Interviews

Writer and Teacher: An Interview with K.L. Cook by Lucrecia Guerrero

Lucrecia Guerrero’s short stories have appeared in literary journals, including Colorado Review and Louisville Review.  She is the author of a collection of stories, Chasing Shadows (Chronicle Books 2000) and recently completed her first novel, Tree of Sighs.

Lucrecia Guerrero: You have a BA in English and Theatre.  How did you get started in writing fiction, and what did you do to develop your craft? 

K.L. Cook:  I went to the local university because the theatre professor there gave me a scholarship.  I not only studied theatre with him and performed in about thirty productions, but I also married his daughter—an actress, director, singer, and playwright.  For a long time, I wanted to become an actor.  I didn’t write a story or take a fiction writing workshop until I had already begun a PhD program in literature.  And I only did that because my thesis mentor for my master’s degree in literature was a young novelist himself, Richard Russo, and he urged me to try my hand at fiction.  Once I started writing stories, I discovered that all that training in theatre was perfect for fiction writing.  Learning how to analyze a play with the intention of directing it or performing in it is very similar to the way a writer must think about literature—as something alive and malleable, as something that must not just be understood and dissected but be fully inhabited.   I think of writing as performance—something that ideally enchants, haunts, and persuades through the senses.

Lucrecia Guerrero: Who are some of your literary influences, and who are you reading now?

K.L. Cook: My early influences were adventure narratives—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan chronicles, Encyclopedia Brown, Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang.  In my adolescence, I read a lot of my mother’s trashy novels by such writers as Harold Robbins, primarily for the forbidden passages.  In high school, I loved the transcendentalists, especially Emerson.  I read Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, when I was seventeen and was transformed.  I didn’t know that you could write in such a nakedly vulnerable way about family.  I fell in love with theatre and plays around this time.  The major literary influence in my life is, hands down, Shakespeare—a twenty-five-year love affair.  I’ve acted in Shakespeare.  I gobble up Shakespeare criticism.  I’ve seen almost every filmed version of the tragedies.  I’ve made special trips to New York, London, Stratford-on-Avon, and other places to see productions.  I teach a Shakespeare seminar every other year.  I’m doing research right now for a novel set at Shakespeare festival.  I’m obsessed.  You wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading my fiction, which has largely been about semi-literate characters from West Texas, but Shakespeare’s footprints are all over my work. 

Lucrecia Guerrero:  Could you give me an example?

K. L. Cook:  What most inspires me about Shakespeare’s plays is the complexity of the characters, what I think of as their thickness.  You can never reach the bottom of them.  Hamlet is the most honorable of the great tragic heroes, the only one given a soldier’s funeral, the sweet prince delivered by angels to his peace, and yet he’s also unpardonably cruel to Ophelia and to his mother, and he feels no regret about killing Ophelia’s father or sending his old pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to their deaths. Throughout the play, he seems both brilliant and foolish, spiritual and crude, melancholy and manic, empathetic and callous, indecisive to the point of paralysis at one point and then suicidally impulsive at others.  There is a mysterious contradiction at the center of his character that is both consistent and unfathomable.  The same with Iago.  He’s a sadistic monster, the most detailed portrait of evil that Shakespeare created.  And yet Shakespeare never allows us to feel too distanced from Iago, never allows us to experience Iago as a symbol or abstract embodiment of an idea.  The whole play is torqued because Iago is essentially our narrator.  Shakespeare invites us into that mind, into that soul, and yes, sure, he’s rotten, but he’s also charming and fascinating and, above all, seductive.  We are with him as he figures out and then executes his plot to ensnare all of the other characters.  In this way, Shakespeare makes us complicit with Iago.  Our relationship to the character is almost unbearably complicated.  Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that my own characters have the level of complexity of a Hamlet or Iago, but when I develop my characters, even a protagonist as seemingly sympathetic as Laura Tate, I search for opportunities to complicate and deepen the readers’ relationship to them. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: Your first book, Last Call, is a collection of linked short stories. When you began writing the first story did you see it initially as becoming part of a collection? 

K.L. Cook: No, I didn’t see the final design of Last Call as an integrated short story cycle until fairly late in the revision process, after most of the stories had already been published in literary journals.  A few of the stories were linked, such as the Lee stories in the “Pool Boy” section and the two stories that take place at the honky-tonk called the Texas Moon.  The radical revision that I did in the final year of work on that book was to envision all the stories as part of a larger narrative—the multi-generational story of a family.  The four 1958 stories came last for me and were the key that unlocked the secret design of the book. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: What do you mean by “secret” design? 

K.L. Cook: After working on a book for a long time, you, at some point, have to give up on your original intentions for it and start honoring the book that you actually did write.  Or at least that was one of the major discoveries I made in writing this book.  By writing about these characters when they were children and adolescents—and focusing on the key event that unites them (the disappearance of their mother)—I finally understood the full trajectory of not only their individual lives but the life of the family, and I realized that it wasn’t just a thematically-linked cycle or one character’s story but rather the entire family’s story.

Lucrecia Guerrero:  Some of the stories from Last Call have been adapted as chapters in your novel, The Girl from Charnelle.  When and why did you decide to turn these stories into novel chapters?  What changes needed to be made so that they would work as chapters rather than stories? 

K.L. Cook: As I mentioned, I wrote the 1958 stories fairly late in the process of revision for Last Call.   I became so fascinated with this family at that particular point in time I didn’t want to stop writing about them, especially since I knew the people they would eventually become.  I finished the novel and the final revisions of Last Call at roughly the same time, and when Last Call was about to be published, I negotiated with the press to be able to use those four stories in my novel.  The stories were changed in minor ways for the novel and serve as italicized prologues for each of the four main parts of the book.  I knew I might be accused of double-dipping, but I couldn’t be assured that readers of my second book would also read the first, and those chapters seemed crucial to the novel. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: The following is a quotation from Daniel Rifenburgh, in his review of The Girl from Charnelle for the Houston Chronicle:  “It’s often said that the ultimate test of a male novelist lies in his ability to faithfully and compellingly portray the inner, emotional life of a woman and that only the greats like Tolstoy, Flaubert and James can pull it off. . . . Cook pulls it off admirably.”   Your ability to get into the mind and soul of a teenage girl is impressive.  The book is told from a third person point of view from Laura Tate’s perspective.  How did you decide on third person point of view?  And why specifically from Laura’s, and only Laura’s, point of view?  In Last Call the stories are told from the points of view of different characters. 

K.L. Cook: When asked this question, I sometimes say that I felt, during the writing of this novel, like I was a sixteen year-old girl.  Seriously, I struggled with point of view in this book. One of the challenges for me was writing believably from Laura’s point of view for four hundred pages. At times, I questioned whether I could or should do it, but she was the character I was most interested in.  The novel is hers.  I wrote a complete draft in third person from her perspective.  Then I re-wrote the novel in first person, which of course necessitated many changes in voice.  The big problem with first person was that it didn’t allow me as much freedom with language.  I also grappled with the retrospective voice.  Anytime you use a first-person narrator, you must, unless you’re writing in present tense, figure out what I call the fixed point in the retrospective narration—the point in time from which the narrative is being written.  In a first-person narration, there are always two narrators: the character who went through the events and the older narrator looking back on and making sense of those events.  After writing the novel in first person, I realized that such a choice was wrong for this book; it lost its immediacy and perspective and drained the story of some of its suspense.  So I switched it back to third person, and again made many more changes. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: Coming back to your training in theatre, do you feel that may have helped, as you said earlier, to inhabit the character of Laura?  Or did you ask women for their insights or feedback on your characterization of Laura?

K.L. Cook:  Absolutely.  Writing stories—especially stories narrated by characters very different from me such as oil riggers, railroad workers, waitresses, bartenders, middle-aged women—was really just an extension of the kind of art I practiced in the theatre: the art of inhabiting characters.  The great thing about writing, as opposed to acting, however, is that the writer is not limited by his or her gender or body type or vocal range or ethnicity.  The writer can be anybody he or she wants to be. The only limitation is imagination.  I felt I knew Laura and could intuit my way into her consciousness.  Of course, in revision, the insights and feedback from my wife, my agent, and my editor (all very insightful women) were invaluable, and I made some changes as a result of their suggestions.

Lucrecia Guerrero: You have said that The Girl from Charnelle grew out of your desire to reconnect with your mother from whom you were periodically estranged.  Once the novel was completed and read by family members, I imagine they may have recognized parts of themselves.  Were there misunderstandings with family members who might have expected you to remain more true to the “real” story?  Did some feel you revealed too much?

K.L. Cook: My family’s reaction to the novel has been wonderful.  Although my mother and her family provided the imaginative seed, the narrative I invented for them is very different from their lives.  For instance, my grandmother never disappeared—though her second husband did.  In fact, she is the original writer in the family. She’s been a journalist and a newspaper editor for more than fifty years, and, while now in her mid-eighties, she still works full-time, investigating and writing articles in Childress, Texas.  My mother said that she was often shocked by how I could have known things about her private life, how she thought and felt when she was that age.  Most of what I wrote, however, was invented.  One of the exciting things about writing fiction is the process of writing not what you know, but exploring what you don’t know about what you know.  I was on a panel at the Texas Book Festival called “What Would Mom Say?: Fiction and Family.”  My mother came down for the panel, and it thrilled me to say, “There’s the original girl from Charnelle.”  She felt like a minor celebrity.

Lucrecia Guerrero: You show great empathy and compassion for all the characters in the novel.  You took time to develop each one, and made them human with their conflicting emotions and actions.  Were the characters always so well drawn, or after finishing the novel did you find you had to return to any of the characters for further development? 

K.L. Cook: First off, thank you.  I worked hard to make sure that all the principle players were fully imagined and complexly drawn. The character that I struggled with the most in the first draft was John Letig, the man with whom Laura has an affair.  I have two daughters myself, so I found myself unconsciously judging him throughout.  I was afraid to identify too deeply with him.  In revision, I had to imagine him more fully, making sure I understood the kind of man he was and why Laura would be attracted to him.  This didn’t mean that I refrained from having the other characters judge him.  But I came to see him as a tragic figure.  It was an exercise for me in what Keats called “negative capability”—the ability and willingness of the writer to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”  Some readers, especially those with teenage daughters, have told me or emailed me that the subject matter was disturbing for them.  As for younger readers?  School Library Journal listed the novel as one of the best adult books for high school students, which surprised me because of the subject matter, but it seems to have found an audience with those readers.  I haven’t let my own children read the book yet, not even my sixteen-year-old son. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: Your novel is set in the late fifties and 1960.  You did not fall into the trap of having characters from another time think and react as though they were living in contemporary times.  I’m thinking specifically of the role of women in the novel. 

K.L. Cook: One of my goals in writing this novel was to try to inhabit not just different characters but also a different time, place, and cultural sensibility.  This novel is set before I was born, and I did a lot of research—both reading about and talking with people, especially women, who grew up in the Texas Panhandle during that era.  There is an anti-nostalgic thread running through the book.  Life was hard, especially for a girl abandoned by her older sister and her mother and left alone to take care of her three brothers and father.  Most of the domestic burdens fell to her simply because she was a girl.  That’s what women and daughters did.  There are many scenes that deal quite bluntly with Laura’s conflicted feelings about these responsibilities, her guilt and resentment and anger.  My mother married my father at a very young age partly, I believe, to escape these burdens.  The way she talked about this time in her life—with a tangled sense of pride and bitterness—fascinated me.  It was also one way that I felt intimately connected to Laura.  My children were very young while I wrote this book.  I often felt that my life was consumed by the relentlessness of rigors of domestic life: laundry, cooking, dishes, and a desperate desire for more sleep. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: One of the themes of your novel is the idea that people we know often have secret lives.  Only Mrs. Tate, the mother, is allowed to maintain her mystery.  And since you felt such empathy for your characters, I can’t help but wonder if there were times when you might have felt guilty revealing their secrets?

K.L. Cook:  Did I feel guilty about revealing the secrets of my characters?  No.  Secrecy and revelation are at center of most narratives.  And at the heart of most of our lives.   One of the epigraphs for the novel comes from Chekhov’s short story, “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” where the protagonist realizes that “everything that was essential to him, everything about which he felt sincerely and did not deceive himself, everything that constituted the core of his life, was going on concealed from others.”  I designed the novel—from the epigraph to the final pages—so that I could investigate this pattern of secrecy and revelation, so that I could test the premise of the value of a secret life.  Every major character and most of the secondary and minor characters have secret lives, and they each exist on a continuum.  The mother remains a total sphinx, with the characters concocting theories about her disappearance.  The level of revelation varies from character to character, and the level of exposure varies as well.  One of the questions that John’s wife, Anne Letig, contemplates near the end of the book is how much exposure is healthy or necessary.  And Laura herself realizes that a part of her will always remain buried in the secret center of the Letigs’ marriage.  One of the great things about fiction—both writing and reading it—is that we are given more access to the inner lives of characters than we are allowed with people in our own lives, even those we love the most.  This access to other lives is why fiction is such a great humanizing art. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: If the access to other lives is why fiction is the great humanizing art, did you ever fear that allowing only the mother to remain a “total sphinx” might leave the reader seeing her as less humanized that the other characters?  Or, at least, that the reader might have less empathy for her?

K.L. Cook: That was a risk I was willing to take. I did, at the suggestion of my editor, provide more short scenes depicting the mother.  But I didn’t want to undermine the essential mystery of her disappearance.  All the other characters—Laura, Mrs. Letig, Laura’s father, Laura’s sister and brothers, Aunt Velma—offer their own theories about why she left.  I hope I have provided enough evidence in the novel so that readers can put together a fairly complex portrait of her.  I feel, by the way, great empathy for the mother.  I started thinking about her situation soon after my fourth child was born.  At that time, my wife and I had three children in diapers.  I could understand how a person whose life is determined by needy children, endless domestic chores, and too little money might very well feel desperate for a different life. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: The novel is structured into four parts, and each part begins with a section that returns to the issue of the mysterious mother.  Why choose this structure, and at what point did you decide to go with this structure?

K.L. Cook: In my original structure, the four 1958 sections concerning the disappearance of the mother happened chronologically and appeared first in the novel, as an extended prologue.  But as I continued to write and revise, I understood that the central narrative question was this: Would Laura, like her mother and sister before her, leave Charnelle, and if so, under what conditions?  Once this became clear to me, I thought about the chapters concerning the mother differently, and I decided to use them as prologues to the different sections, so that the reader, like Laura, would keep looping back to this central mystery.  After I made that decision, I felt liberated to deepen the thematic connections between the 1960 chapters in each section and the preceding 1958 chapter.  For instance, part three of the novel is called “Careful” and begins with the harrowing story of the crazy family dog, Greta. The chapters that follow are full of emotional trapdoors and dangers for Laura and deliberately echo the dangers in the Greta chapter.  Whenever you write a book, you are searching, I believe, for the invisible design.  Sometimes you know it from the beginning.  Sometimes it reveals itself as you’re writing.  Sometimes it only reveals itself in revision.  The goal, though, is to find the design that reinforces the most pressing thematic and dramatic intentions.  

Lucrecia Guerrero: The book opens with a beautiful and terrifying image of a rainstorm and of a great oak being split open by lightning.  The mother touches “the trunk, the branches, the leaves, as if searching for a heartbeat.”  This splitting of the family tree, revealing its very heart, precipitates the disappearance of Mrs. Tate.  Like the tree, the Tate family has been split, its heart exposed.  It is an indelible image.  Did the image develop out of the story or the story out of the image?

K.L. Cook: It’s hard to say, really.  Probably both.  When I was young, I remember standing at the window of my grandparents’ house during a storm when lightning struck the tree in the front yard.  Like Laura, I felt as if the lightning had struck me.  Afterwards, I felt the electricity chattering in my teeth, and I walked around half-blinded by a cross-hatched blur of light.  I gave that experience to Laura.  I knew of course that the mother was leaving, and that the tree would serve as a private catalyst for her.  All of those 1958 chapters circle around traumatic events.  We don’t know why she leaves, and we can’t fully decode the private meanings of these events for her, but there’s the incident in the barn in Amarillo, Greta going crazy, and then the tree being struck by lightning.  The mother searches for a heartbeat.  And then the next day she’s gone for good. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: I have read that you are now working on a new novel that focuses on the man Laura Tate eventually marries.  If you originally created Laura Tate to better understand your mother, do you feel that you and your mother have been brought closer? 

K.L. Cook: Yes, I’m about a third of the way into a novel, The Man Who Fell from the Sky, which focuses on the man Laura marries.  He’s also an important character in a few of the Last Call stories.  This book is, in effect, the third book in what I like to think of as the Last Call Trilogy.  If The Girl from Charnelle is a love letter to my mother, then this new novel is one for my father.  I am currently the age that my father was when he died, so this is a particularly significant moment in my life to be writing this novel.  The book, of course, is fiction and largely invented, but his spirit animates the novel—which doesn’t, by the way, necessarily make it easier to write. 

Lucrecia Guerrero:  You are a professor at Prescott College in Arizona and Spalding University’s MFA Program in Writing.  How do you arrange your schedule in order to have time to write? 

K.L. Cook: It’s not always been easy to establish a daily routine, even though I do advocate the habit of art.  I’ve been teaching for more than two decades now.  I also have young children.  So it’s been a constant struggle to carve out consistent time to write.  I remember reading that when his kids were young, Raymond Carver would hole up in his car for twelve or fifteen hours just to find the silence to write the first draft of a story.  I understand that desperation.  What usually happens is that I write like mad during my times off—vacations, spring break, summer.  Since my last child was born, I have tried at least once a year to go away to an artist colony for four or five weeks.  Most of The Girl from Charnelle was written during several month-long stays at Blue Mountain Center, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.  Those colonies saved my creative life.  Now that my kids are a little older, and more self-sufficient (that is, they can make their own breakfasts and take baths without drowning and sort of look out for each other), I find that I have more time and emotional energy to write at home and throughout the year. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: Are there aspects of teaching which enrich your writing?

K. L. Cook: I know a lot of writers who feel that teaching is not good for their writing, that it saps them of the energy that should be funneled into their creative work, that it forces them to think too analytically about what is essentially an intuitive and mysterious process, and that the constant exposure to student writing deadens their own delight in language.  There’s not a writing teacher alive, myself included, who hasn’t had to grapple with these issues at one time or another.  But teaching is as crucial a part of my identity as writing.  I love designing and fostering a community and an experience in which students can discover the pleasures of reading and the sometimes deeper pleasure of writing their own stories.  I’m fortunate in that I teach a lot of literature courses in addition to fiction workshops.  I relish the opportunities that my classes give me to revisit Shakespeare or Faulkner or Doctorow or Louise Erdrich or Tim O’Brien, to think about literature in terms of family systems or the thread of the American Dream, or as a touchstone for the way our private lives intersect with our public lives.  Working with both undergraduate and graduate writers on their stories, novels, and essays makes me think harder about the nature and aim of fiction and about the practicalities and implications of craft decisions.  It keeps my mind nimble and keeps me in the river of language.  I spend a lot of time writing letters to my students, responding at length to their work. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: You said earlier that your training in theatre has affected your writing.  Has that training also affected your teaching?  Have you adapted any specific exercises for teaching theatre to teaching writing?

K.L. Cook: Teaching, for me, is a kind of performance.  I like my classes to feel a bit like a carnival with lots of laughter and opportunities to play with whatever material we’re looking at, whether it’s Othello or a student manuscript.  But I don’t necessarily see myself as the performer and them as the audience.  I see my job as a director or facilitator of an experience in which we’re all participants.  The experience will always be different because the students are different, but it’s my job to help them discover the material for themselves, just as an experienced director helps actors discover individual moments as well as what actors call the super-objective, the emotional through-line.  A lot of the questions that I ask of students, when discussing their work, are questions that are routine for actors: What do your characters want?  What do they fear?  How do they go about getting what the want and confronting or avoiding what they fear?  What secrets are they keeping from others or themselves?  What form or style does this material require of you? 

Lucrecia Guerrero: There has been much debate about the value of MFA programs for writers.  You studied in an MFA program and now teach at another.  Do you feel there is anything to the criticisms against MFA programs? 

K. L. Cook: I encourage any young writer thinking about entering a writing program to avoid teachers who don’t believe that writing can be taught.  The truth is that most of the best writing published today is written by people who have been, at some point in their apprenticeships, students in creative writing workshops or who now teach in writing programs.  Workshops are full of wildly divergent sensibilities and serve as great laboratories for aesthetics; groups of writers come together and are forced to think carefully about what a story or poem or play is and how it behaves or, even better, how it misbehaves.  I find that students have more often than not read the workshop story three or more times and have written extensive notes about it, really interrogated it—something that many literature students and most editors don’t feel inclined to do.  Also, workshop participants are pretty good at recognizing talent and genius when they see it.  The truly original work is inevitably praised and the weaker work is handled, for the most part, generously but fairly.  Besides all that, the MFA program offers one of the few opportunities in the writer’s life to devote concentrated time to honing both vision and craft.  The world, for the most part, doesn’t want you to be an artist, doesn’t really care if you write a poem or novel or play.  For the two or three years of an MFA program, you are at least in a community that honors that dream and provides time and fellow artists and (sometimes) money to support it. 

Lucrecia Guerrero: I’m sure you’ve heard of the so-called “workshop story.”  What is your take on this issue?

K. L. Cook: I’ve never really understood what is meant by the so-called “workshop story,” even though I’ve been a student or teacher in hundreds of workshops.  Critics of workshops might argue that I can’t see it because I’m so ensconced.  My best guess is that it’s a catch-all criticism for any story that is technically competent but boring.  When reviewers, editors, or cultural critics use the term, they often mean that the work is parochial or narcissistic—concerned with suburban malaise, family dysfunction, or the small disturbances of the self.  Of course, if you take away all the literature that’s been written about suburban malaise, family dysfunction, and the small disturbances of the self, then you have eliminated most literature.  I’m always surprised and often impressed with the rich variety and ambition of work I see from students, even if the work may not be in its final brilliant incarnation.  And the students get better.  You see them, just over the course of the few short months of a quarter or semester, grow.  They make smarter decisions about narrative strategy and become more skilled, and often inspired, in terms of developing their stories or novels.  I like to tell the skeptics who ask me if writing can be taught that I can’t teach brilliance but I can certainly nurture talent.  We all have stories to tell.  The workshop is a good place to explore ways of telling those stories with greater agility, urgency, and resonance.

Issue 73 (Winter 2010) of Glimmer Train Stories

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Q&A by Hannah Tinti

Where did the idea of this story come from?
My grandmother was the original writer in the family—a reporter and editor in the Texas Panhandle for close to sixty years before her death. In her late eighties, she was still filing three stories a week for The Childress Index. Her life was not an easy one, but I always admired her fierce devotion to her vocation as a journalist. The character of Loretta is based on her, though the plot is all fiction.

Most of your work is set in Charnelle, Texas . What keeps bringing you back to this small, panhandle town?
I have set other stories and novels in different places, but Charnelle is a place of my own invention, cobbled together from many small towns encircling Amarillo . I’ve always been inspired by writers who have carved out their imaginary postage stamps of the universe, to paraphrase Faulkner. I’m thinking of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, but also of Louise Erdrich’s North Dakota, Larry McMurtry’s Thalia, James Joyce’s Dublin, Alice Munro’s rural Ontario, Richard Russo’s Mohawk, Charles Baxter’s Five Oaks...the list goes on and on. We’re talking about the place of the heart. I was born and spent a significant part of my life in the Texas Panhandle. Although I haven’t lived there in more than twenty-five years, it’s still the place my imagination naturally returns to with a mixture of pain, love, and ambivalence—a good mix for fiction.

“Filament” drifts seamlessly between many different points of view. Why did you choose to tell the story this way, going into each character’s mind?
I’ve long wanted to write a story using full-blown omniscience—a voice able to move forward and backward in time and, catlike, in and out of the consciousness of many different characters. The omniscient point of view is particularly well-suited to stories that focus on a community rather than one or two individuals. I loved the liberation and the generosity of this point of view. I didn’t just want to write Loretta’s story; I was interested in the way the other characters, and even the town itself, are all drawn in and irrevocably affected by the murder. So my forays, some brief and some more extensive, into the perspectives of Blue, the children, Fortney, the sheriff, Hef Givens, and others are an important part of the conception and vision of the story.

What was the most challenging aspect of writing this story?
I loved writing in the omniscient voice. I loved telling a more novelistic story. I love reading these kinds of narratives—by Tolstoy, Sherwood Anderson, and Chekhov, as well as Joan Silber, Annie Proulx, and Alice Munro. The challenge is: how to tame the beast? My early drafts were much longer and covered many more years in the lives of the characters, both before and after the murder. Although I’m pleased with this version of the story, these characters and this world are still very much alive for me, which may mean that I also have a novel on my hands. That would be a good thing.

The descriptions of Blue’s welding job, and the piece of filament in his eye, are so precise. Do you have any experience in this line of work, or is it just the result of good research?
My grandfather was a skilled welder and still owned his own welding shop until the day he died, in his nineties. I vividly remember those burn holes in his work shirts and coveralls and the way his skin was pocked with small heat blisters. My great nightmare—imagining his world when I was a child and later as a writer—was the possibility of hot steel in the eye. How that possibility could change the course of a whole life became the guiding metaphor for the story.

“Filament” feels like a tragic love story. How you can love someone and hate them at the same time. Was that what you set out to write? Or was it more about the promise of beginnings?
Both of those interpretations are good readings of the story—though I’m not sure I could have articulated those themes when I began writing it. I do know this: whenever an event or a relationship contains contradictory emotions—characters feeling many things simultaneously—I know I’m on the right track. Marriage offers the richest, most complicated kind of relationship, especially for people for whom divorce or separation is not a readily available option. The promise of beginnings—I like the sound of that. Looking back on my work, I see that I have clearly been obsessed with the long-term promises we make not only to others (spouses, lovers, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends) but more importantly to ourselves. There’s always an interesting story embedded in the way we negotiate those promises and how we sometimes come circuitously around to our original aspirations, as I believe Loretta does. She wants to be a journalist; her marriage and motherhood derail that promise she made to herself. How she negotiates that derailment seems to me to be one of the things the story is about.

What’s next for Loretta? Will she ever be a reporter?
Oh, yes. Even though I cut the extended epilogue about her career in journalism, everything is spelled out in the first paragraph of the story: Blue’s death and her return to her vocation.

How does this story, “Filament,” connect with the others in your forthcoming collection, Love Songs for the Quarantined(scheduled for publication in fall 2011)?
They’re all love songs—love stories—but love songs for those who have been quarantined or have quarantined themselves. Literally in some cases. Always figuratively.

How long did it take you to complete this story?
I started writing a draft in Wyoming in the summer of 2007 and continued to expand and revise it, while also working on other stories in the collection. That’s normal for me. Stories take a long time to simmer, and I enjoy that process. I also enjoy the way the different stories simmer together, counterpointing and calling to one another.

What are you working on now?
I just finished a draft of a novel about a character from some earlier stories—a man who once schemed to buy Costa Rica, a scheme that went disastrously wrong. A significant portion of the book takes place in my fictional town of Charnelle.

What is the best bit of advice about writing you have ever gotten?
Every story is a love song.

March 2005

Scene Missing: Please recommend a phrase to mutter under one's breath, moments after running out of bullets, crouched behind a rock, hearing the approaching footsteps of a rival.
K. L. Cook:  Sucken-rusen-rusen-frat!

SM: How would you recommend we recognize you in the land of sleep and dreaming?
KLC:   I’m a friendly, smiling soul, but I’m also the size of an NFL fullback with a dark beard and glasses, so in the land of sleep and dreaming I could very well be mistaken for Emmit Smith’s lead blocker or the bouncer at Lyzzard’s Lounge who is either going to toss you in the street or read you a Rilke poem. 

SM: What do you think would be a good opening line for a romance novel?
KLC:  Here’s the opening line from the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, The Girl from Charnelle, which has plenty of romance in it:  “She’d only tasted beer before, never champagne; it was sweet and sharp and stung high in her head.” 

SM: What is the first thing you want to know on arriving in a strange city?
KLC: Where’s the nearest bathroom because I always drink too many liquids on planes, and airplane bathrooms are woefully small for a man my size! 

SM: Please tell us a brief anecdote to enliven our evening/afternoon/morning.
KLC:  Last fall, my family and I embarked on a 9-week book tour—a self-funded affair, what I called “The Great Futon Tour” since we depended on the hospitality of friends and family.  At the end of October, we stayed in Nashville with my sister-in-law, who was 9 ½ months pregnant.  I was driving back there late from a gig in Memphis.   Within minutes of my arrival, my sister-in-law’s water broke.  My wife and I went to the hospital the next morning, kissed the new baby, and then I caught a ride, minutes later, with a colleague to Kentucky, where I would be teaching at another university.  That night my wife phoned to tell me that a friend and colleague of ours from Arizona had just been killed in a bicycling accident.  The next day, I flew to Austin for a book festival.  Two high school friends took me out on the town—Halloween Eve.  Within a 48-hour period, I had traveled to four different cities in three states, my niece was born, my friend had been tragically killed, I met about 250 writers, and I sleeplessly wandered, with the friends of my youth, down the streets of a strange city cram-packed with drunken vampires, monsters, ghouls, and Disney characters.   It was the most surreal 48 hours of my life.  

SM: Please invent an imaginary friend and an imaginary enemy, set them to dueling, and let us know who wins.
KLC:   Creating imaginary friends and enemies at odds with one another is my job.  When I’m stumped for a story idea, I give myself this task: create a character who wants something from another character (e. g., gold, love, a buffalo head nickel) that the other character doesn’t want to give up.  In my story, “Knock Down, Drag Out,” an oil-rigger, motivated by sun-induced hallucinations, returns from his offshore rig to rescue his estranged wife, who he believes is being seduced by their landlord.  She doesn’t appreciate his brand of chivalry, but determined to save her, the oil-rigger ties her up, puts her in the back of his pick-up truck, and drives away.   Of course he only thinks he won until he hears her in the truck bed, “squirming, rocking slightly from side to side, crying, calling to him in what now seemed like a song he’d heard long ago, a lament or hymn.” 

SM: What aspect of your work are you proudest of?
KLC:  Several years ago my writing seemed dead to me.  I went to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and was housed in this amazing chateau where Leonard Bernstein had written his requiem mass for John F. Kennedy.  None of the projects I brought with me—an unfinished book of stories and the beginning of a novel—seemed any good.  I walked around the snowy acres for a week, expecting the fraud police to boot me out of the colony for impersonating a writer.  About a week and a half in, I began a long, sentimental love letter to my wife.  I couldn’t stop.  I laughed and wept for hours as I wrote.  By the end of my stay, it was 135 pages.  I titled it Private Magic, bound it, and gave to my wife as an anniversary present.  Writing that letter reminded me that writing is supposed to be a gift—for others and for yourself—not a job to be dreaded.   After that, I was able to finish both the collection and the novel.  But Private Magic—a deeply embarrassing, sentimental book that no one but my wife will ever read—is what I’m proudest of. 

SM: When was the last time you drank to excess?
KLC:  I could report a shameful and harrowing story, but my wife tells me that this is just the sort of thing that would pop up first on Google and Yahoo.

SM: What was your last good deed?
KLC:  Last November I visited my mother and grandmother in Childress, Texas as part of my book tour.  They set me up with non-paying gigs at a high school, an assisted-living center, and a prison: all captive audiences with no money to buy books.  I was nervous about the prison.  I’d never been inside one before, much less addressed a large group of inmates.   The other two events were okay, but those inmates were great, eager for stories, eager to have someone there who didn’t condescend to them.   Laughing with them about the way stories can clarify, lighten, and even save our lives was one of the best moments of my professional life.  

SM: Please compose a brief poem or haiku on the subject of your choosing.
KLC:  I’m not a good poet, but my good friend Joe Schuster (who is actually a fiction writer as well) wrote this series of wonderful haikus that he encouraged me to give to my students or to myself (depending on my mood):

            Work moved me to tears
            Not of joy but something else:
            Pinprick in raw skin

            Such a waste of paper,
            Impossible writer:
            Brazil deforest’d

            Think of something else:
            Sewer cleaning, plumbing, crime.
            But write no more. Please.

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Harper Perennial “P. S.” - The Girl From Charnelle

Why did you set the novel in 1960?   The novel grew out of my fascination with characters from my first book, Last Call, a collection of linked stories that spans thirty-two years in the life of the Tate family.  In the final story, “Penance,” a middle-aged Laura Tate reflects back on her life and tries to make sense of it, and she feels that the hole at the center is her mother’s mysterious disappearance in 1958.  There are other stories in that book by Gene and Rich and Gloria’s family, and even a series of stories told from Laura’s son’s perspective.  I decided to go back to 1958 and explore the circumstances surrounding Mrs. Tate’s disappearance, the primal event in the family’s history.  I was also interested in the immediate shockwaves it sent through the family.  That sequence of stories opens Last Call (and they also serve as the italicized 1958 sections in The Girl from Charnelle). When I finished Last Call, I discovered that I wasn’t finished with the Tates.  In particular, I was fascinated by Laura.  I wanted to know what happened right after her mother left.  I knew what happened to the family members much later in their lives, the people they would become.  I also knew, from my many conversations with my mother and her family, that while we may think of the late fifties and early sixties as a simpler time, it wasn’t in reality.  The kinds of moral, emotional, political, racial, psychological, and sexual issues facing people then felt just as perplexing to them as they feel to us today.  The Girl from Charnelle was my attempt to explore that complexity.  The process of writing fiction, for me, is also an act of compassion.  And one of my goals in writing about this time (before I was born) was to try to imagine what it may have been like for someone like my mother to be a teenager finding her way in what she may have felt was a fractured world.  I should also mention that once I knew I was writing a novel that would take place in 1960, I started asking what was happening then—culturally and politically.  What kind of parallels could I draw between the world of 1960 and the early part of the twenty-first century?  That’s how the presidential election and the thematic strand of the literature of the American Dream began to make their way into the novel. 

How would the novel differ if it was set in current times?  Oh, the cultural milieu is very different now.  But I do think that the emotional and psychological dilemmas facing teenagers (and adults) have not changed that much.  How do we make our way in the world?  How do we balance our love for our families and our communities with our desires, which may not be very wholesome?  Who do we turn to when the people we most love and depend upon have left us?  What kind of emotional legacy is created by the actions of our parents and siblings?  What do we do with the secret life that we all have, and how does that secret life affect others?  What happens when the “Yes” and the “No” in our lives become inextricably entangled?  I think those are issues that we all struggle with.  They have been around forever and are never going to go away. 

Throughout the novel, Laura reflects on various stories, novels, plays, essays, and movies.  What role do these texts serve in her life and in your novel?   Literature and films have played a huge role in my own life.  I have been a voracious reader since I was a kid.  As a literature and writing teacher, I believe passionately in the power of stories and language to illuminate and even transform our lives.  I like to joke with my students that literature, a liberal arts education, and the love of a good woman saved my life.  Though I say it in a light-hearted way, it’s the truth.  I think, especially when we are younger, we use stories and films as a way of making sense of our experiences.  I wanted Laura to feel that all of her experiences—what she’s listening to on the radio, what she’s reading in school, what she’s watching on television, and what she’s seeing at the Charnelle Drive-In or the Amarillo Paladian Theater—are vibrating with resonance.  I wanted these “texts” to seem to her like a refracted mirror of her inner life.  Her teacher, Dwight Sparling, articulates that explicitly in the middle of the book, but I wanted Laura to have already experienced the feeling that her life was intersecting with the world around her, including the literary and cinematic world.  So pieces of literature and popular culture such as Conrad’s Secret Sharer, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and “Wakefield” and “Young Goodman Brown,” Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, Hitchcock’s Psycho, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” start to seem very personal to her, as if these writers and filmmakers are commenting specifically on her inner life. 

What are you working on now?  A new novel that focuses on the man Laura eventually marries.  Loosely inspired by the life of my father, it spans twenty years, from 1962-81.  Whereas The Girl from Charnelle is about being part of a small community and deciding whether or not to leave that community, and on what terms, this new novel is more nomadic in its setting and its themes, with the characters constantly roaming—from Oklahoma to Charnelle, from post-assassination Dallas to the Costa Rican jungles and ultimately to the desert of Las Vegas on the brink of the Reagan presidency.  A section of the novel will appear next year in Glimmer Train Stories.

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