Luke Rolfes: We’re here today with Robert Garner McBrearty to talk about his terrific new collection of stories from University of New Mexico Press. The collection is called The Problem You Have, and it features full length stories and some flash fiction. Robert, thanks so much for taking some time with us today! I’m always interested in the construction of a collection of fiction. Can you describe how this project came to be?
Robert Garner McBreaty: When I’m first writing my stories, I don’t really think of a collection. That comes later. I’m just focusing on each individual story. After I’ve written a number of them, and, I hope, published several of them, I start thinking about a collection. Then I start thinking about which stories might go well together and what order they might go in. With my collections, there’s always been some transformations over time, that is, some stories moving in, some moving out. I wouldn’t say it’s an entirely logical process. There’s a certain amount of intuitive feeling that a certain story belongs in the collection and another doesn’t.
LR: Sometimes fiction writers think of building a collection kind of like a “greatest hits” album---as in, “this is my best stuff.” Other writers try to go with a unified theme, or variety, or they simply pick pieces that go together. What was your method for culling/selecting these pieces for The Problem You Have?
RGM: It was almost a little after the fact, but I saw a couple of themes emerging in the stories. One was the idea of the conscience, the inner voice prodding one to take or not take certain actions, whether one heeds the voice or not. The other theme, or subject matter, was danger. In a number of stories, the protagonists are in danger of losing their lives. I was actually a little surprised by that as I was reading over the stories. One of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes is “Every story is a man (person) in a hole story.” In these characters, the characters are in serious, if not always life-threatening predicaments. So, once I saw how those ideas were emerging, I could see how some stories fit better than others. At the same time, I didn’t want to be overly selective or leave a story out because it didn’t quite fit the mold. I like my collections to include some odd fits as well.
LR: One of the things I admire about your writing, Robert, is your ability to render plot. Tension is thick in your pieces, and I, at times, find myself holding my breath. Can you talk about plot and tension as craft elements in your work?
RGM: Well, going back to my previous answer, I think about predicaments. One can build a story on less dramatic material, and the quiet story can be great and profound, but in this particular collection, the idea of danger kept emerging. As a kid, I always read suspense books, Agatha Christie, The Hardy Boys, and the question was always: what’s going to happen? A lot of great literary work also contains suspense. I think of Dostoyevsky and how his books often involve murder. In recent years, I’ve gone back to reading more suspense novels and again that question arises: what’s going to happen? It’s easier to create tension if the stakes are high. I might ask myself the question; what might make matters worse? In the title story, the danger emerges more slowly, but in some of the stories, the danger is presented quickly as in “Holdouts.” In “A Morning Swim” in the opening pages, we’ve got a swimmer and a shark in the ocean. What could go wrong? There doesn’t often have to be a big thing going on. But even in a quiet story, I think if we present the question: what’s going to happen? And maybe insert little reminders of that question, it helps to keep readers interested. Of course, readers have to care about what happens and what happens has to occur in an authentic and meaningful way.
LR: And a follow up to that: What is the inspiration in most of your stories? Do they spring forth from a plot element, or do they start perhaps from a premise or image?
RGM: That’s a question I’m always pondering myself, and I’m intrigued by where stories come from. It’s kind of an inconsistent process, but sometimes everything emerges at once---premise, problem, character, voice. I can have an “idea” for a story without being able to write the story, or to write it in an interesting way. But if I get the first line down and the first paragraph down in a certain way, it leads me on to the next paragraph, etc. But at the same time, I have to know the premise pretty early on, or at least the working premise, or I lose all direction and the story loses momentum, and I lose momentum, and I have to shelve the story, but maybe get back to it later. So, it’s kind of like sound, voice, storyline have to merge. I sometimes find that stories stem from long-ago memories, something I’ve thought about writing about for years but have never been able to. I’m not very good at memoir---I tend to bore myself. But sometimes the long-ago memory suddenly combines with a fictional premise and I’m able to write the story. In one of my first teaching jobs, a kid who dreamed of pitching for the Yankees got cut from the college team because an electronic timer said his fastball was too slow. The kid was devastated. His story always haunted me, and I finally told the story, in “Smitty’s on the Mound” where Smitty, an over-the-hill minor-league pitcher, refuses to leave the mound when the manager tries to yank him. The key to that story, too, was when I realized that Smitty was in therapy for a long-ago incident with his father and his manager reminded him of his father. Not all of that came to me at once. Sometimes my first drafts are like a sketch, needing to be filled in.
LR: Another thing I noticed about your pieces… there is often a physical element of danger: a gun, a knife, even a shark. Is this intentional in your writing? Do you find it helpful to have a dangerous artifact for characters to react to?
RGM: I like that notion of the artifact---the gun, the shark. The tower in “The Professor’s March.” The old farmhouse in “Cold Night in Waterloo.” The soldier’s ruined boots in “Holdouts.” The red van in “The Problem You Have.” I’m glad you pointed that out. I think it was somewhat unintentional, but I think I will use the idea more in the future!
LR: Your endings are always surprising, yet they feel inevitable. How do you know when a story is reaching its final sentences? Do you have any go-to tricks or techniques for finding that right note?
RGM: I very much like the way you put that, that the endings are surprising but inevitable. I’m not sure about any tricks or techniques, exactly, but a few thoughts come to mind. Much of it is a matter of feel, of intuition. Does it feel right? I think of Hemingway when he was asked why he’d re-written the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, and he said he’d written it until he’d gotten the words right. So, there’s a feeling of getting the words right. The problem with that is that you read it once and it feels right and you read it a day later, and it doesn’t feel right. So, it’s a tricky business. There’s a matter of momentum and conclusion, a sense that every moment in the story has been leading to this inevitable end, which may yet be surprising. So, an ending can’t be forced, or it will feel inauthentic. Even if it’s surprising, we have to believe it. By “we” I mean both the writer and the reader. There are some things to consider which might be helpful: what’s the final note you want to strike, the final tone? Do you want a more open-ended conclusion or one where matters are more settled? How much do we want to say directly, how much left unsaid? A rising tone like a crescendo, or a fading out, John Wayne walking into the sunset? There’s no one right way, but the story itself leads you to it. What works on one story might not work on another. I do like at least a momentary feeling of “wow!” when I think I’ve hit just the right note, though, alas, I might come back later and think, “Crap, what was I so excited about?”
LR: One more big picture question: You write both longer pieces and flash. When do you determine the length of a piece you are writing? Is it something you plan ahead or does the ending/length emerge organically?
RGM: When I’m writing a flash piece, I pretty much know it’s a flash, though I’m not sure how long a flash it’s going to be. It might be two hundred words or a thousand, though I think the sweet spot for a flash is really about five hundred. I also write some poetry, though I’ve only published a few poems. So, I sort of think of the flashes as being similar to my poems. Sometimes I write the piece as a poem first. Anyway, I do know when I’m working with something short. The short pieces come into my mind with some regularity. I use a little of the William Stafford technique of getting up early, before sunrise, getting some coffee into my system, and see what thoughts arise.
The longer stories are harder for me these days. I mentioned this earlier, but a lot of things have to come together: concept, character, voice. The concept has to be large enough where I can’t tell the story in a brief way. In a flash, one is usually dealing with one-time, one-scene whereas longer stories usually need a series of scenes or one very well-developed scene. The longer ones tend to bounce around in my mind a lot, sometimes years between a first draft and a final version. It’s not like I’m working on that story the whole time, but working on it, letting it sit, knowing it needs something, but I’m not sure what. Then something occurs to me, and I add it in. Often that’s it---I realize something else has to happen in the story.
LR: Let’s talk about a few individual stories! I love the opener, a piece called “A Cold Night in Waterloo.” In it, a mysterious man is left outside of a farmhouse in freezing weather. When an old man won’t let him inside, he decides to break in. I loved the sense of place in this one, and how the farmhouse, winter, and countryside became a maze for the characters to navigate. Tell us a little bit about this one and how you came across that setup.
RGM: Love the question! And thank you! I really hoped that story would resonate. I can recall exactly where that story originated from, in this case it was a visual image, combined with a certain mood I was in. So, I was driving with three other writers from Colorado to Iowa, to attend the North American Review’s two-hundred-year anniversary conference. (I think that’s the right number of years!) I’d just left my teaching job at the University of Colorado after a long time, and I was in kind of a contemplative mood. What does one do with the rest of his life? There was a lot of good conversation and bantering on the drive, but then everyone fell silent or slept, but I kept looking out at the landscape, at the farmhouses here and there and I knew I had to write something involving one of those houses, but I didn’t know what. It was a story eating at me, wanting to be told. Over the course of the conference---a really great one by the way---I had this feeling I was on the search for the story involving a farmhouse. I probably thought of Capote’s In Cold Blood. But I didn’t think I wanted to write something as violent as that. The story came in pieces, then, and by the drive home, I could see this character, I mean I could feel this character, out on the road, freezing, and he’s got to get inside somewhere, anywhere warm. Here’s something of a mystery to me. After he breaks in, I could see that interior in my mind, going down the hallway, and I don’t know what house that might have been---I think maybe partly my grandmother’s house. But it’s like I’d been in that house and could see it. Yes, I think partly it was my grandmother’s house I was visualizing. Memory is fascinating, the flashes that come to one out of the dark. One other thing about that story. The baby wasn’t there at first. That was the key. When I realized the old man wouldn’t let the young man in because of the baby, that was the key, and the baby is what allows the humanity of the two characters to come through.
LR: Another piece I was drawn to was “A Morning Swim.” This story is about a man who encounters and escapes a shark while swimming out to a buoy in the ocean. This harrowing experience seems to unlock something in the man, and he finds himself able to say things to his wife he has never said---for better or worse. What inspired this piece?
RGM: The triggering event was an incident where I almost drowned. There was no shark involved. But I remember that tremendous feeling of relief that I hadn’t drowned. “Relief” doesn’t really do justice to it. Really, an overwhelming feeling, gratitude, a sense of being changed, of being open to the world and others. It’s somewhat transitory, but maybe one keeps a little of that anyway. At first, though, that’s all I had. A swim, a guy back on the beach, happy to be alive. Not really much of a story. Not enough twists and turns. Then I started asking myself, what could happen to this guy if he got up from the beach and started walking home? I should mention that that triggering episode, the near-drowning, happened years before I actually wrote the story, but I’d flagged it in my mind as something I might write about one day. Sometimes I just ask myself, what wouldn’t be expected? In this case, his very openness leads to rather a disastrous misunderstanding with his wife. I thought, too, of how exuberant moods often end with a crash.
LR: Several of the stories involve characters in the military. I’m thinking about “Sarge and Hollings” and “Holdouts” specifically. Do you approach stories differently when writing about veterans? Why or why not?
RGM: Well, I feel a little cautious around the subject as I’m not a veteran myself, so I don’t want to pretend to be able to tell their story as a veteran would, so “Sarge and Hollings” is allegorical in nature. Hollings is too perfect to be real, and the setting is unspecified, so I hope by establishing the terms of the story, that we’re not talking about an entirely realistic story, it allows me to take certain liberties. I always want to treat veterans respectfully. They’ve sacrificed a lot. I can really only write from the outside, though I’ve been influenced by soldiers I’ve known. When I lived in Mexico a long time ago, I was friends with various Vietnam War veterans and I listened to their stories and some of those types of stories show up in “Sarge and Hollings” so I do want it to feel real within the confines of the fictional world the story is creating.
“Holdouts” is a more realistic story, though with an imagined storyline. My father served in the Philippines just after World War II ended. He didn’t have great war stories to tell, but he did tell his children that there had still been “holdouts,” Japanese soldiers who hadn’t yet surrendered, and now and then they would fire upon jeeps driving on the road. I always remember that and years later, I turned it into that a character, not really that much like my father, who is fired upon and has to escape through the jungle. My real father, in his late eighties, started having these falling episodes and he was a “holdout” from going into a retirement home. My favorite part of that story is when an old army friend, who had escaped with the main character, comes to visit years after the war, and we see that the two men are still haunted by the man they left behind, even though they’d only had a very small part in the war. It made me think about all the people who come back from war and how well or not they get along with their lives.
LR: Another favorite of mine is “Where Are You Going with Him?” In it, the narrator witnesses a man beat another man to death, and then, later on, stumbles across the murderer and becomes deeply intwined in the murderer’s fate. The narrator juxtaposes this memory with the memory of witnessing a woman fall from the top floor of a hotel building. I’m fascinated by this move in the story. Can you tell us about this one? What made you think to bring in the falling woman, especially when the stakes are so high in the thread involving the murderer?
RGM: In real life, I encountered those dead bodies, and I was struck, horrified I guess, at the way the blood ran out from the heads and created a kind of halo effect. So that image formed a connection in my mind. Then in each case, I thought of “intervention.” Why wasn’t the fight stopped, why hadn’t someone stopped the woman from falling, or jumping? I really did see that happen at a hotel. It was pretty shocking. Maybe I needed to write about it because it had shocked me. A lot of storytelling is about combining, how one thing combines with another. Maybe it’s that one memory triggers another, triggers another, triggers a flight of imagination, that sort of thing. So, I saw the connection both visually and thematically. I see images in my mind, too many disturbing ones at times, and I think in this case, it was primarily the image of the blood that led me to the connection. This may sound strange to say, but I’ve always felt like that woman in the hotel has haunted me for years, and I think that leads to the conclusion in the story that we are somehow all entwined on this mysterious journey, whatever this journey is.
LR: The final piece in this collection has a historical slant. It takes place during the infamous University of Texas shooting in 1966. How much research did you have to do on this topic? What made you decide to show this tragedy through the eyes of an English professor?
RGM: Oh wow, another great question that makes me think! I did do some reading about that day, but it’s not meant to be a precise historical reference by any means. But I’ve always been haunted by that day. My family, from San Antonio, visited Austin quite a bit and the campus had always seemed like such a lovely, peaceful place, and the tower had seemed not forbidding, but more like an outlook, watching over the city. So, when that horror erupted, it made an impression on me. Places that had seemed safe might not be. At the time, I didn’t know I was going to write about it. Later, when we started to have all the school shooting episodes, it struck me that that day back in 1966 was the forerunner, in a horrible way.
I taught a variety of English or writing classes in various schools, and I was always aware of teachers, including me, carrying briefcases – another artifact for you. So somehow, I started seeing this professor walking across a campus carrying this briefcase, and in my mind he’s now at the University of Texas on that fateful day. But wait a minute, in an earlier draft, the story is being told by the professor’s daughter who is explaining why her father has had a psychotic episode caused by being on acid during a mass shooting, that is, one unreal experience merging with something that seems unreal at first because it is so horrifying. Later, I changed it to the professor’s point of view.
I went with a professor because of the insulated sense one can have at a university, especially in one’s office. It’s a place of sanctuary. Actually, I never had an office with a nice view of the trees outside, so I had to borrow someone else’s office in my mind.
On that terrible day, the sanctuary is shattered. Yet the story is not without hope. The professor rescues a young man, the professor realizes his daughter and wife still love him, even though he’s been so distant.
LR: What’s next for you? Any new projects on the horizon?
RGM: Well, I’ve worked through several drafts of a short novel over a number of years. I hope to have that novel ready soon. I also have enough stories for another flash collection. I’m considering a hybrid, mostly flash fiction but with some poems and maybe even a one-act play included. I could easily keep it just as a flash collection, though, as it’s primarily flash fiction, maybe some that might be considered flash memoir. I think there’s often a fine line on how we label certain stories.
At some point down the road, I’d like to publish a Selected Works type of book, with maybe 40 or 50 of my best, though I’d probably need an editor’s help in determining which are the best.
Partly, with a new book out, I just want to see how the writing unfolds. The publication of a book frees one up somehow. Did that one, what’s next? It feels good.
LR: Thanks so much for your time, Robert! Best of luck with this fantastic collection.
RGM: Thank you very much, Luke, for your wonderful response to my book, and for these great questions. I love an interview like this that makes me think and helps me to articulate certain things about my stories and the writing process. I’m glad and grateful for our ongoing conversation. I'm also grateful to the University of New Mexico Press for publishing this collection. The team there has been great to work with.