By William Lychack
My friendship with Miles Harvey goes back 35 years, back to our MFA days at the University of Michigan. Hardly a week goes by when we’re not on the phone or writing emails or even visiting in real life to go bowling, and I shudder to think where my life would be without his steady voice and wisdom and honesty about work and teaching and parenthood and all the other things that make up a lifelong friendship. It was such an honor to celebrate and talk about his writing, such a gift to read closely his new collection of stories, The Registry of Forgotten Objects. I thought I knew Miles Harvey. I thought I knew his work, his three books of nonfiction, The King of Confidence, Painter in a Savage Land and The Island of Lost Maps. I thought I knew his dedication as a teacher of creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago. But this conversation deepened my love and respect for him. We spoke on Zoom for almost two hours, and the first transcript came to over 12 thousand words. As you can imagine, we made some edits to downplay—or distill—an affinity we have for sharing questions and ideas and beliefs with one another.
LYCHACK: Miles, you’ve had all these varied careers—a journalist, a magazine editor, a book editor, a children’s book writer, a college professor, an author of narrative nonfiction, and more—and now you have a book of fiction. How do all these various aspects of you and your work intermingle?
HARVEY: Well, an important component of this book is the secret lives of inanimate objects. One of the things I do with my nonfiction students is what I call the “troubling object” exercise. I’ll have them bring in an object to class that troubles them in some way. It could be a sacred object–a family heirloom or some other precious possession. But it also might just be an item that they can’t wrap their head around easily. One student, for instance, brought in a strand of woolly mammoth hair encased in plastic, which his girlfriend had given him just prior to announcing that she wanted to break up. So, we’ll talk about these objects in class, and then they’ll go and write essays about them. I get some of my best work from students on this assignment, in part because objects can outlive us by centuries or even millennia and as a result are just buzzing with stories. But we also project stories into them, give them our own meanings that often have nothing to do with the artifact itself.
With this book, I had six older stories I wanted to include in the collection. And I started by just trying to listen to those stories. One of the few blessings of becoming older and more mature as a writer is that you gain the ability to really listen to your work and sort of figure out what it wants to tell you. So I did that for the older stories, as well as for the newer ones, because for once in my life, I sat down and wrote a bunch of stories in fairly quick succession, by which I mean over the course of a couple of years. I became really interested in the objects that I was writing about and how they intersected with human hopes and fears, and then I started thinking about how the stories might fit together.
LYCHACK: And so how do the stories fit together for you?
HARVEY: Well, I wouldn’t call The Registry of Forgotten Objects a “story cycle,” since that term seems too geometric and tidy for what I was trying to accomplish. The characters in this book don’t necessarily know each other, nor do they share the same time period, the same location or even the same fictive reality. But there are other ways to connect the dots. Andrea Barrett, a writer I really admire, talks about “quiet linkages” between stories. And I started to think that my own stories wanted quiet linkages and that sometimes the objects wanted to be those linkages.
A lot of the fiction I love lately are books where the stories feel connected but not completely tied to each other–books such as Barrett’s Natural History, Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World and Peter Ho Davies’s The Fortunes. Another book I just loved was Joan Silber’s Secrets of Happiness, in which one person who’s a minor character in one story will become the major character in another story later in the book. And somehow, I just found that really satisfying, perhaps because there’s a kind of a randomness to it. It’s not saying everything’s in complete order. It is saying that our lives are interconnected, and we vibrate off each other. And so I guess I was interested in those kinds of connections.
LYCHACK: All the stories have these wonderful, beautiful, kind of spellbinding lists of objects. And often these objects kind of float in and out and then around in the story or show up in different contexts in other stories. How does this interactivity work in your mind?
HARVEY: I was interested in the way objects take on new meanings and new contexts in various different narratives. One object that is really important to this collection, for instance, is a wooden barber shop pole that we first encounter in the opening story, “The Drought,” which is about a town that goes for 27 months without rain. The suggestion at the end of this tale is that the pole has been thrown in a river. And in the next story, which is about a grieving couple who go back to a beach every year to search for their drowned son, this same barbershop pole washes up with the surf. For one of the characters, it becomes a sort of substitute for his vanished son. Then this same pole reappears at various points in the collection until the very final story, “The Registry of Forgotten Objects,” when it falls into the hands of an old man who has no idea what it is or what it means but thinks that it’s beautiful and that it somehow seems to connect all the random parts of his nomadic life. To quote the story: “Everything is intertwined like those stripes, everything is part of a pattern, everything rises.”
LYCHACK: That’s beautiful. And it makes me think of our former teacher Charles Baxter’s notion of “rhyming action,” which he describes in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. I’m thinking of the rhyming action between that older man in “The Registry of Forgotten Objects” and the grieving mother in “Beachcombers in Doggerland,” who finds that barbershop pole in the surf. They’re both cradling the thing like a newborn, almost. And then the woman’s husband gives that same pole a secret burial. He hides it directly under their bed, as I recall.
HARVEY: Correct. He comes to see the object as a substitute for his dead son. And speaking of rhyming action, I just realized that there’s another story in which loved ones are buried beneath beds. In “Postcard from a Funeral,” there’s an archaeologist who works at the Çatalhöyük site in Turkey, researching a 9,000-year-old civilization that buried their ancestors beneath their beds. So whether I’m always conscious of it or not, I’m obviously interested in the way the past impinges on the present, the way we look to the past for meaning and sometimes get it and often don’t but always keep searching. Another story, “The Master of Patina,” is about a time and place where people are swept up in a kind of extreme nostalgia and become completely obsessed with finding artifacts from a lost golden age. I wrote that piece long before the Trump era and I never intended it as any sort of political allegory, but I suppose it has more resonance than ever in our own radically nostalgic time, when millions of Americans are walking around in red baseball caps that say Make America Great Again. This sense that we’ve lost what we had, that we have to turn back the clock to get it back, that the past is our salvation–it’s a very human longing, whether or not you agree with all of its political manifestations.
LYCHACK: It seems to me that your characters are always centered around themes of identity and reinvention. I’m thinking of everyone from the real-life map thief Gilbert Bland in The Island of Lost Maps to the 16th-century artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues in Painter in a Savage Land to prophet/con artist James Strang in The King of Confidence. There’s the pull of a kind of life-or-death striving for a new self in the world of your characters. And that’s true of your story collection, which has similar themes of reinvention and striving toward actualization of a life.
HARVEY: I’ve never thought about that before, but it’s a shrewd observation. You know, I didn’t originally set out to write about con men, who are sort of the ultimate reinventors of self. But two of my three nonfiction books–The Island of Lost Maps and The King of Confidence–were about shape-shifting scam artists. And I think you’re right that the third–Painter in a Savage Land–was about a 16th century explorer who necessarily reinvented himself several times. Among other things, he was part of the Protestant revolution, which was all about reinvention of the self. I mean, it’s not for nothing that we use the phrase “born again.”
So sometimes reinvention can be a discovery of the true self, and sometimes it can take evil forms. I played with that dynamic in a story called “The Miracles of St. Anthony.” It’s about a professional swindler who, for his own financial gain, has assumed the guise of a Roman Catholic priest. But this character deeply wants a sense of self that he doesn’t have. And for many people, I think, that sense of self comes with a sense of God. So at the end of the tale, I leave open at least the possibility for some recognition of self or some recognition of God.
There’s another character who comes in and out of several stories. She’s the younger sister of a teenage boy who disappeared into the waves one day while surfing, leaving his family in a kind of eternal limbo of grief, so she’s just a really screwed-up person. And in a story called “Four Faces,” she encounters what she thinks is her doppelganger, or maybe herself, and starts chasing that mysterious figure around New Orleans. She’s literally looking for a self. And I’m not sure she quite finds it in that story, but in another tale, she maybe comes a little closer.
LYCHACK: I’m holding all four of your books in my hands right now. [Miles and I are on Zoom, remember, and I have this display of his work ready to show him.] When you see your career sort of stacked up like that, what do you feel?
HARVEY: Well, one of the things I feel is that all my books, and perhaps especially this one, are products of an experience you and I shared 35 years ago, when we both joined the MFA program at University of Michigan. Not only did I work with two professors who had a profound effect on me, Charles Baxter and Nicholas Delbanco, but I met some colleagues who became my lifetime friends, one of whom I’m lucky enough to be talking with in this interview. Although I didn’t get my first book published until a decade later, I left Michigan with a different sense of myself, one that’s really hard to describe. For no good reason and based on zero evidence, I felt that I belonged in the world of writers. And I think part of it was just my friendship with you and a few other people. We sustained each other for years by taking each other’s work seriously.
Although all my books until this one have been nonfiction, I studied fiction-writing at Michigan and have been publishing short stories all along, often in pretty good publications. Fiction has always been this beautiful avocation, this escape. It’s definitely my favorite form of reading and might be my favorite form of writing. And so in a way, this book feels like something I began to accomplish in Ann Arbor, sitting across the workshop table from you decades ago.
LYCHACK: Yeah. Something about that experience really gave us all an ability to make a long-term commitment to the work and to the writing and to each other. It’s fascinating to me what makes someone durable as a writer.
HARVEY: Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to use you as an example here. One thing that has made me durable is just having a close friend and a writer I respect like you, with whom I’ve shared drafts of my work for many decades–good work, bad work, work that needs work. Thanks to you, I’ve always felt like there’s an audience, even if that audience is an audience of one–a reader I’d like to please, of course, but also a reader who has my best interests in mind, even when I don’t necessarily want to hear it. One of the luckiest things a writer can have is someone who will always take your work seriously. I constantly tell my students, “Be nice to your colleagues because they could mean much more to you down the road than this workshop ever will.”
LYCHACK: So as a longtime writing teacher, what are some other pieces of advice or things you notice in student writing?
HARVEY: I never seem to get tired of working with young writers, and I still learn a lot from them all the time. But perhaps my biggest worry as a teacher is that I increasingly feel my students are less curious than they used to be. And there’s no good writer I know of any kind who isn’t intensely curious. I can teach my students craft, but I can’t teach them curiosity.
LYCHACK: You can model it.
HARVEY: Yeah, I try to model it all the time, and sometimes I feel like I’m getting through to them. See, my thing is research. You know, I hear other fiction writers–and sometimes even nonfiction writers–saying, “Well, research is important, but don’t let yourself get lost down a rabbit hole.” And, man, I just love rabbit holes. To me, falling in is where the fun begins. True, I’ve wasted a lot of my life researching stuff that I never published. But it’s also true that almost all of my success as a nonfiction writer comes from being driven by the need to know more. I think the research is where I find stories. I’m not just talking about nonfiction stories. I think it’s where my mind starts spinning in fiction, as well.
Not every writer needs to be a great researcher, of course, but you do need a kind of drive that I associate with curiosity. I mean, when I think back on when you and I were in grad school, both of us just really wanted to read more, wanted to know more. And in some ways, the publishing world was in better shape then, and there were more opportunities. But in other ways, it was just that we were driven and curious in ways that didn’t make a lot of sense to anybody, certainly not to our parents or our friends, and probably not to ourselves.
LYCHACK: I’m wondering how you feel about your work as a whole. How do you navigate notions of legacy? Maybe you don’t care.
HARVEY: It’s not that I don’t care. I’ve been lucky to write a couple of books that got a fair amount of attention, but I’m not fooling myself that tons of people are going to remember my work 10 or 20 years from now. But that’s not what really matters to me. The other day, I needed to do something nice for myself, so I headed to my favorite used bookstore and began prowling the fiction shelves. Somehow, my eyes landed on a book I’d never heard of by an author I’d never read–The Film Explainer by the late German novelist Gert Hofmann. It turned out to be one of the best novels I’ve read in a very long time. So that’s my hope for this book–that somebody will stumble upon it at a bookstore or garage sale at some point in the future, and that discovering it will give them immense joy–the kind you get from a lost object found.
WILLIAM LYCHACK is the author of The Wasp Eater, The Architect of Flowers, Cargill Falls, and Sounds of the Night. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Best Small Fictions, and on public radio’s This American Life. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pittsburgh Foundation Grant, a Sherwood Anderson Award, a Christopher Isherwood Award, as well as an Independent Publishers’ Book Award.
MILES HARVEY is the author of The King of Confidence (a NY Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection), Painter in a Savage Land, and The Island of Lost Maps. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher. The Registry of Forgotten Objects: Stories is his first work of fiction. http://www.milesharvey.com