Gabe Durham’s story “This Doomed Gift Before You” appears in the January 2010 issue of The Collagist. He lives with his wife in Northampton, MA. His fictions have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Hobart, Keyhole, Mid-American Review, The Lifted Brow, and elsewhere. He MFAs and teaches English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He gives away free words and music at gatherroundchildren.com.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “This Doomed Gift Before You”? What was on your mind while you were writing this story?

The first piece of fiction I ever had accepted was a short called, “The Cracks and Strains” published by Word Riot, and it features the same two guys as “Doomed Gift.” And although “Cracks” is much shorter, it follows a similar template: the story within a story, or the explanation within a story.

I never intended to write more about Truman since “Cracks,” but since writing that little story, I’ve had a couple of story premise ideas that struck me immediately as Truman ideas, or ideas about another culture that are interesting enough to explore as concepts, but not big enough to take up a story. Because even though I could write a story that takes place in a culture unlike our own—a renegade artist who shows his lover a painting then doesn’t destroy it, and must face the crushing retribution of the system, basically “Logan’s Run” but with lower stakes—it doesn’t mean I should. This way, I get to pit Truman’s love for his own culture against the narrator’s ambivalence about his ours.

To be honest, I don’t remember what was on my mind when I came up with the seed of this one, but I’ll bet it was something about all the ways artists’ egos have gotten in the way of their talent, and then, “What if they tried to legislate against that somehow?” I’m a fairly premisey writer, so a lot of what I do begins with “What if…?” I enjoy the challenge of taking a simple concept and complicating it.

2. The narrator’s mother and the character of Truman are very interesting when contrasted with one another. Their ideas and attitudes about art—specifically the narrator’s—are very different, but both are very influential in the narrator’s life. His mother hoards and proudly displays his artwork, loving anything he produces without even knowing what it is, while Truman is appalled at seeing a piece of art nakedly displayed so that “dozens if not hundreds of leers have already fouled it”. These conflicting views on the sharing and “participation” of art are pretty provocative—what kind of reaction were looking for in the reader, if any?

I guess a violently erotic reaction would be my top choice.

I don’t have one, really—interpret boldly, readers, don’t look to me—but I doubt I’ll be screwing up much of your reading when I say that I think there are so many pitfalls for the artist who is trying to (1) make great stuff, (2) get attention for it, and (3) remain an empathetic and considerate person, because it’s so hard to work at one and keep the other two plates spinning at the same time. I know people who manage it well, and it’s because they’re able to let the attention they get humble them and motivate them to take even more risks, and they let the attention they don’t get slide off their backs. But in practice, it’s tough, so the idea of taking #2 out of the equation is kind of appealing to me, if ridiculous.

Most art is at least lovable in that it’s created by a person trying to connect with other people. And in a kid’s art, that desire is right at the surface. The drawing says, “FOR MOM” and it’s a picture of Mom, and the kid hands it to Mom personally, while smiling. And the parent thinks, “I love you,” which equals “I love it.” But eventually we have to set out to delight ourselves, which is easy at first and near-impossible eventually. I don’t mean to say that I’m not out to delight others. Only that my own delight is the only barometer I can trust. (“Delight” is hyperbolic in many cases, so feel free to swap it with “sense of adequacy” or “sense that this evokes the complicated sadness I’m searching for.”) And once I’ve succeeded in that, it’s time to show it to other people to see whether or not it’s something they’ll like. But once we begin to delight people, we get addicted to the joy of delighting and start asking ourselves what other people want instead of what we want. And then we make dishonest impersonal art.

This is interesting stuff to think about in the wake of Salinger’s death, since holing up, writing, not showing your work to anybody is exactly what Salinger did for last fifty years of his life. Maybe we’ll now get to read what he’s been working on all these years and maybe we won’t. If so, great. If not, what a waste! An aging man hanging out with the Glass family, never letting anyone else see what he’s up to. Is that humble? Selfish? Merciful?

Again, even though I like talking about all this, “Doomed Gift” isn’t a story that’s really trying to say something as much as it is playing with ideas through the lens of these two (or as you point out, Marie, three) characters.

3. I found your choice at the end of the protagonist and Truman destroying Truman’s piece together very interesting—in Truman’s monologue he describes the sole viewers of artists’ work as the ones who do the destroying. Why did you decide to end the piece with this mutual destruction?

I guess I’m less interested in who the destroyer is than I am in the contract between the artist and sole viewer. Once the artist decides to show and the sole viewer decides to look, the art is already doomed. The mutual destruction, then, is probably the most intimate way to destroy Truman’s drawing. So for that brief span, the solitary art is turned into something that they can share. It’s also an apology.

4. You are currently completing your MFA at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where you work with Chris Bachelder, among other people. (Bachelder is a former contributor as well.) What effect has studying writing formally had on your writing over the fast couple of years?

I love Chris’s Collagist story. We may have a long wait before he lets himself collect his short stories into a book, but when he does, we’re in for a treat.

I defended my thesis in December, with Chris as my advisor, and with Noy Holland and Sabina Murray on my committee, and I’ve got to say, UMass has some pretty outstanding faculty. I include Peter Gizzi, Sam Michel, and James Hoag in that complement as well. They’ve each offered a sharp, serious assessment of my work. Chris had a lot to say about which stories ought to go in my collection—he read maybe 24 stories and helped me whittle it down to something that represents my best fiction.

The main thing the MFA has done for me is speed up the learning process. I write more like myself now, I’m a stronger self-editor, I’ve expanded my reading diet exponentially, I’m participating in the indie lit scene, I know of so many journals I want to follow and submit to, I’m a lot more serious about getting the writing done, and I’m more willing to take risks. Before I got to Massachusetts, I’d written exactly one story about which I could say that I nailed it, and that’s the story that got me accepted in the first place. And when I got here and read the work of some of my peers, I got that feeling, “OK, it’s time to get serious.” And I did. Still lots of failed stories, a couple of failed novel attempts, but a lot of stuff I’m happy with too. Three years is a hell of gift. It flies by, but if you take it seriously, you end up with plenty to show for it.

5. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

I’ve got three manuscripts I’m working on—the first two are complete or near-complete, and the third is nowhere near complete.

Every Mostly Great Man in the State – a collection of fifteen stories written between 2006-2009. It’s a pretty varied collection in terms of length (the shortest story is 200 words, the longest is 7500), tone, voice, and degree of resemblance to our world. Some of the stories have appeared in Keyhole, Fourteen Hills, Hobart, NOÖ Journal, Pequin, and Johnny America, and others will appear in The Lifted Brow, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, and two different issues of Mid-American Review. The other five I’m currently sending around.

Them at Their Worst – a short novel (about 40,000 words), written between 2008-2009, about a guy, Buddy, who gets beat up every day. It’s a really simple premise that initially struck me as funny, but the more time I spent with the poor guy, the more the humor became necessarily complicated by sadness. It’s more pared down than most of my stories. There’s a George Saunders quote that goes, “I see writing as part of an ongoing attempt to really, viscerally, believe that everything matters, suffering is real, and death is imminent,” and that same attempt is at the heart of this novel.

Fun Camp – a collection of prose poem monologues that take place in and around an eccentric pseudo-religious summer camp. This is my main project right now, and I’m having a great time writing it. I was slowly working on the first twenty or so pieces for a long time, not really sure what the project was, but it really got cooking when (1) I anchored the pieces in summer camp, and (2) I took a poetry workshop from Peter Gizzi. Peter and my peers had a lot of great observations about how the pieces were working, and that really fired me up to write more of them. It quickly turned from a little experiment on the side to “the book I’m working on.” Some of these pieces have recently appeared in matchbook, Dogzplot, and Everyday Genius, and more are coming soon in FriGG, Saltgrass, Nano Fiction, notnostrums, and A Cappella Zoo.

6. What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

I’ve been reading some seriously good books lately. Homeland by Sam Lipsyte, The Hundred Brothers by Donald Antrim, Europeana by Patrik Ourednik, Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet, Sweet Land Stories by EL Doctorow, Now Playing by Shellie Zacharia, Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Currently in the middle of Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg, That Little Something by Charles Simic, and The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley.

As for excited about: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte. Pee on Water by Rachel B. Glaser. Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young. The Pale King is a long way off, but there’s an excerpt coming out this week in the new Lifted Brow. Chris Bachelder’s next novel. Lincoln Dahl Turns Five by Sam Michel. Whatever Salinger scraps surface. Can I mention Matt Bell’s collection in this venue? Someone told me that Dalkey Archive is putting out another Patrik Ourednik book. Maybe the new DeLillo. Absolutely the new Franzen.

I’m also excited, though, to dig into the ever-growing to-read pile, which includes Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Other Electricities by Ander Monson, Pink and Hot Pink Habitat by Natalie Lyalin, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper. Then there’s Moby Dick, which I’m not going to crack until this summer at the earliest.

[interview by Marie Schutt]