Matthew Baker on Story Collections as Concept Albums
This interview is part of our Epiphany 10 interview series with author illustration by Kendra Allenby.
Epiphany: William Trevor began his adult life as a sculptor and later described his writing as chipping away at a block of marble. Are you a chipper or a builder? In other words, do you chip away at a block of writing, or do build the block brick by brick?
Matthew Baker: I’m definitely a chipper—I work all over a manuscript at once.
EP: What was your first publication?
MB: A very short story titled “Foundling” that was published by a now-defunct lit mag called Lumberyard, alongside an early story by Amber Sparks. Lumberyard had an interesting look—each piece was presented as a photocopy of collaged fragments of text, printed in the style of a newspaper-clipping ransom note.
EP: What are five books you are reading or thinking about now?
MB: First and foremost, Lee Conell’s brilliant debut novel The Party Upstairs. Then a stack of novels for research purposes: Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, Elena Ferrante’s The Days Of Abandonment, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day. And then, this isn’t a novel, but lately I’ve also been thinking a lot about The Anarchist Cookbook.
EP: If you could inhabit a fictional world, what would it be (i.e., the environment of which novel, short story, poem, song, etc.)?
MB: My one requirement is that there be interstellar space travel—so maybe Ursula K Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle universe. Either that or the pocket universe of Moebius’ The Airtight Garage.
EP: What's the most interesting day job you've had?
MB: For a single day I worked as a truck driver for a furniture company. I got the gig through a friend, who was somehow acquainted with the owner of the company, who offered me $100 cash to fill in for the regular driver, who had disappeared under vague circumstances. I had to deliver a shipment of chairs from a warehouse in Grand Rapids—“Furniture City”—to a construction site at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula. The drive took nine hours roundtrip. Before the journey began, the owner of the company assured me that I didn’t need a special license to drive the truck. I never got pulled over, so I never found out whether that was true.
EP: What is it that you prefer about the short story, and why?
MB: I love novels, both as a reader and as a writer, but I have to admit I secretly wish that short story collections were the dominant form. I don’t know why novels are so much more popular. It’s the inverse of the music industry, in which the most popular form by far is collections of short songs. I love the explosive narrative pressure created by the compact space of a short story, love that a short story can be read and experienced in a single sitting, and especially love when a short story collection isn’t just a collection of random stories but instead is exploring some larger question or idea over the course of the book, the equivalent of a concept album like The Wall or Section.80 or Because The Internet or The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars.
EP: What's the best advice on writing you've received?
MB: One of my mentors in college was the poet Jack Ridl, who at that point had already technically retired but was still teaching workshops on campus due to popular demand. If you’ve never met him, he’s a quiet person, profoundly kind, always thoughtful, who emanates a sense of peace and goodwill. He shuffled into every workshop in a thick wool sweater, well-loved jeans, and a pair of moccasins. One of his early proteges was the musician Sufjan Stevens. Anyway, I spent three semesters with him, and I think by the end he had realized that I was only interested in writing weird things. In the last conversation that I had with him before I graduated, talking about the chapbook I had assembled as a final project, he tentatively gave me some advice: “If you’re going to do a weird thing, only do one weird thing at a time.” I didn’t actually take that advice to heart until years later, but that’s the most valuable writing advice anybody has ever given me.
EP: How do you work? Are you disciplined? Undisciplined? Do you have fits and starts, or are you slower and more methodical?
MB: Working on Why Visit America, I wrote seven days a week, typically somewhere between nine to eleven hours a day. I’m very slow and very methodical and drink a lot of caffeine. I listen to songs on loop. Today I’ve listened about eighty times to Nuages’ “Distant.”
EP: In a nutshell, what are you working on now?
MB: I’m finishing work on an experimental graphic novel, beginning work on a new novel, writing a screenplay for Amazon Studios, and writing a screenplay for FX. I’ve also been working on releasing my uncollected stories under Creative Commons licensing—I do one story a month—making the stories available for free on my website in multiple formats, PDF, EPUB, and HTML, so that teachers and professors interested in using the stories in the classroom can easily distribute the stories to students. My thanks to Lawrence Lessig.
EP: What's an interview question you've never been asked that you wish had been asked of you?
MB: Do you or do you not know the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto?
Named one of Variety’s “10 Storytellers To Watch,” Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures. His stories have appeared in publications such as New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City. Visit him online at: www.mwektaehtabr.com
