“Present Company”, a short story by James Reed, was published in Midnight Mind Number Seven.
Question 1: What books are you reading right now?
Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell and Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged American’s Founding Father, by Peter Stark.
Question 2: What authors have inspired you and why?
I’m not sure “inspired” is quite the right word here, but these are authors who greatly influence my notion of how things should be done.
John Berryman, most particularly The Dream Songs. The range and complexity of content and style require an ear for language that I hadn’t exercised or encountered but have found absolutely essential.
Wright Morris. The first of his books I read was The Fork River Space Project, and I kept on from there, doling them out over several years. His command of the written word, his mastery of diction and syntax, are such true and enjoyable excellence.
Alice Munro is another writer whose grace with the language, whose closely drawn observations and subtlety of structure, are a pleasure to read. Andrea Barrett once remarked that Alice Munro had achieved a sort of short story sainthood. That seems about right.
Flannery O’Connor’s work was like nothing I’d ever read before, and one of the earliest and most useful notions to me was the value of having more than one or two things going on at once, even, or especially, if this is not immediately obvious to the reader. This is a quality I also find in the fiction of Graham Greene, but I doubt that the similarity derives from the fact that both of them were fervent Catholics.
Jayne Anne Phillips’ book Black Tickets provided my first introduction to what now is often termed flash fiction. Here I found work of extraordinary emotional depth and beautifully compact construction. I’ve worked off and on in the form ever since.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was a book I stumbled on in a spinning book rack in a grocery store and knew nothing about, but it looked interesting and also unlike anything else I’d read. His work is another case of range, complexity, and technique greatly broadening my sense of possibility.
To a certain extent, I sense the commonality in these folks is that I love their always interesting sense of language, which also could be said of Jerome Charyn and Ford Madox Ford. (and if you’ve not read Panna Maria, The Good Soldier, and Parade’s End you’re missing out and owe yourself the treat).
I also would add, for much the same reasons listed above, the movies of Robert Altman.
Question 3: What’s a book you haven’t read that you really should have read already?
Mrs. Dalloway.
Question 4: What’s the biggest negative about being a writer?
I am used to the slim odds of making any money, but what’s worse nowadays is that so many magazines expect and demand a payment to be made for general submissions. I do not feel an obligation to subsidize a publisher’s overhead expenses. One does not charge wholesalers. One pays wholesalers and charges customers.
Question 5: What is it that inspires you to write?
I’ve been writing for my own entertainment since childhood, so, again, I’m not sure “inspires” is the operative word. Not until college did I learn one could study the subject and take it seriously, but writing is something I’ve done forever. I don’t expect I’ll stop.
