Dave Griffith received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Pittsburgh. He currently teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Susan Neville begins her book Indiana Winter with a quote from poet Mary Oliver:  "I don't know how to pray but I do know how to pay attention."  In her essay "Sacred Space in Ordinary Time," which appears in Falling Toward Grace: Images of Religion and Culture from the Heartland Neville writes, "Simone Weil thought to really fix your attention is to pray."  No matter which you privilege, Neville calls us to think of writing as a vocation -- a job that requires vigilance and hope.
            In her essay "Where's Iago," published in the anthology Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Writing and the Writing Life, Neville tries to understand the position of evil in literature -- a daunting task to say the least.  But, like all of her works, Neville finds a way in to a monolithic subject.  She accomplishes this through Shakespeare's most famous villain, Iago. 
            A number of elegant coincidences are the impetus for this essay: the space station Mir is scheduled to pass directly over Indiana, a colleague is struck by a car, and a late night phone call from fellow Hoosier Kurt Vonnegut (who calls Neville with a question about the words to the Indiana state song).  It is during this phone call that Vonnegut says to Neville concerning her novel-in-progress, "I can tell you what's wrong with it without seeing it . . . You're missing Iago . . . The character that bounces all the other characters around.  I wasted twenty years trying to figure that out.  Look for Iago."  And with that Neville begins her search.
            She writes, "Iago is the image of evil in the way that Romeo and Juliet are forever the image of romantic love, so I have to talk about evil here but also have to say that I'm slightly embarrassed by the idea of talking about it . . . there is no such thing as evil, I've always assumed; it's simply a matter of tracing things back far enough until you can determine some completely understandable cause in biology or chemistry or physics."  Neville's stories and essays are concerned with this type of search -- this kind of tracing back.  Often, the search is difficult and terrifying as in her story "The Increasing Distance" from her 1998 prize-winning collection, In the House of Blue Lights.  In this story the narrator, a grieving middle-aged woman, goes in search of the origins of evil as she tracks down information about the man who killed her brother and several other young gay men over the course of several years.  The story meditates on the appearances we keep -- the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive; and the lies, the lies that we use to befriend and bemuse and that we eventually use to harm. 
            But, despite the subject matter Susan Neville never allows her characters to become paralyzed by morbidity.  Her narrators are some of the most acute and dogged observers of the world's hidden beauty; they regularly perform one of the most amazing alchemical feats in story-telling: transforming grief into hope.

How did you approach writing the essay ["Where's Iago"]?  It seems, as most of your essays do, to begin in this hapless way (laughter), hapless in a Columbo kind of way.  You're very savvy.  We realize by the end that you've drawn us in and made us part of a story as well as this intellectual attempt at making meaning.

Essays like that pretty much feel like gifts.  I was obsessed with trying to figure out what Iago means.  Knowing that I had to write this essay and thinking about that issue, like most obsessions tend to, it kind of served as a lens.  For a couple of weeks everything I saw seemed to move me toward the answer to that question.  Then I sort of followed fascinations too [because] I really wanted to write about the day that the spaceship Mir went across Indiana.  

It's really an elegant coincidence.

Yeah, I was looking for these kinds of coincidences.  I think that the events in the essay actually are the things that lead me to the conclusion . . . my conclusions occur as I'm writing.  But the really fun thing of writing an essay to me is the tacking -- starting with a meditation point or an idea and then seeing how far away from it I can get and still come back to it.  It's really the joy of writing of writing essays to me.

 It's very noticeable in your short story "The Increasing Distance."  Could you talk about the way that this story tacks back and forth?

I actually lived around the corner form a serial killer and so a large percentage of the story is my thoughts on this guy.  So it started with a real event that I had to try to make sense out of.  It was terrifying.  The thing that was most horrifying about the event was that it really it did not make national news and it probably did not receive as much news play as it should have here [in Indianapolis].  It's hard to explain.  I was trying to find a way into it.  I was horrified by the fact that we ignored it and I thought that the sense in which we ignored it had something to do with the fact that the victims were seen as disposable.  No one had paid attention to the fact that these young gay men had been disappearing for years and had we paid more attention to it -- if they had not been [seen as] "disposable" human beings -- I thought that some of the murders could have been prevented and so I wrote the story very quickly trying to get it into [In the House of Blue Lights] before it went to print because I just felt this sort of moral obligation to write about it and to think about it.  The only way I could find my way into [the story] was to make up a character who was a sister of one of the victims and so she was trying to understand why nobody was paying attention to the fact that her brother had disappeared.  So, that's where the story came from.

 I think that speaks to the heart of what I find brutal and beautiful about the story:  trying to figure out what all this "blindness" is about.  There is a play on words between the brother and the mother.  The mother says, "It takes a certain amount of kindness to keep up appearances . . ." and the brother corrects her saying, "Do you mean blindness?"

That whole particular collection is about "The House of Blue Lights," which I have the sense of being like the house of the imagination.  The epigraph at the beginning of the book is "the imagination is this terrible gift.  Cultivate it accurately" which the narrator in "The Increasing Distance" paraphrases.  My sense was that the Bone Man because of lying, because of hiding what he was, his imagination could kind of cut [him] off from the world -- become delusional.  I was really interested in that kind of doubleness.  Actually, that reflects the Iago essay too, the idea that the root of all evil is the lie.

 Does the epigraph have something to do with the narrator's position in telling the story?  I'm always trying to think of ways of talking about the "stakes" of a story and one of the ways that I try to think of it for myself is 'does it seem that it means something for this narrator to tell the story."

It definitely does, because in some ways every narrator who's telling a story is in kind of an epistemological process. I mean you're trying to discover what's true; I mean what's illusion and what's real.  And the stakes are incredibly high because the human being has to know the difference.

Going back to what you were just saying about having to discern as story-tellers, as people living in the world, we have to determine the difference between the real and illusion it seems that your narrators do this by finding traces on the surface of things -- that it begins with image, that it begins with the veneer.  It seems that image triggers these forays down into the heart of things, like a kind of auguring.

I almost always begin by looking around at the surface.  It's a kind of lyrical impulse, to see things and then translate that into the music of language.  The process seems to start with a fascination with an image or a picture or something that I'm trying to understand and then let it lead me to something else. 

 There is something unique about your vision and a lot of it seems to have to do with this "tacking".  This leaping back and forth between the main story and back stories that are departures from the main narrative.

When you're writing, I don't know, . . . maybe I like the sense of power when you get to a place that you can just go, 'OK, I'm going to go for it' . . . take this big leap.  What I really love doing is like tacking, but really is more like leaping away from it and trusting that you're going to be able to get back again; but taking the risk that you might not be able to get back again, that's what's really fun.

 That speaks to the epigraph -- "the imagination's terrible accuracy"-- we want that riskiness and danger, somehow.  No matter how startling it is . . .

It now occurs to me that the Steve Orlen poem that the epigraph comes from is a poem about the Holocaust.  In the poem the speaker is wondering what happens to these sticks, these clubs that were later made into dolls and some of these sticks were used as clubs to beat the Jews.  The epigraph comes from a moment when [the speaker is] looking at [the dolls] and thinking: when the imagination sees something like a piece of wood it can turn it into a club or it can turn it into a doll.  And so it actually demands a kind of accuracy; that you're seeing the thing that is really there.

I think in the introduction to your book Fabrications, you describe language as a conveyor belt on which objects go by and you pick them up and turn them in your hand and find the word that seems to fit them.  You definitely complicate that idea much more throughout your work; that it's not just picking something up and describing it as true a way as possible, but it's what you have just suggested, the way that the imagination works cruelly at times -- to turn the stick into something that can be used to hurt.  It seems that that this where the power lies.

Yes, to be able to say, …this is what it is and that this is real.'  I love Flannery O'Connor and when I think about her work I always think about characters constantly living in this kind of dream world and then the sharp bit of violence that comes into the story.  She said something about how her characters have such thick skulls that it takes violence to make them see what is real.  I like to think of stories, even when they don't have that moment of cleansing violence, which at some point we go from a sense of this is the way we wish things were to this is the way they really are.

 I think many of your stories start out by "spilling the beans" early, letting us know what the stakes are right away, so that we're really not in the dark about what's going on.

There are a couple different ways of maintaining suspense and one is that you read to find out what happens and you read to find out how or why it happened and I guess I'm more interested in how or why.  In the case of both "Night Train" and "The Increasing Distance" in some ways both of those narrators are essayists.  They're both starting with something, some crime that astonished them and they're trying to understand it, and so again it's an epistemological process because they're trying to go through and say ok, here it is, this is what happened, Why? Why? Why?  Because they're first person narrators and I allow them a kind of leisure both those questions (how and why) become larger questions and eventually lead them to meditate on their own crime -- they're own confusion and their own lives.

 Your narrators seem fair, not unbiased, but fair.  They seem to have that leisure you're talking about as they walk around and around and poke in and out of things.

Usually it's because they have a knot:  a thing they're trying to untangle and that's what leads to their sense of fascination and that wandering around trying to understand what's going on.  I mean, I like characters on the periphery.  The thing that's fun about those kinds of characters is that a lot times you're looking for what a character's hiding . . . and so these narrators are able to keep away from what it is that they don't want to talk about but then finally get into it.  I guess in both ["Night Train" and "The Increasing Distance"] the narrators are horrified by the sense of their own complicity and trying not to project it out into the world but instead use it to look at themselves . . . And so I guess I sort of like them for that.  It's too easy to project evil out into the world.

At one moment in the Iago essay you say, "I am going to talk about how Iago creates dramatic tension and to say that there are aesthetic consequences of moral evasiveness or flinching away from evil in fiction -- in addition to a lack of seriousness, a kind of muddiness, characters with a static sensitivity, a case of viral ennui that is never realized in dramatic action."  I think that what you're describing one could ascribe to your narrators.  They don't flinch, but yet they seem to get to heart of the matter in a circumlocuted way.

I think that part of that dramatic tension is that they would prefer to flinch.  They're faced with something . . . that they would like to veer away from so they tack away from it, to bring back that metaphor; they come close and then move away but ultimately they're coming closer and closer and closer.  And again, in order to see it I think they finally have to see it in themselves . . . 'oh, yeah.  I'm part of it.'

 If we're thinking about an aesthetic then let's think about endings.  Your endings lead us to a point of what?  The narrator has fulfilled their obligation; or the narrator has somehow come full circle to themselves?  I'm not sure.

I think the narrator has somehow reached the destination which is to . . . maybe it's a kind of horror, but they have become somehow like Oedipus realizing, "Oh, it's me!  Who's the criminal?  Oh, it's me!"  And so the destination is some kind of insight no matter how temporary that insight will be.  I don't think that the character is going to be forever changed by this insight because, say, another story happens.

 It's interesting that you bring up the point that the characters aren't necessarily changed forever.  This is a common misconception, it seems.

I think it's one of the illusions of the narrative.  I mean that's the way a narrative works that the character's changed or this is the character's last chance to change and blows it.  It's an illusion because the next day you wake up and you're in the middle of a different story.  All of sudden the person who was Iago becomes Othello and the person who was Othello becomes Iago to somebody else's Othello.

 You refer to the Misfit from O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard To Find" in your essay on Iago.  You say that Iago is the "tool of a kind of grace" and you go on to say that the Grandmother in O'Connor's story is a tool of a kind of grace for the Misfit.  You say, "I'm using grace right now in a particular secular sense as a knowledge of the real." Given that doesn't the real equal "mystery?"

Yes, well, "mystery" and complexity.  I think O'Connor's stories always work from a character who's living in illusion and comes to a sense of the real even though it's very difficult.  [O'Connor's] sense of the real is that this is a fallen world and that he or she has found their limitations.  In a lot of O'Connor's stories, and I think I was thinking of this when I was writing the Iago essay, it's that those characters serve as the catalyst and kind of assert themselves into an illusory world that the human being creates, as you know, a world and you want to believe that it's perfect and its grounded by safety, but there's always that flaw in it and it is the Iago character's job to find that flaw and break the world open so that the characters can see: 'oh yeah I am flawed.'

 With this idea of things being "flawed" it might be a good moment to discuss your new book Fabrications: Essays on making things and making meaning.  You start your book by saying that these essays were written inside an old automobile factory.  Maybe you could talk about writing in this place and how it may have inspired you.

There's still like small assembly line things going on in the building, not cars, but small businesses that opened up in this huge old building.  There were also little office spaces that people rent and part of it is still unfinished so it's all pipes and dust and there are still some old cars up on the third floor.  So it had that factory feeling still about it.  The office I had was about as big as a closet and looked out onto a kind of a tar paper roof.  It was a perfect place to write the book.  I basically knew from the beginning that I was writing this book about factories and so I would go to a factory one week and then write a draft of an essay the next and then go to another factory and then write a draft of an essay . . . it was very much an assembly line kind of thing, because while I was writing the essay about the last factory I went to I would be flipping through books and talking to people and trying to determine where I'd go next.  I was really conscious in [Fabrications] of walking into spaces that you would think of as male spaces.  [In that way] Columbo was really one of the most important television shows to me; I love that Colombo character walking in and asking questions in this ditzy way and getting people to talk to him.

I wanted to ask you about your essay "Nineveh" (from Indiana Winter) in which the town of Nineveh, Indiana is completely relocated by the military overnight in order to make way for a ballistics testing range.  This reminded me of a photography exhibit I saw once at the Art Institute of Chicago in which a woman had gone up in an airplane and photographed the patterns that had been pounded into the earth by these shells. You seem   fascinated with places that have this sort of history, like Nineveh, that get cut off or are disrupted.  And also you seem interested in places that have invisible patterns to them, or perhaps a below-the-surface order to the way things work.

My sense is that all places have that pattern, I mean, and it may very well be that the place doesn't have the pattern that the mind imposes upon it.  Certain parts of history are remembered.  The parts that are disturbing are forgotten as well as those parts that don't fit with whatever the dominate narrative is.  It's amazing to me that there could be a prisoner of war camp in Southern Indiana and that there were Italian prisoners of war there building a chapel and painting frescoes using their own blood for the red.  I mean that's just amazing to me.

 I wanted to ask you about the last sentence of your essay in Fabrications called "Veneer."  [It's an essay about visiting a veneer factory in Edinburgh, Indiana.  We learn about the manufacturing process so on and so forth, but then, near the end, we discover that the owner of the factory, a Hungarian Jew, was, as a boy smuggled out of his country just before Eichmann deported all of Hungary's 350,000 Jews to Auschwitz.]  The end of this essay, the last sentence just shook me up.  You write: "Every place is so filled with human history that you could study it your entire life and never get to the bottom of its sadness."  I don't read that as being, well, sad.  I find that whenever you're describing the end of something -- the end of an innocence -- that it seems that you're talking about some sort of progress.

That goes back to Flannery O'Connor.  There's a kind of grace in discovering those layers of sadness and grief and tragedy and darkness and kind of lancing them.  They remain as ghosts in the landscape somehow, and then you find them and you bring them up to the surface and you discover some kind of meaning there and that there's a pattern and a kind of strange beauty, I guess.  And so it doesn't feel sad, it feels like cracking open something and seeing a human story.  To me the word sadness has a kind of nobility to it. 

 I was watching The Exorcist recently and there's a moment when Max Von Sydow (the Exorcist) is sitting on the steps with Father Karas and they've just come from the girl's room; it's one of the most strangely beautiful moments in any film because Sydow says, "He [the demon] wants us to despair."  It's a moment of clarity.  To me, I think it gestures toward the difference between despair and sadness: despair being a state in which we feel there is no hope and sadness being filled with it.

What I constantly want to say to my students, and maybe it's because I've lived around the same area my whole life instead of going from one point to another -- a  thousand miles away to find stories -- I really like seeing how deep the layers are in this particular place and to think that those layers are endless; that you can just think about one place historically or one image or think about one word for the rest of your life and just let it take you from one thing to next.  To me that speaks to the real richness and complexity to the way the world is made.

Copyright 2002, Dave Griffith

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.