually
occurred, though that might have been later, after I wrote the
story. My mother went to the hospital and brushed "Lillian's" teeth.
A beautiful image I'll use sometime, somewhere.

Q: The rhythm of this story is choppy and chaotic -- this lends the
readerinsight into the main character's psyche. Do you always
parallel rhythymwith the main character's state of mind?

Kate: Great question. For writers older than me, film was the big
influence, flash backs and flash forwards, montage, etc. For me, it
was sound, rock and roll was the major cultural influence. I use
rhythm and sound as tools in my language driven writing. I write
every line out loud. You must write for the ear, rather than the
letters on the page. This is a great trick. If you only write on the
page, one word will naturally present itelf as the next idea. If you
write out loud for the ear, you'll be lead to words and ideas that
present themselves through the rhythm and sound. An entirely
different spectrum of possibilities. Yes, the characters have a
cadence. Erica is fragmented because she's having a nervous
breakdown. This is also the key to writing "incantory prose" which
is what I write.

Q: Other than reading and writing a lot, what advice do you have for
youngwriters?

Kate: It would take too many pages to answer this. Remember that the
writer is not only the actress, but the director and set designer,
writer and musicial director. But more. Most young writers
concentrate on what they "see." That's like only using only one
color on your pallett. The page gives you what a movie doesn't. I
use all my senses, with sight being the least of it. I concentrate
on smell, sound, touch, and most of all, thought/association, the
internal screenplay that a movie can't give you. Think of what is
unique to the page, what a movie can't do, and move towards that. My
best advice, in a brutal nutshell encrusted with radiation, is that
the beginning writer not write any stories for 2 or 3 years but do
exercises. Define a world by sound. As 50 sounds of Chicago. 50
smells of Detroit, etc. Recognize that a car alarm or siren is a bad
sound, but a cathedral bell and rain are good sounds. If you have
even the barest sense that something might be a cliche, it is. Delet
it at once. I'd also advise, during the pre-writing period, to edit,
a journal or newspaper, whatever. Editing teaches you how to dissect
a piece. You do autoposies as well as give birth. Remember the page
is three-dimensional (it's really got more dimensions, it's quantum
physics) and you move things around,restructure, as you would with clay, say. It's not a flat surface.

When I was a young writer (the first 10 years after the gathering
period, the charcoal sketch and stretches and weight lifting period)
I used my exercise notebooks for everything I wrote. I had 3 hole
punched color coded books of sounds, landscapes, buildings, faces,
smells, etc. I still never have a character walk to or look out a
window just because. I have them look out a window so I can then put
in "Garden Exercise #391". Now I use poems. Whenever I'm stuck or
can't "fill in" a section, I throw in a poem as prose. The
poems are so intense, they flare up and illuminate the wretched
darkness of a fiction. The notebooks are the tinder to use once a
fire starts, how to begin and keep it burning. Also, if you can live
without writing, please do that. Writing is madness. The world needs
more real readers and fewer suffering medicore writers. Annie
Dillard covers this brilliantly in her "The Writing Life."

Finally, after reading "Histories of the Undead" for the first time
in at least a decade, I'm struck by the writer's willingness to open
her mind, how interesting her thoughts and associations are and how
beautifully she renders the language, her insight and fragility.
When you don't use plot, but motif and association, as I do, I like
to keep a private subtext. I generally use "Am I my brother's
keeper?" That one alone has kept me fully engaged my entire writing
life. Not on the page but in my soul. It shouldn't show on the page,
that would be a cliche. And even more finally, a writer should never
show their work or take advice from a "normal" person. Your
girlfriend or roommate is not qualified. Would a cardiologist ask
her husband or tennis partner what they thought of an EKG? When
you're really writing, resist the temptation to seek the feedback of
normal people. Real writing should be incomprehensible to your
boyfriend. It should be like showing them a page in Coptic or Greek.
They don't know. Guard your time. Find a job w/flexible hours so you
can put in 18 hour days when you're hot and stay home with phone
shut off, you've already divested yourself of TV, etc. Sometimes it
takes 10 hours to find your way back or in. If somebody says I can't
talk to you, I'm on my way to the office or some recognizable job,
the response is sorry, catch you later, bye. If you say I can't
talk, I'm writing, people ignore you, like you're on a basket
weaving assignment during your weekend pass from the mental
hospital. Writing is a real job, like being an architect or lawyer.
Set your boundaries in concrete and then hire some guys with machine
guns to protect you from the well meaning. A writer is never bored.
Down time is a gift you fill with exercise. Airports are great for
faces, how people walk,etc. Nothing is generic. If you don't know
what to do, call it a 5 day or 4 day. That means you do 4 or 5 pages
on every 4th or 5th building or person you see. You must learn to
stretch and these are the flexibility and strength asanas. When you
have to fill 5 pages with what a building looks like, you'll force
yourself into imagining who lived there, what they did, what they
thought. Eventually, almost all"exercizes" evole into fictions.
Art is unnatural.

Of course, I'm a method writer, like a method actress. I can only
tell you what I know. PS. The writing life demands physical strength
and stamina. It's not sedentary. I'm sweating right now and my back
hurts. During the pre-writing phase, embrace a physical discipline
such as yoga or martial arts. You can balance the pains that way.

Copyright, 2005-2006 Kate Braverman.