Ellen Kanner

Ethan Canin wants you to read between the lines. A wordsmith who at 27 dazzled critics with his debut short story collection Emperor of the Air, Canin has learned an appreciation of the tacit, the unsaid. "Space adds immeasurably to the power of fiction," said the author of Carry Me Across the Water.

"If you just go from Monday to Tuesday, it's not as effective as going from Japan in 1940 to Brooklyn in 1990. You can sort of trigger a reader to drop his emotional defenses," Canin says.

These leaps, these spaces add heft to his new novel, which tells of 78-year-old August Kleinman. After emigrating to America from Germany as a boy, Kleinman became an American success story, complete with business, wife and kids. Now more than comfortable in his accumulated wealth, Kleinman is less comfortable with his own grown children. He is capable of generous, even grandiose acts but since the death of his wife, Kleinman has become, as Canin writes, "a stranger to his own life." Re-examining his life, Kleinman on impulse flies to Japan. His hope, which he can barely articulate to himself, let alone to his family, is that by redeeming someone from his past, he can also redeem himself.

Despite the acclaim earned by Emperor of the Air and two other collections of short stories, Canin saw Kleinman's story as a novel. "To me, a novel is the story of a life. That's what interests me. The guy who works in the laundromat, the professor, what happened to them? Where did they make their mistakes? Why didn't they take that job? Why didn't they marry someone else? You could spend the rest of your life thinking about that." Canin hasn't been to Japan, isn't a businessman and at 40, has a long way to go before his children, ages two and five, are adults themselves. "I've never written anything autobiographical. I don't work that way. I make just about everything up." With Kleinman, he's created someone of "an age where one has some authority, where you can look at your life with some equanimity. I've never been interested in young people," said the author, sounding closer to Kleinman's age than his own.

The gravitas belying his boyish face perhaps dates from when he studied at the University of Iowa's prestigious Writers Workshop. Iowa prides itself on being a literary boot camp only the talented and thick-skinned can survive, and while Canin produced short stories there, he concluded he didn't have what it takes to be a writer. "I left having given up. I went to medical school with my tail between my legs," he said.

Thinking his writing days were over, Canin applied and was accepted to Harvard Medical School. While immersed in his studies, Canin received a call from an editor who'd read several of his short stories. She contacted him about putting together a collection. "I forget if I was a third-year or a fourth-year student, but either way, you're the lowest of the low, you're humiliated daily," said Canin, and to be celebrated as the author of Emperor of the Air felt "intoxicating, oh my God, incredible."

While savoring his literary success, Canin didn't quite trust it. He continued to write on the side, making medicine his livelihood, even after publishing a novel, another short story collection and a book of three novellas. He didn't have the confidence to leave medicine until 1995, the year he published his novel For Kings and Planets. Canin hasn't given up on the day job concept, though. He now teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the place he left in defeat more than a decade ago. Either Iowa has changed since his student days or Canin has. "I don't know if it's the zeitgeist, but people seem more overtly supportive and generous. I'm sure they have the same serpentine rivalries when they're in their own dens, but they seem more cooperative," he said. In the five years since joining the faculty, he's learned as much from his students as he has taught them. As Carry Me Across the Water shows, Canin has become "a little more confident" about sustaining a narrative throughout a novel. "You've got to give it a rhythm, from bold to quiet, go from love to horror, travel across space and time, move it along that way," he said.

To achieve that rhythm, Canin sketched out the arc of Kleinman's life on "a huge story board that takes up the whole wall. All the plot lines are in different colors on different index cards. It was the only way to keep it straight in my mind," Canin said. "Orange is when he goes to his son's house, pink was the war, pale pink was with his wife. I spent the most time on those moments where you go from one plotline to another. It gets to be like a jigsaw puzzle at the end. You've got four or five things and they've got to add up and you have to decide what do you reveal, what do you keep hidden." Through flashbacks and transitions flowing back and forth in time, Canin creates Kleinman's entire life. What seems effortless and all of a piece on the page was actually "pretty hard," said the author, who finds the process of writing "agony. I hate it, I really do." Canin laughed and explained that, fortunately, the agony works in accord with "some kind of Jewish idea that if you're enjoying yourself, something's wrong." What makes Canin return to the computer every day is the desire to break new ground with every work he writes. It's a metaphor with real meaning for him.

"Excavating prose is pretty much what writing is like," said the author who won't even reread his early short stories. "I would be embarrassed by their thinness. Right now, a true short story has no appeal for me. It's so shallow, just an affect carried off by a few words. In this book, I've toned down my prose style, tried to make it invisible," said Canin. "I have a greater regard for truth over beauty."

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Freud posited that the keys to mental health are work and love, and if he was right then Robert Olen Butler is the sanest man on the planet. It doesn’t always look that way. Sane isn’t the first word that comes to mind when describing Butler’s idea to write a short story online in real time webcam, mike and all. But Butler, who teaches creative writing at Florida State University, doesn’t care about the looks of things. A prolific and protean writer, he goes beyond the safe and superficial in order to tap into what he calls dreamspace.

"Art does not come from the mind," he says, speaking from his 1840 plantation home in Tallahassee, Florida. "It comes from the space where you dream, the unconscious." This dreamspace has been the source of a dozen books including his 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain and the latest, Fair Warning Its narrator Amy Dickerson, a glamorous Manhattan auctioneer, understands her affluent clients’ need to possess. "I know about desire," she says. "It’s my job to instill it blind, irrational desire in whole crowds of people."

Fair Warning, with its startling opening line, "Perhaps my fate was sealed when I sold my three-year old sister," began as a short story. It was originally published in Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, and the dreamspace Amy came from was not Butler’s alone, but also Coppola’s. "Francis had seen Sharon Stone act as an auctioneer one night and was enchanted," says Butler. The director asked the author to develop that moment into a short story. "When the suggestion was made, it attached itself to some character in my unconsciousness," says Butler. "It struck a chord somehow or I couldn’t have done it. I just loved Amy." Others did, too. The short story version of "Fair Warning" won the 2001 National Magazine Award for fiction.

The voice Butler creates for Amy is sensual, sly, funny and real. Even as she flirts with wealthy collectors, she’s still trying to outrun her Texas cattleman past. "I love voices," says the author. "I’m very character-focused, very voice-focused. I feel often when I write as if I’m channeling more than creating." He often writes in first person, which allows him to create the voices he loves, voices as madly diverse as Amy, Tony Hatcher, a Eurasian boy torn between Saigon and New Jersey in The Deuce (1989), and 13 different Vietnamese voices in A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.

A linguist for the Army during the Vietnam War, Butler spoke fluent Vietnamese, which led him to "encounter the Vietnamese people in very close and intimate ways." He learned the details of their lives and 20 years later, re-created that intimate and complex world in his book which won the Pulitzer.

To create the voice of Amy, Butler also drew from experience. "I’ve known a lot of women in my life," he says. "I’ve been married four times, though only recently for real," to novelist Elizabeth Dewberry. But for Butler, understanding other lives is the thin part of a writer’s responsibility. The rest comes from deep within, from "the dreamspace, the unconscious, a place where you’re neither male nor female, Muslim, Christian or Jew, black, white. The human truth that transcends these superficial differences, if you write from that level of authenticity, is not only possible, but is the profound duty of the artist."

He concedes that the sheer diversity of his work, as he nimbly goes from the stream-of-conscious sensuality of They Whisper (1994) to short stories drawn from real tabloid headlines in Tabloid Dreams (1996), can make people uncomfortable.

"We like our writers to be characterizable entities, and I’m not. I keep following the muse wherever it leads." That’s what led him to Fair Warning and to write "Aeroplane," his online short story (check out the story and web archives at www.fsu.edu and click on Inside Creative Writing). Butler, who’s taught creative writing for 17 years says, "You have to teach [writing students] to access the deeply nonrational parts of themselves. The best way is to let them sit with you and watch the process. Now for the first time, that process is accessible through the Internet. This is the next step, getting naked in front of your computer and letting people watch." Pretty risky stuff, but Butler, who channels other voices in his work, is absolutely at ease in his own skin. It was not always thus. When he began writing, he wrote what he thought people wanted to read. "I courted approval," he admits. "All that stuff was having a bad effect on my writing."

Butler has published 12 works. He has written 17. He laughs. "I wrote five of the worst novels you could ever read and never will, 40 truly dreadful short stories, a million words of dreck, before something clicked," he says. "The click was where I stopped writing from my head and started from my unconscious. I discovered there was something else in me the impulse to create works of art, which requires a total disregard for those other matters. Only after I learned to just write the books that are there and not think about anything else, that’s when I started writing well and getting published. Then I won the Pultizer Prize and I don’t have anything to prove to anybody anymore."

The professional sense of comfort came long before the personal. After three failed marriages, "I finally found a soul mate," says Butler, who after seven years still sounds moonstruck. "I found and married Elizabeth Dewberry, an amazing writer. I’m now the second best writer in my household." They read to each other from their work and encourage rather than compete with each other. "That has made a big difference. That sense of connection has shaped my work as well as my life," he says. "Home is with Betsy. Home is the unconscious, too, the dreamspace. You carry your dreamspace around with you."

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Butler believes accessing the dreamspace is more important than ever. "Art has always responded to the deepest travails of the human spirit," he says. "Mohammad Atta flew that jet into a building in search of a self. More than ever, we need artists to tell us what it means to be human, to live, to die, to seek a self, an identity. Artists must look into the cauldron of their own souls to find what is happening to our world."

Ellen Kanner is a freelance writer in Miami.

One of fiction’s cardinal rules is to write what you know, and from her rich depiction of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, the setting for her new novel Standing in the Rainbow, you’d bet Fannie Flagg was born in a small town where everyone knows each other, part of a boisterous middle-class family like that of her 10-year old character Bobby Smith. And you’d be wrong.

"I wanted to be in that town," says a wistful Flagg, speaking from her home in Birmingham, Alabama. The actress, comedienne and author of the 1987 beloved bestseller Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café "grew up in an apartment in Birmingham, which was a big city. I would have loved to have been raised in a small town," she says. "I’m an only child. I write about families because it’s what I longed for. I’m trying to rewrite my childhood."

You could find reasons for her melancholy—an alcoholic father, the isolation that comes of being an only child—but Flagg wonders "if some children aren’t born sort of sad. I was always that way. It doesn’t matter why. What matters is talking your way out of it." Or in Flagg’s case, writing your way out.

Standing in the Rainbow spans the 1940s through the 1980s and at no time is Elmwood Springs a hotbed for tabloid scandal. Instead, it’s a cozy place with real, textured characters striving to live and love even when the going gets tough. There’s poor Tot Whooten, the hapless hairdresser, Missouri’s gladhanding Governor Hamm Sparks and his terminally shy wife Betty Ray, but the soul of Standing in the Rainbow is Bobby’s mother, known to all of southern Missouri as Neighbor Dorothy.

Chatty Neighbor Dorothy hosts a local radio show in which she dispenses cookie recipes and crucial community news. "Well, everybody, I guess we can say summer is officially here. Bobby has just informed me that the pool is open. . . .Well, go on, but for heaven’s sake, don’t hit your head on the diving board!"

Neighbor Dorothy got her start back in Flagg’s performing days. "I had a little television show in Birmingham in the early ’60s, a local show with local news. It always made me laugh. I started reading these small-town newspapers around the South." Life had an easier rhythm then. Sometimes, it was downright slow. "One year was bad. We didn’t have many people coming to town," she recalls. "We interviewed the cameraman’s mother. Five times. I know about those local shows."

Fans will recognize Neighbor Dorothy from Flagg’s previous novel Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! Although Dorothy was a minor character there, the author knew right away that she deserved more. "I fell in love with her," says Flagg. "I knew I was going to introduce her in that book and devote myself to her family in the next book, so it wasn’t a sequel but a prequel. I do things backward."

She laughs, but she’s only half-joking. A born storyteller, she struggles with severe dyslexia. "I had to work a little harder. I still do."

Shamed by her poor spelling, Flagg didn’t show her writing to anyone for years. She began as a performer by acting out her own stories and starring in movies like Grease and Five Easy Pieces, but when at last she summoned the courage to go from actress to author, "It was like I walked into the right room. I walked in very late, didn’t start writing my first novel until 1980. I was in my 30s, but it was such a pleasure to find it," says Flagg. "I was so lucky to have that second career I liked even better than my first."

Of her previous three novels, Flagg is best known for Fried Green Tomatoes. Not only did the story of Idgie and Ruth resonate with readers, but also Flagg found writing about them to be good for the soul. She had given up acting to write full-time and was in tough financial straits.

Writing Standing in the Rainbow, "I was in a better frame of mind," says Flagg. "The world is getting so crazy, I needed to remind myself and others that most of these people still exist. We shouldn’t let go of that wonderful heritage we have—middle class America is the heroic class. They’re not complaining. They carry the rest of the world on their back. They don’t get written about much, and they never got much credit or appreciation. They’re laughed at or thought of as sort of sappy."

Sappy is hardly an insult for the woman the Christian Science Monitor once called the most sentimental writer in America. "I thought, isn’t that fabulous?" Flagg laughs. "And my friends said, ‘No, Fannie, that’s not good.’ But it is. The easiest thing in the world is to be smart-alecky and cynical and snide and jaded. It’s hard to keep your heart open."

It’s hard because it means being vulnerable, which Flagg thinks is imperative to writing. "To be a writer, you have to remain a child in some areas and not grow up. And keep your imagination open. A part of me has remained a child," says the author whose wild imagination is very close to Bobby’s in Standing in the Rainbow. "I’m constantly surprised at things and don’t seem to get tougher with age, which is a disadvantage."

It does, however, make her a beautiful writer.

In the morning, Flagg stumbles out of bed and goes right to her desk. "If a leaf falls, I’m lost. I can’t have any noise. When I get sort of stuck, I go somewhere for four or five days with no phone, no fax and go on a binge. I get some of my best writing done on my binges."

Though she lives part-time in California, Flagg is always glad to return to the South. "Honestly that’s where my characters come from. There’s a real Southern culture, a way of thinking and looking at things. In the South, if you move into a neighborhood, all the neighbors will walk in the door and never call first. ‘We just dropped by for a visit,’ " says Flagg, thickening her drawl. "People from the North are horrified."

She lets loose with another laugh, but the joy, the lightness that comes through when she talks and writes about small towns and big families stems from "a sadness." Part of her remains the little girl who would look through the windows of other families’ homes and yearn to belong.

"People fascinate me. I don’t understand them as well as I’d like. They surprise me all the time," says Flagg. "I grew up so alone."

Ellen Kanner is a freelance writer in Miami.