{"id":38921,"date":"2017-03-26T15:19:36","date_gmt":"2017-03-26T21:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=38921"},"modified":"2018-10-04T15:20:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-04T21:20:35","slug":"author-michael-gills-the-15bytes-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/author-michael-gills-the-15bytes-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Michael Gills: The 15Bytes Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a><\/strong>Even though author Michael Gills has a doctorate from the University of Utah and was named in 2012 \u201cDistinguished Professor,\u201d he says in a recent profile about him in<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Continuum<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>that,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>\u201cIn my mind, I\u2019m still a poor kid from Arkansas \u2026 It\u2019s just a miracle I\u2019m not pouring concrete.\u201d Gills is the author of<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Go Love, a novel; story collections<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Why I Lie,\u00a0<\/em>The Death of Bonnie and Clyde,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>The House Across from the Deaf School;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>White Indians,<\/em>\u00a0a collection of creative nonfiction essays, part two of which is forthcoming. An associate professor of writing for the Honors College at the University of Utah, he lives in the Wasatch Foothills with his wife and daughter.<\/em>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Tamara Thomson, MFA Creative Writing candidate from BYU, caught up with Gills in an email interview earlier this month.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0Donald Barthelme has famously said that \u201cwriting is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how.\u201d Given that your stories in\u00a0The House Across from the Deaf School<\/em>\u00a0seem to have autobiographical elements in them, how do you approach a story or a character from a place of mystery? In other words, when you first begin a story, how much of the story is already worked out in your mind?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0For me it\u2019s a flicker or a flash out of the periphery, like when you\u2019re in the deep wood and catch a flash of movement.\u00a0Your heart starts beating and you know something\u2019s there, and\u2013whatever it is\u2013you\u2019re on its trail.\u00a0 That\u2019s how the stories feel, like I\u2019m in the hunt, and nearly all mornings I end up with something in that day\u2019s writing that I never could have guessed.\u00a0All my best work has come that way.\u00a0As for autobiographical elements, if the fiction writer\u2019s doing their job, readers believe it\u2019s true, if they\u2019re not, the reader doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0You may hate being asked this, but how autobiographical is\u00a0The House Across from the Deaf School<\/em>?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0Fiction is a composite, part what happened, what might have happened, what you can outright lie into happening, what you hear, dream, steal\u2013all of that plus the magic of luck, when you trip into a truth that\u2019s truer than truth.<\/p>\n

TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0Your stories deal with pain and tragedy, sometimes searing tragedy, but they don\u2019t feel overwrought or self-indulgent, and you manage to instill hope and grace into your narratives in a way that feels natural. How do you manage that? Does that happen in your early drafts or in revision? Do you have to work to avoid being sentimental or is it more intuitive?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0The great power of a retrospective narrative is that a moment is never a moment unto itself.\u00a0It is always fully imbued with all that has come before and all that will come after, interacting.\u00a0Theodore Roethke\u2019s [poem]\u00a0\u201cMy Papa\u2019s Waltz\u201d<\/a>\u00a0teaches us such, as does, on a more searing level,\u00a0The Diary of Anne Frank<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 her joy at the tree turning into leaf.\u00a0Moments of light \u2014 they depend on dark.<\/p>\n

TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0When you started writing\u00a0The House Across from the Deaf<\/em>\u00a0School<\/em>\u00a0did you plan to write a collection of interrelated stories? When in the process do you decide if a work will be a novel or a group of stories?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0The collection is my third, and quite connected, written in concert with four novels,\u00a0The Go Love Quartet<\/em>.\u00a0 In this sense, the work is all part of a created world that gets fractured with the story \u201cLast Words on Lonoke.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ve now finished a third novel in the sequence, and am working on a fourth collection of stories in concert with a two-part series of creative nonfictions.\u00a0A book of poetry,\u00a0First Frost<\/em>, is also interrelated.<\/p>\n

TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0Most of the stories in\u00a0The House Across from the Deaf<\/em>\u00a0School\u00a0<\/em>are told in first person in Joey\u2019s voice, but in the final story, titled \u201cFinisterre,\u201d it shifts to a third person limited point of view. Why did you decide to make that move and what do you think the collection gains from it?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0Third person gives distance.\u00a0The last piece is an airy piece \u2014 an escape, almost.\u00a0\u201cFinisterre\u201d is the grace moment of the book, hopefully.\u00a0I hope it moves the future writing toward such.\u00a0Certainly, it attempts to heal the ruptures that have occurred up through that point.<\/p>\n

TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0Dana Gioia in the essay\u00a0\u201cCan Poetry Matter?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(The Atlantic<\/em>) laments what he sees as the \u201cinstitutionalization\u201d of poetry through the proliferation of academic writing programs and subsidized magazines and presses. What do you think about the idea that literary fiction has become marginalized into a subculture because universities have created a limited audience for serious fiction?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0To the contrary, small presses are producing the very best fiction and poetry today, and we\u2019re fortunate enough to write whatever, whenever we want without censor, as we\u2019re far enough under the mainstream radar to do so. The real crap is what\u2019s coming out of New York now \u2014 small-minded books filled with middle class angst \u2014 how will I make my Pilates today, and still have time for little Ricky\u2019s soccer tourney? The university presses and independents don\u2019t have to worry about pleasing upper middle class sensibilities \u2014 they can rock the boat, and encourage us to rock it.\u00a0Huffington Post\u00a0<\/em>ran a piece on this not so far back, noting that presses run by the likes of\u00a0Paul Ruffin at Texas Review Press<\/a>, and Jennifer Barnes at\u00a0Raw Dog Screaming Press<\/a>\u00a0are where the real work is getting done these days. Have a look at what\u2019s going on at\u00a0The American Book Review<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 see what\u2019s being reviewed there. It\u2019s uplifting. So, contrary to being marginalized, I think we\u2019re seeing a heyday\u2013just under the radar.<\/p>\n

TPT:<\/strong>\u00a0Barthelme describes art\u2019s project as \u201cfundamentally meliorative.\u201d What does fiction offer the world today when truth is as beleaguered as it is in our public discourse?<\/p>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0William Faulkner has answered this question in his acceptance speech which I include here in its entirety:<\/p>\n

Ladies and gentlemen,<\/em><\/p>\n

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work\u2013a life\u2019s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.<\/p>\n

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed \u2013 love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.<\/p>\n

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.<\/p>\n

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet\u2019s, the writer\u2019s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet\u2019s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

MG:<\/strong>\u00a0Amen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Even though author Michael Gills has a doctorate from the University of Utah and was named in 2012 \u201cDistinguished Professor,\u201d he says in a recent profile about him in\u00a0Continuum\u00a0that,\u00a0\u201cIn my mind, I\u2019m still a poor kid from Arkansas \u2026 It\u2019s just a miracle I\u2019m not pouring concrete.\u201d Gills […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[3226],"class_list":["post-38921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-arts","tag-michael-gills"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-02 09:15:46","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1557"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38922,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38921\/revisions\/38922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}