"The reader will still be here long after I'm gone": An interview with Scott McClanahan

by Lacey Lyons

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February 4, 2011

Scott McClanahan is the author of Stories and Stories II, published by Six Gallery Press. His piece “This Is A Story With A Phone Number In It” appears in the recently published Topograph: New Writing from the Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond literary anthology.

His short stories and short films, including the films Preacher Man, The Education of Bertie Mae McClanahan, and Welcome to Rainelle, WV, and the short stories “The Prisoners” and “The Firestarter” appear on www.hollerpresents.com. His novel, Hillbilly, will be published in 2011 or 2012. His work can also be read at http://scottmcclanahan.blogspot.com.

Why do you use blogging and video as mediums as well as writing stories? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Scott McClanahan: Well, I haven’t blogged too awful much. I’ve used the blog to attract people to other things I’ve done. I don’t like the idea of the blog in the way people typically use it, just to talk about their day, but I think it can be an art form. I don’t like the way we compartmentalize things, the way people say, “Oh, I’m a filmmaker,” or “a poet,” or “an acupuncturist,” or whatever they choose to be. I don’t think you should choose between being one thing or the other.

How did your books evolve?
The books were actually written at the same time as the blog. Those stories from the first book – one didn’t grow out of the other. I didn’t really push the blog, but it won some sort of award. I don’t pay much attention to that stuff. The films get more attention and hits than the stories do, and I’d like to continue making films for the next two or three years or so. I use the website to collate and streamline mentions here, mentions there, so it’s all in one place.

Are you happy with the way the books appear in print?

You’re as happy as you possibly can be with a small press book, and of course, it can always be better. They’re POD [publish-on-demand], but that means they’re handmade on the level of printing 1,000 books at a time. I’m kind of bored with the idea of the book as an object. The stories on the blog are the stories in the books, and it would be fairly simple to go back and change things. I’m sure there will be newer versions of Stories and Stories II. As I said, I’m so bored with the idea of the book as an object. The word is alive; the word can change from week to week.

Do you think about tone as you write in each format? Is there a conscious difference between the tones of shorter pieces that appear online versus longer short stories that appear in print, or video?

I’m not sure I do. I just tell the stories the way they need to be told. Nobody’s writing these long, George Eliot-type novels anymore, and I don’t know if anyone’s reading them. Tone is part of the voice – either it’s there or it’s not. Some of my favorite novels are 130-page novels. We have this obsession with bigness, as if bigness makes a book more meaningful. You can get through an 80-minute movie easier than you can a three-hour movie, and that’s why people like Woody Allen films. It wouldn’t surprise me if movies were 15 to 20 minutes somewhere down the line. Look at YouTube.

You use punctuation in your story “Phone Numbers” to describe the experience of people hanging up on you when you worked as a telemarketer. (“Hello my name is Scott McClanahan for the Fraternal Order of Police. Click. Hello my name is. Click.”) How did you decide to take liberties with sentence structure?

That’s my problem with a lot of writing from this century. Writing is like going to the bathroom or having sex with your wife. If you think too much about it, you’ve killed it. You hear people going on and on about the sentence itself, but I’m going for a feeling, rather than a technical achievement. In general, we spit in the face of simplicity, but there’s no simpler book than the book of Genesis, and there’s no more complex book than the book of Genesis.

A revised version of “Phone Numbers” appears in the Topograph anthology. Why did you feel the need to rework the story?

I guess you’re always tinkering with things. Most of my stories start bad. I consider it an accomplishment if I can just make them readable.

Reading “The Firestarter,” your story about the period in your life during which “every time I went outside, I saw somebody get hit by a car,” I wondered how much of it was literally true. Where do you draw the line between factual truth and storytelling?

That’s always a question, right? When a form (like blogging) is new, people are interested in truth and fiction. I write about my family members. Do they take these stories as truth? Probably so, but if you were to go back and ask what actually happened, the truth is probably a little bit different.

You don’t spend paragraphs upon paragraphs describing the accident victims in “The Firestarter” – it’s enough for you to simply state they are dead. Why?

It opens it up for the reader if you don’t describe. When I’m talking to my wife after I get off the phone with you, I’m not going to think about, ‘Well, her voice sounded a particular way.’ That sort of fiction is a lie. Now, if you’re missing an arm or you’re in a wheelchair, I’d probably want to mention that. But stories are a back-and-forth between the reader and the writer. The reader has as much to do with it as the writer does. In a lot of my stories, I address the reader directly. The reader will still be here long after I’m gone.

How did you develop the characters of Rodriguez and Kincaid in “The Prisoners?”

I combined and manipulated and changed several of the characters of the inmates I taught, but they’re real enough that I still worry they’ll come and find me in the middle of the night or come after my family. But if you’re going to be an artist, you have to be a thief. It’s not to say I don’t take truth into consideration, but I transform these events into something people want to read. We have this notion of the artist as the public intellectual who leads the way in new ideas. I worry about these guys coming and killing me, even though they’re an amalgam. I by no means want to hurt people, but you do that in your daily life.

Why is connection a theme in your work?

I have been writing about technology, and I’m sitting here in front of a television, talking to a complete stranger on the telephone. I have family upstairs, but I’m not talking to them. We’ve filled ourselves up with technology and these days; you can’t have a conversation with someone without them checking their phone to see if they got a text. I think in order to connect, you have to know how to be alone. But that saying, “the unexamined life is not worth living”? Sometimes, the examined life is pretty damn painful.
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Arts editor: Jeff Jackson
This article was made possible by a grant from the Arts & Science Council.