Author Andre Dubus III calls the writing process "beautiful, mysterious . . . even sacred." Rather than telling a story, he seeks to "find the story" through writing into images, writing in "a dreamlike state" before any plotting or editing.
Dubus's latest novel, "The Garden of Last Days," is a layered work with multiple viewpoints that tackles the complexities of fanaticism, violence, sex, subjugation and rampant consumerism. Set in Florida in the early days of September 2001 preceding the 9/11 attacks, the book focuses on the intersection of the lives of April, a single mom and stripper, and her three-year-old daughter, her ailing landlady/babysitter, a strip club bouncer, a distraught club client, and Bassam, an Islamic extremist plotting a violent mission. Writer Irvine Welsh praised the novel in The Guardian for its compassionate characterization and wrote: "Dubus's writing makes most post-9/11 novels . . . seem knee-jerk, shabby and out of time."
Dubus is probably best known for his novel "House of Sand and Fog," a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999, and the basis for a 2003 movie starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly that was nominated for three Academy Awards. His other books include "The Cage Keeper and Other Stories" (1989) and the novel "Bluesman" (1993). He has received numerous awards for his short fiction.
Dubus teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He has also worked as a carpenter, contractor, bounty hunter, corrections officer, bartender and more. He's currently working on a memoir that explores his hardscrabble youth and life with his father, Andre Dubus, a revered short fiction master.
Dubus recently spoke about his writing process from his home in Massachusetts as he chauffeured his children to various destinations and then created a five-cheese pasta sauce (Gouda, mozzarella and cheddar included).
Was "The Garden of Last Days" sparked by a need to somehow deal with September 11th in fiction?
No. I honestly had no intention of writing about 9/11. I had this strange, lingering image of a lot of cash on a bedroom bureau. I've learned to trust these images, and I [wrote] into it. It became clear [the money] was tips of a stripper in Florida. I probably got that from stories about these [hijackers] being seen in strip clubs before the attack. How could they be so extreme in their interpretation of Islam to commit mass murder and suicide? But I was more interested in what it was like to be a woman who danced naked for one of these men and then, after that horrific day, to have this blood money in her possession. That question and that image gave birth to the whole novel.
Does your fiction usually start with an image in that way?
Exactly. I never know why I'm writing what I'm writing. I don't know what I'm trying to say, if anything. I consciously try not to say anything, because I've found that if I try to say anything in my fiction it reduces it and eventually kills it. I learn over and over that the writing is smarter than the writer, and the joy of writing is the astonishing discoveries.
Your work seems to be what John Gardner called "moral fiction:" not moralistic or judgmental but tackling complex moral questions and leaving a sense of mystery.
I think you're right. In a wonderful essay called "The Magic Show" the writer Tim O'Brien says that successful characterization in literature is an opening up of mystery -- not a solving of mystery, but a capturing of it. There are no answers to this man or woman; there's just a deeper experience of him or her.
You've said you write in a dreamlike state with plot and editing later.
Yes. I drive that home to my writing students: you've got to find the story first. You've got to put the clay on the table or you have nothing to work with. Then you worry about plotting, which is a shaping of the thing.
Can you describe your research process?
When we're writing, we're making up a story or imagining it. The challenge is to write scenes that are true. Research is important because, unless you're dealing with the facts of experience, the imagination has nothing solid to work with.
There's a wonderful line from Hemingway about "not the why, but the what." I tell the students don't go after people on deep psychological questions, just ask them the what. I interviewed a few strippers and I never asked them what it's like to dance naked for a stranger. I asked how much they made. Where they put their money. What happens if they don't earn enough money in a night? Then you bring your knowledge of human beings to the table. The character-driven fiction I write is a sustained act of empathy where I'm asking what's it like to be you.
Did you visit strip clubs to research "Last Days?"
I went to two clubs. It was not too painful, but it was a weird, dark, depressing scene. These women [asked] to get a private dance, and I would say, "Can I just ask you questions?" They were happy to sit down, and I'd ask them questions about their jobs, and give them 20 bucks a song for doing it. I wish they knew I had a Guggenheim Fellowship and it was all tax deductible.
Did you also talk with managers and bouncers?
No. All those guys I imagined instead. So much of that stuff is transferable from my experience. For years, I was a bartender in the restaurant business.
And I read you were a bounty hunter and corrections officer too.
Yes. Isn't that weird? That happened in a six- to eight-month period in my 20s. I had a job in a halfway house in Boulder working with convicted adult felons. One of the guys in the house also worked in his own private investigation business and did bounty hunting. He went after guys with prices on their heads and brought them in. He was really a healer and worked with them once he caught them and tried to help them through the system. I worked with him and went to Mexico looking for a killer and all sorts of weird stuff.
Did you do extensive background research for " Last Days"?
I've never done more research than I did to try to become Bassam. I resisted writing from his point of view. About a year and a half into [the writing], the resistance was literally making the story sick. I realized I had to practice what I preach, follow the impulses of this thing and let him in. It was clear to me I was trying to have a guy in the story whose existence I couldn't imagine.
I didn't work on the novel for about five months. I read all day long. I read the history of Islam. I read the Qur'an from cover to cover twice. I read the history of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and read about Saudi Arabian customs and food. I read the 9/11 Commission report. Thirty-some books. By the time I was done, I could teach a course on Islamic extremism.
I took that book learning and tried to be open and receptive to this guy coming in, and he did. He started to talk to me right away.
Bassam's father observes that jihad is not war, but the struggle within oneself.
Jihad comes from an Arabic word, which means to strive or to struggle, and its essential meaning is to strive to be closer to God. I had the father in there because each of these [hijackers] came from moderate Islamic families. Not one came from an extremist family. I didn't want to add to the divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims. There's enough of that. It was important that I had a voice for the moderate majority through his father.
Your writing is very rhythmic. Do you write poetry?
I don't write it [now], but I read it more and more. Poetry feeds me. I'm not a religious man, and poetry is my daily prayer. I read it before I write every day and it brings me to a more meditative state. What poets do so well is boil things down to the essence. I also like how poetry focuses on the non-dramatic, quotidian moments that on the surface wrongly seem not worth exploring. Jane Kenyon is particularly good at that.
And your work expresses the ordinary in surprising ways.
I'm writing my best when I completely disappear. D.H. Lawrence said, "It is not I who write, but the wind that blows through me." You simply try to write the tree as it is, the boy as he is, the moon as it is [and] that's when illumination can happen.
When you plan and plot and control and contrive, you're sending a message to your imagination that you don't trust it, and the imagination says back I don't trust you either, and it doesn't show up.
When I'm writing well, it's not as if I'm gripped with a story to tell. It's more that I'm gripped with a story to find [and] that flow of finding that keeps fueling the story. E.L. Doctorow says that the writing creates more writing, and amen to that.
Who are writers that you find inspiring?
There are so many wonderful writers. One of my heroes who I met recently is William Kennedy in Albany. He's 80 now and doing great. I've taught his novel "Ironweed," an American masterpiece. I dedicated The Garden of Last Days to the writer Larry Brown [who wrote] character-driven, compassionate fiction where you could feel him as the writer trying to understand these people and writing the story as honestly as he could. It wasn't about the writer, but to illuminate the truth of the lives of the characters. I love the short stories of Alice Munro. My old man is one of my favorite writers, and E. L. Doctorow, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver. So many.
What's your advice for people who want to write?
Faulkner was asked what a writer needs to create what he had done. He said, "It ain't talent." I agree with him. Talent doesn't hurt, but the main thing, he said, was "curiosity, insight, to wonder, to mull and to muse why it is man does what he does." He said if you've got that, then talent doesn't make much difference.
As a child, you've said, your family was poor and you moved frequently.
Yes. My family was already financially strapped and then the divorce happened. This was the late 60s. We were a one-income family. My dad made $7,000 a year as a full-time college teacher. He had to support our rented house, his rented apartment, his $100 used car. We went from poor to poorer. We moved two or three times a year for cheaper rent. I was always the new kid and got beat up a lot. It was also the end of the Vietnam War.
There was a lot worth expressing [from my childhood] and I've been trying to do it as fiction for 27 years. After "House of Sound and Fog," I went back to that novel and spent three and a half years on it, and sent it to my publisher. My editor said it wasn't done yet. I realized I'm not the kind of writer who can write fiction from my life, and that was a valuable insight.
What are you working on now?
I actually have a contract for a collection of personal essays. I started an essay and I'm 440 pages into it. It's an accidental, reluctant memoir, and that's whats in the works.