Issue 81: Dan Chaon

BORROWING ELEMENTS OF HORROR, mystery, thriller, and literary fiction, Dan Chaon weaves complex stories of estrangement, heartbreak, murder, and suspense. As Elizabeth Brundage puts it in a recent New York Times review, “[Chaon] has made a habit of pushing the boundaries, daring to try new things while returning to various signature motifs: parental death by suicide or disease; estranged siblings; fire-ravaged families; foster children and failed adoptions; people with missing arms, severed fingers, prosthetic limbs; childhood neglect; and more.

Chaon’s novels and short stories often begin with situations we recognize, whether from our own lives or borrowed from what he has dubbed “contemporary headline horror,” the barrage of violence and fear that permeates American life. From that starting point, Chaon leads readers into a world of the uncanny, where characters begin to question the basic assumptions of their lives and readers are left with a new, surprising view of the world we thought we knew.

The author of three novels and three collections of short stories, Chaon has been the recipient of a pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short story collection, Among the Missing (Ballantine Books, 2001), was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award.

Chaon’s newest novel, Ill Will (Ballantine Books, 2017), is part serial killer mystery, part examination of the Satanic ritual abuse frenzy of the 1980s, and part of meditation on the nature of identity. With the pacing of a detective novel, the characters stumble through one realization after another, struggling to maintain their sense of self and their relationship to the world around them. Chaon’s experiments with form and genre often leave readers with more questions than answers, while keeping them grounded with his lucid prose and keen eye for surprising detail.

We met Chaon during the 2017 Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, where we talked about hypnosis, writing for TV, turning off your internal editor, and the influence of classic horror films.

REBECCA GONSHAK

Your novels blur the line between literary and genre fiction. When you write literary thrillers like Ill Will or Await Your Reply, do you feel liek you need to meet certain genre expectations? Or do you try to subvert those expectations.

DAN CHAON

I consume a lot of genre work, a lot of thrillers and stuff in the horror genre, so I have those templates in my head. They give me a backbone or framework that’s going to be the skeleton of the book. Then, when I put the meat on the bones, the skeleton may not be completely visible to most people. I don’t know if I intentionally subvert the genre, but I do know the genre is there. I also expect that my readers are familiar enough with the genre that any subversion I’m doing they’ll recognize as breaking the form, or traveling alongside the form but not necessarily on the same highway.

CHRISTOPHER MACCINI

You’ve said that you’d be happy to have some of Stephen King’s reader, but that most of them would be disappointed. What do you mean by that?

CHAON

When you have a serial killer novel like Ill Will, there is the tradition of the final chapter being like, “Detective Hercule Poirot explains it all to you.” And that’s the chapter I’m not particularly interested in. To some extent, it’s still there in Ill Will and even more so in Await Your Reply—that last chapter is just ticking off all the questions that readers have, sort of like, answer, answer, answer, answer. But my heart isn’t in it. A lot of the last chapter in Ill Will and the last chapter of Await Your Reply came at the very end, and they had to do with y editor saying, “Please, Dan. . .”

MACCINI

The last chapter of Ill Will answers some questions, but definitely not all the big questions the reader might have.

CHAON

Right. It’s a book about the multiplicity of memory, the inability to ever really know something factually. It’s like, I’ve been telling you this for the entire book, so why would you expect the book to give you the things I’m telling you don’t exist?

My tolerance for ambiguity is super high, and having an editor has been good for me in finding balance between my natural inclination and not creating rage in a hug portion of the readership. One of my main readers is my sister, who’s a very conventional reader, and I really value her feedback because she’ll be like, “Dan, I don’t understand; why did this happen?” There’s a passage in Ill Will that I ended up adding just for my sister, where Aqil is talking to Aaron as he’s leading him to his doom, and he starts doing that “Let me explain to you my motivations” thing that I usually hate. But I ended up finding a way to make it fun for myself. People will scream, “Why did Aqil . . . why, why, why?” But at least there are like two pages where he basically lays out his motivations. It satisfied my sister, so I figure it’s going to satisfy the majority of readers.

MACCINI

Do you go through that process with short stories?

CHAON

Sometimes, but less so. Short stories are more naturally open-ended because there tends to be a lot of space around them. The beginning is in media res and usually the ending is in media res as well. So you’ve just taken a character through a gesture as opposed to an entire pantomime.

MACCINI

Though your work can be described as falling within horror or thriller genres, what’s scary in your writing is not blood or gore. There’s a lot of violence, but it’s underwritten. What’s scary is the psychological fear, like losing the person closest to you. Or the conspiracy theories, like the idea that there could be a serial killer in your town.

CHAON

Which I think is ultimately scarier anyway. I guess when we choose a genre or when a genre chooses us, it’s because it has given us pleasure in some ways to and marked us. I think the things that mark us are things we’re talking back to. So I don’t think I’m even writing to readers. I’m writing to the writers and the works of art that have influenced me.

It’s like we’re all whales, and we send out these long whole notes. We’re sending them to somebody who’s making the same sound, right? So you hear this whole notes, and then you respond with something that’s similar. I feel like that’s why we choose genre, because it created some kind of pleasure in us, and wej ust want to do that. As Hannibal Lector says, “You start with what you covet.”

GONSHAK

What were some of your horror influences?

CHAON

I remember seeing a lot of Hitchcock movies, and those made a big impact. And some horror movies of the ’70s: The Exorcist, The Omen, Burnt Offerings, The Changeling. And certainly the higher-end arthouse horror, as well as something like, Last House on the Left and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. One way in which I was very much like my character Dustin in Ill Will is I had older cousins who babysat me and took me places that probably a sever or eight-year-old should not have gone. Like to a drive-in movie to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was eight or nine . . . It scared the living shit out of me. Part of it had to do with just the grubbiness. I’d never seen a film that looked so much like it had been buried in the dirt and unearthed. It’s grainy and washed out and too dark in places and too light in other places, and there’s something that seems really wrong and distorted about the whole experience. It kind of replicates nightmares in a way that is hard to do. And yeah, I can saw that it fucked me up for my whole life. I can still think about it and scare myself if I’m alone in a hotel room.

GONSHAK

Do you remember when you went form being horrified by that movie to being like, I want to do this?

CHAON

I think both experiences exist at the same time. I was so scared by that movie, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t wait to see another horror movie. For some people it’s like you ate some bad fish. You’re just never going to eat fish again. Or tequila, or whatever. And for some people it’s like, yeah, I’d like another shot of tequila please.

MACCINI

You’ve done some screenwriting, and the word on the street is that there may be a TV version of Ill Will forthcoming. How do you feel about switching to those mediums.

CHAON

I’m working on Ill Will as a limited TV series, a one-season thing. I just finished writing the pilot. It’s okay for me because I already have the object; the book, Ill Will, is always going to be there. I’ve had some not-great experiences with film and TV. Not that I’ve ever had anything produced, but I’ve had a lot of watching something go very slowly off the rails and then wishing I’d never started to participate. But there’s about the idea of seeing your work on screen. There’s the possibility, no matter how slim, that it might turn out cool. I still keep going back to try one more time and see what happens.

The frustrating thing for me about film and TV is that collaborative nature of it. That can be something that people really get off on. With novel writing, I like the idea of having a world that you’re building. You get to do all the set design, and you get to do the music. You get to play all the parts. You’re making at least some filmic scenes, but you also get to be inside the person, which you don’t get in film. And for me, the music is always in the language. So, finding at least palces in which the music can sign is important, that point where the story sort of stops, and you just have the song playing.

GONSHAK

Is the way you create characters in your writing similar to the way an actor would get inside a character?

CHAON

I don’t really know what actors do, but I think so. You’re writing a scene, and you get to a point where somebody has to say something, and you try a bunch of things. A lot of time you’ll say them out loud, or at least, out loud in your head, and you’ll try different levels of subtlety. I thing my first instinct is always to be a bad actor. Like, “Why did you do that?” she screamed. Frequently in a first draft, people will start screaming or hitting way earlier than they probably should. And then I have to step back. I can imagine a director stepping in and being like, “Dan, let’s try that again from the top.”

GONSHAK

Do you have to learn to let go to a certain extent when collaborating?

CHAON

To let go or to negotiate. But when you’re working with a commercial publisher and an editor, there’s negotiation that happens at that level too. I remember being shocked when my editor first acquired Among the Missing. It had twenty stories, and he was like, “Okay, we’re going to take these seven out.” I was like “What? But . . . that one’s been published in Pleiades.”

GONSHAK

What was his reason for that?

CHAON

Length and tightness, and he just didn’t think those stories were strong enough. He was like, “You want it to be a strong collection. You don’t want it to be every piece of shit you wrote over a five-year period.” That’s a hard lesson. I was still in my early thirties. It was a hard lesson that even if a story was publishable, it might not be that good.

GONSHAK

What about line changes?

CHAON

I’ve never had an editor who does a lot with my word choice, expect in places where I need it. I have a blind spot about repetition. One of the crazy things about Ill Will—it’s still in there. The word “ruefully” appears forty-seven times in the book. I don’t know what was going on with me. I was stuck on that word or in love with that word, or it was a gesture I was interested in for some reason. But5 I’ve never had editors edit my sentences too closely. Punctuation is always an issue, though, especially for copyeditors, because I have a random sense of what punctuation is for, rather than a standardized sense.

GONSHAK

Do you think about who your characters are before you start writing, or do you discover them as you go along?

CHAON

I think of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, where he had a rotating cast of actors who worked for him, and sometimes they’d get the main part and sometimes they’d get the side part. I have a rotating cast. Like, “In this novel, the role of Kate will be played by my sister, Cheri.” So that gives me a core. But because the circumstance is different and the plot is different, it’s never going to be her. It’s just that I’ve cast her to act this part, and I have strong gestures and expressions and maybe an attitude I can draw on. That’s sort of an early-on thing, and by the time I’m into a story or a novel, most of it’s gone. I’ve never had too much of a problem with people saying, “Oh, this is me,” or “You stole . . . ” My sons were freaked out though because the house in Ill Will is our house, and Dennis and Aaron clearly occupy their rooms. Although neither one of them is Dennis or Aaron, so . . .

MACCINI

Your work is often described as “uncanny” or “unsettling”, which is similar to the way you describe your response to horror films. What about that feeling keeps you trying to evoke it in your work?

CHAON

I guess it comes back to that quote from Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, the idea that most of our lives are spent in a state of “cotton wool.” It’s a sort of sleepwalking state where we’re making dinner, going to work, washing dishes, watching TV, and we’re not experiencing the world in an active way. It’s different for everybody, but for me, the times when I am experiencing the world in an active way are often times when I’m experiencing the uncanny. For other people it might be some other experience. It depends on how your brain works, what grabs you. But I think most genres are about jolting you out of sleepwalk. Think about comedy. When you laugh, it’s not like you think, “I will laugh now.” It happens to you physically, and it jolts you out of something. Part of laughter is about surprise, but it’s also about delight. It becomes three-dimensional. It allows you to re-see. I think that’s part of our project: the re-seeing of things that have become commonplace or buried under all that cotton wool.

GONSHAK

Can you give an example of a time you saw something uncanny and it kind of jolted you out of a sleepwalk?

CHAON

Yeah, it’s in the story, “To Psychic Underworld” in Stay Awake. When my kids were little, I was the primary caretaker because my wife was working and I wasn’t. I watched them during the day and did all kinds of small-child things. I was feeling very tired and down-trodden. I had tad taken them in their stroller to the library and looked down on the ground, and I saw someone had written, I’m watching you.” It was really creepy. Then I realized it was just birds’ footprints, which had looked to me at first like letters.

MACCINI

Your most recent novel, Ill Will, does interesting things with form. You have chapters written in multiple columns across the page. And more subtly, you have these weird spaces and line breaks scattered throughout. It disrupts the reader in a way that many authors would consciously try to avoid. They’d be afraid of breaking the “dream state.” Was disruption your intended effect?

CHAON

To some extent it started because of the way I actually write when I’m doing a first draft. It’s hand-written and a lot of times I”ll just do line breaks in the middle of a sentence, or I’ll write it in a kind of verse. Not straight-up verse, but I’ll break where I feel like there’s a pause in the music of the language. And sometimes I’ll use the “field of the page,” as the poets call it.

I actually got into it with the last two short stories in Stay Awake: “The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White hands” and “I Wake UP.” There are pasages with line breaks in the sentences, broken sentences, and little quasi-poetic passages. Originally, there was a lot more of that kind of thing in Ill Will, but when it came to the typesetting, the book was like 800 pages. And my editor was like “We’ve got to do something about this.” So I cut a lot of them, or I standardizes them.

Because both those stories and Ill Will are kind of ghost stories, and both of them are about the dissolution of identity, it felt like the breaks physically represented this thing, that I wanted to get at, and also musically represented that thing. It’s like trying to find an equivalent to a special effect in film.

One filmmaker who has influenced me a lot is David Lynch. I’m thinking of particular moments in Lynch that become visual poetry rather than narrative. There’s some kind of slowed down thing or sliding thing or blurring that happens and you’re like, what the fuck is this? But it also has an emotional intensity to it. A lot of his films are ridiculous from a plot perspective. They’re so silly, but he’s imbuing these plots with an intensity of emotino that can put you in a state of dreaminess or hyperreality.

MACCINI

At first I wasn’t sure how to read the columns in Ill Will. One column at a time? Or straight across? I struggled with that a bit, but once I gave into it, I found myself flowing in and out of the different perspectives. It had a profound effect of dissolution. At times you’re not sure which character’s perspective you’re in or what the time is. Or you’re seeing the same scene from multiple perspectives almost simultaneously. How did you intend those chapters to be read?

CHAON

I wanted it to work both ways. You could read them all vertically or you could follow them paragraph by paragraph horizontally. They’re all mirror images of one another.

What I was really interested in, especially in Ill Will, was the multiplicity of self. Not split personality or anything like that, but the fact that there’s an executive function that thinks of itself as me, but there are also all these other things that are going on. For example, you may be driving, but you’re also having a vivid memory of something that happened to you when were a kid, and you’re also vaguely imagining yourself in the grocery store, what you’re going to pick out for lunch, and then there may be some kind of crawling thin gin your right brain that you’re not even aware of, which might be some stupid song you can’t shake. And all of those things are happening at once, and they’re all you. And Dustin, the character in Ill Will, was sort of my avatar for examining that feeling of multiplicity. I’m super interested in it, and I’m super interested in being aware of who’s in control and who’s the second mate. The problem is when you try to pay attention to it, it’s so elusive.

It gets at the heart of this question: What makes a person have an identity? What makes a person who they are? And how well do we know what that is? I’m fascinated by that. All these novels deal with it in some way. My first novel, You Remind Me of Me, deals with it the most overtly with the question of adoption, these two brothers who have never met and how they turned out. Await Your Reply deals with it as more of a game. Like, if you can change your identity, can you change yourself?

GONSHAK

Have you come to any conclusions through your writing about this idea of identity?

CHAON

I haven’t come to any conclusions, but I feel like I have a broader idea of it. It’s such a huge subject that has continued to open up for me as opposed to coming to any final conclusions. Maybe there aren’t any conclusions to be had. Usually my novels are about people who have come to conclusions, and they’ve made a huge mistake.

GONSHAK

You’ve talked about trying to tap into different parts of your brain through various writing exercises. Is this idea of the multiplicity of self connected to your writing process? Are the writing exercises a way to connect with your different “selves”?

CHAON

Yeah. There’s also something autobiographical about it. Adoption was a big part of my life and my self conception, and I’ve taken a journey with that. It started when I first knew about my biological parents, then moved into a world in which I knew them, or at least I knew one of them pretty well. The shifting nature of my self knowledge has been a big part of my life experience. And also as somebody who has moved through social classes. Neither of my parents finished high school. My dad was a construction worker, and a lot of my family were rural poor people. Going from there to being this professor guy who lives in a suburban house in Cleveland, that’s another journey that leaves questions of identity transformation in my head. So in a lot of ways those personal experiences are feeding into what I end up wanting to write about as a novelist. I think that’s probably true for everybody.

MACCINI

You write a lot about families and estrangement within families. In Stay Awake, every parent either dies pretty quickly or is absent in some way. In Ill Will, the characters who you think should be closest end up being estranged. I’m thinking of the twins, Wave and Kate, and Dustin’s relationship with his sons. Is that something that organically comes out of your own experience, or do you consciously employ it as a plot device?

CHAON

Both. As a fiction writer, you learn to look for hot sots that have plot tension in them. Estrangement has plot tension in it, but it’s also something that I”m drawn to personally. Finding that electric wire where the personal and the fictional can hook up is a big thing for fiction writers. I think som e peoplea re scared to do it because they think it might limit what they are able to write.

MACCINI

They’re afraid of autobiography?

CHAON

Yeah, or of going back to something one too many times. That’s sometimes a danger. But I also think that for most writers, even great writers, there are a limited number of electric wires that really “hook.” Like when your favorite writer decides thy’re going to write something that takes place in ancient Egypt, you’re like, damn it, I don’t care about his. Go back to what I loved.

GONSHAK

How long did it take you to find your electric wire?

CHAON

I think you can see it in the early stories in Fitting Ends, but that’s certainly my least favorite book. Probably the story that most calls forward what I”m going to be doing later is the title story, which has ghosts and brothers and the sort of multiple-story structure. A lot of those stories are still very “grad-school-y”

MACCINI

Do you think that’s because you were still figuring out what you were interested in?

CHAON

Yeah and also, all those stories were written when I was in my twenties, and you’re still a pretty unformed person in your twenties. They’re stories where I’m kind of slashing around and figuring it out and trying to find out if I’m ever going to get a story in the New Yorker. Answer: no.

MACCINI

Can you talk about your philosophy of teaching writing? You teach a lot of timed writing exercises as way to sort of shut off that conscious part of your brain. What does that allow you to do?

CHAON

Well, it ultimately started when I was just out of graduate school. I was frozen for a lot of reasons. Most of them had to do with the workshop itself and my own ambitions or expectations. I’d start writing something and I’d be like, no, you can’t do that. There was a strong executive part of my brain that was saying “no” all the time. I can’t tell you how many one-paragraph stories I had. I’d write the first paragraph and then polish it and not move forward. There was a point where I was so blocked I was ready to give up, and somebody suggested I just set a timer and write without stopping for a certain person of time.

My writing didn’t suddenly become better, but things emerged, even though I hadn’t planned ahead. This idea that you can plan a story in some way and have everything lined up for yourself and then fill in the blanks of an outline is not really the experience of writing. I was so resistant to the experience of going into this fictional dream, or this fictional play area, that I’d actually forgotten what it’s like to write. Because really what you’re doing, when it’s going well, is the same thing you did when you were a kid, learning to play. None of it was ever planned out. You had a Barbie and a G.I. Joe and you were doing things with them, and pretty soon one of them would fall and the other would try to rescue them and then something was unfolding. It was an interesting realization for me that the storytelling apparatus isn’t something that the executive function controls. IT’s something that is probably . . . older. Because, just having observed babies, I think we know how to tell stories before we even have language.

MACCINI

One of your exercises involves drawing, even if the writer isn’t a visual artist. Do you find that tapping into that visual part of the brain allows you to tell stories in a different way?

CHAON

Yes. And one of my weaknesses—it’s not everybody’s weakness, but it’s common enough that I can say maybe fifty percent of my students are in this boat—is that I tend to avoid writing in scene. Or when I write in scene originally, the scenes tend to be sketchy. They’ll just be dialogue, gesture, dialogue, gesture, and someone’s sitting at a vague kitchen table. Or, especially with novels, I can get really caught up in summary for long stretches.

When I was writing You Remind Me of Me, I had this passage that was just my character, Jonah, remembering an event. It was a paragraph-long summary of when he was attacked by a dog as a child. My editor circled that and was like, “Write this in scene.” And that was when I came up with this idea: okay, I’m going to try to write it as if I”m making it into a movie, so I can get images. That was when I realized that images are super important. Trying to get yourself into that state where images come without forcing it. “What’s on the table? Salt and pepper shakers . . .” That’s kind of artificial, or forced. When you’re struggling, you can’t picture the scene, so you just start designing the set like every other set.

MACCINI

It’s interesting to hear you say you struggle with imagery because in the section of Ill Will that starts the morning before the murder, there are so many strong images—the fly buzzing in the window that wakes Kate, Uncle Dave peering in the bushes in his underwear.

CHAON

And every single one of those came from a freewrite. I had no idea Uncle Dave was going to show up peeing in the lilac bush in his underwear until that happened in the middle of a freewrite. Wave’s just sitting there smoking a cigarette, an then the door opens and Uncle Dave comes out. I can picture him. He’s this little badger man in skivvies and he doesn’t see her and she watches him walk out . . .It was a seven-minute, timed freewrite that that came out of.

MACCINI

Where do you think those images arise from?

CHAON

From a confluence of the subconscious, or your right brain, and every kind of narrative things you’ve consumed in your life. It’s a mixture of those things. I don’t know whether you can put a pin on it. Probably the desire to put a pin on it is death to the image-making process. My old thing that I’m always saying to my students is, “Stop thinking.” They’re supposed to be freewriting and I can see people like, “Hmm . . . hmm . . . ” You can’t think yourself into a scene, except a scene that is set-decorated in cliché. This stupid executive function thinks it runs everything, and it just doesn’t.

GONSHAK

There is a lot of hypnosis in Ill Will and Await Your Reply. Where does your interest in hypnosis come from? Do you use self hypnosis to get intot hat imaginative state when you’re writing?

CHAON

I loved hypnosis as a kid, and I wanted to be a hypnotist. Hypnotism is a state of mind. I don’t think it’s a “mesmerized by the pretty coin, and now you must do my will!” sort of thing. I think it’s a state of being receptive. It’s also a state of closing down the executive function to some degree. Or quieting it, and that has always been a huge problem of me as a writer, because the self critical part of myself kicks into really high gear and interferes with starting to write. There are times when I’ve been blocked, and I would rather do anything than sit down and write a paragraph. Putting yourself into a mode where you can experience the fictional dream world—I think that requires a certain level of hypnosis. I suspect that’s why so many writers are drunks. Because people use alcohol to do it. I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea. On the other hand I certainly use cigarettes for it. And I use music for it. If you’re going to write a significant body of work you have to get into that state.

GONSHAK

Does that help during revision too?

CHAON

Yeah, I think it can. It depends on the kind of revision you need to do. If it’s line-by-line, then it’s useless to be in the hypnotic mind state. But the kind of revision where you have to rethink a scene, I think it’s incredibly helpful. Even if it’s a question of the details just not popping. How can I find better details? I think that freewriting technique is so perfect. The truth is for every freewrite you do, you may get one good image or sentence. But you know, for me it’s mostly seven-minute freewrites.

MACCINI

And then you have to turn on that executive part of your brain to figure out which of those images fit?

CHAON

Yeah, I think so. I split it up into different times of the day. I tend to do most of my original writing or freewriting between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. And then I do a lot of the revision and the other stuff in the late morning or early afternoon. I feel like I’m in a different mental state at both of those times. Late at night is my favorite time. I can do anything I want, read or watch TV or wander around.

MACCINI

Is sleep deprivation a form of hypnosis too?

CHAON

Depending on where it’s coming from. I’ve known writers who get up at 4:00 a.m. Forget it. There’s no part of me that’s ever going to get up at 4:00 a.m. and go to the keyboard.

MACCINI

Parts of Ill Will feel almost like historical fiction in the way the fictional events are interwoven with real, historical events like the mysterious deaths of young men in Ohio and the Satanic ritual abuse frenzy of the 1980s. What is the role of real world events in your fiction? Is that something you’re conscious of when you write?

CHAON

Yeah, I think I am conscious of it. It varies from novel to novel. With You Remind Me of Me , the majority of the research was about homes for unwed mothers. It seemed so outrageous and crazy that this was part of American life and culture. I immersed myself in it.

With Await Your Reply, it was the world of hackers and 4chan and anarchists. I spent a lot of time online on 4chan lurking and listening to these guys talk. Listening to them brag and make up stories about what they had done and what others had done. I’m fascinated by that kind of weird freedom, but also terrified by how dangerous they were. And with Ill Will it was this idea that we had this thing—Satanic ritual abuse—that everyone so firmly believed in; it was like a religious conviction. And then we stopped believing it, and we pretended like we never did.

I recognize that as a very crazy part of American life. There’s a kind of historical blindness. But there’s also the blindness to the sheer violence of American life. Every week is a new horror. Think about howm any mass murders there have been in 2017. How many do we even recall at this point? I would guess that five years from now, most people won’t know what Sandy Hook was. It’s such a violent country.

GONSHAK

But the way you handle violence in your writing is subtle. Is that a response to how unsubtly violent the world is?

CHAON

It’s a response. It’s a fascination. Maybe it doesn’t matter, but particularly if you grew up in the West, the entire history of colonization and estward expansion is unbelievably violent. It’s in your history and your soil and your blood. It’s difficult to ignore. It is ignored, but it requires a particular sort of blindness to ignore it. I think about the violence and dysfunction I experienced in my own life as a child, and from there I look at the violence and dysfunction in my community, and the violence and dysfunction that are endemic in the society I’m living in. But to start making connection between those takes a while.

GONSHAK

A lot of your characters are victims of trauma. From some, their lives don’t turn out so well. I found myself wondering a lot about the idea of free will. Whether that’s a real thing . . .

CHAON

You know, it’s a big question for me too. And it’s not something I have an answer to. I feel like I got out of a very complicated and violent family situation and made a different life for myself. But I am not entirely sure why, or why I’m different life for myself. But I am not entirely sure why, or why I’m different from some of my cousins and brothers and sisters who did not. It’s like a sore tooth I keep poking. I think everyone wonders about it. Once you start thinking about your own situation vis-à-vis the culture as a whole, you can see places where you have been put behind other people just by virtue of your birth. You start thinking about how that effects who you are and who you became. It’s an important part of considering your place in the world and how you can change it. If everything is fate, then you can’t change anything.

GONSHAK

The thing I like most about fiction is how it makes me feel like ordinary lives have meaning. I found You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing life-affirming that way. You’re so compassionate to the characters. Do you feel like you have the power through fiction to make the world a better place? Or at least to help people?

CHAON

I don’t think fiction changes anything politically or socially. But I know it has transformation power for an individual because it has that transformational power for an individual because it has that transformational power for me. There are writers who, because I read them as a kid, I”m the person I am now. They live inside me the way beloved ancestors live inside me. What I want my books to do is not change the world, but just find their kindred. And comfort my kindred, whoever those people are. If you’re thinking about writing as a political act, I don’t htink it is. Or when it is, it flattens the writing into slogans, which is less interesting to me.

MACCINI

We just ran an interview with Paisley Rekdal in which she said all writing is political. Is that something you’re actively trying not to do? Or is it just something you don’t want to consider?

CHAON

It’s something I’m aware of to some extent. You could say that Ill Will is a kind of feminist examination of the way men deal with, or fail to deal with, trauma and the suffering that occurs over generations and generations. And at the same time it doesn’t say anything but, “Don’t be like these fuckers.”

MACCINI

Does framing it in that way reduce the story to a moral lesson?

CHAON

I don’t think politics is about moral lessons. It’s about trying to understand why the culture has shaped and twisted people in a particular way, and how you can try to straighten that out. But generally I don’t think literature is political. Or it may be political, but it’s not prescriptive. That’s the difference between what she is saying and what I am saying. I don’t think Paisley would have said all literature is prescriptive.

MACCINI

No, in fact she said that poetry is a particularly poor place to be prescriptive or didactic, because the audience is so small and because that’s not really the point. But art often does have a political point of view inherent to the work.

CHAON

I’ve always balked at the books we had to read, the specifically allegorical. At least as they were presented to us as students. George Orwell, Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid’s Tale. They all feel like X=Y sort of books. I shouldn’t . . . I don’t know. If Margaret Atwood reads this, I like almost all of her other books so much more than The Handmaid’s Tale. And I don’t think it was her intention for it to be taught the way it’s often taught.

GONSHAK

How?

CHAON

Where it’s just a way for us to leap from the book to theory. Like, Animal Farm is just a way for us to leap to a discussion about Marxism and Stalinism and Leninism. Which just seems super uninteresting to me. Like fiction is just a way for the simple to think about more important things. I’d like to think fiction goes beyond that.

GONSHAK

Do you read much philosophy or theory?

CHAON

I used to more than I do now. I think the contemporary philosopher I love the most is Hélène Cixous. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, particularly, but all of her work. I feel like a lot of philosophy is cod, but there is such heart in what she’s doing and such urgency. It’s like she’s trying to figure this out, not because she’s just some pipe smoker gazing at the stars, but because it’s a matter of life and death.

GONSHAK

Is writing a matter of life and death for you?

CHAON

I don’t know . . . it seems pretentious to say yes, but then . . . if it’s not “or death,” it’s certainly life. It’s a way to get out of yourself. A way to live from multiple perspectives. And it’s also a way of vivifying the world so you can actually contain it and think about it. That’s one of the things we’re doing when we’re kids playing. We’re making a world. A world we can control and understand. It’s a miniature, but it helps us visualize the larger whole, which we can’t ever possibly visualize.

GONSHAK

You said you’re especially comfortable with ambiguity in a way most people aren’t. The future of humanity seems so uncertain these days. In your books, you don’t always resolve the big mysteries. Has working with uncertainty in fiction made it easier to face uncertainty in life?

CHAON

There’s that sense of an openness of possibilities that I think is scary and unnerving for people. But I also don’t think we have anything without it. If you knew when and how you were going to die, you’d still try to figure out a way around it. If someone told you from the beginning that these were the five important things in your life that were going to happen, you would be somewhat resistant to it. We like the comfort of a safe space and home base, but there’s an importance to the possibility that multiple things could happen. I find comfort in not knowing. I can still saymaybe everything will be all right.