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Midwestern Boy

An Interview with Larry Watson

Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota, and grew up in Bismarck. He completed his BA and MA degrees at the University of North Dakota, and went on to receive his PhD from the University of Utah’s creative writing program before moving to Wisconsin. Perhaps best known for his 1993 novel Montana 1948, Watson is author of In a Dark Time (1980), Justice (1996), White Crosses (1997), Laura (2000), Orchard (2003), and Sundown, Yellow Moon (2007). His stories and poems have appeared in North American Review, Gettysburg Review, Mississippi Review and other literary magazines; his essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Washington Post and in such anthologies as The Most Wonderful Books, These United States, Off the Beaten Path, and Baseball and the Game of Life. The recipient of many literary awards, Watson has also received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987, 2004) and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Watson joined the Marquette University faculty in 2003 after twenty-five years of teaching creative writing and literature at the UW–Stevens Point. He currently lives in Milwaukee with his wife Susan.

Wisconsin People & Ideas correspondent Bruce Jacobs recently interviewed the revered author in the weeks before the release of the much-anticipated American Boy, Watson’s new novel available from Milkweed Editions this October.

Where is Rugby, North Dakota?
Rugby is the geographic center of North America. Not the center of the United States, but of North America. Amtrak stops there and in fact, the train passes right by my childhood home.

Many of your books are about young people growing up in the middle of nowhere. Did you have this kind of a typical small-town, Midwest youth?
Yes, it was pretty typical. Though when I was growing up in Bismarck, North Dakota, I didn’t think I was living in a small town because it was, if not the biggest city, one of the larger cities in the state. My family lived in a new housing development, so it definitely felt middle class and suburban. I had a fairly innocent childhood—baseball and bicycles and pennies on the tracks. That kind of stuff.

It was less innocent as I got older. Guns and fast cars were part of my teens. I remember shortly after Montana 1948 came out I was giving a reading in Detroit of all places and someone said, “What’s with these kids and guns [in the novel]?”

What could I say? We had ’em. We were trusted with guns— and shouldn’t have been. I’m not talking about hunting, which many of us did also, but about just being out there blazing away with .22s and pistols from an early age.

It strikes me that American teenage life is not represented particularly well in our culture. It’s sort of been made cute, or sweet in many ways. Even when the raunchier aspects are portrayed, it’s still done with a smile and a wink. And maybe this is just me, but it seems to me that those teenage years were dangerous—dangerous and intense, in feeling and experience. I was not a risk-taking kid, particularly, and yet it scares the hell out of me now when I think about some of the things we were doing [at that age]. I’ve tried to be true to that intensity in my fiction.

I know you published a poetry book early on in your career. How did you end up writing fiction?
I took an Advanced Composition class in college, and since it was the Sixties and our teacher was young and just out of college herself, she let us do our own thing. I don’t know why, but I decided poetry would be my thing. Making poems felt good right away. What I was writing was awful but it didn’t matter; it just felt good to make poems.

Later, at the University of Utah I took a couple workshops from the poet Richard Schramm. He didn’t give me a lot of direction, but he gave me a little encouragement. And when you’re that age, you don’t need much—or at least I didn’t.

But I was writing fiction at the same time and part of [the move away from poetry] came from writing novels. I’ve often said that novels will eat everything. When you’re working on a novel, everything seems to belong in that work. You look around and no matter what you see—someone’s gesture, a pot of geraniums—you think, I can use that, that’ll fit. As a result, a lot of things that might have found their way into poems are in the novels.

What was the transition like from Utah to Wisconsin?
I wanted to teach. And there was a job at UW–Stevens Point. There weren’t that many jobs back then, so I felt lucky to find one. My wife’s family lived in Wisconsin, so we were happy to come here. Wisconsin was definitely on our list of preferred locations.

I [got a job] teaching fiction writing, but it was a four-course-a- semester teaching load so it was always at least two freshman English classes along with a creative writing class or two.

So did you write Montana 1948 while you were there?
Yeah. I’ve always been able to teach and write. I have to say, however, that it’s easier to do both at Marquette where I have a lighter teaching load and smaller classes.

Actually, my first published novel was In a Dark Time, which was my doctoral dissertation at the University of Utah. Because Scribners—they were Charles Scribners and Sons back then, not Scribner—had accepted it before I had finished it I was pretty sure I was going to get through my oral defense. In a Dark Time came out in 1980. Then for thirteen years I could not get another novel published. I was writing them, but I couldn’t land one with a publisher.

So when Milkweed accepted Montana 1948, what I felt more than anything else was relief.

Did you submit it to Milkweed or did they find you?
No, I submitted to them. I knew about them and their annual fiction prize.

Did you have an agent?
Nope. I submitted it on my own.

I had an agent with my first novel, though. He found me when I was in graduate school. It was a process that was so easy I was totally deceived about what the writing life was going to be like. I was working on a novel for my dissertation, and I sent about fifty pages off for a fellowship application. I didn’t get the fellowship— it was for the National Endowment for the Arts—but one of the readers was a guy who had been an editor and was just starting as an agent with the William Morris Agency. He read those pages and liked them and called me and said, “Do you have an agent and if not would you like me to represent you?” and I said, “No, I don’t have one, sure.” He said, “Why don’t you send me what you’ve got,” and by then it was close to a hundred pages. I sent them to him, and he sold the unfinished novel to Scribners for a small advance. It wasn’t much money, but it was a lot of money to us back then.

So I thought, Where is all this agony [about getting published]? An agent found me, I didn’t have to finish the novel, and it was sold.

Then, it just got real hard. That agent and I soon parted ways when it became apparent to both of us that I wasn’t going to write the kinds of books he hoped I would. I tried another agent, and he represented me for a few years and tried to sell a couple novels but couldn’t.

So, when I finished Montana 1948 I didn’t have an agent or a relationship with an editor.

I had, however, tried [to get] Montana 1948 [published] on my own. I’d sent it to one of the big New York houses, and didn’t hear from them for quite a while. Then I came home on a Friday afternoon to a message on the answering machine from an editor at this big house. He said he liked the novel, and wanted to talk to me about it. I was really hopeful. It was hard to wait until Monday morning. And we talked—or he sent me a letter, I forget the sequence—but he said, “I kind of like it, but I’ve got some suggestions for you and I’ll send them on in a couple weeks.

A couple weeks went by and I didn’t hear from him. So I wrote him again and said, “What are your suggestions?”

He said, “I’m sorry I’ve been really busy”—I didn’t know how usual that is for editors—“just a couple weeks and I’ll get back to you.” And still more weeks passed and I didn’t hear from him. So, I wrote to him and told him to send the manuscript back to me.

As soon as I did that I thought, You idiot. What have you done? You had a novel on an editor’s desk, and you asked for it back? But I already felt that maybe a big house was not the place for me. As I said, I knew about Milkweed and I thought maybe it would be better to be with a small press, something in the region. [Editor’s Note: Milkweed Editions is based in Minneapolis, MN.] So I submitted it to them.

Montana 1948 turned out to be a home run for them, and for you, in many ways.
Yeah, it did. Suddenly the process got easy again, and the agents and editors who I couldn’t interest in my work earlier, were now contacting me.

Initially Milkweed was a little nervous. They planned to print 7,500 copies, and that was the biggest printing they’d ever done of a novel. That was okay with me. I was just happy to have a novel published again. Everything that happened after that was totally unexpected and great.

You helped them out, they helped you out, and then you moved on … only to return with American Boy.
To be crass about it, I moved on for money. I was offered a very large advance, and more money would mean that I would be able to cut back on teaching. And that was exactly how it worked. For a number of years I taught half time at Stevens Point. Half time at half pay. So that first large advance—and later the offer of another—meant that I would be able to supplement my teaching income and still be insured and have a regular paycheck.

I was with Simon and Schuster first and then Random House, and I was happy enough with both but I kept losing editors because of that New York thing where they move from house to house. This was also the time when lots of publishing houses were downsizing and laying off editors. I never had the same editor for two books in a row.

When I finished American Boy I thought maybe it would be better if I went back to Milkweed Editions. I’d formed a friendship with Daniel Slager, the publisher and CEO. They were going to do Montana 1948 in paperback when the paperback license expired, so in a way I’d already returned. But Daniel and I got along well, so I thought, yeah, I’ll try Milkweed with the new novel. So far, it’s worked out very well. I’m happy with my decision.

Sundown, Yellow Moon and Orchard were published by Random House, and they turned out well. Orchard is a great book; how was it different from what you’ve done in the past?
I’m not a wildly experimental writer, but I’ve tried to do something new with every book. Sometimes that has to do with what I did previously that makes the next book more or less of a departure. Orchard felt different to me in a number of ways. For one thing it’s nonlinear, and that way of structuring a novel was something I hadn’t done before. The multiple points of view felt a little risky, and I hope that worked. Finally, I was attempting something with style that I thought fit the novel’s subject. I wanted to do something that matched the technique of an Impressionist painting, where the artist represents something clearly, realistically, and then with maybe just a few brush stokes here and there, invites the viewer to participate and to complete the picture. That’s what I wanted to do with Orchard, to suggest as much as I made explicit.

As I said, the previous book often influences how I will write the next one, either as a departure or a continuation.

What is it about the 1960s that fascinates you? Most of your books are set around this time?
I was born in 1947, so mid-twentieth century is an era I remember, or at least partly. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the sixties that I’m usually writing about—in American Boy it’s 1962—are really the 1950s. I don’t think that the decades necessarily mark the eras precisely, and maybe that’s especially true in rural or small town America.

I think of that time as an era of repression, a time when things were pushed down here only to pop up there. I’m interested in and write about people who have difficulty expressing themselves, and often what doesn’t get expressed are desires and obsessions. I’m really interested in that tension that Faulker called, “The human heart in conflict with itself.” In the 1950s and early 1960s maybe the human heart was also in conflict with society. Of course when the later 1960s came along the human heart seemed to get whatever it wanted.

How did you choose the setting for Orchard, for all your books?
We used to have a place in Door County, so the terrain was familiar to me. But from the time of our very first visit there it seemed to me really different; a very interesting mix of the nautical, agricultural, artistic. Sort of isolated. And there’s something about remote or isolated settings that appeals to me. It somehow makes things seem possible.

Also I work from memory, which seems to me quite different than writing from observation. But it’s a special kind of writer’s memory. I use what sticks in my memory-filter, but I also feel the need to make up things. It’s so obvious but I never quite thought of it this way: Joyce Carol Oates says that memory works or is activated once you are removed from memory’s source. Well of course. I’m not writing about Bismarck, I’m not writing about Stevens Point, and I’m not writing about Rugby, but I might use details from any of those towns—at least the details that I remember and that seem to belong in the fiction.

I also try to choose settings that have no literary claims on them. That’s the way I picked northeast Montana for Montana 1948 and southwest Minnesota for American Boy. I feel for those writers who live in Mississippi and have Faulkner constantly looming over them.

American Boy is a pretty ambitious title. Are you trying to say something about what America is or once was in this book?
I was trying to depict a particular brand of striving, that desire to define yourself, to make something of yourself, to capture your portion of the American dream. I felt as though I was working in the realist, naturalist tradition of Dreiser and other writers who wrote about people who have dreams and ambitions but get caught up in something bigger than they are, and about which they’re powerless to do anything. I think this applies to the novel’s narrator, Matthew Garth, but also to Louisa Lindahl.

I was also thinking about a town that has a divided sense of itself. Some people in the community have a certain view of what life in that place is like and others think it’s something quite different. I also believe that it’s true in smaller towns that people like and need a kind of a validation of themselves and their community, and they look to prominent, handsome people like the Dunbars for that validation. They think, There must be something good or right about us because look, he’s living here. He could live anywhere, but he chose to live here. That’s a theme that’s also in Montana, 1948.

Are you going to tour for American Boy?
I’m going to do a few things, mostly in the Midwest. I’m appearing at a couple trade shows. I’m reading at Boswell’s and Next Chapter in Milwaukee, in Oconomowoc, at the Wisconsin Book Festival, and at a bookstore in Chicago.

What’s the next novel in the pipeline?
Milkweed is going to do another one. It’s back to Montana, and back also to the early 1960s. It feels more or less finished. We’ll just have to see. 

 

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Bruce Jacobs retired after forty years in the Wisconsin iron and steel industry and is the founding partner of the independent bookstore Watermark Books & Cafe and the small publisher Watermark Press, both in Wichita, Kansas.

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