SSM 2011: Justin Taylor Interviewed by Mark Cugini

When I'm running Creative Writing workshops, I like to assign readings from contemporary authors (many of whom are associated with the indie scene) instead of canonized ones. I do this because I think it helps students remember that fiction is as alive and vital as it's ever been. One of the stories they all seem to gravitate to is "Tetris" by Justin Taylor—a story I assign to stress difference between naturalistic details and expressive ones—and many of my more committed students go out of their way to purchase Justin's collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever. I'm always so thrilled to see so many young writers find inspiration from an author who's making significant and important contributions to our modern literary landscape.

But I digress. A couple of months ago I was in the middle of a class when we started talking about the possibilities of internalized exposition. I wanted to offer "Amber at the Window in Hurricane Season" (admittedly, my favorite in Justin's collection) up to the class as an example of what well-written interior thought can do. Not having the book on me, I did a Google search for "Amber" and found a version that had appeared on Monkeybicycle a couple of years earlier. Having read "Amber" so many times, I immediately noticed small differences between this version and the one that had appeared in Everything.

Justin is a stellar writer, a brilliant analytical thinker, and (above all) a lovely and courageous human being. The following conversation is evidence of that: I recently asked Justin if he would like to chat about the differences between these two versions. He provided some incredibly insightful thoughts on the revision process, online publication, and proper usage.  

Mark Cugini: For this conversation to make any sense, I think it might help if we talked a bit about how this story was initially conceived. What were you thinking (or maybe intending to convey) when you sat down to write "Amber at the Window in Hurricane Season?"

Justin Taylor: "Amber" started its life probably eight, maybe nine years ago--as a poem. I wrote it about my friend, Amber, who I knew when I lived in Gainesville. There was a hurricane one time when I was out of town, and I wrote a little poem based on some things she'd said about her experience. The hurricane was what interested me, but I figured she'd make a good anchor, and anyway it was mostly her story. I worked on it as a poem for a long time, and some of the individual lines and images got very strong, but it still wasn't anything. At some point it occurred to me to cut the line-breaks, turn each stanza into a paragraph, and then run with it--adding details and scenes and the central conceit of the narrator's sexual jealousy.

MC: So you're saying the drama between the narrator and Amber and Patrick and Marissa and Kim wasn't part of the original inclination? It's funny that the hurricane was what first interested you: when I read the version in Everything, what struck me was that the real emotional weight wasn't located in the storm's narrative (although it does seem to do a hell of a lot to set the tone and mood), but in these interior reflections this narrator is having.

JT: Definitely not. I don't have a copy of the original poem anymore, but I remember it as a single-character study, almost a still-life. Once I converted it to prose, it opened up and I made it into a story. That was the story that occurred to me, which in itself isn't very surprising since a lot of my stories describe some kind of improperly balanced love triangle. I guess once I hit on that idea, I started developing the rivalry between the two guys—so you get the list of girls they've both been with, etc.—and it seemed like maybe that was what the story would be "about." But that was a dead-end, and so the Monkeybicycle version of the story represents a terminal point, a dead-end in the same sense that the poem-version of the story was a dead-end. But I mistook that dead-end for the finish line and so I sent it out. It's a young writer's prerogative to want to be published badly, but wanting it so badly that you'll send out any damn thing is a mistake. I made that mistake many times, early on, and you wind up paying for it later, when you're stuck with a lot of things you'd like to disown. I have to say that I don't like the version of "Amber" that's on the Monkeybicycle site. With apologies to the noble souls who published it, I wish that it was unavailable online. Now that you've got me thinking about it, I really want to ask Steven Seighman to take it down.

MC: What specifically do you dislike about the Monkeybicycle version? I don't think there's anything too be ashamed of, or that a reader is going to hold any of it against you. When I stumbled across it, my reaction wasn't to judge you but to look at both pieces side to side and determine what specific changes you made so that the story would be more effective.

JT: I'm sure all of this looms much larger in my own head than it would for any reader, but still. I think the Monkeybicycle version is mean-spirited, and that it fails to justify its existence or repay its claim on the reader's attention—which to my mind is something every story must do. The MB version is still figuring out what it has to say, and how to say it. I'm glad that I kept working on it, and eventually arrived at something I thought of highly enough to publish as the first story in my first book, but that doesn't change that I wish the old version would vaporize. In fact, I almost didn't agree to do this because it seems inevitable that it will send some readers over to the old version, but I decided that this was worth talking about, and also I like you. I appreciate that you took an evolutionary/comparative perspective, and that we're having this chance to talk about how a piece of writing grows and changes over time. But I didn't set out to offer a case study in the writing process, or to impart a lesson about the pitfalls of web-publishing (though I seem to be doing both those things now and so be it) I set out to tell a story. What it comes down to is this: the final version of "Amber" is the one I am proud of, because it is both whole and complete.

MC: Well, let's talk about the final version then, because it's a story I'm proud of, too. Did the "mean- spirited" thing effect the way you arranged the last two paragraphs of the final version? I certainly sense a more reflective, reminiscent tone in this revision. Is that why you decided to go with more expressive descriptions like "an unfair summation of an era-a summer-we spent in grand subtropical poverty and boasting that we were the people who did not listen to Jimmy Buffet") instead of more character-narrated exposition like "Our life was scored by poverty..."?

JT: Yes, definitely. What the old version shows, more than anything, is a writer not fully in control of his powers. There are some strong lines in the MB version, but there are other lines that are literally incoherent, such as when something that's introduced as a simile (their feelings "charged the air like static electricity") becomes apparently literal a moment later, because their "hair stood out straight" from it. So is the language figurative or literal? The story itself doesn't know. Elsewhere in that same paragraph the description of the "queer-strewn beaches" is truly reprehensible. It's not meant as an epithet, but it's almost impossible not to read it as one. I was going for a Lishian acoustic repetition thing, but those were the wrong words to do it with, and perhaps the wrong sound to repeat--that "ee" sound is like nails on a chalkboard.

MC: I'd like to quote the final version of sentence because I think it's so beautifully complicated:

I began to believe we were the secret owners of the world and everything in it: our shitty rental home; that one bar on Tenth that we liked; the whole state from the Alabama border over to St. Augustine, down past the Rat Kingdom all the way to Hemingway House and the beaches from which you can practically spit on Cuba.

What's so problematic about that "queer-strewn beaches" line being perceived as epithet? Does that just not fit with the story's intentions?

JT: My intent was to acknowledge Key West's being known as a gay vacation destination, i.e. just one more highlight in the sentence's quick tour of Florida, and to do so in a way that was concise and acoustically resonant. But in the context, I think that "queer" leaves itself open to being read as pejorative rather than inclusive. This is especially true since the word is paired with "strewn," which connotes something like an infestation or a mess--which, again, it is emphatically not supposed to be implying. The reader is forced to stop reading and try to puzzle out what the hell the writer means. This is what I mean by a lack of control—the writer hasn't yet mastered the relationship between word-choice for sound and word-choice for meaning. It's not that different from the earlier example with the simile blurring into the story's reality. You can find plenty of other examples in the MB version.

MC: I guess I'm so curious about all these things because this story does such a great job of setting up the other pieces that follow it--even though they aren't directly related to one another, there are still a lot of similarities in the settings and cultural landmarks and tones that add a nice intrinsic symmetry to the book. Is this something you were aiming for when you decided that "Amber" was going to be the first story of your collection?

JT: "Amber" functions as a kind of overture to the collection, not least for the reasons of symmetry and setting that you mention, but I didn't revise the story so it could open the book. I revised the story because it felt unfinished to me, and I wanted to get it right. It was only after I made it into what I wanted it to be that I thought to lead off with it. Earlier versions of the manuscript had "Tetris" at the beginning, and "Amber" more toward the middle, or else not included at all.

MC: How does being more in control of your powers effect your writing process nowadays? I find that the more I learn about English usage, the less forgiving I am of myself when I make those incoherent mistakes in earlier drafts. Is that something that's complicated things for you or made them easier?

JT: Having more control makes my writing stronger. It's like an understanding of fingering and notation for a musician, or ball control for a basketball player, or leveling up for an RPG nerd. As your baseline levels of facility, dexterity, and experience with language and writing increase, you are able to take on challenges of increasing difficulty and sophistication. Obviously, my word-choice here has revealed me as neither the musician nor the basketball player, but as the RPG nerd. Oh well. A first draft will always be a first draft, and because I tend to write my first drafts quickly they'll probably always be a mess. I'm just going as fast as I can--sometimes barely even listening to myself, just trying to get it down. The control comes later, in revision, in being able to identify what's working and what isn't. And before, when I mentioned "difficulty," I don't mean it in the sense that Joyce is more difficult than Hemingway, or something like that. I can hardly imagine the amount of work that Hemingway put into becoming Hemingway; but I'm sure it was at least as much as Joyce put into becoming Joyce. Anyway, you'll always be read in ways you can't predict or account for, and you can't be held responsible for what somebody makes of your work or takes from it. But you are responsible for what you put out there, and so to say something you don't mean is inexcusable. You owe the work complete fidelity, and must do everything in your power to make it the best version of itself that it can be.

Mark Cugini

Mark Cugini's not guilty, but he's filthy. The founding editor of Big Lucks, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Everyday Genius, Stymie, Petrichor Machine and others. He curates the Three Tent Reading Series in Washington, DC and is the recent recipient of a Scholarship Grant to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst. Visit him at teachyourselfitsbeautiful.com.