Dan Chaon is the author of two short story collections, Fitting Ends and Other Stories and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. Fitting Ends was originally published in 1996 by Northwestern University Press and re-released in April 2003 by Ballantine, and includes several new stories. A novel, You Remind Me of Me, will be published this May by Ballantine. Walter Mosley chose the short story, "The Bees," to be included in Best American Short Stories 2003 and the story "Big Me" was selected by Michael Chabon as the second prize story in The O. Henry Awards 2001. Currently, Dan Chaon is the Houck Associate Professor of the Humanities at Oberlin College.
Karin Lin-Greenberg is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

So I'll start with beginnings. I'm struck by the first lines of many of your stories. Here are a couple: "My mother owned a lakefront cabin, not far from where the bodies were discovered"; "Here is a snake with a girl in its mouth." They're really intriguing first sentences and make me curious about the story that is to follow. Do you adhere any sort of rules or advice about the beginnings of short stories or if you were ever given any advice about useful ways to start stories?

I think Gordon Lish talked about the idea of an attack sentence, which is an opening sentence that grabs the reader and pulls them into the world of the story. I was really struck by that idea particularly because I'm not from a family of readers and in the early stages of writing I would show things to my brother and often he would tell me how boring it was. So one of the things I became determined to do was write stories that would at least make my brother read the first paragraph.

You've spoken in interviews both about your affinity as a child for horror and science fiction stories and also about how you now value ambiguity in stories. I wonder if the genres you read while growing up may have informed this sense of ambiguity in your work. I'm thinking specifically about stories where a crime or act of violence is committed off the page, such as "I Demand to Know Where You're Taking Me" or "The Bees," in which the reader can't definitively answer the question "what happened?" Or I wonder if that sensibility is more grounded in real life and you are challenging your readers to accept ambiguity in fiction because a lot of things in life don't have neat answers?

I think I came to the idea from the genre aspect. I was pretty influenced by writers such as Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, and Peter Straub. Certainly one of the things that fascinates me about real life is the stuff you can't find the answer to, so it's not a totally supernatural idea. I think the mood and the texture of the stories are rooted in genre elements. The Twilight Zone etcetera.

Did you watch a lot of The Twilight Zone?

It was already over by the time I was growing up, so I never actually saw it on TV, but when I was a kid there was a magazine called The Twilight Zone Magazine, and one of my ambitions was to get into The Twilight Zone Magazine as a high school short story writer. I never did.

Did you submit to it?

I did. A story every month or something. Finally they did start writing back to say "No. Please stop."

This is a broad question: What's your opinion on the state of the short story in America today? Do you think the general public is reading short fiction?

Boy, that is a really broad question. I actually think the short story is in really good shape right now, better than it was ten years ago, probably. There's a pretty interesting change that's happened over the last ten years where I think short story writers are less wed to straight ahead stories of epiphany and realism and there's more ambition and experimentation going on now than there's been in a while. In terms of being commercially viable, it's really hard to say. There are short story collections that sell well, but they never sell as well as novels. But there are people out there who love reading short stories. One of my stories is being made into a short film, a twenty-minute film, and it occurred to me that there's probably less of an audience for the short film than there is for the short story. But I do think all arts in the United States are in danger in a lot of ways because they have to compete with more immediate commercial culture. At the same time, I think there's still interest out there and still people who pick up short story collections and are excited about them. The issue of McSweeney's that "The Bees" was in was a huge seller -- it was very successful -- so it seems to suggest that there's a hunger for that kind of thing out there.

You were just talking about how in the last decade short story writers aren't adhering to stories with epiphanies or sticking to realism. How do account for that change?

Boredom, probably. I know that a lot of times when I was writing early stories I thought, "Oh, I can't do that. That would be corny." Or people would think it would be trashy or pulpy to have too much plot or to have something supernatural happen. There's something kind of nerdy about certain kinds of plot; it's like admitting that you play Dungeons and Dragons to say that you like horror stories. At the same time, I think a lot of the stories that I wanted to tell and the stories that caught my attention in the newspaper or in the anecdotes people told me had those elements in them and those were the things I was drawn to. I was very interested in finding a way to wed the literary impulse, which includes complex characterization and use of setting and mood and rich and evocative language, with some of these elements that are kind of pulpy. One of the people that was a model for me is Flannery O'Connor who does it a lot. I don't think of my work as quite as satirical as hers, but I think there's a lot to be said about her approach to finding a significant and surprising line of action in the daily lives of characters. I've been inspired by younger writers who I think are really pushing boundaries in the short story form, people like George Saunders and A.M. Homes.

So do you feel you have more of a freedom to experiment now that you've had publishing success? Did you feel you had to adhere to more traditional forms when you were first starting out?

Very much so. For a long time I was obsessed with getting into The Atlantic. So I analyzed The Atlantic's stories and decided there was a kind of formula that would work for The Atlantic if only I could hit on the right story. It had some kind of emotional yearning in it, it usually ended with an epiphanic metaphor, it started with action and then did flashback and then did rising action, usually with a regular plotline and a metaphoric plotline brushing up against one another. For example, a girl is learning how to drive stick shift and that's the metaphoric plotline and the actual plotline is her mother is dying of cancer. At the very end they converge and there's something like, "Her life was shifting." So I was obsessed with those Atlantic stories. I never got into The Atlantic. Maybe my frustration with never getting into The New Yorker or The Atlantic made me say, "What the hell? I'm not doing this for them anyway" (laughs). I think if I'd had early big-time success, I might have been tempted to keep repeating it. So I think the short answer to your question is that one of the things that made me feel free to experiment was early failure.

You wrote the stories in Fitting End when you were in your twenties and recently went back and revised them for the re-release of the book. Can you talk a little about that process? What's it like to return to something that you put down or finished a while ago?

There were some stories where I felt there was something a little young about them that I wanted to touch up a little. Some stories, if they had been written now, would be different sorts of stories. A lot of them were written from that twenty-something angst, which I don't feel quite as strongly anymore. I mostly changed pieces of the prose I thought, in retrospect, were overdone. I took out some of the little tics that I notice now more than I did then. Still, rereading Among the Missing, there are things I wish I could get over. There are some words I use over and over, there's an overuse of adverbs. All of those things that you somehow get stuck in your mind and you don't notice them until it's too late. I especially notice them when I read things out loud. I find myself correcting things as I'm doing a reading, or wishing I could correct them.

How conscious are you of your audience when you're writing? Now you have a definite audience -- you know you have people out there reading. How has your consciousness of audience changed since you were starting out?

I always have a kind of ideal reader in mind who I think I'm talking to. I've never felt like I was just talking to myself. I've always had the sense that there's some ideal reader, who's not unlike me, out there who I'm writing to. But I try not to be too conscious of real readers' expectations.

So what's this ideal reader like?

Well, the ideal reader would recognize the things in the stories that are funny, which there are many people who, when I tell them that there's stuff in the stories that are funny, they don't get it. So those people are not ideal readers. They have to be at least tolerant of ambiguity and not get freaked out by stuff that's sad or scary. Those are the complaints I encounter -- the stories are really depressing and they don't explain everything that happened exactly at the end. They don't give you all the answers. And those are the times when I feel like those people just aren't going to enjoy what I'm doing, and I can't write for them.

You're currently working on your first novel, You Remind Me of Me. Can you talk about the difference for you between writing short stories and writing a novel? A lot of people say that short stories are a training ground for novel writing. Do you see short story writing as a stepping-stone to novel writing?

It is a really different process. I'd originally approached the novel as if it was going to be a long short story, which it turns out this was not a good approach. Ultimately I found myself using a lot of the same mental machinery in a different way. I guess I began to treat individual chapters as somewhat story-like. This seems simple-minded, but the architecture of a novel is really important. In some ways, with a short story, when you're writing it, you can just feel your way. It's like being in a house in the dark and you can find the walls and you can figure out where you're going and you can surprise yourself. And novels surprise you, but in a different way. If a short story is like being in a darkened room, then a novel is like being in a darkened field. You can't find the walls if you're just feeling your way in the dark. When I started revising, it was a process of finding the architecture of the novel before I even knew what was going to happen in it. The process of finding a story is more intuitive for me. The other thing is that you just spend so much more time with the people in the novel, so it's a different emotional thing. Stories are like having a flirtation with someone and novels are like being married to them for a long time.

So how did you teach yourself to write the novel? Was it just a matter of sitting down and writing or was it studying the structure of novels?

I got a lot of help from my editor, who I owe a great deal to. He really sat down with me and helped me break the novel down into pieces and showed me what the arc of it was going to be and gave me really good advice on how to pace it and develop individual sections. I don't think I could have written this book without his help. Or it certainly wouldn't be the same book. Now, having done it, I'm ready to try it again. I think this particular novel that's coming out in May is very non-traditional in its structure and approach. Now that I've done that, I'm interested in trying something that's more traditional in its approach, like a short novel.

Can you talk a little about the novel?

It takes place over the course of twenty years. The time is divided up into three or four timelines and there are five main characters. One of them is a woman who gave up a child for adoption in the sixties. The other two main characters are her sons. One of them she gave up for adoption and the other one she kept. The novel follows the interception of these characters of these characters' lives and what happens when the brothers get together. Hilarity ensues, as you can imagine. (Laughs.)

I read that you're editing an anthology of forgotten short story writers of this century. Who are some of the writers that are included here? Where have you encountered their work? Why do you think these writers didn't enter the canon, and what do you see as important about their work?

The project is kind of on hold right now because I've had trouble finding a publisher and permissions are a nightmare, so I haven't had time to sit down and work on getting it published. But hopefully I'll do that this year when I have a sabbatical. I guess I started becoming interested in the process of canonization when I found some old anthologies of short stories at a garage sale and I was kind of amazed that I didn't know anybody in the anthologies and these were people who were being represented as the best of their generation. I was curious to know what happened to them. I started out with a few people I particularly liked: one was a guy named Robert Coates whose work appeared frequently in the New Yorker. He started out as a Dadaist novelist, then in mid to late career moved toward a somewhat Cheeverish style. In some ways he got pushed out by people like Cheever. But he also got pushed out because there's something feverish and strange and frightening about his work. It's much darker and in many ways more unpleasant than in many ways traditionally canonized writers are. There's a woman from the turn of the century called Katherine Fullerton Gerould who was a big best seller at the time and actually wrote really interesting and very socially aware stories. She was most prolific between 1900 and 1920 and was like the Joyce Carol Oates of her time. She has a lot in common with Oates in that she tended to write about women and violence and those kinds of social issues. One of the interesting things about her is that a lot of the New Critic guys, when they were young, like Cleanth Brooks, really hated her work. She was almost targeted to be blasted out of the canon. Once those people started taking over the critical machinery, she vanished and within a generation she was completely forgotten. It's been several generations now, but it was really interesting to go back to those old anthologies and find this woman whose name you never even see anymore. In any case, I think most of the process of canonization is extremely political and often has to do with categories of one sort or another. The critic always has in mind that there's a category that a writer fits into, whether it's stylistic or sociological or ethnographic.

You've posted on the website Readerville about your disappointment about the lack of first, second, and third prize winners in this year's O.Henry Prize collection. Can you talk more about why you think the elimination of the top three stories is problematic and also about whether you think prizes are important means of recognition for writers?

Well they certainly were something I paid attention to, but I may be a bad example because I love prizes. I love the Oscars and the Emmys and all of that crap. When I was a kid, the first contemporary short stories I read were the O.Henry prizes because there's a first, second, and third prize and I wanted to know what the best short story of the year was. I know that's kind of a ridiculous thing. Obviously there's no best story of the year. People that I know who have been on the panel judging are like, "You know, it's so silly and dysfunctional and it probably doesn't matter." But I think there's something about that idea that's really appealing. In terms of the individual short story, which gets very little recognition anyway, there's only the one prize. That was the only prize that an individual story could get. A couple of the big genre prizes, the Hugo and the Bram Stoker Award and the Edgar Allen Poe award, all give out prizes for short stories as well as novels. They have that Oscarish thing where they have five nominees and then they announce the winners. I think that is so cool. It's like the Oscars -- you know there are people that get lopped off, but at least it gives that sense that there really is something going on in that world and there's attention being paid, and there's a little bit of excitement that goes along with it. Of course now there's still the O. Henry awards proper -- all twenty of them are now O. Henry winners -- and there's the Best American and there's the Pushcart Prize, but to be a first prize winner is a really cool thing and I'm sorry that I'll never get the chance to do that now. (Laughs.) That may be just me, but it was certainly something I had in mind when I was a kid and when I was starting to become a writer.

You graduated in 1990 from Syracuse with an MA in fiction. What do you think about graduate writing programs in general? Can you also talk specifically about your experience and what you think you were able to take from your program?

I loved my experience in a writing program. I think one of the things it does and one of the things I think that people are critical about writing programs hate about them is that they, in some ways, democratize the process. I come from a really working class background and there's no way I would have been able to be a writer in a different time period. Or it would have been much much more difficult. One of the things that a writing program does is that it gives people time to write. At least in my case, and I know this is true in a lot of programs, but not all of them, I got a little money to live on. I still had to take out loans, but I think it was a really invaluable experience. The other thing about writing programs is that you find a group of people who care about writing as intensely as you do. A lot of those people that I knew in grad school I'm still in close contact with; they're still readers for me. And finally you get the opportunity to have a real writer who's willing to read your work and to comment on it and if you're really lucky, to mentor you a little bit. And that's another experience that I think is really invaluable. This is not to say that you can't become a writer without a writing program. There are plenty of people who do and there are many people who poo poo the idea that writing programs have any value. For me, it just made things a lot easier and made me feel more sane. There's a kind of cliché line now about how writing programs are creating these normative short stories, and I just don't buy it. I don't see the connection between say, George Saunders or T.C. Boyle or whoever. There's a million people who have gone through writing programs and they're not all the same writer and they're not all writing the same stories. Most of the time people in workshops are pretty open to a lot of different stuff as long as the teacher knows what they're doing.

You teach writing now. What do you think is the most important advice you give to your writing students? What do you want to send your students out into the writing world knowing?

Gee. That's a good two-hour question. I guess the aspect of workshopping that I think is the most important is helping other writers find what's most interesting and unique in their own work and, at the same time, looking for that yourself, looking for that little piece of ground that is yours and yours alone that you can till. That's sort of the direction that a lot of my teaching goes in. Okay, you've got your own imagination and here are ways to find a balance between that private world, which no one will probably understand if you just put it out there raw, and all the techniques and traditions that we use to shape that imagination into something that amounts to an open letter to the world. I guess my goal is to help my students find a balance between those two things, neither too much tradition so it's just an imitation of someone else or too much private stuff.

And finally, since I asked you about beginnings, I'll come full circle and ask about endings. What, in your opinion, is a satisfying ending to a story, either in your writing or in work you read?

In any writing it's the ending that resonates with you and the one you can't get out of your head in some way or another. Not necessarily the one that closes things up, that's one of the things, for me personally, what stays with me is the ending that I'm still thinking about and wondering about a year later and somehow still gives you that little frisson at the back of your neck when you happen upon it. I try to tell that to my students and they're like, "How do you do that?" I don't know the answer. I only know that when you get there you know what it's like.
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