Do you ever reread your books and think, “Oh, my goodness, I completely forgot about this person I created?”
I try not to read my own books because I would rather read somebody else. But my first book came out again this year—a reissue of the 2001 edition. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn’t miss any mistakes, and I didn’t know who had written some of the stories. I am a different person now. It’s weird. I think that if stories are any good, they have to have a life of their own that’s independent of the writer. And characters, too, if they’re well drawn, they’ll live on in other people’s heads.
What can you do with a short story that you can’t do with a novel?
So much. A story, to me, in the best of senses, is like a sucker punch in the gut. [laughs] Put it another way: a novel is like a long relationship, and a short story is a brief one that lingers—it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that’s true in a lot of cases. Some long-term relationships are less powerful than some of our briefer ones—the intensity of those brief ones is what I’m after. I think a short story is kind of like that. That said, I try to write novels that have this sort of intensity as well, which is why I work with short chapters. I’m constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery—how to make a novel that has the sense of immediacy of a short story.
I feel like there are too many words in the world, maybe now more than ever, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words. I like to think you can gain so much power by just shutting up and letting the people do their thing, but also letting the reader work. We don’t want emotion handed to us—that’s not emotion. You have to build it and let the reader’s soul take over. [laughs]
As a professor, what do you tell your students on the first day of class?
Number one: I can’t teach writing. Number two: people have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can understand it, they lose. I encourage students to be awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not to try to see the world for other people.
Do you show drafts of your work to people, or do wait until you’ve finished?
I tend not to show my work to people, even the people closest to me, until it’s been worked in my own head over and over. I rewrite, in some cases seventy to eighty times, before I show it. I write by hand in notebooks and number the drafts. It’s a little nutty but the only way I can work.
Do you write every day? Do you get writer’s block?
I write when I have something to say and not when I don’t. I think writers should wait for something to say. [laughs]
This interview is reprinted with the permission of Interview magazine, where it first appeared in slightly different form.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
Although some of this collection’s stories are set in places Peter Orner has called up in previous works—Fall River, Massachusetts, and the suburbs of Chicago—others range from North Carolina, Nebraska, and Wyoming, to Mexico City, the Czech Republic, Moscow, and elsewhere. Did you find yourself relating more to the characters in the familiar places, or did you find that elements in the more far-flung places were still universal?
Some of the women in these stories stay fixed in place, constricted by the social mores of their era, while their men are fantasists, dreamers, hamstrung by their disappointments. How does this difference create conflict within the couples? Have times changed sufficiently to address this disparity in expectations, or do couples still face such challenges today?
“Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove” speaks directly to the power of stories in people’s lives. One reviewer wrote, “We’ve experienced the story as memory, as history, as projection, as defense, as regret.” Is there a story about your own life that you tell often? How has it changed over the years? How close to the truth do you think your version comes?
In Orner’s stories daily life often brims with interest and mystery. “Every day,” he has said, “I watch people—on the bus, on the street, at the post office. The need to see the world through other people fuels my work.” Is your curiosity about the lives of strangers as strong? Do you think social media has enhanced or diminished your ability to observe others?
In the foreword to a recent reissue of Orner’s first collection, Esther Stories, Marilynne Robinson writes that he focuses on events that “send their repercussions across time so that they become events again and again.” In other words, recalling the past can be dramatic, as is living in the present. Do you agree, or do you think that remembrance is a passive experience?
The human condition involves enormous personal losses—of family, love, and aspirations—all of which are frequently addressed in this collection. “How is it possible that we aren’t in a permanent state of mourning?” (here) asks Walt Kaplan in the title story. Did you find this aspect of Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge dispiriting, or did you find the author’s preoccupation with past and future loss to be a way of honoring his characters’ life stories?
Ann Beattie wrote of “At the Fairmont” that “Peter Orner’s story is one of regret tinged with exhilaration.” In what ways do humor, absurdity, and mischievousness leaven even serious moral transgressions in some of Orner’s stories? And in your own life?
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
Survivors Foley’s Pond
Occidental Hotel
Spokane
The Poet
Herb and Rosalie Swanson at the Cocoanut Grove
My old boss E.J. once told me he was famous for goofy hats
At the Kitchen Table
Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago, 1875
Railroad Men’s Home
Plaza Revolución, Mexico City, 6 a.m.
Horace and Josephine
I was six, maybe seven months old
Pampkin’s Lament
Lincoln
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Part II
The Normal Nathan Leopold Writes to Mr. Felix Kleczka of 5383 S. Blackstone
At the end of our street was a commune in a log mansion
Detamble
Dyke Bridge
The Mayor’s Dream
Fourteen-Year-Olds, Indiana Dunes, Late Afternoon
Denny Coughlin: In Memory
The Divorce
1979
The Vac-Haul
Part III
At the Fairmont
Roman Morning
Eisendrath
Woman in a Dubrovnik Café
Reverend Hrncirik Receives an Airmail Package
Call these the meditations of an overweight junior lifeguard
Waukegan Story
Lubyanka Prison, Moscow, 1940
February 26, 1995
Late Dusk, Joslin, Illinois
Part IV
Country of Us Waldheim
Renters
On the 14
Longfellow
Paddy Bauler in a Quiet Moment
Geraldo, 1986
Harold Washington Walks at Midnight
From the Collected Stories of Edmund Jerry (E. J.) Hahn, Vol. IV
The Gate
A couple of years before I was born
My mother stands by the window
It may have been in The Wapshot Chronicle
The Moors of Chicago
Belief, 1999
Irv Pincus used to steal lamps from Kaplan’s Furniture
Shhhhhh, Arthur’s Studying
Acknowledgments
Praise for Peter Orner’s Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with Peter Orner
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Peter Orner
Reading group guide copyright © 2014 by Peter Orner and Little, Brown and Company
Cover design by Kapo Ng. Cover photographs: Roger Wright / Getty Images.
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: August 2013
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ISBN 978-0-316-22463-5
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