An Interview with Deb Olin Unferth
By Julie Karnes
Deb Olin Unferth's work has appeared in Harper's, Conjunctions, NOON, Fence, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and elsewhere. Minor Robberies, a selection of her stories, will appear as one volume of three from McSweeney's.
Julie Karnes is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The following interview was conducted via email 11/18/06 through 12/6/06.

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What does your workday look like?

A lot of fumbling and self-scolding and walking up and down staircases. Writers are such farcically beset creatures. When things are really bad, I lie in bed all day with my papers on top of me and when I am able, I raise my head and pick up a piece of paper and look at it and make a note on it maybe. If I can't do that, I leave books or dictionaries on the bed and every now and then I pick one up and read a few words and shut it. It is ridiculous. I have been writing a novel for the past year and a half and that is very consuming. I had to stop for a while to make revisions to a collection of short shorts. I found it very difficult to put the novel down but then I found the stories so refreshing that I was relieved, but then, over time, I found the stories so difficult to deal with and so disappointing, that I was relieved to go back to the novel, only then I was disappointed with that as well.

How does your day job affect your work life? Can you talk to me about economic survival as a writer?

Somewhere M.T. Anderson says, "Do not expect to make any money from your writing ever," and I have tried to live that way. I know writers who support themselves from their writing—M.T. Anderson included—and I am very admiring of them, but I do not seem able to do it. These days the problem is not money so much as time. I have a messy life and I need so much time to get anything done. I seem to have to do three or four times what other people need to do only once. So I have cut a lot of things out of my life. I have no hobbies of any kind other than reading and writing anymore, for example.

So how do you manage it? Teaching and writing?

I cannot come back after being at school and attend to my fiction writing unless it is really desperate, unless I feel like I have try to write my way out of the box that I've put myself in.

How does reading fit into your process? i.e. do you schedule time for it? Do you make a plan for reading work that "feeds" your own work?

I do try to make reading plans but I can never read a tenth of what I plan to because I am such a slow reader. Anyone who actually witnesses me reading is amazed at how slow I am. I was assigned to teach a class once for “slow readers” and I went through with it but I was a much slower reader than any of them and they always had to wait for me to finish. 

I do try to read the sort of thing I am trying to write although I am less approving of that strategy than I used to be. I discovered that I was missing out on a lot. Other writers I know—I am thinking of four in particular who I consider to be important artists—read essays, old newspapers, journals, interviews, style manuals, and other writings.

Who are you talking about?

Diane Williams, David Ohle, Lydia Davis, and Gary Lutz.

Who are you reading right now?

In the last year my favorite new reads (new to me) have been: My Most Secret Desire by Julie Doucet, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Ungentine byStanley Crawford, Modern American Usage by Wilson Follett, The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia, and The ACME Novelty Library by Chris Ware. Today I am reading volume 8 of The Paris Review Writers at Work series: in particular, an interview with James Laughlin. I keep Gertrude Stein nearby.

How do you handle inspiration? The sparks or "germs" as Henry James describes them? Where does your inspiration come from?

I used to write on busses, preferably in Nicaragua. I had to go all the way to Nicaragua just to sit on a fifty-cent bus and write down a few sentences. These days I rely for inspiration more and more on words I get out of the dictionary or other books and on dreams. Sometimes I copy down sentences I read on boards or that I hear people say. Sometimes it's just an approach that interests me, like an approach to humor or to a dramatic moment and that I try to write down. Sometimes music, solo piano, if I listen to certain pieces over and over I start to hear a complexity that I want to try to imitate. It’s best if I am wandering through a crowd while listening so that the people transform into notes and then words, and I can feel like I’m conducting them or moving them around.

What about writer’s block? Do you have any tricks you use to get yourself to write when you don't want to?

Oh yes, well, I don’t get writer’s block. I get stuck because I’m so full of doubt and self-loathing. I have to write myself admonishing letters telling myself that no matter how hateful I am and how hateful my prose, that I damn well better sit still and work on this piece of crappy writing in front of me. I find it doesn't help to read the old letters I've written. I have to write new ones all the time. Also I list my failures. Listing acceptances and such does no good at all, but listing rejections helps. A friend of mine, a novelist, keeps a list on his computer of all the people he wants to impress with his "next great book."  These can be writers he admires or people he feels snubbed him or in some way weren't nice to him. I tried that but I found it didn't work for me because each time I looked at the list I had to remember why each person was on there. I had make each person come alive in my mind and I simply didn't have the imagination for it.

Do you have a group of people (trusted readers) you show work to before you submit to publications?

Sometimes I show my work to other writers before I send it out, but sometimes I do not. Sometimes I show it to my family. The first time I showed my father a batch of my stories he said they were fine but that they would be much better if they had more sex in them. Especially gay sex. Gay sex is so popular now, he said, I would certainly be able to sell my work for more money if I had some of that in there. So for a while I was writing a story called “Sex for Dad” but I never finished it.

What is success for you? And is it a motivating force in your work?

The word success, my earliest understanding of the word and the way it imprinted itself on my mind, has always been so divorced from anything having to do with me. I recall a cheerleading tryout where we had to spell the word success accompanied by a series of claps (I did not make the team). I recall school teachers using the word in sentences and my feeling like it was a completely alien concept. Success is a measurable achievement. It implies a finish. “There, that’s done.” That has nothing to do with my writing. Writing is never done.

When I first answered this question I typed, “I want to create an object that shows how I uniquely experience things, how the world looks to me and what it sounds like,” but I am cutting it (sort of) because it sounds not quite right. It’s more like there’s a rhythm that I hear in the hum of the world. I just like to take note of that rhythm and how strange it seems to me. I like to try to get it down and then read it back and try to match it—what’s in my head, what’s on the page. If I hear it coming up from the page (which doesn’t happen often) in that moment it isn’t success, it’s relief, like hearing a song I wanted to hear. It might not be a good song but it’s my song.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Deb!

Thank you.