Goals, Detours, and Persistence: A Joint-Interview with David Borofka and Caitlin Hamilton Summie

Caitlin Hamilton Summie: David, we have known each other a long time, meeting when I was handling your publicity for your novel, The Island (MacMurray & Beck, 1997). Before that, though, you had published a story collection called Hints of His Mortality (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award). Now your latest collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, will be published in March 2022 as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series. We both can take a lot of time to write our stories and novels, something like 25 years. I know why I end up working at a slow pace, but what in your process takes you a long time to complete your projects?

David Borofka: I don’t know if I really work that slowly… Sometimes, I feel as though I’ve been a victim of my own laziness and sloth, and other times, subject to life interruptions—parents who were dying, children who were growing, a teaching schedule that became more demanding. Maybe I was subject to a mind less able to juggle disparate obligations and assign them their proper place. There were too many days, weeks, months, and years when the writing wasn’t being done at all, at least not on paper. Thinking, yes; writing, no. (Sometimes even that thinking made me preoccupied, much to my daughters’ or my wife’s frustration. Then again, my wife named the upstairs room where I work “Clarissa” [after Clarissa Pinkola Estés], as though every time I climbed the stairs, I was going to visit a mistress. Maybe I was…) I also know that I’m not the most fastidious writer in the world. If it’s a question of sending something out before it’s ready or revising overmuch, I’m guilty of the former more so than the latter.
You have a collection of stories that came out in 2017, and now you have a novel, Geographies of the Heart, coming out in January of 2022. That’s a gap of only five years, but before the collection came out, you were a student in an MFA program and you were working in the publishing industry before you branched out as owner of your own publicity and marketing agency. Were you writing that whole time? How much of your time was spent in your various “day jobs” or family obligations as opposed to writing? What about your MFA experience—was it solely dedicated to writing fiction, or did you find you were distracted by other obligations there as well?

CHS: I began writing pieces of this novel in my MFA days so with breaks and years spent doing other things, it has been a twenty-seven-year journey to see this novel into print, if my math and memory are correct.
I wasn’t writing that whole time. I was writing between work and parenting, all of which I celebrate. Even during my MFA, I couldn’t write the whole time because we students had to pass a comprehensive literature exam before defending our theses, so I was taking literature courses and reading.
The MFA at Colorado State is three years long, and it was a wonderful three years. I’d majored in Middle Eastern History in college and was not as well read as some of my colleagues in the program, and I’ve often thought that I landed at exactly the right school for me, pursuing the best MFA for me.
Also, during my MFA, I made time for fun, hiking or eating Sunday brunch out at one of the lovely small restaurants in Fort Collins on the weekends. Things like that. A favorite memory is riding down Poudre Canyon on the back of my friend, Dave’s, Harley.
Do you think our work benefits from our pace? If so, how?

DB: Seeing one’s work from a distance of time is an odd experience. That telescopic perspective can be a reminder of how much historical as well as personal time has passed; it can also be a reminder that the writing that one did so many years earlier had something of value, a little like looking at a snapshot of yourself from twenty years ago and being shocked to realize that you thought you were fat then. I like some of the writing I did twenty-five years ago. I like it much better now than I did then. All that stuff that went into the drawer? Pull it out… It may not be as bad as you once thought, just written by a younger you.

CHS: Would it bother you if, after spending decades working on a book, it was not published? I ask because the marketplace is so tough, even tougher lately, and it is a real possibility that some beautiful books may not see print. I know it would disappoint me if my dedication and time did not merit publication.

DB: My honest answer? I know myself well enough to admit that I’m craven. I want publication and I like (no, love, who doesn’t?) external validation; there’s nothing like the thrill of someone else telling you that your work has value. However, I also know how cringe-worthy it can be to see something in print that is not one’s best work.
I had a novel manuscript that I finished around the year 2000. On the strength of that manuscript, I got the attention of an agent with an outstanding track record. However, I don’t think we were a particularly good match. She liked the novel well enough to take me on, but she didn’t like it as it was; she wanted the book to resemble another recent bestseller. Without getting too much into the specifics—the agent’s name, the subject of the book, etc.—I will say that I never felt comfortable making the changes that she suggested, nor do I feel that I was very good at turning the story from what I had originally envisioned into the story that she felt would be more marketable. After about a year and a half of mutual frustration, we parted ways. But for several years after that I kept trying to repair it. I took what I thought were the best parts of the revision and the parts of the original story that I was loathe to discard and tried to stitch them together. Did it ever work? Not according to the publishers that she sent her version to and not according to the small presses to whom I sent my cobbled-together version, subsequent to our divorce. Finally, I stopped tinkering and submitting, but it was a tough project to let go and let die. Was it “beautiful”? I don’t know, but I am still fond of the story I was trying to tell, and I still grieve the fact that it didn’t see the light of day.
That’s probably the biggest reason why I’ve continued to churn out stories as opposed to working on novels. I’m a chicken at heart, and while I can stomach the cost in time of a story that goes sidewise, the thought of investing a decade in another novel that turns into quicksand scares me to death.

DB: How quickly do you send your work out? When do you know it’s time? What does it take to convince you that a story is ready to be sent out to journal or a novel manuscript out to an agent or publisher? Have you ever talked yourself out of submitting work that you later decided was publication-worthy?

CHS: I don’t send much out anymore because I don’t have stories I want to share right now, but when I was younger I talked myself out of sending out some pieces. Later, far later, I decided life was short and if I was going to try to publish ever again (I had had some acceptances in my twenties), I needed to try again. I started submitting and had a handful of stories accepted, which inspired me to revisit my invitation from Marc Estrin at Fomite Press to send him a story collection for consideration.

DB: Given the length of time before you published To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, what is the time span of your writing life that the stories represent? What do you think of the writer who was responsible for those earliest stories?

CHS: I spent 25 years on To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts, from beginning to end, with breaks and distractions (all happy ones). I think the writer who was responsible for the earlier stories unwound her stories faster, but then again, they had clearer conflicts as well. I think my later work shows more clearly the messiness of life, the way conflicts can multiply.
After such a long time away, how do you feel about the publishing industry of today?

DB: Gosh… after being away from book publishing for twenty-five years, it feels like an alien world to me. Does it seem that way to you as well? In the early- to mid-1990s, most everything was printed manuscripts, snail mail, and postage for return envelopes. Now nearly every facet of the submission process is conducted online, which is easier but also even more impersonal. What we don’t have to pay to the post office or Kinko’s, we’re paying in contest fees and Submittable charges. I have to confess to a slight case of masochism; I miss going to the mailbox and seeing what’s there. Emails are not the same.
The marketplace that writers, editors, and publishers are collectively facing also feels significantly tougher to me, and it’s not as though the 1980s were a book paradise. Forty years ago, we were bemoaning the dwindling numbers of readers and the nearly impossible business model of publishers and booksellers. Has that improved in any way?
You, on the other hand, know publishing from several perspectives: author, a small publisher’s marketing/publicity director, a Big 5 imprint’s marketing/publicity director, and for eighteen years as owner of your own marketing agency. What do you think of the publishing world that first-time authors are hoping to enter? What about the grizzled veteran, who is hoping to rejoin the party after some time away?

CHS: I think in some ways this industry is harder to be a part of than ever before, and in some ways it is more welcoming than ever before. I’d tell any writer to be strong. Publishing a book is not easy and takes a lot of perseverance and grit and hope.
As a former writing professor, what advice did you give to students who also wrote at a slower pace?

DB: For about the last twenty years of my career at Reedley College, I taught mostly online. (It is an abiding irony to me that I retired and then a year later the entire world was online.) I told students in my online classes of the past that they had the opportunity to know truly what writing is like—you’re alone in your office, nook, carrel, or closet, and you only periodically come up for air. The real world does not give a shit if you can crank out a 500-word essay in forty-five minutes—that’s an artificial skill that only academia seems to care about—but readers do care about whether or not you are willing to think hard. In an online class, the students had the opportunity to manage their time in the way that was most workable for them. Life always hands us deadlines of one kind or another, but you have the autonomy to do the work that needs to be done and the timeframe in which it must be completed. If it takes sitting at one’s desk for three weeks in six-hour chunks, then do it.
During our grad school years, my wife made cross-stitch samplers as a way of relieving stress. She made me a small one that still hangs over my desk; the message is simple: “Never work quickly but always work.” It seems as true now as it did then, maybe more so…

CHS: Your new book is due out in March. Can you tell us a bit about it? How long have you been working on it?

DB: In one form or another, I’ve been working on A Longing for Impossible Things for about twenty years. A collection of thirteen stories, Longing has gone through several iterations. Under the title My Life as a Mystic, it was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and under the title Christmas in Jonestown, it was a finalist for the inaugural Donald L. Jordan Award. That last near-win forced me to reconfigure the book one more time. I took out several stories and added several others. Rather than taking the title from one of the stories, I found a passage from Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet to use as an epigraph and took the title from that. The passage is as follows:
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
In one form or another, it seems that I keep coming back to this notion: that sense of longing for, yet never finding, that transcendent “thing” that hovers on the edge of perception. The word that refuses to swim to consciousness.
When did you begin writing Geographies of the Heart? Before or after the publication of Ghosts? What was the gestation process for the novel? Do you feel as though you have a better idea of navigating the publication process now as opposed to when you were writing the stories in the collection?

CHS: Three of the stories in the collection inspired the novel, made me want to finish the character’s stories, but one chapter was written long before the story collection. “Cleaning House” was written in 1994 or so, and I revised it to be chapter two in my novel. A number of other pieces not included in the collection were written before I decided to pursue the novel. I’ve spent half of my lifetime to date writing Geographies of the Heart. A heck of a long time, but I was compelled by these characters.
The novel is about how much of an anchor family is in the life of my main character, Sarah, and what happens when family stress and loss develop. It’s about how our hearts guide us, and fail us, literally and figuratively. It’s also about getting overwhelmed and resentful and learning to let that go, to forgive others and oneself.
I think what taught me about the publishing process has been work more than publication. I have been a book publicist for nearly two decades. That experience has certainly helped me navigate publication. My publicist is my husband and business partner, Rick, and that has been wonderful, having someone else handle my campaign. It lends perspective and also is a great support.

DB: What new projects are you working on currently? Do you set yourself anything like a timetable for a project’s completion? How do you measure a good writing day’s work?

CHS: I’ve never had the privilege of having time to write each day, and because my writing takes ages to complete, I never have a timetable. Right now I have a middle grade novel which I have worked on for ten or eleven years that I hope to revise again and send out. But other than that, there is nothing in the hopper and nothing in my mind, and I am enjoying the silence. We are finally getting some household projects done. That feels great.
How about you: what's next, and, if I may, how long do you think it will take to complete?

DB: What’s next may be a relative thing… Since my retirement in 2019, I’ve written another novel (Wanting) and a slew of other stories, all of which are currently making the rounds. Who knows what will become of them? Now, I’m starting to dance around the next novel idea. I have to be careful though; I’m Medicare eligible, and I don’t have the time (nor do I have the energy) to extricate myself from the sinkhole of any further failed projects.