No. 4

Spring 2003

Kate Gadbow's debut novel, Pushed to Shore, won the 2001 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Some of her other work has appeared in Epoch, Northwest Review, CutBank, and Talking River Review. She lives in Missoula, where she directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches undergraduate fiction classes at the University of Montana.

Brian Joos is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and a former student of Gadbow's.

Both Pushed to Shore and your story "Colony" deal with interaction between "normal" Montanans and people from other, outside cultures who have relocated to Montana. How did you become fascinated with this sort of interaction?

For me, it's a deep, long-standing issue. I grew up in Cut Bank, a border town right on the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation where race is a huge issue. It's everywhere, but very rarely spoken about. I actually didn't know an Indian adult until I had one as a teacher for fifth and sixth grade, a marvelous man who made me want to be a teacher too. But he himself ended up being a victim of racism in a small Catholic school where you'd think people would know better.

This has been a big issue even within my own family, because we ranched on the Blackfeet Reservation from the time I was about eleven or twelve. My father had grown up in the area and felt comfortable as a white rancher on an Indian reservation. But my mother was not from the immediate area and was extremely sensitive to those issues. Then, during the AIM [American Indian Movement] days, it just became clear that we should not be there. The owner wanted to lease the ranch back to her son who, ironically, was adopted and white.

So it was always an important issue for me, and then I fell into a job as an ESL teacher in 1983. I taught Hmong and Vietnamese students at Hellgate High School here in Missoula, and it made me realize how little I knew about the Vietnam War and its victims. The cultures of those peoples are endlessly fascinating to me.

So then you chose to draw your novel from that experience rather than from the experience of growing up on the reservation with the Native Americans.

Oh, that's there too. That's the novel I quit to write this novel. You're a writer; you understand how this happens. You get going with something for a while, but then you move on. That biographical, coming of age novel is the one I started in graduate school.

"Colony" is a chapter in it. Another chapter in it was a story that Epoch published called "Buffalo Jump." I tried to hang onto that as a chapter for as long as I could, and then suddenly I realized it had nothing to do with the book. So I had to throw it out. But that novel was the one I left graduate school trying to do.

After I finished school and had gone through a lot of workshops, I was aware of my own bad habits as a writer. So I decided to give myself an assignment. I said, "Okay, I'm too much of an expository writer, my sentences are too long, and my writing is too biographical. Now I have to write a story that is ten pages or less. It has to be about a character sort of unlike me." Also, to get rid of some of my expository, descriptive habits, I decided to write it in present tense. So in about three days, I wrote a story called "Refuge" which, in a different form, ended up being the first chapter of Pushed to Shore.

So I completed the assignment; I did what I told myself I had to, and it drew on my 1983 teaching experience. I had created a character that had some of the same feelings I did at that time. When I taught those ESL students, I had been home with babies for five years. I felt isolated; I felt like I'd lost all my social skills. I felt as though I didn't know what I was doing with my life. Janet, Pushed to Shore's narrator, feels a lot of those things too. She feels very separate from the other teachers in that she doesn't really know what she's doing. She has a need for her students to connect with her that comes out of her own other needs. I understood that feeling, but I thought I had created a character very different from myself because her external life circumstances were different from mine.

So I finished that, sent it around for a couple years, and Epoch finally published it. I thought I was finished with it then, so I went back to my long, expository, biographical novel. But I hit another wall with it and just didn't know where it was going. I'd published some chapters from it as stories: "Colony," the "Buffalo Jump" one that I thought was part of it, and another one in Northwest Review, from a male point of view. So I decided to go back to that Janet character and see if I could develop her story.

The first ten chapters came in a white heat. It was writing like I'd never known. It felt so good because I'd been beating my head against a wall with the other book, but then the last two thirds took two years to write just like everything else does. A lot of it was written during the Gulf War, when all those feelings about what happens to refugees in the aftermath of something like this got dragged up again.

So I finished a draft of the book, got an agent, and she took it around to about six places in New York. She decided it was dead in the water and I decided I didn't really like working with her. So we broke up, as my daughter put it, the novel went into a drawer, and I went back to my big, long, biographical novel. But then in 2001, I saw that Sarabande had opened their Mary McCarthy prize to short novels and that Rosellen Brown was judging it. I have always liked her work; I felt she would understand where I was coming from. She had just written a novel about the 60s activists, and I thought that, if I could get past all those first readers at Sarabande, I might have a shot with her. But the book was 300 pages long and their page limit was 250 manuscript pages. Cutting it back down again was a good exercise for me, and I spent a winter break doing that before I sent it off to the contest. And I won. It totally amazed me.

Did the fact that the first chapter was out there already in Epoch affect you at all while you were finishing the book?

What was interesting was that I took that first chapter to a class that one of my friends was teaching and read it to them. This was after I had finished the book, and in reading the chapter, I realized how much Janet's character had changed for me. In that first, early edition of it, the one that came out in Epoch, the writer's take on the narrator was a very ironic one. I was trying to write something that would sort of turn around on the narrator; I was trying to make her almost unreliable in her romanticism of these students and in her feeling that she can help them but nobody else can. She skews things out of proportion and she doesn't see herself clearly at all. But when I started to write the book, I couldn't sustain that ironic take on her. I got invested in her, so by the time I finished the first draft, I had to go back to that first story and insert some things into it to give her more self-awareness than she has in the original version. There are some things that are just laid out there in that original version that she actually thinks about in the book.

Actually, having the first chapter out there wasn't a bad thing at all. It was chosen for some kind of best stories from new writers collection that never saw print because whoever was publishing it decided not to do it. But the fact that I'd placed it in a good journal and put it out there gave me hope that at least the material was worthy and interesting to people other than me. So I think it actually helped.

You mentioned Janet's feelings of isolation. I'm reminded of the scenes where she's in the faculty lounge with all the other teachers and they always seem like they're thinking, "Oh, well she's the one that deals with those kids." Does her isolation stem more from what's happened in her personal life or from the fact that she's dealing with the ESL kids instead of the "normal" students?

I think it comes equally from both. Her feelings of failure, her failed marriage, her inability to connect with other people, and her inability to see herself clearly make her a zealot when she gets with these students whose needs are just so obvious. She's been teaching junior high for years, teaching kids who've been suffering in their own family lives, but it's all sort of nebulous there; she can't quite get a handle on it in the way she can with students who have lost every family member that they have. So I think it works both ways. Because you're being told the story from her point of view, the antagonism of the other teachers is something that you have to take at face value. She's saying it, but you don't know for sure. But I did sense, when I was doing that job for a semester at Hellgate, that all the teachers had so much to think about that they didn't really want to think about those students very much. It took a lot of effort; for one thing, you had trouble understanding them when they spoke. So there was that feeling of, "Oh, well those people are assigned to them; they'll handle them."

So your novel came out of that experience you had as an ESL teacher, and we've talked a little bit about where you grow up. But one thing that fascinates me about your background is that you went to France, and you got your first degree there from the University of Montpellier. Have you drawn from that experience as well?

Actually, I finally have started writing about that time in my life. I'm just not sure anybody who's twenty -- I turned twenty-one when I was over there -- should really go study in another country because all you're really worried about is your love life. At least that's what I was focusing on. Well, not entirely, but there are things now that I would have got out of that experience that I just didn't at the time. I was too concerned with what was going on with me personally. But I did just write something about it. When I won that Mary McCarthy prize, I was so stunned that I couldn't write for six months. And I was scared thinking that the book was actually going to go out into the world. But last summer, I finally got over that and wrote a story that I have out circulating right now about that experience in France. It's partly about this young woman trying to figure out how Europeans think. I had a Danish boyfriend when I was over there, and so there's this young woman in the story and she's just trying to figure out how this guy's thinking. You realize the cultural differences when you're trying to figure out how a person fits with your life and how their value system works with your life. And so the story is, well, I think the story is kind of funny, and it was fun to write a funny story for a change.

Something I've noticed in a lot of your work, particularly in "Colony," "Myron's Galaxie," and Pushed to Shore, is the involvement of children. There aren't child narrators, and these works don't focus completely on children, but kids have been a very strong element.

I think that's probably because I didn't start writing until after I had children. When I describe my grad school experience to our graduate students, they all just say, "Oh, you poor person," because I had a seven-year-old and a five-year-old when I started graduate school. I was writing, my husband worked nights and weekend nights, and so my writing time was from nine or ten or whenever I could get my kids to go to sleep until about midnight. And I was teaching as a grad student too, so I wasn't one of the grad students who went to the bar and hung out. But what I did find was that, at the time I went through this program, it was more of a traditional male program than it is now. There were a lot of western-centered tough guys, and much of the writing was like all of the Carveresque stories that were coming out at the time. It was the mid-eighties, and everybody wanted to do that. Most of the other people were writing about tough guys in bars, and what I wanted to write about in grad school was children. They were my whole focus. And when you have them, and they're going through these different phases in their lives, you remember very clearly yourself at that time. As a young adult, you're often not thinking about yourself as a six-year-old, but when you start seeing kids every day and understanding how they're apprehending the world, it becomes a big focus for you. But I just knew that I really couldn't write those stories in grad school. I wrote a couple chapters of the autobiographical book, but I was just kind of finding my voice then.

It didn't even occur to me to write fiction until after I had that teaching experience at Hellgate. I didn't really know what to do with all those emotions, and the job went away after one semester because it was grant funded. So I applied to grad school and just started writing then, but I had a lot to learn. Now, I see these freshmen, these eighteen-year-old people in my 210 classes, and I admire them because it took me years to have the courage to write fiction. I knew it was something I wanted to do, but all the way through my undergrad education, I was much more comfortable writing academic papers. I was terrified to take a writing class.

So for most of your writing career, you've also been a teacher. Do you find that teaching helps you write or that it takes away a lot of your time for writing?

I think I got the most work done when I had a really circumscribed teaching experience. It was just out of grad school and I lucked into a job here at the university. I had thought that I would be going back to teaching high school because I knew I had to publish something before I could teach creative writing at the university level. But then they started a writing lab here, and they had a director the second year I was in grad school who kind of blew it and lost the job. So they did a local search at the end of that year and hired me to direct the writing lab. It was a half-time job, defined as half-time, and I taught one composition course during the year. The rest of the time I just supervised the lab and tutored in the lab. I was tutoring three hours a day, mostly foreign students, and so it felt comfortable to me, working with them on their papers. They were mostly grad students in business from Japan. But I could leave that job at school because I was just giving feedback on students' work. Teaching where you have to prepare, where you have to think about your students, and where you get invested in their work, does for me take from the same place that writing does. So I've tried to keep myself mostly in the realm of administration here. After I directed the writing lab, I moved into directing composition, and these organizational jobs don't seem to take from the same place that writing and teaching do. If I taught a full load of courses, I think it would be very hard to get any writing done. The problem I have right now is that this organizational part can get bigger and bigger and bigger, and during the school year, unless I'm really disciplined about it or really going on something, I have a hard time writing. I spend my summers and my breaks catching up that way.

So do you find that you write on a schedule?

Well, last summer I made a schedule for myself that worked amazingly well, the best a schedule ever has, and I realized it's not the schedule that I've tried to enforce during the school year. For me, the best schedule, and the one which I'm looking forward to when I retire, is getting up whenever I wake up, working out to get my blood moving and my brain going, and then spending a good chunk in the middle of the day working on writing. Then I gradually come out of it and start seeing the world and my dog and my family. But what I have to do during the school year is try to get my papers for classes done at night. So then I've got the mornings free to get myself up and write for a couple of hours, before I do my aerobics and come to school to do my organizing. And teaching.

Earlier, you were talking about how, when you got to grad school, there was this whole macho kind of thing going on. There's definitely a category of literary fiction that some people back East call "Montana Lit." It includes Rick Bass, Kevin Canty, and some of Richard Ford's stuff. It's getting published in really good places and drawing a lot attention to this area. Do you think that's helped all writers in Montana?

No. I mean, I'm not sure that the whole "Montana Lit" idea holds up anymore as well as it did at one time. Debra Earling certainly works against that. And Deirdre McNamer has never written what everybody would comfortably like her to write as part of the whole "Montana Lit" thing, and she's always questioning things in her work, particularly the stereotypes of the area. I do think that, as more women are getting into it, that it's changing a lot. This program has become much more sophisticated than it was when I went through. It was pretty laid back then and it was kind of fun, but now we're getting such good students from all over the country. And they're more than half women, a lot of them are gay, a lot of them are urban, and they're comfortable writing on their own topics. Kevin [Canty] definitely writes a certain kind of story, but he's a very good teacher in that he encourages different kinds of stories from the grad students, and I don't think they feel too constrained to write in innovating ways here. I think what brings them here now is the size of the community and the size of the program. I mean that it's smaller, smaller than Iowa, we're isolated geographically, and that makes for a good writing community.

And there are a lot of writers around.

This town is full of them.

You broke into publication fairly recently. I'm wondering about those first stories, those chapters from your other novel. How did you publish those? Did you just send your manuscripts around or did you know people?

I just sent them out. In fact, this came up with the first story I ever sent out because Deirdre McNamer is my sister. She had published in the New Yorker, and although she'd not yet been published in fiction, she'd written talks of the town and a lot of journalism. So I made a conscious choice in grad school to go by my married name because I was in the same place with her. She gave me the name of an editor at the New Yorker to send a story to. But I very consciously said, "I'm not going to use her or use her name," and I didn't mention her to the editor. I just said, "I'm submitting this for your consideration." The editor actually wrote me back a long letter about the story, and I had no idea how unusual that was. I just thought, "Oh, I got rejected." And then people said, "You got a letter?" I sent four or five stories to that particular New Yorker editor. She was wonderful; she remembered things from story to story and said, "Yes, this is tighter than the last one," but I don't know if she ever intended to take one. Then she got hurt in a bizarre car accident and now she's working as a translator. But she was so encouraging to me that I thought, "Well, I can do this." I started getting much more systematic about it instead of sitting around waiting for things to come back from the New Yorker. I made myself lists of literary magazines that I'd like to be published in and just started sending the stories out.

I never did have an agent for that; I don't think you need agents for that. I think you just get your work out there and the story has to speak for itself. It may have helped that I had graduated from this program. I mean, Michael Curtis at the Atlantic seems to have a great interest in our program; he's publishing two of our grad students this year. Actually, I think that that first story I sent to the New Yorker editor didn't even have a cover letter on it because I didn't have anything to say. I hadn't published anything yet. And I still got a letter back from her, so that was very encouraging. Then I just kept the stories out there, and once Epoch took "Refuge," I realized how long it took and how systematic you had to get. I really did follow Bill Kittredge's dictum: the day it comes back, it goes back out. This is, of course, unless you start getting a consensus of notes from editors saying, "If only this were different," and then you look at the story again. But I got to the point where I just wasn't revising; I'd just keep a story out there once I was finished with it.

You mentioned before that, while Kevin Canty writes a specific sort of story, he would encourage grad students to write a different kind of story. I had a different experience with him as an undergrad. He said, "Okay. I recognize that you want to write this kind of story, but you have to learn how to write a "traditional" story first." Where do you draw that line?

I think there is that division in the teaching of a lot of people. With undergrads, it's like art. You have to learn how to draw a figure before you can do what Picasso's doing. I do think that building the basics is important, and I think that knowing what you're writing against is important for young writers. You need to know that there is a tradition of constructing a story in a certain way, and then you can deliberately break that. What I find with my 200-level students, the ones who are going to make it later as writers, even as really experimental writers, is that they're the ones who will listen. They will work at writing a certain kind of story and will respond to assignments to do something like that. I think that, in high schools, before people ever get here, often some writing teachers will make a distinction between being correct and being creative. So they'll encourage students who haven't even got the basics of sentence structure down by saying, "Oh but you're very creative." So those students will keep telling themselves, "I'm creative. I'm creative so I don't really have to learn this stuff." I do think there's a fine line there because every editor and every writing teacher really wants to see something incredibly original, and they don't know what they want to see until they see it. But I also think that there is a tradition in all art that has to be understood even if it's not going to be honored.

Then you've probably read a good deal of fiction. Is there anything out there right now that's really influenced you or that you really think about a lot?

The Alices continue to influence me, Alice McDermott and Alice Munro. I finally met Alice McDermott at AWP, and I admire Charming Billy. I also like her stories, and her latest novel was such great risk in a way because it's so different from Charming Billy. She acknowledged that everyone wanted Charming Billy again and so the new book's getting mixed reviews. And Alice Munro I just learn from and learn from.

I just finished Colum McCann's Dancer and thought that he did a great job of taking a big, sweeping risk with a way of doing a biography. The bare bone details are there, but he actually made up most of it. I'm really interested in that right now because I've been looking at books that are working with how you write a life, how you make it fiction and make it true to a person's life. That's the next project I would like to do.

So who's it going to be?

Actually, I have a proposal. I applied for a fellowship and had to write a proposal for a book to do that. It's back to my old obsession with race; I'd like to write about the couple who owned the ranch that we grew up on. My only touchstone would be having grown up in their house for a bunch of summers. But they were both half Blackfeet, and she was educated at Oberlin College and was incredibly wealthy. Her father was a steamboat captain in Fort Benton and then they built this ranch on the reservation and alienated most of the tribe because they acted more white than the whites. But all those lines are part of their story, and it would be really interesting to write that story and try to understand how they got there.

Copyright 2003, Brian Joos

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