All Interviews

About four years ago, just before he began work on his beautifully written second novel, The Storm at the Door, Stefan Merrill Block installed a new black-and-white checkered floor in the apartment kitchen where he writes. The floor is now seriously chipped around his writing desk and darkly stained near the coffee pot.

“If you were to take an aerial shot of the floor, it would be like a map of my anxiety,” the 29-year-old Block says, laughing. “But I’ve come to understand that it is anxiety that writes the books.” Anxiety, Block adds during the call to his apartment in Brooklyn, pushes him “to go through draft after draft after draft and focus on every sentence and every word until the point where there’s no further you can take it.”

“There’s something spooky about [writing]. It’s strange how these observations that you didn’t know you thought about people or the world come out of you.”

Fortunately that anxiety is invisible to readers. As the many fans of Block’s first novel, The Story of Forgetting, know, he has an uncanny ability for someone his age to inhabit the deepest parts of his characters’ psyches and to find language that precisely evokes those states of being.

“There’s something spooky about it, as Norman Mailer said—he called fiction ‘the spooky art.’ Because it’s strange how these observations that you didn’t know you thought about people or about the world come out of you.”

Block’s first novel was a sometimes fanciful, often moving story of a family with inherited, early-onset Alzheimer’s. The Storm at the Door, an even better novel, is a sort of mythic re-imagining of a period in the 1960s when his grandmother put his grandfather in a mental hospital. Block thinks the two books share a lot thematically, but that the new book “addresses those complications in what feels like a much truer way. It feels like the first novel was like a rough draft of this book. But I’ve only written a few novels. Maybe that’s the way a career feels. Maybe you always feel that the previous book is a rough draft of the new one.”

The Storm at the Door arose out of “a deep personal urgency,” Block says. “I had been haunted by this absence my whole life. I was homeschooled by my mom. My relationship with my mother has been my central relationship from my childhood, and we are still very close. She is my first reader even now. On the opposite side of her is this absence [her father died some years after his institutionalization when she was in college] and this sadness that has been transmitted through her. In some ways it feels like I have been the correction to that. So I think my relationship with my mother first compelled my curiosity about my grandfather. The other fact that I know is that we look quite similar [for example, Block’s grandfather was 6’6” and he is 6’3”]. Since I was a kid, my relatives have been very moved by our obvious physical similarities. And everyone said he was the writer in the family. So I’ve always had this extremely close sense of identification with him, as if he is an alternative version of myself. . . . There has always been this terrible urgency to understand who he was and what happened to him.”

Then why didn’t Block simply write a memoir? “My grandfather was absent for so much of my mom’s childhood and he died so young that there’s little that factually remains. Basic things that are so telling of a person’s character—the way he held his body, the kinds of conversations that he had, the women he loved—all these things that are so important to understanding a person are gone, so I felt that the only way I could explore this urgent need was through fiction.”

Of course Block’s novel is much more than historical fiction about his grandparents. Block’s grandfather was institutionalized at McLean Hospital, a place with an “inverted sort of glamour” outside of Boston that was undergoing immense change at the time, with decidedly mixed results. The great poet Robert Lowell was there then and wrote of his experiences with mental illness in Life Studies. Block heightens and transforms McLean into a more mythic place called The Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill. Lowell appears in the novel, but for the most part Block peoples the institution with a set of invented characters who blaze with the strange and discomfiting beauty of madness.

“I’m very interested in the way that societies consider madness,” Block says. “It has a long and complicated history. In biblical times it seems that schizophrenics were considered prophets. Then there’s this long romantic history of the link between madness and genius, particularly poetic genius. I was interested in assessing the truth of that, whether there is a link or if madness is what keeps poets from being even greater poets. In general, I don’t write with any sort of political objective but I was also interested in exploring what now seems like the obvious mishandling of mental illness as a way of understanding how little we understand it and probably still mistreat it.”

Block says his writing begins every day with “a reading of a novel that I’ve carefully selected to restore me to a literary voice.” For this novel, he read Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Yates’ Revolutionary Road, whose voice he deliberately echoed.

He also had before him a photograph of his grandmother and one of his grandfather, which are reproduced in the novel. “I know there’s this tricky interplay between fact and fiction and between memoir and imagination in the novel. And the photographs were a really important part of the writing process. I wanted to present my story as earnestly as I could—that this is how I think of my family’s history, that there are things that are true and that I know and that there is all this space that I have to imagine. I feel it’s a type of story I don’t see depicted often, probably because it straddles such an awkward line between nonfiction and fiction.”

Which returns Block to a discussion of his writer’s anxiety. “Most of my anxiety is that I have not yet written the book that I feel I can write,” he says. “That anxiety is something I hope I never lose. I hope I never feel satisfied with anything I produce, that I always have the worry that the book on the page will never equal the book I have in my mind, because that is what really powers me forward.”

It has been 15 years since you wrote about Precious Jones in Push. What inspired you to tell her son's story? Was this something you had in mind before the movie version of Precious' story came out?
The Kid is not a sequel in a traditional sense in that we don’t enter into and follow up on the life of Precious Jones. It is a sequel in the sense it continues to look at the profound and devastating effects of AIDS on the African-American community. I would posit that AIDS/HIV has hit us as hard as slavery in some ways and that the way AIDS has been dealt with in the black community has been directly related to our disenfranchised position in American society. African-American women who were diagnosed with AIDS at the time Push was being written were many times more likely to be dead within months of their diagnosis than gay white men who were diagnosed at the same time. I believe that was the result of racism. People like the gay white male activist Andrew Sullivan said things to the effect of, if there is to be a triage for the dispensing of antiviral drugs they should go first to gay white men who have and do contribute so much to society as opposed to poor blacks who don’t even know what has hit them. One reason I wrote Push was to show how “precious” those poor blacks might be if given an opportunity to live. The Kid resonates on many levels and has many reasons for being and indeed one of them is to show the continuing impact of the loss of our “precious” one(s).

I started working on The Kid (or The History of the Future as I was calling it, among other things, back then) many years ago. So “the kid” was definitely there before the movie, but I might have still been “working on my novel” to this day had it not been for many outside fortuitous events in my life; the movie was definitely among them. 

The Kid can be a rather grueling book. How did you prepare psychologically to write it?
I don’t know if one prepares psychologically so much as one prepares intellectually and even physically. I remember a favorite professor at Brooklyn College, James Merritt, who had written about the Romantics poets, talking excitedly about actually walking around Grasmere Lake where Wordsworth and Coleridge had walked. That became important to me, the concreteness of physical action—walking with attention—I walked Harlem. There’s a fascinating book (dated, but it served my purposes) The Geology of New York that gives you a sense of what you’re walking on, what’s underneath your feet, underneath the concrete, when you walk the streets of New York. Evidently there’s a fault that runs through northern Manhattan, Harlem. And even though I had lived in Harlem, I lined up with the German and Japanese tourists and took walking tours of Harlem trying to find out the places Langston Hughes had lived and where this or that historic place had been. I worked with an eighth-grade teacher’s earth science class teaching them how journals could be used in the middle-school science classroom and went on a city “earth walk” with them. 

I read texts like Shengold’s Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, Brunner/Mazel Clinical Psychiatry Series No. 1: The Child Molester, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, The Betrayal Trauma: The Logic Of Forgetting Childhood Abuse by Jennifer J. Freyd, and Young Men Who Have Sexually Abused by A. Durham from the NSPCC/Wiley series that explores current issues relating to the prevention of child abuse. (There is no dearth of written material out there, as a fiction writer and non-clinician the challenge is choosing what to read not finding material to read.) I went to school; I enrolled in seminars on the works of Richard Wright and Dostoevsky. I’ve studied dance. I spent hours at the Bodies exhibit when it opened. I have taken college level classes in anatomy and physiology, anatomy and kinesiology, choreography and dance history. Zora Neal Hurston said, "to know there you got to go there"! I went to Pat Hall, the famous Afro-Haitian dance teacher, and to Bernadine Jennings (who taught for years at the dance center in Harlem mentioned in the book) and took their classes. I bought tickets to Ailey, ABT, Savion Glover. I went to see snippets of films that showed African-American tappers (who never got the big movies parts like Fred Astaire and hence their contributions to American dance while imitated were never acknowledged). 

All that, I think was a “preparation”, and while not “psychological”, it laid a foundation so that the hard psychological truths that would be revealed in writing the novel had a context and were not reduced to exhibitionism.

How did you capture the voice and thoughts of a teenaged boy so well?

I think it was desire. I wanted him to be known! And the only way he was going to be known, this particular little boy, was through me. So, again I put in the time, I listened. I wasn’t always sure I had “it," the voice; but I kept working. This was a place I had to have faith, I mean I couldn’t know what it is to be a little boy but I had to believe a boy’s voice could come to me or allow itself to be “captured” by me. I also put the focus on connecting with him when he was little and not so filled with rage and hurt. So when I did have to show him engaged in some very questionable and outright bad behaviors I, as a writer, was also connected to that part of him that had been an innocent little boy

Why is Abdul drawn to dance (as opposed to astrophysics or anything else)?
Almost from the moment Abdul’s mother dies his body goes from being a location of connection and pleasure to being one of pain, betrayal, and disconnection. One of the things I wanted to do was show how pain breaks the connection one has to one’s own body and by extension the connection one has to the world. But I also wanted to show how that connection can be rebuilt, re-established, and nurtured. I did not think “astrophysics” or even painting or photography (for a minute I had thought of Abdul having a camera or notebook and “recording” his environment and through that means understanding his life). These things might have been interesting but would they have restored the site—the child body, the black male body, his body—that had been the recipient of so much pain. While astrophysics probably wasn’t going to do that for him, dance did.

Dance enables him to bear reality: “once I get warmed up and moving I’ll get over the pain.”

Dance takes him out of a painful past and a frightening future and connects him to the now: “You’re off Abdul! Listen to the drum, come down on the one!” [His teacher tells him] “Shit! I get back on the beat put everything out of my head except the drums.”

Dance connects him with himself: “I move on out, dancing fast. . . . I go with what I feel . . .” [emphasis added]

Through dance the primal connection with his mother/the earth/ humankind is, if only fleetingly, restored: “My body is not stiff or tight, [when he’s actually dancing as opposed to just warming up or doing exercises] I’m like my mom, soft, dark, and beautiful . . . I feel her kiss, kiss her lips . . .”

Most importantly dance defies the authority of the trauma that’s been inflicted on him to be the sole determiner of his reality. Dance gives him back, in a healthy way, some of the power abuse has robbed him of: “[dancing] my body is not a stranger, not a traitor tricked by white homos in black robes, not a little boy in a hospital bed . . . here [dancing] my body is my own . . . here I got a mother.” 

Why did you name the school St. Ailanthus? Isn’t that the name of a tree?
Most Catholic schools or institutions are named after saints. Had I named the school in the novel after a real saint it might have looked as if I was pointing fingers at a specific school or boy’s home which I most decidedly was not. I think for most readers St Ailanthus will just seem to be a saint they’ve never heard of before.

Ailanthus is a tree, also known as the Tree of Heaven, it is the tree referred to in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ailanthus has also been called the Ghetto Palm because it’s frequently found in areas where few trees can survive. It is one of the most pollution-tolerant of tree species; evidently its leaves absorb sulfur dioxide. It can withstand cement dust, mercury, and coal tar. The Tree of Heaven thrives in hell. Unfortunately it is a bit of hell itself, actually earning the nickname Tree from Hell because it is malodorous, aggressively invasive and hard to eradicate, and its roots produce a poison that inhibits the growth of other plants. 

The end feels like a cliffhanger. Any plans for a sequel?
Actually I don’t see the last chapter or the ending as a “cliffhanger." It’s not a happily ever after or he dies or is doomed etc. The reader goes through a dark night of the soul with Abdul in a real or imagined place of ever lit and blindingly bright darkness. With the help of Dr See Abdul confronts the only part of the vicious cycle abuse he has total control over, that which he does to others. We never know what is the truth or what are his guilt ridden tortured imaginings, but a confession of sorts emerges, whether it is “real” or whether the events if his past have filled him with a need to construct a false reality where he has the power to be as brutal to others as they have been to him. 

Too much happens at the end to talk about right now, but he is freed from the real or imagined hell he finds himself in. One of his last acts before he is freed, inadvertent though it was, was to shatter the artificial lights (and those could symbolize almost any of the false gods he’s been oppressed by) that have cut him off from nature (his own and the world’s!). When the book ends he’s free to really be an artist (or anything else he wants to be), something “Slavery Days” (his great-grandmother) and his mother never had a chance to do. 

You're also a poet. Do you still write poetry, or do you consider yourself more of a novelist now?
I used to think of myself as a poet who wrote a novel. Now I think of myself as a really old “emerging” novelist. I’m making fun of myself there, but seriously, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life, God willing, write stories.

Both The Kid and Push deal with the legacy of abuse. Judging by your writing, it would seem that you believe breaking free of that legacy is close to impossible. Why do you feel compelled to tell these sorts of stories?
Quite to the contrary, I feel it is entirely possible to break free of the legacy of abuse. It is possible but not easy. I feel that one way to break free of the legacy of abuse is to tell the story. Silence is not just a collaborator with evil; it is, I believe, a perpetrator, of evil. 

Set in south Arkansas of 1956, Jenny Wingfield’s debut novel is about the family of Samuel Lake, a preacher who has lost his congregation. Sam moves his wife, Willadee, and their three kids to his in-laws’ farm, where the children can run free but the drama is high. Sam’s daughter, Swan, makes friends with (then hides) the son of an evil horse trainer—providing the suspense in the story. Willadee’s sister-in-law, Bernice, attempts to seduce Sam. All the while, Sam looks inward—and to God—to figure out what comes next. The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is a small-town story packed with action, charm and sweet—but not too sweet—characters. Readers who love Southern settings populated with complicated family dynamics will dig into this big-hearted novel.

You have several screenplay credits, although The Homecoming of Samuel Lake is your first novel. What do you like best about writing in this form? How is it different from writing screenplays?

I think what I love most about writing novels is that it allows me to feel more like a storyteller. I’m speaking directly to the reader, and I love that. With a screenplay, the writer is somewhat removed from the audience. There are all these layers in between, but with a novel, there’s a tremendous sense of intimacy and freedom. Writing this book was work, but honestly, it felt like dancing. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

I understand that you wrote a couple hundred pages of this novel, then set it aside for 12 years before you finished. What about the story inspired you to come back after such a long break?

I always loved the story, and wanted to get back to it, but I think I was afraid of the commitment that would be required to finish it. I was a single mom, so I kept taking jobs in order to get that paycheck.

The terrible thing about this world is that evil exists. The glorious thing is that hope and love and laughter and music exist at the same time.

Then I had cancer, and—for a variety of reasons—there were no jobs. There was no money. Some hard years followed. My friend Charlie Anderson kept telling me to sit down and finish the novel, and I kept repeating a string of excuses. It would take too long. There was no guarantee that anyone would buy it. On and on. I don’t remember what he said to spur me into finally writing the next ten or so pages, but once I got that far, the story started telling itself to me again. I hadn’t been thinking about it all that time, but it was the most natural thing in the world to take up where I had left off, and see it through to the end.

There are a lot of big personalities in this story—from the spunky Swan Lake to the conniving Bernice to the optimistic Samuel. Was any particular character the most fun for you to write?

Swan, of course. She’s who we’d all be, if only we were brave enough. 

There are some very painful passages in this book—especially those involving animal and child abuse—yet overall the novel feels uplifting and optimistic. Did you make a conscious effort to balance the darkness with humorous or happy scenes?

Basically, I just wrote a story, and the characters did what was in their nature to do. The terrible thing about this world is that evil exists. The glorious thing is that hope and love and laughter and music exist at the same time—and I believe that good is infinitely more powerful than its opposite.

Samuel and Willadee's relationship with God (and attitude toward religion) is an essential part of this story, even though they don't always see eye to eye. Has religion played an important role in your life? Why did you want to write about a preacher's family?

I didn’t exactly want to write about a preacher’s family. I wanted to write about my family, and my father just happened to be a preacher. It would have been impossible to get inside Sam Lake’s head without revealing his constant and sincere thoughts of God, the same as it would have been impossible to describe [horse trainer] Ras Ballenger without showing the pleasure he took in inflicting pain on others.

My own faith is vitally important to me, although my views are less traditional now than when I was younger. I tend to believe that God speaks to everyone, everywhere, and that we’d all do well to listen more and talk less.

BookPage readers love Southern fiction. What, besides setting, do you think makes a novel uniquely “Southern”?

Oh, Lord, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the inevitable mentions of honeysuckled air and steam rising off the pavement. There’s something languorous about the south that permeates everything we say and do.

You could easily imagine that with all the hilarious—and, well, less than hilarious—antics of his fabulous fictional family Fang, Kevin Wilson might have some serious family issues of his own. You would be wrong. 

“I have incredible parents and I have a sister with whom I am very close,” Wilson says during a call to the “little cabin” in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife Leigh Anne, a poet, and their three-year-old son. Wilson, who recently turned 33, is the author of an award-winning story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. This fall he will become a full-time faculty member at The University of the South in Sewanee. Until then he will be “basically a secretary,” helping organize the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and teaching fiction-writing workshops.

Wilson’s parents live just a 20-minute drive down Monteagle mountain, where his father—whom he describes as “the most capable person” he’s ever known—sells insurance. “My parents didn’t really understand what I wanted to do when I wanted to write, but they were always supportive. My father was paying for me to go to this great school [Vanderbilt] in part because I was going to get a good job. When I told them I wanted to write, both of my parents said, ‘That’s what you should do.’ They just kind of embraced it. My father always reads everything I write.”

And his parents’ impressions of his first novel, The Family Fang? Or their thoughts about performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang, who sow chaos wherever they go—with the reluctant help of their children Buster and Annie (known in the art world as Child A and Child B)?

“They loved it! The characters of Camille and Caleb are so divorced from them that it was pretty much impossible for them to mistakenly read themselves into them,” Wilson says. “Sometimes I think they worry about being characters in my stories. But with this book I think it was so bizarre that they just didn’t worry about it.” 

The Family Fang is told from the alternating points of view of the older and perhaps wiser Buster and Annie, who woefully return as adults to live with their parents after a series of missteps. When their parents mysteriously disappear, Buster and Annie launch a skeptical search, more than half-believing that the disappearance is just another of their parents’ performance-art schemes. The setup allows Wilson to dazzle and amuse us with some very inventive and provocatively imagined performance art.

“I hesitate to say that I’m a fan of performance art because I know so little of it. But when I was in junior high or high school, I read about this guy who had someone shoot him for a performance piece, for an art piece! The way it was posited in the article was ‘isn’t this ridiculous, this is not real art, this is a kind of profanity.’ But I thought, this is the best art, this is the most incredible thing I can imagine. I was just so taken with the idea that art can bleed into the spaces where art is not supposed to enter.”

In this case, Wilson’s performance art pieces allow him to enter the deeply complicated spaces of family relationships.

“The thing that I most care about in writing is the ways in which we’re bound to these people who for all intents and purposes create you. They build you up, and the second step after they make you is that you unmake that and become your own person. I think that’s a really weird relationship.”

And so there is a startling point at which The Family Fang is suddenly something quite different from the satirical romp through the art world that it first appears to be.

“One of my strengths is humor. It’s easier for me to get into the darker stuff if I initially treat it as absurd. It gives me an entry point. One of the things I’ve always loved in the books or movies I admire is that moment when something funny shifts so quickly into sadness that you are laughing and you are crying. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s a magic trick. And it’s something I’ve tried to emulate. One of the things I want to do is make it light in a way that right up until the moment it becomes dark, you don’t notice how much light has disappeared from the story.”

Wilson continues, “I like the absurd, I like magical realism, I like fairy tales. When those things are done correctly, what is a dream and what is real bleeds into each other so much that you just cannot trust that yourself. I think those transformative moments when you are not sure what is reality are just wonderful. I’m very much interested in that kind of magic, where you’re amazed by the strangeness and weirdness of the world.”

The Family Fang. Magic indeed.

In the August issue of BookPage, reviewer Abby Plesser describes In Malice, Quite Close—Brandi Lynn Ryder’s debut novel—as being “at once a murder mystery, a vivid exploration of the art world and a meditation on the secrets we keep.” She continues: “Ryder’s novel is unlike anything else you will read this summer.”

Describe your book in one sentence.
“That which you long to possess comes to possess you . . . “

What was your reaction when you found out your first novel would be published?
Overwhelming, indescribable joy. It had been my dream since I learned to read . . . I was in a hotel in New York at the time and after “the call,” I threw my phone up in the air, let out a whoop of delight and danced around the room in a very unwriterly way. It took me quite a while to rediscover my angst.

Your novel is told from multiple points of view and is quite puzzle-like. How did you keep up with different threads?
I’m slightly obsessed with the limitations of perception and tend to look at things in a prismatic way. It didn’t pose any trouble for me, and is meant to enlighten rather than confuse readers . . .  

The foundation of the novel—the core relationship between Tristan and Gisèle—is built on a lie, which spins into a great web of them. Years later, each of the characters live in a house of cards in which nothing is as it seems. They each labor under their own delusions, their own ‘truths,’ which begin to crumble as events unfold. To convey this, I felt I had to step into each character and see things through their eyes, while allowing the reader to be privy to these varying perspectives and connect the dots. It is meant to be a bit of a puzzle . . . It’s not nearly as easy to deconstruct illusions when they’re your own! To that end, I hope readers will question the degree to which all reality is constructed and subject to the limits of our perception.

Besides reading and writing, what do you like to do for fun?
So many of my favorite pursuits—reading, writing, yoga, (long, long) walks, art and music—are meditative and solitary, that I find in my free time, I most enjoy socializing. Not the modern social media version, but the old-fashioned art of conversation. I love to meet new people and hear their stories. Napa Valley, where I live, is the perfect facilitator for this, with its constant flow of tourists from everywhere in the world. Not to mention the beautiful backdrop, fine food and wine, and inspired cocktails . . . You’ll often find me out and about in the town I love. I suppose I’m an extroverted introvert!

I also love to cook—especially rustic French and Italian dishes that take hours to make and are such fun to share . . . Travel, and art, art, art. Of all kinds, everywhere I can find it. And I find it everywhere, in everything . . .

Name one book you think everyone should read, and why.
John Fowles’ The Magus. A masterful psychological and philosophical work, it is that rare treasure: a book of ideas . . . Compulsively readable, yet it will stay with you long afterward. An exploration into so many things: identity and ego, cynicism and idealism, truth and illusion. Fowles forces his central character, Nicholas Urfe, to confront his most deeply held assumptions about the world and about himself—and encourages us to do the same. The world should look a little different to you after reading it! And that, for me, is the highest praise one can give a piece of art . . .