The Real United States: A Conversation with Matthew Baker

Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures and the children’s novel Key Of X, originally published as If You Find This. His stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Conjunctions, and in anthologies including Best Of The Net and Best Small Fictions. A recipient of grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Prairie Center Of The Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he has an MFA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the founding editor of Nashville Review. His other projects include Early Work. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.

I’ve been a fan of Matthew Baker’s work since 2013, when, as an editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review, I was introduced to his story, “Goods.” A year later, the journal published another of his stories, “Html,” a story partially written in code.

When I read “Goods” for the first time, I was a first-year MFA student, writing a series of unsuccessful stories and struggling to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be or could be. Baker’s stories were playful and idea-driven, but simultaneously had heart, had the ability to move me. He provided me with an example of the sort of writing I might want to do.

I jumped at the opportunity to read Baker’s new collection, Why Visit America, forthcoming in August, and I was not disappointed. The stories he tells are funny and heartbreaking and familiar and surprising all at once. In this interview, Baker discusses writing high-concept narratives, how speculative fiction can allow us to grapple with controversial topics more genuinely, and the films that inspire his writing.

*

Dana Diehl: Many of your stories seem to be driven by “What if…?” questions. What if men became obsolete? What if children were raised by the government instead of parents? What if people could become data? I love how deliciously high-concept this collection is. Did all of your stories begin with a concept? Did any of them begin instead with a character or image, for example?

Matthew Baker: I’m embarrassed to say that every story began with a concept. The book itself began with a concept: thirteen parallel-universe stories (one for every stripe in the flag) that would span all fifty states of the country, and that together would create a composite portrait of the real United States: a Through The Looking-Glass reflection of who we are as a country.

I once submitted a story to a prestigious literary magazine, and the editor rejected the story with a note that said: “too high-concept for us.” For a writer like me, what that note actually said was: “don’t submit to us again.” I can only do high-concept.

DD: What was it like to write a short story collection with an overarching concept already in mind? Did it make it easier? Did it ever feel restrictive?

MB: It was a tremendous challenge. I loved that about it though. That was what made the writing fun.

DD: Despite these stories being very high-concept, they are also movingly character-driven, grounded in an individual human experience. Do you think character is key to writing narratives that move beyond a concept and become stories? What advice do you have for writers working in a similar genre, who struggle to move beyond their initial concept and develop character or find their inciting incident?

MB: I think about storytelling less in terms of “plot” and “character” and more in terms of “idea” and “emotion.” Strategically, I don’t approach a story thinking “how can I develop a plot?” or “how should I develop this character?” I approach a story thinking, “Given this premise, what combination of events and desires will maximize its emotional impact?” In my experience the nature of the work becomes very clear very quickly when plot and character are viewed as ingredients in an emotional reaction in the reader, rather than simply as necessary elements of a story.

DD: Was there a story in this collection that especially challenged you? What do you do when the right ingredients are difficult to find?

MB: “To Be Read Backward” was the greatest challenge conceptually—trying to imagine the physics of that universe accurately, and to be consistent in how the narrator uses language, especially verbs, to describe the events of the story. But the story that was the greatest challenge narratively was “Testimony Of Your Majesty.” I wrote about half of the story and then got stuck. I knew the emotional reactions that I wanted to synthesize, and I had assembled some reliable ingredients, but I still couldn’t quite figure out how to achieve what I wanted. I set the story aside for a couple of years, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again, came back to the story, struggled with the story, set the story aside again. That was the process. Years of failed experiments. That story was a work in progress from 2013 through 2018.

DD: Were there any concepts or ideas or stories or experiments written for this collection that ultimately didn’t make it in?

MB: There were a number of concepts that didn’t work on the page. And there’s one story that I actually completed and even published—a story called “The Eulogist” that appeared in New England Review in 2012—that I was still planning on including in the collection as late as 2018. Ultimately, though, I decided the story was just too rudimentary and clumsy. Also, I wanted the collection to have a neutral emotional pH—there could be stories that were depressing and there could be stories that were uplifting, but I didn’t want the collection overall to register as depressing or uplifting—and “The Eulogist” would have given the collection an overall unneutral pH. So that story got replaced by “The Sponsor.”

DD: The issues tackled in these stories are painfully familiar. You explore violence against women, parents struggling to accept their transitioning child, and flaws within the justice system, just to name a few. But by placing these issues within parallel universes or dystopian (or utopian) futures, you allow readers to see them with new eyes. Why do you prefer speculative fiction for these stories instead of straight realism?

MB: In any human society, having a constructive conversation about social or political issues can be difficult, and we live in a country so radically polarized that at times it seems to be on the verge of a civil war. If you try to have a conversation with somebody about a topic like climate change or gun control, immediately these walls come up, these psychological barriers as thick as brick. It’s become impossible to talk about anything important. There’s no way to do it—unless you disguise what you want to talk about, cloak the topic in a seemingly harmless form. I turned to speculative fiction in hopes of giving readers a space to genuinely grapple with the ideas behind these issues and to genuinely access the emotions involved.

DD: If you had to live inside one of these futures you’ve imagined, which one would it be? Why?

MB: “A Bad Day In Utopia.” I wouldn’t mind having to live in a menagerie, and I honestly do think the world would be noticeably improved.

DD: How would you spend your time in this hypothetical menagerie?

MB: Probably reading, writing, napping, and trying to convince the guards to play chess with me.

DD: You’ve also written a really wonderful children’s book titled If You Find This. Can you talk about the experience of writing this novel and how it differed from your experience writing short stories for adults? Were the experiences surprisingly similar in any ways?

MB: Well, If You Find This was also high-concept: a children’s novel narrated partly in music dynamics and math notations. And like Why Visit America, If You Find This is a book that’s about place. It’s a Michigan novel, a Great Lakes novel. But If You Find This was also a very personal book for me. It’s not autobiographical, but in that book I was writing about my childhood and about my family and about my friends back home. Why Visit America is different in that I wasn’t writing about my own life in any of the stories in this book. In Why Visit America, what’s personal are the issues.

DD: Who or what are your inspirations outside of the literary world? Are there any filmmakers or artists or musicians who influenced the stories in this collection?

MB: The films Her and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind had a tremendous influence on the book, as models of emotionally rich sci-fi. The anime Sword Art Online, which for me was a master class on sincerity and vulnerability and the virtues of sentimentality. The video games BioShock and BioShock Infinite, which deliver social and political commentary with such supreme grace and skill.

But—I hadn’t thought of this until just now—maybe the biggest influence was an old VHS tape that I discovered at my father’s house when I was a child. Written on the tape in my father’s handwriting were two words: “The Wall.” I distinctly remember watching that tape later that afternoon, alone in the basement, lying on the carpet, gazing up at an old cathode-ray television. It was Pink Floyd — The Wall, the film adaptation of the rock opera by Pink Floyd. Seeing it was a revelation for me. I hadn’t realized until that moment that a music album could be more than a collection of random songs—that together the songs could tell some larger story. From the beginning I’ve thought of Why Visit America as a concept album, and that old VHS tape is what taught me what a concept album is.

DD: Is there a short story collection that you feel like does this especially well?

MB: Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, although that’s composed primarily of nonfiction. And Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, along with Invisible Cities, although that’s technically considered a novel. I especially adore The Periodic Table.

DD: Who should read Why Visit America? Who is your ideal reader?

MB: All true Americans.

Annie Bell's Dust Bowl: I Will Send Rain

The Dust Bowl is one of those time periods in history I’ve heard about often enough that I feel like I know it, only to stop for a moment and realize I don’t. Upon reflection, I realize my knowledge doesn’t extend beyond the bounds of The Grapes of Wrath, a few old photographs I’ve seen, and countless mentions of the words “Dust Bowl.” And really, I don’t even get much of picture of the Dust Bowl itself even from The Grapes of Wrath. That novel begins with the devastation already in place, the main thrust then being the struggle for a new place in the world upon leaving all that behind. I Will Send Rainhowever, Rae Meadows newest novel, provides a wonderfully detailed picture of people actually trying to live within the Dust Bowl:

Birdie loved the musty, sweet fruit and larded crust of mulberry pie. Before she turned toward the house, though, she saw what her father now saw. The clouds were not gathering overhead as they should have been, they were instead moving at them like a wall, the sun lost in a hazy scrim, the winds picking up, dry and popping with electricity, biting and raw against her skin.

“What in God’s name?” Her father squinted against the darkening sky, which turned brownish and then dark gray, even green in places where the sun was trying to burn through. It was midday but it looked like dusk, the sweep of an otherworldly hand….

“Fred!” he yelled, though it was pointless given the wind. Dirt began to blow. The world had gone dark and haywire. Dear God, Samuel thought, what is this ugliness?

Annie Bell and her husband try to protect their family and provide as the dust storms ravage their farm. Her husband dreams of tremendous floods and begins to build a boat, feeling called by God. Her daughter pines both to get away and for her boyfriend from a nearby farm. Annie’s son, an asthmatic, simply tries to keep breathing amidst the worsening dust. Facing heavier and heavier burdens in an already difficult life, Annie finds herself increasingly attracted to the cosmopolitan mayor despite still strongly loving her husband and family:

“Oh. Hello, Mayor,” she said, registering how quickly he had managed to make it out to the sidewalk, She wished she’d had a chance to blot her face with a handkerchief….

“Nothing wrong with a parade,” she said. She should have kept going then, but there she stood, a tension between them both awful and delicious. “You can call me Annie.”

“Can I carry that for you? Help you to your car?”

No one who saw them would have thought anything of it, and yet Annie knew different. What could people see anyway? They couldn’t see the weight of a glance or the impurity of a thought. They were in plain view, but the town might just have easily fallen away. “No, no. I’m all right,” she said. But she didn’t move on….

“The truth is I didn’t want to go home just yet.” She felt lighter having said it, a new hollow in her gut.

“Can I walk with you? I’m in no rush to get back to my desk.”

She was pleased, but she knew it was not quite right for him to ask. Are you doing good by God, Annie, she heard her mother say before she could quiet the voice.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, Annie,” he said. “And you can call me Jack.”

Meadows paints this picture of the tense and ravaged farming landscape in unadorned, straightforward prose. At the same time, a good amount of beauty and warmth manage to come forth. There is suffering, people bearing more than they can because there is no choice, being pulled between many different kinds of needs, but there is an overwhelming sense of home within it. Maybe some of that is my childhood in Nebraska calling to me, but that isn’t it entirely. There’s definitely more. Of course, that sense of home breeds a great deal of tension in the face of almost ever-present possible doom. Wonderfully tuned suspense keeps the pages continually turning.

I Will Send Rain is delightfully vivid, both in the setting and the windows into the characters. The reader can taste the dust, and the longing in the characters’ mouths. I didn’t feel that I was reading as much as watching, and that kind of dive into prose always speaks highly for a novel. I Will Send Rain is an impressive showing from Meadows, well worth checking out.

The Power of the Alien Cohort: On Helen Phillips's The Beautiful Bureaucrat

What I found perhaps most impressive about The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the way in which Helen Phillips navigates the difficult business of making a surreal reality feel realistic and credible in a real-ish world. In this briskly plotted and thrilling novel, Josephine and Joseph Newbury are a pair of newlyweds who have recently moved from the “hinterlands” (“hinterland, hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness”) to a city reminiscent of Brooklyn, although it is never called that. After months of unemployment, Josephine has finally landed a job. But right from the very beginning things are not as they should be. For one thing, Josephine’s boss has no face. (“The person who interviewed her had no face” is the first line of the book.) And what’s more, this person (of indeterminate gender) has the worst breath Josephine has ever smelled. Hitherto, he/she is referred to simply as The Person With Bad Breath. Following a series of uncomfortable and inappropriate questions (“Does it bother you that your husband has such a commonplace name?” “You wish to procreate?”) Josephine is led to a small box of an office, with “pinkish clawed walls,” where she enters a jumble of indecipherable names and dates into a mysterious system known as the Database. It is a mind-numbing task that Josephine is neither encouraged to understand nor question.

Helen Phillips writes with a wonderful accuracy about the doldrums of office life. “It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices,” she observes. “Had there been a window, September might have taunted her with its high and mighty goldenness. As it was… she spent the rest of the workday blasting through files, devoid of curiosity, dying to get the hell home and just be a person with Joseph.” The mysterious agency where Josephine works is located in a “vast, windowless” complex that stretches endlessly down a block; the concrete halls, punctuated at regular intervals by closed doors, drone with buzzing typewriters, an anxious noise that reminds Josephine of scurrying cockroaches. “So, what do you do for work,” a person asks Josephine at one point. “Such an uncouth, painful question,” Phillips writes. For anyone who has ever worked at a soul-crushing office job, these observations ring horribly (and hilariously) true.

On nearly every page, I found myself marveling at the deft touch and careful craftsmanship with which Phillips omits and reveals, elaborates and elides. Such is the case with Trishiffany, whose very name (“My parents couldn’t pick between Trisha and Tiffany”) is an example of what I mean. Aside from the Person with Bad Breath, Trishiffany is the only one of Josephine’s “busy lookalike bureaucrats” to have a significant role in the book. She looks like a Barbie, wears “bubble-gum” pink suits, and always seems to appear out of nowhere. She also seems to know more about Josephine than Josephine reveals. The first time they meet, for instance, Trishiffany asks, “Mind if I call you Jojo? I’ve always wanted to call someone that. Such a cute nickname for Josephine!” It is only later that Josephine realizes “she hadn’t told Trishiffany her name.”

There are literally dozens of instances like this throughout the novel, which skips from one strange incident to the next, such as when Josephine enters her boss’s office to find The Person with Bad Breath sitting at a desk “covered with a white tablecloth and set for an elaborate luncheon for two.” “The table is set for you, Ms. Newbury,” The Person with Bad Breath says. “I have been awaiting you.” As the luncheon unfolds, The Person with Bad Breath behaves in an increasingly bizarre fashion, monologuing about cats, devouring Josephine’s pumpkin pie, swallowing shakers of salt and pepper, licking “pats of butter off their foil wrappers,” drinking the “remainder of the cream straight from the pitcher.” It is remarkable that Phillips is able to get away with this. But she does, time and again, by telling the reader just enough to make things plausible before wisely moving on, with a sort of dream logic or fairytale momentum, as though the bewildering were the most normal thing in the world. She plays a straight-faced game, and for that reason the surreal-within-the-real works absolutely.

In addition to the strangeness and corporate satire, The Beautiful Bureaucrat abounds with allusions and symbols. A neighbor’s three-headed dog snarls and barks in one of the many hellish sublets the Newburys rent, reminding us of Cerberus. Is there really a three-headed dog, or are Josephine’s tired eyes simply imagining things? Phillips never clarifies. But this strange detail, along with so many others, entices and unnerves, lingers and haunts. Phillips knows this, and she uses the ambiguity to create a mounting sense of unease. Pomegranates play a key role, recalling the Myth of Persephone. And there is plenty of religious symbology: Virgin Mary candles, everything in sixes, sevens, and threes. It can’t be a coincidence that Joseph wants a baby.

Beyond the allegory and satire, however, there is a beating heart, and Phillips is at her best and most sincere when portraying the Newburys’ fledgling marriage, the mundane intimacies and small heartbreaks of which will be recognizable to anyone who has ever been in a meaningful relationship. In one passage, Josephine returns home from work, and Joseph says, “You look like you need a hug.” “She felt like an alien,” Phillips writes. “As though she had never before been exposed to the ways things are done on Earth: that you can return home to someone who cares for you, that a few overused words can hurt your heart with their appropriateness, that your muscles can soften into the muscles of another human being… She wanted to cry out when he pulled away from her.” This was the most winning aspect of the novel for me. As I read, I found myself desiring my other, as Josephine, in her loneliness, desires Joseph; and in the end, I was left with a heightened awareness of the power and importance of having a partner—an “alien cohort”—in this strange and often bewildering world.