Mary Kay Zuravleff July 2, 2024

Two or three times in my life, I’ve had instant affinity with a writer, and one of those times was meeting John Mauk. His fierce imagination, dramatic skills, and ingenious use of language are evident in every dang sentence—and he’s also a smart, generous critic. Soon after meeting, we commenced to egg each other on in weekly emails, which also included rants about the writing life or thoughts on how another author pulled off a particular magic trick. We both enjoy taking apart the work of writers we admire, especially when we’re flummoxed by our own drafts. I’m proud to be his buddy, reader, and draft-swapper. 

MKZ: Congratulations on Where All Things Flatten, your new novel-in-stories. Since I met you, we have been writer pals who rely on each other for advice and courage. After emailing you every Tuesday for years, I actually welcome having your voice in my head, challenging me to take my instincts up a notch, so thank you for that. I give a nod of gratitude in your direction when readers praise particular passages in my latest book, American Ending.

In your latest, I don’t know if I’m more in awe of the predicaments you create for your characters or the language you use to describe them. The narrator sees through to the black smudges on their soul, ever ready to give them another chance. And, oh man!, the dialogue fulfills the goal I set for myself, which is that dialogue is something one character does rather than says to another. Allow me to pick your brain!

JM: I live by your dialogue goal. In any conversation, we’re always up to something beyond expression itself. In this exchange, you and I are not only trading thoughts; we’re reinforcing shared beliefs, bolstering professional ethos, performing our writerly selves in a public forum, cheering one another, and—to be honest—making a case for the value of our written work.

In our stories, exchanges are driven by desperate needs—each character working their karmic tail off to change the prevailing winds. The motives are subtle, their needs seething between words. That’s why good dialogue is riveting. It dramatizes what characters are doing or trying to do, and it’s mostly subtextual. Sometimes, readers must figure it out along with other characters. By the way, your novels do all this beautifully. They allow readers to find their way into the characters’ needs. Dialogue is one of the doorways.

Thank you!

You’re very welcome. I try to remember—especially when a scene needs more vibrance—that language is not transparent. It doesn’t accurately represent an external or internal reality. We writers are always looking for the right word, but language doesn’t care about rightness. In the heat of a linguistic moment, sentences go off the rails on a crazy train. Stuff comes out in idiomatic spurts, in clunky, stupid, and un-pretty ways. Dialogue is our opportunity to capture some of that, to dramatize the beautiful incoherence, sophistication colliding—in the same mouth—with dunderheadedness.     

In short, I take every bit of dialogue as an opportunity—especially when characters are wiseacres or boozed-up mouthy wiseacres. For instance, in “Panda’s Wishes” I tried to let two characters dance through a long and quasi-intimate conversation about work. There isn’t much of a plot—action outside the long exchange. Their lives show up in the conversation, nowhere else. Everything that matters to them gets half-uttered. To be honest, this story was an experiment, an attempt to get as much life as possible into a single conversation.

Reading your stories is like being shot out of a cannon—well,  what I imagine being shot out of a cannon might feel like. Talk about process as it relates to that propulsion and intensity, not to mention danger. In first draft, do explosions go off all over the place, and you must shape/contain them in subsequent drafts? Or are you packing the TNT in with each draft, lighting the fuse, and seeing how it goes?

Thanks! That’s the type of description every writer longs for. Like you, I’ve never been shot out of a cannon, but I like fiction to push me toward some aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual boundary. I don’t want to nod along in agreement. I don’t want my biases or worldview confirmed. I want to be shaken, concerned about characters’ decisions. While I can certainly sympathize with all my characters, I hope I’ve winced at what they’ve cooked up. In fact, I hope my characters have made me nervous. If not, what’s the point?

Early in my process, I typically have a sense of the main trouble. If I know what a character yearns for, I can get a plot going. After I capture the general arc, I can settle into nuances—all the secrets, desires, and bad decisions that make things messy, then messier. And here’s a confession: my early drafts lack TNT. They’re basic. After I live in the story for a while, I can start packing in the powder—and then lighting it.

In “The Angel of Lead Belly’s,” a server, Lana Peres, glances into the restaurant dumpster and thinks she sees a human arm. So the story starts with some mystery. Is it an arm or arm-looking trash? As I lived in Lana’s situation for a few drafts, I realized a deeper entanglement: She doesn’t want to deal with the question—she’s overworked, drained from family politics, and dreading the dinner shift. But the question follows her, haunts her. As others get involved, the story is less about the arm and more about the people fretting around the dumpster. My point: The second layer didn’t happen initially. It grew through various drafts—and I think it’s the prevailing force of the story, the reason it’s more than a gross moment behind a restaurant.

These linked stories take place in or around Lead Belly’s, a rural Midwestern dive bar which is as much sanctuary as powder keg. Three different owners struggle at the helm in stories that stretch over twenty-six years. We readers feel like accomplices in their disasters, along with those of their customers, servers, bartenders, thieves, and extended families. Can you discuss you as moth to this bar flame?

I like bars, bartenders, servers, even kitchen folk. (For a few years, I was a kitchen folk—a ponytailed grill/fry guy. Since then, I’ve become a regular at plenty of places, which says something about me.) Bars are kind of a miracle. In this highly privatized, super-modern, individualistic culture, a place of collective and easygoing pleasure stands out. And if you work in or frequent a bar/restaurant, you realize something about the sociology: Most of the staff is Steinbeckian. They believe their better days lie ahead. They’re on an upward slope to a higher plain. That belief is countered by the insistence of customers, the quotidian patterns of consumption, empty glasses, a full grill, dirty plates, grimy floors, and irate managers. The dinner rush squeezes out all contemplation, all past and future. There’s no time to meditate on life’s failures. Meditation comes afterward—on a smoke break or during a post-shift beverage.

That rhythm is further complicated by extra-restaurant life: dying parents, dead fathers, domineering mothers, wayward sisters, college classes, failed exams, addictions, poverty, and flaming relationships. Add all this together, pour in several adult beverages, and stir. You’re bound to witness a good story.

Maybe this is a public service announcement: Tip your bartenders and servers.

Your diction is so vivid and fresh, I could quote from every page. An intruder is “one of those hard drinkers with fish-belly skin and piggy skin.” The regulars are “bargoyles.” A customer has been “smearing his germy presence around for a full year.” When the earliest bar owner is nearly treed by a thief, she has a familiar flash forward of anxiety: “Hula could feel a boil of possibility, something physical, something with fists and screaming, . . . decades of good life stolen. She pictured her brother and sister getting a call from Toledo, from some unknown voice. We found your sister.”

Even your description of the weather rocks: “Saturday was pulpy warm. . . March would turn to gray fecal matter like usual but this fingery breeze and freakish blue sky felt like a victory lap. . . .”

Tips, please, on word choice—how to use words that already exist, the ability to invent a word, or ways to surprise and satisfy the reader with the unexpected, right word? I guess I’m asking, too, about what drafts that language happens in.

Again, thank you. My early drafts are much more flat, even voiceless. After I get characters moving around, interacting, fighting for/against something, I can start pushing on the language, both the narrator’s tone and the characters’ conversations. For me, plot makes for heavy lifting. It’s the grunt work. Then comes the real pleasure: adding rocket fuel to sentences, finding fresh ways to describe fear, panic, longing, disgust, and so on. For what it’s worth, I also spend a good deal of time speaking the prose, whispering it or announcing it. If I let the words stay on the screen—and not live in my mouth—they can get too heady, so by the third draft, I’m usually talking aloud. I want to hear a cadence in each voice. That takes time, lots of time.

Years ago, my wife and I attended a lecture by Russell Chatham, the hailed American landscape artist. His work is known for its grand simplicity—open landscapes, sweeping views. Someone from the audience asked him about process—how long it takes to render a field or mountain scene. When he said, “about a year,” the audience gasped. He went on to explain that developing artists “stop painting exactly when they should start.” He meant the nuances that attract eyes come slowly over time, uncountable small strokes working in concert.

Why so many years and owners, rather than a year in the life of Lead Belly’s and its circle? Asked another way: How do you keep characters distinct while weaving and carrying through so many people’s stories?

Thanks for calling that out. I hoped to place these characters in familiar patterns, to have them acquire similar woes, dreams, and frustrations. At the same time, each must have a distinct crisis or problem. For example, Simon Bettendorf, who shows up in several stories, is a liberal grill cook in 2004. Like millions of people in that era, he hates George W and Dick Cheney. Fair enough. But he also loves a woman who might be dying. He wants to be a political pundit like James Carville (before he started waxing his head). And while Simon is smart enough to run a small country, he lacks motivation to move onward from his grill cook life. He’s resigned to Lead Belly’s and whatever it does to him.

And his distinctness, his weirdness, impacts everyone else. When he and Holly Matthews, a new server, fall in love, she acquires some of his impulses and vice versa. They don’t simply influence one another; they absorb the      other’s attributes. We are entangled and codependent. And in a closed environment like a bar, the acquisition of otherness gets intense.

Your characters are each eking out a life, and the compassion you show—you are equal to George Saunders in that skill—ensures that we are on their team as they fight with and often lose control of their lives. They’re tetchy when they walk into Lead Belly’s; while the drinking intensifies whatever ails them, the bar itself is the eye of their storm. In this potentially menacing setting, the collective soothes rather than provokes. What’s your secret to capturing often self-destructive but largely self-aware characters in a working-class neighborhood?

I appreciate your point about self-destruction. Most often, it’s the real force of demise—at least for my favorite characters. Coincidentally, I just read a compelling article by John Pipkin (in Good River Review), which dives deep into this issue. Pipkin offers a Latinate term, cacoethes, or “the irrepressible urge to do ill-advised things.” He says we can see this urge in countless protagonists—be they wayward, doddering, or heroic.  

I’m convinced. Granted, there are ample threats around us. Cars, cancer, viruses, and bullets abound. Gravity is also a mean antagonist. But I believe cacoethes ends up doing the most damage in our everyday lives. And while this may sound a bit grand, I wonder if some jobs, even whole industries, come packaged with self-destruction. Some walks of life stoke intrapersonal rebellion—the need to mar something in oneself or bash one’s existence against the walls.

I have no secret sauce for capturing such a life, but I always hope to see characters as real, not objects of intrigue or representations. And the best way to make them dimensional—fully alive except for breathing—is by putting them in a community. When they respond to and engage others, their humanity blooms. For instance, in the second story, we meet Hula, one of Lead Belly’s several owners. We get to experience her within an intimate relationship, but we also get to know her through the eyes of an employee in another story, “Never a Middle.”

In these stories and this setting, tension often leads to violence. In fact, where crowded drunken nights tend toward brawls, lack of violence is a surprise. In the novella, the beautiful title cut “Where All Things Flatten,” Simon confirms to Lana, the current bar owner, that he and Holly are an item. And you write: “‘I’m all for it,’ Lana said. ‘We could use some tenderness in this place.’”

Talk about writing violence and lack thereof. I know you played music in bars for years, so you’ve witnessed more than most. But keep talking about how you as a writer are attracted to people who wrestle, verbally and physically, with their tormentors. 

Yes, between kitchen jobs and my years as a working musician, I’ve seen my share of strident physicality. (How’s that for euphemism?) When you spend three, four, five nights a week in a bar, you’re bound to see people at their most desperate. And here’s a secret about late-night life: At some point in the circadian rhythm of bars, the atmosphere shifts. Words start losing their rhetorical force and bodies take the foreground.

 Stitching these stories together, I realized how much physicality matters—how often the characters work to manage their own and others’ violence. Is there too much? I mean, I don’t even like to see anyone fall down. Seriously. It always strikes me as the saddest thing ever. So I’m not attracted to violence, but as you perfectly describe, to people who wrestle with their demons. In a bourgeois society, we use lawyers, human resource departments, social media posts, or other institutions to battle our tormentors. That all makes sense, but I’m also here to say: people have arms, legs, teeth, and foreheads. Those get used regularly, way more often than polite society wants to imagine, especially after midnight.

Here’s one twist. For years, I’ve said X begets X. It’s a formula that dominates the biosphere and infosphere. Trees beget trees, ants beget ants, love begets love, violence begets violence, and so on. In “Driving the Messiah,” however, the main character disrupts the formula. In a sublime moment, he turns violence to tenderness. If you can do that, you’re beyond the conventional patterns of life. You’re divine. That’s the narrator’s revelation.

You landed on my favorite story in the collection, a moment where the enlightened Julien reveals to both the narrator and the antagonist a way to grace. What a great place to stop, my talented friend. Best of luck with your book in the world.

Mary Kay Zuravleff’s fourth book, American Ending, was an Oprah Spring Book Pick and a finalist for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Her third novel, Man Alive!, was a Washington Post notable book. She lives in Washington, DC. Find out more.

John Mauk began professional life as a rhetorical theorist and then fell headlong into fiction. His stories have appeared in journals such as Salamander, Arts and Letters, New Millennium Writings, Concho River Review, The Forge, and The Mainstreet Rag; his nonfiction in Rumpus, Beatrice.com, Writer’s Digest, and various anthologies. He has two full-length story collections, Field Notes for the Earthbound and Where All Things Flatten. He currently hosts Prose from the Underground, a free online video series for working writers. He lives and writes in northern Michigan. Find out more.