LitMinds Blog and Interviews

Julian Kudritzki forms half of the literary duo featured at tomorrow night’s DebutLit sponsored event in San Francisco.  The reading, a release party hosted at The Hive art-space, features new author Phil LaMarche (interviewed here on Wednesday), and Kudritzki, who will read from his new short story, “Blood on Blue Lawns,” forthcoming in NY Tyrant magazine. 

We’ll be in attendance at the reading, and we hope you’ll join us.  Here are the details:

Release party for Phil LaMarche & Julian Kudritzki
The Hive, 1392 Pacific Ave, San Francisco
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Suggested donation
Doors open to the public at 8 p.m., reading begins at 8:30 p.m.
Book-signing and party following the reading

Both Kudritzki and LaMarche write about visions of America, and particularly the American outdoors.  In this interview with LitMinds, Kudritzki talks about his geographical influences, the regional bias of American fiction, and the truck drivers of the world.  

1. Your short story, “Blood on Blue Lawns,” is being published in the literary magazine New York Tyrant.  This piece explores the relationship of one struggling couple and the influence of a father.  Tell us a bit more about your interest in exploring this triangle of relationships: son and father, girlfriend and boyfriend, father and girlfriend.

The three of them always belonged to the story. None of these specific characters could exist without the other(s). In general, triangulated relationships are fascinating as there is a kind of emotional violence in the precipitancy of shifting alliances—the attraction and repulsion are simultaneous, which can lead to conflicted decisions, which results in confusion and chaos.

The story was always meant to be about a couple that is struggling. If they lived in a vacuum or oasis, it is not guaranteed that they would stay together. As they are barely making that relationship work, further factors complicate matters. The father is one. He represents something of an archetype that has worked the dangerous jobs of the area and wields that experience. He draws life lessons from his past that are really not valid, relevant or wise, but they are delivered with all the weight and significance of his ‘heroic’ work experience. He is further compromised by his body failing from abuse (alcohol, physical labor), which makes him reliant on his son and his son’s girlfriend. It is a difficult relationship that he won’t accept and he orbits their life somewhat menacingly, exacerbating matters. The other intrusions are the guy just out of prison, the girlfriend’s coworker, and finally violence at the son’s worksite, which enters their life through an industrial accident that maims a co-worker.

What I was trying to do was establish a precarious relationship that is further assailed by factors out of the couple’s control. I am fascinated by storylines in which the characters endure a crushing event—just barely scrape through—but you are left at the end with this divination that, due to their life’s circumstances, another, bigger blow is coming and it is likely that they won’t survive that one. I find those stories inspiring because the beauty is in the struggle, not the outcome. I find stories that celebrate successful outcomes as disingenuous and tedious in their naiveté. You have to love it enough to be honest with it.

The novel that I am working to get published, The Fruit Promise, has a lot of the same elements. It has a single struggle that is compounded by other struggles and others’ struggles that are beyond the central character’s control. Again, an industrial accident intercedes.

2. Your published works range in length from a two-paragraph moment called “Sogged” to a 4,000+ word short story.  How does your writing style differ amongst your various pieces?  What are the common threads within your writing?  If you were to compile your short stories into a collection, what would be your title and summary for the book?

I find much fiction too long. I am a sucker for the techniques of voiceover and montage in film because of their ability to expedite. I also enjoy multiple endings as they tend to compress large amounts of time, which doesn’t need to be carefully documented. The ‘Lives of Others’ is a recent example. There is an embedded message in multiple endings (or all good endings) that the lives will continue beyond the confines of the book or story. There is a tentativeness in some contemporary writing to move a scene forward, which might be because of the sentimental attachment to the subject or the characters. I caught a lot of criticism in grad school because the third-person narrator in my stories was deemed detached. It’s as if the readers longed for a compromised third-person narrator.

The different pieces and different lengths all belong to the same world and are intended to layer that world. I like to think about it as ‘hardening’ all the moments into a reality, in which each supports the rest regardless of length. I want to be careful so as not to appear as writing inter-related short stories. It is simply that certain moments and exchanges don’t warrant further elaboration—it’s the difference in the duration of a joke and a eulogy. There’s something in good film about getting in and out of a moment quickly and letting it stand on its own, a tonal adjustment, that I like to incorporate into fiction.

In terms of title and summary, I defer to the experts in writing those sorts of things. I think the common thread, most simply put (and lifted from Peter Guralnick’s description of soul music) is the vagaries of love and the inequities of work (labor). Those two meet up often in my stories.

3. Between prior work on a ranch in Northern California and your passion for fly-fishing, you appear to spend a substantial amount of your time in the outdoors doing physically demanding activities.  How does this environment influence your writing – your writing process as well as the content of what you write?

We grew up fairly unencumbered. We were five kids (four sisters) and we were (and are) fiercely independent. I am always blown away when I hear people talk about their childhoods and how regulated they were. Of course, it didn’t seem unusual at the time, living it. We were taken for camping trips during the summer to fairly remote places, such as Washoe and Pyramid Lake. They have since been developed, supplemented and infrastructure added, but at the time it was like going to the moon, a moonscape especially in the lack of trees so all of us were burned to a crisp within minutes of getting out of the car. It was made clear to us that we were to be nowhere near the tent for the course of the day and cut loose on our bicycles and whatnot.  My parents were very well traveled overseas and that had an appropriate effect on our desire to live and work in a lot of different places.

I have lived in New York and San Francisco and while the benefits of both are unassailable, I have this thing about the disappearing West, which is admittedly romantic and I have to be watchful of letting that seep into my writing as it is unfair and inappropriate to the people and situations that I want to write about. Arizona is just out of control and talking about that situation is talking in a massive order of magnitude that is ungraspable. But it’s visible in New Mexico and Idaho and Montana. I make it up to Idaho and Montana annually and the difference is evident in just that 11-month period.

There’s this scarred majesty to Montana, especially, which is very seductive. It has places like the Bitterroots which are so fertile and then the lake of sulfuric acid in Butte which grows by thousand of gallons a day and is the area’s ‘fuck you’ from Anaconda and all kinds of mining.

In relation to writing, The Fruit Promise and short stories are deeply informed, if not outright cribbed, from experience such as working on a pear and grape ranch in Northern California. I was afforded a very close experience with lives that do not appear frequently in fiction. It is very easy to get to know someone working alongside on a forklift 100 hours a week during harvest. While operating heavy machinery around trucks and whatnot, there’s a responsibility that quickly grows into a trust that quickly grows into confidence and I was told lifetimes, often with such detail and vividness and cruel humor that it was difficult to transition them into fiction. Interestingly, those things that I witnessed are least likely to make it into the final draft. They are also the hardest things to pull out, but all too frequently they don’t belong to the story and they always feel out of place and antagonistic, like a person yelling in a darkened theatre.

I too often feel that only the experience of rich Northeasterners are celebrated in our country’s fiction, which says a lot about our values.  There is the ‘human infrastructure’ to our society, which does not make it into the pages of the books that win the big awards.  I know that term might seem overly clinical, but it is not often, except allegorically or as a juxtaposition or cameo, do the truck drivers of the world make it into print. Of course there are people like Russell Banks who do concern themselves with people who actually work for a living.

In terms of fly-fishing, the intent is to reach a remote piece of water and imitate nature through grace, timing and perseverance. I haven’t found a higher pursuit. I have fished places like Texas Hole on the San Juan in northern New Mexico, where fishermen stand shoulder to shoulder and pull up large fish. I’m more likely to work the waters where I won’t encounter another.


4. You have completed a novel, The Fruit Promise, that is centered on a small agrarian community.  Tell us a bit more about this work, its major themes, and your inspiration for writing it.

As stated above, the work afforded me insight into lives that don’t often appear in fiction. This wasn’t the intent to begin with. It wasn’t a research project, but a way to put myself through college.

As I worked over five harvests at this ranch, the change that the area was undergoing was drastic. Bankruptcies or transition to other crops (mostly from pears to wine grapes) was radical in effect. The landscape went from orchards to vineyards. Orchards a hundred years old were being ripped. The market prices simply couldn’t sustain the growers. The reasons are myriad: international competition mostly from Chile, tradition, changes in farming techniques (e.g., the move away from toxic chemical pest management), mismanagement of the product in the marketplace. In terms of the latter, there was a time when the Lake County Bartlett pear was known as the world’s premiere Bartlett. People would wait until they hit the markets and it was a big deal and the growers and packing houses made money. Then, other areas planted and their harvest was a few weeks earlier in the year. First-to-market became more important than quality. To some extent, the growers and packing houses fell down on the job in terms of protecting their interests.

I really had no impulse to write a novel until I witnessed this. This was history. And it needed a novel rather than a selection of short stories, especially since I have a keen dislike for the collection of inter-related short stories, which strikes me as a poor compromise of both formats. This isn’t a revelation, but I think that short stories are a historic slice of character and scenario, but a novel has to incorporate history. If a novel’s well done, it’s impossible that it doesn’t. Look at the final pages of L’Assommoir. Paris is being razed right in front of Gervaise. The street literally changes, as she walks down it, from a squalid alley into a great, tree-lined avenue--the execution of Baron Haussmann’s grand reconstruction plan. But, her character is oblivious, utterly compromised by booze, to the point of begging and prostitution. In true Zola fashion, her attempts to prostitute herself are met with brutal rebuffs. It’s the balancing of the history around her and her demise as an individual that is so compelling.

I like what Fanny Howe says about writing: that it should be about history and it’s as simple as the lot you played in as a kid is now a strip mall. That is history. And the effects of bankruptcy and replanting had a fundamental effect on that farming community. And whether or not we’ve set foot in the area or ever do, it’s a loss to our shared history and collective identity. This nation as a whole is still very young and is agrarian at heart. Although, that heart will essentially be gone in my lifetime. I read that it’s not unrealistic for all of Iowa to be consolidated into five massive corporate farms. It’s not just this little community that I wrote The Fruit Promise about. This is happening everywhere.

5. What are your reading interests?  What do you read and who have been your major influences?

Nineteenth century French and English literature are where I spend most of my time. And then there’s a lot of non-fiction, especially Robert Fisk, who is a very fine craftsman writing about the world’s most wicked situations. But, it’s hard to put down What Maisie Knew or The Woodlanders or Chaterhouse of Parma and get excited about much that’s current. Their worlds are so well contextualized and layered. And there’s nothing they didn’t do. Although there are moments that are particularly Jamesian or Dickensian, they really achieve every type of moment and some wild shifts in perspective that would rival anything being shelved in the experimental section. It was their bravery that is inspiring, especially in the detail and wonderment of the worlds that they created. There is something irrepressible in their writing and to finish the book is process of giving yourself over it to.

Zola writing about miners and peasants and shop clerks is addictive as is Balzac on everyone from the wretchedly poor to the fabulously wealthy. Of course, unfortunately, one can’t really write like they did anymore, with such presumption to know everything about every aspect of a society.

Nevertheless, I do find too much modern fiction timid and overly personalized. The chronic sentimentalizing of the characters is brash and vulgar. The characters are so well liked and molly-coddled by the author that it’s really a letter of recommendation rather than a piece of fiction. There are distinguished exceptions like John Banville, who are not interested in writing hagiography.

I do watch a lot of film and the pacing and writing of David Gordon Green, Malick, Jules Dassin or Cassavetes puts me in a place to write, although our projects are dissimilar. Green especially is interested in the context, especially work, of his characters’ lives. And his movies are full of moments that are purely tonal in terms of their relation to the ostensible plot. I like what he says about film, which is applicable to writing: if you are doing it right, there is no such things as ‘mistakes’ because a project should be able to incorporate moments that don’t make ‘plot sense’. Cassavetes, especially Woman under the Influence, which I watched constantly while writing The Fruit Promise, is indispensable. I have never been married so I can’t get high and mighty about its accuracy, but I had never and never since seen a movie that I believed that the actors were a couple. The tenderness and anger is jumbled and fraught and lovely. I just find so many more interesting things going on in film in terms of pacing and writing. On the other hand, one need only to read a few pages of Hardy to recognize he accomplishes something more filmic than any movie.

You can find Julian's LitMinds profile here and discuss the interview here.