{"id":81379,"date":"2015-01-08T17:04:28","date_gmt":"2015-01-08T22:04:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=81379"},"modified":"2015-01-08T23:01:21","modified_gmt":"2015-01-09T04:01:21","slug":"inventing-situations-an-interview-with-thomas-pierce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/08\/inventing-situations-an-interview-with-thomas-pierce\/","title":{"rendered":"Inventing Situations: An Interview with Thomas Pierce"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Thomas<\/a>

Photo \u00a9 Andrew Owen<\/p><\/div>\n

What\u2019s immediately striking about Thomas Pierce\u2019s debut story collection, <\/em>Hall of Small Mammals<\/a>,<\/em> are its wild, unforgettable conceits. In \u201cShirley Temple Three<\/a><\/em>,\u201d a long-extinct dwarf mammoth is cloned for a TV show, then dumped off in a small Southern town with Mawmaw, the show host\u2019s mother. In \u201cMore Soon,\u201d the body of a man\u2019s brother is shipped all over the world because of worries over a mysterious contagion. In \u201cVideos of People Falling Down<\/a>,\u201d the lives of a host of characters\u2014a local-news reporter, a right-wing Listserv manager, a cheesy pop singer\u2014converge and intertwine through the shared humiliation of having been filmed while falling. But Pierce\u2019s characters never feel secondary to his plots. They are resoundingly human, with their bundles of worries, joys, dreams, and burdens, their beliefs, theories, and suspicions, their wanderings and wonderings.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pierce and I first met in 2000, as students in a high school summer program in South Carolina, our shared home state. Even then I was impressed by his charm and intelligence, and his lively, slightly askew sense of humor. In 2013, my magazine, <\/em>Gigantic, published his story \u201cTime to Get Radical<\/a>,\u201d a funny and unexpectedly moving catchphrase-driven monologue that in around twelve hundred\u00a0words manages to capture the highs, lows, and in-betweens in the life of one semi-religious auto-parts salesman someplace down South.<\/em><\/p>\n

This interview took place over a series of e-mails and a shared Google Doc, along with two in-person meetings\u2014in his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he now lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

You worked for five years at NPR as a blogger, reporter, and producer. How has this experience informed your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In radio, you\u2019re always aware that you have to win the listener\u2019s attention. You\u2019re wrestling them away from their breakfast or their drive or kids. So lesson one is to be interesting and engaging. You also learn quickly that the best sentence to read over the air is usually the simplest one\u2014complex ideas don\u2019t necessarily require complex sentences. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love beautiful, confusing sentences, too, but I also value clarity\u2014and radio helped me in that regard.<\/p>\n

You may only have ninety seconds to tell a story on the radio. When you write a radio script, there\u2019s software you can use with a little clock in the upper right-hand corner that tells you the piece\u2019s length in terms of time. This helps you to remember that what you\u2019re creating will occupy a portion of a person\u2019s day. One of my short stories might steal forty-two minutes from your life. I want to use your time wisely. <\/p>\n

Do you ever experiment with writing fiction using that software?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. When I\u2019m in the middle of writing a story I never ask myself if what\u2019s on the page is interesting or engaging. I never wonder if I\u2019ve gone on too long. At that stage, I\u2019m incapable of worrying about the reader\u2019s time\u2014or anything else either. Finding the story, for me, it requires a lot of mindless wandering. I\u2019m not sure I could write a story using that radio-script software. It would be too distracting\u2014like going through life with a little clock in the upper right corner of your vision, a clock that tells you how long you\u2019ve been alive\u2014or even worse, how long you\u2019ve got left. Can you imagine? On second thought, I bet we\u2019d all be much nicer to each other if the minutes were always counting down, down, down.<\/p>\n

George Saunders once compared fiction to a toy racetrack, with the story being the series of little mechanical gas stations that fling the reader forward. Any other pleasures of the story, he says\u2014theme, character, moral uplift\u2014are dependent upon getting the reader to finish the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m inclined to agree, and I suppose there are all sorts of ways to accomplish that flinging. A memorable voice, escalations of plot, wild ideas and observations, beautiful sentences all the way to the horizon. Being interesting, at a very basic level, is sort of the point of telling a story in the first place. When a friend tells you he\u2019s got a story for you, what he really means is that he wants you to shut up for a minute and be patient because what he has to say will be worth it\u2014worth it, presumably, because it will be of interest <\/em>to you. And if you aren\u2019t enjoying his story, you might be thinking, He\u2019s just sort of rambling on, or, Nothing\u2019s happening, or, It\u2019s not going anywhere, or, even worse, What\u2019s the point of all this? I suspect readers are a little more forgiving than listeners are. I know I am. Writers can tell interesting stories about anything\u2014about magazines we didn\u2019t subscribe to that keep showing up at our door, about an allergic reaction to blueberries, about a broken toenail, anything. But if you\u2019re going to shut your friend up and tell him a story, it\u2019s good manners to make something happen.<\/p>\n

\"Hall_of_Small_Mammals\"<\/a>When you\u2019re starting a story, which usually comes to you first, the conceit or the character?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most of my stories begin with what might be called a \u201csituation.\u201d This word is stuck in my brain, in part, because of that Talking Heads lyric from \u201cFound a Job<\/a>\u201d\u2014\u201cJudy\u2019s in the bedroom, inventing situations.\u201d\u00a0A situation, in this context, concerns both character and<\/em> conceit. The two are twisted up together. A double helix, the story\u2019s DNA. A conceit alone is ultimately lifeless. It\u2019s all head and no heart, in other words. A character brings the heart and is ultimately more important to me. I should add that when I say I have a character at the outset, I may only have in mind a certain sort of person, an emotion, a particular bundle of questions and concerns and memories. Ideally, the conceit will test or challenge the character in the right way, will investigate those feelings and questions.<\/p>\n

Do you ever see your stories as trials for their characters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never thought about the stories as trials, per se, but it strikes me as true for more than a few of them. I don\u2019t think my characters are being tried in the same way that, say, Job is, but I do think many of them have been plunked down into unusual or even absurd ordeals. With a trial, at least as I\u2019m thinking about it here, a character might be pitted against, or at the mercy of, something large and faceless and untouchable\u2014a state, a system of belief, a bureaucracy, God, the universe, existence itself. Something diffuse or nonterrestrial. For instance, my story \u201cMore Soon.\u201d A man named Bert learns his brother has died overseas from a mysterious illness, and the powers that be won\u2019t allow the body back into the country. There\u2019s little Bert can do about it directly except to stay tuned and hopefully make peace with his brother\u2019s fate. I\u2019m channeling my inner preacher here, but I\u2019d say trials are something to be endured, and the manner in which we endure them reveals us. To paraphrase one of the books we read our daughter before naptime, Oh no, mud! Can\u2019t go under it. Can\u2019t go over it. Got to go through it.<\/p>\n

Almost exclusively the stories in Hall of Small Mammals<\/em> are set in the South. How has the region informed your approach to fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The honest answer is I\u2019m not exactly sure. I suspect I\u2019d still be writing fiction if I\u2019d been born elsewhere, but I\u2019d be writing with a slightly different accent. The South is what I know, so it\u2019s easy for me to set stories there. Maybe I should note that you and I grew up along the I-85 corridor between Atlanta and Charlotte, which historically was full of textile mills and peach farms, though today a lot of what you see along the interstate are big manufacturing plants and suburbs and outlet stores and what I call church-malls, not to mention the famous peach-butt water tower in Gaffney. The people and the landscape have changed some over the last few decades\u2014but not altogether. It\u2019s a culture in conflict with itself, no doubt about it, and I\u2019m sure aspects of that conflict have imprinted onto us\u2014or find expression through us. My imagination does seem rooted there.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve expressed a complicated relationship to certain writers associated with the South\u2014Flannery O\u2019Connor and Barry Hannah, among them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t necessarily say \u201ccomplicated.\u201d I love and admire them both, though in all honesty I probably haven\u2019t read enough Hannah to have any sort of proper relationship at all. The other day, when we were chatting about O\u2019Connor, I was griping about one or two particular stories, about what I\u2019ll call their neatness, but I told you then if anyone ever asked me about her in an interview, I\u2019d only say I love her. Well, the moment has come. I love her!<\/p>\n

Needless to say, the South is a large place, with many voices and with a long tradition of wild and fantastic fiction. Sometimes I do wonder how I fit into that. Maybe the trick for any new Southern writer such as myself, living in 2015, is not to cling to old ideas of what constitutes Southernness, to stay away from archetypes, stereotypes, all<\/em> types, really. If I\u2019m writing about a character at dinner, maybe I shouldn\u2019t put him at a meat-and-three but at the Applebee\u2019s or a Thai restaurant. Maybe a character has a Robert E. Lee portrait over her mantel but maybe she also goes to hatha yoga classes every morning and drinks iced almond-milk lattes or whatever. What I\u2019m learning, slowly, is that I don\u2019t need to impose any ideas about the South onto my stories. The South, at least as I experience it, will bubble up on its own.<\/p>\n

James Yeh<\/a> is a writer and a founding editor of <\/em>Gigantic. His stories and other writing have appeared in or are forthcoming in <\/em>Tin House, <\/em>the <\/em>Believer, Bomb,<\/em> and <\/em>Vice, and he is a frequent contributor to <\/em>NOON.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s immediately striking about Thomas Pierce\u2019s debut story collection, Hall of Small Mammals, are its wild, unforgettable conceits. In \u201cShirley Temple Three,\u201d a long-extinct dwarf mammoth is cloned for a TV show, then dumped off in a small Southern town with Mawmaw, the show host\u2019s mother. In \u201cMore Soon,\u201d the body of a man\u2019s brother […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":783,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[893,16535,4867,339,8671,7845,3113,16536,16534],"class_list":["post-81379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-debut-fiction","tag-hall-of-small-mammals","tag-npr","tag-radio","tag-short-fiction","tag-short-stories","tag-south-carolina","tag-southern-writers","tag-thomas-pierce"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAn Interview with Thomas Pierce<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The author of \u201cHall of Small Mammals\u201c discusses his short stories, his time writing for radio, and writing in the Southern tradition.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/08\/inventing-situations-an-interview-with-thomas-pierce\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inventing Situations: An Interview with Thomas Pierce by James Yeh\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 8, 2015 \u2013 What\u2019s immediately striking about Thomas Pierce\u2019s debut story collection, Hall of Small Mammals, are its wild, unforgettable conceits. 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