Jerry Gabriel

Why did you choose to be a writer?
I think I might have subconsciously chosen to be a writer because of the general acceptance of the long learning curve. Brett Favre is about six weeks older than me and is considered basically ancient. Meanwhile, in the right company, I am still considered a young writer. I kind of love that.

How did you go about writing this book, and can you talk about the process of getting your work published?
The earliest story I wrote for my book is old. I wrote the story “Falling Water” in the spring of 1994 for a poetry forms class at Northern Arizona University. It was for the prose poem exercise. I quickly converted the story, then called “Relations,” to a more proper short story form—I feel like this was at the urging of a classmate, another fiction writer. Shortly thereafter, I started sending it out. Probably it was among the first things I ever sent out. I received a lot of rejections on it, naturally—not because it wasn’t any good, but because rejection is what happens to most stories and books that venture out into the world. I may not have totally understood this at the time, but I was learning fast.

Two years passed and the friend I’d ceded my apartment to when I left town called me from Flagstaff (I was by then living in Denver) to say I’d gotten some mail from Tampa. I asked him to read it. The gist of the note (which I believe was a form rejection letter on which the editor had crossed out the typed words and handwritten a few sentences) was that my story had fallen behind a book shelf and been lost. The editor had found it while cleaning and read it and liked it and wondered if it was still available. What a world, I thought. I’m published.

When it came out, I put in my bio that I was working on a collection of short stories tentatively titled Relations, not because I was, but because I figured that’s what the world expected. It was at least what everyone else said in their bios. I was writing stories, one after another, but I wasn’t yet to a place where I was conceiving of them as a book. I have tons of these stories—each one with a fatal flaw or two. Most of them with something more along the lines of “system error” than just some weird plot quirk or badly drawn character.

It wasn’t until four or five years later—and many more stories—sitting in the apartment my wife and I shared in Wellington, New Zealand, where we lived for a year, that I got to wondering if it wasn’t time to get serious about putting a book together. I remember very clearly the afternoon I came to this conclusion. I had been inspired by listening to Stuart Dybek talk in a class I’d had with him at the University of Iowa about the creation of his book The Coast of Chicago. And so I started to write the stories that would become Drowned Boy. I think I already had about three stories that I thought I could work with, and I moved forward from there, revising those and writing new ones. From that point, it didn’t actually take me long to put the book together. It certainly gained momentum as I went, the stories feeding off one another.

It’s a trick question to ask me how long it took to write Drowned Boy. In real time, it’s been 16 years since that poetry class at NAU.

The stories in your book are interconnected. Can you talk about why you chose to write Drowned Boy as a story cycle?
The truth is that I’ve always been drawn to story cycles as a reader; Sherwood Anderson’s 1Winesburg, Ohio—for a multitude of reasons, though especially because of the Ohio setting and the emotional content of small town life—appealed to me early on. There’s something satisfying as a reader to pop in and out of characters lives—to see them up close and then from a distance. Junot Diaz’s Drown has some great overlap like this, as do Andrea Barrett’s last several books. The great thing about the story cycle to my mind is that you can both see a larger arc and the local impact of events on a life that only a story can do.

Bracing oneself against the inevitability of loss is a powerful theme in your stories. Could you comment?
In profound ways, much of the book is about this fear of loss. From “Boys Industrial School” on, the specter of losing his family is a powerful source of anxiety for Nate. In this story, his father’s absence—he is in the hospital, though we don’t know why or for how long—is most profoundly experienced by Nate’s mother, who is trying to keep the family together through this period. But Nate’s worry about the disappearance of his brother is, I think, an offshoot of this very fear—at the very least, a re-channeling of it. It seems to him that the family is essentially dissolving, which at that age is the most terrifying thing a kid can imagine.

In terms of the psychological origins of the idea, the possibility of the loss of someone close—my father, in particular—was something I was aware of from an early age. He was diagnosed with heart disease when I was about six, and I think from then until the day he died, when I was 21, I lived in fear of that eventuality. I used to wonder when I heard sirens through the small town where I lived if the ambulances were going to my house.

Landscape and weather in this book seem almost like characters in their own right. How does the environment shape your human characters?
I think that Drowned Boy is very much a place-driven book. Place has always felt like an important thing to me, something not distinct from a given experience—not some independent variable. As I wrote these stories, I was very far away from southern Ohio (on the other side of the planet, in a few cases), and it was fun—at times, important—for me to conjure it up, to bring it back and smell the smells and hear the sounds of the place, to put myself in its hills and interact with the people there in my mind—even with the weather. Some of the stories are more inclined toward this end than others, but I think they all reveal an interest in the idea that the place we live in (possibly more importantly, the place we’re raised in)—without suggesting something like pre-determination—is part of who we are.

You taught creative writing to prisoners at New York’s Auburn Correctional Facility. How have those experiences shaped you as a writer? Did your students in prison influence you or inspire you?
To say that working with prisoners in the context of creative writing has been perspective-giving would be short-changing the experience. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but the experience was frankly a little humbling.

For prisoners—at least for most of the guys I worked with, who tended to be lifers—art is one of only a few things in their lives that reminds them that they are human. Because they live in a world stripped of so much of what gives meaning to the lives of people not incarcerated, many of these guys had come to see writing as a practically sacrosanct thing—not just a thing on a page, but a part of you, a limb. And so it was amazing to see the reverence they brought into that classroom, for each other and for the work in front of them and for me for trying to help them do it better.

And so, yes, I was absolutely inspired by many of them. I don’t pretend to understand the hardships of prison, but I could see that some of these guys had literally taught themselves how to read, taught themselves to write, even taught themselves English so they could write creative works—all on their own, with the paltry resources available to them. And they would come into class talking about Faulkner or Don Quixote—things they just happen to be reading. It’s jarring when all you’ve known is that people reach that level of aptitude through one standardized channel, and these guys make it happen with little more than some pens and paper and whatever books randomly end up in the prison “library.” They are experts in DIY.

Actually, one of the really fascinating and inspiring things was seeing how alive the imagination was in people who are locked up. While I obviously don’t envy them their situation, I did envy their ability to imagine. For one of the assignments in a class, a student of mine—a guy named Stephen Matthews, who has written a handful of amazing plays—wrote a short story in which he metaphorically mailed himself—his thoughts and ideas, his essence, his humanity—out of the prison. The work recalled the longing, pain, sophistication and imagination of Going After Cacciato for me. Now that’s an escape narrative. Not your garden variety, Shawshank Redemption escape, but a mystical deliverance. Yes, I’ve been inspired. Have I learned anything is another question entirely.

What are you reading?
As a reader, I’m sort of all over the map. Not really very focused at all. Right now I’m reading Roberto Bolano’s 2666, Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock, Junot Diaz’s Oscar Wao, and Kevin Moffet’s Permanent Visitors. All of which I’m liking. Usually there’s one or two non-fiction books in the mix. But I guess I’m on a fiction kick. Many of the books I “read” I actually listen to, through audible.com.

A native Ohioan, Jerry Gabriel is currently a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His first book of fiction, Drowned Boy, was the winner of the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Selection. Read an excerpt of Drowned Boy and follow Jerry’s readings on his website at http://www.jerrygabriel.net. Learn about other books from the publisher of Drowned Boy at www.sarabandebooks.org.