Nicholas Grider is an artist and writer with an MFA in both from CalArts. Misadventure is his debut collection of short stories, published by Austin small press A Strange Object. Unflinching and raw, these stories will grab you by the shoulders and sit you down until you’ve read every single one.
Ben, of our booksellers, recently reviewed Misadventure . He also had the opportunity to ask Grider a few questions about his work.
BOOKPEOPLE: First and foremost, congratulations on the debut of Misadventure. I’ll do my best to keep from gushing about it here and will jump right in with some questions. While this is your first book, you are also a photographer and visual artist. Your website’s bio states you’re “an artist and writer.” Do you think of yourself as one before the other, or is that ordering just alphabetical?
NICHOLAS GRIDER: Thanks! And to answer your artist/writer question, I don’t really prefer one over the other. They both have advantages; I can paint a painting and then have a tangible thing in my hands, or I can use my camera to take hundreds of pictures of something it would be hard to take writing notes about, but there’s stuff with storytelling and language I can do in writing that don’t work in art. I’m usually doing more of one than the other at a given time but it balances out to about 50/50.
BP: Following that question, I noticed there are quite a few text art pieces you’ve done, and in the collection you certainly tinker with story structure and word play. The stories “Disappearing Act” and “Liars” are two that immediately come to mind. Could you elaborate a bit on your relationship with words and also how you decide when to abandon the conventional narrative?
NG: There’s actually a really involved backstory to this I won’t bore you with but just say that, for me, writing comes more naturally than speech. And writing for me is also a place where I can make experiments, and the results don’t always fit within a particular tradition of experimental writing, it’s just that I’m just as interested in how a story is told as in what the story is, and I approach projects thinking “I’ll give myself rules A, B and C and character X and see what happens.”
BP: You went to school at CalArts out on the West Coast and currently live in Milwaukee. How did you come across A Strange Object here in Austin? What has it been like working with them?
NG: I actually grew up in suburban Milwaukee and moved back after school for a couple of reasons, the main one of which was to help out my mom. I’m forever planning returns to Los Angeles, because I love it there, but those plans need to be pragmatic. I started working with Callie and Jill because I’d produced a book of stories intended for a contest but my agent wanted to try to sell it, and during that process A Strange Object approached my agent and luckily for me he handed over my manuscript and Callie and Jill liked it. And working with Callie and Jill has been great; they’ve involved me in pretty much every step, more than most publishers would ever do, and they’ve made a real book out of my rangy manuscript and I’m very thankful it’s in their hands.
BP: One thing I’ve heard in the past is that readers often assume work to be autobiographical or reflect the author’s opinions in a very literal fashion. Since it seems that this intertextuality is inevitable, is there any particular story or theme you think you’ll be answering a lot of questions about?
NG: There’s also a long story behind why so many characters are gay or lesbian, a boring story, but I assume people will (correctly) assume I’m gay; there’s no particular story I think I’ll get questions about that have to do with me, though one happenstance of trying to write a very interconnected book of stories that span eight years of production is people might think I have a particular interest in bondage; I don’t, not that I would be ashamed if I did, it just kept helpfully popping up as an interesting structure or story element, so I began to treat it as “how many different ways can I approach this?”
BP: Reading quite often informs one’s writing. What were you reading throughout the writing of Misadventure, or instead, are there any books or stories that really influenced you for this collection?
NG: Right before and during writing the bulk of the book’s stories I was reading a lot of David Markson’s late novels, a lot of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and in particular Walter Abish, both How German Is It and his earlier story collections. Compton-Burnett’s work is a lot of very dark stuff going on underneath a prim Victorian veneer, so that influenced the content, and the ways in which Abish and Markson break storytelling convention encouraged me to try “alternate” story structures, in particular in “Disappearing Act,” “This is Not a Romance,” “Millions of Americans” and the title story.
BP: What are you reading right now?
NG: I tend to have a lot of books open at once, so the main literary three are Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge, and Lily Hoang’s Unfinished. I’m also reading a lot of Jewish/Biblical academic and folklore texts because I’m converting, but I’m also mining what I read for kernels of future stories and for a book of poetry that’s almost finished.
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Copies of Misadventure are available on our shelves at BookPeople and via bookpeople.com.
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