The Mind’s Ear: An Interview with Gary Lutz
Interviews
By Kimberly King Parsons
I first read Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way in 1999, at the suggestion of my favorite undergraduate writing professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Earlier in the semester, this same professor had urged me to read stories by Christine Schutt, Amy Hempel, Denis Johnson, and Barry Hannah (my god, what a teacher!), but the way he talked about Lutz was different—he was full of fanatical reverence for the work, but he also seemed terrified to recommend it to me. “You okay with weird?” he asked. I was. He handed me the book and told me to be careful—not like I might lose his beloved, marked-up copy, but like reading it might hurt.
It did. Lutz maimed and crushed and cracked me up—the “blood-gaudied parabolas of dental floss” and “dampish, insinuative memoirs,” the “vast lactic women and self-heckling men in coats.” These unnamed narrators were bleak, beautiful misfits, letting life lead them around. They were “hygienically delinquent” or “sweat-sluiced,” eating “tiny meteorites of fried chicken that came casketed in clumsily slotted and tabbed cardboard.” Lutz utterly fucked my frame of reference—the work was so achingly incomparable to anything else I’d read. Stories in the Worst Way cemented something I was starting to suspect: that every single sentence in a story is an opportunity to elevate to nose-bleed height, to kill with sonics, to deform and distort language, to be urgent and tender and playful. And if you’re Lutz, you can do all these things at once.
Years later, another writing teacher of mine said everything in this life is rigged, heartbreaking, and inconsistent. It’s mayhem, chaos, but you can inscribe order, maybe, if you have the confidence to write directly into your wound. This was the best a writer could do, he argued: put your distinct sadness on the page, turn it into something that resonates with everyone. My favorite Lutz story begins with the line “Do what I do: come from a family, have parents, have done things, shitty things, over and over and over.” Book by book, Lutz’s narrators ruminate and bloviate—they turn and turn and turn their specific despondencies until they shift and seep into the reader, wrecking her heart, sure, but altering her atmosphere for the better.
The occasion of Lutz’s latest, The Complete Gary Lutz (Tyrant Books), is an opportunity to appreciate decades of brilliant accrual and adherence, and to read new stories as odd and inventive, slippery and devastating as ever. Lutz and I first met at Columbia University in 2008, at the craft lecture The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. We recently spoke over email about movies, scale, mentors, and the melody of vowels.
Kimberly King Parsons: Your last collection, Assisted Living (Future Tense, 2017), is a bookletty chap I carried with me everywhere, switching it between my back pockets for more than a year. You said you loved the format, how “a crisply crafted and innocent-looking, colorfully stapled thing could be housing such downers, such concentrated doses of moping prose.” How did it feel to see the heft of The Complete Gary Lutz for the first time?
Gary Lutz: Wow, I’m honored that you were taking that chapbook with you everywhere. I’d always been accustomed to working on a very tiny scale, and that book was by far the tiniest of them. All of my books were always either short or very short. So seeing those bitsy things massed together in a collected-stories format made me feel queasy at first. As I worked on the larger book, I tried to keep thinking of it as a collection of little books. I would’ve otherwise felt too overwhelmed to proceed. Now that the book is out, though, all I think is, That’s it? That’s all she wrote? After almost thirty years, I never even made it to the five-hundred-page mark?
KKP: The new section of the book, Stories Lost and Late, is bookended by two of your longest stories, “My Bloodbaths” and “Am I Keeping You?” Did you recently finish those or have they been in progress for a while? You’ve said you “prefer the intimate enclosures of very short fiction.” Did you set out to make these two stories longer or did it just happen that way? Are there advantages to the broader space of the longish short story?
GL: Those two long stories were the last things I’d written for the collected-stories book. A part of me wanted to see whether I could write anything longer than I’d ever written before. So I started with “Am I Keeping You?,” and the goal was to reach seven thousand words in an unsegmented story. My goal with “My Bloodbaths” was to reach ten thousand words in a segmented story. I was trying to write a miniature novella. That story was composed of new material, as well as pieces from unfinished stories from the past thirty years and entirely rewritten, and also some deformed entries from an old journal I’d once kept, forgotten about, and then rediscovered on loose, typewritten sheets tossed haphazardly into boxes later sealed up and stacked at the back of a closet. After the collected-stories book went to press, I worked on a thirteen-thousand-word story, also thinking of it as a micro-novella, and it, too, is pieced together from cast-aside stories, old journal entries, and new writing. Now I feel an urge to return to writing very short pieces.
KKP: Can you trace any sweeping, overall trajectory in your writing? Any incremental change or movement between collections? And is this something you ever consider as you’re working (or a concept that even matters to you)?
GL: From book to book, I wanted to see if I was capable of writing longer pieces. I’d started to feel ashamed that so many of my pieces were just a few pages long, even though I never thought of them as flash fictions. And I think my attentiveness to language increased from book to book. When I was writing Stories in the Worst Way, I didn’t yet really understand what Gordon Lish meant by consecution and the swerve. That book was written intuitively, I guess. I had no real sense of what I was doing. I’d start writing a few minutes after I woke up, trying to drag into the stories as much as I could of what little was left of my dreams.
KKP: Were you tempted to make changes to older stories in this collection? Do you typically think about/want to change stories after they’re published, or do you find they leave you alone once they’re out in the world?
GL: I hadn’t realized there was any tradition of keeping stories intact for a collected-stories book, so I made loads of changes, most of them in the Divorcer book, from which I’d cut at least a fourth of the sentences from “Womanesque,” changed a lot of words in “Fathering,” and made cuts and changes in the other five stories as well. And in the book as a whole, I made hundreds of changes, mostly word substitutions or cuts. I tried to eliminate all of the inadvertent repetitions of peculiar words from one book to another. I’m sure I missed some. Whenever my first and second collections were reprinted, I always made changes. Some of the stories in the second edition of I Looked Alive are appreciably different from their counterparts in the first edition. Each of the three editions of Stories in the Worst Way is slightly different, too, and I made changes in some of those stories for the collected-stories book, too. I never feel that a story is finished. I’ve always tried to avoid reading my stories after they’ve been published, but during those occasions when it’s unavoidable (such as when I am preparing for a public reading) and I have to make eye contact with the sentences, I always feel that every word is wrong. It’s always a demoralizing experience.
KKP: Demoralizing! I know it’s impossible for a writer to really see their work, but if it’s any consolation, making eye contact with your sentences is one of the utter delights of my life—every word feels exactly goddamn right.
You’ve said you think movies are in some ways superior to writing, that they are “the ideal medium for getting characters from one place to another without making a big deal out of routine movement, and at the same time you can get the colors of the rooms or the neighborhoods, the weather, and emotionally convenient music on the soundtrack.” Are there any particular movies or actors you come back to again and again? Does music or other visual art inform your work?
GL: A decade or so ago, I watched the movie Wendy and Lucy (an eighty-minute movie with not much dialogue) almost every night for a little over a year. Watching it repeatedly like that induced in me a state that felt close to meditation. (I have at least eight copies of that DVD.) A few years ago, I was obsessed with a German movie, written and directed by Maren Ade, called The Forest for the Trees, a very low-budget, master’s-thesis film, about a teacher who makes just about every possible mistake on the job and in her personal life. The movie undoes me every time, partly because of how eerily it parallels my own life. And a French movie with a misleading title, The Dreamlife of Angels, about two down-on-their luck young women in Lille, a small city in France, is another movie I’ve watched over and over, and it reliably destroys me. The same goes for the second half of Blue Is the Warmest Color, which also takes place in Lille and has the best and probably longest breakup sequence I’ve ever seen. I return every few months to Richard Linklater’s Before series and watch and rewatch the films of Eric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo (the latter recommended to me by the brilliant short-story writer and essayist Greg Gerke). I don’t listen to music as much as I used to, and for the last few years, it’s been mostly the Smiths, with some early Belle and Sebastian mixed in, though a couple of nights ago, I was enjoying some of the obscurer songs of the Shangri-Las, and I admire what Kramer records and produces. It’s possible that the moods of some of these movies and some of this music might have seeped a little into my pieces.
KKP: There’s something about the way light attaches to Michelle Williams’s face that wrecks me—I bet I’ve watched Wendy and Lucy twenty times or more—nice to know I’m not alone in that.
You’ve talked about “intra-sentence intimacy” and “throbbing interior vowels,” how words “rub off on each other, feel each other up.” Is your passion for language as intense as ever, or, like some relationships, has it changed over time?
GL: It’s probably more intense now than ever before, maybe partly because I’ve got some hearing loss, which tends to dissolve the consonants and leaves me hearing only the vowels with any accuracy and confidence. “Love” and “shove” now reach my ears as pretty much the same word. The same goes for “thought,” “sought,” “fought,” and “hot.” I haven’t done anything about this matter yet, because I can’t stand noise anyway, I wear earplugs most of the time, I activate white-noise machines as soon as I return to my apartment, and I’m almost never around people who are talking to me. As far as my writing goes, I guess I’m increasingly drawn to the melody of the vowels in a sentence and maybe less concerned with the consonants that pen them in.
KKP: I recall that you used to read your sentences aloud when you’re working. Do you still do that? Or can you catch those melodies now just by reading on the page?
GL: I don’t like to talk, because my speaking voice and my inner voice have nothing in common and seem to belong to two different persons, so I no longer can stand reading my sentences out loud. I have to rely on my mind’s ear, if such a thing can be allowed.
KKP: Do you have a favorite story in this collection, maybe one that came easier than most or one that closely matched your expectations? What about one that was particularly difficult?
GL: I don’t really have favorite stories, except in the sense of ones that might be somewhat easier than others to put across during a public reading. “You’re Welcome” would be one of those. A couple of stories that I struggled with over very long periods of time were “This Is Nice of You” (the story “Dog and Owner” was originally a part of that story) and one with an intentionally ungrammatical title: “To Whom Might I Have Concerned?” I’m not the sort of person who thinks that writing is fun, but for six months, twenty years ago, when I was forty-five, I was the student, rather informally and very enjoyably, of a writer, then in a low-residency program and twenty years my junior, who gave me some assignments and graded very severely. One assignment was to write a third-person story in short sentences and to lay off the ambiguity for a change. So I would send her draft after draft, which she would mark up mercilessly and then assign a grade. This was the story that became “People Shouldn’t Have to Be the Ones to Tell You,” and I went from F’s to D’s, and among the comments was “Stop thinking that every reader is smarter than you and will patiently puzzle out what you’re intending to say. Just say it straight out for once.” So I kept sending her more and more revisions, and they kept coming back with all sorts of exacting and harsh line-edits, but by this point my grades were slowly inching up toward the low C range. If I remember correctly, the final grade for that story was a B–, and I was overjoyed to have earned that. A couple of other stories she oversaw through many drafts were “Men Your Own Age” and “Her Dear Only Father’s Lone Wife’s Solitudinous, Peaceless Son,” but her final comments on those were “These will have to do for now, but only maybe.” After that, I was put on academic probation in perpetuum, it would appear.
KKP: What have you read recently that you loved? It doesn’t have to be something new, maybe just new to you.
GL: Your collection, Black Light, and among other books from the past year or two, in alphabetical order, Elizabeth Ellen’s Saul Stories, Brian Evenson’s Song for the Unraveling of the World, Greg Gerke’s See What I See (essays) and Especially the Bad Things (stories), Christopher Kennedy’s Clues from the Animal Kingdom, Lauren Leja’s Rotor, Vi Khi Nao’s The Human Camouflage (out in 2020), Sam Lipsyte’s Hark, David Nutt’s The Great American Suction, Joseph Rathgeber’s Mixedbloods, and Kathryn Scanlon’s The Dominant Animal (which comes out early next year). I am sure I am leaving others out without wanting to; I don’t have bookshelves, or any furniture for that matter, so everything is all over the place. Lauren Leja turned me on to Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood. Writers whose works I return to again and again are Christine Schutt, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sam Lipsyte, Gordon Lish, John O’Hara (the early work), and Jean Rhys.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light (Vintage ’19), which was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, Oregon, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.
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