SLEET INTERVIEW

by Susan Solomon

Jim Heynen is a poet, short story writer, and teacher with over 20 books published, including The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap, one of the first prose poem collections not rooted in the French tradition of surrealism. His book The One-Room Schoolhouse traveled with Minnesota astronaut George “Pinky” Nelson on his last space mission. Jim is currently working on a short story collection inspired by character studies written around 350 BC by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. Currently, Jim teaches graduate classes in Pacific Lutheran University's low residency program, as well as the annual summer workshops at the University of Iowa.

In June, he granted Sleet an interview. We met at Cahoots, a local neighborhood coffee shop in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he talked about writing, finding beauty in unusual places, and the art of teaching.

SLEET: Many of your stories are based on small town farm life, such as The One-Room Schoolhouse and The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap. Where do your stories and ideas come from?

JIM: My stories quite often are spin-offs from the truth, like “Who Made Such Good Pies?” which is really my mother's joke. There is barnyard humor on a farm, and then there is kitchen humor. This story is a spin-off from one-liners from my mother.

For a certain kind of story, clearly, I like the oral tradition, and quite often I feel like when I am writing stories like that, that I am writing in the oral tradition. I like to think that many of these stories are not that different from the way they would be told in an oral tradition over 50 years, like a stone slowly getting the rough spots out.

SLEET: It is interesting that that the boys in the stories don't have names.

JIM: If you go to folk tales, you would find the same thing. The king had three daughters. What is the king's name; what are the three daughters' names? I am not exactly sure how that fits with the oral tradition, but it seems to be in harmony with it. You come up with a type who does very ordinary, familiar things, but he still stands out as a type, like the youngest boy. The youngest boy is the vision of innocence usually.

SLEET: It feels as if you go into a sort of flow state and the stories just come out.

JIM: They come pretty fast. There seems to be a groove in my head for them. When I wrote the very first story in this collection, I was writing almost all poetry at the time, and I had been inspired by a book called Born Tying Knots: Swampy Cree Naming Stories, translated by Howard Norman. It is done by a small press out of Michigan called Bear Claw Press. And those naming stories were really stories of how someone got their name – there was one who had such big eyebrows, and one who had this and one who had that. I even imitated that manner of “Who Built a Lot of Sheds.” And he wrote them in lined poetry, and I was sort of under the spell of that little book when I first wrote The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap. I wrote it in lines, and that just didn't feel right and I rewrote it in paragraphs, and I realized that these stories needed to be in paragraphs.

SLEET: Even though the words are the same?

JIM: Yes, it's funny, though because I have written some things both as poems and as short stories, the very same material. I have a story about the roof of a church blowing off and a very strong man lifting the roof off the people trapped under it. I wrote it as a poem and then I wrote it as a story, and the minute I started writing it as a story, the sentiments and the language changed. It got much more direct in its language. I'm going to do a lecture at Pacific Luther University Graduate Program this summer, “Same Content, Different Form.” Maybe it is a habit we get from grade school – when we have written a humorous essay, then we go on to the next one and we don't return to the same manner. And of course, people who become serious writers, most of us rework either a theme or a style or a form again and again, and only in doing that do we discover its possibilities. But if you take the same content and experiment with it in different forms, really interesting things happen.

There's lots of theoretical stuff that the form finds the subject, the subject finds the form, and form and the subject are one; the arguments go back and forth, but I don't think it can ever be resolved other than what you experience yourself as you try it. I once took Gretel Erlich's lyric essays, and I just lined them as poetry. Then I saw that she actually has done it herself. I sometimes think that some people are so much a poet that they can't adjust to the narrative form very well – that they can only hover in lyrical beauty.

SLEET: And then some people write such beautiful prose. . .

JIM: That you don't really care.

SLEET: What inspires you – trying to understand people and relationships?

JIM: It is hard for me to answer that without thinking about other writers. I think in all of us there is a tension between the introvert, the one who likes to step outside and watch, and the person who has a real hunger to be engaged. The moment you put things on paper you want other people to read, you are really trying to touch someone else; you are trying to get an engagement. But it is mostly the work of the introvert, the one who is outside looking in. I have to admit, my favorite thing at a party is to go outside and watch the party from outside. I really like to do that. But I think you can spot the creative introvert in almost any circle. He or she is the one who goes to the piano; he or she is the one who cooks, who would like to connect with people in an introverted way. And then of course most of us have to engage the world. Often actors are introverts. And think about the classroom. You think you have to be an extrovert to be in a classroom – well, not at all. That is a performance time. So you can put on a persona, but you are still the introvert behind it.

And yet, you have such grand exceptions, like Bill Holm. He was about as much of an extrovert as you could ever imagine. He would go in a bookstore and start proclaiming to everyone in the bookstore what book they should read – just marvelously extroverted in his mannerisms, But in truth, the guy would hide away, sometimes for days, to get his writing done, so he had that side too that most people didn't see because when you saw him he was so conspicuous. He was a good friend and he just died, and I'm still pissed at him for that. He was like a 50-wicked candle that had lit all the wicks at once. But he was a very important person in my life. One of his early books is called The Music of Failure, a wonderful collection of essays. The University of Minnesota Press is going to reissue it, and they just asked me to write the introduction to it. So it's like coming full circle because he wrote the first draft of that title essay, “The Music of Failure” on my living room table back around 1981. Now I will do this retrospective and make sense of it. Yeah, we were going away for the weekend, and he said, “Could I stay here and write” So he stayed there and wrote, and he wrote The Music of Failure. It is a touchstone in contemporary American essays. It celebrates people who do things earnestly who are not particularly good at them. That was one of his mantras. He had great sympathy for little guys of all sorts.

SLEET: What are you reading now?

JIM: I am rereading Galway Kinnell. I am rereading D.H. Lawrence's poetry. Anybody who is a poet and feels they have writer's block, sit down with a collection of D.H. Lawrence. He has so many bad poems. I should probably blame the editor who decided they were going to print everything they could find that D.H. Lawrence had written. You have to go through about 30 or 40 bad poems, and then there will be this marvelous poem, like “Snake” or “The Elephant is Slow to Mate.”

And I am reading the founding fathers. I just can't get off this kick. There is one called Manhunt, which is the story of the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth and the 12-day chase after him. Then I read a book on black spies in the South – incredible. Jefferson Davis would discuss strategies with Southern generals and what they were going to do. And the person who was his main slave would be in the room, and they would dare to say anything in from of him because to them he was “just this black guy.” What is interesting about this is that Willie Jackson is so much in the oral tradition, a person who never learned to read, but learned to memorize what he heard. Not only was he able to hear the North exact plans, but he would be able to give them exact directions. He would have an encyclopedic memory of what he heard, and he listened to so many discussions among these Southern generals that he developed his own military theories, which were taken seriously by the Union generals. There is so much incredible material out there.

SLEET: Who are some of the new poets that you like to read?

JIM: Do you know the local (St. Paul) poet, Todd Boss? He's got the goods. I think he's the real thing. But I do always go back to Galway Kinnell; I think he is just wonderful. And I have time now, since I'm not teaching full time, and it's really kind of delicious. But I do have to admit when I read, I constantly find myself thinking about how I can teach from what I've read. I'm a teacher and I'm reminded of that over and over again, that I really need the classroom too. I really do; I don't feel fulfilled unless I've spent some time teaching.

SLEET: So you get energized by reading, then, to write and to teach?

JIM: It's something that I can't control. I don't know if it's my cross to bear or blessing to accept.

SLEET: It's easy to tell which teachers like being in the classroom. Some teachers make you want to write just by their presence.

JIM: That's the kind of teaching William Stafford did. People would write well to please him, and he would never give a signal whether he was pleased or not. And they would work harder!

SLEET: How do you critique students' work when it just isn't very good?

JIM: You find the one place in it that is good. There is always one good place. I really think you need to do that, to find something. It was Tobias Wolff – I don't know if he was at a lectern or a party when he said this, but he talked a little bit about never prejudging a writer too soon. You have to deal with how bad it is and somehow you need to be honest about what's there, but you don't want to say, “you don't have it” because you don't know what that person has. And his example was Alice Sebold, who was his student at Syracuse. He said that she had not distinguished herself in that class at all. And he said that he always carries that around as an object lesson in not judging too soon.

SLEET: What are you working on now?

JIM: I'm working on a new collection tentatively titled “Ordinary Sins: (After Theophrastus)”, which is just a nerdy way of saying they are mostly character sketches. Maybe I'll call them something like ‘epitomes' of atypical people in today's world. Theophrastus did mini-character studies of people from his world. There are these little characters from around 400 BC that are significant because they are one of the few insights we have into society of the time, and there is a lot of bizarre information about these characters. And so I'm doing character epitomies, parodies almost.

SLEET: I'd like to ask you about some of the tips/quotes/advice on your website. You say: “Always write the story that doesn't seem very important to you.” Why is that?

JIM: I've learned from myself and my students that the story/poem/novel we consider our life's mission is too often doomed because it comes only from the blazing intention part of our brains. The real stuff, the deep secret and genius of ourselves, often bubbles up from our subconscious as a kind of interesting aside, like the shy person at the party who we find cute and maybe a bit pathetic but who is indeed the one we should make a pass at.

SLEET: Could you elaborate on this one a bit? “The part of the story where the fiction writer should most feel that he/she is doing the work of a poet is not in description or narration, but in dialogue.”

JIM: By saying something rather shocking like that, I'm trying to get aspiring writers to realize that good dialogue is not holding up a tape recorder to the world. Good dialogue, even when it's wordy, has to be multi-dimensional in its effect; it needs to be suggestive with rich subtext.

SLEET: Another one: “The right ending to a story has its roots in the depths of the writer, not in what has happened so far in the story.”

JIM: Most of us who did serious graduate work in the 60s and 70s were indoctrinated with the notion of the ‘organic’ work of art – the notion that we have fewer choices as we move along because the art itself is determining the perfect place to go. It was William Gass who first gave me the idea that that notion might be totally false. And then there were people like John Fowles giving two alternative endings to a novel, and the metafictionists like Barthelme and Coover who would scramble stories structurally – all hinting that those old notions of how a story/poem is made might simply be bogus. And they are, I think. It's all artifice: You want the reader to feel/think that where a poem or story has gone is inevitable, but that feeling of inevitability that you create in the reader's mind is simply an indication of how successfully you've snowed them into accepting what you know is the true progression of a story of poem – and that ‘true progression’ is rooted inside you, not dictated by what you have written so far in the poem or story.

SLEET: So when you talk about “the depths of the writer,” do you feel that you are pointing fiction writers toward poetry?

JIM: All writers should be pointed toward poetry. Don't trust any write who doesn't read poetry. They're mathematicians, philosophers, psychologists, or scientists more concerned with ideas than the beauty of language.

SLEET: What comes first in your writing – characters or plot (idea)?

JIM: I run the risk of being evasive here, but when I think honestly and hard about this question, I realize that for me it's a false either/or dilemma.  When I try to recall the impetuses of many of the boy stories, I realize that they began as memories of characters in situations.  The characters are just kindling material in my mind without the spark provided by a situation--that is, characters at odds with circumstance.   So did the situation give rise to the story (plot) or did the nature of the character?  I think the oral tradition, which is really at the base of many of my stories, uses the simple formula of a character's misfit with situation (ergo conflict and plot?).  But even as I try to simplify the notion of character/plot, I also realize that sometimes I'm working on an idea: for example, in the YA novel, Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice, I'm working on the idea that genuine virtue in character defies the contexts of secular or religious frameworks.  In some of the boy stories (my favorites but not the audience's) I try to get inside pre-adolescent rage, which I think is much misunderstood and under-acknowledged.  No matter how we try to codify or simplify the formula, one thing is pretty certain: a story, as Richard Bausch proclaims loudly, needs TROUBLE TROUBLE TROUBLE.  One of the problems for nice people who try to write stories is that they by nature want to resolve problems, not create them.  Whether a writer has the courage to make trouble by creating problematic people as characters or by putting virtuous people in impossible situations, either way you're trying to create a situation of disharmony, of conflict.

A few final thoughts, since you put “idea” behind “plot”.  Plotting is, of course, working through an idea. An arrangement of events may be a story of sorts, but it doesn't have meaning until the writer imposes purpose on the events.  That, essentially, is plotting: giving meaning to events.  Bad plots are ones that present worn-out ideas or present new ideas in unconvincing ways. The elements of originality and surprise may be essential to plotting if the writer expects the audience to go along for the ride.  The final irony here is that “originality” and “surprise” are rarely convincing if they're pulled from a writer's notion of what is currently “in.”  The secret to convincing “originality” and “surprise” are that they need to be deeply rooted in the writer's sensibility, emotional makeup, value system, view of the universe, etc.  That's why I say in one of my guidelines that the ending of a story needs to come from the pit of the writer's stomach, from the deep core.

SLEET: One last question: Do you have a favorite or specific example from your own writing where the ending came from “the pit of the stomach?”

JIM: The ending to the last story in The One-Room Schoolhouse is a perfect example (“The Grandfather.”) It's anything but a Hollywood ending, but it is an honest ending as the boys come to understand, or at least accept, the ambiguous sacrifice that may accompany giving. Needless to say, it's not a story I often read at public gatherings and it's certainly not a story that every reader is going to like, but the ending has always seemed just right to me and it came from the pit of my stomach.

For further reading, please visit www.jimheynen.com. Jim's poetry is also featured in this month's edition of Sleet.