Interview with David Daniel

by Dan Trask

[about this interview]

[about Six Off 66]

Q: Is there a common thread linking the six stories of Six Off 66; a reason you've chosen and bundled these particular ones?

A. I met Adam Robinson at a writer’s retreat last summer, where I read “Girl at the Aquarium” and he said he liked it and did I have anything similar that might work as a chapbook. I told him he could take “Girl” if he wanted it. A month or so later, he got the notion of blowing out the walls of the traditional short chapbook and asked if I might have some additional stories to go with it. Adam is nothing if not polite and low key, but he’s also very persuasive. I’ve had this other large manuscript of stories ready, but these six were stories that for one reason or another didn’t work for that book. So I sent them to Adam, and those are the stories that make up Six Off 66.

I guess I knew, too, that his readership was younger, more hip, a little out there, so I chose “The Thing in the Road” and “Inheritance” as a nod in that direction. He said he wanted to try some traditional stories, expose his readers to that—“Chekhov” tales, he calls them—thus “Collecting” and “The Man Who Dreamed of Death” and the others. So, yeah, I think the stories connected in some not very obvious, synaptic way.

Q. When the idea for a story first hits you, do you immediately know whether it will be a short story or an entire novel? What's the determining factor for you?

A. It’s a matter of scale, a function of heft. A story idea is a kind of seed—and some are going to be house plants, others, you sense, have potential to become trees. You get pretty good at figuring out which are which. It’d be a mistake to try to turn one into the other. Then you’ve got to determine which, if any of them, is worth committing to. With a story, that commitment may be a few days or a week. For a novel, you’re looking at a year or longer.

Q. One of these stories, “Inheritance,” is told in the second-person, from the point of view of a young girl.  How difficult was it to tell a story from that foreign perspective?

A. It was an experiment. Like the title story, this was written in a time in my life when I was warding off a depression following the end of a relationship, and writing was a way to keep me relatively stable, a lifeline you might say. The train trip in “Inheritance” is based on one my family took when I was a kid. I thought a young girl having a psychic inheritance that hints at the roots of her true origins had possibilities. In the interest of adding colors to your palette, it’s worth trying other points of view, and characters that aren’t too much like you.

Q. From reading your novels and short stories, one gets the sense that you're a relatively well-traveled, jack-of-all-trades kind of guy who's got his finger on the pulse of America's working class.  How important is it that the details in your stories - the details about small cities, towns, and various professions - come from your own real-life experiences? Perhaps this relates to the Rilke epigraph.

A. My own roots are blue collar. I’m aware of class differences. I write about working people, but I try not to idealize them. It’s a mistake to idealize—or to demonize—any group of people. But, you’re right, I do tend to draw from what I know and use what has come to me by way of the many jobs I’ve held, my travels, relationships, the rest. My very earliest attempts at fiction were ridiculous because I didn’t recognize that. I thought I had to make it all up. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. As for the Rilke idea, good point. I think that all of us need to be prodded now and again to break out, to take the long way home.

Q. The Girl at the Aquarium is a great story, and a wonderful end piece to this collection.  The tension is drawn out beautifully, and the reader is left wanting much more.  Do the characters live on in your mind?  Do they spill out past the edges of the page?  

A. My series characters do. Alex Rasmussen talks in my head quite often. The others, not so much. But sometimes. I read that story (“Aquarium”) to a library audience recently, and my 17-year old daughter was there, and afterwards she said, “That was sad. But they got together after that, right?” I told her I certainly hoped so. I wish all my characters well.

Q. I admire your decision to take a chance with a smaller press.  What are your thoughts on the current trend towards self-publishing (due in large part to leaps in printing technology) and the inevitable flood of questionable writing that will be thrust upon the public as a result?  Is it possible, or even advisable, for young people outside the industry to compete with professional editors and agents and large publishing companies?  

It’s true that self-publishing means there’s a lot of dubious writing getting out, but I heard recently that the average American spends two hours a day watching TV but only seven minutes reading. To my mind, anyone who’s trafficking in the written word, no matter how unskillfully these words are applied, can’t be all bad.

This book is my first go with a small, high-end press, and that’s a trend that’s refreshing. If you look at the production values, the art work, the attention to detail, you see they’re onto something valuable. In my long experience with big New York publishing—the so-called “legitimate” publishing—I’ve never found anyone who’s savvier, or more sensitive to writing than Adam Robinson is. He’s got an eye for nuance that any writer would benefit by. He could rise in the ranks of the big-time book world, but he’s got a maverick streak, and I think he’d get frustrated with the politics. As it is now, he’s part of the entire book process, start to finish.

Q. This relates to the preceding question (at least in my mind).  You're a great admirer of the generation that produced the culture of the sixties.  What's your opinion of today's youth, the generation that will be reading Six Off 66?

A. Good people are where you find them. As for the generation under 30, they’re smart in ways that astound me. I do wish they’d be more upset with the state of things, and that their anger would be to some purpose. In a coffee shop recently I saw the words, “The ax soon forgets; the tree always remembers.” When I consider the ax job to our spirit that our current culture is delivering, I guess I hope the tree’s going to do something with the memory.