Amy Hempel and Andre Dubus, two masters of the short form (encore episode)
In these two episodes from the archives, Eleanor Wachtel interviews American authors Amy Hempel and Andre Dubus.
Amy Hempel's first book of short stories was published in 1985, and since then she has written three more collections, which have been compiled in the 2006 volume The Collected Stories. Not a vast output, but size doesn't measure impact. Her writing is elegant, compact and unsettling. Hempel is a master of the miniature, and her stories are infused with pain and comedy.
In this interview from 1991 — the very first year of Writers & Company — Amy Hempel joined Eleanor Wachtel in Toronto, where she was speaking at Harbourfront's winter literary festival.
WHY SHE LIKES WRITING (VERY) SHORT STORIES
It's getting at the essence of something. I used to define minimalism for myself as "leaving out the boring parts," and there's just something very attractive, as in poetry, of just getting to the essentials of a situation, of a moment, of a story or of a person's life. I don't start out with volumes of material and just tear it off as I go. I might ask myself: What is it about this person? What is the one thing that will tell you everything about this character? And to me that's the interesting piece of description that I'll use.
WHY HER TWENTIES WERE HER WORST YEARS, AND HER INSPIRATION
I really felt as though that was a wasted decade, and yet when I started to write, everything I wrote about came from that awful time. Everything you can think of happened. I was in two very serious accidents, there were two suicides in my family, there were earthquakes in California... on and on and on. There was disruption and calamity everywhere, and I just felt beaten back by it. You walk out the door in the morning and you're looking up to see if there's a safe falling out of the sky at you. It was very hard. I worked very hard for a long time to recover a sense of control over my life. Some of it had to do with the writing. The realization that the experiences I'd had were valuable, or could be made into something valuable. I felt for the first time a kind of entitlement — I am entitled to tell this story in a way no one else can, which is a kind of power.
ON TRUSTING YOUR READERS AND GOING BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
I have a great love of anytime somebody says something a different way, or says something I don't expect to hear or have never heard before. Especially if it's a twist on something that already exists. For me, that's what writing is all about. We know all the stories — we've been around the block, we're grown-ups. It's saying it a new way, or seeing what these people are doing in a situation that we already understand. And that gets back to the minimalism thing — why describe this whole situation that everyone already knows? Give the reader some credit for understanding that.
Amy Hempel's comments have been edited and condensed.
Pain, vulnerability and hard-won strength are the veins that run just below the surface of Andre Dubus's fiction. His stories and novellas are set in the blue-collar world of waitresses and bartenders, mechanics and labourers. After eight books of fiction, Dubus published his first nonfiction work, Broken Vessels, in 1991. The collection of short pieces deals in part with the repercussions of a tragic accident five years earlier, in which Dubus lost one leg and the use of the other.
Andre Dubus died of a heart attack in 1999, when he was 62. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1991.
ON BELIEVING IN MARRIAGE AFTER THREE DIVORCES
I believe that marriage is essential, and I would have liked very much to stay with all [of Dubus's three ex-wives], with our children all together. And my not having achieved that doesn't make me like the wolf in Aesop's fable, with the sour grapes. I know that it's worth more than most things that happen, for people to be able to actually stay together and love each other through all their changes. And I know that people without love are not fulfilled. I've never written what I would like to write either, but I keep trying. So, I write and I date!
ON ADJUSTING TO BEING IN A WHEELCHAIR
I don't really remember the way I was. People who knew me before and after say I have changed, and positively changed. I don't know that yet — I'm still learning how to get to the ashtray, and longing on a lovely day like today to be out walking. It is making me try to live in the present, as in a wheelchair you can't think about the future because you'll just get messed up. You cannot hurry, and you have to just try to stay in the moment. It's an inaccessible world — the world is not built architecturally for people in wheelchairs, and it's not built spiritually for people in wheelchairs.
Andre Dubus's comments have been edited and condensed.
Music to close the interview: "Return to Little Rock," composed and performed by Stefan Grossman.