Scott Nadelson's fiction examines characters trapped in the middle. His are folks who can't quite shout, can't quite cry, can't quite mourn, and can't quite live. Often set in the New Jersey suburbs of his youth, the stories move as if teasing frayed threads out of a safety net, always conscious that the next might be the one that lets us fall. He possesses that rarest of talents, able to create utterly familiar situations that still offer surprising insight into the human condition. He's s the author of two story collections: Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award; and The Cantor's Daughter, recipient of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. His work has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Post Road, and his new story collection, Aftermath, is forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in fall 2011. His story "Forked River" appears in TRACHODON 2, Spring 2011.Where are you living now and how do you make a living?
I’m in lovely Salem, Oregon (or New Jersey West, as I like to call it), where I teach undergraduate creative writing at Willamette University.
New Jersey West--that doesn't sound entirely complimentary. Care to elaborate? Seems to me that New Jersey is often maligned in the media. Does that motivate you at all when writing about the state?
Let’s just say that both places have some rough edges. In New Jersey, I grew up a couple of miles away from the mental hospital where Bob Dylan famously visited Woody Guthrie; here in Salem I live a couple of miles away from the mental hospital where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed. Both places have rich potential for fictional material. When I lived in New Jersey I couldn’t wait to get away; now that I live on the opposite coast, I have a real affection for the place, and a nostalgia for all its warts. I think that comes out in the stories.
How did you start writing? What keeps you writing?
I started late in high school, soon after I discovered my father’s collection of early Bob Dylan records. It was the first time I’d heard language in a way that made sense to me, the first time it occurred to me that I might be able to externalize the voiceless angst that often tied me up in knots. I had no musical ability, so I quickly turned to poetry; I didn’t have much ability for that, either, and moved on to narrative by the time I hit college. And pretty shortly I discovered not just that I could write a passable story but that doing so could bring me great pleasure. And it’s that pleasure that keeps me writing, even when the writing is going badly; as soon as one story idea or scene falters, there’s another waiting to be written, and as crushed as I might be by the failure, I’m doubly excited by the next attempt.
I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that we're close in age--anyway, I've heard a lot of writers of our generation cite musicians as early and important influences, from Dylan to The Dead Kennedys, but who knows what Bellow or Hemingway listened to. What do you think accounts for these young writers claiming musicians as artistic forbearers?
That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer, but my first guess would be that it has something to do with our education system and how we’re taught about literature. All the way through elementary and high school, poetry and fiction was presented to me as a something to be dissected and studied rather than something lived. Music was something we could just immerse ourselves in. It was obviously rebellious, subversive, dangerous, sexy. Literature was all of those things, too, of course, but it wasn’t framed that way, and we couldn’t see it. But Dylan opened the language up for me, and after hearing him I could finally read poetry. Soon after discovering those records, I read T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas in my English class, and they set off fireworks for me; I was no longer reading them for class, but for myself. Does that explanation resonate with you?
It does resonate, and it's a great explanation. For me, it took me a while to be able to recognize the energy in writing, whereas in music it's immediately apparent. The mood of a song is created by chord progressions and the sound of the guitars and the beat of the drums and wail of the singer--in literature, all of that happens in the language. What's funny is that the books I love most are ones that "sound good" to me. Do you find yourself relying a lot on your "ear" when reading or writing?
Absolutely. That’s a great observation. More and more what draws me to a story is the sound of its voice. Above all else storytelling is seduction, and different readers are seduced by different voices. There’s a certain quality of voice that always gets me, and if it does, the subject matter of the story almost doesn’t matter. I could read anything by Leonard Michaels, for example; if he’d written a treatise on waste disposal, I’d want to pick it up, because for me the sound of his voice is incomparably alluring. When I’m writing now, I spend a lot of time trying to find the right sound for a story, and it’s usually the sound that finally allows me to access it most deeply. If I don’t have the right voice, I can’t get more than a few pages in; but if the voice sounds right, then it takes me places I couldn’t have expected.
How would you describe yourself as a writer?
Broadly speaking, I’m a story writer. I claim the title proudly and often argue that the story be considered a different genre entirely than the novel, rather than its undersized cousin. In practice, I’m a persistent flounderer; most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, no idea where my ideas are leading me, but I’m stubborn about following them through, and eventually the effort leads me somewhere interesting. This approach is probably better suited to the short story than the novel, and that’s why the form is one I’m happy to return to again and again. I’d also say that I’m a joyful writer, though writing causes me anguish more days than not; on the whole, the daily routine of it, the immersion into language and narrative, gives me great pleasure, and even the failures contribute to the sense of privilege I feel when I am able to dedicate a part of my time to this strange pursuit.
It's a frightfully surface observation, but many of your short stories are, well, long. The pacing of your scenes often strike me as more like novels than stories, and you include a lot more background than most story writers. "Half a Day in Halifax," in The Cantor's Daughter is an example of this. I feel like I know both of those characters so well, and I want good things for them both, so when things start slowly deteriorating it gives the reader such a profound sense of heartache. Does the length of the stories develop through your "floundering," as you put it? And I have to ask: where did you find the courage to stay with that length, which so often goes unloved by the literary community?
It’s true, my stories tend to be long, usually between seven- and thirty-thousand words. A big part of that length is definitely a result of my process; when I start a piece, I never have any sense of what shape it should take, and in my explorations I allow it to take whatever shape seems most natural to it. The forms that seem best suited to my particular interests and obsessions are often the long story and the novella. But aside from practical considerations, I just deeply love those forms. My favorite stories are those that have the expansiveness of novels—James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Peter Taylor’s “The Old Forest,” Eudora Welty’s “June Recital,” Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”—and my favorite novels are those that have a story’s compression. It does drive me a little crazy that the most widely accepted forms of fiction are those that are fewer than fourteen pages or longer than two hundred. I understand that journals want to include as many different voices as possible, but that has meant that published stories keep getting shorter. At the same time, novels keep getting longer—especially novels that are considered “important.”
To leave out the intermediate lengths limits the possibility of what fiction can do. I want my stories to explore lives deeply and fully, but I don’t want the elaborate plotting of novels; for me, the long story and the novella are perfect at capturing the odd, plotless, messiness of life. My devotion to these forms hasn’t helped my career any, but I’ve had enough success that I can keep going; and over time, I’ve come to accept that this is just what I write, and it doesn’t do any good to fight it, even if agents or publishers would much prefer I give them something they could label a novel.
To leave out the intermediate lengths limits the possibility of what fiction can do. I want my stories to explore lives deeply and fully, but I don’t want the elaborate plotting of novels; for me, the long story and the novella are perfect at capturing the odd, plotless, messiness of life. My devotion to these forms hasn’t helped my career any, but I’ve had enough success that I can keep going; and over time, I’ve come to accept that this is just what I write, and it doesn’t do any good to fight it, even if agents or publishers would much prefer I give them something they could label a novel.
What are the primary obsessions of your work?
I am particularly interested in the drama of consciousness: when internal conflicts come into contact with the external world. In particular, I find myself exploring the ways in which characters’ fears undermine their desires. My characters tend to inhabit a limbo of one sort or another—emotional, psychological, cultural—and they often have to face a choice between remaining in this limbo, or taking a step in one direction or another. Most of my stories are about secular—or ambivalent—Jews in suburban New Jersey, which is a physical and cultural landscape I know well, but more important, one in which characters often have one foot in the dominant culture and one foot out, attempting to live safe, sheltered lives in the shadow of the looming city.
What are some landmarks in your evolution as a writer?
A big one came during graduate school. I had just gotten back from a year overseas, and I was writing stories about people in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I’d bartended for six months. The stories were predictably distant, and a teacher pushed me to look closer to my own experience. I’d grown up in the suburbs of New Jersey, in what seemed to me the most mundane circumstances possible; I set out to show the teacher I had no interesting stories to tell about the place I’d grown up, to write the dullest story possible; and I haven’t stopped writing about New Jersey since. His advice was a version of the “write what you know” cliché, but a more nuanced one; what you know is a set of emotional truths rather than a set of facts or details, and to explore those emotional truths as directly as possible brings a level of honesty to one’s writing. My writing journey since then has been one of getting deeper and deeper into my particular perspective on the world, of understanding and exploring the angle of vision my upbringing and experiences have provided me.
That's a great story. Did you feel pressure to write about exotic locales or blue-collar jobs?
I did, and I still sometimes do. But if I write about those locales or themes now, I do so from a perspective I know, from an angle I can truly access. Certainly the imagination allows us to step out of ourselves, but only so far. I can write best about blue-collar jobs from the perspective of a kid who was raised in a white-collar household and who longed for the perceived “realness” of blue-collar life; and that’s an interesting story to tell, at least to me.
Say a little about your publishing history: any advice for other folks sending out their work?
My only advice is work hard and get lucky. That has been my only experience of publishing; I have tended to work in a void, just trying to focus on the particular project in front of me, and when the time comes to find a way to get the work out into the world, I close my eyes, cross my fingers, and hope for good things. And I have been very lucky: Hawthorne Books, the publisher of my two story collections approached me after seeing my name on a list of fellowship winners. They will be putting out my third collection next fall.
Hawthorne Books who, by the way, prints the most gorgeous paperbacks on the market today. What's been your experience working with a small west coast publisher? I know an awful lot of MFA grads who tell me they're mailing their theses to NY agents in the hopes of being the next Russo or Franzen. If you could offer them some advice, what would it be?
My advice is to let Russo and Franzen be Russo and Franzen, and instead to be the writer you want to be. If that means your work is good enough—and commercially viable enough—to be picked up by NY agents and publishers, then great, by all means, enjoy those big advances. If your work is good, but it doesn’t fit with a marketing department’s need to sell fifty-thousand copies, then there are great small presses that put out wonderful books and take good care of them. And they’ll keep them in print if they don’t sell those fifty thousand copies, rather than remainder them and send your beautiful work to the shredder.
What are you working on these days? What plans do you have for it?
I have recently finished (or at times am still tinkering with) a collection of personal essays/stories that form a kind of loose autobiography—I’m thinking of the book as a whole as a search for identity and fulfillment in a life governed by fear. A number of the essays are out or are coming out in some fine journals, and I’m just thinking about sending the book out as a whole. Otherwise, I’m floundering again, trying to discover my next project: starting stories, throwing them away, starting again.
You've mentioned fear a couple of times as a motivating factor in your characters' lives. Can you say a bit more about it?
Fear is such a powerful engine for narrative. It’s an emotion that’s all about conflict; it gets in the way of characters (and people) bei