Matthew Salesses' story “Mongolia, New York, Prague, Krakow” appears in the first issue of
The Collagist, published August 15, 2009. He is the author of the chapbook
We Will Take What We Can Get, from Publishing Genius Press, and his stories appear or will soon appear in
Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, The Lifted Brow, and others. He is also the editor of
Redivider.
Here, he speaks to
The Collagist about the inspiration for his story, as well as why Prague is such a compelling location for fiction, what "up-to-the-minute nonfiction" means, and what it takes to write "stories that are invested in sentences."
1. Can you talk about the inspiration for "Mongolia, New York, Prague, Krakow"? What was on your mind while you were writing this story?“Mongolia, New York, Prague, Krakow” started for me with Krakow. Then came Prague. Then Mongolia. And lastly New York. In the title, though, they are in the order in which these cities mean something to the narrator.
To turn that answer into an answer that actually addresses your question, I started with the Gestapo cells in Krakow. Those cells stuck in my mind. The quote in the story is a real quote. I knew the moment I saw those words that they were a story. What I didn't know was how. Writing this was very hard for me, and I'm glad you thought it worked in the end. I wish I were more confident that it worked, even now. What I saw on those walls was an instant of existence, in words, that was also an infinite existence. Full of hate and love. I had traveled to Krakow from Prague, and I think there was something in that movement, from a place that had outlasted basically every war thrown at it, to a place where someone had had to write himself down to exist, that I wanted to get at in the story. At first, I included a number of imaginary existences, very nice sentences, I thought, but sentences that didn't add up to anything.
Later, when I was in Korea, my wife and I watched a television show about an eight-year-old eagle hunter in Mongolia, this old way of life that is disappearing. Cathreen translated this—I don't speak Korean—so I'm not sure how much was lost, or perhaps gained, in translation, but the idea of this boy eagle hunter fascinated me. I soon thought of it as a love story, the boy and the eagle in the middle of a vast desert. And my character seemed to speak up and say, “This is my past.” That kind of estrangement seemed right for him, who he was in Prague: imagining lives and living an imagined life.
Those were my first two years with the story. And for two more years, I just couldn't get it to work. Something was missing. I desperately wanted it to be a story, but my character was having none of it. Then the New York part came to me, the child. I was thinking of writing a story about an unborn child, and it just clicked into place. An unborn child, really, is the ultimate imagined life. In the end, I structured the story around the child, the advice, the loneliness and possible loneliness, as a way to focus the imaginings and sense of loss.
2. In every story I write, there comes some point where I write just the right thing, where I know that despite not knowing what I'm doing, despite all the doubt and struggle inherent in writing, I know that this particular piece is somehow going to turn out, that it has to turn out, all because this one image or sentence or passage is in it. I feel similar sorts of things as an editor, when I'm reading submissions—Something happens in a story that makes it stand out in some way, that makes me absolutely sure that this is the work of a talented writer in complete control of his craft. Your story had one of those moments for me, when the narrator confronts the mother of his child, trying to convince her to stay:When I left your mom, I told her I would give her three chances to keep me in her life, in yours. The first was this meeting to tell her I was going. The second was our kiss goodbye. The third I said I would keep until she could not resist me. She said this would never happen, and when I said what about when her husband saw the baby's brown skin, she said she had already told him what was coming. The truth, her trump card, like in the game, hearts.
The last sentence of this paragraph told me this was a story I wanted, and then the rest of the story confirmed what I already knew was true. Was that moment as surprising for you, writing the story, as it was for me, reading it? Or was there some other killer moment that the rest of the story organized itself around?I'm glad you liked that. I'm invested in sentences. I like stories that are invested in sentences. I like stories where the sentences do the work of the plot and move the story along, rather than stories where the destination does the work of the plot—where the point of the sentences is only to get the story to the next predetermined place, no matter how unpredictable.
What I mean is that ideally I would like every sentence to become a killer moment. Though of course this is impossible for people who are not Amy Hempel.
I actually wrote drafts and drafts of this story in which the narrator narrated in broken English. I loved this, but in the end, it had to go. I got some good advice about letting it go. Though I did keep much of the second-language-speaker sentence structure.
The music of a second language was always this character's voice, and some of the more startling sentences—at least for me to write them—were a result of this translated way of saying things.
3. You were one of the very first people to submit to The Collagist, and I can't thank you enough for that. I think I mentioned it when I first accepted this story, but out of the first hundred stories we had submitted to us, eleven were set at least partly in Prague. What is it about this particular city that makes it such a good setting for fiction?I'm glad I got the story in before too many better stories obscured it. There are so reasons why Prague is a wonderful city for a writer to live in and to write about. I've actually just finished a draft of a novel set in Prague, so it's clear I can't get away from it. The city is a mix of old and new, medieval juxtaposed with Art Nouveau, a place where time is revealed as indeterminate. It's a city that survived occupation in both world wars and countless invasions before that. The people there have this amazing attitude that the world just goes on and goes on unalterably; some have the attitude that suffering just goes on and on unalterably; and yet this does not depress them. Their spirit survives.
4. Your chapbook We Will Take What We Can Get was recently put out as part of Publishing Genius' This PDF Chapbook series. The web page for the book says that you call the work "up-to-the-minute nonfiction." What do you mean by that?When I sent the essay to Adam at PGP, I was writing a series of essays online at
http://live-essays.blogspot.com. My wife, Cathreen, and I were going through this unbelievable series of disasters, or rather, Cathreen was going through an unbelievable series of disasters, for which I was partly to blame. And of course, I thought this would be perfect to write about.
This is going to sound bad, so if you want to like me, stop reading. Or, alternatively, graciously believe that none of this was my fault. It started like this: one day, I slammed her hand in the door, and the next day, I drew a bath for her and lit candles and the candles singed off most of her hair.
I was writing about what had happened and what was happening to us in real time (I was able to write more often, then). So I called it “up-to-the-minute nonfiction.” Something would happen, and a little while later, usually the same day, sometimes as it was actually happening, such as when she said she didn't like what I was writing, I wrote about it.
5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?Well, there's the novel—which I mentioned is set in Prague. In the novel is illicit love, a flood that devastated part of the city in 2002, revenge, flesh-eating bacteria, and other good things.
Then I'm also working on a series of fifteen short shorts about an island of epidemics. The epidemics are epidemics such as the epidemic of unrequited love, or the epidemic of memory loss, or the epidemic of magic, or the epidemic of extra-sensitive hearing. The stories will be illustrated by the wonderful Marisol Abbott.
6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?I'm reading
Bel Canto now, which I've wanted to read for ages. I’m finding it beautifully emotional. Not at all embarrassed to be emotional in a way that many American novels seem to have become.
Two recent small press books I’ve loved are Shane Jones's
Light Boxes and Paul Yoon's
Once, the Shore.
As far as upcoming releases, I'm extremely excited for Laura van den Berg's
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, which I'm sure everyone at Dzanc is excited about as well. Also, Mattox Roesch's
Sometimes We're Always Real Same-Same, from Unbridled Books. These two books also happen to have perfect titles. And not to forget, I look forward to Alexander Chee’s
The Queen of the Night. I talked to him at length about it in an interview forthcoming in the Spring
Redivider.