Fall for the Book presents the second in a series of interviews conducted by graduate students in George Mason University’s MFA program in creative writing. The first, David Heath’s interview with novelist C.M. Mayo, was published last week.  Here, Meredyth Byrd, an MFA fiction candidate, interviews novelist and 2009 festival participant Matthew Vollmer:

Matthew Vollmer

Matthew Vollmer’s short stories have appeared in Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Antioch Review and New Letters, among many others. His work has been short-listed for the Best American Short Stories series twice and nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. His first book, Future Missionaries of America, a collection of short stories, was published in 2009. He is currently at work on a novel.

Vollmer got his B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University, and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives with his wife and son in Blacksburg, VA, where he teaches at Virginia Tech.

Meredyth Byrd: Each story in the collection begins with a kind-of challenge to the reader to figure out who the speaker is, what their back-story is, whom they’re speaking to or what the circumstances are. Sometimes I didn’t really know much about the narrator until the middle or end of the story. What, as the author, do you gain from this, and what do you think it does for the reader?

Matthew Vollmer: Great question. Honestly, I’ve never thought about it this way. I mean, in some ways, it makes sense that you don’t know exactly who the character is in the first few pages — it’s still the beginning. But you’re right: I usually don’t start out with a whole lot of exposition (though I have to say the title story is fairly front-loaded in that respect). My main concerns, both as a writer and a reader, are voice, character, and plot — usually in that order. It’s important for me to be able to tap into the voice of the story immediately. If I don’t sense a strong voice at the beginning, I’m likely to put the book or magazine down, and I expect other readers feel the same. I also understand that readers want action, and I try to deliver that, too, on the first page. It’s no accident that at the end of every first paragraph in this collection that you find characters confronted by something problematic — the death of a friend, lost keys, a teenager suffering a punishment, a message left on a dead wife’s cell phone, a lie, a trip, a new and horrifying job, a bad father who visits his nearly famous son, a man who’s haunted by the death of his daughter, an impending death, an ice storm.

A few days after reading “Stewards of the Earth,” I was still thinking about it, and wondering about the character of Jen, whether or not she was the same throughout the story as she was in the end, or if in the beginning she was just lost, like most people are at that point in life. As I thought about the story it made me think of other Southern writers’ short stories. I know you don’t write exclusively about the South, but having being raised there and setting some of your work there would you say that you belong to that tradition at all?

I’ve always felt like an outsider. It’s the sort of role I was groomed, as a child and adolescent who attended Seventh-day Adventist schools and churches, to play. My teachers and parents and family all let me know (either directly or indirectly) that I (and we) should not think of ourselves as belonging to this world. We were “not of this world.” Heaven was our home. Also, I grew up in the southern Appalachians, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and many people who live there not only tend to have independent spirits, they think of themselves as living a part from everybody else. I’m sure a lot of the people I know from my hometown (and I include myself in this) would prefer to think of themselves as “mountain people” rather than “Southerners.”

Still, many of my favorite authors are Southern, and many of my favorite books are written by Southerners — or by writers who spent a lot of time in the South. Flannery O’Connor. Faulkner (though I overdosed on him as an undergrad). Cormac McCarthy. Joy Williams. Barry Hannah. I don’t think it’s the southern-ness of these writers that I love. It’s their voices, their ability to know when to harness language and when to let it run wild.

While I was thinking about these Southern writers in relation to “Stewards of the Earth,” I wondered if you were working in a modernized Southern Gothic style. The religious zeal and psychotic tendencies that is sometimes seen in Southern Gothic stories certainly seems reminiscent. Even the house Jen lives in and the twins’ peccadilloes felt like they are part of that tradition. Is this something you were attempting to play on? Or do you try to avoid influences like that in your writing?

I’ve never thought of myself as writing in a Southern Gothic style. Then again, I’ve never thought to give whatever style I’m writing in a name. I’m not big on labels. I basically wrote that story because I wanted to set a story at the school I attended in the mid ’90s and where I later taught for a year — a very small Adventist college. I started thinking about what it would be like for a non-Adventist to go there. Then I started thinking, what if someone were to attend the school without paying? What if they just went? And what if they had some serious anxiety problem that happened to manifest in a weird religious vision? And what if this person who was experiencing strange religious visions also decided to develop an alternate identity for use while she was on campus? It was, needless to say, a fun story to write.

Who are some of your influences? Either when you first began writing, or currently?

My first influences were poems that I read in an English class. I remember arguing with my teacher (whom I loved) about the merits of e.e. cummings. I thought he was awesome. He was rebelling against convention! Down with capitals! I was also into Sylvia Plath, like every other adolescent with a maudlin romantic streak. I liked that she took stuff that’d hurt and blew it up into something you could look at. Her poems were nightmares. My life felt to me, often, like a nightmare. I fell in love with an average of two or three girls a year at my boarding school. Like, head over heels. Of course, these crushes were followed by periods of devastation, usually lasting one to two weeks. Anyway, back then, I wrote a Plath-like poem that included the word bitch, and probably some references to blood, trees in winter, lips, and a heart. I remember showing it to some friends and they were like, “This is intense.” After that, it (writing) became just another obsession, like playing guitar or trying to track down Cure t-shirts.

Your characters are so well defined that they never seemed to slip into a flat stereotype, even though some of them are types that we see in daily life and could describe in narrow terms, like the slightly Goth girl in the title story or even Melashenko himself from that story. Do you find yourself creating a character first and figuring out what their story is, or do you begin with an idea and situation and create a character that would be able to fit that story?

I usually begin with an idea, voice, or situation. The title story originated when a student of mine tried to write a story about a mom who “did coke.” I thought: that’s a great idea for a story, if you could do it right. So I tried, got interested in Alex (the female narrator) and her relationship with Melashenko. At first, the story was all about them meeting and having this spontaneous hook-up, even though Melashenko was putting some evangelical moves on her. Eventually, I decided to start the story after they’d been friends for a long time. And also to toss in a cranky infant simulator.

I understand you teach at Virginia Tech, do you have any advice you’d like to share with a large audience of young writers?

Read as much as you can. Imitate everybody. Write constantly. Don’t give up. Go for the gold.

How did you originally become interested in writing and what drew you to it?

Honestly, reading and writing came naturally to me. My mom encouraged me to read. Adventists are big readers. In addition to the Bible, they have thousands of pages of prophetess-penned books (written in the most archaic and uninteresting voice imaginable) to get through, on top of all the SDA-printed materials they produce and consume. They’re a highly literate people.

I was always a daydreamer. I lived in rural North Carolina. There wasn’t much to do, especially if you didn’t hunt or fish or wander the woods by yourself (I didn’t). Instead, I read MAD Magazine, made haunted houses in our basement, made movies with a camcorder, recorded radio shows on a tape recorder, and typed crazy stories on an old typewriter. I basically see my fiction as an outgrowth of all that.

And finally, just because I like to know how writers work, do you have any writing rituals?

No rituals, really, except for running, which clears my head and often leads me to unexpected revelations about characters. I try to write something every day. ♦

Matthew Vollmer will join Alan Cheuse, author of A Trance Before Breakfast, on Thursday, September 24, at 1:30 p.m., at the M&T Bank Tent, outside the Johnson Center, on George Mason University’s Fairfax, Virginia Campus.

MORE AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Check out an interview with festival author Jessica Anthony, posted at Art & Literature, one of the many blogs listed on our Festival Blogroll to the left of our homepage. Anthony  reads  from her debut novel, The Convalescent, on Wednesday, September 23, at 1:30 p.m. at the M& T Bank Tent on Mason’s Fairfax Campus — part of a Mason MFA Alumni Reading also featuring novelist O.H. Bennett, author of The Lie, and poet Nancy Pearson, with her award-winning collection Two Minutes of Light.

And for more previews of headlining authors, check out BookTV’s archived interviews with 2009 Fairfax Prize winner E.L. Doctorow and with 2009 Mason Award Sherman Alexie, originally broadcast on C-Span2. Alexie speaks at Fall for the Book on Tuesday, September 22, at 7 p.m., and Doctorow speaks on Thursday, September 24, debuting his new novel, Homer & Langley; each event takes place in the Concert Hall, Center for the Arts, on Mason’s Fairfax Campus.

More than 130 additional authors will be appearing at the 2009 Fall for the Book, with events at Mason and at select locations throughout Northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland. All events are free and open to the public. For a complete list of programs, visit our events page here.