Conversations with the Bookless: Gabe Durham

A couple of years ago Jeff Vandermeer ran a series of blog posts called Conversations With the Bookless. The Conversations with the Bookless series was designed to showcase those writers who are up and coming, who don’t yet have a collection or a novel out, who are making their names known writing short stories. With Jeff’s blessing I will be continuing the series here at BSC over the next couple of weeks, but with a focus mostly on mystery/crime fiction.

From the first generation successes of Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler and Sean Doolittle that came out of Plots With Guns to the later success of zine author/founders Sandra Ruttan and Russel McLean to a lot of others the online zines have, over the years, proved to be a fairly successful and fertile ground for emerging talents to launch a career, highlight their own work and showcase the work of others.

These writers are the next generation and it will be interesting in the next couple of years to see which of them will make it and which will stand out.

Nothing else to say really except to end with a quote from the original series.

The fact is, if you don’t have a book out, it’s harder to get attention and it’s harder for reader attention to crystallize around you. I hope these interviews introduce readers to some of the great talent that, in the coming years, will be amazingly and bountifully bookful. — Jeff Vandermeer

    
Gabe Durham lives in Northampton, MA. His writings have appeared (or will appear) in Mid-American Review, Fourteen Hills, Daytrotter, Hobart, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon, NOÖ Journal, and elsewhere.

    
What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?

I’m writing a first person novel that spans about 25 years, so I’ve been thinking a lot about using voice to show how someone changes over time. It’s tricky.

    
Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?

This may not be true in Israel, but Etgar Keret deserves more attention in the US. Last summer, I blew through The Nimrod Flipout and The Girl on the Fridge, and I’m trying to track down his other book, the one with the novella in it. He writes really premisey (idea-based) stories, which is probably my most common mode as well. What if somebody’s girlfriend turned into a fat dude every night? What if a girl spent her childhood in the space above her family’s fridge?The difference between Keret and me is that he’s inexhaustible, an idea machine. I think that’s why he makes his stories so short: he can afford to. The rest of us only stumble onto something good every now and then, so we hone and stretch–we milk them.

    
Where are you, right now, as you’re writing these answers?

My sister’s house in Austin, TX. Spring Break!

    
What’s your favorite story written by someone else?

Most recently, I was bowled over by a James Salter story called Last Night. It’s the last story in a collection (also called Last Night) full of pretty good stories about rich people cheating on each other, but this one is better than all of them. There’s not a lot I can say about it that wouldn’t give something away, but I especially admire the horror he achieves with such clean, mannered sentences. It’s ambiguous about characters’ motives, too, in a really exciting way. And, hey, check it out, I just found the full story in the New Yorker archives [embedded link above].

    
Who are your influences and what is your unlikeliest influence?

Influence is mostly subconscious, so it’s impossible to say, but sometimes I’m aware of the tradition I’m writing in. One story has a Donald Barthelme voice, another owes it’s structure to Aimee Bender, another is rambly and self-centered like Thomas Bernhard or a drunk Dostoevsky character. George Saunders was a revelation, so his influence kind of stalks my work. For my novel, I found Cormac McCarthy and Ingeborg Bachmann really instructive early on. Also, “Forever Overhead,” the David Foster Wallace story about the kid in line for the high dive.

    
What do you like most about short fiction?

Conciseness. Greater potential for invention. That you can read a story one sitting. That it has its roots in a tradition that began before the written word.

    
When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?

In 2nd grade, we had a time set aside for writing stories in our Creative Writing notebooks. My breakout story was called “The Big Bad Monster and I,” about a boy who finds his house overrun with monsters and has to kill them in hilarious Home Alone-like ways. The class liked Home Alone as much as I did, so they loved the story. I also drew a lot of cartoons growing up. Then there were the dark ages of TV and video games. I started writing stories again in high school after reading Palahniuk. He was just what I needed at the time–punchy, nervy, simple, imitable.

    
Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?

I’m sentimental about this literary/sci-fi thing I wrote called “The Inaugural Jump,” summer after I graduated from college. It had voice, characters, plot, emotion and big ideas, it felt like I was the only who wrote it, and it gave me that Best Thing I’ve Ever Written feeling you get to have a handful of times when you’re young (and that I hope I keep having long into adulthood). I sent it out in all of my MFA apps–which seems ballsy in retrospect, sending out a story with even a whiff of genre–but it got me into UMass Amherst and I’m grateful for that.

More recently, I’ve got one called “Every Mostly Great Man in the State,” which is about my silliest story yet. Usually, when I write something wacky, I eventually reign it in and take it more seriously as I edit further. This one just kept getting weirder.

    
Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?

I have a story called “The Conversationalist” coming out in the Madison Review, and one or two short shorts coming out in Matchbook, which is a new online/print journal that my friends Brian Mihok and Edward Mullany are starting.

    
How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

I tell you what hasn’t helped: Bursting into tears every time I’m reminded of it. In the works are a novel, a story collection, and a series of short shorts. So I’m at the stage where I’m trying to be patient and failing. I’m eager for the “realizing that having a book out does not make life fall into place” stage. Or maybe, for me, it will.

    
_{Gabe Durham blogs at Gather Around Children with his fiction listed on the right sidebar.}