Music and Connection: A Conversation with Ron MacLean
I first met Ron MacLean as a student in the year-long intensive Short Story Incubator program he teaches at Grub Street in Boston. His enthusiasm for the process of revision and the short story form proved inspiring and transformative in my own work.
Ron MacLean's short fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, and Fiction International. He is the author of the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies, and the story collection Why the Long Face?. In his new story collection, We Might As Well Light Something on Fire no two stories are alike. These diverse narratives, from the traditional to the experimental, span a vast range of emotional experiences. What unites these stories is an expert rendering of the complexity and connotations of what it means to long for a connection with others.
Ron and I met in person to chat about We Might As Well Light Something on Fire, the intersection of music and language, the creative tension between tragedy and hope, and the role of longing in fiction. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
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Jennifer Marie Donahue: Music is everywhere in this collection and played an integral role in my reading experience. I would love to hear about the link between your writing and music. How do these musical choices and references create meaning and unity in this collection?
Ron MacLean: I was completely unaware of it as a theme or a thread until I started putting the collection together. Music is very important to me. I love music. This feels self-aggrandizing to say and I don't mean it in a highfalutin way, but I pay great attention to the music and rhythm of writing. I'm thinking about the sound, the patterns, and the rhythms that I'm creating and I think of it as music rather than as text. That's how I think about the language. When I started noticing all the music in the book, I was thinking about how music matters to each character. My ambitions were simple. I wanted to make sure it wasn't simply my love of music getting on the page but instead to say everywhere it comes up does it matter to the characters and the situation. I trusted that unconsciously whatever I knew and felt about music would make connections between stories.
JD: I think it was very successful. In the first story of the collection “Toilet” when a Michael Jackson song starts playing our narrator reveals: “I have expectations I can't escape. I want to eat my own flesh. I want to shout, “Run!” This critical moment of the story reveals an emotional vulnerability that we felt but that had not yet been articulated. Then there is the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson's music, since he represents a music superstar, with the character of this story who in his own words says, “I have recently recognized I'm a failed actor.” To me, that was powerful. Was that organic? Did that come through revision?
RM: Almost everything good in the book came through revision. That came through revision. The presence of the Michael Jackson music in the story ended up giving me the space to work in the narrator's revelations. “Wanting to be Starting Something” is the first song. I chose that consciously because it's the beginning of something and for the narrator, the juxtaposition is the narrator beginning to own who and where he is in his life. The trigger is this Michael Jackson music. Who doesn't love dancing to Michael Jackson music, pre-scandal? That factor, that I bring out later at the end of the story, is part of what allowed me to have the narrator reveal himself. Here's this song, it's just a party song, except, oh no, it's more than that. It gave unconscious permission for the narrator to say: here's the truth – “I want to eat my own flesh. “
JD: I felt like music also informed my reading of the next story in the book, “Lesser Escape Artists.” The bridge sections callback to musical structure but subverts my expectation because in songs bridges reflect back on earlier material. These sections seem to open up the story world. And then we have Mahler and his Symphony #6! How much of these story elements are meant to guide the reader?
RM: What you say you read, in terms of the bridges opening up rather than providing callbacks was exactly what I intended. I did not start out with those as part of the original structure of the story. The structure of the story came pretty late. What I had initially was a story that embodied chaos theory, fractals, and some esoteric stuff that felt like an interesting intellectual exercise. So, it took me a few drafts to pry my fingers off of how proud I was of having a brilliant idea. There's emotional material happening here and while the chaos theory is really interesting it's not the heart of things.
JD: It's just one layer but a compelling one.
RM: Thank you. It is definitely there. The butcher makes it pretty explicit. The way the bridges came up was I had material I felt belonged in the story but kept landing on the cutting floor. I trust my intuition a lot as a writer. I would try to shoe-horn this material somewhere and my writing group would say, the story is getting better but what the hell is this? Why is Dorothy Dietrich catching a 22 bullet in her teeth? I knew it belonged in the story.
JD: So, rather than slip it in, you decided to call it out?
RM: After a bunch of failed drafts, I stepped back and thought about the story as a symphony. Because Mahler was one of the pieces that was not making it into the story but I knew I wanted. That started, I will admit, from the sheer joy it gave me to throw Norman Mailer and Gustav Mahler into a conversation together, inadvertently. Most of the time for me, those things are draft delights that I think, okay, I've had my fun now it's time to go away. But that one I felt like it was speaking to the story in a larger way. It doesn't directly relate to the rabbit who is trying to get off the chopping block at the butcher shop, nor does it relate necessarily to the couple. But then I started to think about one of the Mahler lines, “I want it to fall like an ax.” I realized late in the story that it absolutely does relate to what the couple is going through and what the rabbit is going through. That was when I stepped back and said, what if I think about it as a Mahler symphony? That didn't work directly, so then it was: what if I think about structuring it as a piece of music? That is when the bridge idea occurred to me. I will also confess, I was also thinking of my mentor and his question he often asked: “How do you build a bridge to readers?” I decided I was going to build a bridge. It was a goofy and literal idea in a story I was lost in and it became a way to open it up and create connections that wouldn't have been there without it.
JD: The first line of this story “There is blood in the end. I'm not going to toy with your emotions by keeping you in the dark about that” is ominous. While we are reading the story we are striving against that darkness, looking for that victory or win. Rooting for the blind rabbit, the couple, the narrator to push against the idea that “desire fractures us all.” The final line of the story leaves us in a complicated emotional place: “In a world this chaotic, I choose to believe.” Can you talk about the inherent narrative tension between the tragic and hopeful?
RM: I think for me, the tension between the tragic and hopeful, or between the dark and the light is a pretty central thread in everything I write. I don't experience simplistic victories in my life nor simplistic defeats. When I think back on some of my best days, they are punctuated with some awful moments. Maybe not awful moments, but the good and the bad it's all there at once. Most of us don't get to choose ecstasy alone. That to me is really important to reflect in what I write.
JD: This calls to mind the quote by John O'Donoghue that I shared with you not long ago, “the human heart is a theater of longings.” This idea crystallized for me why I'm drawn to certain stories. Many of the stories in your collection evoked this sense of longing, the permutations of this feeling and all the ways it can manifest in life. You render this longing so beautifully on the page. How are you able to tap into this emotion so successfully?
RM: The easiest answer is, how am I able to recognize it and tap in, I am filled with longing in my own self. It's a pattern that I recognize in my life and its one of my obsessions in fiction writing as a result. Whenever somebody asks me -- what's your subject in fiction?, my answer is the attempts we make as humans to connect with one another and the imperfection that is inherent in that. To me that is very tied to desire. I have a really deep longing for connection with other humans and I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of connections but it is always imperfect. I think that the relationship of desire and fulfillment, partial fulfillment, occasional fulfillment – the slippage of good intentions that don't quite connect because of the various pressures on us is something I'm endlessly interested in. I have massive compassion for it. Because I think we are all looking for it, in one way or another, even if we are building walls so we can hide from it.
