I broke my foot at a demonstration, and my major sponsor became livid with me for not toughing it out and finishing the tour. After that, I was pretty jaded, so I went back to school and didn’t skate for a few years. Then I went to a pawnshop, bought a board, and I’ve been back at it ever since. One of the ways California State University, San Bernardino, convinced me to teach here was by sending e-mail links to the many skate parks near the school.
JR: A colleague of mine was a high school teacher for several years, and he recently commented that a lot of the students who were really into skating were also among his brightest, most driven students—and also the ones who were most interested in coloring outside the lines. Does that mean anything to you?
BAJ: I’m so, so happy you said that, and I couldn’t agree more. The public perception of skaters is changing, and I think for the best, but they’re still often viewed as misfits or delinquents. When I was in school, the perception was far worse, and it has very little basis in reality. It comes from the fact that skaters are more likely, as you say, to color outside the lines, and that inclination frightens and confuses most people and institutions. Because skaters have always worn different clothes and different hairstyles and listened to different music, and because they’re typically genuinely happy to live outside of convention, society deems them dangerous or troubled. The reality is that the ability to think for themselves and to act independently is dangerous, but only in the way that art is dangerous. It has the power and potential to bring about change. I’ve long thought of skateboarders more as artists than as athletes. Off the top of my head I can think of skaters who have become highly successful visual artists, actors and filmmakers, musicians, teachers, and of course, writers.
JR: What do skating and writing have to do with each other? Is there some rich, heretofore unmined metaphor to be derived from the collision of these activities?
BAJ: I think so, and I think it comes down to independence and discipline. Next time you see a skater in a parking lot or at a skate park, watch for a few minutes and see if he or she—that’s another thing that’s changed since I started skating: now there are so many female skaters; it’s wonderful—misses a trick. Chances are he’ll stay in that exact spot until he completes the trick; it could take hours, but most skaters won’t be able to leave until they’ve landed what they’re trying to land. It’s a bit masochistic, and it’s quite a bit like writing.
None of the stories in Corpus Christi were done in less than fifteen or twenty drafts. I can’t leave them until they’re as sound and as polished as I can make them. It’s the same with, and perhaps because of, skateboarding; I think nothing, literally nothing, of spending an entire day trying the same trick over and over. It’s the idea of process rather than product. When I feel I’m on the verge of discovering something significant about a character or a plot, I completely lose track of time just as I do when I’m close to doing a trick I’ve never done. It’s impossible for me to write at night because once I close up shop, I won’t be able to sleep. Likewise, it’s hard for me to skate at night because I won’t want to stop until I’ve literally worn myself out or gotten hurt.
And skating, like writing, is an entirely singular art form. Other skaters can give you tips, the way other writers or professors can, but at the end of the day it all comes down to the work you’ve done, alone. Skating taught me dedication, and I think dedication goes a lot further than talent. I’m not a very good writer, honestly, but I work as hard as I can, and eventually I trust the hours logged will pay off.
JR: You attended the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Tell me what talent and drive you took into the program and how it evolved during your time there. Also, tell me about your working relationship with Ethan Canin—who, it should be noted, cannot say enough good things about you as a writer.
BAJ: I took far more drive than talent to the Writers’ Workshop. Going back to what an independent and difficult art form writing is, I think one of the best things about going to a place like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the sense of community, the luxury of being surrounded by brilliant people who care about language as much as you do. Most writers will never have another time in their lives when they’re praised for putting literature above everything else. Corpus Christi exists largely because of my time at Iowa.
And Ethan Canin is one of the biggest reasons. He’s a fantastic writer and teacher, and I feel incredibly fortunate that he’s been so supportive of my work. Every story that I wrote for Ethan’s workshop is in the collection, and although I cringe at the thought of those early drafts, he understood them very clearly, saw their potential, and he encouraged me to keep at them. When I’m teaching now, I regularly hear myself repeating what I learned with Ethan. There were three of us who, somewhat by chance, enrolled in two of Ethan’s workshops (the typical routine is to work with four different workshop leaders while at Iowa), so we studied intensely with him for the better part of a year. All three of us have books out now.
JR: What do you bring to your own classroom that you may have carried over from Iowa?
BAJ: You hear a lot about the competition at Iowa, its cutthroat atmosphere, and I just didn’t see much of that there. All of my teachers— Frank Conroy, Marilynne Robinson, Chris Offutt, Ethan Canin—really deeply cared about their students’ work. They all stressed—as I stress to my students—that writing very probably can’t be taught, but rewriting, patience, and stubbornness very much can be. The most important thing is for beginning writers to feel as though their work is being taken seriously, which is how we felt at the Writers’ Workshop, and that’s what I try to bring to my classes. I also try to give them great, interesting things to read. The better books you read, the better books you’ll write.
JR: What writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists have influenced your work? Corpus Christi is, really, a singular work in my opinion—but with some fine flavoring, maybe a little Denis Johnson, a touch of David Lynch, possibly a pinch of Wilco.
BAJ: Thank you for those comparisons. Robert Stone is perhaps the biggest influence, but not in an entirely conventional sense. He was the first “real” author I ever saw read in person. I’d never heard of Stone, but I went to his reading because my sophomore literature professor gave me a free ticket. By the reading’s end, I knew writing was what I wanted to do. It was a watershed moment for me. Writing stories seemed like a dignified way to spend a life.
Beyond that, I can best answer the question by listing people who I wish had more of an influence on my work: Ian McEwan, Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy—the list is endless. There are also pieces of art that I wish would have more of an effect on my writing.
JR: What are your writing habits? Every day, same time? When inspiration strikes? Surrounded by bottles of hard liquor and playing punk rock on the radio, or by candlelight with a string quartet tuning up in the background?
BAJ: I don’t believe in inspiration nearly as much as I believe in the labor of writing, the rhythm of the work. I try to work every morning, and on a great day I can go for three or four hours, but not always. Even if I’m not working, or not working well, I still do my best to finish out the session. It’s hard for me to miss days of work because I know that it’s going to take longer to get back into it, that it will be more taxing to find that level of intense concentration. Frank Conroy taught me that. I write every first draft in longhand, then I type it into the computer and revise a little as I go. Beyond the daily typing, I never read anything I’m working on until I’ve reached the end of the first draft. The few times I’ve allowed myself to reread earlier, I get stuck. I start doubting the work because I’m not trusting the process, not trusting the labor. I didn’t read the first draft of my novel, which was about six hundred pages, until it was completely done.
JR: Let’s talk about Corpus Christi. Why did you choose to set the book in Corpus Christi? Do you have a Texas background, or is the city simply the perfect geographical r
epresentation of these characters’— indeed, all of our—lives? I mean, there’s always a storm coming, isn’t there, and if we’re lucky our headlights stay above the flood?
BAJ: I grew up there, so I knew the area quite well, but I didn’t start to write about Texas, let alone Corpus, until I was living in Ohio, attending graduate school at Miami University. As the stories started to accumulate, as the themes and characters started to echo, I began to recognize the profound role the particular setting of South Texas was playing in the narratives. In many ways, Corpus is a beautiful, beautiful city, and as complex as almost any place I’ve known. Being situated on the Gulf Coast, the city is always, as you say, vulnerable, and at the same time there’s a flourishing ranching and farming population there— again, people whose fates are often directly linked to elements fundamentally beyond their control—and of course there’s the city itself, the oil refineries, the tourism industry, the beach community, the naval air station, the wonderfully rich and diverse culture of the people. Turn one corner in Corpus and the city can reinvent itself immediately; turn another and it happens again. I’m fascinated by the city’s character, its concerted and admirable effort to weather storm after storm.
JR: Violence and love are so intrinsically and intimately interwoven in these stories. Sometimes love requires violence. Sometimes violence begets love. Sometimes love is violence and violence is love—at least to these characters. Can you speak to why you’ve employed these elements in the stories?
BAJ: Again, I think it’s not so far removed from the geography of the stories. In Corpus, the weather can be terribly severe in the morning, seventy-miles-per-hour winds that make rain fall parallel to the street, and then it’s serene and gorgeous by early afternoon, and of course there’s no controlling it. When these characters find themselves in violent or intimate situations, they’re often stripped down to their essences, and I’m very interested in those revelations. Violence and intimacy, or love, require the participants to leave themselves unprotected, to take chances, to gamble with the worst odds for the highest stakes.
JR: These characters are hanging on to stories, reimagining their histories, angry and afraid of the chapters they’ll not be around to witness. What role does storytelling—mythologies we make our own, and those that serve us all—play in the lives of these characters, in your life too?
BAJ: I honestly believe that we live by stories, and regardless of how tragic, how unsettling, there is some comfort to be derived from the very telling of them, the experiencing of them. This is linked to memory, of course, and one of the things that I’ve tried to explore in the collection might well be called the mythology of memory. I find the subject endlessly fascinating, so I was intrigued by those characters whose memories were revised or lost. If our memories play a large part in defining us, what happens if those memories are wrong or no longer accessible? How would a father who’s lost his son react upon learning that some of what he recalls most vividly is incorrect? How would a woman who’s been clinging to the past, who’s really relied on her memories to sustain her, cope with dementia? I literally couldn’t conceive of those answers, so I wrote the stories.
JR: John Lennon wrote that life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans. The characters in your stories almost count on this happening. Many of them are past the point of trying to steer the current; they’d rather let the flood carry them away. (Recalls for me Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood,” which—along with Sparklehorse and Polyphonic Spree—makes a fine soundtrack to your book, by the way.)
BAJ: I agree. I love Peter Gabriel for the reason that his songs tend to wreck and buoy me at the same time. Other soundtracks might be Tool’s album Undertow, PJ Harvey’s To Bring You My Love, or Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Also, Willie Nelson’s entire catalog. We can add all of those to my influences as well.
And I think you’re right about the characters, but I’m not sure that’s as nihilistic as it sounds. Isn’t there an odd, almost paradoxical comfort or relief in knowing that there’s no outrunning the flood, that no one can, and the flood doesn’t care one way or another? Well, maybe it is as nihilistic as it sounds. . . .
JR: Mothers and fathers die a little bit for their children, and kill their children a little bit in return. This idea crops up in the stories, doesn’t it? Whether they’re very young (as in “In the Tall Grass”) or older (as in the Minnie/Lee trilogy), children’s relationships to their parents seem to fascinate you.
BAJ: What I find inherently interesting about the parent-child relationship is its fragility and its durability. Immediately, undeniably, there’s a dramatic conflict within the relationship, not to mention the often divergent, conflicting desires of parents and children. The parents and children in the book often face situations where no choice is clearly or completely right, but my hope is that readers will still empathize with them if they make the choice that is clearly and completely wrong. I’m not sure any of us can ask for anything more.
JR: There are a lot of cultural critics who have begrudgingly lamented the death of poetry, the imminent death of the novel, and the unlikely survival of the short story in today’s world. Why write short stories today? What does a short story do that a novel cannot?
BAJ: This topic seems to crop up every so often, and each time the cultural critics seem to think they’ve offered some especially mortifying news. I just disagree. In reality, this country has never been a country of readers. I remember reading that in the 1920s booksellers estimated that one out of every five hundred people bought and read serious literature. Maybe I’m being naïve, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that number has risen a bit. And the fact that publishers continue to publish many good, great, and bad collections of stories—not to mention novels and volumes of poetry—might reliably indicate that stories continue to find a dependable audience.
I think the reason short-story collections don’t sell as well as novels is because they’re much more difficult to read. Novels might require a longer commitment, but stories demand a deeper concentration and a more intense focus, and a lot of people would rather not exert themselves in that way. On the surface it would seem as though our sound-bite society would gravitate to shorter work, but it’s not the case. However, those that do buy and read literary short fiction are among the best and brightest readers we have. They’re willing to take risks, to invest their attentions and emotions; that’s exactly the kind of reader I want. The book was written for them.
J. RENTILLY is a journalist in Los Angeles.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
JACOB M. APPEL
“Waterwalkers”
In “Waterwalkers,” Sonny and Nora remember the hurricane party at which they met very differently. What do their different memories reveal about each of them? What larger implications does this have for their current relationship?
Nora tells Sonny: “We’re not wired to remember what hurts us. Our bodies have no memory for pain” (p. 14). Is this true of Sonny’s own experience? Of Nora’s?
Why does the author choose to end this story with an upbeat flashback to the Atwill family’s trip to the company picnic? What insight does this give us into who Sonny was before his son’s death? How has he changed?
“I See Something You Don’t See”
Minnie reflects in “I See Something You Don’t See” that “she’d always believed Lee would make a good doctor” (p. 37). Is this an accurate assessment? How might Lee have compared with Minnie’s actual physicians, Dr. Rama and Dr. Wood?
Is Lee correct in trying to hide the metastasis from Minnie?
In her final weeks, Minnie starts to wonder “what kind of mother she’d been” (p. 57). In what ways has Minnie been a good mother? In what ways, if any, has her mothering fallen short?
“In the Tall Grass”
Are the narrator’s parents in “In the Tall Grass” a good match for each other?
The narrator’s father, George Kelley, tells his
son, “A person can care too much” (p. 71). What might he mean? How does this explain the events that follow?
The narrator in “In the Tall Grass” says that his father “saw that he’d led his family into a different life” (p. 90). Do you think the narrator’s father regrets this decision? Do you think the narrator—self-described as “a happily married, college-educated man who’s never known violence” (p. 89)—regrets his father’s decision?
“Outside the Toy Store”
Why does the narrator in “Outside the Toy Store” tell Anna, “I hope it never happens to you” (p. 100)? Is Anna’s response reasonable? Do you think he understands that she will respond in the way that she does?
The narrator in “Outside the Toy Store” describes his encounter with Anna as an effort “to incite a drama that could open a new door, or an old one” (p. 101), but one that had failed. Is their encounter entirely a failure? Are there any ways in which it might be considered a success?
“Corpus Christi”
What roles do coincidence and fate play in “Corpus Christi”?
Charlie in “Corpus Christi” thinks, “How easy to underestimate the wounded” (p. 118). How does this apply to Edie? To Donnie? To Charlie himself? In what ways might this be ironic?
“The Widow”
Is there a turning point in Minnie and Lee’s relationship in “The Widow”? How does their relationship change as Minnie’s condition deteriorates?
Why does Minnie insist on planning her own funeral? What light does this shed on her personality?
“Two Liars”
Is Robert Jackson in “Two Liars” a good father?
Corpus Christi Page 21