{"id":567,"date":"2019-03-06T16:46:08","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T21:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/?p=567"},"modified":"2022-11-23T10:10:37","modified_gmt":"2022-11-23T15:10:37","slug":"a-conversation-with-mu-press-novella-prize-winner-paul-skenazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/2019\/03\/a-conversation-with-mu-press-novella-prize-winner-paul-skenazy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with MU Press Novella Prize Winner Paul Skenazy"},"content":{"rendered":"

To promote his novella \u201cTemper CA,\u201d published Jan. 2019 by Miami University Press, author Paul Skenazy sat down with Sam Keeling, a Creative Writing and Media & Culture major and Editorial Intern for the Press. Their discussion covered everything from Skenazy\u2019s writing rituals (or lack thereof) to the nature of truth and memory. For more on the novella, read this<\/span> article<\/span><\/a> from <\/span>The Miami Student<\/span><\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Keeling: Let\u2019s start generally with your writing process.<\/b><\/p>\n

Skenazy: The best way to start about my writing process is that it\u2019s fumbling. I start generally with images, or character, or a voice. And I try to figure out what that\u2019s about, or who that is. In [the case of \u201cTemper CA\u201d], I had heard a story of a girl who was able to hold scorpions in her hands without getting stung. It just seemed a wonderful image. I had a second image of a woman, and I kind of stuck them together. <\/span><\/p>\n

But [my process] is really exploratory. I went back a couple days ago and realized I\u2019d done about 11 different drafts in the last four years of this book. When I say \u201cfumbling,\u201d I mean stumbling, falling over myself. <\/span><\/p>\n

I pretend I\u2019m gonna get up every morning and get to my desk, and I don\u2019t. I have a dog. There\u2019s laundry, dishes. There\u2019s my wife, my kids to talk to. But I try. So, three or four days a week, I try to sit down for an hour or two. Usually, I\u2019m best when I have a project.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the things that any good writer should tell you is that it\u2019s best when you can get a writing residence somewhere. They\u2019re taking care of the outside world while you write. The last version of this book was written in Oregon, at a place called Playa, where I actually <\/span>did <\/span><\/i>get up every morning and make coffee and sit, and sit, and sit. Then go out and take a walk, and come back and sit. There\u2019s nothing quite like putting your butt in the chair, you know? <\/span><\/p>\n

The other thing is to keep rereading [your drafts] and follow up on the instincts that seem weird. For example, there\u2019s a moment here about discovering a skull in the mine. It took me a few years to realize that, oh, this connects with the cemetery, the graveyard, it connects with 19<\/span>th<\/span>-century history. [The ideas] are first unconscious, then conscious. Throw out ideas until something clicks, then figure out why it clicks. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: Going back to the details about the scorpion. The book\u2019s original title was <\/b>Scorpion Queen<\/i><\/b>, which then became <\/b>Temper<\/i><\/b>. It\u2019s the character\u2019s name, but it\u2019s also the name of the town itself. In its own way, the town is a character in the book. Can you compare and contrast creating a place and creating a character?<\/b><\/p>\n

S: The character of Temper was always there. I tried to find a name that would Anglo-Saxon so that we could go back to the 1848 Gold Rush period. It was also a little weird because a lot of the towns from the Gold Rush era have weird names. <\/span><\/p>\n

But really, the image was of this girl. The first lines that I wrote years ago were \u201cI wonder what my mother was like when she was in love.\u201d It was very much from the girl\u2019s point of view. In some ways, I was trying to tell the story of the adults through the child, because I know her parents\u2019 world better than hers. It\u2019s the period when I became more conscious, and politics made sense to me for the first time. <\/span><\/p>\n

Then, she just kept growing. I realized that she had her own story, and her parents wound up with very different stories. The more I saw her, the more I realized I wasn\u2019t just telling her story. I was telling the story of the town. <\/span><\/p>\n

And then the problem came in: how do you put history and politics and still keep generating the story, pushing it forward? That really was a buzz. To the extent I\u2019ve done it successfully, you tell me. It really was that effort to see, is there a way to connect her story with the Chinese American experience? The experience of the Anglos taking over from the Mexicans and Chileans? While not bringing those in with a heavy hand, like, \u201cOh, see what we\u2019ve done!\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

This is the consequence. We have a personal history and we have a public history. It became <\/span>Temper CA<\/span><\/i> when the two meshed. It wasn\u2019t \u201cTemper\u201d until the two could join. And then her name made sense. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: It\u2019s not just a story about Joy\u2019s childhood. It\u2019s about her looking back on her childhood, which brings its own lens. What\u2019s the difference in writing a flashback scene and writing a scene about memory?<\/b><\/p>\n

S: From the very beginning, she and her father were photographers. Photographs are at the heart of this book. <\/span><\/p>\n

And photographs are a certain kind of memory. But they\u2019re frozen. They pretend that they show you a landscape, but really, they close off a landscape. They frame a landscape. There are a zillion things going on outside of [the frame]. <\/span><\/p>\n

For me, part of the philosophical issue was, how do you have this vision \u2013 which is like a photograph of a moment in time \u2013 yet at the same time, you know your memory is skewed? How do you penetrate the scene of the photograph itself and realize that everything I believed about that is kind of wrong? That I\u2019ve been hiding a lot of it from myself? <\/span><\/p>\n

The issue of trying to recreate these moments was to create them as [Joy] thought she knew them, and then gradually have her have to give up those assumptions. In the first part of the book, I had to give over to her romanticism. And then kind of let it break apart. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: David Lynch once said something along the lines that he hates camcorders because he prefers to remember things his way. Not how they happened. I think that happens in this. <\/b><\/p>\n

S: Right, yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n

K: I think that it does shine a harsh light on the truth of her history. At the same time, she does kind of think of it fondly, even at the end. <\/b><\/p>\n

S: But, she\u2019s ready to accuse her parents of a little bit more. She\u2019s ready to recognize that she had so little control as a child, and so that\u2019s baffling.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, of course, her memory is no worse than the national memory. One of the nice things about California is that it has this massive mythology all around the Gold Rush. There\u2019s other mythologies \u2013 there\u2019s Hollywood and so on \u2013 but the California mythology begins there, with the Gold mountains. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: I noticed that there are scenes of intimacy and violence that push the story forward, and are emotional highlights. Did you have to worry about keeping those from becoming gratuitous? <\/b><\/p>\n

S: At one point, I had an agent who said he loved the book and sent it to a publisher who didn\u2019t want it. He literally wanted me to rewrite it as a thriller in which Joy kills her grandfather and blames her father. <\/span><\/p>\n

I actually tried to do that for a year. <\/span>Everything<\/span><\/i> was gratuitous [laughs]. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: Even though this final version is not a \u201cthriller,\u201d it does have a lot of forward motion. It unveils itself like a mystery. Was it your intention to have this be a sort of mystery in reverse?<\/b><\/p>\n

S: No, actually. But I needed more motivation for Joy to go to Temper, and to keep the energy going. <\/span><\/p>\n

It actually was the one contribution these months of trying to write a thriller did for me. I wanted an internal thriller, a psychological thriller of her discovery. I realized that I could do that with the mystery form. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d been a mystery book reviewer for many years. I did a column for <\/span>The Washington Post <\/span><\/i>and so on. I was inside the form a lot. It wasn\u2019t automatic, but it was pretty familiar to me. <\/span><\/p>\n

And again, it\u2019s almost like a matter of chemistry: how do you balance the clues you give and the clues you don\u2019t? Is it too much to say, \u201coh, there\u2019s a duffel bag. There\u2019s a mystery. There\u2019s a ghost!\u201d How much of that do you want to give away?<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want big shows, big revelations. I wanted the book to be inching and inching and inching. I didn\u2019t want these great, \u201c<\/span>now <\/span><\/i>I know everything\u201d kind of moments. That\u2019s the balance I was trying to get. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: I also think about the dialogue in the book, which plays into the mystery. It\u2019s often as much about what isn\u2019t being said as what is between the characters. It does a great job of revealing the relationships between the characters, and how much they want to reveal to each other, especially between Joy and her father. <\/b><\/p>\n

S: I think learned a lot about dialogue from writing this book. I don\u2019t think I could\u2019ve done it five years ago, when I started writing it. I mean, I wrote a lot \u2013 a <\/span>lot<\/span><\/i> \u2013 of dialogue. I just kept carving away at it. <\/span><\/p>\n

A very good friend of mine who is one of my best readers is someone who writes for theater. The whole idea is that a dialogue has to clip. There\u2019s a kind of split from one person to the second as if there\u2019s a third person the middle. Most readers can make that connection because of movies and TV. We can skimp on a lot of things. And the dialogue has to keep bouncing, moving us forward at a good clip, or else it\u2019s stagnant, and we\u2019re stuck in the same space. <\/span><\/p>\n

Probably, Hemingway taught me a lot about dialogue. He\u2019s really good at it. I don\u2019t like a lot of other things about him, but boy, those short stories where he has relationship with men and women. So much is unspoken, and implied, and dangerous. It just threads through. Each of us has a slightly different version of what it means, but it\u2019s all there. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: I always feel that dialogue between two characters, they would never say what\u2019s mutually known between them. But if the reader doesn\u2019t know it, it creates a challenge. <\/b><\/p>\n

S: I will say that I\u2019m still trying to figure out dialogue between 3 or 4 people. I don\u2019t know how to do that and keep the energy going forward. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: Was \u201cTemper\u201d originally a longer work?<\/b><\/p>\n

S: Yes. A shorter work, then a longer work, then a longer work, then a shorter work\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

K: Did shortening it teach you about what was important to the story?<\/b><\/p>\n

S: [In newspaper writing,] you only have 500 words, or 300, or 700 if you\u2019re lucky. So you\u2019ve got to get it down. You have to be lean. The question was, what mattered?<\/span><\/p>\n

Some things are no longer in the book. The ending is different. The inner chapters are different. There are things I added that I missed. But everything has to stop. Again, how much does a scene matter? If it didn\u2019t matter much, get rid of it. <\/span><\/p>\n

I probably miss some of it. There\u2019s a little explanation in the longer version. I could go into longer descriptions. There\u2019s more detail about the grandfather and his past; it\u2019s probably a little more forgiving of him. <\/span><\/p>\n

But this is a better book, honestly. A couple of friends have said, \u201cCan I read the other one?\u201d And I said, \u201cNo. It\u2019s over. This is what I wanted to say.\u201d Because I had to cut it down and cut it down, I got to it in a way that I think I don\u2019t think I could have at 60,000 words. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: We\u2019ve chatted about him a little bit, but I feel like the grandfather is an interesting character because he\u2019s introduced to us dead. <\/b><\/p>\n

S: [Laughs] I hadn\u2019t thought about it that way, but yeah!<\/span><\/p>\n

K: So all the work you do is done knowing that he\u2019s not alive, only in memory. Did you approach him differently knowing that you could never see him in the present to explain himself?<\/b><\/p>\n

S: That\u2019s so interesting. No, I don\u2019t think so. <\/span><\/p>\n

Once I began to conceive of this version of the book, I knew that he was the excuse to get Joy to Temper. <\/span><\/p>\n

But yes, it restricts him. So you have to have reflections. <\/span><\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one character that I\u2019m unfair to, or less fair to, it\u2019s Isaac, except in the historical sense, when I try to bring out some of the reasons why he felt he needed to defend himself and be the kind of person he was. What his version of honor meant in some deep way. <\/span><\/p>\n

Part of it was to make sure there was enough of a sense of Joy\u2019s pleasure spending time with him early on. You had to recognize, \u201cNo, this is not a <\/span>horrible <\/span><\/i>human being.\u201d He might be jealous, he might be silly, he might be self-serving. But there are things about him. <\/span><\/p>\n

K: I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s necessarily you being unfair to him. It\u2019s interesting because, it\u2019s always another character\u2019s perception of him. The reader has to come up with their own unbiased version while using the testimony of other characters.<\/b><\/p>\n

S: Right. It\u2019s the \u201cRashomon\u201d kind of moment, where you have all the characters looking at something. Or it\u2019s that moment in \u201cMoby Dick,\u201d where they stare, and \u201cI see, you see, he sees.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

But you don\u2019t know what\u2019s there. It\u2019s just perceptions.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Sam Keeling <\/strong>is a senior studying Creative Writing and Media & Culture. He is an Editorial Intern at Miami University Press, Editor-in-Chief of Happy Captive Magazine<\/em>, and Entertainment Editor at The Miami Student<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To promote his novella \u201cTemper CA,\u201d published Jan. 2019 by Miami University Press, author Paul Skenazy sat down with Sam Keeling, a Creative Writing and Media & Culture major and Editorial Intern for the Press. Their discussion covered everything from Skenazy\u2019s writing rituals (or lack thereof) to the nature of truth and memory. For more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2540,"featured_media":569,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[211,201,210,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-we-like","category-events-readings","category-interviews","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2540"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":963,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions\/963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}