Pete Fromm: Our 2003 Interview

Pete Fromm, author of the memoir The Indian Creek Chronicles and fiction like How All This Started and Night Swimming, releases his second novel this month. Set in his home state of Montana, Pete has finally established himself as the Montana author he was destined to become. Or at least that is what everyone around him would have you believe. Pete, though, seems content to write about his characters as they come to him, even if they don’t live in Montana. And, he seems very aware of what becoming a “Montana Author” could do to him.

BRETT: I just got done reading your new novel, AS COOL AS I AM, and was very impressed. I tend to be a slow reader but this I couldn’t put down. At first there seemed to be many similarities between this new novel and your other novel, HOW ALL THIS STARTED, but the main females in each book are completely different once you get into their personalities.

PETE: Thanks, Brett. I still kind of sweat out these first few readings, wondering how the characters will work for someone brand new to them. Always nice to hear I haven’t embarrassed myself.

BRETT: Did you feel more pressure writing this novel than your first novel?

PETE: As little as I get monetarily for my work, I’ve never felt any pressure to write anything. If I had, I probably wouldn’t have followed up a Texas tale of a manic-depressive girl’s effect on her family, with that of a Montana girl dealing with her own growing up while her parents fight to remain kids. Neither of these plots have Beach Book or Screenplay stamped all over them.

I’ve always written simply what interests me, which has always been character driven, rather than plot driven. I get fascinated by the people in the stories. And I better be, knowing I’ll be spending two to three years with them down here in my basement.

So, the work is what drives me, the people inside the story, rather than any outside force. Usually that’s extremely rewarding, and I honestly look forward to work every day, though there are days, of course, that are tougher than others.

BRETT: AS COOL AS I AM is written from the perspective of a 14 year old girl. That is not tried too often by male authors. Were there times that you had difficulty continuing the story in her voice?

PETE: Once I got into the voice there weren’t many problems maintaining it. Repetition of phrases or words — I mean, like, just, really — got to be a problem, because it was how Lucy talked, but was annoying to read through. The copy-editor did a great job of pointing these out, after they’d gotten to be so much a part of her that I’d learned to tune them out. But once a character comes alive, I don’t think much of things like maintaining a voice.

Without getting all new-agey on you, it’s more as if she’s telling the story, as if I’m sitting back and watching. The most frustrating thing was the limitation of a young first person narrator, there’s so much she isn’t able to report on because she can’t see it, and some that she just isn’t old enough to understand. Of course, that’s part of the strength too. I did have some worry about the gender switch, but one high school girl and a couple of women read early drafts and gave it high scores which put that worry to rest. I wouldn’t say the gender thing was anymore worrisome than writing about manic-depression, something else I had no first hand experience with. A psychiatrist agreed to check through that one for me, with the same results.

BRETT: I am interested a little in how a novel like this starts. HOW THIS ALL STARTED was, I believe, originally a short story. Did the new novel start out the same or did you know that it would be a larger work?

PETE: You’re right about HOW THIS ALL STARTED. From the story of the same name in the collection NIGHT SWIMMING. Lucy, too, was from a story in NIGHT SWIMMING, titled “The Gravy on the Cake.” In both cases, though the stories were finished, the characters had become too alive for me to leave. The New Yorker asked me to do a rewrite of “Gravy,” which turned the original, funny, but pretty simple eleven page story into a much more complex 23 pager. They still turned it down, of course, but by that time I knew Lucy was going places. “Gravy” was pretty much about the end of Lucy’s involvement with her parents, and there was much more that came before that I wanted to know about her. Unlike HOW THIS ALL STARTED, when I began working on Lucy’s earlier life, another story — actually a partial story I never did complete — about a tough girl coming to the rescue of her scrawny friend on the jungle gym by trading a kiss to his tormentor for her friend’s release, suddenly seemed like something I’d been saving for Lucy. That story — Kenny and Lucy’s first kiss following close behind — really took the book in an unexpected direction; Lucy’s exploration of love and sex and what it means for her parents as well as herself. By the time I got to the original story, “Gravy,” near the end of the book, much had to be changed, but I was surprised by how much I was still able to use.

I’m working on a new novel now, that doesn’t have a story to hang it from, and I’m finding myself writing a lot just casting about, learning about the characters, so I think, one way or the other, I’ve got to have a character that I find compelling enough to live with for a few years. Finding one pestering me years after their story was completed seems a pretty good sign that they’ve got what it takes.

BRETT: That collection, NIGHT SWIMMING, was a wonderful book and was the first book to really throw you in with other Montana writers in the public eye. The quote from McGuane on the front of that book seemed to signal that a new “Montana Writer” had arrived. Your new novel is set in your hometown of Great Falls. How important is Montana to your writing? I mean, if you lived somewhere else, do you think you would have turned out a similar novel?

PETE: Tom’s quote was a great one, but I haven’t really noticed a difference about the public eye thing, either from the six books before NIGHT SWIMMING, or the two since. My one non-fiction, INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES, continues to outpace all the other books combined. That story, about my coming to Montana and jumping into some sort of mountain man thing, cemented me as a writer of Montana non-fiction, at least in the eyes of my agents and editors. It took years to convince them that I want to write fiction, exclusively. An earlier collection, DRY RAIN, after forty rejections, was finally published only after I agreed to remove the two or three stories set east of the Mississippi (they later found a home in NIGHT SWIMMING). And, when my editor read the first draft of HOW ALL THIS STARTED, she wondered if there wasn’t a way to set it in Montana, instead of Texas. That’s the downside of the Montana angle — it can swallow up all else you try to do.

But so many of my stories have Montana, or at least the west, for settings, that there’s no way I can deny the influence.

When Lucy’s story came along, Great Falls seemed natural for it, because I wanted someplace somewhat isolated, sort of stuck in the fifties but wanting to be part of the big world. The nuclear missile base — all these guys and their deadly weapons with no targets left to aim at — worked well at the edge of the story, in some ways mirroring Lucy’s father’s fit in the family

The novel I’m just now starting is also set near here. There is something about this place, where it sits on the edge of the mountains, not really part of the cool, sexy side of Montana (the west side of the divide, the mountains), but not totally left out on the plains either, that makes it, I think, a perfect place for stories. There’s a kind of inferiority complex around here, one I feel is largely undeserved, but it’s a rich vein in any case.

BRETT: Were you angry when your editor suggested that you rework HOW ALL THIS STARTED into a “Montana” novel?

PETE: Not angry so much as taken aback. I thought, “You have got to be kidding me. How could you so not get it?” To her credit, she took it back almost immediately, and never brought it up again. She was, I think, simply thinking out loud, letting her years in marketing overwhelm her editing sense for a second.

BRETT: I read INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES after being introduced to you through your fiction. I was surprised that, in that work of non-fiction, you seemed to have no aspirations to become a writer. At the beginning of that book, when you set out in a truck bound for months of solitude, sick to your stomach from drinking, did you ever see that day leading to you eventually becoming a fiction writer?

PETE: Not then, no. A few years later, in my last quarter in college, I stumbled into an intro to creative writing class. That gave me my first taste of the charge of inventing people and watching what happens to them. And then it was years of playing with stories before I had an idea as ridiculous as actually being good at it, of being able to do it for a living. But I think the months of solitude certainly helped when it came time to write. It made sitting alone in my basement, for a living, not seem so odd, and it gave me an idea that hanging around in my imagination wasn’t such a bad way of passing the time.

BRETT: I wanted to know how much other writing affected you becoming a writer. Are there writers who influence your work? Writers you consider influences?

PETE: Ah, the dreaded influence question. Before I’d ever started thinking about writing, I happened to pick up a copy of Hemingway’s THE NICK ADAMS STORIES which, having spent much of my life out of doors, I liked a lot. I was stuck in a foreign country, and it was one of the first books I read for pleasure since leaving my tent in Indian Creek. I ran across sentences as profound as “Nick liked to open cans.” But, hell, I like to open cans. With just that one tiny sentence, Ernie had me out of my chair and into Nick’s tent on the Big Two-Hearted. And, “Nick liked to open cans”? Not exactly tough stuff to come up with. Hell, I could write, “Nick liked to open cans.” Or so I thought. Before I’d ever tried. Or dreamed of trying. Later, when I stumbled into my writing class, I remembered that sentence. So I’ve never tried to dazzle with style, just tried to get the detail right enough to put the reader in the story. And keep him there, keep myself out of it altogether.

Other than that, as a youngster trying to catch up, I read all the usual suspects, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Twain, the Russian guys. I got into a big Graham Greene kick. For more modern stuff I really like Roddy Doyle’s stories. Ron Carlson’s somebody the world will wake up to someday, for his humor and his kind, wise heart. But, the list is so long, and so eclectic, it really doesn’t make sense to try to name just a few of the many.

BRETT: Do you, as an author, feel a pressure to be “well-read”?

PETE: I’d like my books to be well read, but in the mean time, I struggle to be well read. Not so much out of a feeling of pressure, or obligation, or to cross out any books on anyone’s “canon”, but simply to find what’s out there and to learn from it, good or bad. I’ve found myself, for the last several years, reading almost entirely contemporary fiction, novels mostly, since that’s what I’ve been working on. But, with my own writing, and two young boys around here, I don’t get nearly the time to read I used to.

BRETT: What would you like people to take away from the new book, AS COOL AS I AM?

PETE: You know, I usually wait to hear what people are getting out of it. By the time I’m finished with the writing, and rewriting, and rewriting, those kind of thoughts seem to have been lost in the grind, in the technical stuff, the smoke and mirrors involved in pulling a reader through the story.

Foremost, I suppose, I’d like them to get tied up in Lucy’s life, have them start to consider her as someone they know, that they’d like to offer advice to, at least to say, “Oh, shit, Lucy, don’t do that,” or “Now you’re thinking!” But there’s a lot of other stuff in there, more general stuff about love, and loyalty, about kids having kids and trying to raise them, parental responsibility, whose life comes first when you have a child — that, hopefully, will be something a reader will give a thought to.

BRETT: I was really into Lucy and hoped for the best for her as the novels ends. I don’t want to give away the end here, but the novel leaves us with Lucy beginning a new chapter in her life. Is there any thought that you might go back and see what she is up to in the future?

PETE: I just finished giving the first readings from AS COOL AS I AM and was asked the same question. I got it too after HOW ALL THIS STARTED, and there I could honestly say that I doubted I’d go back. Abilene’s on as good a track as I can hope for her, and the end of the book was really the end of the story I was interested in exploring — her effect on her brother and her family. But, with Lucy, I have to admit that there could be more. As she promises herself at the end, that she won’t stay where she is for more than a year, till she gets her feet on the ground, I can’t see her sticking around long.
And I still find her compelling enough to go back to. She may someday power another novel, maybe tracking down her father, but not the next one. It was a lot of work landing her where I did, and I’m ready for something new. But she’s still down here in the basement with me, looking over my shoulder, so, maybe.


Pete Fromm’s work was featured in Midnight Mind Number Three and Midnight Mind Number Seven.