---

Writing Against the Bone: An Interview with Chuck Kinder

October 16, 2001

Chuck Kinder is the author of several novels, most recently Honeymooners, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. He has attended numerous colleges, and was a Mirreelees fellow at Stanford University. He is currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jon Manning/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux

 

Heather Thomson is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and a former student of Kinder's.

 

 

Thomson: How did a kid from rural West Virginia end up in the San Francisco literary scene of the 1970s?

 

Kinder: How did I get from the hills of West Virginia to Stanford? That's so convoluted . . . well, I never really took school seriously, unlike everyone else I can think of, and I really attended maybe about a half dozen various colleges in southern West Virginia. I'd go for a term, knock off for a term or a year and work and I've had a multitude of interesting jobs. I've worked in coal mines, I worked in the steel mills up in Cleveland, --what else did I do?--well, I ran moonshine with my uncles. I was a bartender, of course, and a bouncer...

Finally--what happened to me?--well, I was at West Virginia Institute of Technology in the Kanawa Valley, and I married the homecoming queen, Miss Golden Bear. I'm a man who was married to Miss Golden Bear. She was a very linear, sweet, dear woman who looked like Mary Tyler Moore, and she got a job in Morgantown, West Virginia teaching math at the junior high school level and I simply went up there and popped into their MA program . . . I was supposed to go to law school, that was my original idea, but I found out that I couldn't do it, simply because I had a little bit of a record, and you can't go to law school with a little bit of a record. And so I got into the MA program, and wrote the first creative writing thesis there--it was called Memorial Day--and then I got a job handed to me at Waynesburg College. I mean, literally, the English department chairman came to my door and knocked on it. He wanted to start a writing program, and since I had written the first creative writing thesis out at Morgantown, he just knocked on my door and said, "Do you want a job?" and I said, "Yes, yes!"

I taught there for about two years, maybe three, and I had a scholarship offered to me by Indiana University . . . so I was gonna be an academic, but then various, sort of expatriate, doper West Virginians had a house together, a commune together, in San Francisco, and I had sort of a mid-life crisis when I was 23, and I said, "I'm not gonna do this," and literally I bagged the scholarship, I quit my job . . . I bagged everything, including my first wife. I didn't bag her, I basically just begged her to let me go be a hippie and a flower child, and got on a Greyhound bus and went to San Francisco.

My idea was to be a flower child. I wanted to be a hippie. I wanted to be part of the Age of Aquarius. I got out there and moved into the commune, and I realized that I would never be a successful flower child because I was too much of a redneck. I had to eat red meat, I mean a lot of it, you know, six burgers a day. All my little flower child friends started calling me "Big Mac breath." And the peace and love stuff, the free love stuff. I'm from West Virginia--anything "free" makes me nervous, and especially love, free love? I really couldn't handle it. And plus the peace stuff. There was this big, thuggy flower child, much bigger than me, who would come to my part of a little room, in my little commune, and he would liberate my love beads. I was wearing love beads, and a bandanna, sandals, of course, and that's when I grew my hair long. I would say things like "groovy" and "far out." So he would come in and liberate my love beads, and liberate my purple-tinted shades, and say, "Well, they're the peoples' shades man, you know, man." And I said, "Don't do this any more," and so I liberated his lip, that's what I finally did. I popped him. And my little flower children buddies threw me out, I got drummed out of the commune. It was heartbreaking.

Meanwhile, I'd applied to Iowa and Stanford at the same time, and I got accepted into Iowa with a teaching fellowship, and I accepted. But then two weeks later I got offered a Mirreelees [fellowship] at Stanford so I said, "I'll go to Stanford," and so I did.

 

Thomson: Honeymooners has been described as a "Pittsburgh literary legend." How does it feel to have your work described in those terms?

 

Kinder: To be called a legend, under any circumstances, no matter how inaccurate it is, feels wonderful. It's only a legend 'cause people said, "Poor old Chuck--he's still writin' that big dumb book" . . . the word "legend" just means that people talk about it, and you know, as I said, "Poor old Chuck, he's still workin' on that big dumb book." And that's basically it, you know. If anything lasts long enough, is around long enough, it's going to be a legend in some sense. So in other words, it's not a term I take too seriously as applied to me or my work.

 

Thomson: When you were out in San Francisco, and in other places over the years, you've gotten to know other prominent writers--Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Scott Turow. How has having relationships with these people affected you as a writer?

 

Kinder: Affected me as a writer, I don't know . . . I mean, we were all there . . . in my classes there was Ray, of course, Scott, of course, Toby was a year behind me, Alice Hoffman, Richard Price, William Kittridge, April Smith--people who have published and done really well. So I was just lucky. But back then, we were just these young writers hangin' out. We had a softball team, we had favorite beer joints. We just hung out together a lot. People fell in love, out of love, and all this and all that . . . so I didn't give it much consideration. I mean, we were in awe of the people who had gone right before us, they were our heroes. I mean, the classes right before us--Robert Stone, who's a real nice guy, Ed McClanahan, Larry McMurtry, Gurney Norman, Ken Kesey...I'm leaving out names. I can't do that well off the top of my head. But we were like "Ohh!" and we got to know them. A lot of them were still around Palo Alto. Kesey still had his house over in La Hondo, and so we'd meet him, and I'd just stand there. I couldn't even talk around him. I even met Neil Cassidy. He was so wired and freaked out by then on speed and everything that he was incoherent, but I guess he was like that most of the time, anyway. It was so strange, though--he always carried a big hammer, and he was always flipping it. Sometimes he'd have two and he'd flip them. He was real muscular, but his face was just caved in. I just met extraordinary people.

But like I said, Ray, we were just guys hanging out together, we didn't think a thing about it. I mean, I knew they were extraordinary writers, you knew that, but we didn't talk literature much, sitting around talking deconstruction or anything like that, but we'd tell stories. We sit around the kitchen table, night after night after night, and simply tell stories, and laugh a lot, we hung out a lot together and suddenly, lo and behold, a lot of my friends became rich and famous. I was lucky, in that sense. But we never looked at it like that, even later when people became very successful...it's hard for me to think of them with that kind of awe . . . because I knew them as real people.

 

Thomson: In an interview you said that when Raymond Carver died, you stopped working on Honeymooners for a while because it just wasn't fun anymore. What allowed you to take up that project again and be able to finish it?

 

Kinder: Well, how it began, way back, was really as a joke on Ray. Ray lived with Diane and I, off and on, a number of times, and he was living with us on California Street in San Francisco. His birthday was coming up, so we decided to have a party for him. Now, I knew I couldn't throw a surprise party --cause he was too snoopy--you know, the phone would ring and I'd get on it, and he'd pick up the extension--so we just told him we were having a nice birthday party for him, and I invited a lot of really well-known Bay Area authors--Lenny Michaels, Leonard Gardner, the guy who wrote Fat City, just a multitude of well known writers.

Ray and I played practical jokes on each other all the time. He was so genteel, he was such a gentleman, and he really cared about appearances, which sounds kind of strange, given his reputation, but he really did. So what Diane and I did, we faked a fight, and we acted like it was about who was gonna cook. And I usually cook, but Diane likes to cook for affairs, functions. And so we faked a fight about who's gonna cook, you know: "I'm not gonna cook," "Well, I'm not gonna cook," and I said, "Well, screw it, we're not gonna cook then," and Ray said, "Woah, what? There are important people coming tonight. If there's no food, what will they think of us?" He was really like that. "What will they think of us? They'll leave here and think that we're barbarians!" He was really distressed, but the thing was, I'd told everyone to bring their favorite TV dinner, you know, a big laugh on Ray. I got his favorite turkey TV dinner. So it was all a big joke. But the second thing was, we all were to write something in parody of Ray's work--a poem or sketch or story or whatever--and try to parody his style, so everyone'd get up and read it and laugh, laugh, laugh. And I wrote what turned out to be, rather than a scene, a story. It was based on a night that my first wife, Mary Tyler Moore, and Ray and his first wife, Mary Ann, went out to celebrate an anniversary dinner of theirs. And horrendous kind of Ray Carver things happened. We were all drinking really heavily, and we tried to walk the check and were caught. And I wrote a story based on that. And Ray just laughed and laughed and wagged his old woolly head . . . and that was the start of it.

I kept writing it, kind of as a continuing joke, and I kept doing it, kind of with my left hand, while with my right hand I was writing, you know, my "serious literature." You know, like a continuing joke, and I'd send him sections of it, and he'd say, "Oh, you're awful. I'm gonna sue you, you're gonna go to jail!" And I kept doing it, and I got really interested in it--started writing it with my right hand, seriously. Unfortunately, it started getting way out of hand--maybe because I was in academia, or because of what I was reading, I don't know...I read a lot of science fiction, and I got to the point where I had metaphoric spaceships landing on my deck in San Francisco and taking us off into the clouds to visit other literary planets and meeting other literary characters. I had a whole section of sort of magical realism with the ghost of Jack Kerouac knocking around the bars of North Beach. . . clearly, it got way out of hand.

But in '88, I was in Yaddo, a writers' colony up in Saratoga Springs, where I used to go every year. I'd always go in August 'cause that's the racing season up there and I got to be really good friends with a lot of the jockeys--I'd drink with them, get tips. At any rate, I was there, and when I left there, I was supposed to go out, before our school started here, to go out for a week to fish, out in Port Angeles with Ray, which we did at least once a year. He was supposed to be doing fine, but I hadn't heard from him. So I called Richard [Ford] and Toby [Wolff] both, and Richard said, "Well, he and Tess [Gallagher] went fishing up in Alaska, he's taking a little vacation." But he fell ill up there. We believe he had a collapse again.

So the night before he died, I was having dinner with Galway Kinnell. And we got to talking about Ray, how's he doing and stuff, and he was friends with Tess [Gallagher]. And I got Ray on my mind. He'd been on my mind, but somehow it really spooked me. I don't know what it was. I'm not a big, brave fellow, but I'm not afraid of anything, generally, I mean nothing, and that night I got the willies. I couldn't sleep, I wanted to go out and--everyone put their communal wine and stuff downstairs in the bar--I figured I'd get something to drink, and I couldn't even open the door, I was so scared. Finally I did, I got a lot of wine and ran back upstairs like a kid. And I wrote about Ray all night, and I still have it in one of my infrequent journals I keep. He was on my mind, I was just remembering stuff about us.

Anyway, daybreak. I go down to get something to eat and get my little lunch bucket--it looked like a little miner's lunch bucket--and went back to my room and slept. I was supposed to be drinking with Alan Cheuse that night--that guy who's on PBS, he has that "All Things Considered" kind of thing--and we were gonna go drinking. And I got out on the back porch where I was supposed to meet him and there was the president of Yaddo, and she looked up and I said, "Oh, God. It's Ray, he's in the hospital again." And she said, "No. He died." He died that night. And I swear, I left--I was supposed to be at Yaddo another two weeks--I left a couple days later, and I've never been back. That was in '88, I've never been back to Yaddo. That was August of '88, and I put the book away for years.

Actually, it was Scott [Turow]--of all the human beings on the face of the earth, he's one of the few who's read the three feet of fiction. And he kept saying, "Get back to it, man, get back to it. Get down to the fiction, get back to the story and get off that metaphysical, metaphoric, metafiction, all that crap--bag all that." And I just went back to it and did it. I cut it down to a measly 900 pages. Scott in essence served as my agent. He pretty much said to Farrar, Straus & Giroux--they're his publishers--he pretty much could say, "Do me a favor," and they'd do it. Essentially, that's what happened. He got me introduced to Farrar Straus, and I was lucky enough for it to land on a young editor's desk who thought it was funny. Hopefully more than just funny. But that's essentially how that happened.

 

Thomson: You mentioned that one of the editors who saw it thought it was funny, which is one thing you hear a lot when people comment on this book. Another thing that reviewers have said is that the characters aren't necessarily sympathetic, but they have the readers rooting for them anyway. How did you do that--create characters that aren't necessarily "nice" or "good," but still have the readers invested in them?

 

Kinder: Boy, if I knew that, I'd distill it, put it in a bottle, and I'd sell it. Hock it to creative writing programs. I have no idea. I didn't set out with a sense of "OK, now let me create characters who aren't necessarily sympathetic, but you can empathize with." I haven't a clue. I think, if nothing else, they just begin to loom. I've said this before--I wish I did have more imagination, to make things up out of whole cloth, just invent them, because I do like science fiction, I like genre mystery and stuff, but I do write pretty close to the bone. Yet I think of this book as a work of imagination in the sense that my imagination--and I think every writer, to one degree or another, starts from their own experience to a degree, some are more successfully "imaginative" than others--I found myself collapsing characters, combining events, moving the narrative line, kind of like a shell game. But yet again, I had really good material to begin with, and the characters, I lived with them both really and imaginatively for so long. I just sort of knew them so well, and I think within any "character/real human being" there are enough empathetic points, and if you render them well enough, we can even find our own humanity in outlaw characters. I guess because they were so real to me that I could render them in a way that people could empathize with them.

 

Thomson: Most writers will say that there isn't one right process of writing or one right set of rules, but people are always curious to know individual authors' methods and idiosyncrasies. Do you have certain habits you follow in your writing?

 

Kinder: Nothing of interest. What can I say? I used to write longhand on legal tablets, and finally I got to a word processor, and still what I do is sort of like longhand and transferred to the word processor. I got used to using that, but slowly and surely Diane pulled me into the electronic age. I have a computer that I can use like a typewriter, so I do.

I play tricks on myself. I'll change my schedule--there'll be a period of time where I'll literally write all night, go to work at 10:30 and work until dawn, end up out on my front porch smoking and drinking coffee, watching the morning come alive. And then it goes stale for me, and I'll switch it around. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

In terms of process--none. When I'm really working, I try to have a solid five-hour day, though I often work more than that. I'll get my morning time in then sit down and watch TV or listen to music. I usually find myself getting back to work after dinner. That's when I'm really cookin'. I've always found if I tell myself, "You must do something good." I won't do it. I have a tendency to be lazy. I have horrible taste in things, like I watch "Judge Judy" and "Seinfeld" reruns every night at 7:30. So I have absolutely no suggestions at all, none whatsoever, --cause my habits are so erratic. Except I do it. I do do it, you know?

 

Thomson: You're on hiatus from teaching right now, but generally in addition to your own writing, you're teaching. Does working with young writers influence your own writing?

Kinder: I'll say. Especially because I get so much energy from my so-called "students." I get more energy from them than they get from me. I'll come out of workshop, especially a really good one, just high as a kite. I'll come home and think about everything we talked about, and I'll invariably get ideas, and I get those down and get to work. I don't know why, but I seem to get more work done, fresh work, when I'm teaching then when I'm on sabbatical.

 

Thomson: A lot of people are really critical of MFA programs. How important do you think they are in the development of writers? Do you see potential drawbacks to them?

 

Kinder: Well, there can be drawbacks, of course. Sometimes people come away with too high a sense of themselves, they've been flattered too much. A lot of it has to do with, like any kind of community, the cliques that are formed--MFA programs have all the inherent problems with something like that. There are teacher's pets, there are teachers--no one I can think of here, but I can think of people I've met in the past--who like to have their little coterie, to enhance their own self-esteem, I guess. So there are pitfalls. As I said, you can be flattered too much, to the point where you're not really looking at your problems. One thing I learned a long time ago, and I've probably mentioned this in workshop, was that I was always bringing only my very best stuff to workshop, stuff I knew was good, so that I'd get the winks and blinks from the chicks, you know, whereas Ray, for instance--I really learned from him. I'd read his outside stuff, you know, he'd been publishing in small magazines, so I knew how good he was, yet he'd bring rough stuff to workshop, and he really, really wanted to find out whether it was working or not.

But all that is sort of beside the point. I think that--and not just because it's my day job, conducting workshops--they were awfully valuable for me. Besides that, I met some of the best friends I ever made in my life and fell in love with some of the best chicks I've ever known in my life, which is all really good. Nothing wrong with falling in love in workshops . . .

It's a really nice community of fellow writers. You're in competition, surely, but on the other hand everyone seems to have a...well, we're kindred spirits. And you get feedback, you know, you're in a community that cares about what you're doing, what they're doing. Competition's good...it depends on the workshop not to let it get destructive, which it can be, I know. What else can you do? There's this fantasy of working a nine to five job, then going home at night, no other writer buddies, except maybe the bartender down the street . . . that's just bullshit. I mean, Hemingway had Paris--Gertrude Stein, he had Ezra [Pound] before he got too crazy--I mean, they had their communities. Now, those communities are in the universities.

 

Thomson: What do you think of the publishing market now, as opposed to when you first started?

 

Kinder: I think it's probably a lot harder--but my so-called "publishing career" has been so erratic and so strange that it really doesn't address legitimate concerns. I know that when I published my first couple books, eighty-seven years ago or whatever, agents would come to Stanford to recruit us. They would come, and that's how I made my first connection with an agent. She came to campus, and I gave her my manuscript, and within a week she'd read it and wanted to handle it, and in about a month, Alfred Knopf bid on it, and it just happened like that. On the other hand, there were other classmates I had who had manuscripts and it didn't happen so quickly. Scott [Turow] pretty much quit writing and went to law school. He worked on a novel while in law school and only later, after he was an attorney riding the train in and out of Chicago every day for seven or eight years, did he finish up Presumed Innocent. So, it was different then. And, as I said, this time around Scott was pretty much my agent. I had a friend at Alfred Knopf, and old editor friend, and he didn't know what to do with it. For one thing, he was also Ray's editor, and some of the material was sort of too close . . . but I hadn't sent Honeymooners around. I don't even have an agent now. You know, I have various agents who are in contact with me now, and I can kind of decide who I want to go with, but I didn't even have an agent.

I do know it's different. It's harder. For one thing, there are so many more writers. When I was at Stanford, there were maybe half a dozen, maybe a dozen, writing programs around the country--Iowa, Columbia, here and there. But now, there are like 360 or 380, and there are so many aspiring writers. Plus it's changed in the sense that most of the publishing houses aren't as independent as they once were. It's common knowledge that big conglomerates have bought them up, so it's sort of different. They're looking for more of a bottom line, I think--books that can make bucks. It's harder to break in now.

 

Thomson: What would say to these aspiring writers who are trying to publish now?

 

Kinder: Well, that's one thing good thing about the MFA programs, because the bottom line is, you're going to have to have a day job, and the best day job in the world to my mind is teaching. Preferably on the college level. Even the community college level, though that's really hard--a lot of comp classes. I'd take that valuable, precious time you have as a so-called student and just bust butt on your book. Get that manuscript done, and put all your heart in it. Then you come out with an MFA degree, you gotta have that degree--with the idea that you're gonna want to have a good day job, teaching. You come out of MFA programs with a degree, you come out with your manuscript. I would spend at least another year or two on your own, working on that manuscript. I would start submitting it to contests, like the Drue Heinz contest, the Flannery O'Connor, or the contest at Iowa, there are a lot of contests out there. I would apply for anything--fellowships, whatever. There are a lot of those, too. You look in the Writers' Chronicle. You do all these kind of linear things, and of course try to secure an agent or an editor, as opposed to even sending it out. Listen to what the editors have to say. Be astute, and listen, and don't write just so that you can sell it, but do listen. Again, it's just one foot in front of another--no real news or philosophy here. Just one foot in front of the other.

          I only have a couple of students, from all my years of teaching, who make their entire living from writing. Virtually everyone else I know, I mean really talented people, have to get a day job. Most of them are teaching. For better or worse, sometimes that means a kind of extended graduate school-level life . . .so, it can be a little scary, but--so what?