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Michael Kimball’s Authorial Climb
Posted by Susan in Book Blog Entertainment and Pop Culture.
Just ask Stephen King. He loves him. The King short-listed one of his stories for Best American Short Stories, as did Dave Eggers for Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Michael Kimball’s latest novel, Dear Everybody, is gathering wild praise. Same deal for his first two novels, The Way the Family Got Away and How Much of Us There Was. I caught up with him recently about his latest project.
*What was the inspiration for Dear Everybody?
Michael:Dear Everybody started with one short letter, a man apologizing to a woman for standing her up on a date; the man is wondering if they had gone out that night, if maybe his whole life would have been different, better. At first, I didn’t know then who was speaking or that it was a suicide letter, but I did have a strong voice and a skewed way of thinking. That one letter led to a rush of about 100 letters—Jonathon, the main character, apologizing to nearly everybody he has ever known—and the novel opened up from there. Most of the novel is Jonathon’s letters, but it also includes newspaper articles, psychological evaluations, weather reports, a missing person flyer, a eulogy, a last will and testament, and many other fragments, which taken together tell the story of the short life of Jonathon Bender, weatherman.
*And your trudge to publication? Including first draft, revisions, submissions, agent and contract – where were you and how did you find out?
Michael: I have a difficult publication history. My first novel, The Way the Family Got Away, was rejected 119 times before I found a publisher. My second novel, How Much of Us There Was, did well in the UK, South Africa, Australia, and there are translations in the works, but it never came out in the US (though it finally will next year with Tyrant Books). So I feel very lucky that Alma Books wanted to bring out Dear Everybody in the US, UK, and Canada all at the same time.
* How does your relationship with your agent shape your writing life?
Michael: I love my agent. (Bruce Hunter at David Higham Associates). He’s incredibly supportive, unwavering. And his approach to representation, it’s that he represents an author (rather than a particular book). That has allowed me to continue write original novels and to continue to have an agent (rather than being dropped).
* Los Angeles Times says the book is “funny and warm and sad and heartbreaking” ~ how did you nail the voice?
Michael: The voice was the first thing I had and it felt like a strong voice to me—a certain diction, a clear syntax, a skewed way of thinking. The letters just kept coming. I figured who the character was, what the story was, through the voice.
*What are you writing now?
Michael: I just finished a fourth novel—Friday, Saturday, Sunday—that my agent has just sent out. Now I’m working on a new project: Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard). It started when my friend, Adam Robinson, who was the curator for a performance art festival, asked me if I wanted to participate. I asked him what he thought a writer could do as performance and we made some jokes about that. But then I remembered these promotional postcards that I had for Dear Everybody and I suggested that I could write people’s life stories for them. That’s how the project started.
I thought it would be fun and funny and that I would ask a few questions and write on the backs of a few postcards and that would be it. The first postcard I wrote was for Bart O’Reilly a painter, who quit art school in Dublin to work as an ice cream man in Ocean City, MD—which is how he met the woman who became his wife. When I finished writing the postcard and looked up, a line had formed. For the rest of the night, I interviewed dozens of people and wrote each person’s life story on the back of the postcard. I did this for four hours straight without getting up out of the chair that I was sitting in. I was completely exhausted by the end. My mind was racing with the details of people’s lives and the hope that I had done their various stories justice in the space of a postcard. I was astounded by what people told me, the secrets and the difficulties, the pain and wonder and hope that they revealed.
People told me about being in jail, about having too many boyfriends, about suicide attempts, about computer hacking, about communicating with the dead, about communicating with aliens, about terrible things they have done. The life story project tapped into something I hadn’t expected. I was struck by how earnest and forthcoming most people were, how eager they were to share their life stories, how grateful they were for their postcard. People sometimes ask me how I get people to tell me the things I write about them, but there’s no real trick to it: I just ask questions.
The one thing that I have learned so far: Everybody is amazing.
*Tips for aspiring authors?
Michael: Read a lot, write a lot, and revise as much as you can stand without becoming disgusted with your own work.
Michael Kimball
Email Michael, and check out his MySpace and Facebook pages, too!
http://postcardlifestories.blogspot.com/
Book Blog, Entertainment and Pop Culture |One Response to “Michael Kimball’s Authorial Climb”
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I really like his project/book ideas! I esp. like the “Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story” concept. It’s taking the old adage “write what you know,” and transforming it to “write what your readers know.” People are engaged because they are the story, and by simply outlining their life on a postcard–by making them feel like their life is important enough to be documented by someone else–it makes the story they already know so much more special. Now I want my life story on a postcard… perhaps it’ll make more sense then