Interview with Evan Mallon.

Hello to new subscribers and welcome to Sitting in Silence, a newsletter for readers, writers, and thinkers. The Interview has become a popular feature for the newsletter. I love talking to writers of all stripes regarding their journeys. They never disappoint. This issue’s conversation is with Evan Mallon.

Evan Mallon is a writer and scholar of writing. He is a good friend. We first met at Randolph College MFA where I was faculty, and he was a student. Evan is kind of a legend in the program for his warmth and camaraderie.

As always, thank you to the premium subscribers who make this newsletter possible, especially those who just signed up. I appreciate your support. This would be much harder to do without your help.

Special note: Sitting in Silence has an app now! iPhone users are invited to download the app today. Just look for my name in the Substack app.

And now for our chat…

Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading or writing stories?

Evan: I once heard a writer (I forget who) say that they know they like a story or a novel when it changes their body temperature, literally. As they step deeper into a work of fiction, the words act as a kind of fever that manifests physically. And truthfully, the first thing that I can remember doing that for me, were not books or stories or even writing, but bookstores. My obsession with reading came after college and I didn’t write any fiction until way after that. But even from a young age I knew I liked being alone, while still being in proximity to others. So, I spent an incredible amount of time by myself at bookstores during high school. There is one particular used bookshop outside of Chicago that stands out in my memory. It was one of those delightfully chaotic stores that would not pass current fire codes. Books piled everywhere. An inventory for which exists only in the elderly owner’s head.

When I look back now, entering that specific shop was much like how I enter a book now as a reader. It was accessed not at street level, but by a cement staircase that looked like it was cut from the inside of a castle turret. It had narrow steps that wound in on themselves as they descended, blocking the entrance from street view. I don’t even remember the store having a sign or a name but I’m sure it had both. But what still stays in my memory is that the only part of the shop that was visible from above was this glow of light that pulled customers down with its warmth.

It was there, when I was about fifteen years old, that in one of the many piles of books at that bookstore, I found a hardcover copy of “Wild Seed” by Octavia Butler that I still own. Look at the cover if you’ve never seen it. It is so beautiful and terrifying. I purchased it on that alone. And after that, whenever I had extra money, I would carry my copy of Wild Seed back to that shop, show it to the owner and say “I want more like this.” That is how I found SFF and magical realist authors like Leguin, Bradbury, Marquez, Karen Joy Fowler, Salman Rushdie, but also writers like Toni Morrison, Amy Hempel, and Carson McCullers. All of whom, for one reason or another, changed my temperature.

Maurice: Yes. I remember that cover! I first came across Butler through Kindred. That was one of the first times I felt like a book was really talking to me directly. That bookstore sounds incredible. I bet that most readers have similar memories of special bookstores. For me, it was a comic book shop in New Orleans right next to a beauty supply and a Chinese restaurant. Do you still have that feeling of your body temperature changing when you read a great book? Does something else happen when you read a book you don't like? What do you look for in the books you read these days?

Evan: Yes, all the time. But for different reasons than that fifteen-year-old of myself. Twenty-five years ago, my temperature changed when I discovered some type of media (a new band or a movie or a book) that showed me that I wasn’t as alone as I felt I was, if that makes sense. Especially in terms of how my body experienced sensations like anxiety or depression or grief. The blend of those big emotions were, and still are, largely untranslatable for me by human language. And as a ten, thirteen, fifteen-year-old, instead of examining those emotions in a meaningful way, I would mostly remove myself from a situation that I knew would cause those feelings to pop up. Now, I write instead of removing myself. And as a writer and reader, I find speculative elements to be incredibly useful tools to investigate what I’m feeling about a topic or a clashing meld of emotions. There is something about a good speculative element that (in my opinion) can take the wheel of language’s untranslateableness and show us another angle of what it means to be human. So, to answer your question, I suppose that is what changes my temperature now. Any detail or line of dialogue or element of writing craft that adds to my understanding of what it means to exist as a person with a body that feels things.  That takes what I think I  know and shows me that I actually don’t know anything at all.

Maurice: I've had the pleasure of reading some of your work. Every writer has a superpower. In your stories, you have this superpower of analogy where the objects in the story are amazing stand-ins for grief, anxiety, depression, etc. Underwater ossuaries. Giants wandering the landscape. Where do your ideas come from? How do you know how "out there" to go? 

Evan: Thank you for saying that. It means a lot coming from you.

My process for finding that weird / emotional balance is rooted in revision. But how I approach it is actually wildly inefficient and I don’t wish it on anybody. But it looks like this: Years ago, I took a course called “Generative Revision.” Which, in a nutshell, is a type of revision that relies on the idea that something written in a first draft is not inherently right solely because it’s there. Which sounds simple enough, but it was a game changer for me. Before that class, my revision process was just me trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the sinking ship of my boring story. A story that I was trying to salvage merely because it was written.

So now, I come to the page with only the vaguest image of the speculative element and nothing else. I once heard short stories described as a “constellation of images that when connected form a well for the emotion to pool.” Which I absolutely love. Through that lens, the vague idea of the speculative that I start with is usually part of that constellation. But I don’t know if it belongs in the beginning, the middle or at the end. So, what I do is write a first draft orbiting that one image, making up everything else as I go, already knowing that about 90% of it is a placeholder for something I have yet to imagine.

After that first draft sits for a few months, I will do a very quick read through and highlight only what I actually, truly love. What changes my temperature, so to speak. Which, on a lucky day, is about 10%. Then, I move those temperature changing parts to a blank document, and I write new stuff around it. Purposefully not using any of the unhighligthed plot points or details from the previous draft. I repeat this until I have that speculative element more or less worked out at a fundamental level, and then I move on, trying to discover who the characters are, and why the speculative element I’ve created refracts some deep hole in them.

A quick example of how this worked in real life: in the ossuary story you mentioned, the first draft was actually set in The Arctic on an iceberg prison where prisoners are held inside the ice. And for visitors to see their loved ones, they needed to scuba dive down in the cold water to visit them. After years of running the story through this generative revision process, it now takes place in a Wisconsin boreal forest and the only thing recognizable from that first draft is the idea of someone diving down to see something they miss. Which was the original vague image in the yet-to-be-imagined constellation. I am a big believer that you should trust your body as you are writing, and while the iceberg story was fine, my body did not like the idea for whatever reason. But through continuously eliminating other possibilities that were not right for that particular story, I eventually found the ones that were.

So, I suppose the answer to how I get my ideas, and how to balance the weird and the emotional, is not a helpful one. It is basically time, patience, and trial and error.

Maurice: Your process sounds incredible. I've never heard of anything like that! But it definitely explains why your stories have such a particular feel to them, a dreamlike quality. It's like you're cherry picking the best parts of your drafts and stringing the cherries together. Are you often surprised by what you create? Is surprise something you aim for in writing?

Evan: Yes and no. I always want to surprise myself, but don’t really want to surprise the reader, if that makes any sense. Maybe another way to phrase it is that I want some element of each new draft to pull the rug out from under me at least a little bit, but in the best ways. Which is where the generative revision process really helps, because I can enter each new draft already knowing that most of it probably won’t make it into the next one, which allows me to shed at least a little of the self-imposed pressure of I need to write something good (slash) I’m a total failure if this doesn’t work. I am an anxious person in my day-to-day life and am generally very hard on myself when my writing isn’t living up to what I hope or want. Sometimes, that hard-on-my-selfness results in me just not writing anything out of worry or fear of failure. Now, through this process, I view writing as an exercise in inviting surprise. Where before, I would write with a mindset that orbits good or bad; publishable or not. Writing to invite surprise gives me the courage to try ideas that I might not try otherwise. And a lot of the time, it is these risky feeling ideas, even if they don’t work in the vacuum of that draft, or even if they don’t change my temperature, that illuminate some part of story – a character or setting or plot point – that allows the piece to move beyond what I originally thought was possible for it. 

Maurice: Speaking of illumination, you, perhaps more than anyone I know, are a scholar of writing. I don't mean in the academic sense. You're not working at a university, but you have an incredible thirst for knowledge. You read an astonishing number of books each year, and you've interviewed some of the most respected authors around--not for publication but for yourself. Why do you seek these answers? What are some surprising things you've learned from the writers you've talked to?

Evan:  I appreciate you saying that, but the only thing I’m probably a scholar of is sweatpants and going to bed before 10. But you are right when you say that I love hearing writers discuss their philosophies on story and how they use craft to fill the space their stories carve.

The more woo-woo answer to your question is that I have never loved another life practice in the way that I love writing. Books literally helped me rebuild a life. I have been sober for six years, and if not for the support of my spouse and the writing community that I’ve built in my sobriety, I don’t know where I’d be. There is a saying that I learned in recovery that I think also relates to writing, “I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever met.” This is so true for me as a human, but also as a writer. My work is a puzzle made up of pieces I created on my own but also has sections of other puzzles: every conversation I’ve had, book I’ve read, lecture I’ve heard, friend I’ve made can all be found in my work. Because each encounter lends me some new language to attach to the complicated or abstract ideas of craft. So, I suppose my answer to why I seek out these discussions is that I am always looking for fresh language that helps me translate the amorphous goop of our complicated selves into a workable narrative that feels right to me as the writer.

What most surprised me was that I could ask ten authors the same exact question and get ten completely different answers. All would be equally articulate and constructed with deep thought and care, but the ideas they shared with me often opposed or pushed against what another writer had to say. Which was actually so liberating. Because when I first started writing, I thought of craft as concrete, non-negotiable ideas. I’d read a book and think, This person published a book on writing so they must have the answers and if I just memorized enough of these well-established tips and tricks then my work would bloom! All of my writing dreams will come true!

I’m happy to say that this did not happen, thank goodness. When reading a book on craft or listening to a lecture, ask the question, “who and what does this author’s particular craft idea serve?” Does it serve me and my idea of story? Or them and theirs?” One reason I sought out direct conversations with authors whose work I loved and admired, was because when in a workshop or while I read craft books, I kept seeing and hearing advice that only related to a certain kind of story shape. One that the author or facilitator considered “correct.” I found myself thinking, ok, this makes sense I guess, but the author so-and-so doesn’t do that, and I love their work, so now what? But what nobody told me when I first started writing, especially not the authors who penned those craft books, or gave me feedback in workshops, was that there is always a chance that the information presented could either be actively unhelpful or flat-out harmful to the way that I wanted to tell a story. I think of it like this: the equipment used by a general surgeon is different from a brain surgeon. So why not for writers as well? Yes, they are both surgeons; and yes, we are all writers, but our objectives are different. No two of us are writing the same story, so it makes sense that these different stories require different craft.

The most helpful thing I’ve heard was from a former mentor of mine, who described the writing process to me as “A mixture of magic (ourselves) and mechanics (craft).” A phrase that still gives me goosebumps now just writing it. But when I heard it I felt an empty well inside myself being filled. They did not say 80% mechanics and 20% craft. They just used the term “mixture”. That could be 90% to 1 % or 50% to 50%. There is no right combination. Craft is a vehicle that can lend clarity to a writer’s vision. What percentage is up to us. Personally, I’ve found that the drafting and revision process that work best for me are built on the shaky scaffolding of this calibration. The adjusting of the two might take a long time for any one particular piece, but the closer I get to finding that balance, the closer I am to answering the question the story is asking on its own.

Maurice: I found that asking writers about their process has been one of the most helpful things I've done on my journey. Writers are a gift in so many ways. Many are generous to a fault. Speaking of which, you gifted me a spoon with "Maurice's Peanut Butter Spoon" engraved on it. That was so kind of you and basically made my year. What does gift-giving mean to you, and where would you like your writing life to take you? 

Evan: What a generous question!! Thank you for it! Disclaimer: I might not be the most level-headed person when it comes to gift giving. I start buying holiday presents for people in my life around June, which is totally normal, right? But I think of gifts as an opportunity to let someone know that I see them, and that while we might not be in daily contact, I still carry them with me every day in one way or another. And when I say gifts, I don’t only mean gifts in the physical sense, but gifts of knowledge, of friendship, and of generosity. Which segue ways into where I want my writing life to take me. I am currently in revisions on a novel that I would very, very much like to see the world at some point. If that happens, then I would love to teach in some capacity. As you said, many writers are generous to a fault, and during my short writing life, I have crossed paths with an incredible amount of people, you included, who believe in the sharing of knowledge instead of hoarding it. People who have created an atmosphere of we are in this together instead of one that feels like competition. I would not be where I am in my writing life or in my emotional wellness without the generosity of many peers and mentors who have made me feel seen and understood and loved. And nothing would bring me more joy than the opportunity to repay that generosity to others.