RH: How long have you been writing short stories?
AD: Since I started writing, in junior high school, maybe a
little bit earlier. But I wasn't showing them to anyone, it was just
something I did. And they weren't fully formed stories, they were
just...things, pieces of stuff. Then when I was in college, and after I
got out, I started being more serious about stories and form.
I went through a long time where I read nothing but short stories. I
think part of that had to do with moving to New York, where my
attention span was stunted. There's so much going on--and you have
this built-in time when you're traveling in New York if you don't
drive; when I was working at a job that I hated, I still had a great
way to start the day and a great way to end the day.
RH: What prompted the decision to start showing your work to
people?
AD: I graduated from college as a theater major, but knew
pretty much in my last year that I didn't want to do anything to do
with theater. But I didn't quite know what my life was going to be. I
graduated, and I wrote PR copy for a theater during the day and
worked at a restaurant at night. The other woman on my shift was
74 and had been there since she was 22, so every day I said to
myself, " I'm going to be here 52 years..." That inspired me to move
to New York. I got a corporate job that I hated. That forced me to
find an outlet, and I focused on my writing. I eventually quit my job
and waited tables for a few years and just wrote.
RH: How long did it take you to get your first story published after
that?
AD: Right around the time I decided to quit my job, I showed
some of my work to a friend who'd gone through graduate school,
got some feedback from her. I enrolled in a workshop at the New
School, too the first three stories I wrote for that, and mailed them
out to graduate schools.
I have a very lucky story--a year later, I got a scholarship to the
Bread Loaf writers conference. It was a wonderful experience; I was
surrounded by people who read books and talked about books and
about writing. It was an amazing bunch of talented people. I didn't
understand publishing at all, and I got to meet people who had been
published, got to meet editors and agents. I met Lois Rosenthal, the
editor of Story, and about a month after the conference, I sent
her "Chase," which she bought. That was my first published story.
RH: One of the qualities I notice in your writing is their surreal
nature.
AD: There's something about what's not known, what can
happen, what's possible ... I've never been drawn to the traditional
narrative. Even though I can appreciate it, it doesn't seem to be what
I do. There's always a fantastical element that wanders in. Parts of
these stories come from dreams or things that flicker in my head
that I can't get rid of.
RH: Do you tend to have characters in your head until you get the
story out?
AD: Pretty much. Sometimes it's unpleasant, sometimes it's
great. The novel that I'm working on now is spun out of "Faith." I'd
finished that story, and I'd felt that it was finished, but these people
would just not stop talking, and so that's how the novel started
going.
Sometimes it's a line, like "Lily was in love with a boy who chased
freight trains." That line was in my head for a long time, the story
came tumbling after that. I try to sit down and write every day.
RH: There's a wall that you hit eventually as a short-story writer,
facing the prospect of making a living as a writer.
AD: The really frustrating thing is that the periodical market
for short stories is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. I
spent a year and a half working for Esquire in the fiction
department. It was tremendous--I learned a lot, got to read a lot of
great stuff--but so frustrating. There'd be a two-foot stack of
submissions that I'd be looking at, twice a week. And you have to get
through it, because there's another stack just like it coming. And as
you read, you develop a sense from the cover letter or the
presentation or the first two pages...I always give everybody two
pages, but if they haven't got me by then, it'll get rejected. Maybe
30% of the stack is ready to be published, but so much of it is wrong
for Esquire, like mother-daughter stories. That's just not what
their readership is looking for. I would get really great stories that
weren't right for us, and wonder where they could be sent, and the
landscape is just shrinking. The New Yorker has an array of big
name writers, but their voice is pretty specific. You can pretty much
see their entire spectrum. A lot of novel excerpts, a lot of big name
writers, and not a lot of discovery going on there. Story does a
lot of discovery, and publishes a broad range of voices--but they
publish maybe 36 stories a year.
RH: But of course novel writing has technical challenges of its
own.
AD: I have a tendency to write very short things, and a really
solid short short is almost like an object. There's such a shape to it.
I've been comforted writing shorts that there's a shape, that there's
an ending coming. But with a novel, you're coming back to the same
thing every day. There's a way in which that's more intimate
somehow. The shape is difficult to see because it's larger, but it gives
you so much more freedom. You can write whole sections you know
you'll take out later, but they teach you something about what's
going on. It's been very exciting to me. I have no idea what I'm
doing, but I'm enjoying it.
