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
For those that have been keeping up with the series when the previous Conversations participants were asked the question “Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?” time and time again, more then any other, one name rang out. That was Kyle Minor. I’m going to let you in on something, that way years from now; you can say that you got in on the ground level. Kyle Minor will be one of the great ones. His name will be one to remember, he will be relevant and he will craft masterpieces.
He possesses the rare ability to write fiction that hurts; it hurts because the writing is so good that you find yourself re-reading parts; it hurts because the characters are aching in so many ways. It also hurts because he’s not afraid of having characters with emotions that are raw, complex and contradictory.
Some authors like their characters; others think that they are cool; still others think that they are disposable. This is a disservice to those characters because it focuses solely on one facet of their personalities and their presentation suffers for it. The difference in Kyle Minor’s fiction is that he loves his characters, all of their traits and, in many ways, accepts them.
In his collection, In the Devil’s Territory, all of the stories are good, some are great and one is a stone cold masterpiece. In “A Day Meant to Do Less” he manages to take the simple act of a man caring for his ailing, elderly mother and subvert it to where it becomes a criminal act. It is one of the finest short stories that I have ever read.
Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?
I’m quite taken with the work of Donald Ray Pollock, and his book Knockemstiff, which is, to my taste, the best short story collection published in 2008. Other short story writers who deserve more attention: Christopher Coake (We’re in Trouble), Edwidge Danticat (The Dew Breaker), Stephen Dixon (I. and End of I.), Roy Kesey (All Over), Tao Lin (Bed), and Paul Eggers (How the Water Feels.) And there’s a part-time copy editor at Time Magazine in New York named Douglas Watson who is writing some of the strangest, most beautiful tiny stories, and not publishing many of them, but there are few available here and there. My favorite is “Against Specificity,” which was published by the now-defunct Backwards City Review and is still online.
Where are you, right now, as you’re writing these answers?
I’m at the Jimmy John’s sub shop in Maumee, Ohio, where I’m skimming Internet from the bread shop next door. Jimmy John’s has the best barbeque potato chips I’ve ever tasted. They soak them in peanut oil. They also have the best fountain Coca-Cola you can find in the United States. I don’t know why, but their Coke is sweeter, more sugary, and more caffeinated. Plus, the music they play is great — the Beatles, Beck’s Odelay album, the Rolling Stones, The Band’s “Cripple Creek.” I wrote one-third of my book here, and every time I have something anthologized, the employees celebrate with me. The only drawback is they don’t have any electrical outlets at ground-level, so once the battery dies on my laptop, I have to move next door to the bread shop, which plays jazz, which wears me out, and then I go home and watch TV.
What’s your favorite story written by someone else?
It’s hard to pick a favorite. Some favorites: “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” by Lorrie Moore; “In the Gloaming,” by Alice Elliott Dark; “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” by Barry Hannah; “What Y Was,” by Lee K. Abbott; “Seven,” by Edwidge Danticat; “The Apology,” by Stephen Dixon; “All Through the House,” by Christopher Coake; “Dynamite Hole,” by Donald Ray Pollock; “Voices from the Moon,” by Andre Dubus; “Bullet in the Brain,” by Tobias Wolff; “The Abduction,” by Joyce Carol Oates; “The Old Forest,” by Peter Taylor; “A Wilderness Station,” by Alice Munro; “Good Old Neon,” by David Foster Wallace.
Who are your influences and what is your unlikeliest influence?
For the stories in In the Devil’s Territory, I think I was influenced by James Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, Andre Dubus, and James Baldwin. I say this because these are writers whose work helped me solve problems with the stories as I was writing them. These aren’t necessarily the writers I most want to be like, but you never r know what will help you over the hump.
Right now, I’m working on a novel set in Haiti, and I think a list of writers whose work might be helping would include V. S. Naipaul, Louise Erdrich, Edwidge Danticat, Amy Wilentz, Bernhard Schlink, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, and Vladimir Nabokov.
What do you most value in the fiction you love?
I want to feel like the world tilts on a new axis by time I finish the story. I want my guts to be ripped out. I want to be moved.
What do you like most about short fiction?
I like the briskness of it, and I like the economy of it. I also like the way it can accommodate so many different forms. It can be like a lyric poem, or it can be novel-like.
When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?
I started writing short fiction after writing a failed novel about a self-help guru, his son, and their nepotistic empire. It was terrible, and it cost me a year and a half of my life, and I realized I had a lot of failure between where I was and where I needed to be. Short fiction was a vehicle by which to fail more often.
Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?
My favorite story I’ve ever written isn’t even in my book. It’s a robot story called “The Truth and All Its Ugly,” and it appears in an anthology of weird stories from the South. Surreal South, it’s called, edited by Pinckney Benedict and Laura Benedict.
Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?
I’m writing a bunch of them for the website Plots with Guns. The stories in my book are I guess literary stories. The stories I’m writing for Plots with Guns are I guess super-wild stories, with amped up language and guns. I also have a story told in comic book panels coming out in a book called Versus Anthology.
Your first collection came out last year. Tell us about that experience and what you’re working on now.
It was awesome. The book is beautiful, my publisher worked hard to get it into plenty of hands, and I just finished a 25-city tour promoting it, with my tour partner Kathleen Rooney. (You should read her memoir Live Nude Girl, which is fantastic.) Now I’m working on a narrative nonfiction book about a child abduction case in the Haitian countryside, and a novel, also set in Haiti. I’m also working (more slowly) on a graphic novel set in Berlin and West Palm Beach, a short story about a priest who murders a nun in the Rust Belt, a book of poems about New York City, and a screenplay. I also have some sketching done toward a Broadway musical comedy about death, which I’m hoping to write with a friend. I get restless.
For more information on Kyle Minor check out his website.
This cat is alrighty.
Reading Minor is like attending a Master’s seminar on short fiction. No word is wasted, every sentence has purpose. Outside of Pollack, there are very few short story writer’s who can match the sheer force of his work.