by J.W. Wang
Eric Puchner is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author of the short story collection Music Through the Floor. His fiction has appeared in a number of prestigious publications, including Zoetrope: All-Story, where I was first introduced to him through the story “Animals Here Below.” Immediately I became enamored with the unique narrative voice, the rich, almost fantasy-like setting, and the deeply flawed but eminently lovable characters. Earlier this year Eric was kind enough to do this interview over e-mail, when he really should have been off celebrating the completion of his first novel.
Q. I love the title, Music Through the Floor, but found it unusual because a) it’s not the title of any of the stories, and b) I didn’t come across it while reading the book. What made you choose this title, and what is its significance?
A. I’m glad you like it (not everyone does). Actually, it’s taken from an image that appears in the story “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan.” There’s a moment in that story, toward the end, where the protagonist is imagining her runaway sister with her ear to the floor of her apartment, listening to the music that’s coming from the apartment below. I just liked the image, and it seemed like an apt metaphor for the themes of the collection.
Q. If there is one place that this book brings to life (the way Dubliners did Dublin), it’s the Mission District in San Francisco. (Don’t you just love getting a taco in the Mission at three in the morning?) Do you, in fact, live there? What is it about the Mission that brings you back to it? Do you fear its gentrification?
“I’m not interested in just making people laugh. Life is funny and tragic both; the two seem to me inextricably wed.” A. My wife and I lived there for eight years before moving to the Richmond District about two years ago. I worked there for a long time as well, right in my neighborhood, running a computer and ESL training program for immigrants and teaching ESL myself. It’s a fascinating and vibrant and difficult and violent place, with a good deal of class and racial tension as more and more upper middle class, college-educated people move into the area. Obviously, that fascinated me as a writer. The story “Mission” in my collection comes directly out of my experience living and working there.
Q. I love that you explore, on multiple occasions, the workings of a child’s mind, writing from the perspective of a child or writing very close to children. In fiction workshops teachers frequently discourage students from writing about children or from children’s perspectives, since most children’s concerns are deemed to be not as weighty as adult concerns, and too many student writers, when they try to write about children, spend more time being cute than actually writing a story. What made you focus on stories about children? Do you think you experienced any more difficulty doing this than writing the ones centered on adults?
A. I agree that it’s hard to write about children: How do you write a sophisticated story from the perspective of an unsophisticated character? But I also think it affords great opportunities in terms of voice, comedy, unreliability. Mainly, though, I’m drawn to writing about children, I think, because they aren’t cute: they’re possible of tremendous cruelty. It’s an uncivilized age, and for a writer there’s a lot of possibility and life and unexpectedness in characters who aren’t constrained by bourgeois pieties.
Q. A number of these stories start out side-splittingly funny—I laughed out loud more times from reading this book than I have reading just about everything else the past couple of years—but then take a rather sinister, macabre turn. Even in “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan,” the story closes with an ominous feel, a veiled threat. Is this a conscientious decision you make—starting funny and ending dark—related to craft and story arc, etc., or is this more of a natural expression of some darker, cackling side of Eric Puchner?
A. It’s not so much conscious, I think, as something in my sensibility, something I have very little power over. Often what gets me started on a story, excited enough to begin, is a funny situation or stylistic choice: telling a story in the form of a grammatically incorrect essay, for example, or wondering what would happen if a carjacker tried to carjack a Driver’s Ed vehicle filled with people who couldn’t drive. So I guess I do try to make the stories funny, but then some dark sensibility takes over, I guess. I’m not interested in just making people laugh. Life is funny and tragic both; the two seem to me inextricably wed. Perhaps they’re even natural responses to each other.
Q. I have to ask: When writing from the perspective of a lovesick teenage girl in “Essay #3: Leda and the Swan,” did you actually come up with every grammatical, syntactical, and lexical gaffe, or did you dig up old papers from previous students and pick out your favorites? Those must have took some work for you to get in there without gumming up the story. Did you find it any more liberating than writing a more conventional story, or more taxing?
A. I found it incredibly liberating to write bad prose on purpose. I’d spent so many years trying to make my sentences beautiful that it was terrific to dispense with all that, to give up any pretense at being “literary.” In fact, I had so much fun writing the story that it never occurred to me anyone would want to read or publish it. But to answer your question: I don’t think I cribbed anything directly from student papers, but the whole story was inspired by some of the essays I got teaching composition at SF State. They were often unintentionally hilarious, filled with malapropisms, but also sort of accidentally poetic at times. I wanted to try to capture that tortured, original, weirdly poetic language: great fun to write, but I worked very hard to stay in voice and keep it credible. I don’t know how many rewrites I did just on the level of voice.
Q. There is such a lush cultural and social landscape behind these stories: Mexicans, Chinese, Russians, children, teenagers, handicapped people. Yet, many writers probably would shy away from depicting a handicapped person with snot coming out of their nose, a fraternity boy flipping the bird, or my favorite, teens with so many piercings they look like they’ve been “dragged across the bottom of a fishing hole.” How do you deal with these familiar tropes and still make them something more or something new?
A. Well, I think stereotypes in fiction are only stereotypes because the language describing them isn’t fresh. People have piercings and developmentally disabled people have runny noses: that’s just life. Ideally, the trick is to defamiliarize the stereotypes somehow.
Q. Favorite dim sum dish?
A. Pork buns.
Q. Worst experience with ethnic food?
A. German.
Q. What was the greatest surprise for you in writing these stories?
A. That I was able to publish a collection, honestly. I worried that they were too diverse, both in terms of style and subject matter. So I was very happy when it sold, and happy too when some reviewers saw a strong connection between all the stories.
Q. Could you tell us a little bit about your novel project? How is the transition from short story-writer to novelist?
A. The novel is called Model Home and it’s coming out in February, 2010. I’m sort of superstitious about talking about a book that hasn’t come out yet, so that’s all I’ll say.
Q. Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.
A. Marilynne Robinson. I just read Housekeeping for the third time.
Q. What are your writing habits?
A. I write every morning when I’m not teaching, 4-5 hours at a stretch. I always listen to the same CD: Bach’s cello suites. My wife (also a writer) listens to noisy alt rock while she writes, so I have to drown her out.
Q. What is your relationship with rejection like?
A. We’re very close.
Q. What writerly habit would you most like to break?
A. My use of the words “weird” and “weirdly.” I used them close to fifty times in my novel; luckily, my editor caught them.
Q. One piece of advice to all the creative writing students moiling in fiction workshops across the land?
A. Read more, and write the sort of fiction you’d most like to pick up and read yourself.
Eric Puchner teaches at Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner and John L’Heureux Fellow. His short stories have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Zoetrope: All Story, The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, Best New American Voices 2005, and other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Music Through the Floor. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel.
