[reviews]
[masthead]
An Interview with Peter Ho Davies
Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl (2007) and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000). His work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Independent, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Born in Britain in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Dolly Laninga conducted this interview with Peter Ho Davies from October to November 2008 via email, following his reading at Grand Valley State University.
Dolly Laninga is a senior in Creative Writing at Grand Valley State University.
__
UpInMichigan.org: Throughout the collection Equal Love, the stories approach the parent-child relationship from various angles and points of view. Now that you are yourself a father, are you still confident that your examinations on parenthood/childhood attain poignancy, or are there other nuances of these roles that you would be more likely to explore?
Peter Ho Davies: I remain happy with the stories, though it’s really for the reader to decide if they’re poignant or not, I think. I have been asked recently to contribute to an anthology of essays about fatherhood and had to pass on the invitation in the end partly because my experience of parenthood so far (my son is almost 4 and a half) has been so varied and so swiftly changing. It feels like it would be try to hit a moving target to write about it. Essentially, I’m so in the middle of parenthood I don’t feel ready yet to step back and write about it.
UIM: The children in "Frogmen" understand that if they express a feeling of loss, they will in turn receive things from others. I’m thinking of the toys, of course, but also of the calculated leniency the boys elicit from their mother when they are unkind to their sister. I might argue that the adults featured in other stories from Equal Love haven’t really progressed to a more sophisticated understanding of emotional exchange. Were you consciously trying to articulate this?
PHD: Perhaps the very notion of an "equal love" implies a balancing of love, an attempt to compare it with the love of others, or perhaps with other things. My characters do do that, but I think we all do, whether as adults and children. The older characters in the stories seem to me to often be in the process of discovering how problematic such equations, such trades can be.
UIM: How often is the problem you examine or attempt to solve in your stories of a social nature? Meaning, can your stories ever be read as social critique—at least on a smaller scale? Do you feel your stories have something to say about social currency, on the give and take between everyday people?
PHD: I don’t often consciously set out to address social issues in my work—I think that’s a tricky and treacherous goal for fiction—but we all (writers included) live in the world, are a part of society so inevitably, I suppose, my work must reflect some of my attitudes to social issues. If we consider two people to form a small society, any fiction has a social dimension.
UIM: In another interview you said "The Criminal Mastermind" and "The Great Detective" provided an outlet for some residual thoughts from your novel, The Welsh Girl. How do you decide when to retire a theme or concept in your fiction? Or does it not require a decision—do exhausted concepts simply cease to crop up in newer projects?
PHD: It’s not a decision, for me at least, and I hope and suspect that major thematic issues that inform my work, identity for instance, are complex enough that I can’t imagine exhausting them (indeed, since multitudes of writers tackle the same theme, the issue is more that the theme might exhaust us!)
UIM: Today’s dramatic political and cultural landscape provides us with people who seem increasingly easy to criticize—and of course to parody. Do you foresee any projects tackling contemporary political or cultural leaders?
PHD: I’ve tried a couple, with varying success, but I don’t yet know if I’m done with them or if they’ll ever see the light of day. The challenge I’m struggling with I think is to make them somehow more than parody (though what that might be I’m still trying to figure out).
UIM: Because of the historical and political content of your work, it is clear you have a lot of knowledge in the field. But then you have also studied physics extensively, leading to a logical approach to writing stories. Do you expect that kind of logic and tight thematic content from the authors you read?
PHD: Actually, I’m by no means the most diligent researcher—imagination I hope fills in the gaps—and while I have a science background, I find the problem-solving mind set useful only in revising, not really in generating new material. As for what I look for in other writers I am drawn to some of the things you suggest—I’m interested in character motivation which is a kind of narrative logic, I suppose, and I respond to thematic resonance—but like most of us I also like to be surprised by a book or a story, to discover something different that offers fresh pleasures.
UIM: Do you find the truths you discover in fiction to be more valuable than those you pursued in your scientific studies?
PHD: Yes, but that’s just me, and why I made my life as a writer rather than a scientist. But, of course, the two are essentially incommensurable, neither more valid than the other, but pertaining to different spheres (the physical world and the human heart).
UIM: We have discussed the relative merits of the fantastic in fiction versus the realistic. While we agreed that at times absurdist fiction is better able to reveal truth, most of your fiction could be categorized as realist (with arguable exceptions—"The Great Detective" and "The Criminal Mastermind" are almost allegorical, but not overwhelmingly unrealistic). Do you think you might experiment with stories that belong in "more fantastical stream" (as you have put it)?
PHD: I don’t think one mode or other is necessarily better able to reveal the truth, but I do think there’s a resurgence in more fantastical fiction now which I hypothesize might be in response to our more absurdist political times. This vein in the history of short fiction, which one might associate historically with Kafka, and Borges, last had a dominant place in US fiction in the 60’s and 70’s (Donald Barthelme is an obvious exemplar) and I think some great contemporary writers—George Saunders, say—might be seen in this context. As for my own work, I think of those couple of stories you mention as operating in this fantastical realm (they proceed realistically from absurd premises, a little like The Metamorphosis). I’ve a couple of other such pieces and like working in this territory, but it’s probably not my natural mode, so I suspect I’ll return too to more realistic fictions in future.
UIM: In our conversation following your reading, you joked that you turn to television to kill time when you’re not writing. How much do you write a day, and how do you know when you’ve exhausted your capacity to be creative?
PHD: It depends on what I’m writing—a story, a novel, a first draft, or revising—but I’m rarely good for much more than three hours a day and there are many, many days on which I don’t write. Only when working on a novel have I had a set schedule and that changed over the course of work on The Welsh Girl depending on our life circumstances (for a year or two I worked on it every morning from 7 or 8 for an hour or two before teaching and directing took over the day; after we had our son it became much harder to wake up early and work, because he was usually up before me!)
UIM: I’m not going to ask you about the greatest literary influences on your writing, as you’ve already answered that pretty thoroughly elsewhere, but I would like to know—whom or what have you been reading lately?
PHD: A random recent selection of those I’ve admired and enjoyed: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays, Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel, Zachary Lazar’s Sway, Saher Alam’s The Groom to have Been, Porter Shreve’s When the White House was Ours, Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories.
UIM: You are certainly an author one can point to as an example of short fiction’s flexibility: you have a terrifically varied background and body of knowledge, and, as others have noted, a spectacular range within your prose. Given the limited market for short fiction, it seems likely that all writers will have to be equally flexible in range, or form, or in their relationship to other media (such as art/design, music, etc.). What do you think we can expect from the short story in the future?
PHD: That’s too big a question to do justice to in a brief answer here, but I’m not sure that the limited market requires writers to be as flexible as you suggest. If I’m flexible in the ways you describe it’s not in response to a market, as much as it is to the range of materials, the stories, I want to tell. The market, I suspect, would like us all to do the same thing, the commercially successful thing (whatever that is). As the short story market contracts (and I think that’s true of the market for collections; I’m less anxious about the market for individual stories which is still the envy of writers in the UK, say) the likelihood is we’ll see more themed collections, more linked collections, more novels-in-stories—all of which are fine forms, but ones that I suspect are more marketable than collections that are a little more varied (and which I actually see as one of the freedoms and strengths of the collection as a form).
___
FEATURED:
An Interview with Peter Ho Davies