To Experience a Kind of Vertigo
Kevin Sampsell Interviews Diane Williams

The first Diane Williams story I ever read was called "An Opening Chat" and it began with: "I am glad he is this man here so that I can do a fuck with someone, but I am regarded as a better cock-sucker." It is in her third collection, The Stupefaction, which I read upon its release in 1996.
How could I, a hot-blooded American male working at a suburban bookstore, resist such a bawdy introduction? I could not. At an impressionable time when I was reading almost any writer whose work was marked by the red pen of writer and renegade editor Gordon Lish, Williams was my newest and most puzzling discovery. Her abrupt tales seemed, at first glance, like sketches or half-finished stories. But their open-ended structure, when approached from a different frame of mind, proved to be less like sinkholes and more like mirrored portals into various memories. Her stories resemble poetry in this way-the impact that the reader feels is more from what's left out than what is presented. Perhaps more than any writer I've read, her work somehow sparks ideas and odd memories in my own head.
But apparently it's not for everyone. Though the usually generous reviewers of trade magazines like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews have given her favorable notices they have also called her stories "anti-narratives" that were "fragmentary to the point of deliberate incoherence" (PW) and that "the reader often struggles to figure out what they mean." (Kirkus).
It could be this incoherence or the struggle to figure out or anti-whatever that makes Williams such an intriguing person. And such an intimidating figure. Not one to travel the country on long book tours, get lots of media attention, or have souped-up websites like other writers, my perception of Williams and her life has been fueled almost exclusively by her writing and the few author photos of her I've seen. In these photos, she looks serious, secretive (sometimes obscuring her face), strict, and pent up-just like the narrators of her stories often seem pent up and seemingly about to erupt in one direction or other. And sometimes the stories do erupt, quickly and suddenly of course. Often in these moments though, I find a great charge of humor; an oppressed voice instantly blunt with awkward vulgarisms.
Williams's newest book, It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, is a novella and story collection that features some of her most refined work to date, strangely evocative to the point of being unsettling and surprising in its linguistic vigor. Williams is also the editor of NOON, a beautifully-produced literary journal that features the strongest offbeat writing from a select group of literary stylists.
This interview was done through a long volley of emails. Some of the resulting Q&A appeared in the October 2008 issue of The Believer magazine. I'd like to thank them for letting me publish the rest of our dialogue here. -Kevin Sampsell

I noticed that Bill Hayward did the author photo for your first book and also the new book. I take it you've been friends with him for a long time. What is he like to work with?
Yes, Bill and I have been friends for a long time and he is kindly, cagey, brilliant and kindly and kindly and demanding! I am a great admirer of his work and NOON has featured a portfolio of his collaborative portraits in nearly every edition. I told him at the first-I pleaded with him for my first book-for THIS IS ABOUT THE BODY, THE MIND, THE SOUL, THE WORLD, TIME, AND FATE-please help me to appear to be the person I wish I am! And, in the service of this, he let me wear his nice, great big jacket!

Do you think the genre of "flash fiction" has become more popular or understood since you started publishing?
I think "flash fiction" has gotten more popular. Short, short fiction was causing consternation when I began to publish my stories and books-which bewildered me. Would people argue so publicly and so vehemently in favor of privileging a very tall person over a very short person? And the trouble people took to attach a modern-sounding label to these texts and to create a special genre-haven't there been short texts since way back when? So people were, perhaps they still are, fidgeting with blaster, sudden fiction, flash fiction, prose poem and attempting to segregate these texts. The quality of the thing ought to be foregrounded.

There have been times, as a writer of flash fiction myself, I've worried, maybe foolishly, if it's even a worthwhile format to be writing in, in terms of readers. To me it's like poetry in some ways, but I hope it's a step above poetry because I don't want it to be as ignored as poetry. Some literature is already in enough danger of obscurity, and I'd say 90% of poetry is dead. The sentiment and the impact of poetry have a better chance of surviving in a prose format. What influence does poetry have on your work, and are you worried about the state of poetry?
All literature, including poetry, is always in danger of obscurity and 90% of all literature is dead. The challenge is to make a character of noise that will be, ought to be, heard in the ruckus. If a poet is someone mindful of all aspects of her noise and tries to manipulate any and every element of it that she can, then I'd like to try hard to be a poet.

Did you have aspirations to be a poet at any time?
I had, have aspirations to write well!

Who are your favorite poets?
I think Sharon Olds is one of our greatest living poets.

What about her work excites you?
There is zealous courage in Olds. She confronts the mighty living and the mighty dead. She hunts for complexity of feeling. Her language is stellar and her compositions brilliantly combine the banal, the comedic, the tragic, and the sublime.

Do you see a connection between your work and hers?
I'd be honored if anyone should find a connection between her work and mine.

How long does it usually take you to write a story? Do you let things sit in your head for a long time, or are these thoughts fairly raw?
How long does it take to write a story? Horribly long, desperately long-weeks, months, years-all depending. The amount of time it takes doesn't ensure a better outcome either. That is-longer doesn't necessarily augur better. The thoughts are built by words and the words come onto the page any old way they please, usually unhelpfully-and they have to be managed.

Didn't you once work for a company that produced textbooks?
Yes, I did. In the late sixties I worked as an editor for J. G. Ferguson, a subsidiary of Doubleday, on career guidance books-and in the seventies at Scott, Foresman and then for SRA writing workbook text and helping to produce readers and other materials for the primary grades. I loved doing that!

What did you love about it?
I had someone to tell me what to do every minute of the day. There were the smartest people all around me. Let's see-we had fun. My colleagues and I-we felt purposeful and socially useful and well supported by managers aiming to solve crucial problems. I was reading and writing and editing, which I found were my favorite occupations.

What were your intentions and inspirations for starting NOON?
When StoryQuarterly-which I published and co-edited for twelve years-was threatened, I gave out with a scream of a kind I had never produced before, and I had two small children sleeping upstairs when I did that.

A scream? Threatened!? How do you mean?
The scream is something that has always remained a mystery to me-since I had never screamed like that before nor after-I am not a screamer. I think that's the kind of scream one must emit when a life's in danger-but I only guess that on account of the movies I've seen. As to why or how I felt that the life of StoryQuarterly was threatened-alas, I need to leave that murky.

Alright then. Tell me more about NOON.
NOON permits voices I cannot bear to live without to be heard. Everybody should get the chance to hear these voices. I want to pay tribute to Christine Schutt here, too. If it had not been for her brilliant support in every way at NOON's inception-the venture would not have been possible. I used to tease her that she'd boost my confidence by saying such things as, "The way you tie your shoes is so amazing! I just know you can do this!" Christine is the one who gave NOON its name.

Do you think that literary journals in general are still important? Do they serve the reading culture or are they just instruments for MFA students to find publishers?
Of course certain literary journals are still important. I don't know how to answer that question in the negative. How could this be debatable?-and what's wrong with MFA students finding publishers?

Well, I think this is quite debatable, and I'm most certainly not against literary journals myself, but you said, "90% of all literature is dead." Literary journals have their covers torn off and their insides recycled every day at bookstores all over the country. I doubt there's a high percentage of them actually read. And I don't have anything against MFA students-I know little about them. But I wonder how unique these writers are. It seems like a formulaic culture to me-quite the opposite of where I see your work. Sure, you can teach people how to write but I think real talent and imagination can't be taught.
I'd likely never have had the life of a writer without the graciousness of the so­-called literary review editors. My first story was published in 1983 by Dan Curley in Ascent (University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign). What a generous heart Dan Curley had to send me two pages of patient and intelligent single-spaced comments and suggestions-asking me to rewrite my story. He said I'd managed to interest him in a thoroughly repellent woman. (He also strongly recommended against enclosing typescripts in clear-plastic sleeves!) No, I wasn't an MFA student, but then, who is? There are only frightened, lonely souls, talking, pleading, who never were in school, who are in school, who are now out of school. I read thousands of manuscripts a year submitted to NOON-before that I read as many for StoryQuarterly-I've done this for nearly 25 years. I never bother to read the cover letters (there isn't time) until there is a need-that is, the need to contact the writer. Yes, true-90% of literature is dead -most everything gets shredded, but some voices cannot be ignored or expunged-these insist upon themselves. And, for the lucky few-the gifted learner-studying with the gifted teacher or editor- talent and imagination can be taught, can be nurtured, absolutely. I get angry repeating the terrible tale that the commercial presses have consolidated into profit-driven conglomerates hugely inhospitable to literary artists. That's why I'd rather answer your question in a couple of sentences-it's less painful. But how to avoid pain?-for every story I have published and there have been many hundreds of these, many hundreds have also been rejected. This is heartbreaking and inexpressibly difficult work for most of us and only the slightest fraction of what any one of us has to say in print bears repeating.

You mentioned your children. How old are they now?
I have two sons-aged 27 and 31.

I have to ask, do your sons talk to you about your writing, or fiction in general?
We've spoken of my writing a little, not a lot. The convergence of my family life and my life as an artist is a very uncomfortable convergence for me. It pains me to wonder how my sons might conflate my fiction with the facts of my life. As an artist I am dedicated to a heedless amoral stance, but not, I hope, as a member of a family, or as a friend or citizen. Of course, both of my sons have heard me speak about what sort of literature I value the most. How could they not?

In a 1992 interview with John O'Brien you said that you were living in Glencoe, Illinois because you thought it was a sweet, safe place to raise kids. Do you think the danger that you foster in your fiction made you seek out a larger sense of safety in real life?
I wasn't writing reckless fiction when I moved to Glencoe. The protection from harm or from being harmful never was achieved.

What do you mean by "protection from being harmful?"
I mean that no habitat, no person or persons curb significantly enough my own blundering about-ignorantly-and often harmfully. You can't intend for me to elaborate here the harm I think I've done. Well, I won't.

How many times have you been married? How does marriage affect your life as a writer?
I have been married once. Goodness! How does marriage affect my life as a writer? My writing life began late. My first book was published when my long marriage was nearing its end. So, I don't really have an answer to the question. My relation to my work is opportunistic. Whatever the quality of the emotional weather is, I'll be doing my work with the same expectations... it's going to be a terrible struggle.

Getting back to Christine Schutt, I saw that you two collaborated on a story that appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in September of 2006. Have you done much of that kind of co-writing?
Nope-neither of us had never done it before. Christine and I were asked by Donald Breckenridge to interview each other-I think that's what it was-about our writing-and when we tried it-we could not enjoy doing that at all. So, instead, we offered to converse by telling a story, trading places as the narrator. It was nerve racking-competitive, and hilarious and very, very interesting. Christine is much more fluent than I am. When we transcribed the story, I had to doctor up my language to bring it into the vicinity of the quality of hers. Now, when I am a guest at her home in Maine-in the summer-where all is calm-we try this again and again and we've come to think these are among the best times that we share.

When you accept a story for NOON do you do any editing with the authors?
Sometimes we suggest a great deal of editing. Sometimes we suggest absolutely nothing and sometimes just a tiny bit!

What do you think about the current renewed discussions about Gordon Lish?
Gordon Lish is a writer, editor, and teacher of great historical importance. You must know he was my teacher and, for a time, my editor. His editorial collaboration with Raymond Carver and many, many other writers is a notable and fascinating subject.

Oh, c'mon, Diane. I could have read that on Wikipedia. You must have something notable and fascinating to say yourself. Is there a shroud of secrecy enforced among former Lish students?!
I don't think there is any shroud of secrecy. I have spoken often and publicly about my studies with Gordon Lish and my debt to him as have so many of his other students. As a matter of fact, when my first book was launched by Grove in 1989-I spoke about his teaching in a TV interview that ended up being aired at 11 AM on a Sunday morning in Chicago! Sports fans, preparing for football coverage, saw and heard me instead! The interview had been set to run in the late evening and a technician made a big mistake! These days I feel uneasy and awkward speaking about Gordon Lish because we haven't had any contact in over ten years-we've had a falling out. Of course, there is much to say-Gordon Lish inspires one to be vehemently ambitious for the project in all its aspects. He demands an excruciatingly fine-grained attention to the text. He encourages one to labor in the most dangerous emotional terrain. In my own case, I found I was compelled to test the obverse of every presumption I'd ever had. Rearranging myself psychologically has led me to linguistic experimentation as well.

I notice that you often set your stories in polite settings-dinner parties, birthdays, family gatherings-but there's an element of rebellion or anger boiling in the narrator's voice. In my mythologizing of you, I always imagined you were a New York socialite, perhaps married to a doctor, living in a really nice apartment. But you were pissed off about meeting these well-dressed people. How wrong am I?
No, I was never pissed off meeting well-dressed people! I am admiring and envious and intimidated by well-dressed people! I keep trying and trying to be well-enough dressed! I lived for 20 plus years in a suburb of Chicago and was married for all that time to an investment banker. That's the news on that. More news than that- you're right-is in the fiction.

Do you think of yourself as an original writer? I mean, do you ever catch yourself mid-story and say, that sounds too much like so-and-so?
I am usually catching myself and telling myself that that sounds too much like an unconvincing and flinching version of myself. I am sure I am very often unoriginal.

How do you respond to people who think your stories don't make any sense? For instance, if you have to defend a story like "A Thousand Groans" how do you do it?
Oh, you don't think that story makes sense? Perhaps it is a botch! Both of us may be more confident of our evaluation in twenty years time. I have been in love with stories that I'd like to beat to death at a later date. I just recalled several from consideration I'd sent out. I think they are botches. However, I am still stirred by "A Thousand Groans"-but you, Kevin, you should, by all means, stay away from it!!!

Oh no, I'm not saying anything about that specific story. I am stirred by it too. For what it's worth, I would say "Everybody's Syrup" is one of the more inscrutable texts of the new book. But do you deliberately paint incomplete pictures to disorient readers or manipulate them in some way?
Disorient?-manipulate readers? No, those are not my goals. Since I am unable to predict anyone's response to these texts, I rely on my own responses. I am glad when the story provides a reorganized place or a new place where I can go to be in a daze or to experience a kind of vertigo. Vertigo-that's a type of disorientation-so you're right about that. However, I'm a fan of other purposes for a story. I don't want to rule out anything. I like magic. I like prayer. I like relief.

How do you feel about clarity versus mystery? I always try to strike a balance between clarity and mystery myself. Many writers usually do one or the other.
I respect clarity. I seek clarity. I am referring to the tediousness of stale memories and my long held convictions that feel dreary often only because they keep on. My motive is to break up and reorganize. My prayer is that a new object may be revealed. An object can be seen with clarity and still be mysterious. I love Magritte's observation that the mind loves mystery because the mind knows that it is mysterious.

Has anyone ever noticed something in your work-a strange connection or subconscious meaning-that you didn't realize or catch yourself?
I am ever grateful for the ingenious commentary some of my works have received. In The Los Angeles Times, recently, Matthew Sharpe points out that I choose an unconventional time and place for the description of clothing. I was startled to read of it. So, then it's true, I think, that even the subtlest shift in custom can produce energy. How I long to change my own bad habits and so take delight in the slightest degree of alteration.

I'm interested in your thoughts on characters. In the short span of your stories, you often introduce characters, or mention names (sometimes your own!), out of the blue, very suddenly. Again, it sometimes makes me think I'm at a dinner party with a bunch of people coming in and out of the room. How do you decide what characters come into your fiction?
That's an interesting question! Usually my fictions operate with one voice. It's a strain for me to include two voices. I am often worn out having done that. Can't we get a crowd? Why not a crowd? Well, why not a mob? My subjects are often so intimate. Who is being addressed? This is a crazy-making question. I am only keeping company with myself as I write. I used to refer more often in stories to the girl, the woman, the child, the father than I do now. I must have tired of that or maybe I am feeling friendlier these days or crazier and am engaging a fantasy reader who knows the narrator well. Although, even if I formally introduce Mr. Horowitz-he's just as much a stranger as Fred is. None of us knows either one of them! I've never thought about how characters come into my fiction, so I don't have an answer and no answer is emerging. I have my preoccupations, certainly. I'm not keen on the designation "character" and cannot say why. I have blurry visions of bodies, clothing, and some few remarks by personalities! Big mouths! I'd like them to stay for a while when they appear, and they could stay longer, if I were more skillful-or more hospitable.

Do you have secrets inside you or personal thoughts that have frightened you too much to write about?
Of course I have secrets and personal thoughts too frightening, too threatening to write about. Many of these are repressed or willfully suppressed. Gossiping about one's self, confessing to someone else's crimes-why do we do it? I worry over crimes obsessively and their aftermath. But here we go! Only Heaven or Hell? How deadly dull.

Do you ever want to write a novel? Is that appealing to you at all?
My novellas are my attempts to write novels. There is such a daunting and vast array of elements to manage in a novel... the novelist's mind requires a capability mine may not have. We'll see, we'll see.

What would you say your novella, On Sexual Strength is about?
My relation to this novella is mysterious. I wrote it after hearing the true partial story of some deceased remarkable persons. I could answer you with another question this way-What is sexual strength about? Not the novella, but the concept. What?-Let me see... let me see... I first ask myself, is it a good thing? A rapist can be sexually strong-so that implies sexual strength often is a bad thing. Sexual strength can signal sound health-ample pleasure-or too much pleasure? Forget good and bad. Can we acquire sexual strength? Sexual-the word upsets me, so that I cannot forget good and bad, nor can I think clearly. I am ever fascinated by people who use that word sexual cheerfully and with dignity and they do! They do! Strength! That word is reassuring for me. I consider it an accomplishment to investigate a concept thoroughly and I am not a philosopher or a scientist, as I have ably demonstrated here. Therefore, I need to make my attempt this other way.

Do you enjoy reading sexual writing by others?
Of course I enjoy reading great sexual writing. So, you don't mind using that word! I really didn't like having to say it again! Schutt and Gary Lutz and Sharon Olds come to mind right away and Clancy Martin and Harold Brodkey-Bataille and Catherine Millet-and there is the classic My Secret Life by Anonymous that I never tire of.

What do you want to be remembered for as a person and as a writer?
That's an awful question. I don't want to be remembered. I don't want to die!