BookPeople Q&A with Manuel Gonzales

Chances are, we would’ve been looking forward to The Miniature Wife even if we didn’t already know and love Manuel Gonzales. A new collection of short stories – particularly of weird short stories – will always get us excited. But the fact that Manuel is a familiar face, that we’ve worked with him on events here, that we’ve attended so many Austin Bat Cave events around town (the Bill Callahan show was phenomenal!) makes this debut collection something we want to shout about from the rooftops.

So, ahem, IT’S HERE! IT’S HERE! THE MINIATURE WIFE IS HERE!

It’s on shelves today, and boy, does it look good in its bright green cover. That has to be the most inviting grinning skull we’ve ever seen. Perhaps it’s because we know what’s inside – stories that will surprise you, make you laugh, make you consider what you would do if you were stuck in an airplane circling Dallas for twenty years….

We’re stoked to celebrate the book here in the store  tomorrow night at 7pm with a reading, refreshments, and a Perpetual Oil cocktail (that airplane has to run on something, you know). And we’re very grateful to Manuel for taking the time to answer a few questions for us. Liz Wyckoff, events leader extraordinaire and Bat Cave volunteer (and stupendous writer in her own right) conducted the Q&A.

BOOKPEOPLE: Some of the most exciting and delightful aspects of your stories are the elements of magical realism. In one, an otherwise-normal father turns into a werewolf; in another, an idealistic, chronically-unemployed man keeps a unicorn in a shed in his backyard; and in the opening story, a plane circles eternally over Dallas propelled by “perpetual fuel.” What do you find compelling about the fantastic? What specific authors or works of magical realism have influenced your work?

MANUEL GONZALES: When I was younger, the kind of books I really dug into were fantasy, sci-fi, and crime and adventure genres, and so there’s a thrill for me when mucking around in some of those genre elements—fantasy and sci-fi, mostly—and then in college and after I left college, I discovered the magical realism of Garcia Marquez and, to an extent, of Faulkner and Ahrundati Roy, and then Jorge Luis Borges, who also traffics in a kind of sci-fi/fantasy hybrid, though steeped more in philosophy, I suppose, and these writers, along with Jose Saramago, have long been a huge influence on me. But then, I also feel a strong influence from realist-based, minimalist writers—John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Deborah Eisenberg and the like—who write stories that have this veneer painted over them of quiet barely containing earth-shaking heartache or fear. Then, on top of these writers, you add people like Ben Marcus and Kelly Link and Karen Russell and George Saunders and Gary Lutz and Brian Evenson, who are all trafficking in their own heady mixture of fabulist and language-heavy writing, all of whom I really enjoy reading and who’ve influenced my own writing, as well.

When it comes to the fantastic or science-fiction elements, what compels me about them is the idea that you can introduce something fantastic or horrific—like a unicorn or a zombie—to a story and then play around with expectations and actions and reactions. These set-pieces are there to act as a catalyst, to stir things up in these characters’ lives, but not generally in an expected way. The unicorn in the unicorn story isn’t typical, doesn’t bring a goodness or purity to the world it inhabits, but causes rifts and strife. I always feel that the fantastic, when introduced into real life, will complicate life, not make life better, and I think it’s fun to play with those complications, and speculate on how characters will react to them.

BP: Communication is also a central concern in many of your stories—quite a few characters have trouble speaking, listening, or expressing their thoughts. In The Sounds of Early Morning, for example, innocuous sounds such as chirping birds and playing children are so dangerous to humans, they can even be fatal. And in The Miniature Wife, the narrator struggles to come up with a way to successfully communicate with his coffee-cup-sized wife. Can you talk a little bit about your interest in the concept of communication?

MG: I’m not always a very good communicator, or a very good listener, and most of my characters take on some of the worst of my own traits, but amplified to make them seem even worse than they are, which is why a lot of communication issues come up in my work. It’s funny, though, because one of the stories very much concerned with communication, “The Artist’s Voice,” which is about the composer who is paralyzed and so talks through his ear—there I had no idea what that story was about while writing it and then hit a wall because in the middle of writing it, I realized I had this paralyzed composer engaged in all these conversations, but then, how could he talk when he’s paralyzed? Which made me realize that the whole point of the essay would be about how he talks despite being paralyzed. Which is, obviously, through his ears.

BP: Lots of the stories in this collection are written in the first person. What are the benefits of allowing your readers such direct access to the thoughts of your narrators?

MG: I think a lot of that has more to do with my own comfort as a writer. For a long time, I found it very difficult to write outside of the first person voice. The language in third person felt stilted or without a strong narrative voice. I found myself disinterested in my own storytelling because of this and so I gravitated again and again back to the first person narrator. The only time I didn’t find it out of place was when writing the short, encyclopedic Meritorious Lives, because then I was aping a certain style of writing—technical, expository, dull—and so that was part of the game. I’ve gotten over all of that, though, and a lot of what I’m writing right now is in the third person. In fact, I just recently rewrote three sections of a novel that had been in first person to make them third person. I used to think that a first person narrative gave readers a deeper insight, or easier access to a character’s thoughts than a third person, but if you look at, say, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, that book reads almost as if it were in first person but it’s not. Chabon manages, however, to bring you into the protagonist’s thoughts, tell the story as if through the protagonist’s voice, but all within the confines of the third person narrator. It’s amazing.

BP: You’re currently the Executive Director of the Austin Bat Cave—a nonprofit creative writing center for youths and young adults here in Austin. I’m curious to know: what was your relationship to writing as a young child or teen? Also, do you think this job has affected your writing in any way?

MG: I was a horrible writer when I was younger. I fought with my dad all the time in middle and high school over how badly I wrote essays for English. I had to rewrite them all the time, just to bring failing grades up to a C. I didn’t understand grammar or why it was important. I was a reader but not a writer at all, until my senior year of English, when my English teacher found a way to encourage what she thought were good ideas, offer me enough encouragement, took enough stock of what I was trying to say, that she made me want to figure out how to say it better. And that’s what’s always in the back of my mind when figuring out programs or workshops for Austin Bat Cave: if you show enough interest in someone’s story, someone’s ideas, then they will want to find the way to articulate those stories, those ideas better.

What’s interesting about ABC and how it’s affected my writing is in how it’s the first job I’ve had that didn’t play complete second-fiddle to writing. Before, I’ve worked in jobs that didn’t ask much of me, so I could devote as much of me as possible to writing. But I like ABC and feel devoted to its mission and feel I have a strong vision for it, which we’re coming close to achieving, that the work, which I enjoy, has made me willing to adjust my own writing schedule.

BP: As a debut author, what surprised you most about the process of publication? Has there been any change in the way you think of yourself as a writer?

MG: What’s surprising so far is just how much attention the book is receiving even as publication nears. I’ve written a collection of stories in a time when everyone is ringing the death nell of the American short story, and I didn’t expect it to receive as much review space as it has, or to be received as enthusiastically as it’s being received. Also, the enthusiasm with which it’s being tackled by the publisher and my agent. It’s silly to say this, but they seem to really like it and are in many ways better advocates for the book than I am.

As far as how I think of myself, though, no, not much change. I feel as compelled to write as I did before, and to write the things that I find funny or tragic. I am still thrilled when a piece of some thing I’m working on falls into place, or when I’m writing something that is pure invention.

BP: The Miniature Wife and Other Stories has already garnered some excellent reviews and praise in the media. I’m sure many of your readers are already hungry for the next book. What are you currently working on, and how does your new work compare to the stories in this collection?

MG: I’m working on a couple of different projects. Every week, I’m posting brief stories at whatstheworth.com, wherein each week I write a new story, under a thousand words, based on a photograph a friend of mine, a fabulous photographer in New York, sends me. Those are fun exercises, some of which might become the basis for something more than exercises. I’m also in the second draft of a novel that speaks a lot to some of the science fiction and B-movie tropes I play around with in some of the stories. And I’m working on a novel that’s stylistically closer to the three fake non-fiction pieces in the book—Artist’s Voice, Sebali Tribe, Africa—in that the novel is essayistic in nature but concerning outlandishly implausible conceits.

Manuel Gonzales reads here tomorrow night at 7p. If you can’t make the event, you can order a signed copy through our website.