Judd McDonald interviews Kevin Canty

JM: I once read something you said in an interview that struck me as interesting: "As a writer I'm interested in speed." I wonder if you could elaborate on that, and how does this affect the choices you make on the sentence level?

KC: Speed is one facet of the thing and surprise might be another. I'm deadly bored by writing that seems to just be about what it's about, in the same way, through its length. I'm not necessarily talking about car chases and gunshots, though I've been guilty of a few of those. Some of it is the rate of revelation, some the ability to shift in tone as the story goes on -- I just want the story to move away from its starting point as quickly as possible, and to get more complicated with every page. I think the moment where the reader thinks, Oh, I get it, has to be immediately followed by the story saying, it's not like that at all.

If you try to approach this just by folding in more events, it will make your stories feel nervous and jumpy and self-conscious -- I speak from experience. It's some combination of event and attitude and language that makes a story feel fast.

On the sentence level, it's all about the verb, baby.

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JM: Speaking of the sentence level, I often read reviews that praise the poetry of a fiction writer. Oftentimes I think that praise is unwarranted, but your writing demonstrates a clear understanding of poetry--economy, rhythm, a reliance on imagery. Perhaps it's a suspicion that's reinforced by the fact that the main character of your latest novel is a poet, but has poetry been influential on your writing? If so, how, and any particular poets?

KC: A few years ago I was at Chico Hot Springs when a busload of hot-springs-worshipping Japanese people pulled up and went into the breakfast buffet, which has everything from eggs to watermelons. Clearly they had no great familiarity with any of this food, being from Japan, but they laced into it anyway: ketchup on the pancakes, jam on the cinnamon rolls, bacon with maple syrup.

This is kind of my relation to contemporary poetry. I don't know what or who is "important" or what I'm supposed to like or what goes with what but I do have my favorites -- Lynn Emanuel, for one, and Kathleen Halmé for another. Malena Morling, who taught here at Montana for a while, is another amazing poet. Gary Snyder. Richard Hugo. You'll note that these poets have not much in common. I read the "Poetry Daily" website every day -- a poem-a-day from a contemporary writer -- and I find something I like there more days than I think I will. I have no desire to write poetry but I like to read it, which I believe puts me 180 degrees away from 98% of Americans.

JM: A lot of modern fiction seems to take place primarily in the interior of a character--lots of thoughts and feelings and ideas without as much interaction with the surrounding world. Your characters, though, are clearly and actively living in the worlds you create. Can you talk about the importance of this in your work?

KC: Somebody told me -- one of those lit-class bon mots -- that after 1900, everything happens inside somebody's head. This seems about right. It's the thing that fiction can do that a movie can't: get inside a mind and tell us what's going on in there. The texture of the written word seems best-suited for this kind of internal work, the way a sentence can echo the shape of a thought. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like writing can be kind of nimble and quick when it's tracing the reactions of the mind, the interface between desire and world -- and a lot slower (there's that word again) when it's stuck in the external, gestural world.

I mean, I could describe Scarlett Johanson to you for three days and never make her beautiful -- but put her on screen for three seconds, the three seconds, say, when she smiles in Lost in Translation, and you will never forget her. I could write a story about the Bill Murray character, though, in which we saw what kind of pinball antics his brain produced in response to that very smile.

None of this is legal or illegal, of course, just tactical. It's hard enough for me to write a short story, so I figure I might as well leave the hard ones alone & stick with what seems natural to the medium.

JM: I completely agree about fiction’s unique strength, but I'm often put to sleep by fiction that relies too heavily on tracing a person’s thoughts and doesn't reveal those thoughts through action. You know what I mean? Through an interaction with the world. I’ve always felt your work strikes a nice balance.

KC: I suspect I was less than clear the first time through.

JM: I suspect I wasn’t clear with my question. I’m not a professional interviewer.

KC: What I meant to say was that everything is seen from inside a head, everything is sensed and felt and interpreted through a character. But if it's just a character sitting around thinking, nobody will read your story. I don't even think there will be a story until the character gets off his butt and does something. I feel like this is where stories take place, at the intersection between the inside world and the outer, the place where desire becomes action. This striving does not have to be successful or even accurate -- how many characters in fiction have a clear idea what they want, and the go about getting that in a healthy and efficient way, and then end up satisfied with what they've got? Zero, is my bet. But if they don't make that move, if they don't try, then nothing happens, and you haven't got a story.

JM: You've written two collections of stories and three novels. Does your process differ at all if you're working on stories or a novel? Do you have a preference for either form?

KC: I suffer more when I'm trying to write stories. As my friend & former teacher Bill Kittredge once said, the nice thing about the novel is that when you get to work in the morning, the tools are right there in the tunnel where you left them. With stories, you have to invent a new universe, and a new way of describing that universe, every fifteen or twenty pages. This leads to a lot of self-criticism and doubt, a lot of mornings allegedly attempting to write but actually staring at a blank screen and compulsively checking my email ever four minutes. This sounds like more fun than it is. As the late Gene Fowler put it, "Writing is easy. All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead."

Whining aside, I love both forms, the novel for its complexity and depth, the story for its coherence and punch. You can write more loosely in a novel, and there are techniques (I'm thinking of omniscient third-person narration) that seem much better-suited to the novel than to the story. The story seems to put more emphasis on the line, the image, the word, the "poetic" aspects of writing, and less on the larger movements of plot. If I had to give up one form or the other, I'd stick with stories. I have a secret theory that the great writing over the last 30 years has been in the story and not in the novel: Carver, Ford, Joy Williams, Denis Johnson, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, etc etc etc.

JM: The obvious follow up to that is, of course, what are you working on now?

KC: Four novels, all of which are terrible, and a story collection.

JM: In the first chapter of Winslow In Love, after learning of the visiting writer position he's been offered (by default), we read: "the thought of trying to tell anyone anything about poetry made him ill. The idea of standing up in a classroom again, which he had done before, and pretending that he knew anything about it." You've been teaching creative writing for some time now. How does teaching affect your own writing?

KC: Winslow's cynicism about teaching is kind of a put-on, kind of a pose, as is mine. (We're not much alike in other respects, though.) I really enjoy teaching, when it's good. It's mostly pleasant work, and there's not too much of it, and you get three months off every summer. If I'm jealous about husbanding my time, there's time to write, and the students here at Montana are an alert and restless bunch. I don't know if you can teach writing or not, but you can certainly coach it. If you get somebody coming in who's bright & willing to work, you can watch them grow quickly. It's amazing, sometimes. You'll see somebody come into the program as essentially a college student and two years later they're looking you right in the eye as an actual full-size American writer. Pretty cool when that happens.

JM: Last question. What would your advice be to those of us struggling at (what we hope are) the beginnings of our writing careers?

KC: Find a way of working and stick to it. Don't let a week go by without getting some work done. Learning to write is a lot like digging your way out of San Quentin with a spoon. For most people, there's a lot of work to be done, a lot of difficult stuff standing between you and your first real story. There are a lot of little twists and turns to this business and it took me quite a while to figure a few of them out. My experience is that a person with some talent and lots of discipline will stand a much better chance of making a mark than a highly talented writer with no discipline.

JM: Any specific “twists and turns to the business” you can think of?

KC: Well, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that something needs to happen to start your story. I'm still trying to figure out when to summarize and when to put something into scene. The link between language and character in a close third-person narration seems like a tricky business. It feels like every story I write presents a fresh set of technical challenges. But that's one of the things I love about writing, the certainty that I'll never get to the bottom of it, that I'll never achieve mastery.