By Patricia Ann McNair

There is this wonderful thing that sometimes happens to a writer: you open your inbox and find an email from someone who you have never met, but who shares mentors and friends and writerly sensibilities with you. Such is the case when one day last year I got an email from Jenny Robertson, whose wonderful collection of short stories, Hoist House, was going to be released by Cornerstone Press where one of my own collections was published. Through this email I discovered that Jenny and I could make a Venn diagram of the writers who have helped foster the work each of us has made. 

So when Jenny asked if I would be willing to read Hoist House, I was eager to dig in. And after spending time with her stories, I knew that we had to talk about them, about writing the Midwest, about mentors, and about the goodness and ugliness of everyday things—and a whole lot of other things. Here then, is our conversation. 

Patricia Ann McNair: Your rich Hoist House: A Novella & Stories opens with the evocative and compelling short piece “Sex-O-Rama, 1993.” The backdrop of 1990s Minneapolis club culture is vivid and essential to this story, as are the people who populate the situation. I can’t help but wonder what came first for you as a writer, the place or its people? Perhaps it isn’t so easily separated as this. Maybe what I am really asking is for you to talk about the way the story emerged for you.

Jenny Robertson: The summer after my junior year in college, three beloved guy friends and I drove from Northfield, MN to Minneapolis to celebrate one friend’s birthday at the club First Avenue. I’d been to First Ave several times for concerts (the Gear Daddies and Trip Shakespeare), but never to one of their themed nights, and I expected whatever Sex-O-Rama night was to be a fun and probably funny experience. But it turned out that watching my three guy friends (one of whom was in the process of becoming my ex-boyfriend) mesmerized by hot city girls dancing was horrible in a kind of out-of-body way. I knew I eventually wanted to write a short story about this experience, if just to explore that unexpected sense of alienation.

Fast-forward twenty years or so, and I was in a fiction workshop with the brilliant Antonya Nelson at the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Michigan. She asked all of us to start a story with an anecdote from personal experience, but to tell it through the perspective of a third-person narrator. I later read an essay Toni wrote about this writing and teaching technique (“Short Story: A Process of Revision,” published in The Writers’ Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House, 2012, Tin House Books), and have taught her process inmy own classes because I find it so effective. 

Toni’s prompt immediately helped me name the central problem of my Sex-O-Rama experience: I was the wrong narrator. Yes, I’d been profoundly uncomfortable in that decadent environment, but being profoundly uncomfortable wasn’t, in itself, a story. I decided to create a narrator who instead would have felt most at home, most free, most themselves at an event like Sex-O-Rama, and from my first draft in that workshop the story took on a life of its own. The narrator was originally called Un Arte, a nod to one of my favorite poems, “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop, so I knew that though he was going to be a bold, brave character, he would also be dealing with loss. 

“Cher Bebe was supposed to be a dentist. Or a minister” say the first two lines of this opening story, letting your readers know immediately that Cher Bebe is neither of these things, nor anything else so pedestrian. Cher Bebe is a force, a larger than life character who struts and dances and commands his way over the pages of the story, serving a situation that is both gritty and luminous. How did you bring Cher Bebe’s imagined life to the page? 

Un Arte became Cher Bebe only after I moved with my family to Lafayette, Louisiana to start a doctoral program in English. By then I’d done a lot of research on First Avenue, which had been a wild place in the nineties, and the story was several drafts in, but my main character wasn’t real to me until I realized he was from Louisiana. It’s weird to me how these things happen, but I guess I trust it too, because it happens so often for me and other writers I know. Two random experiences in Lafayette—waiting in line at the grocery store and visiting the UL-Lafayette art museum—are responsible for Cher Bebe’s arrival. At Albertson’s, the grandmotherly cashier spoke these words of admiration—cher bebe, Cajun-speak for dear baby—over every small child she saw. The warmth of these words felt like a blessing. I knew my narrator had chosen his own name, and I thought about what it would mean for him to choose this phrase of deep love, support, and blessing—in his case, spoken by his grandmother—as his identity.

Around the same time, I saw a gorgeous Mardi Gras Indian suit displayed at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette. The piece was created by the artist Rukiya Brown, and was called “Metamorphosis – The Awakening”. It was so intricate and beautiful: beaded depictions of caterpillars transforming into monarch butterflies; a 3D buffalo head framed by sequins and crystals; a butterfly headdress with a joyful top of white feathers. I thought about Cher Bebe claiming the Masking Indian tradition of his grandfather, even though he’d left Louisiana, and repurposing it in his new life as a performer at First Avenue.

After these aspects of Cher Bebe’s character became clear, I began to sense that this story was operating on two parallel levels: the clock of the one night at the club, and Cher Bebe’s reckoning with the sacrifices and freedoms of choosing a path incomprehensible to his family. While he doesn’t become a dentist or a minister, I did begin to feel that he was, in some ways, a John the Baptist character, though maybe not one many Bible readers would recognize, and that idea of a wild prophet with redemptive power guided my revisions of this story.

One of the remarkable things you do in a number of these stories is allow your readers to experience some real ugliness. Yet the stories transcend that, even use it, to get to something quite beautiful. Is this an intentional writerly move on your part, or is this something you discover along the way, the play of light and dark against one another in a character or situation? 

I think that, to the extent that I’m conscious of it, I try to work against my first impulse. For instance, “The Triumphant Return of Maggie Pancake” is at its heart a story about friendship and grief, two subjects that could easily tilt too far into sentiment. And maybe this points to my own inability to sit too long with heavy emotion, but I found it easier to explore those topics within the inherently ridiculous world of 20s and 30s dating and bar life. I write into what I don’t completely understand, and this story rose out of the bewildering loss of my best friend from childhood to cancer. I gave this loss to my narrator, Maggie, and watched her navigate it in the imagined setting of a northern Minnesota bar. The villains she encounters are comic, the man who jilts her is a professional clown, and even the real loss of her friend points to the tragicomedy that arises from outliving people you don’t feel you can live without.

Similarly, though in the opposite direction, the story “Ground Truth” began in humor and worked its way into deeper waters as I wrote. I started with the idea of a character, Len, who, as a trained weather spotter, set himself apart from the glory-seeking storm chasers who film themselves courting disaster. Len is a worrier who overprepares to handle his many fears. These character traits, sadly, doom his marriage, and this story finds him grappling with the recent fracturing of his family. He is also tracking a weather system—a real danger loosely based on a tornado that hit Dexter, MI in 2012—that threatens to upend his daughter’s birthday party. While early drafts of this story were perhaps a bit hard on poor Len, his travails ended up reminding me, in an Everyman kind of way, how the immutable traits that make us who we are, and also make us incompatible long-term with so many others, are incredibly funny even as they cause such heartbreak.

A few short pieces in this collection go further into that ugliness you mentioned. They are short because I can only handle their subject matter in small doses, and I know they’ve shocked a few readers, but in each case I felt I needed to explore the various shades of evil they represent. Sexual predators, corrupt political tricksters, and domestic abusers exist, and these flash pieces are my attempts to dive, however briefly, into their realities. These short pieces may lean more on poetic language, if only to give me something to hold onto as I look closely at things I’d rather not see. While as a teenager I inhaled graphic depictions of horror, both in film and on the page, age and parenthood have rendered me more vulnerable, so my own contributions to the genre will probably remain lyric and compressed.

As you talk about those pieces and how you navigated their tricky terrain of the funny and serious as well as the good and bad found in the everydayness of these stories, I am reminded of how deeply set in the Midwest so much of this book is. Do you consider your stories Midwestern stories? Do you consider yourself a Midwestern writer? And if yes, why or how?

I’ll defer to one of my writing mentors, the great John McNally of Chicago, who wrote “quintessential Midwestern” on my master’s thesis (a project which included the early stages of my novella, Hoist House). I guess you’d have to ask him what qualified me for that status, but, yes, I think I can’t help but write stories most people would tag as Midwestern. I grew up in Minnesota, spent another two decades in Michigan, and now live in Wisconsin. With the exception of some other adventures—waiting tables near Harvard Square in Boston, working on a nature tour sailboat on the coast of Alabama, and seven years in Lafayette, LA for a doctoral program in English—I’ve lived in the Midwest my whole life.

Sometimes you see your home more clearly after being away. My family felt that way when we moved back to the Midwest from Louisiana. We’re in a tiny Norwegian farming town in Wisconsin now and it’s a very specific type of Midwest: gnomes all over town, signs written in Norwegian, everybody raising two fingers off the steering wheel in greeting when you drive past. My mom’s family is Norwegian, my dad’s mostly Danish and Finnish, and I recognize the emphasis on the community over the individual, with anyone appearing to brag ignored by all until they stop showing off. I definitely write out of that Scandinavian subset of the Midwestern experience. The narrator of Hoist House, the novella in this collection, is the 14-year-old daughter of Finnish immigrants. Her immersion in, and quiet rebellion against, the strictures of her 1923 Iron Range Minnesota upbringing have been confusing to a few people who weren’t familiar with that community’s insistence on stoic reserve, but other Midwestern friends have understood her dilemma immediately.

That being said, the minute you write about Scandinavian immigrants and Minnesota, you’re in Lake Wobegon territory, and I was actively writing against easy answers and stereotypes. I love Minnesota and Minnesotans, but any historical accounting that ignores real tragedies and injustices—theft of Indigenous land, the cultural genocide of boarding schools, exploitation of immigrant workers, the KKK and lynchings in place like Duluth—is just a fable. Researching and writing the novella allowed me to reckon with ugly truths that are often papered over in favor of Midwestern narratives that make the majority feel comfortable. 

You mentioned one of your mentors, the stellar Midwestern writer John McNally. You and I were both fortunate to have a mentor and friend in common: the remarkable Jack Driscoll. Jack died quite suddenly recently, leaving behind dozens of writers who had been his students and hundreds–if not thousands–of others deeply affected by his work.

Would you mind talking about the importance of mentorship to you, and perhaps to any emerging writer? Did Jack offer you guidance with HOIST HOUSE ? In what way?

And in your own capacity as a teaching writer, are you aware of your role as mentor to others and how it affects your writing?

Like a lot of fledgling writers, I was first mentored by my local library. I haven’t lost the sense of magic I felt as a little kid entering the building with my mom and leaving an hour later with a towering stack of books. From the fantasy of Anne McCaffrey and Madeleine L’Engle to the horror of Stephen King—and as a teenager discovering Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, John Irving, and so many others–the books that transported, thrilled, and educated me made me a reader. And as addiction specialists will warn you, it’s only a short, slippery step from being a reader to becoming a writer. I’m always interested in hearing about the literary lineage of my favorite writers: who did you love? who made you want to write? I hope current and future kids are given the same opportunity I had to read freely and widely. Libraries are our treasures and should be protected and cherished, not vilified.

I had great teachers as an undergrad at Carleton College—Mary Moore Easter, Wayne Carver, Keith Harrison, Paulette Alden—and fell into a supportive creative community when I moved to the Sleeping Bear Dunes region of Michigan a few years after college. Jack Driscoll, who was teaching at Interlochen Arts Academy then, was an integral part of that community, but I didn’t study with him until I entered Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in 2012. I worked through the first pages of Hoist House with my mentors at Pacific: Craig Lesley, Pam Houston, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and, my last semester, Jack Driscoll. I’d been writing on my own for quite some time, and publishing short stories and poetry, but I’ll never be able to repay the debt I owe these teachers. They pushed and encouraged me and showed me, by their example, how to write and teach and be of service to a larger community of writers. Jack always said that he was prouder of his former students’ books on his bookshelf than he was of his own, and by now that number is substantial. His legacy will continue to ripple out long after his passing.

Probably the best way that I can honor Jack’s legacy, as well as those of all the teachers I’ve been lucky to study with, is to keep that energy moving forward, to offer the kind of guidance and encouragement that I was given. I taught fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction as Writer-in-Residence for Front Street Writers, a program for high school students in Traverse City, Michigan, and as a doctoral student at UL-Lafayette I taught creative writing, early American literature, modern drama, and global short fiction. While I haven’t had much luck on the academic job market so far, I really miss teaching and I’m on the lookout for new opportunities now that I’ve moved back to the Midwest. For me, teaching fills the creative well more than it depletes it. There’s something magical about a room filled with people engaged in making art. My goal as a teacher is always to create a safe, welcoming, generative community where we learn and grow as writers together. The world doesn’t always value this kind of work, but for those of us who need to create to be happy, it’s essential that we have time and space to gather and support one another.

PATRICIA ANN McNAIR has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. An Associate Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, McNair facilitates workshops all over the US and is the Artistic Director of Interlochen College of Creative Arts’ Writers Retreat. The Temple of Air (stories) received the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and the Society of Midland Authors (US) Finalist Award. Responsible Adults (stories) was named a Distinguished Favorite in the Independent Press Awards. McNair’s essay collection, And These are The Good Times, was named a finalist for the Montaigne Medal.

JENNY ROBERTSON is a writer from Lake Shore, MN. She holds a BA in Natural History from Carleton College, an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University, and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Jenny has served as writer-in-residence for Front Street Writers, as creative writing instructor for Interlochen Arts Camp and Ellipsis Writing, and has taught American literature, creative writing, global short fiction, and drama at UL-Lafayette. She is also a publishing poet and received the William J. Shaw Prize for poetry. Jenny currently lives in Wisconsin with her family.