TUE., JUNE 09, 2009
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eMusic Q&A: Haven Kimmel
by Elizabeth Isadora Gold
Readers of Haven Kimmel's bestselling memoir, A Girl Named Zippy, already know how brilliantly her work straddles the line between tender coming-of-age narrative and full on kook-out. Kimmel's novels Iodine and Something Rising (Light and Swift) also defy stereotypes in all of the best ways. They are stories of Midwestern life as gothic as those of Flannery O'Connor; chronicles of the domestic spheres of home, hearth, and childhood that simultaneously tackle the Big Unspoken Subjects of poverty, class, and life on America's margins; tales of wide open spaces that feel as claustrophobic as the character's own diminishing choices.
A poet and a former divinity student, Kimmel's influences and references range both deep and wide. Perhaps this is why her work inspires such — to quote the wonderful author and feminist pioneer Vivian Gornick — "fierce attachments."
Though all of your work is set in the Midwest, it feels very Southern in terms of language, the gothic quality, the closeness of life and decay, etc. Do you consider yourself to be writing in a specifically Southern tradition? Or in any literary tradition, for that matter? Who are some of your favorite influences? As I was reading your work, I kept thinking of Ellen Gilchrist.
That's very flattering, thank you. I grew up in a town populated almost entirely by natives of Kentucky and Tennessee, who moved just a little north for the factory jobs at Chrysler and Delco-Remy. My father's side of the family was from Kentucky, and I was a feral hillbilly child from the moment I could get my shoes off my feet and head for the nearest tree. A few years ago I heard a cassette tape my mom found, recorded on my little blue tape recorder when I was about six, and my accent was so pronounced I flinched. So, in fact, I was a southerner living among other southerners in the Midwest, and then I abandoned all pretense and moved to the South. I've lived in three other states since I left Indiana: Mississippi, Louisiana and North Carolina. Pretty clear geographic trajectory. I moved to Mississippi when I was nineteen, and I was stunned to discover how much more at home I felt there than in any part of Indiana.
When I began to read — really read — the first three writers I chose were Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson and Thomas Tryon. Thanks, Mom! And I loved them, but the first book that turned me upside-down and shook me like a ragdoll was The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. I was stupefied by it. I had no idea what to do with myself. So, of course, I checked The Member of the Wedding out of the library in New Castle and that was the first and only time a book made me suicidal. A couple years later I read Virginia Woolf for the first time, and had a similar, but not so intense, reaction to To The Lighthouse.
I'm not sure how to explain what happened to me internally at the end of that novel. I was overwhelmed with grief, and I decided it would be a good time to die — not because I was so grief-stricken but because It Had Been Done. I'd read the only book that would ever matter, there it was, might as well go. I made no effort toward my own demise, not the slightest gesture. I just sat on the edge of my bed and waited. Presumably I got hungry after awhile, and thus ended my vigil.
How heavily do you research your fiction? Could you make a tidy side living hustling at pool, as Cassie did in Something Rising?
[laughs] How heavily do I research my fiction? I'm imagining what would happen if I tried answering, "Just, you know, the normal amount." Everyone who knows me would riot. Augusten Burroughs is my partially-absorbed fetal twin, and has known my comings and goings every day for the past eight years. We recently did an event together, and he was trying to explain to the audience that I might appear to be a normal person but actually I'm freakish and terrifying — I think those were the adjectives he used. He said, "Take this for instance. She decides to write a book about pool, you know, green felt, balls, a stick — anyone with a penis can play it. So she learned string theory." I could hardly deny it, but it's just like him to jump all the way to theoretical physics, he could have softened the blow a little.
Before I wrote a word of Something Rising, my husband, John, and I spent eighteen months playing pool every night. On my book tour for Solace I played pool in every city, if I could find a pool hall. I went to New Orleans to research the last third of the book, and found myself in a bar that did indeed have standard tables, and also nearly naked gay strippers. They danced on the bar itself, but you could also hire a scantily clad young man to play pool with you. That is pure New Orleans, right there.
I also played all night against a drunk and powerful man way down in Mississippi, but not on the Gulf. There was another southern novelist with me, but I won't name him because he was a damn good sport and he remained sanguine at all times, exactly as he should have, and saw it through to the end. I read every book on the mechanics of the game, and the very few novels, and bought a series of instructional videos that were painfully boring, and watched The Hustler, some parts of it over and over — which was not like work but a bonus. Jackie Gleason didn't use a pro to take his shots — that's really him playing. He's divine. And there was some study of geometry and physics, as was mentioned. And okay, Jung and James Hillman on the animus figure, fathers transported to the Underworld.
I'd say that's pretty much how it goes with every book. Or it did, I should say, until Iodine. I read 3,000 pages of source material before I began it; John built a bookcase just for that research. If you take Freud, Jung, Hillman, add every available book about UFO abductions and the theories thereof, all the archetypal literary theorists beginning with Northrop Frye, very detailed technical manuals on the Winchester and Mossberg shotguns, medical texts, studies of Goth culture beginning with gods hung from trees in what is now Wales, and three or four other subjects, you end up with a disaster. It was like being stuck on a very scary ride at the wrong kind of carnival, good Lord. I would say, "No, I'm stopping, I'm stopping! I'm not reading anything else." Then I'd realize I of course had to read Jung's book on UFOs, I couldn't just skim it. And I'd look the fool if I skipped feminist critiques of the Bluebeard myth. In short, my family grew afraid.
Your working class characters are often shockingly well read and erudite (as is your mother in your memoirs). Are the libraries of rural Indiana particularly well stocked? Or is the stereotypical vision of small town homogeny just totally wrong?
This question comes up periodically and it always stumps me. I have no idea where the logic lies in the equation — why wouldn't someone who lives in a small town be well-read and intellectually curious? We were all born there, which is accidental, and most people stay and raise their own families, so new humans get born there, and I can't imagine any connection to IQ. The first time the subject appeared in a review (it was the only time, too) I blinked, read it again.
There is homogeny in my home county in a number of areas, absolutely, and one of them is a ferocious work ethic. To give just one example, I grew up with a boy who became a treasured student of my mom. She saw his potential, urged him to take certain paths, and he graduated from our high school at 17, the valedictorian of his class. He was given a full-ride to Indiana University-Bloomington, and Mom suggested he try to test out of some of his freshman classes, with the result that when he entered IU in the fall, at seventeen, he did so as a senior, and graduated one year later with a BA in engineering. And he didn't even live in the town limits, he lived on a road without any name I knew of. Hoosiers have a strict code of good behavior, it's immediately recognizable. It's not Deliverance, for heaven's sake, it's where Kurt Vonnegut came from. If anyone from my high school fit that stereotype it was me — I was wild and lawless, hated school, refused to do anything I was told, was most likely to be the one who stole a tractor in the dead of night in order to drive it around on the ice of the school parking lot. And I'm the person who wrote the books in question, so you can imagine how confusing the whole subject is for me.
What is the difference for you between writing fiction and nonfiction? Your fiction is so clearly based in the places and people of your actual life (as evidenced in your nonfiction). Are there themes you're more comfortable tackling or playing out in fiction than nonfiction?
The difference between fiction and nonfiction is the difference between standing in a room with four walls and a closed door, or in the middle of a thousand harvested acres of flat space. Non-fiction is the room enclosed with walls, and they represent the vertical facts one must hone to them as closely as possible. Let's say the nature of a series of events is agreed upon by those involved: there was an accident, it occurred in 1987, the hour was late and it was raining, there were four people in a blue Ford Taurus. Start with what seems historically solid, and deal with nuances as they arise. The beginning, middle, and end of a particular story is already known — what the writer is left to do is craft it into its most vibrant retelling.
Fiction is that seemingly limitless horizon, and every word chosen is the place infinite possibilities end and a particular path is chosen. Considered too closely, it's really quite horrifying, how easy it can be to go wrong. I have to learn how to write every book as if I'd never written another, because the two things aren't connected. No matter how many novels preceded it, I'd never written Iodine until I began it. It's tricky, allowing oneself to be taught by what doesn't yet exist. But it works. It happens. Those infinite possibilities used to scare me witless — I spent every hour at my desk convinced I was about to take a false step.
At a critical moment in The Solace of Leaving Early I realized, after probably an hour of writing, that I'd been sitting on the very edge of my desk chair, and I'd been frantically bouncing my knees against the bottom of my desk, which is just crazy behavior. Of course I continued to do it until I finished the chapter, and then I laid face down in the dirt and wept until the authorities arrived. Naturally, I would choose to do this sort of thing over the joy of non-fiction, every day, no doubt about it.
My fiction never involves the people in my life; I've never based a character on anyone real. My concern is with Place, the particularities of the overlooked landscape, all of the types of families and crossroads and crushing winters of a square of the world dismissed as far too unimportant for literature. I could write about it forever and never come close to the heart of it all.
eMusic is, obviously, primarily a music site. Do you listen to music when you write? Also – and this is a reference to Zippy – did you ever learn to play that piano?
No, I never, ever listen to music when I'm either reading or writing. Like most writers, I spend the great majority of my life in silence, and alone. This is why so many of us go barking mad, take up with strong drink, and eventually wander naked into traffic.
Now I want to say up front that this is not a sad story; I recently mentioned it to someone who thought I was suggesting something traumatic, but I wasn't — I reserve trauma for massive head wounds.
It was a chord organ, a highly sophisticated version of the original instrument, and yes I certainly did learn to play it. Within a year of getting it, a woman in our church gave me her family's piano, an old upright that had been converted from a player piano into one that didn't do things on its own. By 13 I was writing songs, and in high school I often practiced all night. I started playing at weddings, and then in little clubs, and I won contests, I recorded twice. Being a singer/songwriter was at the center of my life, certainly, but it also came very easily. At eighteen I could have had paying work every day if I'd wanted it — it was like I just stepped into things.
I was working at a record store (like most musicians I was a voracious collector of new music or limited remixes or things that came in a can) and one afternoon I opened a stack of in-store demo CDs, put six in without looking at them. I was out on the floor and a song began with a series of unusual changes in the lower register of what was instantly recognizable as a Bosendorfer, the piano I coveted with blinding intensity when I thought about it. Bosendorfers are among the oldest piano manufacturers in the world, and no piano comes close to their sound. They're all made with a soundboard of aged spruce (just typing the words makes me dizzy), and the soundboard is connected to a solid spruce frame. If this means nothing to you that's fine, it means enough to me for all of us. It's the piano of big passions, a long, dramatic sustain pedal. From the first heavy chords of the song on the demo I had stopped moving; I was perhaps legally dead for a few moments.
I listened all the way to the end, the woman's ingenious use of her voice, her touch on the keys, which contained such focused confidence it was nearly lazy. The composition delivered the same message: "You think I've been playing this piano like it was a honky-tonk beat up ton of scrap? Listen to this insane and operatic bridge, which I have in no way prepared for in what preceded it, because I don't have to." It was the title song on Tori Amos's Little Earthquakes, and by the time the second song began I had decided I would never play the piano or write another song, ever again, and I haven't. There was no point — she'd attended the Peabody when she was like three years old, she had my piano, she'd learned to write for her voice to great effect. It didn't matter that as a lyricist I kicked her lyric's self-indulgent asses, the role was filled.
For me this was a clear and instantaneous decision, but other people didn't take it that way. When I told my dad I was done, he just looked at me. Finally he lit a cigarette, looked off into the distance and said, "I'd have bet the house on you." My throat suddenly ached, the facts hurt when they hadn't before. I showed him nothing on my face; if I had, he'd have called the hand in an instant. I said, "How about this: no matter what I decide to do, you put everything in. The house will win, we both know it." He flipped his cigarette into the grass, said, "It's a deal," and walked away.
That was the problem between us — either could have been bluffing, neither would guessed it.
This is a completely selfish question. I'm Jewish but went to Quaker school for 13 years, so now I'm obsessing over this. Are you the only Quaker fiction writer? I can't come up with any others!
I honestly haven't figured it out, either. The two most famous, Jessamyn West and Jan de Hartog, are not currently living. There are countless Quaker writers, but all are in scholarship or are historians. There's a fairly broad field called Quaker Studies, and memoirists, personal essayists. But I may be the only lifelong Quaker thoroughly prepared to get that dirty. Novels are about the Truth in every manifestation, and the Truth is a dirty business, God knows.
A poet and a former divinity student, Kimmel's influences and references range both deep and wide. Perhaps this is why her work inspires such — to quote the wonderful author and feminist pioneer Vivian Gornick — "fierce attachments."
Though all of your work is set in the Midwest, it feels very Southern in terms of language, the gothic quality, the closeness of life and decay, etc. Do you consider yourself to be writing in a specifically Southern tradition? Or in any literary tradition, for that matter? Who are some of your favorite influences? As I was reading your work, I kept thinking of Ellen Gilchrist.
That's very flattering, thank you. I grew up in a town populated almost entirely by natives of Kentucky and Tennessee, who moved just a little north for the factory jobs at Chrysler and Delco-Remy. My father's side of the family was from Kentucky, and I was a feral hillbilly child from the moment I could get my shoes off my feet and head for the nearest tree. A few years ago I heard a cassette tape my mom found, recorded on my little blue tape recorder when I was about six, and my accent was so pronounced I flinched. So, in fact, I was a southerner living among other southerners in the Midwest, and then I abandoned all pretense and moved to the South. I've lived in three other states since I left Indiana: Mississippi, Louisiana and North Carolina. Pretty clear geographic trajectory. I moved to Mississippi when I was nineteen, and I was stunned to discover how much more at home I felt there than in any part of Indiana.
When I began to read — really read — the first three writers I chose were Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson and Thomas Tryon. Thanks, Mom! And I loved them, but the first book that turned me upside-down and shook me like a ragdoll was The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. I was stupefied by it. I had no idea what to do with myself. So, of course, I checked The Member of the Wedding out of the library in New Castle and that was the first and only time a book made me suicidal. A couple years later I read Virginia Woolf for the first time, and had a similar, but not so intense, reaction to To The Lighthouse.
I'm not sure how to explain what happened to me internally at the end of that novel. I was overwhelmed with grief, and I decided it would be a good time to die — not because I was so grief-stricken but because It Had Been Done. I'd read the only book that would ever matter, there it was, might as well go. I made no effort toward my own demise, not the slightest gesture. I just sat on the edge of my bed and waited. Presumably I got hungry after awhile, and thus ended my vigil.
How heavily do you research your fiction? Could you make a tidy side living hustling at pool, as Cassie did in Something Rising?
[laughs] How heavily do I research my fiction? I'm imagining what would happen if I tried answering, "Just, you know, the normal amount." Everyone who knows me would riot. Augusten Burroughs is my partially-absorbed fetal twin, and has known my comings and goings every day for the past eight years. We recently did an event together, and he was trying to explain to the audience that I might appear to be a normal person but actually I'm freakish and terrifying — I think those were the adjectives he used. He said, "Take this for instance. She decides to write a book about pool, you know, green felt, balls, a stick — anyone with a penis can play it. So she learned string theory." I could hardly deny it, but it's just like him to jump all the way to theoretical physics, he could have softened the blow a little.
Before I wrote a word of Something Rising, my husband, John, and I spent eighteen months playing pool every night. On my book tour for Solace I played pool in every city, if I could find a pool hall. I went to New Orleans to research the last third of the book, and found myself in a bar that did indeed have standard tables, and also nearly naked gay strippers. They danced on the bar itself, but you could also hire a scantily clad young man to play pool with you. That is pure New Orleans, right there.
I also played all night against a drunk and powerful man way down in Mississippi, but not on the Gulf. There was another southern novelist with me, but I won't name him because he was a damn good sport and he remained sanguine at all times, exactly as he should have, and saw it through to the end. I read every book on the mechanics of the game, and the very few novels, and bought a series of instructional videos that were painfully boring, and watched The Hustler, some parts of it over and over — which was not like work but a bonus. Jackie Gleason didn't use a pro to take his shots — that's really him playing. He's divine. And there was some study of geometry and physics, as was mentioned. And okay, Jung and James Hillman on the animus figure, fathers transported to the Underworld.
I'd say that's pretty much how it goes with every book. Or it did, I should say, until Iodine. I read 3,000 pages of source material before I began it; John built a bookcase just for that research. If you take Freud, Jung, Hillman, add every available book about UFO abductions and the theories thereof, all the archetypal literary theorists beginning with Northrop Frye, very detailed technical manuals on the Winchester and Mossberg shotguns, medical texts, studies of Goth culture beginning with gods hung from trees in what is now Wales, and three or four other subjects, you end up with a disaster. It was like being stuck on a very scary ride at the wrong kind of carnival, good Lord. I would say, "No, I'm stopping, I'm stopping! I'm not reading anything else." Then I'd realize I of course had to read Jung's book on UFOs, I couldn't just skim it. And I'd look the fool if I skipped feminist critiques of the Bluebeard myth. In short, my family grew afraid.
Your working class characters are often shockingly well read and erudite (as is your mother in your memoirs). Are the libraries of rural Indiana particularly well stocked? Or is the stereotypical vision of small town homogeny just totally wrong?
This question comes up periodically and it always stumps me. I have no idea where the logic lies in the equation — why wouldn't someone who lives in a small town be well-read and intellectually curious? We were all born there, which is accidental, and most people stay and raise their own families, so new humans get born there, and I can't imagine any connection to IQ. The first time the subject appeared in a review (it was the only time, too) I blinked, read it again.
There is homogeny in my home county in a number of areas, absolutely, and one of them is a ferocious work ethic. To give just one example, I grew up with a boy who became a treasured student of my mom. She saw his potential, urged him to take certain paths, and he graduated from our high school at 17, the valedictorian of his class. He was given a full-ride to Indiana University-Bloomington, and Mom suggested he try to test out of some of his freshman classes, with the result that when he entered IU in the fall, at seventeen, he did so as a senior, and graduated one year later with a BA in engineering. And he didn't even live in the town limits, he lived on a road without any name I knew of. Hoosiers have a strict code of good behavior, it's immediately recognizable. It's not Deliverance, for heaven's sake, it's where Kurt Vonnegut came from. If anyone from my high school fit that stereotype it was me — I was wild and lawless, hated school, refused to do anything I was told, was most likely to be the one who stole a tractor in the dead of night in order to drive it around on the ice of the school parking lot. And I'm the person who wrote the books in question, so you can imagine how confusing the whole subject is for me.
What is the difference for you between writing fiction and nonfiction? Your fiction is so clearly based in the places and people of your actual life (as evidenced in your nonfiction). Are there themes you're more comfortable tackling or playing out in fiction than nonfiction?
The difference between fiction and nonfiction is the difference between standing in a room with four walls and a closed door, or in the middle of a thousand harvested acres of flat space. Non-fiction is the room enclosed with walls, and they represent the vertical facts one must hone to them as closely as possible. Let's say the nature of a series of events is agreed upon by those involved: there was an accident, it occurred in 1987, the hour was late and it was raining, there were four people in a blue Ford Taurus. Start with what seems historically solid, and deal with nuances as they arise. The beginning, middle, and end of a particular story is already known — what the writer is left to do is craft it into its most vibrant retelling.
Fiction is that seemingly limitless horizon, and every word chosen is the place infinite possibilities end and a particular path is chosen. Considered too closely, it's really quite horrifying, how easy it can be to go wrong. I have to learn how to write every book as if I'd never written another, because the two things aren't connected. No matter how many novels preceded it, I'd never written Iodine until I began it. It's tricky, allowing oneself to be taught by what doesn't yet exist. But it works. It happens. Those infinite possibilities used to scare me witless — I spent every hour at my desk convinced I was about to take a false step.
At a critical moment in The Solace of Leaving Early I realized, after probably an hour of writing, that I'd been sitting on the very edge of my desk chair, and I'd been frantically bouncing my knees against the bottom of my desk, which is just crazy behavior. Of course I continued to do it until I finished the chapter, and then I laid face down in the dirt and wept until the authorities arrived. Naturally, I would choose to do this sort of thing over the joy of non-fiction, every day, no doubt about it.
My fiction never involves the people in my life; I've never based a character on anyone real. My concern is with Place, the particularities of the overlooked landscape, all of the types of families and crossroads and crushing winters of a square of the world dismissed as far too unimportant for literature. I could write about it forever and never come close to the heart of it all.
eMusic is, obviously, primarily a music site. Do you listen to music when you write? Also – and this is a reference to Zippy – did you ever learn to play that piano?
No, I never, ever listen to music when I'm either reading or writing. Like most writers, I spend the great majority of my life in silence, and alone. This is why so many of us go barking mad, take up with strong drink, and eventually wander naked into traffic.
Now I want to say up front that this is not a sad story; I recently mentioned it to someone who thought I was suggesting something traumatic, but I wasn't — I reserve trauma for massive head wounds.
It was a chord organ, a highly sophisticated version of the original instrument, and yes I certainly did learn to play it. Within a year of getting it, a woman in our church gave me her family's piano, an old upright that had been converted from a player piano into one that didn't do things on its own. By 13 I was writing songs, and in high school I often practiced all night. I started playing at weddings, and then in little clubs, and I won contests, I recorded twice. Being a singer/songwriter was at the center of my life, certainly, but it also came very easily. At eighteen I could have had paying work every day if I'd wanted it — it was like I just stepped into things.
I was working at a record store (like most musicians I was a voracious collector of new music or limited remixes or things that came in a can) and one afternoon I opened a stack of in-store demo CDs, put six in without looking at them. I was out on the floor and a song began with a series of unusual changes in the lower register of what was instantly recognizable as a Bosendorfer, the piano I coveted with blinding intensity when I thought about it. Bosendorfers are among the oldest piano manufacturers in the world, and no piano comes close to their sound. They're all made with a soundboard of aged spruce (just typing the words makes me dizzy), and the soundboard is connected to a solid spruce frame. If this means nothing to you that's fine, it means enough to me for all of us. It's the piano of big passions, a long, dramatic sustain pedal. From the first heavy chords of the song on the demo I had stopped moving; I was perhaps legally dead for a few moments.
I listened all the way to the end, the woman's ingenious use of her voice, her touch on the keys, which contained such focused confidence it was nearly lazy. The composition delivered the same message: "You think I've been playing this piano like it was a honky-tonk beat up ton of scrap? Listen to this insane and operatic bridge, which I have in no way prepared for in what preceded it, because I don't have to." It was the title song on Tori Amos's Little Earthquakes, and by the time the second song began I had decided I would never play the piano or write another song, ever again, and I haven't. There was no point — she'd attended the Peabody when she was like three years old, she had my piano, she'd learned to write for her voice to great effect. It didn't matter that as a lyricist I kicked her lyric's self-indulgent asses, the role was filled.
For me this was a clear and instantaneous decision, but other people didn't take it that way. When I told my dad I was done, he just looked at me. Finally he lit a cigarette, looked off into the distance and said, "I'd have bet the house on you." My throat suddenly ached, the facts hurt when they hadn't before. I showed him nothing on my face; if I had, he'd have called the hand in an instant. I said, "How about this: no matter what I decide to do, you put everything in. The house will win, we both know it." He flipped his cigarette into the grass, said, "It's a deal," and walked away.
That was the problem between us — either could have been bluffing, neither would guessed it.
This is a completely selfish question. I'm Jewish but went to Quaker school for 13 years, so now I'm obsessing over this. Are you the only Quaker fiction writer? I can't come up with any others!
I honestly haven't figured it out, either. The two most famous, Jessamyn West and Jan de Hartog, are not currently living. There are countless Quaker writers, but all are in scholarship or are historians. There's a fairly broad field called Quaker Studies, and memoirists, personal essayists. But I may be the only lifelong Quaker thoroughly prepared to get that dirty. Novels are about the Truth in every manifestation, and the Truth is a dirty business, God knows.
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