NEWFOUND CONDITION: Alex Higley talks to Matthew Baker
Alex Higley and Matthew Baker discuss Baker’s short story collection, Why Visit America.
What do you start with when writing a story? Many of these stories exist in worlds with rules/conventions/laws slightly (or very) different from those of our world. How central are those differences in writing early drafts of these stories?
For this book, each story began with a speculative premise. All of the other narrative elements—character, plot, perspective, voice—were designed around that central concept. What if the criminal justice system was revolutionized by a new method of punishment? What if children were raised by the government? What if men became reproductively obsolete? What if humanity was struck by a pandemic that was impossible for modern science to explain? I was specifically looking for setups that would give me a way to write about the social and political systems of the real world. I wanted to examine the fundamental assumptions underlying the structures of American society.
These stories span roughly ten years judging by the publication dates listed for their original appearances in journals. Did you have this organizing principle for the collection all along? Or did you happen to start writing several stories in a row with a speculative premise and saw the opportunity for a collection down the line?
Technically my work on the book began in 2009, but the organizing principle didn’t occur to me until 2012. I was living in Ireland; I had never lived in another country before, and the subtle cultural differences between the United States and Ireland illuminated certain characteristics of the United States for me with sudden clarity. By then, I had already written “Fighting Words” and “Appearance” and “To Be Read Backward” and had been thinking about the possibility of assembling a collection of speculative stories. I had also recently become obsessed with the first-person plural voice and had been trying to dream up a premise for a story that would have a reason to be written in it—and then one day the idea for “Why Visit America” occurred to me. I didn’t write the story itself until years later, but that title seemed like the perfect organizing principle for the collection: thirteen speculative stories, each with some social or political agenda, spanning all fifty states of the country.
Embarrassed to say I didn’t pick up on all fifty states being mentioned in the book. The jacket copy calls this book slyly subversive, but I think plain “subversive” is more apt. The distinguishing feature that makes these stories, especially when taken as a whole “sly” is how clean and fully-formed they are; their slyness lies in their believability. These stories sprint by but also, it seems, have a depth of research behind them that feels unique for this form.
The breadth of research appears to be vast; I’m thinking of the various religious opinions on reincarnation in “Lost Souls,” or even understanding various types of abuse in “A Bad Day in Utopia,” or maybe PTSD for “Life Sentence”? Did you get yourself to a place of workable shorthand with these topics or was your approach more comprehensive?
Comprehensive. I would begin working on one of those paragraphs and think, “Uh-oh,” and suddenly there would be a hundred Wikipedia tabs open in my browser. I love learning, though, so those research days were always fun.
Research-wise, I thought of Jim Shepard, but his prose is nothing like yours. I had trouble thinking of precedent for stories like these in short fiction. But, I would give your book to a non-reader of literary fiction with absolute confidence, and couldn’t really say that for Shepard (though I’m a fan). Did you have models for implementing research or highly technical information into your work?
No, I probably should have, but I rarely use models. The only story in the book that was consciously modeled after another story in any way is “The Transition.” Before beginning that story, I reread “The Metamorphosis” a number of times, analyzing the structure of the story, trying to figure out what Kafka had done that made the story so magical.
How do you actually find a way into sentence-making when starting from such a macro-world building position? I was surprised to hear that you did start with a question for each of these stories solely because I could not relate at all to writing stories in that way. I need some language to get going, otherwise I feel like I have no motor.
I usually found the voice fairly quickly, because the voice was always designed to complement the central concept for the story. In “Life Sentence,” for instance, I thought the voice should be simple and rough: lots of single-sentence paragraphs, incomplete clauses, to reflect the protagonist’s newfound condition. For “Testimony Of Your Majesty,” in contrast, I thought the voice needed to be complicated and ornate: grammatically complex sentence constructions, in sprawling paragraphs crammed with an overwhelming excess of detail, to reflect the narrator’s great vice. The perspective for each story was also chosen to complement the premise. Once I had decided on the voice and the perspective, then I would actually start to write. For me, that’s the exciting moment—after all of the planning and the scheming, finally launching into it.
What does your drafting process look like? Your stories have a combination of overall economy and clear decisive world-building paired with real sweep; they feel to me most likely not conceived sentence-to-sentence?
My process changed dramatically in 2011. I’ve always loved comic books and graphic novels, and although I’ve always been terrible at visual arts, I had artist friends who told me, “Anybody can learn how to draw. You just need to take a class.” So one fall in grad school I decided to audit an introductory drawing class. The professor was brilliant and kind and very attentive, but by the end of the semester we had determined that in fact I could not be taught how to draw. I’m still terrible. Nevertheless, the class did have a life-changing effect on me. Somewhat naively, I had always imagined that when working on a sketch or a painting, artists would begin at the top and then work on down to the bottom, or maybe would begin at the bottom and work on up to the top. So I was stunned to see how the professor and the other students in the class actually drew: working all over the canvas at once, first with faint tentative strokes and then with darker, more purposeful lines, occasionally erasing or reworking a certain section, gradually filling in the image in greater and greater detail until the final image had emerged. I never made a conscious decision to begin writing that way, but after that class my process changed. Before, I had always written a story in order, starting with the first word and from there working on down to the last word, but now I write like a visual artist—working all over the canvas at once, gradually filling in the story.
I love this answer. It devalues “style” in a way I find heartening. “Style” can be such a prison when drafting. Who are some visual artists whose work you enjoy? Graphic novels that you’ve loved recently?
Yayoi Kusama was an early obsession. Pieter Bruegel The Elder, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Monet, Mondrian, Pollock, Seurat, Klimt, Klee, Van Gogh, Af Klint, Toulouse-Lautrec. Joan Mitchell’s La Vie En Rose. Joan Snyder’s Smashed Strokes Hope. Egon Schiele’s Transfiguration. Pat Steir’s Sixteen Waterfalls Of Dreams, Memories, And Sentiment. Mika Tajima’s Negative Entropy. Cheyney Thompson’s Broken Volume. Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays. Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 289.
I’m forever fascinated by Moebius. Winsor McCay, Hayao Miyazaki, Maira Kalman, Chris Ware, Shaun Tan, Enki Bilal, Luigi Serafini. In my father’s house hung a single painting, a reproduction of a painting by Vasily Kandinsky, and the sight of any painting by Kandinsky now instantly transports me back to the rooms of that home. Similarly, my mother’s family used to take camping trips every summer in northern Michigan, and while we were up there we would always go to visit the studio of Gwen Frostic, and now the sight of any print by Frostic instantly transports me back to that studio among the trees and the dunes. I could go on forever. But this actually reminds me of something related to the book. Shortly after finishing work on the collection, I happened to see three pieces of art that all, to me, seemed to be grappling with some of the same questions I had been grappling with in Why Visit America. The first two were Glenn Ligon’s Double America and Rena Detrixhe’s Red Dirt Rug. And the last had an especially profound effect on me: Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today. If you’ve never seen it, America Today is a mural composed of ten interconnected panels, a panorama of epic proportions that was intended to chronicle American life in the 1920’s. The Met displays the mural in a single gallery where the panels cover every inch of the walls. Sitting in that gallery for the first time, inhabiting that space among the overlapping narratives of the panels, I was exhilarated. I kept thinking, “I hope this is the exact feeling that people get reading Why Visit America.”
Answers like this is what I am wanting when I read interviews. I want lists of artists that I’m mostly not familiar with. Thanks for that. Did you conceive each of the worlds of these stories to exist solely for that story? “A Bad Day In Utopia” and “One Big Happy Family” exist in different worlds but the place where each of these stories arrive seem to be in conversation with one another. (One large alteration to society based on empirical data for the betterment of the largest amount of the population as possible.)
I love that you noticed that link between those stories. Personally, yes, I consider each story to be set in a different parallel-universe United States. I do think of each of the stories as having certain companion pieces in the collection, though. Trying to figure out the best order for the stories, I drew an elaborate color-coded diagram showing all of the connections between different stories, which honestly ultimately wasn’t that useful, but is nevertheless satisfying to look at.
Do you have any superstitions around your work? A story like “Lost Souls” reads very differently in our current situation than it would have three months ago. How does your relationship to your stories shift in that situation?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. “Lost Souls” is a starkly different read during an actual pandemic. Similarly, I started writing “Why Visit America” during the Obama administration, and that story is a starkly different read in the Trump era (I won’t say “administration” because that would imply that there was somebody making a genuine attempt to manage the country). “Appearance” had started to feel dated to me, and then suddenly a presidential candidate began boasting about plans to build a wall. “One Big Happy Family” felt almost absurd to me, and then suddenly presidential candidates began talking about plans to institute universal childcare. Speculative fiction, I think, is a particularly volatile form of storytelling. I love that about it, but as the writer, that does mean having to live with uncertainty. How will the stories in this book read in a month, or in a hundred years, or when America is gone?
Right. I think that question, of questioning the perpetuity of America and the decisions that form it, is the important one. These stories are subversive because you seem to begin from the position that our country never was what we believe it was, will no longer be able to hide that fact, and that the changes that have already been made and must still be made are ones that will change America in a fundamental, not cosmetic, way. These stories might read like a map looking back, or a dream, who knows? I don’t mind fiction that is dated. We are dated. Our thoughts and choices and mistakes are dated. I like that you forefront that risk in this book. If you have hope, what is it that brings you that feeling?
I do have hope. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but I do. The vision for this country is a beautiful one. A democratic republic that welcomes immigrants from every nation, of every culture, of every religion, granting freedom and justice and equality to all. It’s a vision we’ve never lived up to. It’s a vision that was betrayed by the very founders of this country, who failed to outlaw slavery from the beginning, who failed to grant people of color a right to vote, who failed to grant women a right to vote, who failed to grant the working class a right to vote, who granted the right to vote only to landowners and yet were founding this country on stolen land. Even after all of the progress we’ve made in the past 244 years, we still haven’t come close to achieving that vision. I can’t tell you how sad that that makes me. I can’t tell you how much that it haunts me. But I do believe that if America is anything, it is a country capable of radical change. What brings me hope is the sight of a protestor out on the street, holding a sign high. I believe in the vision for this country, and I want to believe that we might still achieve it.