One Woman's Writing Retreat: Interview

By Catherine Tudor

CT: How long have you been writing? When did you first realize you would write a novel?

KM: I started writing in 1980, so it's been 21 years now. Writing was not something that I had dreams of doing, and I came to it late in life, compared to many writers. I was 25 years old before I actually started. I've never taken a creative writing course and in fact started out my undergraduate career as a Chemistry major. After two years of the hard sciences, however, I grew bored with college and for a while considered dropping out and doing something else. Before I got around to doing that, however, I experimented with courses I'd never tried before, and had a quarter at the University of Minnesota, Morris, where I took philosophy, drawing, music, and a course in understanding poetry. I was so amazed at the complexity of poetry, at the things that writers accomplished with it, that I changed majors and went on to get an English major. (My science friends thought I was copping out, and I couldn't convince them that English actually was as difficult as chemistry and physics.)

I went on to get a Master's degree at Washington State University, with the sole intention of teaching at a college. After I graduated I got a job at Black Hills State University, and the first year I was here went to a regional writing conference with a couple of people who became very good friends. The major thing that had kept me from creative writing courses in college was my feeling that I simply couldn't write well enough; I had so much respect for the writers I'd studied and the things they were able to do that I never even considered that I could attempt it. At this writers' conference, however, there were many local and apprentice writers attending, and when I heard them read, I thought to myself: "I can write that well." My two friends, Tom Herbeck and Wendy Mendoza, had a similar thought, and on the way home--packed into a Chevette for a seven hour drive across the state--we decided to form a writer's group and meet to critique each other's work. For four years, then, we met once a week and did so--and these two people are the ones who really taught me to write, and whose voices and criticisms I absorbed and made part of my own self-judgment.

I think that for me the period of not-writing was healthy. It gave me time to simply study writers and see what they did and how they did it, without concerning myself with my own ego and my own writing. I needed to swing the other way, though, too, and realize that even the great writers began as mediocre writers, and that the writing we study is writing that has gone through extensive crafting and revision.

When I began writing, I started with poetry, but quit because I don't think I do it well. My natural tendency is toward narrative, and even my poetry tended to emerge as small stories. When I turned to fiction, I actually wrote a novel before I wrote a decent short story. I've always been interested in the medieval period, and I wrote a novel, between 1980 and 1984 that was set in medieval England and concerned itself loosely with the Robin Hood legend. I was interested in pushing that legend back to the point when it was nothing but gossip--when people, before the age of newspapers, were talking about this character in Sherwood Forest. I had a great deal of fun with this novel, and though it doesn't seem, at the outset, to be much like The River Warren or my short stories, I think that it laid the foundation for my interest--which is so apparent in Warren--in storytelling itself as a means of knowing the world. Gossip is both the most basic form of story telling we have, and the most powerful. (It can literally change people's lives--chase them from a community, for instance). And it occurs only in defined communities, and actually serves to define the community, the limits of behavior within a community. (Something truly bad becomes news, and good behavior isn't talked about--gossip is told only about events which are questionable, which perhaps many people are tempted toward, but for the most part resist, and in talking about these events people in these communities are talking as much about themselves--their own desires, their own sense of restraint, their own temptations--as they are about the person they're talking about; they're trying to come to grips with their sense of values and morals and ethics, and they use the story to re-define those things.) This is the essential theoretical idea on which The River Warren is based--and I don't know if I could have arrived at this conception without first writing that original novel about Robin Hood.

I'm going on too long here, but I want to say one more thing: I found that I could finish a novel before I could write short stories. I spent five years trying to write a decent short story, and all of them were terrible. (A couple of years ago I went on a search-and-destroy mission, and I hope I found all those early stories and rid the world of them!) A novel is more forgiving of mistakes than a short story is. If you misconceive something in a novel, you have hundreds of pages to continue writing, but something wrong in a short story will screw it up badly, and prevent you from going on. A novel might still be opening up after 150 pages, but a short story has to be closing down already after the first paragraph. This intensity makes the short story, I think, very hard to write well--and it took me a long time to learn how to do it.

CT: Not only are you an accomplished author, you are an English professor at Black Hills State University. Teaching takes stamina and dedication. How do you make time to write?

KM: I'm an early riser--get up naturally around five in the morning. I spend the first half hour just drinking coffee and reading, then go to my office and write for the first three hours of the morning. I try to get two pages done a day. I take a long-term view; two a day is over 600 a year, and even with four or five drafts on each novel or story, it adds up.

Very small things can rob a writer of time and imagination, and I try to stay aware of them. For example, we started to get a morning paper, and for quite a while I got in the habit of reading the paper instead of a book in the morning. But a paper is addictive. There's always one more thing you can read. I got so I was finishing the entire paper--perhaps an hour or more of time--before I'd go back to write. And it would take me another half hour or so just to come out of the world of "happenings" into a frame of mind that would allow me to experience the fictional world I was working on. When you figure that I'm only allowing myself three hours or so each day to write, this is a huge problem. When I recognized it, I quit reading the paper in the morning and returned to books to wake up to--which can always be stopped when the coffee cup is empty, because I know I won't finish the book that morning anyway.

The same sort of thing is true of teaching. It's the sort of work that will always take more of a person, if he or she is willing to give it--always another comment a teacher could write, another handout he could prepare, another reference he could find. I simply try to recognize those things, and make actual decisions about their importance--and then not-do most of them. To talk like a football player, I don't give 110 percent to my classes. This doesn't mean that I shirk my responsibilities or don't take teaching seriously. I simply try to be conscious of the ways it can take more than is good or healthy for me, or my writing.

As a result of trying to be conscious of such things, I discovered that many of the things I'd thought I was doing for my students were actually things that had me taking responsibility for things they ought to have been responsible for. In teaching, as in writing, less is often more. I've devised ways of teaching that have my students doing more of the work, and me less--but that's just good teaching.

I think that a big factor in all this is guilt. It's very easy to feel guilty about writing, and about time taken from other things to write. But the real problem is guilt that isn't recognized and conscious. So I try to be very conscious of when I'm feeling guilty about not doing something else in order to write. If I can make it conscious I can deal with it and make a decision about it. It's unconscious guilt that shuts many writer/teachers down (or writers/mothers/fathers, etc.).

I do think also that developing a habit of writing is very important. It takes time, like any other habit, but if a new writer can give it two or three weeks, of just writing at a certain time of day, for a certain period of time, it will become an ordinary part of the day, and other things adjust to it, or you adjust your other activities to it. If I insist on writing during the first hours of the day, even when I feel pressured to get other things done, I find that I still get those things done. The writing merely forces me to make decisions about what is really important and what isn't.

A final note: I practice what I call "creative procrastination." Procrastination, like many other "negative" things, can be positively practiced. If I have to do something, and I know it's unavoidable, I tend to get on it right away and get it out of the way so that I can get back to what I consider important, without the distraction of the thing I don't want to do. But if it looks like something I'm expected or feel I ought to do might turn out to be unimportant, I wait until the last minute--and 90 percent of the time, it just fades into insignificance at the last minute, and so I save myself the bother of having done it. I much prefer to walk into a classroom under-prepared than over-prepared. If I'm under-prepared, it forces me to be more creative in my approaches to getting students to think harder in order to make use of the time. If I'm over-prepared, I tend to just present the information that I have--and I don't think that is necessarily good teaching.

CT: In your experience, is it talent, persistence, or attention to craft that makes a writer great?

KM: Probably the wisest thing I've ever read about writing is in John Irving's The World According To Garp. I may not quote it exactly, but somewhere in that novel, Irving says: "A writer finishes." He is comparing Garp, who finishes, to a friend of Garp's, who is a beautiful writer, but who does nothing but write a series of wonderful and powerful beginnings to novels. This friend is "a better writer" than Garp is--but she's never "a writer."

It seems to me that those three words--"A writer finishes"--answer this question completely. A bad finished book has a much better chance of seeing an audience than a great unfinished one does. By an extension of this reasoning, a writer finishing a bad first draft has a much better chance of turning it into a better second draft than a writer who begins a great first draft and then stops before he or she finishes it. And--since your question really concerns what makes a writer great--a hugely talented writer who never finishes anything is much less likely to go down in history as a "great" writer than one of above-average talent who manages to finish a few books--and perhaps, by doing so, writes one or two that capture something essential and enduring.

I'm actually more interested in asking "What does an individual writer have to do?" than I am in asking "What makes a writer great?" And what an individual writer has to do is finish. I know many, many talented writers who begin things, and then wear out and never finish them. Finishing is the hardest, the most onerous, the most boring and difficult task we have as writers. Anyone can write a fantastic first page--but finishing the implications of that page is where the real work lies, and many people won't put themselves through that work.

I would add to the list, then, the word "patience." It takes not only a great deal of perseverance, but also a great deal of patience, to finish something. Perseverance is the ability to continue to write in spite of difficulties and setbacks; patience is the ability to wait for a book to reveal itself, to not force it into places it won't go, to keep writing and looking and waiting for things to make sense. In my own experience--perhaps it's just the way my mind works--it takes me about three drafts just to find out how a book hangs together and what is happening in it and who the characters are and what they're doing in this particular book. Consequently the first two drafts can be incredibly difficult to get through; they can seem like a mishmash of mumbo jumbo that has no direction and no focus. I'm currently working on a new novel. I wrote 160 pages on the first draft before the story shut down on me and I found it extremely difficult to go further. I pushed it as far as I could, then started over. ("Finishing" doesn't necessarily mean finishing every draft; it means, for me, doing what it takes to eventually finish a draft, any draft.) If a book blocks, the problem is going to be somewhere else than where the block is occurring--probably somewhere very early in the book. So I started the second draft, and I thought I "had" the book, and got to 320 pages--and then it shut down, and for a while I just wrote a bunch of stuff that didn't really fit--skipped ahead, for instance, and wrote a possible ending, just to see if I could figure something out from that, and wrote about some minor characters, just to . . . well, just to keep writing, to do something besides mope and feel sorry for myself.

Finally, though, I realized I had to start over again. I'd been resisting it, because I'd really wanted to reach the end with the second draft, and I thought I could. But I was only about thirty pages into the third draft--which, by the way, began with something I'd written on page 289 of the second draft--when I took a long walk one Sunday afternoon, thinking about the novel, and had one of those "Eureka" moments, and realized why most of what was happening in the novel was happening. I'd essentially written all those pages without knowing the real plot and motivation behind what was happening. And when I realized that single thing, that single reason (I'm sorry to be vague, but if I start to explain what that reason was, I'll end up summarizing the entire novel, and I want to avoid that), a dozen other things locked into place. And what is really strange is that one of those minor characters I'd written about suddenly became significant in the book, and part of this new understanding.

The persistence part of all this is continuing to write in spite of the difficulties. The patience part is remaining receptive to the book, waiting for it to reveal itself.

In a similar way, The River Warren started off as a third-person narration, concerned primarily with Jeff Gruber. It blocked about 150 pages into the first draft, and at that point I began to write in a few first person voices, just to hear the characters, just to see what they might reveal that might allow me to go on. When I started the second draft, though, the first person narration seemed far more interesting to me than the third-person had--so I began to write the entire novel in first-person voices. And through that, the idea of writing in the form of small-town gossip emerged. Pop Bottle Pete, if my memory serves me well, didn't even enter the book until the third draft--and he's, of course, absolutely crucial to the novel in its present form.

For what it's worth (I think this has something to do with all this!), I write all but the final drafts of my novels and stories on a manual typewriter. ( I own four Hermes 3000 manuals, one retired, two in use, one for parts). When I re-write, I don't see myself so much as re-writing as I see myself writing a whole new book, and plagiarizing from the earlier drafts as it's useful. Using a manual typewriter forces me to re-type the entire thing--and this frees the book completely from its original drafts and my own original conceptions. I tried using a computer for drafting quite a few years ago, but found that it tended to trap me within the earlier drafts. Because a computer allows certain things to be done easily, I got caught in doing those easy things--limited, if you will, by the computer's capabilities, its programming. Most people regard computers as a freeing technology for writers, but I find them to be just the reverse. There is nothing more freeing than a brand new blank page. If I'm re-typing an entire book (which, truthfully, isn't that onerous or time-consuming a task, compared to the thinking time involved in writing), it's as easy to type something brand new as it is to re-type and slightly change something old. Thus there's no incentive to stay with what I've already written, and I'm free in every way to use the old if I find it good, or invent something entirely new. I think that is a powerful thing, and it allows for vast and sweeping changes in conception.

I know, of course, that many writers use computers and use them successfully. What I'm describing here is merely what works for me, and it may or may not make sense for other writers. I do believe, though, that creative activity in general depends on inefficiency, because inefficiency is the avenue by which smallness and insignificance can be recognized as largeness and significance. Inefficiency allows the small and insignificant and irrelevant to be produced, and only when they are produced can they gain potency to effect change in thinking and conception. Perhaps all truly human endeavor depends on inefficiency. Injecting efficiency, or even its pretense, into creative activity strikes me as a good way to kill it. So I'm rather proud of how inefficient I am in my process!

CT: You write honestly and compassionately about the harsh realities of farm life. You delve into complex emotions without ever becoming sentimental or melodramatic. How have the land and the people of the Midwest inspired you? Would you ever be happy living somewhere else, like in a big city? Do you consider yourself a regional writer?

KM: Given the length I've gone on with the previous questions, I almost hate to even begin this one. I might never finish! I spent the first 18 years of my life farming. I didn't just live on the land, I lived with it, and it was driven into my consciousness--and skin--on a daily basis. I've written, in The Witness Of Combines, about how this influenced me, how it formed a sense of myth in me, of living in a world larger than the present. I grew up with a sense of big land, big waters, and great age--this latter coming primarily, as I write in "Old Waters," an essay in that book, from my awareness of the glaciers that gouged the upper Midwest thousands of years ago.

In response to what you say about sentimentality and melodrama, perhaps a more specific response is required. I don't like sentimentality in literature (what writer does?), and I try to avoid it. But perhaps some of the sense you're feeling there does come from a background of living with animals on a practical and daily basis--not as pets but as a way of survival. In such a situation, I suppose, one learns to avoid sentimentality. While it's possible to become attached to the animals on a farm, even children on farms are aware that those animals have a real and practical purpose, and that learned sense perhaps has emerged in my writing as an adult. Even the pets on a farm--and we had them, cats all over the place, several dogs--died in the course of my childhood, and I grew up, perhaps, with a sense of natural loss. And the death of my father when I was sixteen reinforced this.

I doubt I'd be happy living in a city. I find it difficult to stay in a city for more than a few days. While I love those few days, I soon find myself frustrated by my inability to walk out of a city. I mean this quite literally. I'm a jogger and a walker. In the town where I currently live, I can begin to run, and within five minutes--about a half mile--I will be out of town, with nothing but sky and space and Crow Peak to the west, and snow in the winter and wild flowers in the summer, and deer in the evenings and. . . . But when I've been in a city, and I take a run, I can run for a half hour, or more, and I'm still in the city. The kind of variety, and subtlety of expression in the land, and the openness, that I get when I run out of town, is simply unavailable to me in a city. A city seems much more monochromatic to me than open land does. It could be my eye, of course; perhaps city dwellers find cities endlessly variable because they've trained their eye to see the differences, and so a walk may be refreshing, but for me, walking or running in a city feels more like just exercise than anything else. A lot of cars go by, and a lot of buildings stand, but I can't find the variety and subtlety that I do in open country.

I don't know what to say about the "regional" question. I write about people who live within a particular place, and I write about them, I believe, without cynicism or superiority. I try to understand them at a level deeper than they understand themselves. Perhaps that makes me a regional writer. On the other hand, if I do achieve that depth of understanding, I would assume that such depth transcends regionalism. The question may come down to whether I achieve that depth or not, and that question isn't for me to answer.

I do know that when I started to write fiction, I had a hard time identifying tension in the lives of the people I wrote about. Only after years of thinking about it--and actually noticing what I actually did write about--did I realize that people in the West and Midwest tend to hide their tensions so successfully that they can look like they don't have them. But in truth, what they do is divert their tensions into something else. If I can speak in stereotypes just to make a point, if a stereotypical East Coast city dweller has a problem with you, you'll know it; he or she will be in your face, and the tension will be dealt with. But if a stereotypical Midwesterner has a problem with you, you may have no idea at all; you'll just wonder why your dog is limping. Because Midwesterners are so successful at hiding their tensions, these tensions can drag on for years--and then if something breaks them into the open they drag an entire life along. I think that some of my short fiction, and The River Warren also, accomplish this--or I hope they do; the immediate tension in many of my stories, the one that the story seems to be "about" is actually only the surface tension, and the real ones are years-old, and very deep, and as the story progresses they get revealed. I think it can produce very powerful stories--and I suppose that that kind of story is, to some extent, regional.

CT: How do you feel about the ravages against the small family farm, how progress, development, and corporations seem to be winning out over the land and a way of life?

KM: I don't feel good about it at all. But to be honest in considering this issue, the things you mention here have won out over land and a way of life since long before the present era. If you take a long-range historical view, the Native Americans who lived on this continent before European settlement had a way of life that lost out to these very things also, Manifest Destiny being just another name for "progress," and the U.S. cavalry being the primary way that "development" was encouraged. I sometimes think, in my more pessimistic moods, that all but a minority of the rich in this country are being forced onto various "reservations" by the forces of uncontrolled, corporate capitalism and the religion of development. I've written in an essay titled "Abandoned Farmsites, Yuppies, Drug Wars, and Geese," about these things. One of the premises of that essay is that as more and more land is bought up and controlled by fewer and fewer people, it is turning into a luxury as opposed to its more traditional conception as a necessity. And when it turns into a luxury, the traditional and communal ways of living on it break down. This, however, as I say, is not a new thing, but rather an extension of an old thing. And it seems one of the hardest things in the world to fight, or to stop, or to even slow down. It is so engrained in our system that everything supports it.

A few years ago I and many other people in the town where I live tried to stop a street project that was going to cost us a lot of money and destroy old trees and do other unpleasant things. And we stopped it; we got out the petitions and did the work, and got the votes, and over-rode the City Council. And six months later, they simply passed the proposal again. They could pass it with a few words, but for us to stop it required all that work again. It's far too easy to wear the opposition out when things are set up that way. Our system makes an assumption toward development and progress, and the fight is always against it. The example I've given is a small one, and maybe it's not right on-target concerning the question, but I think it indicates how the system works--and has been working for a long, long time.

But if you want to take a truly long-range view, perhaps all of this started with the advent of agriculture, which, as Sean Kane points out in Wisdom of the Mythtellers, is the watershed event in human history, where humankind necessarily set itself against nature, or more accurately had to both cooperate with nature while fighting it at the same time. Once land is enclosed and crops are raised, it becomes possible to store wealth for the future, and it becomes possible to hoard, and that means it becomes possible to get rich, which makes it possible to be poor. And all of this makes it possible for the richer to buy out the poorer and . . . by now I'm way out on a limb, of course. My point, if it can be a simple point--which, obviously, it can't--is that modern ways of thinking are embedded in a long history and a deep and lasting way of knowing the world, and often the very things that most disturb us are also the things that most make us who we are.

CT: Does Cloten, Minnesota exist? If not, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a fictional setting?

KM: Cloten, Minnesota is a fictional town. I suppose that Morgan, Minnesota, my home town, serves in a very general way as its model, but only in the vaguest way. Cloten and Morgan are different in their characteristics, though the land surrounding them is similar. I spent a lot of time on the Minnesota River when I was younger, and the river scenes in the novel are based on land I know well.

As far as advantages/disadvantages, I try as much as I can to clearly create and maintain a fictional world when I write fiction. Frankly, I don't see how anyone can write a novel based on his/her life; for me the difference between fiction and non-fiction is quite clear and distinct, and if I try to turn life into fiction, I just end up with a mess. I think the two forms make meaning differently, and are read differently, and do everything differently. So when I write fiction--though I may borrow from the real world, and obviously have to do so--once I begin to actually write, I try to make that borrowing a thing that is no longer part of this universe but a thing solely and completely a part of the fictional universe. Thus, the Minnesota River is a part of my own universe, and the River Warren, its great glacial precursor is also a part of this universe--but when I use them in the novel, I try to feel them as a part of that fictional universe and not this one. I don't know if any of this really makes much sense, but I think that the word "universe" is an important one; a fiction writer isn't just writing about fictional characters or fictional places but instead about an entire fictional universe, which quite often has rules and laws and histories like our own--but nevertheless is a thing entirely distinct from ours, with a semi-permeable membrane between it and our universe. (Non-fiction, on the other hand, is about our universe directly, and so is read more directly, without the membrane between it and the reader's universe. This is the reason it's possible to write non-fiction directly about ideas, since they relate directly to this universe, whereas trying to make fiction be about ideas tends to ruin it. The ideas in fiction have to be formed in this universe, by the reader, through the membrane of metaphor and symbol and relationships).

CT: In The River Warren you get inside the head of many diverse characters, each narrating in first person. You also explore different points of view with great skill in your short stories. You write as a mother, a young man, a doctor, a town gossip . . . In The River Warren, you even write from the perspective of a retarded man called Pop Bottle Pete. How do you get so deeply into character? Is it ever a challenge? A risk?

KM: For me, voice is the heart and soul of narrative fiction. I always feel that if I get the voice right, everything else will eventually come along. Voice is first, of course, the rhythms and the ways of language use, and second, the underlying emotional response to the world that a character has. (I don't mean specific emotional responses to specific situations, but the way the character feels in general about herself, the world, others). If I begin to hear these things in a voice (and "hearing" is crucial; I really listen for the voice), then other things begin to cohere--for instance, the metaphors a character uses, the ways he/she understands the world through similes; or the things the character notices or ignores in the world, the details of sound, sight, scent that the character perceives. This sense of perception--what a character notices and doesn't--strikes me as the very heart of character development, perhaps the most intimate and unknowable aspect of character there is--and therefore one that a writer has to work hard to know. We notice particular things in the world precisely because they mean something to us, so that when I'm writing, I try to ask myself constantly, "Why did she mention that, why notice that?" Or again, "Why would he compare his son to that?"

If all of these things start to work, then you're onto a sense of the character's obsessions (which may be small or large), and obsessions, if you can understand them, can really drive fiction.

I'm speaking primarily of first-person voices, but all this is true for a third-person voice, too. To return to my comments on the universe of fiction above, the author of a fiction can never also be the narrator. In fact, that is one way to look at the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and how they make meaning. In non-fiction, the author, the subject of the writing, and the reader are all in this universe of time and space. In fiction, the author and the reader are in this universe, but the subject and its narrator are in a different one. Since the author can't have witnessed or known the fictional events she's writing about, she must necessarily be inventing a narrator who could have. So even in a third-person voice, the author must be inventing a narrator.

And the clear sense of this narrator is necessary to retaining the sense of a real fiction. Very good writers might be able to fuzz the edges, but when I work with college students in creative writing classes, I find that it's easier to get them to experience the real sense of writing fiction by asking them to write in voices very, very different from their own--to move them to a first person voice that isn't theirs. They may have trouble hearing the voice at first, but once they do, that voice will naturally preserve the integrity of the fictional universe. If they write in a third-person voice much like their own, they're more likely to collapse back into their own voice, and then just re-tell a story from this world, rather than re-invent one in another world.

Is writing in all these various voices a risk? Yes, I suppose it is. You might really screw up. It took me years to generate the courage--or perhaps just the insight--to write in a woman's voice for instance. But I do believe that imagination allows it. If we can't write in voices different from our own, that would suggest to me that neither can we read and understand anything not written in a voice like our own, because we would be unable to re-imagine, or re-create, that voice in our own heads as we read. And if that's true, then literature has no connective power, no power to break down barriers, and imagination is useless. So there's risk in writing in voices unlike one's own, but it's a risk that is perhaps similar to the moral risk we take whenever we try to connect to others and try to understand them. We could really screw up--but we can't isolate ourselves just because of that.

And, truthfully, I think the greatest risk a writer can take may be writing in the first person, non-fiction voice--in other words, in one's own voice. If you reveal too much, or in the wrong way, or even just say something exceptionally stupid, it points directly back to you. That may be a much greater risk than writing in a fictional voice where you might get the voice wrong, but at least if the character says something too intimate or stupid, it's his or her problem, not yours!

CT: One of the many aspects I admire about your work is your pacing. You have a way of drawing the reader in and not letting go. You explore many sides of a situation with insight, yet you manage to remain concise. Is structure a conscious effort on your part or does the story grip you, too?

KM: Structure is one of those things I need patience for; I wait for it to make itself known. It seems like an absolutely crucial aspect of writing narrative to me, but, to use old terms, it's more organic than artificial for me, I think. My awareness of its necessity and significance is conscious, so I'm consciously aware of seeking it; but it tends to emerge slowly, through successive drafts, and in that sense it's unconscious. Whenever I begin a new draft I begin differently. I change the starting point, or I add chapter headings or delete them, or any of a number of things that force me to re-conceive the book. And these are structural changes, and they can be very powerful. Structural changes have the power to absolutely blow a book open, to reveal things of huge import. Usually, I think, when a draft blocks up, the reason is because of something structural very early in it--and changing the structure, even a tiny bit, can resonate throughout the book.

I'm not sure why this is, but I have some ideas. I suspect that beneath structure is the very deep question of time. Structure in a narrative is actually the answer to the question: How does time pass? Does it pass chronologically? Do the past and present and future exist all at once, and if so, is that all-at-once within a chapter, a paragraph, or even a single sentence? How are flashbacks handled? How does the past impinge on the present? Does the future influence the present? As an example of what I mean, one of the most obvious structural elements in The River Warren is the use of white space, and of distinct chapters that make no attempt to segue into each other. In those abrupt chapter changes, immense amounts of time can pass, and the reader has to supply that passage. So the novel is saying something, I think, about what time is, or at least how human beings make use of it and perceive it. When you change structure, you're changing the answers to questions about such things, and the repercussions therefore can be huge. In many ways, of course, the philosophical base of all narrative is this question of time--what is it, and how does it work, and how do human beings relate to it? But yes--once a structure sets in and is "right" for the book, it tends to grip me, and seems to tell me where to go.

I should add this very practical thing, though, too; the last thing I do with a book is edit it. I love editing, and I do it pretty fiercely. My favorite part of writing is cutting things out, and my favorite part of cutting things out is finding those things I thought were great and seeing how all they really were was me trying to impress myself, and slashing them. When I go from the penultimate to the final draft of a book or story, I reduce it, on the average, by 20 percent, just by finding the excess words and phrases and squeezing them out. This may have quite a bit to do with the sense of pacing you mention. The other side of the coin in all this, of course, is that in early drafts I allow myself to overwrite excessively, because I think it is in overwriting that we allow things to happen that we didn't expect. It's that notion of inefficiency again.

CT: Do you follow an outline when you write, or do you let the characters lead you where they want to go?

KM: I think I've answered this one already. I couldn't write from an outline if I tried--haven't written from an outline, in anything, since my high school English teacher forced me to. Writing early drafts is the way I find out what something is about, and I never know until I write.

CT: Your prose is rhythmic, profound, lyrical: poetic. The New York Times Book Review compared you to Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. Many writers despair over an internal editor that stifles their creativity sometimes on a daily basis. When I read your work I can't imagine you ever face that dilemma, your words all seem so effortless. Do you ever battle self-doubt? If so, how do you squelch it?

KM: Growing up on a farm, at least as I grew up, tends to teach you at a very young age to tackle anything--and it also teaches you that almost anything can be tackled successfully if you work at it hard enough and are willing to make some mistakes. You're right--I don't much know what it means to feel "stifled" in terms of creativity. I know what it means to hit points where I don't know what to do, where I have to spend weeks experimenting and working something out--but this seems to me to be more a technical problem, or a problem with the material, far more than it's a "mind" or "creativity" or "psychological" problem. I almost never feel that there's something in my mind or in my life itself that is shutting me down.

Part of this may be due--as I started out to say--to the fact that I grew up farming, and I learned very young to just do things. I learned that work pays off, that a little bit of work, done long enough and often enough, eventually turns into a lot of work; and I learned that there are very, very few mistakes that can't be corrected. It may take some cursing and blue air, and some expense and effort, to correct them--but they'll get corrected. As a result of learning these things young, I'll tackle almost anything, and I figure that I can learn what I don't know as I go. The first time I overhauled an engine on my own, I'd never done such a thing, with or without guidance--but I knew that if I made some mistake, which I did, there'd be a way to backtrack and correct it, and there was. Two years we added onto our house, and I decided to do most of the work myself. This included such things as the electrical wiring. I'd never done wiring in my life, but I thought that I could probably learn it, with a few books and a lot of advice from the local hardware store. Again, I made all sorts of mistakes at first, but they were correctable, and by the time I got done I'd learned how to do it pretty well.

The essence of these examples is that I believe most things we learn to do by doing them, and putting up with the mistakes and correcting them. It's possible to plan so much to do something, trying to learn everything and get it all down perfectly, that you never get around to doing it. The planning to do something actually becomes an excuse not to do it. I tend to operate in the opposite mode--just throwing myself into things with a minimum of preparation, and learn as I go.

This method, of course, has its own faults, but for a writer it's a good mental outlook, I think. It allows me to just start a novel without huge expectations for it, and without a lot of sense for where it might go--just a minimum sense, just enough to keep me writing for a while. And then I wait for the writing that I do to suggest more writing--and so on, until I hit a point where I can't go forward, at which point I start over and hope that what I've already written suggests a new and fruitful starting over point. (And if it doesn't, I'll start over again; "mistakes" can always be corrected.)

My greatest periods of self-doubt do occur in early drafts. There are times when I'm operating on nothing but faith in the process, and solely out of the habit and discipline of writing. I wake up at five in the morning. What else am I going to do at that time of the day besides write? So even when an early draft looks like nothing but a huge mistake, when nothing is working in it, when there's no drive or force behind the writing at all, I still have the purely physical habit operating to keep me writing. Sometimes that's all I have. That, and the very faint belief that eventually all this ought to amount to something are the only two things that keep me going. But so far it's been enough. If my goal is to write two pages a day, I can usually manage that, even if the writing is not doing much for me. And sometimes I have to shorten my goal, quite literally, to just that--get the two pages done and get out of that office. But if I can do that long enough, it seems I come out on the other side of the desert.

In any case, that sense of effortlessness, when I do achieve it, is a result of a lot of effort.

CT: What happens to you emotionally when you write? Do you enjoy the process or do you suffer?

KM: This is an extension of the previous answer. I hate early drafts. They're truly nothing but work. Even when certain parts of them are well-written, the lack of direction, the lack of any real sense of overall worth, makes it very difficult to enjoy the act of writing. "Suffer" is too strong a word for this, I think. The closest it comes to actual suffering occurs during those times when it seems it's never going to come together, and I wonder whether I'm fooling myself by thinking I can make a novel out of the original image or idea. But that's not suffering. After all, I chose to do this, and to call doubts about your ability to do something you chose to do "suffering" seems to me to dilute the meaning of the word. And it's such a powerful and noble word, and such an important one, that I hate to see it diluted by some comfortable, middle-class author who's worried that his next literary effort might not be well-received, or that he might not finish it.

As far as the enjoyment part, there are times of absolute euphoria. They're short lived, but I suppose they're one of the major reasons I go on writing. When a novel "breaks open," after a year and a half of work, and suddenly a dozen things make sense, and every word I write seems not a word I choose but a word that seems to come from the writing itself, seems more to flow through me than from me--when that happens, it's close to the feeling of falling in love again, as if I'm existing in a world all my own, floating through it, and the fictional world is larger than the real one, and more real. I feel untouchable then. It's wonderful. It's also all an illusion--but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it. (What is an illusion is the feeling of invincibility; the creative energy is not an illusion at all, nor the incredible experience of the language speaking itself and choosing itself).

CT: You have written a short story and based an entire novel on Simon "Two-Speed'' Crandall. Was this character based on anyone you knew? How much of your fiction is autobiographical?

KM: To answer the last question first, very little of my fiction is autobiographical. The story in Light In the Crossing that is the most autobiographical is "The Husker Tender." I did, in fact, work in a canning factory, and one summer we had a guy show up who did many of the things I describe in that story, and who claimed he was a Hell's Angel and who threatened the town with retribution if he got fired. So there are many elements of that story that are autobiographical, except that the narrator of the story is a combination of me and the actual Blue Hat who did the firing eventually. (I was only a Yellow Hat). But as soon as I make that narrator switch, the story ceases to be autobiographical, and takes on a life of its own; much of that story actually concerns the narrator, his own dreams and his failure to reach them or sometimes even to sense them. That isn't me; it's Darren Beckman, the narrator, and he's in a different world than I am, and the details of the story have to be freed from my own experience to become his.

Nevertheless, that story is closer to autobiography than any of the others. The stories may have brief elements borrowed from my life, but the stories themselves, their characters, relationships, plots, are all fictional. I think it was Henry James who said that a writer needs a very small thing that will ground a story, but he doesn't want too much, because then he can't make the rest up. I pretty much subscribe to that idea, though I've also made stories up without that grounding element, too.

I like urban folklore, as I like gossip--both, understand, in a professional sense. I think these basic kinds of stories are basic precisely because they're powerful, and if they're powerful, they're appealing to something in the human heart--and a writer can make use of that appeal and refine it. The River Warren contains two pieces of urban folklore within it. The first is a story I heard in high school and took for truth: A semi comes downhill into a town along the Mississippi River in Minnesota and loses its brakes on the way downhill. The driver grabs his air horn and starts pulling. Down in the town the people look up, see the thing coming down, and clear Main Street of all the cars. The semi roars right through town and out the other side.

As I say, when I first heard that story, I thought it was true. It wasn't until I was much older and had heard of urban folklore, that I realized that's what it was. Urban folklore makes perfect sense until you think about it, and then it all breaks down. The longest hill in all of Minnesota can't be more than a half mile long. It would take a semi doing 60 mph a half minute to cover it. In that time people are supposed to see the thing, recognize its problem, notify everyone else of disaster approaching, go out to their parked cars, and drive them away?!!

Nevertheless, you want to believe that story. A semi is a huge and frightening thing, and this story appeals to that fear of uncontrol in us. All I did was begin to wonder: "What if the town didn't clear the streets? And then, what if the driver didn't lose his brakes, maybe, but maybe had a reason for running his semi downhill into that town? And what if . . . ?"

The other piece of urban folklore in the novel comes from the idea of big fish in the river. All over the country there are stories of catfish big enough to swallow the divers who go down to repair the dam that was built across the river. Push that one a little bit, and combine it with the very real geological history of the Minnesota River, and you have the chapter where Angel Finn encounters the River Warren.

And gossip, as another form of basic story, is a rich source of material for a writer. It contains all the themes that any piece of great literature does. (One of the simplest tricks in the world to create fiction is to take a piece of gossip you've overheard and begin to re-tell it not in the third-person voice, but in the first-person voice of one of the characters about whom it is told. Immediately the story becomes something different, is freed from its source, and a fictional universe opens up.)

The River Warren, as I've already indicated, is based on the idea of a small town gossiping as a means to figure out what happened to Two-Speed.

Two-Speed himself? He's not based on any particular person I've ever met. All small towns have one or more Two-Speed Crandalls, just like they all have a Pop Bottle Pete. A person like Two-Speed defines the community; he's at the very edge, the perimeter. If the community were drawn as a circle, Two-Speed would stand on the circumference line. And the paradox is that by standing at the very fringe, such a person becomes central to the community. He becomes the way others define themselves. I suspect there's some sociological term for this, but I don't know what it would be.

As far as the story and novel both containing TS--I started him as part of the novel, then got blocked and for about a year thought I wasn't going to finish the novel and wrote other things. I salvaged the story out of that first draft, but the novel stayed in the back of my head, and I finally returned to it and finished it.

CT: How much research do you do? How important is research to you when you write fiction? How do you go about it? Do you do research before or after you begin to write?

KM: I don't consider myself a good researcher, and I greatly admire good researchers. I'm amazed at books where a writer has done everything possible to research, and sought out everything possible to make the book. Part of the pleasure of reading such books is just being in awe that some one person actually knew all that stuff, and well enough to re-create it.

I do research for fiction if it's necessary. And I do it when it's necessary. Sometimes that means I'll do it before I write. I recently published a story in The Georgia Review that concerns a woman from Cloten (my fictional Minnesota town) who went down to Central America as a missionary, fell in love there, and returned to Cloten under less-than-favorable circumstances. I did quite a bit of reading about Central American countries before I tackled this story, and I sought out a Catholic nun who had been in Guatemala and called her and talked to her about what it was like--really just had a conversation with her that helped a great deal with feeling the country and people and sensing the details of living there.

With other stories, though, I'll only see the need for research once I've begun writing. I don't generally let lack of information keep me from writing. I'll just mark my ignorance in the manuscript, but make things up to keep the story going, and then when I've done research I'll make the adjustments. In this novel I'm currently writing one of the characters is a German foreign exchange student, and I'm doing quite a lot of reading about the Nazi period in order to understand a particular aspect of his character. This is a case where I did research before writing, and will probably continue doing it right through four or five drafts, and hope that my understanding coincides with finishing the book.

CT: What teachers inspired you most, and why? What was the best advice they gave you?

KM: I've already noted that I've never taken a creative writing class, so I have no traditional mentors. Don Spring, who taught the poetry class at the University of Minnesota, Morris, was the teacher who first made me realize the depth and beauty and complexity of literature. And Nate Hart at the same school was the first teacher who actually told me I could write a book, in an Advanced Composition class. But truly, as writing teachers, Tom Herbeck and Wendy Mendoza, the two friends who formed that original writing group with me are the best I've had. They were superb. I can't think of any particular pieces of advice they gave me, but they never let me get away with anything cheap. Wonderful people, wonderful writers, wonderful critics.

CT: What authors do you admire most?

KM: The summer after I got out of grad school, when I was absolutely sick of reading the classics, I read Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, and Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. These three novels absolutely riveted me, and my reaction was something like: "You mean you do this with fiction?" They opened doors I'd never considered before. I've read both Far Tortuga and One Hundred Years of Solitude at least three or four times each. (Once was enough for Gravity's Rainbow; I loved the book without really understanding it, and though I've considered re-reading it, it's formidable enough that I've never quite managed to do so.)

I also think that Chaucer in some ways influenced me, in his incredible way with narrative, with setting things up, and with the way he uses characters. J.M. Coetzee's Waiting For the Barbarians blew me away, as did Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

But I only discovered Cormac McCarthy about two years ago, and as I go on reading him, I have to say that I think he's insurmountable. Blood Meridian was a novel I didn't just finish; I emerged from it. It absolutely absorbed me. McCarthy's astonishing.

CT: Do you feel differently about being published than you thought you would? How has the transition from being unpublished to published changed you or your writing? How has it not changed you or your writing?

KM: For better or for worse, I was published so much later than I originally thought I would be that by the time it happened my reaction was more a "Well, it's about time," than it was a "Wow!" As I said, I'd been writing nearly twenty years before I got a book published. The River Warren had been rejected 23 times, my first novel over 30, another novel 47, my short stories in the dozens, a collection of essays around 15. When you've survived that much rejection, and all on things that you thought were publishable, when something finally is taken the happiness is there--but it's not the huge and celebratory kind of happiness that I might have felt if I'd had a book published when I was under thirty. By the time it happened for me, it was mixed with relief: "At last," and "Now we can pay that bill."

Oddly, when I did get published it all came at once. Within the space of six months, I had three books accepted by three different publishers in three different genres. What a goofy world!

For me, the major change in being published has been practical; I'm asked to give readings, asked to attend writers' conferences, asked to speak to people about writing--and I get offers of money to do these things. As a consequence, I no longer teach five or six classes every semester, which I used to do (four as a standard load here, and then one or two overloads). Looking back on those times, I wonder how I managed to write at all. It's good not to have to do that. Four classes are enough, and more than enough. Other than that, I can't define any specific changes. I just think that it took so long for me that by the time it happened, I was so disciplined with the writing, and so established in other areas of my life--family, job--that changing things was difficult.

CT: Are you working on another novel?

KM: Answered already. Whew! (And I've already said as much as I want to say about it! I'm not superstitious, but there's no sense going too far!)

CT: Any last words of advice to writers?

KM: If you're going to write prose, write every day. Find out what it takes to form the "critical mass" in your mind that will keep your mind working on a story even when it's doing other things--and then write until you've achieved that critical mass, every day. If you can, use the best part of your mental day for writing, and do other things when you're less sharp. Be patient. Understand writer's block as a technical thing, lying in the work, not in you. It's a problem to be solved. It's the mind coming up against the deepest ideas, the toughest things, and if broken through, they'll be better than anything you've done so far. Seen this way, writer's block is a positive thing--the verge of greatness! Finish.

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