Damian Tarnopolsky, "Chris Cornell"

It’s December 19. Damian Tarnopolsky, author of Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster, can solo just as well on an acoustic.

How would you describe your story?

DAMIAN TARNOPOLSKY: It’s a commonplace that all writing comes from reading, but with this story it’s deeply true—it’s a close response to a story that I love, Isaac Babel's “Guy de Maupassant.” I'm working on a book of adaptations, rereading and rewriting some of my favourite short stories. The project started with this piece, but to be honest I feel like I’ve been breathing Babel's story in and out for twenty years and will probably go on.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

DT: Well, I haven’t literally been working on this story for twenty years, that would be insane. But it was a big one for me when I first read it, in my mum and dad’s blue-carpeted little TV room full of books in the house we first lived in when we first moved to Canada. It’s about art, love, youth, desire, mystery—it has everything. I remember the physical feeling the ending of the story brought on in me, its cautiously incredible last sentences, how delicately they proceed word by word, step by step, like a deer edging out onto the ice. At least in Walter Morison’s translation; I don’t speak or read Russian, in spite of my surname. Anyway, I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.

I studied the story, inconsequentially, pressed it onto people with mixed results, taught it in workshops similarly, and then started on my own version of it, stopped, started, stopped... It was hanging over me for a long time until, as often happens, the opportunity came to publish it (thank you, Short Story Advent Calendar—nothing like a deadline to concentrate the mind).

Usually I keep my influences more hidden, but in this story the influence is naked. Which is an interesting part of the larger project. It means I find myself altering my style in conversation with the original, trying on new voices, expanding the kinds of stories that I can write. You can’t write exactly like the people you love most, but every time you try to copy them you make mistakes, and those are part of what makes the work new. I think Lewis Hyde said that in The Gift. 

What kind of research went into this story?

DT: Reading and writing, in the manner described above, viz:

IF in the following my daughter is me and Isaac Babel is my son, THEN when my daughter was younger she was a bit of an artist, and her older brother came home from school one day carrying a drawing he’d done that had some cross-hatched shading on it and she was amazed by it. Like very seriously she said, “How did you do that?” She took the piece of paper off him; I thought she might eat it. But she sat down to draw, and make it her own.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

DT: I teach writing from time to time, so I have lots of clever things to say about this that I’ve stolen from cleverer people than me over the years. For example, we were just talking about endings:

One idea I’ve encountered and the like is the short story as decisive moment, almost in the photographic sense employed by Cartier-Bresson, i.e., the short story as capturing a frozen instant around which everything is arranged. Maybe this instant is the ending? This model would be in contrast to the novel considered cinematically, as a possibly infinite reel, I mean, as something that might be infinitely extended, that could begin in Hammurabic Babylon and then have a section among feral cats in 18th-century Tangiers and go on to Pluto or Andromeda, say. 

I believe this distinction comes from Julio Cortázar in some brilliant lectures he gave at Berkeley, but I also believe that Milan Kundera is saying something similar when he argues (for this reason?) that a short story is not a “little novel” but ontologically different—different in its being, different in its bones. Its own thing. (Incidentally, people who write short stories to learn to write novels, as I did, or write stories to take a break from novels, as I have done, are going about everything the wrong way.)

But endings: I remember this from a story contest I once entered. They said to think of your short story as an ending. They offered this advice on the contest website: “If you don’t have an ending, you don’t have a story.” But an ending can be lots of things: you could think of this as referring to the emotional height of the story, the felt climax, rather than literally the last word or punctuation mark. (I didn’t win.)

Kathryn Kuitenbrower says that perhaps unexpectedly a short story can afford the writer more stylistic flexibility than a novel does, and I think that she’s right. I’ve certainly seen and felt that in my work. And in terms of endings, Nancy Baele just got in touch with me about the ending of “The Moslem Wife” by Mavis Gallant, and now I think of it as very much like the Babel ending. I like inexplicable endings. I find many more of those in short stories than novels, I think, maybe because the end of a novel may be expected to do more narrative work. The ending of my story is my copy of Babel’s ending, and similar short-story-only endings. 

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

DT: Two places:

1) My new book. Please buy it and read it and let me know what you think.

2) You can get in touch via my website, which also has fuller info about readings, reviews, how I’m keeping busy. Please visit!

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

DT: I’m very happy to be in this beautiful box of stories...

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