Interview by Tara McGuire
Peter Orner’s new collection Maggie Brown & Others (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) was released in early July. The New York Times calls Orner “A master of his form.” Tara McGuire spoke with Peter Orner during his drive home from New York City.
Tara McGuire: You’ve been quoted as saying that writing about something is another name for being intensely curious about it. What were you intensely curious about for this collection, Maggie Brown & Others?
Peter Orner: Did I say that? (laughs) That’s probably why we do what we do. I don’t think of writing a story as an answer; it’s more of a probe, or looking deeper at a mystery—why people do what they do. So I think in this book I was continuing a conversation I’ve been having with myself since my first book in 2001. In some cases, the questions, I still have them. There’s a lot of recurring characters in this book who’ve been with me for a long time and I think I’m still curious about them. I’m not done with them. It’s always hard for me to talk about something in the abstract, but I will say that I was interested in how people live in the present while dragging around their past. There’s a certain simultaneity that occurs for a lot of people and I’m very interested in that idea.
TM: Many of the stories are really short. The first story—“Deer”— is only one page. And some of them even feel like poems, but they contain entire life histories at the same time. What does the short story offer you as a writer with the ability to encapsulate such big images in such a small form?
PO: The short story form allows me incredible elasticity in terms of the narrative choices I can make. I mean right now, at this moment, I’m walking around Springfield Massachusetts. It’s an interesting town—there’s a lot going on in Springfield today—there’s stories everywhere. I mean, there’s a woman with a pit-bull walking down the street, now running down the street by a church, there’s a statue of the Virgin Mary. There’s just a lot of things to take in. When I’m working with a story I get to employ all the things I’m noticing and it doesn’t have to be one continuous narrative. Now here’s a cop with a bullet proof vest, flak jacket, just kind of walking across the crosswalk. What the form can do is I can put the most random things, like what was that cop thinking about just now—could that be a 400 page novel? Absolutely, but if I can do it in three I’ll do it in three. I just appreciate the ability of short stories to get deep inside someone pretty quickly.
TM: There’s a lot unsaid in these stories that the reader can interpret based on their own experiences and filters, their own baggage. How do you approach this negative space? What are your intentions with the gaps in your prose?
PO: I don’t know if I think about it when I’m doing it but I definitely believe that I don’t want to say too much—I turn away from stories and novels that say too much. With respect to books that I love that maybe sometimes do cross the line and tell me more than I need to know, but I am very conscious. I want to respect the reader enough to allow them to be a participant in what I’m doing and not be told everything. Because I don’t know all the answers, I think silence is important in trying to respect the mystery of things we don’t know.
TM: How do you decide which details to include? The stories seem kind of sparse, but in that sparseness they are so rich because of the details that you choose.
PO: I appreciate that observation because they’re thick. I’ve talked about this and I probably shouldn’t open my mouth again—but I don’t always appreciate the little names that people give to very short stories, which I won’t even mention—but I think a lot of very short stories can actually be thin. I’m very conscious of that fact that even if I’m doing it in only three pages, there has to be a certain amount of weight, not too much weight, but I actually really like a dense story that has a lot going on even though it’s maybe not a lot of pages. Someone like (Jorge Luis) Borges, I mean, what was his longest story that he ever wrote? And those stories have so much density. It contradicts what I just said I suppose, but I think I’m constantly wrestling with the calibration between density and not saying too much.
TM: You mentioned titles—in this collection it seems like you’re having fun with titles.
PO: Ya (laughs)
TM: And some of them do really heavy lifting as well. I’m wondering what you are asking your titles to do?
PO: I think it always depends on which one. I like a title to have a certain amount of weight, without overdetermining a story, weighing one versus the other. There’s a story in the collection called “My Father at the Urinal, Drake Hotel 1980.” This does tell you a lot about the situation, but it allows the story to begin with my father’s speech, it allows you to just get started without over-explaining. I guess I’d say, for me, a good title situates a reader but doesn’t take away the mystery of why this story is being told.
TM: Another thing I really notice is the sharpness of your beginning and endings. I’m thinking of one that starts, “In the last year of his life, he got back in touch with his sister.” That one sentence holds the entire backstory. We just hit the ground running and at the end it’s lights out, boom. Many of the stories left me sitting there gob-smacked asking what just happened? What is the job of a good ending in terms of where it leaves the reader?
PO: I should start by saying I never really know what I’m doing. I truly don’t. I don’t plan this stuff out, ever. A line will come, or I’ll see somebody on the street. That line came to me watching somebody. I had a vision of that person calling their sister after not speaking to that person for over twenty years. I didn’t know where I was going with it, there was something in that guy’s face. I was to take a step back, it never starts with a calculation, it’s always spontaneous—that’s the only way I can work. By providing backstory with the first line I don’t have to spend all of that time setting it up. I didn’t want to investigate why he hadn’t called, I just wanted to think about what it was like if he started to call her. It was a guy on the street, completely random.
TM: I’m very interested in the phenomena of how readers can care so much about characters when they’re not really likeable, they’re not in the least bit noble, and they are flawed people. How do you explain the way readers have affection for characters with such negative traits?
PO: I don’t know about you, but if I read about somebody whose good, totally good, I’m not buying it. There’s this trope you hear sometimes in creative writing classes—this narrator is unreliable, as a concept, like there’s a thing called an unreliable narrator. Show me a reliable narrator. Show me somebody who really understands themselves. So I think it’s the same with a flawed person. Find me that saint. (laughs) Mother Teresa, I heard was very vain, God love her. I just don’t think Mother Teresa was perfect and I think we’re all luckier for that. She wouldn’t have been real. I hope my characters are as flawed as I am.
TM: How much do you know about these characters that’s not on the page?
PO: It varies from story to story. I do a great deal of revising. I spend a lot of time with these people before anybody else does, so I suppose I get to know them that way. But I’m not trying to answer everything, that would be the most important thing. There’s a lot that I don’t know. Again, there’s these tropes in creative writing that suggest you need to know everything about your character, but that’s just not how it works. I keep returning to them because there’s more questions that I have and that’s why in this book in particular I had a number of them. Walt and Sarah Kaplan are people I’ve been writing about for almost twenty years.
TM: You mentioned revision. What questions are you asking when you enter into the revision process? In this collection you spend an awful lot of time on lives that sort of fell short, maybe as a general theme.
PO: (laughs) yup, that’s been my theme all along. There’s no one thing I’m thinking of, I’m trying to stay engaged. If I can write a story thirty, forty times, by hand, if I can stay interested then hopefully a reader can, once, and hopefully multiple times, but I’m hoping for once.
TM: Are you saying you revise your stories thirty for forty times?
PO: Some of them, yes. Yes. I wish that was an exaggeration—it sounds like an obsessive streak but, that’s how it is. And sometimes I’ll rewrite without changing a word.
TM: Okay, last question because I know you’re standing on the side of the road. Place. Fall River, where Walt and Sarah live, it’s a very specific place but it also is representative of many towns that are perhaps dying or changing, how does place become a character for you in this collection?
PO: That for me is the most important thing. I want people to feel like it’s a very specific place on earth, but that it can also speak to a town in British Columbia, or a town in Ontario that has seen better days. Again, I’m walking around Springfield, Massachusetts which is very similar to Fall River, Massachusetts, which I write about. This town has seen a lot better days, although right now it looks pretty good. There’s some revitalization going on in Springfield. They’re both industrial cities in New England, which kind of subverts the notion of quaint New England. It’s industrial, the textile mills were shut down over a hundred years ago and yet they’re still sitting there. So, when I spent my summers in Fall River with my grandparents I was fascinated by the relics of this once glorious past and how the people just lived among those relics. The thing I’d say about these places that I write about is that an economically depressed, down and out place does not automatically mean that the people there are not living very full lives. I guess in terms of the Walt Kaplan is Broke novella I wanted to make that really clear. Yes, Walt doesn’t have a lot of money, yes he lives in a place that had rather hard economic times but they’re as full of life as anybody I’ve ever met.
TM: I lied, I have one more question, I meant to ask you about the structure of Maggie Brown and Others. There are five sections of short stories and then the novella at the end and some of the characters move from one section to another, and Walt and Sarah are really anchors. What were you trying to achieve with this structure? Or was it reverse engineered based on the stories that you were working with?
PO: I would say both. I wanted the stories to speak across sections, I wanted you to recognize oh, there’s a cousin or a nephew of the Kaplans. There’s a character called Bernard in one of the other sections, and these are all characters who have already appeared in other books. I can’t get enough of these lives. I think there’s so much more to say, and if you look back on your own life, [you see] all the angles that you could take, all the people you’ve known, all the relatives, how many options there are there. If I was trying to say anything—again, in hindsight—I want the stories to speak to each other across geography, across generations, across space and time. Love and loss and everything in between. There’s a lot of grief. It doesn’t necessarily matter when that happens, those things can speak to each other. That’s what I’m trying to do.
Peter Orner, a two time winner of the Pushcart Prize, is the author of five previous books including the novel Love and Shame and Love and the collection Esther Stories, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His memoir Am I Alone Here was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Tin House and Granta, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright to Namibia, Orner holds the Dartmouth Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Tara McGuire’s short stories have been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in local and international publications. Her personal essay “Hook an Anger” was shortlisted for the 2018 Writer’s Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers. The anthology Always With Me: Parents Talk About the Death of a Child includes Tara’s prose and poetry. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia.