English Department News

Stephen Kellar

An Interview with Willy Vlautin

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Willy Vlautin

Novelist Willy Vlautin is the next guest in our Autumn Readings & Lectures series hosted by the University of Portland’s English Department.  He has published four novels: The Motel Life (2007), Northline (2008), Lean on Pete (2010), and The Free (2014).  

For all the violence and tragedy that fuels the characters and storylines of his works, Willy Vlautin is one hell of a friendly guy. His band, alt-country quartet Richmond Fontaine, just recently back from their final European tour, have been playing the Portland scene for over twenty years. His novels—The Free being the most recently published—recall John Steinbeck and John Updike in their intimate portrait of day-to-day survival and mundane tragedy in the lives of ordinary people.

It’s easy to assume the people who rarely have their stories told don’t have a story to tell. The people who inhabit Vlautin’s stories are burdened by their choices. They’re burdened by their need and, often, their inability to escape. These are people who want to change, who believe change may be the only thing that can save their lives, and yet they do not. This is the magic of Willy Vlautin’s writing. It’s a sleight of hand, to show us we don’t know the people we think we know.

Between your records and novels, you’ve created enough fascinating (and tragic) characters to populate an entire seen-better-times logging town. How do you build these characters, and would you say it’s the characters that inform the stories and songs?
I think of things in stories first. A broad idea of story from start to finish. Inside that initial idea are the themes I’m interested in. From there I’ll get the characters. I’ll run into the first few and then they meet people after that and so on. Usually I write the first draft and then develop the characters more after each edit. Like getting to know someone, it takes a while. It takes time and interest and desire.

Living in the wake of Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize, it seems a lot of people are trying to to redraw the lines between literature and music as distinct modes of storytelling. As an artist working in both mediums, sometimes at the same time, as with Northline, do you see any real divisions? How has being a novelist informed your songwriting and how has songwriting informed you as a novelist?
They are much different crafts that’s for sure. Writing takes much more time in the nuts and bolts sorta way. You have to put down the pages. You have to get a character from Mexico City to Toronto and he’s driving. A lot of days pass, a lot of things happen along the way. Songs are like dreams, they have more mystery. Where the hell did that melody come from? How come when you add harmonies the song suddenly makes you want to cry? Music has magic, I really think it does. They are different mediums but they are both crafts and they both can transport you into a different world.

Earlier this year you just put out your last record with Richmond Fontaine (for the foreseeable future?), what do you see yourself working on in the near future? Will music take a backseat to writing, or do you have other projects in mind?
You’re right, RF just finished its last big tour. Next year I’ll start work on my new band The Delines. I’ll probably do that band and stay at home more and try and work on my novels.

Willy Vlautin will be reading at the UP Bookstore on Monday, November 28th at 7:30 pm.

 

*Photo by Dan Eccles, from the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

An Interview with Kate Gray

By

Kate Gray

Poet and author Kate Gray is the first guest in our Autumn Readings & Lectures series hosted by the University of Portland’s English Department.

Her work in her poetry collection Another Sunset We Survive and in her first novel Carry the Sky explores the rhythms of water and rowing, the personal and impersonal erasure of queer and female identities, and the beauty and strength found in the relationships that carry us through the violence and traumas that fracture our lives.

In addition to her writing, Kate has taught extensively, from college students to women’s writing residencies to workshops for women inmates. Kate was kind enough to explore her work and process with us in this brief but candid interview.

In Another Sunset We Survive fishing and rowing appear again and again, as does water in many forms. What is your history with these activities, and what brings you back to them in your writing? What places do they evoke for you?

At Williams College I rowed competitively, and when I came to Portland in my twenties, I continued competing for another 15 years. Many of the poems in that collection were written for an Oregon Literary Arts grant: to write a series of poems placed along the route I rowed every morning on the Willamette River. Rowing is part sport, part religion. While matching the stroke of others, you transcend and become part of a force much larger than yourself. Fishing and rowing provide bountiful metaphors, and the physicality of each evokes rhythms enhancing the meanings. Traditional forms like the villanelle match the repetitive nature of those sports, and the contemporary use of tradition forms with untraditional topics, like AIDS (in “Catch and Release”), creates a tension that I hope calls tradition into question.

Your new book, tentatively titled Any More, Black Shoe, “imagines the intersecting lives of Sylvia Plath and Maureen Buckley, younger sister of William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1953.” Your poem Dear Sir, Comma appears to evoke a Maureen Buckley-esque figure, living in the radius of “a pundit launching conservative reform in language / and politics.” How long have you wanted to tell this story and what turns has it taken along the way? Has anything about it surprised you?

Great question. My mother was Bill Buckley’s next older sister and worked for him answering his mail, the topic of the poem you cite. I grew up listening to her call out punctuation and defend his vocabulary in letters to his readers. She read her responses into a tape recorder for a secretary in New York to transcribe. When I was sixteen, my mother dropped on my desk a copy of Letters Home, the collection of letters Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, in which Plath wrote about attending my Aunt Maureen’s debutant party at my grandparents’ home in 1950. My mother said, “Read this. That’s how it was.” The letter contained a fairy-tale description of my family’s home. Plath and my aunt were in the same dorm at Smith for two years. My Aunt Maureen died of natural causes when I was four, a year after Plath suicided, and so, I never knew either of them. This story has been in my body for a very long time, the story of two smart, attractive, vivacious young women in the 1950s who made very different choices, and I started researching it more than ten years ago. Because poetry is my first language, I had to learn how to write fiction; the story requires a bigger bucket than a poem. I abandoned my first attempts in order to tell my own story in Carry the Sky, make whatever mistakes I needed to make in order to tell the bigger story of young women growing up in the rarified world with 1950s’ strictures. The surprises keep coming, especially in the scenes or moments I’ve imagined which I find to be historically true or possible.

Beyond your writing, you have a great deal of experience teaching and volunteering. For many young writers, the idea of teaching often feels both daunting and inevitable, but how might you describe your experiences in teaching (and teaching writing) and how have these experiences informed your own writing?

Every liberal arts graduate faces teaching as both daunting and inevitable (your great words). For me teaching and writing were complementary. Sure, I lamented the 9-month sprint of the academic year in which every moment is spent grading and preparing, but within the teaching, I learned so much about writing. I could read and teach writers I loved, dig deeply into their backgrounds, techniques, and publications in order to wear their shoes. Or at least, admire their shoes. After a few years as a full-time instructor, I was able to manage time, by getting up at 5am to write for an hour or two, before grading papers and getting to campus (after I stopped rowing). And working within academia gave me the impetus and the funds to attend conferences, workshops, and residencies. And best of all, students showed me the impact of great stories on them and honored me with their stories. Little helps a writer more than listening, providing a safe place for the stories to rise.

Kate Gray will be reading at the UP Bookstore, Wednesday October 5th, 7:30pm.