Craig Fishbane

RS:

We did your first collection of shorts, and I kept wondering why you don't write a novel. I think I even asked you about it. So ... why not?

 

CF:

I could actually write a novel answering the question about why I stopped writing novels. I used to only write long pieces. In my 20s, I wrote three complete novels and drafted large sections of two others. I’ve got literally thousands of pages on my computer that never went anywhere past the slush pile of a literary agent. I eventually got burnt out. It was incredibly frustrating and isolating to lock myself away and write these drafts that came to nothing. I worked with an editor to help me revise one of the manuscripts and his insistence at working at a breakneck pace completed the process. I got so sick of the endless, fruitless revisions that I stopped writing for a year or more.

 

The thing that pulled me back into writing was an acceptance of a poem that I hadn’t even remembered I sent out. I finally had a piece of my work in a literary journal and that one tiny bit of encouragement was all I need to throw myself back into the game. I spent the next few years participating in the spoken word scene and writing short narrative poetry.

 

My bad experiences with novel writing made me almost neurotic about writing prose. When I tried to draft an idea for a short story, I could feel the needles of anxiety coursing down my arm. It was like I was about to have a heart attack. I finally overcame my self-induced abstinence from fiction when I came to realize that the poems I was writing weren’t really poems at all. They were very short stories—the form we now call flash fiction. Slowly and nervously, I underwent the process of unbreaking the lines and turning the verse back into sentences.

 

The unpublished poems became published stories and eventually they became the collection you published, On the Proper Role of Desire.

 

See what I meant about writing a novel about this?

 

My first taste of success encouraged me to write more and more stories and I became comfortable writing short fiction. In fact, it was a positive relief that I could focus my creative energies for, say, an hour each day, and then I could go about the rest of my life without becoming obsessed with the rest of a potential chapter. It was like what Hemingway described in A Moveable Feast, when he could satisfy himself with writing one true sentence.

 

That being said, I clearly am at a turning point. The ideas I have right now are clearly too big and complicated to be contained in a very short piece. I am indeed feeling the urge to let it all go and write longer pieces, perhaps something book-length. The key is to preserve my mental health in the process. When I was younger and didn’t have much going on in my life, I could easily spend my days obsessing about how character A was going to meet character B and whether character C should wear a raincoat or a poncho. My life is too emotionally rich for me to want to go into full OCD-shutdown mode for months on end.

 

So I’m trying to find the balance between the call of living and the call of writing, while also trying to heal the scars of a decade of failure at long-form writing. I’ll let you know how it all turned out in the sequel.

 

RS:

What are some themes that keep cropping up in your writing?

 

CF:

For the last few years, ever since a certain reality-show celebrity got elected, I’ve found myself writing about issues that we find ourselves surrounded by. The plight of immigrants has been a focus of many of my recent stories. I make my living as an ESL teacher and, for better or worse, I’ve had a front row seat at the Theater of Anxiety that Trump has created for immigrant children. 

 

I’ve written a half dozen pieces from the point of view of a kind but ineffectual teacher who is witnessing an entire world of ideals and assumptions slip away. I can’t say I’ve expected these stories to magically change anyone’s mind, but I did need to document the very real horror that this president has created. As William Burroughs once put it, I wanted to show what we were actually being fed with the newspaper spoon.

 

My more traditional or personal themes have always been about the issue of self-actualization or, at least, grasping something about the world beyond your limited sense of self. Many of the stories in On the Proper Role of Desire feature a character having some sort of ironic epiphany, interacting with a person in such a way that they learned about something that was beyond their original frame of reference. A lot of the best characters in that collection are know-it-alls who discover, usually at the last sentence, that in fact they don’t know it all. Many of my stories deal with travelers. Thailand features prominently in many pieces in On the Proper Role of Desire. It was the first country I visited in Asia, and the indelible blend of spirituality and corruption damaged my mind in ways I’m still recovering from. In a broader sense, a lot of pieces I’ve written capture a sense of the world in flux—snapshots of globalism, if you will. 

 

I guess you could say that my more recent stories touch on the moment when globalism came to a crashing halt, when walls both physical and metaphorical started being erected. The characters are forced to come to terms with more limited horizons, the epiphanies less hopeful. I suppose the theme I’m grasping towards in both real-life as well as fiction is how we can continue to aspire towards growth and becoming richer, fuller human beings while living in dark times.

 

RS:

Best tip for someone who wants to write short stories?

 

CF:

Read a lot. Learn about all the possibilities of the form: both classic and contemporary. Be humble and let the brilliance of other writers be an invitation to your own excellence. And after you’ve crowded your mind with a staggering array of voices and visions, push them all to the side and let yourself discover what you—and you alone—really want to say.