What We Do With Loss: Dawn Raffel

Dawn Raffel’s newest book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe. She is also the author of a novel, Carrying the Body and a previous collection, In the Year of Long Division. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University. She now works part time at Readers Digest as Editor at Large, Books, and is completing a memoir. She lives outside New York City with her husband and sons. There’s a Reader’s Guide at O, the Oprah Magazine and there’s a great animated trailer. At Vanity Fair, Elissa Schappell says, “The stories in Dawn Raffel’s astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (Dzanc) are as sharp and bright as stars.”

Michael Kimball: I’ve been reading your work for almost 20 years now, since you first start publishing stories in literary magazines, and one of the things that is still striking to me is your particular sense of syntax. Nobody else is writing sentences like your sentences. Could you talk about your syntax—how you developed your own personal syntax and how you think about it now?

Dawn Raffel: First off, I am very grateful to have you as a reader. Regarding syntax: The rhythm of language is so important to me that I will often take a sentence off its moorings in the service of cadence. I revise by reading aloud, again and again. So I suppose the syntax is governed by the peculiarities of my ear, as well as by my sense of what the story needs. My last book, Carrying the Body, is filled with long, winding, complicated sentences, almost like snakes eating their tales; I wanted to evoke the emotional legacy–the body of feeling and knowledge–carried by the family at the novel’s center. For “Adventures,” I was in flight from that fussy language; in many of the stories I tried to strip the sentences down to the bones.

Kimball: So two things here: I want to know why you wanted to get away from the baroque language in Carrying the Body and I want to know what kinds of things you found yourself eliminating from your sentences as you stripped them down.

Raffel: My greatest fear as a writer is that I will write the same book two or three or four times. We have all seen that happen: A writer becomes a prisoner of his or her style. I don’t think you can will yourself to change your obsessions; they are always in wait for you. But you can tussle with those obsessions in a different way.

I didn’t go about stripping down the sentences in an analytical way; I just wanted to simplify, to keep them, for the most part, short and direct.

Kimball: It is striking, how stripped down parts of these stories are. I just flipped the book open to “Heaven” and there are a bunch of places on the first two pages of the story where the dialogue is simply one word:

“‘God,’ our mother said to us …”

“‘Bacteria,’ she said to us …”

‘Dinnertime,’ our mother said …”

“‘Crazy,’ she said.”

These one-word pieces of dialogue are oblique and elliptical, but they also move the narrative. Could you talk a little about how you were thinking about the dialogue?

Raffel: I wanted to cut away the conversational softeners and adornments and get to the heart of what was being said. And I suspect we hear only a few words of what our parents tell us anyway.

This story was one of the hardest in the book to write. I had a beginning and then didn’t know what it was or how to move it forward; it was almost a year to completion. Everything that happens in this story really did happen, by the way … but not in the order I’ve told it. Years ago, the writer and critic Rick Whitaker said, “The lie is in the assembly,” and I’ve thought about that a lot; I think the meaning is also in the assembly. I grew up in a very secular Jewish family in the Midwest in the 60s–we never spoke about the Holocaust but it was a low rumble under the surface of everything in our lives. My father—a self-described “born-again atheist” had a prayer book hidden in a drawer, which I found after he died.

Kimball: I didn’t think that I would ever ask you this question, but how much of your material comes from your life and how do you use that material? I’m assuming that it isn’t an attempt for representation, but mostly, simply, as it’s useful for particular purposes in a particular story, or am I way off?

Raffel: If you look at the dedication of this book, you will see that it is in memory of my parents. My mother and father both died suddenly, without my having had a chance to say goodbye. At its heart, Further Adventures is about what we do with loss. Many of the stories are purely fiction but the stories in which my parents and grandparents appear are deeply rooted in my life. For instance, The Air and Its Relatives is as close a portrait of my father as I could produce, given that memory itself is a fiction and that the “father” I knew is in some ways my own creation. The “plot” of this story is invented but the details and, more importantly, the relationship between us is as real as I could make it. My immigrant grandfather’s stories, which are woven throughout the book, are as he told them. The challenge was to find a context for them. The story “Love” centers on a story my grandfather told and retold about the horse that died of heartache. What gave it significance was the story he never told, which was the one in which the people who remained in the village were murdered by the Nazis. In real life, I didn’t manage to ask him about that at all. As for the stories that are “fiction,” they’re still sprinkled with things I saw and heard. For instance, I once heard a waiter say that the beef was “with awe juice” and that just seemed to belong to “Her Purchase.”

Kimball: That’s a beautiful answer. I don’t quite know what to ask after that, so I’m going to go a very different direction. The good J.A. Tyler is putting together an issue of Mudluscious that will have excerpts from recently released or soon-to-be-released books. I suggested he get in touch with you for a piece from Further Adventures and told him that there isn’t anybody else who writes like you do. So here’s the question: What are the things that you would say make you the original writer you are? I’m curious about anything from your general considerations as you approach a piece of fiction to the ways that choose words, work with acoustics, get from one sentence to another sentence, etc.

Raffel: I never set out to write differently from other people and I don’t approach a piece of fiction with a methodology. It’s much more of an intuitive than an analytical process. But of course my fiction is informed by the circumstances of my life; I have a husband and kids and a household and a year-round job–no long summer breaks or sabbaticals or trips to writers’ colonies. Several things are always happening at once and there are constant interruptions. I think that layering and breaking off finds it way into my stories.

Kimball: I’d love it if you could point out one of those places that layering and breaking off found its way into one of your stories.

Raffel: Let’s stick with “Our Heaven.” The mother and daughter have phone calls that keep getting interrupted by call waiting; that also happens in “Coeur” (the caller hangs up) and of course “The Interruption.” Space breaks in “Our Heaven”–as in a number of the stories–are followed by leaps in time, backward and forward, and after a few pages, the leaps in time occur within paragraphs to convey, I hope, the sense of a lot of things going on at once, at least on the level of emotional legacy:

“Run past the corner as fast as you can!” The gunner was out, or so we had been told, and did not abide children. Dared, we gawked: the soundalike boys—whose mother occasionally raised her hooded head, the boy who’dlost his brother, the girl who in a few more years would be killed by a bomb that was meant for someone else.

The neighbor girls said, “Shut your eyes.”

We peeped, of course. We scouted containers from in back of the drugstore. Redeemed illegally: a coin in the palm.

Our dad was working overtime. The miracle was Herculon, the fabric indestructible, and also—save your investment!—Scotch Gard; spray it and no stain was ever absorbed. The family store was decked out and festive: Orchids for ladies on Mother’s Day, a dozen to a box, plus pins. We helped to hand them out. At Christmastime a glittered tree, not home, but here, as a business decision. Ashes in glass, the angel on the door.

They poured water on our heads so we wouldn’t go to hell.

It was sweet as a stolen candy in our mouths.”

I’ve conflated scenes to throw a lot of balls in the air at once.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY, is now in paperback in the US, UK, and Canada. The Believer calls it “a curatorial masterpiece.” Time Out New York calls the writing “stunning.” And the Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking.” His first two novels are THE WAY THE FAMILY GOT AWAY (2000) and HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS (2005). His three novels have been translated (or are being translated) into many languages. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, Open City, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)—and two documentary films, I WILL SMASH YOU (2009) and 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES (2010).