By Cyn Vargas
I’ve long admired John McNally—from Troublemakers to The Book of Ralph and numerous works in between—and it was my honor to chat with him about his latest, the incredible short story collection The Fear of Everything. Receiving an advanced reader copy before the rest of the world felt like eating candy before bed. I was so excited to dive in and, when I did, I got what I expected. Like his other work, John’s original, authentic, relatable, and emotionally charged characters stuck with me long after their stories on the page ended.
Your collection centers on fear and many of the stories felt, to me, like that moment just before a roller coaster plunges. What is it about fear that appeals to you?
More than any of my other books, there’s a sense of menace in this book. For me, menace sets the tone. It’s like waking up but the sky is too dark because a storm is rolling in. Or how before a tornado, the sky turns green while everything gets eerily calm. But before that, there may be humor or nostalgia, or something else to pull the reader into the story. But even then there’s some menace. In “The Creeping End,” for instance, a cop finds a cell phone with over a thousand photos of a man’s penis…but the man is dead, and the cop is looking at the photos while standing next to the dead man. And so I guess, to answer your question, there are degrees to the fear, and at each step I’m hoping to lure the reader into the story that way. I’m the fiction writer driving the beat-up white van with the “free candy” sign spray-painted on the side. Sort of.
Which characters in your book make you wonder: What will happen next to them?
Probably the ones who most resemble me? None of the characters are based on me, but some resemble me more than others. The narrator in “The Fear of Everything” or the narrator in “Catch and Release,” for instance. I probably share more autobiographical details with them than the others. So our fates are more intertwined. I wish them well.
Your characters struggle with isolation and loss and your use of the collective voice in “The Magician,” “Perry in The Blueprint of Your Brain,” and “The Fear of Everything” emphasized your characters’ dilemmas. Were you aware of these character traits when you were writing this collection?
I’m usually not aware of those kinds of patterns or character traits as I’m writing. But since all of this stuff is coming from my subconscious, it’s clearly there – and it’s there prominently. When I was in grad school, I was sending a lot of stories to a major commercial magazine, and the editor kept writing longer and longer letters back to me. Eventually I met him, and after reading a few more stories of mine, he said, “You write ‘lonely guy’ stories. Maybe you should give you
r main characters a friend.” And that was the birth of the character Ralph, who appears in multiple books of mine, including The Book of Ralph. It was a revelation! And, as a piece of advice, it probably had more impact on my career than any other piece of advice I’d ever been given. But the truth was that I’m a solitary guy. I don’t have hundreds of friends. I’m not particularly social. And so this editor had tapped into something deeper about the kind of person I was. In the new book, I didn’t realize I was writing about loss, though it should have been obvious. I started writing most of these stories during a time when I was going through a divorce, when my father died, and when I was moving 900 miles away from my friends for a new job. So, I was experiencing a lot of loss, but it took other people to point out to me all the loss in this book.
You bring such a natural voice to all your narrators whether the POV is in first, second, or third, man or woman. How do you determine what POV a story demands? Are there additional considerations when you write from a woman’s POV?
The older I get, the less comfortable I am writing too far afield of my own experiences. One of the stories in this book that’s written from a woman’s point of view – “The Lawyer” – is mostly a monologue, so the narrator is primarily just listening. When I realized that what the attorney is saying would be so much creepier if he was saying all of this to a woman, I made the switch. But it wasn’t a major switch from a technical standpoint, and since the story is primarily a man’s monologue, I didn’t feel like I was appropriating a story that wasn’t mine to appropriate, which is probably the big question I ask myself when making a decision like that. The other story from a female POV is historical, and so there was something about the remove that made it easier (by which I mean “less problematic”) for me to do.
The Devil in the Details is a story that takes place in the mid-1800s? It is fantastical historical fiction and while reading it, I felt like I was back in grad school studying the short story, being drawn into it and seeing how historical fiction should be done. How do you manage to capture the sense of that time period while also developing a story that is relevant even now?
This story was an odd one because it was part of a 600 page historical novel that I spent seven years researching and writing but couldn’t get right. Several years later, after the novel had been rejected by every major publisher, I read it again, saw all the problems, but decided not to revise it. Buried in the novel was the story of Mary from “The Devil in the Details,” so I pulled out all those sections, pieced them together, and then began giving it a shape, adding and taking away scenes. It’s not how I’d recommend writing a story! But I managed to salvage 40 pages out of 600. It’s like running into a burning house and saving vintage radio while everything else catches fire.
I went through so many emotions reading this collection—joy, anticipations, surprise, sadness, hopefulness. How do you manage to bring so many dimensions and layers of emotion to your stories?
I tell my students that writing is like method acting, and that if you submerge yourself deeply enough into the consciousness of a narrator, what comes out may surprise you. So I don’t necessarily go into a story with the intention of evoking certain emotions; I let the narrator take me on a journey, about which I usually know very little. The best writing moments are when something happens that surprises me or evokes melancholy – or whatever the unexpected emotion is. And that’s what I write toward: the unexpected. Until then, it’s all a mystery to me. Or most of it is, at least.
How do you decide when a story is finished? How do you know when the ending is the ending?
At this point, it’s intuition. I feel it when it’s done. I sense it. I also know when it’s not quite right, but I can’t figure out how to get it to that next level. Even after a story is included in a book, I think about ways it might have been better. Fortunately, I never read my books again once I’m done promoting them – otherwise, it would be a kind of torture. I’d want to revise them some more. Raymond Carver did that – continued revising his stories so that there might be four different published versions of the same story – and it seemed like a kind of madness, a madness I could relateto.
Most of the stories in The Fear of Everything have been published before. Did you realize you were writing stories with a theme?
No, as I wrote above, it takes me a long time—and sometimes it takes someone pointing it out to me—for me to see what a book’s about. But by the time this book was done and I was searching for a title, I realized there was a lot of menace here. In the back of mind, I realize that I’m probably writing a collection of stories, but until I’m about three quarters of the way there, I don’t print out the pages and compile them as a manuscript. But at that point, after I compile the stories and start thinking about how to order them, that’s when the book begins to congeal into something larger than just individually published stories.
I love the sense of nostalgia throughout the book including the old school heavy rotary phone, the objects in 1950s diner, the missing person fliers tacked on walls and store windows. Objects become characters in their own right. What advice would you give to writers on how to use objects in fiction?
I make sure that those kinds of details are organic. I try never to add something for the gratuitous sake of it being a period detail. The rotary phone in “The Phone Call,” for instance, is almost a character in that the story wouldn’t function without it. I remember giving a draft of a novel to an agent once, and she pointed out a page of description and said, “This is MFA writing.”I don’t agree with the term “MFA writing,” but I knew what she meant: I was painstakingly writing details, but the details didn’t go anywhere. They weren’t part of anything larger in the story. They were wallpaper. Occasionally, you need wallpaper, but you don’t need a page of it. And so occasionally, if a scene is flat, I have to ask myself if there’s too much wallpaper. Right now, I’m writing a thriller set in Thailand, and since Thailand may be unfamiliar to the reader, I have to balance details that are necessary versus ones that are gratuitous. The best way for me to do that is to filter them through the narrator’s consciousness. If it makes sense to pause for that detail because the narrator would process it, then it stays. If the prose seems like it’s becoming a travelogue, then I have to rethink it.
Is there anything you wish someone would ask you about this book that they haven’t just yet?
One cool thing is that after the publisher accepted this book I was awarded a professorship that came with a stipend. One of the things I can use the stipend for is book production costs, so I asked the publisher if I could be in charge of cover design, printing, etc., and they let me! So, I hired an artist to do the cover (Keith Rosson), a copyeditor, and a printer. It was the first time I had that much input on the production side of things. Of course, I ran everything by the team at the press, and I took their advice to heart. But at this late date in my career, it was a nice thing to be involved in. A little nerve-wracking at times but ultimately worth it.
Buy The Fear of Everything HERE.
John McNally is the author of ten books, including the novel The Book of Ralph and, more recently, The Promise of Failure: One Writer’s Perspective on Not Succeeding. “The Devil in the Details” is from a recently completed story collection titled The Fear of Everything. He is presently writing feature screenplays for the Norwegian film company Evil Doghouse. A native of the southwest Chicago suburb Burbank, John now lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, where is he is Writer-in-Residence and the Dr. Doris Meriwether/BORSF Professor in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Cyn Vargas’s short story collection, On The Way, (Curbside Splendor, 2015) received positive reviews from Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Heavy Feather Review, and Necessary Fiction, among others. Book accolades include: Newcity Lit’s Top 5 Fiction Books by Chicago Authors, Chicago Book Review’s Favorite Books of 2015, Bustle’s 11 Short Story Collections Your Book Club Will Love, and Chicago Writers Association 2015 Book of the Year, Honorable Mention. Her prose and essays have been published in the Chicago Reader, Word Riot, Split Lip Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Midnight Breakfast, Bird’s Thumb, and elsewhere. She received a Top 25 Finalist and Honorable Mention in two of Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers Contests, is the recipient of The Guild Literary Complex Prose Award in Fiction, is a company member of the award-winning storytelling organization 2nd Story and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. She is currently working on her novel based in 1980s Chicago. Find out more @ CYN VARGAS.