Kelly Cherry and the Hard Work of Imagination

In the eighth in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, Kelly Cherry, author of Twelve Women in a Country Called America (Press 53) talks about her characters.

When I published my first novel, a friend wrote to say she was surprised to learn that I had gone to med school. It was my character who had gone to med school, not I. When I published my second novel, my kid sister was sure I was mocking her: Why else would I have made the lead character a flautist, just like her? Of course, Augusta was not just like her; Augusta was made up. And so it seemed to go, book after book. The hard work of imagination was read as biography, usually autobiography.

There is no autobiography in my new collection of stories, Twelve Women in a Country Called America, which, by the way, is for male readers as well as for female readers. There are no stories based on anyone I've known or am related to or have been told about or whom I've read of. All of the women are grown up (even the ten-year-old), all are complex and interesting, all have comments to make about the states in which they live and about America in general. None of the women mention designer brand names, though a rich man named Clyde Beamer refers to "Armani and vintage Pucci." (But he admires Lorna Jo precisely because she cares about things more important than designer wear.) The characters' lives take twists and turns. There are men among them. Clyde, of course. Sloan, Hodder, Gerhardt. These are pretty terrific men, I think, but then there's Constantine, or Connie, from "The Starveling":

Connie had wooed her with poems—his own, yes, but also the poems of other poets—and by now she recognized the difference between his and theirs. The words of the old poets were like beautiful beads. But she respected Connie's passion for his craft, his art. If he was a jerk sometimes, if he never made the bed, never washed the dishes, she fully agreed with him that his art lent him privileges she did not deserve. In her view, he had earned an exemption from daily life. 

She also believed that a girl was supposed to encourage her boyfriend, but it wasn't always easy to see how. "I love that," Calista said, at last. "An old man who has forgotten how to spit. How in the world did you come up with that?

Certainly, the women have feelings. They also have thoughts and opinions and questions. The ten-year-old contemplates the nature of time. The schoolteacher nearing ninety remembers her mother, her siblings, her first-graders, and the man who would have been her husband had he not been killed in WWII. Gods and aliens turn up because sentences conjured them. These characters are real and various and their lives are not for mocking any more than my sister's. I wanted them to have dignity. To own their lives. Perhaps I approached the writing of these stories the way an actor may portray a character: I sought to inhabit each of them, to understand their needs, desires, and choices and to grant them the authenticity of their being.

Each woman is clearly different from the others. My perspective therefore shifted with each story. In fact, there is such a range of perspectives that this time I am certain no one will imagine that I am writing about myself or my family.

The joy of writing is creating, that is, making stuff up. The more realistic you can make the stuff you are making up, the more readers are inclined to think you are writing nonfiction, or almost-nonfiction. But surely, with twelve radically different women, it must be clear that this new collection is based on imagination, not life. And when I speak of joy, I mean joy: To write is to be entranced, to live outside of time, to concentrate so closely that the world disappears. The backache disappears, the anxiety about paying bills disappears, time disappears. The writer comes back to the world she lives in, of course, but she returns with pages, and they seem to be a mystery: Who wrote these words? Where did they come from? Could they be autobiographical? But no. They have come from somewhere utterly mysterious, an island, maybe, obscured by mist and fog, where owls dance by moonlight, and where all the cats read poems by T. S. Eliot.

Kelly Cherry Makes a List

In the eighth in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Kelly Cherry, author of A Kind of Dream (Terrace Books), discusses her interest in linked stories.

My first husband borrowed something I'd written and showed it to his friend. "Is she," he asked the friend, "talented enough for me to marry her?" As you might guess, the marriage didn't last, and when it ended, I felt I had lost five years of writing time (the marriage plus recovering from the divorce). I published a first book of poems with a small press and a first novel with Viking. Then I found myself thinking about what else I wanted to write.

I made a list. I thought of it as my bookshelf.

Not every book title I had on that list came to fruition, and editors changed a few of my titles despite my protests. But in between writing books on the list, other titles revealed themselves, as if they'd been lying behind some other book on the shelf.

This was not compulsive. I never felt I couldn't make room for another book, and at least twice I had to acknowledge that a book had failed, or, rather, I had failed the book, and I dumped it. But I had a lot of ideas. They are all around us, you know. All you have to do is reach up for one and it drops into your hand.

Publishers are not so plentiful and after a while, I no longer had an agent, so I couldn't submit to the big houses. My work was better, but I was older, which meant, to publishers, not new. Instead of novels, I took to writing linked stories, or novels-in-stories, a form I love. I've written a trilogy of linked stories. I call it "A Divine Comedy," which is what the ex-wife of a main character says when she describes the off-Broadway play she has written about him. "It's such a divine comedy!" she chirps.

To some degree, writing linked stories is like making a collage. Pieces need to be usefully shaped and carefully placed. It is also, and more, like orchestrating a symphony, as is a novel: Characters and events need to enter and leave quite like various instruments or instrumental sections.

I was born into a family of musicians. My late younger sister used to tell me that my poetry is my music, and I admit I liked to hear her say that. But I think that different genres require different musics because their fundamental elements differ: the sentence for the story, the scene for the novel, the paragraph for the essay, and the line for poetry. (I recognize that other people have other views, so I won't try to push mine here.)

Ludwig van Beethoven

The biggest influence on my work is not a literary figure, although there are a number of literary figures, past and present, who have influenced me or sent me in this direction or that; it is Beethoven, especially in his late string quartets and piano sonatas. I feel I've learned a great deal from him, and if I'm not Beethoven, it's not Beethoven's fault.

My second husband (much nicer than the first!) and I recently discussed what books might have been within our compass to write if only we'd thought of them before their authors did, if only we were capable of writing them: what books we'd read that we felt closest to and, maybe, almost able to write. I chose The Magic Mountain and Grace Paley's stories. Where stories are concerned, on another day I might have picked "A Still Moment" by Eudora Welty or Chekhov's "The Kiss." I suggested Heart of Darkness for him, and he smiled.

About stories I want to say this: The wonderful fictionist Fred Busch may have been correct when he said that short stories are about death; that is, about their endings. Lorrie Moore may be right when she says the ending of a story should subvert what came before. Russian absurdists may have been right when they dreamed up preposterous, and often hilarious, plots. But I think Fred Busch wrote the endings that came to him. I think Moore has looked at her work and noticed that she tends to subvert the beginnings of them. And I think Russian absurdists knew very well what it was like to live under an absurd regime. The doing comes first, theory after. Never trust a theory too far. What counts is the doing.

As for what I hope to do? I hope to complete my bookshelf. There are at least two more books of short stories on it.