What is most gratifying for you about writing fiction?
Most gratifying of all is the process. I love playing with syllables and cadence, zeroing in on the mot juste, shuffling scenes, inventing and being surprised by characters, learning a trade from the outside in, collecting factoids and finding a place for them (Did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died the same day, July 4, 1826? Or that Henry Ford got his idea for the assembly line by studying the disassembly lines at meat packing plants?)
Porter Shreve is the author of three novels, most recently When the White House Was Ours. In the 1970s his family started an alternative school called “Our House Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House,” the loose inspiration for his latest book. His first novel, The Obituary Writer (2000), was a New York Times Notable Book, a Borders Original Voices Selection and a Book Sense Pick; Drives Like a Dream (2005) was a Chicago Tribune Book of the Year, a People "Great Reads" Selection and a Britannica Book of the Year. A part-time resident of Chicago, he directs the graduate creative writing program at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, and has also co-edited six anthologies.
—Sarah Layden
You held a variety of jobs before going the MFA route. How did that experience factor into your decision to become a writer, and did the jobs influence your writing in any particular way?
I was a waiter, courier, housepainter, clean water canvasser, hotel desk clerk, mailroom sorter, and for a number of years I owned a small landscaping company called Clean Cut. Any experience where you have to work for a boss and a low hourly wage or in some way serve people helps you understand the power dynamics that are so essential to fiction. So I wouldn’t trade my teens and twenties, when I worked these jobs, for anything. I had a paper route with the Washington Post through junior high and much of high school and later worked for four years on the night city desk at the Post. I remember the loneliness of that paper route, slinging dailies at dawn onto my neighbors’ stoops, and I think that tactile connection with newspapers helped me dream up my protagonist, Gordie Hatch, of The Obituary Writer. Also, working in the newsroom on the low rung of the ladder gave me a sense of the rhythms of a big daily newspaper. I knew what it felt like to dream big and continually come up short.
You assigned yourself a “Great Books” program of sorts, reading extensively while holding down a reporting job. What were some of your favorite books? Did any feel like drudgery, truly “assigned” rather than enjoyed?
I was a lousy student throughout my childhood. I got kicked out of nursery school, had to repeat sixth grade, and I dropped out of college twice. Through it all I read constantly, mostly contemporary fiction and history, but I was mule-headed and hated to be told what to read. I was the kind of kid who I see in the back of my own classroom these days and knowingly narrow my eyes. Sometime in my early twenties I decided to fill the holes in my education and become a great books autodidact. Because I had “chosen” the books myself I loved nearly all of them, especially the plays of Aristophanes, the essays of Montaigne, and big, highly imagined novels like Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov. Having grown up and lived much of my life in DC I also loved political texts like “The Prince,” “Wealth of Nations,” and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I skimmed most of the math and science, and beyond Plato and Aristotle found too much of the philosophy and theology painfully abstract. I guess I’d rather get my Boethius from A Confederacy of Dunces, my Kierkegaard from The Feast of Love.
Your third novel, When the White House Was Ours, is set during the Carter administration, and was released in an election year. Lucky timing or careful planning? When did you first start working on the book?
I began the book during the 2004 election season, and was probably so urgent to see George W. Bush retired to his Texas ranch that when it didn’t happen in November I plotted my own small, personal retaliation and titled a book I knew very little about When the White House Was Ours. As with The Obituary Writer, I had the title almost before I’d written a word, and the title took me back to a moment in my childhood when I felt great pride in the presidency. That was 1976 and the election of Jimmy Carter. I was ten years old and my family had just moved back to DC in time for the bicentennial. I won’t forget my parents volunteering for the Carter campaign and my whole family standing in the cold on inauguration day watching Jimmy, Rosalynn and Amy walk along Constitution Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. At first I didn’t plan for When the White House Was Ours to come out in an election year, but as the story developed and began to resonate with the elections of 1976, 2000 and even 2008, I realized I was writing a nostalgic and perhaps even a timely book, so the title ended up giving me a deadline.
Do you consider your fiction at all autobiographical? If so, at what juncture does it shift and become less “recognizable”?
My three novels have all been inspired by family stories. The Obituary Writer has its origins in my grandfather’s unlikely friendship with a young widow he met while working on the city desk of the Cincinnati Post; Drives Like a Dream began when I was feeling a particularly acute empathy for my mother whose four kids had all moved thousands of miles away from DC, where she’d raised us with an all-for-one, one-for-all communal spirit; and When the White House Was Ours is based on my family’s experience starting our own alternative school in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. Invariably, I begin writing a story as it actually happened, then characters I can never anticipate appear out of nowhere and take over. Often the secondary characters, like the widow Alicia Whiting in The Obituary Writer; or the in-laws Casper and M.J. Spivey in Drives Like a Dream; or the hippies Tino, Cinnamon and Linc in When the White House Was Ours create trouble for the protagonist and the clash has a transformative effect, rendering him or her less familiar to me and in the process loosening my imagination so that by the end of the story there’s little relationship to my autobiography, at least in factual terms. But I guess a certain emotional core remains.
Writers are inventers, fantasists. What in your life nurtured that imaginative ability, particularly as you were growing up?
My mother, Susan Richards Shreve, is a novelist, and I guess you could say she brought her work home with her. She’s a great storyteller but even in daily life was never afraid to exaggerate details or make things up whole cloth. While some writers grow up using their imaginations as an escape from a troubling reality, I lived in a household where it was often difficult to distinguish between truth and invention. This caused me a good deal of bafflement as a kid, but it’s become a major theme in my fiction.
Didn’t you enter graduate school with a completed manuscript of The Obituary Writer? How many drafts had you written at that point, and how did the novel change over the course of your MFA program at Michigan?
I went to graduate school with a dreadful draft of The Obituary Writer, and assumed that the workshop would give its collective seal of approval and I’d be on my way to fame and fortune, a la Scott Fitzgerald. No such luck. One of my professors told me that every writer worth his salt has a practice novel in the attic, and though I was crestfallen by the implication that my book was a false start, in hindsight this was one of the most important comments I received in graduate school. I was so determined that The Obituary Writer would not be a practice novel that I worked and reworked it until finally, after four years and more than a dozen drafts, it found its way.
Writers become experts at multitasking. You also teach, speak at conferences, write reviews and articles, and more. How do you make time for writing while teaching in and directing Purdue’s MFA program?
I like teaching, and I’m so proud of my students when they finish a book manuscript and go on to publish. And I really can’t complain about a job that allows me to read and talk shop all day. The directing can be tough, however. Someone recently described the job as the equivalent of being pecked to death by ducks. That’s pretty accurate, I have to say, though I do get the occasional crow or vulture. There comes a point in the semester when the best I can do is carve out a half hour in the morning to read what I wrote the day before and perhaps add a line of dialogue or a brief description. I protect my summers vigilantly and get eighty percent of my writing done during those three and a half months. I do enjoy directing the program at Purdue, even knowing how much it cuts into my writing time. I like helping to build a community of writers, and I think that writing a novel is a form of community-building, too. As I see it, everything – the writing, the teaching, the directing – is or should be interconnected.
You’ve said you have your next several book projects mapped out. How do you decide upon the material? Does it choose you, so to speak?
Earlier I was talking about how my books all have their sources in my own life, usually a pivotal moment for me or a member of my family. But in the novel I’m working on now there’s very little autobiography. Before I started it, I knew only that I wanted to write linked stories set in an apartment building in Chicago and that my protagonist was going to be a morally challenged property manager. So I knew the setting and the main character’s job. Now, it occurs to me that setting and jobs have always been among the first things I know before researching and writing a novel. I knew Gordie Hatch’s job in The Obituary Writer before I’d written a word, and the “Show Me” state of Missouri seemed a natural fit for a newspaper story. Drives Like a Dream could only have been set in Detroit and I knew early on that I wanted Lydia Modine to be a car historian. And When the White House Was Ours was a DC novel from the beginning and I knew that the fate of the school at the center of the story was going to mirror the fate of the Carter White House. So my approach seems to be that I locate a pivotal emotional moment from my own experience, choose a setting and work environment that interests me, then start typing and see what happens.
What is most gratifying for you about writing fiction? Least?
Most gratifying of all is the process. I love playing with syllables and cadence, zeroing in on the mot juste, shuffling scenes, inventing and being surprised by characters, learning a trade from the outside in, collecting factoids and finding a place for them (Did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died the same day, July 4, 1826? Or that Henry Ford got his idea for the assembly line by studying the disassembly lines at meat packing plants?) I love the research and often hate to let a book go. But go it must, and that’s perhaps the least gratifying part of writing a novel. There’s the ecstatic day of completion, but soon thereafter a malaise sets in. I also don’t like the stress leading up to a book’s publication or the anxiety that sometimes, inevitably, only three people will show up – the bookstore owner, a guy I knew in Social Studies class in third grade, and someone named Shreve who thinks he’s related to me but isn’t – which is what happened at a reading I did in Plano, Texas. I’ve been lucky to receive warm reviews, by and large, but you do feel exposed putting a book out there with your name on it.
The publishing world loves classifications – writers come out of a certain school, tradition, or region. What classifications have been foisted upon you, if any? How would you classify yourself?
I’ve written three novels set in three different cities and have a fourth underway set in yet another. I’ve used first person and third and written from the points of view of a 61 year old woman, an 80 year old man, a 23 year old innocent and a precocious 12 year old boy. So I’m not doing a very good job of classifying myself. But I have been called a seriocomic novelist, though I don’t know exactly what that means. I guess I’m neither comedian nor tragedian, satirist nor realist. My books are amphibious, like a duck tour. I remember an old Saturday Night Live faux-commercial about a new product called Glimmer. “It’s a floor wax!” says the wife. “It’s a dessert topping!” says the husband. “Hey, hey, calm down, you two,” says the spokesman. “New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!” That’s me, the seriocomic novelist.
Sarah Layden's fiction appears or is forthcoming in Stone Canoe, The EvansvilleReview, Artful Dodge, Zone 3, Pindeldyboz, wigleaf, and elsewhere. Excerpts from her first novel, Sleeping Woman, can be found in Freight Stories, Cantaraville and the Dia de losMuertos anthology. Find her online at www.sarahlayden.com.
