Transcript
Unpublishables: This is Unpublishables, episode three. And we've been on a little bit of a hiatus, but I'm um very pleased to be able to speak today with Gary L. Lutz, who is, I think, a writer, a contemporary writer that's sort of uncommonly distinct and original, and also whose work is kind of unified in a certain way um and has a kind of consistency to its themes and to its style as well that is is not is not that common necessarily.
Unpublishables: And so I think um the first thing, thank you for coming on, Gariel.
garielle lutz: thanks for having me.
Unpublishables: Yeah, the first thing I sort of wanted to talk to you about was, ah you know, how did you come upon, you know, thematically, you've sort of chosen, i think, I've just recently gone through your collected works from Tyrant.
Unpublishables: And um thematically, it feels like you've taken on the very sort of difficult task of of focusing in on maybe the most unglamorous stratum of society, because obviously the rich and famous have a certain kind of glamor and the big city kind of people, but so does the sort of abject or the outcast, like someone like maybe Dennis Johnson works with. But you have picked that this group that is sort of
Unpublishables: existing in a kind of, ah as you put it, secondary cities, tertiary cities, um and they are characters that you know are working jobs that they themselves don't find particularly meaningful, um and they're in relationships that often are often not particularly meaningful in an obvious sense to them um and there's like a pulse of like sex sort of driving a lot of of uh of the stories like almost on a on a biological level and an instinct and not so much as a i find this very meaningful um so i i'm wondering how you came to
Unpublishables: these set of themes and this sort of subject matter to to to take on the sort of the faceless, that sort of that that type of stratum in your writing? And was that there, did you start there or were there things before stories in the worst way that were, you know, on other matters?
garielle lutz: Oh, well, when I started writing fiction, I am and was in a program. It wasn't an MFA program. It was just a master's degree with a concentration in creative writing.
garielle lutz: I am um was mostly writing imitative things at that point in my life. I had initially been interested in writing poetry, and I entered that writing program with the intent of ah writing poetry.
garielle lutz: But there wasn't any poetry course offered the first term that I was there. So I mostly just stumbled into the fiction workshop. The poetry that I'd been trying to write and which I gave up writing, I think had two major influences.
garielle lutz: Number one, Richard Braudigan, whom I was introduced to in the high school by a friend. So that was one extreme of the very personal short poem.
garielle lutz: at the At the opposite extreme was Hart Crane. And I realized that Hart Crane was not an especially useful influence. In fact, I don't feel that I've ever understood much of anything that Art Crane has written. In in fact, I read a a new critical biography of him a few years ago, and I was i was struck by the the interpretations that were so far afield from anything I was getting out of the poems, because it does seem as if his work is strenuously cryptic.
garielle lutz: And so I think at that point in my life, I did not want to directly reveal myself. So I thought Crane, Hart Crane was a ah good model in in that sense, because it was also very verbally complicated, very complex.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: So I would read and reread and reread a lot of those poems and just be completely clueless. I know that he was heavily influenced by by Shakespeare and I think mar Marlowe as well. So I think the linguistic complications
garielle lutz: appealed to me as ah kind of camouflage. At the opposite extreme, I was attracted by Brodigan's casual approach to poetry. But the thing is,
garielle lutz: um I would send my work out to really marginal magazines and i would I would get responses like, kindly stop writing like this. And that was ultimately um helpful, I believe, because I realized that this this writing was not communicating at all, except to me, because I was essentially hiding myself in what I was writing. So when I ended up in that fiction workshop,
garielle lutz: in graduate school in that non-MFA program, I thought I'd better try to learn how to be clear and you know lucid and imitative.
garielle lutz: So I guess at that point, since the course was emphasizing the rudiments of fiction writing, you know characterization, a character has to change over the course of the story and oh the setting and the dialogue.
garielle lutz: I was writing things that were just so slavishly imitated that I felt that I wasn't any kind of presence myself in the stories. So after I left graduate school, I essentially gave up writing fiction.
garielle lutz: Although I kept writing long letters and and writing a kind of journal to my you know journal entries to myself, but I thought there's no way I can ever write fiction. I don't have what it takes. I don't think in terms of plot.
garielle lutz: not only in fiction, but even in life. I don't see a lot of continuity or development or progression or causal analysis relations. So, as I said, I gave up writing fiction for about 10 years.
garielle lutz: And then I eventually just stumbled upon some books that appealed to me because they were they were not plot-oriented and instead were language-oriented and particularly sentence-oriented. And that was also when I discovered Gordon Lish because he was publishing a literary quarterly called The Quarterly.
garielle lutz: And I would eventually find remandered editions of the quarterly for like two bucks or three dollars. So I started picking them up and reading them and I thought, I sort of feel at home in a way in in what he was publishing because the writers he was publishing were pretty much rejecting conventional approaches to fiction writing and they were and they were emphasizing the individual sentence.
garielle lutz: The same thing happened with with the books I mentioned that I stumbled upon. i didn't know at the time that they were all edited by Gordon Lish but they all shared this this sculptural quality to the writing. And these were all rather slim books. I mean, some of these barely reached the 100 page limit.
garielle lutz: So I thought, I just felt as if maybe this is the space that I can enter. Yeah.
Unpublishables: um That makes sense, but i'm I want to discuss style for sure. because they but
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: your theme, your subject matter is not sort of scattered across a million different topics. You know, there's a, there's sort of a ah ah certain type of person and type of lifestyle that seems to be being discussed in the same, you know what I mean?
Unpublishables: Like it's, there are writers who write book Nabokov on all sorts of topics and, you know, it, it you know, there's a lot of variation here.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: It's like, you have really, In a way, I think of writers like um Beckett or Kafka. there there's ah ah There's a range of subject matter that you seem very obsessed by or very interested by. And I'm sort of wondering how you came to sort of train your stylistic abilities on that particular matter rather than than something else, something a historical novel, a historical fiction, short fiction or whatever. You know what i mean?
garielle lutz: Yeah, I realize that I of forgot to answer that part of your question.
Unpublishables: No, that's OK.
garielle lutz: And I think that a lot of it, the emotions come directly out of my own experience because I've always felt like a very marginalized person, a peripheralized person. I grew up in a yeah ah working class household and I never felt comfortable with life in general.
garielle lutz: I never felt that I fit in, that I was freakishly incompatible with the way life is supposed to be lived. so i was So I was writing directly, in some ways, again, emotionally, I was writing directly out of my experience.
garielle lutz: And even with them my experiences with the working world, I just never fit in at all. i And I was drawn toward essentially menial employment.
Unpublishables: Okay.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: ah For example, my career consisted of teaching English composition, mostly freshman courses. And
Unpublishables: And teachers do recur in in your fiction as as primary narrators. So yeah, that makes sense.
garielle lutz: And I think that teaching composition is probably the least desirable aspect of teaching English. And welcome that. I welcome the marginality of it because
Unpublishables: Right.
garielle lutz: because I felt that is where I belonged. at I've always considered myself like at a low level in the universe. And i guess...
Unpublishables: I mean, but I think that's one of the the tensions in your work that are is interesting is that on the one hand, the subject matter is very sort of, you know, gritty and ah sort of fundamentally drab, like a drab type of existence, you know, um in this kind of somebody living and feeling excluded from, I don't know, the bigger streams of sight. But what's funny is, and they're working jobs that aren't particularly glamorous or interesting and in the normal way, but the the the complexity of the narrator's way of of of articulating all this
Unpublishables: is almost like that sort of pulls against the realism because I don't think there are a ton of people who could put things, could could find so much in the in in the drabness and and that. but i've I've lived in some smaller cities too and I'm thinking, when I think of those sorts of lifestyles, oftentimes the, the people themselves are not capable of, of this type of absolutely pristine kind of articulation and a poetic and articulation. So I think it's on a really level, putting your life aside and your specifics, it's, it's sort of gritty, but then it's also elevated by the, the poetics of it.
Unpublishables: Do you know what I mean? Like it,
garielle lutz: Yeah, I think that, and you're absolutely right. I mean, my life has always been drab. And I think I was simply trying to express exactly how I feel about the drabness and how I cope with it ah through you know repetition and oddity of vocabulary, that sort of thing.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
Unpublishables: yeah
garielle lutz: um yeah I've occasionally in my life encountered people who had completely different backgrounds, who grew up in a world of elegance and elitism. And I realized in those encounters that i I just don't belong in that world. I could never fit in that world.
garielle lutz: So I guess my work, my writing was just taking me further and further into my head and how I just deal with the reality of my life. i mean
Unpublishables: It's just such an interesting combination that on the wall you know we we feel we hear a ah lot of narratives about this kind of sort of faceless kind of existence that sort of has a kind of emptiness or vacuum in it. But a lot of those narratives, even today, we get a lot of autofiction and other things where the writing itself is also very...
Unpublishables: itself kind of drab and everyday and not very careful and kind of, whereas here you get this lovely contrast between a ah subject matter that is low as it were, and ah but an articulation that is like, when you read, if you don't know your biography, it's like,
Unpublishables: this It's like very implausible that somebody would would be thinking these thoughts, but of course you in particular do have these thoughts. But I think ah a reader just coming to the text would be like, this isn't this isn't the normal realism of you know of of a more down style, a more casual style. actually the absolute opposite. It's sort of a you know highly poetic style applied to a subject matter of very everydayness.
Unpublishables: That's what i'm so I see in it anyways.
garielle lutz: Yeah, and in fact, um I remember one time after a reading, one of the other writers came up to him and said, don't you live in the Hamptons? And I do not live, I've never been to the Hamptons.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: And I was struck by that. So it's kind of similar to what you're saying, that because what i've what I've discovered pretty frequently in the academic world is that often middle class and upper middle class writers will be writing about the working class.
garielle lutz: And maybe as they're doing that, they're not truly entering into what might be going through the mind of a person who is living that marginalized drab existence at the lower end of the spectrum, the socioeconomic spectrum.
Unpublishables: yes
Unpublishables: yes
garielle lutz: And so they might actually be condescending to via the the characters.
Unpublishables: Interesting.
garielle lutz: But one thing I've discovered just didn't, because I ride buses a lot, um I often hear marginalized people who might be living this barely above the poverty level expressing themselves in ways that are extremely articulate.
garielle lutz: In fact, last last month when I was on public transportation, it was a light rail train.
Unpublishables: interesting
garielle lutz: ah A man sat down next to me in a kind of threatening way or a way that I experienced as threatening. And he launched into a rant.
garielle lutz: Now, the rant was incoherent, but the language was polysyllabic. There were so many Latinate words in it. And it just made me realize, well, it just confirmed my sense that a person's social status or socioeconomic status are not necessarily aligned in alignment with their theirre vocabulary or their syntactic command.
Unpublishables: Yes.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: And at the at the opposite extreme, a lot of people, some people in the middle class don't have a sophisticated approach to language Yeah,
Unpublishables: That's absolutely true, yeah.
garielle lutz: yeah and
Unpublishables: but One thing I i think is is interesting anyway about your technique is that you know there's there's a general sort of humanistic desire. you you know I think fiction in particular has always sort of spoken to to sort of dignifying what was in previous eras ah ah considered sort of unworthy of attention, the working class, the the struggling people, that sort of thing. But oftentimes it's done by sort of sentimentalizing or trying to get our sympathy and and and feel like i I connect with this person, this is like me, or also, oh, his life is much more interesting than I would have thought if only i had paid attention. But I think in your case, this is where you remind me a little of somebody like Beckett,
Unpublishables: What's interesting is how you you you you make the drabness of the life very complex and nuanced. And it's interesting in its desolation, not because it's, oh, if only I knew these people better, I'd i'd be having a good time. This sounds like a good, it's like, wow, this is kind of horrific.
Unpublishables: And then on top of that, there's a kind of shadow sense, I feel in reading, that maybe people who are are living in this higher stratum's that if they thought about their own life a little more carefully, it's it's maybe not, it's more empty than they would have thought. So I do feel there's a sort of aesthetics of bareness or emptiness to two human struggle that you sort of articulate without ah ah romanticizing or you know trying to make working class life cool. You know what I mean? like where you Whereas many writers are are actually on on that, trying to be like, this is so interesting. this is You're almost showing a kind of inverse of that, I feel like.
Unpublishables: And that's that's it's hard to do, to to to dignify without creating false sympathy or or false celebration. you know You don't really celebrate these characters is what I mean. They don't look super happy.
Unpublishables: But they're very, very bright. That's the difference. And just as you say, the guy you might was ranting. he's He's not happy, apparently. But nonetheless, he he has a complex understanding of his unhappiness.
Unpublishables: Does that make sense? or
garielle lutz: Oh yeah, i um yeah, and when I depict miserable life in in my stories,
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: of yeah, I would never want to romanticize it or sentimentalize it because it's not romantic.
Unpublishables: Right.
garielle lutz: it's It is miserable.
Unpublishables: okay
garielle lutz: it's and But nevertheless, there were ways that people can find to cope with that without compromising themselves in such that they're not going to be led into ridiculously fatuous self-affirmations of up
Unpublishables: And that miserableness has complexity that we can gloss over if we don't. It's like you're paying attention to misery in a very fine grained way. So the work is interesting, not because it celebrates this this thing, but just like Beckett or Kafka, it's interesting because it it makes it brings nuance to misery or to emptiness in some way.
garielle lutz: yeah In fact, I ran across a term a couple years ago called depressive realism. And I don't think I really understood it, but essentially it seemed to say that people who are very depressed often have an extremely realistic view of the world, not ah not a distorted view, as some people claim, but instead they see life as it is.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: And i feel as if that's what I was trying to do in my stories. I mean, i I didn't want to deny how difficult so many moments of life can be if one simply doesn't fit in where everybody else either fits in or is attempting to fit in.
garielle lutz: And my characters, my narrators, have given up on trying to fit in.
Unpublishables: Can I ask you about the the question of style and its relationship to subject matter and theme? Because frequently you're a writer who is referred to as the consummate stylist.
Unpublishables: And in some ways, i I think that that does a disservice to what's unique about your work. Because that sort of, sit like, we don't we what we don't say about Proust, oh, he's the he's a consummate stylist. We just think he has a lot of fascinating things to to say about life that he he does or he uses language to unearth by by by seeing things in different ways. So I often think of your work, it never has, how shall I put it? a Your style never has a ornamental or decorative feel. like there are You have imitators who,
Unpublishables: the writing appears kind of florid, like it's not actually grounded in an interesting or new thought about life. It's ah just a reframing of a familiar thought in a like complex way. or you know what i do you know what I mean? like I never have that sense that you're there's anything gratuitous about your style. It's like, no, you would have to put it this way to express these feelings, thoughts, perceptions about ah human life.
Unpublishables: So I wonder how you see the relationship between style and subject matter, et etc.
garielle lutz: Yet,
garielle lutz: well, I have noticed that occasionally people refer to me as a stylist and I think that might be one way of not to,
Unpublishables: I mean, it's absolutely true. You have a great style, just like Proust does. It's just, it seems like, well, yeah, like if there's a lot else going on here. The style is is grounded in reality, in in an exploration of life.
Unpublishables: I put it that way. Yeah.
garielle lutz: Yeah. um
Unpublishables: and not there for its own sake in the way say Nabokov, when he's not on his game, sometimes can it's like it's like in heavy metal music, a guitarist who's just shredding and like just delighting in like the aesthetics alone. Yours always seems like, no, he the it's not that the language is surprising and the thoughts ordinary, the language recapitulates the surprise about reality, ah a thought or a idea.
Unpublishables: Sorry, I'm not sure if that's,
garielle lutz: Oh, no, I think it's possible that a person who would refer to me as a stylist might be wanting to ignore the content of what's going on because, yeah, typically when I think of, you know, when somebody say when somebody says, oh, so-and-so has a great style, the style can essentially be
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: the writer's way to compensate for a deficiency in emotional content or depth of understanding of the world. Because yeah, I, I occasionally run, create occasionally start reading things that are stylistically impressive, but the style does seem to be a substitute or trying to camouflage the paucity of, um,
garielle lutz: of emotional understanding or, yeah.
Unpublishables: Right. I think that's a remarkable feature of your writing because it's so easy to go wrong that way with the kinds of inversions or the way you will verb nouns or or turn you know certain nouns into verbs, different phrasal things, or what you do with cliché.
Unpublishables: You have a remarkable way of finding a ah new reading of a cliched phrase and suddenly, oh, that's that's so like a hidden meaning within a phrase that has died for us in some way and become sort of stale. So it's it's remarkable. I think of your work, I think this is the connection to poetry.
Unpublishables: Your work is very philosophical. you know It has a lot of conceptual and semantic surprise. So the like the syntactic approach interest, which is very great. And obviously, people that's what people celebrate you so much for the syntactic interest and diction and your absolute mastery of those things. That's not not in question.
Unpublishables: I just think it's like that's true, but it's all in service of understanding and feeling and these other things. And and that's why it reads so. It never reads as, as um you know, cleaved off from the world. It's just like, how else would you want me to put it?
Unpublishables: This thought or this feeling or that, you know what i mean?
garielle lutz: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean because sometimes I've been criticized for resorting to wordplay and I actually don't think there's any word.
Unpublishables: you know i
Unpublishables: and I really don't think that's true of you. Yeah, go ahead.
garielle lutz: Yeah, because, well, for example, in contemporary
garielle lutz: journalism, for instance, you'll often see, well, I haven't read Time Magazine in a long time, but, um, you know, they would emphasize what they called copy brightening, where you you take just a familiar thought or whatever, but you present it in such a way that's clever and, you know, new, or they might be using a cliche or subverting it a little bit.
garielle lutz: But I never really cared for that. I mean, i when I was younger, I sort of liked that. I could see what they were doing, but I hope that that's not what I'm doing because, i mean, i would I would feel as if I failed if somebody thought I was just using wordplay as a...
Unpublishables: Right. that that I mean, one of the things about your writing that I think is is fascinating is, to me, it seems the purest expression of what the term prose poetry ought ought to mean, in a way, rather than how it's actually used, because oftentimes a lot of things that are called prose poetry or this type of thing are are really quite fragmented. They seem sort of incomplete. It's not grammatically actually sentences. It's like a more stream of consciousness type of thing. Whereas your writing has an absolute claim to being prose in the in the most...
Unpublishables: traditional sense that that you can see the grammar and the structure as you read it. It's it's it's so precise and meticulous, as opposed to sort of loosey-goosey and impressionistic, which is often stuff that's called prose poetry. But on the other hand, it has absolute claim to being poetry because of the the degree of I don't know, the the semantic and affective surprise of your work. You have to read it at the pace of poetry, even to fathom what might be meant. This is perfectly grammatical, but words are being used in such a way to extract, as it were, a new meaning out of life, out of society, out of out of people, I think. what How do you see your work in terms of of of those kinds of terms, prose, poetry, or you know what you think of the state of flash fiction, which is often sort of lumped in?
garielle lutz: Yeah, those terms, flash fiction, microfiction, prose poetry, they have always baffled me.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: And at at a certain point, I just stopped even trying to understand them ah because occasionally I'm referred to as ah a writer of flash fiction. And i don't think I think all I am is a writer of who writes things of various length.
garielle lutz: And um I mean, it's that's all all there is because you were mentioning prose poetry. I guess I just haven't read the good stuff because um I find almost paradoxically ah paradoxically enough
garielle lutz: that some of the best writing that I consider poetry actually is fiction. It's in novels or short stories.
Unpublishables: Right.
garielle lutz: Whereas a lot of poetry that I see is increasingly narrative in aim and the language is kind of flat. I once read a definition
garielle lutz: of poetry in a book that was aimed at college freshmen who were predisposed to probably not want to read poetry. It said something like poetry is nothing more than concentrated language.
garielle lutz: And I think that's a a good definition. And what I see in a lot of contemporary poetry is not concentrated language, but instead slack language and over overly familiar language.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: So, as a reader, I am drawn toward concentrated expression.
Unpublishables: But that semantic kind of density is what, I mean, your work has at at in every way where i frequently it's such an interesting field. But it's also, it's strictly prose. It's not, you know, sort of loosey-goosey stream of consciousness, just impressions. it's tightly structured too. So it's it it has a but strange phenomenon where you know you're reading prose. you should You should be able to read it faster than this because it's not poetry on its surface because it's very much grammatically structured and all that. But then you actually end up reading it at the pace of poetry because as you say, maybe the correct definition of poetry isn't syntactic.
Unpublishables: It's really about, how did you put a concentrated use of language, and and yours always embodies that.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: So i I associate your work more closely with, as I say, it's it's the height of prose and the height of poetry. it's a I mean, I think that's what makes it so special. you You pay equal respect to both and not one or the other.
Unpublishables: OK.
garielle lutz: Well, I think I've always been a slow reader, just an extremely slow reader, and it's really been a problem because I i read so slowly.
Unpublishables: thank you
garielle lutz: But I guess I wanted to write something that could be effectively enjoyed by a slow reader because you really do have to to slow down, I think.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: Yes. And how would you, I mean one of the things about your work, I guess you sort of answered this, that your your first book seems you know more formed or more, all the seeds seem there of your your later work, like they tease out the themes and the style and those things. I guess it's because your first book came later in your life after certain aborted attempts at writing and and and figuring, finding your way. So that makes sense. I'm curious how you see, because it's definitely there, that how you understand the evolution of your writing but between, say, story collections like that are in the collected works or
Unpublishables: Buhlman- Worsted because it's it's more subtle than than in a certain other writer who just like maybe switches topics or changes up in ah in a more broad way like oh this is David Buhlman- About something completely different it's like no it's a it's a further exploration of that same material, and I wonder how how how you think, for instance, you some of the later.
Unpublishables: collections have stories of a greater length, for instance, than, you know, um My Bloodbaths, for instance, is a quite extended piece. And I'm just curious how you how you see your own evolution over 30 years now of of publishing, right?
garielle lutz: I think primarily it's a matter of aging. So my narrator's preoccupations are increasingly the preoccupations of an older person. And I did
Unpublishables: Okay.
garielle lutz: and i did
garielle lutz: try to write longer, longer pieces. So as you mentioned, my bloodbaths and also the title story in my Worsted book were attempts to approach the novella, but I could never, I don't think I could ever write anything longer than that.
garielle lutz: But I was trying to write pieces
Unpublishables: ah yeah But but and as an aside, but why do you think that is? What is it about your work? when when you When you go longer, do you feel maybe that intensity of language is getting diluted or?
garielle lutz: But that was a big fear, a really, really big fear.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: And also that I would simply run out of words that I wouldn't know what to say, that I've exploited what whatever limitations of vocabulary I have. But I think also to some degree, I felt a little pressure, i don't know where it was coming from, to write something longer.
garielle lutz: ah Because I've noticed that some people, when they talk about my writing, they'll say, well, the stories are never longer than two pages, which is not true. I mean, even in my first book, there were some one page stories, but there were longer stories.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: So I thought that possibly i was being limited by the length that I was confining myself to, but I just,
garielle lutz: at this point in my life, I don't feel self-conscious about it. I mean, I i write the way I can write. That's that's about it. i
Unpublishables: um but You know, one thing about your work, if some of the criticisms of, say, flash fiction is that it it seems like, um how to put this, it seems like a sketch.
garielle lutz: Oh, yeah.
Unpublishables: it seems It seems like preparatory or somebody, in a way, just working out some thoughts and riffing, and it doesn't have a sense of completeness or unity.
Unpublishables: One of the, again, the remarkable things about your, even the very short ones, is they always feel like a thing. You know, they don't just feel like something dashed off or or or ah sort of dropped halfway through, they have a sense of completeness that the longer works of other writers would have. So i i i can see why also you would say maybe I don't need, just like poetry traditionally is not super, super long. We don't think the Wasteland is incomplete because it's not, you know, like 300 pages or length of whatever, um Paradise Lost or something. You know what mean? Like,
Unpublishables: you So I think that's another thing that distinguishes you from some of those those other writers in a flash fiction kind of crowd where it is seeming more off the cuff and and a little bit more almost like a building up to and maybe a novel in the future.
Unpublishables: But they're not there yet or they're not maximizing what they are. They're just playing around or experimenting a little bit. Yours don't feel like that type of experiment. They feel like, no, he here's a here's a here's a complete thing.
Unpublishables: It just happens to occur in a page and a half, you know even when you write very short.
garielle lutz: yeah I think that, again, I haven't read a lot of flash fiction, but often my response when I read examples of that genre is that the pieces seem like exercises.
garielle lutz: And you said they don't seem like finished, completed works.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: And sometimes it also seems, and and I guess this is true, that they were written in response to a prompt. And um A couple of times people have asked me to write about something and I i couldn't. I just told them, i it has to emerge from within me. I can't i can't have something imposed upon me. i' I'm just not capable of that.
garielle lutz: And I think that, and I haven't explored this a lot because I'm really not that much interested in in it, but I think that a lot of flash fiction might be written in response to a prompt.
garielle lutz: um
Unpublishables: Right?
garielle lutz: and
Unpublishables: It's actually like MFA fodder in a way, ah a training school for, ah you know, working towards the novel that everybody needs. But you're one of the cases where, no, no, no, you, like somebody like Kafka, though he has a couple of novels, that's not really his great work. He also feels like he's overextended when he writes too long and seems like at his best,
Unpublishables: in that more compressed way. So I think you're really very separate from that trend. it Could you, I mean, tell me what you, but here's the caveat, but what, I mean, and is it, there must be a tongue in cheek element that you would most recently publish a ah thousand page memoir. i wonder how how you think of that book in relation to your other work and what inspired it and,
Unpublishables: And how do you sit it how do you think it sits in relation to the themes of that are under a fictional heading versus ones that are more openly or directly autobiographical?
garielle lutz: well Well, I was originally going to self-publish worst of backwardness because Well, I felt that the length of the work worked in my favor because I thought nobody's ever going to read this whole thing.
garielle lutz: So i can I can really express my life, express myself, because nobody's going to see it.
Unpublishables: yeah
garielle lutz: I mean, at one point in that book, there's a paragraph that goes on for like 40 pages or more. And I figure that's going to discourage people from from reading more than than a page of it or whatever. And I mean, that book really came into existence. or came the reason that book exists is that during the pandemic, when I was sheltering in place, as they say, ah I wanted to make use of boxes full of papers that otherwise would eventually be discarded.
garielle lutz: And I realized that so many of those pages and printouts, et cetera, um involved descriptions of my daily life. so And also at that point, um a friend with with whom I'd had a falling out decades ago got back in touch with me.
garielle lutz: And i had often earlier in my life sent him really, really long letters. So he said, Would you like to see all these letters? So he sent me this huge box. I mean, one letter was like 30 pages long, single space typed.
garielle lutz: And I wanted to extract things from those letters as a record of my life because... I've noticed that some people who read my fiction think that it's autobiographical.
garielle lutz: I depict things in there that actually happened to other people. They told me these experiences of theirs. But what I did, I threw my i threw my own emotional coloration over those those experiences.
garielle lutz: um So I wanted there to be some kind of record of what my life actually was like. If if anybody ever wanted to read it, So I was just going through all those pages. And again, it was during the pandemic and I would just type stuff up that I thought was usable. It might be funny or just weird in some way.
garielle lutz: So that's how that book came into existence.
Unpublishables: Okay. That's interesting. I mean, you mentioned that you were thinking of self-publishing it, and I know that, I believe your first book, ah Stories in the Worst World, was published by Knopf, is that right?
garielle lutz: Yeah, yeah.
Unpublishables: And so, it's interesting, like, so you're such a revered writer, frankly. Yet you've you've had to sort of live the the difficult life of indie publishing, you know, since that point. I believe that's correct.
Unpublishables: That most of your books have been with smaller presses. And I wonder what that, just what it's been like to to do that for 30 years and to face that, you know, there's so many places that won't, you know,
Unpublishables: even though the ah sort of the inner coterie of writers has great belief in you, that nonetheless, larger presses won't pick these books up. And this is not just something from 2020 or something, a recent phenomenon, even in the 2000s and 2010s, that struggle to to have it accepted in a more mainstream way. I mean, how has that what's that been like, that sort of journey?
garielle lutz: Well, um my first book when it was published was a disaster in terms of reception.
Unpublishables: All right.
garielle lutz: It got very few reviews and some of the reviews were really extremely uncomplimentary to put it mildly. I mean, there was one alternative newspaper in which the review included the sentence even people who are congenitally cheerful will will want to blow their brains out after reading this book.
garielle lutz: ah So at that point I realized that there's no way that my writing will ever enter the mainstream of any sort. The weird thing is, is that when I collected stories book, um I came close to having that published by one of the big five.
Unpublishables: OK. Yeah.
garielle lutz: But, and the reason, and yeah at first I was overjoyed by that prospect, but the the person who would have been the editor of the book said, first of all, I'm not going to edit this, or I don't think I can edit this. And I would have liked being edited, especially with that uncollected stuff, or you like my blood baths, et cetera.
garielle lutz: But the thing that bothered me was that the the person who was going to be the editor said, look, once this comes out,
garielle lutz: Those small presses that keep your work in print, they can't do that anymore. they ah They can sell the copies that they still have, but we can't have them reprinting this.
garielle lutz: And I was thinking, well, these small independent presses are like mom and pop operations they on a shoestring budget.
Unpublishables: Yes. yes
garielle lutz: So why did this major is this major publish why is this major publisher worried? about the minimal sales from other publishers. So I had to wrestle with that.
garielle lutz: And fortunately, a friend of mine said, you you cannot do this. If you do this, you're a complete sellout and you're you're saying to hell with all the people who supported you.
garielle lutz: So I didn't go with it. i
Unpublishables: Right?
garielle lutz: And Gian Carlo was very interested in publishing.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: so And he was assuring me that um those other publishers can keep their books, they can keep your books in print. So yeah, i yeah i went I went with him.
Unpublishables: Oh, that's interesting. Okay.
garielle lutz: So it was kind of a discouraging experience because in fact, the um the guy who would have been the editor, i don't think he was aware of it, but he he would often make some pretty insulting things.
garielle lutz: He said, well, make sure you don't kill somebody before this book comes out. And I'm thinking, where is that coming from?
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: What what in the world? i So I was really offended by that. and
Unpublishables: but What do you think he meant by that?
garielle lutz: I don't know, but it was really insulting. I mean, it was just flat out insulting.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: And I no longer,
Unpublishables: have Have you found it that I guess i'm I'm asking sort of a personal question of just like, have has it been a ah real frustration that though you're obviously so good at this thing of writing fiction, that the the world hasn't been receptive in in the way that it's you know one might have hoped the literary world would have been. i mean, these this is a topic that comes up all the time that the really good work is often pushed to the side, whereas these sort of digestible, palatable, more positive oftentimes or works sort of surface. Has it been a frustration or have you learned to sort of, hey, that's what it is to be a serious artist sometimes?
garielle lutz: Well, I think initially when my first book came out, I was i didn't expect the um that there would be so few reviews and that many of them would be so ne so negative.
Unpublishables: Right. Right.
garielle lutz: So at that point I realized there's no point in my pursuing trying to be in that world. And I don't really consider myself part of the literary world at all. I mean, I don't have an MFA.
garielle lutz: and was teaching composition and
garielle lutz: I mean, even with my worsted book, i I just sent that to the slush pile of a small press. And i just felt relieved that it was being published. so In fact, after my first book, I feel lucky that anything of mine has been published because,
garielle lutz: and don't know, occasionally people will email me out of the blue or they'll send me a direct message on them X. And they'll say things like,
garielle lutz: My professor says you're the worst possible influence that I could possibly have as a writer. And another person once told me after I'd gone to give a reading at an elite liberal arts college, that in the workshop in which my work had been discussed, people got into a fist fight over it because some people hated it or or on the verge of his fight.
garielle lutz: I don't know if it was actual fist but so, I mean, a lot of the comments that I get about my writing are extremely negative.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: So I just feel like,
Unpublishables: Do you think there is a kind of there might be potentially a kind of complement in that? Because there are certain writers, when you're exposed to, especially ones that have ah very much a signature kind of style,
Unpublishables: that can become too much of an influence. I mean, frankly, though I will not get ah go into names, I think there are people who have been influenced by you in in a way that Maybe they're just not up to the job in the same way, but they're like the bad version of Gary L. Lutz. Is it possible that sometimes that might be meant by your would be a bad influence? Because sometimes a really great writer is is not a great influence because he as as it exercises too much control maybe over the ones that his disciples or the ones that follow.
garielle lutz: Yeah, i can I can see that. And i think, I guess I haven't encountered much fiction that has been influenced me by me, but I think in ah in a few cases that I've seen, they were emulating surface qualities.
garielle lutz: And um in a way, yeah.
Unpublishables: And that's what I mean, that's the bad influence. like that They're taking the wrong lessons from you about ah you know sort of unusual syntax and stuff rather than looking more deeply into what you offer.
garielle lutz: yeah
Unpublishables: I think a writer like Nabokov is a horrible influence on most writers because they end up just sort of prettying up their prose and not really expressing anything fresh or new about life or about feeling or any of these things.
Unpublishables: but on a surface level, they've picked up something. And for a lot of beginning writing often sounds to me like bad Nabokov. That's one writer.
garielle lutz: Oh.
Unpublishables: It's just like you just have a ton of adjectives and adverbs and you think this is what this is about rather than something deeper. Whereas the original, Nabokov himself, of course, had greater control and greater depth, particularly when it came to certain subject matters about literature, like a pale flyer a pale flyer or Nin or some of these books.
Unpublishables: But his disciples or the people who get influenced sometimes seem to go off the rails because they get obsessed by the surface features.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: Yeah. I mean, i can think I can think of two people who were influenced by me and that then went on to surpass me, which made me very, very happy that they've achieved so much.
garielle lutz: But um
Unpublishables: Well, I mean, make maybe you could tell me a little bit, because this is a maybe a good segue to the work you have done as an editor, for instance, at Hobart, and i think also Calamari archive, right?
garielle lutz: I don't know.
Unpublishables: what what What has that been like? And working with writers, seeing some, i presumably some that have in in good ways been influenced to you. for For instance, by ah a friend of mine, ah Greg Gerke, he's a writer who, when I talk to him, he's like, yeah, this has been sort of formative for me to to understand. So what has it been like editing at at Hobart and and and how does that relate to maybe your own writing practice or does it not? or what
garielle lutz: Yeah, I think my
Unpublishables: oh ah One thing I would say is that because you're so meticulous in your own writing, I think it's especially admirable that you could ah function as an editor with people who maybe are are not up to that that quite the compression of of language and meaning in the way that that you know you have a a special gift for.
garielle lutz: I guess my e
Unpublishables: Like being open to people doing stories that are looser, a little bit more, you know,
garielle lutz: Oh, well, I think my editing experience is actually pretty limited. I've done much more copy editing than actual editing.
Unpublishables: Oh, is that right? Okay.
garielle lutz: Yeah, and because I was, i developed a fixation on grammar when I was an undergraduate because even though I went to an extremely undistinguished college,
garielle lutz: it was expected that students would arrive already understanding grammar, and I did not. So I immersed myself in in grammar books and became kind of obsessed with grammar. That's why I ended up writing this book called The Gotham Grammarian, which is, um I mean, there's ah a bridge version that's available as a paperback, but it's a huge document online. It's like, it's, um ah it's very, very, very, very long and it's available.
Unpublishables: So since does that mean you you have gone through all of Fowlers and Garners?
garielle lutz: Oh, I love Fowler.
Unpublishables: Okay, yeah.
garielle lutz: Yeah. Oh yeah. Garner is great too.
Unpublishables: Yeah, exactly.
garielle lutz: Yeah. The biggest difference is that Fowler was a writer, a really good writer. And Garner was not even attempting to do anything other than ah put a, you know, straightforward.
garielle lutz: There was another book, the book that initially I became obsessed with that I found on one of those revolving paperback racks in the days when drugstores actually had racks like that. It was called Modern American Usage.
garielle lutz: by um wil Wilson Fowler, which was sort of model but modeled on Fowler, but it was obviously, you know, Americanized and everything. But it had, but also, unlike the Fowler books, there were some very, very long entries for terms like sentence in the Fowler book.
Unpublishables: Right.
garielle lutz: So I, The first few times I read it, I didn't understand most of it, but I kept rereading it over the years. And that was very, very formative. And when the Garner books came out, because I think it's like in this fifth edition now or whatever, but um it was much more comprehensive than that those other books and was much more geared toward contemporary American English.
garielle lutz: Yeah. So I was, so I did work as a copy editor. I've stopped doing, I'm sorry.
Unpublishables: And do you enjoy that type of work? Because if if you have the kind of obsession you do, presumably you you might get a kick out of.
garielle lutz: i Yeah, when I was younger, i did enjoy it.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: For example, in the later days of the quarterly Gordon Lish's journal, I was the copy editor for for that.
Unpublishables: Okay.
garielle lutz: And I loved that sort of thing back then. Now, i just it's very depleting, so i I just don't do it anymore. and And even with editing fiction, there were a few cases in which I very, very closely edited novels.
garielle lutz: But for the most part, well, recognize that one of my limitations... And I think this accounts for why my writing is the way it is, or at least to some extent, is that I have difficulty forming a global view of anything.
garielle lutz: I see the parts. I don't see the whole. As a consequence, I think I'm just completely useless at editing the content of a story or a novel. i Because I, no, I am.
garielle lutz: I'm definitely one of those people who simply sees the trees and not the forest. And that's true, not only as a reader, but in terms of my entire life, I just don't see the whole, I see,
Unpublishables: And as a writer too, I take it. But but does that does that mean in your, which I think is interesting, you don't see the the wholeness of your ah individual works of short fiction, that or that you see them in a sort of the trees and not the forest, or or you you over time you've come to appreciate the the continuities and the
garielle lutz: yeah we
garielle lutz: oh Oh, yeah, with my own work, I can see the continuity, and that continuity arises out of my limitations because I'm always writing about the same thing. In fact, I just i just by chance discovered a French writer just a week and a half ago named Patrick Modiano.
Unpublishables: Oh yeah.
garielle lutz: Yeah, and since then, I've read
Unpublishables: He also loves to write on, the he has like sort of the same topics that he has evolved over like 30 novels or something, right?
garielle lutz: Exactly. i saw I saw an excerpt from an interview in which he said that he's been rewriteing he's been writing the same book for 35 years. And the thing is, I love the book that he's rewriting.
garielle lutz: so um So I've read like, I guess, seven of his books because they're very, very short.
Unpublishables: Absolutely.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: ah So in the past week and a half, ah because I haveve access to a good library now where I live. so I've read about seven books and they are essentially the same thing, but I love i love it. I mean, in fact, sometimes she even repeats the same sentence from book to book.
Unpublishables: Right.
garielle lutz: and But it's a it's a sentence worth repeating. i mean, it should be in wider circulation.
Unpublishables: No.
garielle lutz: so
Unpublishables: i'm I'm also an admirer of of his. I've maybe read maybe 10 of them or something like that. And i the continuity and the... the sort of going over the same issues again and again he's is ah is a way of deepening the themes in some way. I don't see it as a problem But as you say, i think i think of another writer like Katsia who says, you know, part of my style is a function of my limits of visual imagination, that he doesn't see things very vividly, but he sees them almost more linguistically. and So so yeah it is often the limitation that is actually the the virtue or what has made that writer what they are and why we care about them. So I think the flaw is often the good thing too.
Unpublishables: you know that
garielle lutz: Yeah, in fact, em I don't know how you pronounce his name, in one of his books, he says something that really resonates with me, mobilize your defects.
Unpublishables: Yes.
garielle lutz: And that's what I've tried to do. i'm and there i i Any occasional attempts over the years to write differently were just complete failures. I was in a relationship once long time ago, maybe like 25 years ago,
garielle lutz: with an emerging writer. And um she would give me assignments, you know, write this kind of story. And I would always fail. It was just because we used to give each other their grades. And I would always get, you know, D's and F's on the stuff stuff that was right. But it was fun, though, because she was trying to
garielle lutz: usher me into different directions and be supportive about trying something different. And at this point in my life, I would not even attempt that anymore. And there are some writers who I don't really read, but i I mean, I read reviews and they'll say, well, now this person is writing a genre novel, like a detective novel, and after doing literary novels, et cetera, and I'm just not flexible.
Unpublishables: Yeah.
garielle lutz: I'm very limited, very confined in
Unpublishables: Yeah, and I mean, a writer like Proust, right? it's It's the same thing that he's always up to and always pursuing. So I don't think it's a limit on on profundity or greatness as a writer, but yeah, that one has a certain set of obsessions, one has a certain way of of a way about the language, like in his case, very extended clauses.
Unpublishables: I don't think he he would have been able to write concisely. That's just not his method.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: It's the opposite of you, where it's like the densities and structure are just different. But i in both cases, I don't think you know a writer could obviously write in ah in a wide variety of ways and still be the the kind of you know, that kind of really benchmark kind of figures that that they are, you know?
Unpublishables: So, um ah yes.
garielle lutz: Well, you mentioned Greg Gerke, for example. I mean, there were so many impressive things about him as a person, as a writer. And one of them is the fact that now he's writing book about art.
Unpublishables: I know.
garielle lutz: And um because I would never be able to do something like that, just to go from writing fiction to to writing art. And he's doing it so amazingly. I mean, I've i've been reading you know the the drafts of that book and it's superb.
Unpublishables: I often talk with him about that, and I'm always amazed by the range of his writing. um I would say, i i can't I don't think I could do this. you know It is a limit of mine that I don't think I could.
Unpublishables: Also, it's a kind of omnivorous curiosity you have to have to write to to do it. And I think maybe i have my themes just like you have yours, and um um I'll probably stick with those and not jump.
Unpublishables: But he has a great way of jumping around, doesn't he?
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: Applying his mind to a new era. area or, you know.
garielle lutz: And also editing Socrates on the beach was just an amazing journal.
Unpublishables: um man Yeah. yeah
garielle lutz: I mean, it's, yeah.
Unpublishables: And those those skills would would have ah have a link that being able to see all these multiple styles and see how they in fact they can be in conversation with each other. They all hold their own interest as different as they are. I think it's a real benefit to ah an editor to be able to have that type of eye that he has for variety. Whereas, as I say, some of us, when we write, it's like, no, um I just don't, I don't,
Unpublishables: This doesn't you know doesn't resonate here. And that could be a good trait in some writers, but it may not make you the the greatest editor, you know because you have to be able to step into other people's shoes and stuff. So is so I wanted to ask you, if there is there anything else you wanted to say? Because this has been a a fantastic education in your your own work for me, because which I've been curious about a long time.
garielle lutz: Well, thank you. yeah I guess I can't think of anything else. I i mean, ah one last thing in terms of my limitations. I was a nonverbal kid. So that's why my relationship to language,
garielle lutz: um it evolved.
Unpublishables: It makes me think a little bit, even in a different way, but the way, um you know, Conrad or Nabokov, they're not writing in their first languages even. So there's that little bit of a parallel that when you're more conscious of it, something else maybe comes to the surface that wouldn't if it was more ah default or natural to you.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: and And do you have any other things you're working on or writings that are...
garielle lutz: Actually, um i recently undertook a major move, so I haven't been writing anything other than emails.
Unpublishables: Okay. Right.
garielle lutz: I mean, I have a few friends and we exchange very, very long emails. So I realized that some of the things that I'm including in those emails could eventually become, or I could eventually work them further.
garielle lutz: I i mean, i In the emails, I write a lot about this experiences I have on the street because i i ride buses all the time and I walk a lot and I overhear or witness so many things, many some of which are very peculiar.
garielle lutz: And I don't record them to the extent that I used to, but in some of these emails, I can't help but recounting.
Unpublishables: Yeah. Right. the the The writerly mind is not going to shut off it at those moments.
garielle lutz: Yeah.
Unpublishables: This has been so great. I really appreciate also that there was this was slightly belated. So thank you for accommodating that.
garielle lutz: Oh, that's fine.
Unpublishables: And it's been a thrill to speak with you.
garielle lutz: It's been a thrill to speak with you too. i Thank you so much and thanks for reading.
