“People are fundamentally mysterious when you get down to it”: An Interview with Damian Tarnopolsky

All Lit Up: Congrats on your upcoming short story collection, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster. Can you tell our readers a little of what to expect from your book?

Damian Tarnopolsky: Thanks! This book will renovate your kitchen while giving you a splendid back rub; it is entirely phosphate-free, and guarantees not only eternal life but also eternal youth. Also, it’s a collection of linked stories that circle (obsessively?) around the same characters, the same family, the same questions: how do we get on with ourselves? How do we manage with the people closest to us? The stories are linked, then, but not too linked: it does this in a wildly different range of voices, tones and settings, so as the book goes on it’s constantly changing shape and adding colours. I hope that as a reader you’re challenged, curious, intrigued, compelled, outraged, delighted…? It also offers a 3.5% annual rate of return, which is pretty unusual in this economy.

ALU: Mark Ferguson, the narrator that links many of the stories together, is interesting: some stories are about him; others are written by him. What was your approach to writing this character? What’s your approach to writing characters in general?

DT: I have many clever-sounding things to say about this that I’ve stolen from other people (I teach writing). For example:  “A character is a question mark walking around,” Elizabeth Bowen. “Don’t write characters; write people” -Ernest Hemingway. Nice, no?

Mark is fraught at times but I think he’s trying, though not always trying his best. It’s his book and it isn’t: we see him from different perspectives, get his perspectives on different things, and then dip into other characters and spend time with them. I’m curious about the different things people are at different times, and including his writing seems like a good way to offer a different angle—not necessarily a more open or honest one, of course.

I’m pretty psychological in my orientation to life and to writing, and sometimes that’s good, it can give characters genuine depth. But sometimes you’re better off being less explanatory. People are fundamentally mysterious when you get down to it, and sometimes you’re better off as a writer trying to preserve and communicate that mystery. That way they can come alive for the reader as people.

ALU: You’re also a playwright. What’s it like switching between forms?

DT: I like everything I write to be in a different genre. It keeps things interesting. Though it’s not something I do very consciously—maybe it’s just to keep things interesting for me. The play I wrote: it started out as a novel, but I think it wanted to be a play from pretty early on. I got to a draft that was about 98% dialogue and a friend pointed it out to me: “You know this is a play, right?” One of the stories in Every Night is a short play too, it just had to be from the start. I’ve always enjoyed writing dialogue and for some reason I really like writing stage directions: There’s a long emotional speech full of tears and then something as plain as “He walks over to the table and picks up the glass of water.” I’m not sure what it is that tickles me, something about the present tense, the control, the way they describe action while the “action” is elsewhere? It’s an odd status and tone that I enjoy and in Every Night…I try to exploit it a little.

ALU: We read that you were mentored by Mavis Gallant. How cool! Care to share a little about your experience?

DT: She was always one of my idols, so it was quite something to come into contact with her. Though I’d be lying if I said she changed my life in a dramatic way at the time. The mentorship was by correspondence, and I sent her my stuff air mail (this was a while ago), and had to wait ages to hear back from her. So at the time it was frustrating! But it’s one of those experiences that becomes more important the more you look back at it; I remember pretty much everything she told me, about venial and cardinal writing sins, about writing and waiting (ironically enough), about the different ways to be a writer that I see now she was modelling for me. In her last note to me, in one of her massive white envelopes from Paris, with my name and address in her thick blue round fountain pen, she said, “Perhaps I haven’t said this enough—you are a very good writer.” I was in my twenties and starting out, so to hear this…what more could I ask for? So in spite of all the difficulties, in a way—very much in her way—she helped make it possible for me to go on.

ALU: What do you hope readers take from your writing in general?

DT: I guess what I said earlier about this book applies more generally: I’m driven by challenge, curiosity, intrigue, compulsion, outrage, delight…I mean those are the things I enjoy when I’m reading, and that I want to have happen in my writing…I want to be surprised, I want to be enchanted, I want to be jarred into alertness and then have my head gently laid back upon the pillow (and then a floorboard creaks…). If my work does any of those things for people, I’ll be very happy.

ALU: Have you read any books lately you can’t stop thinking about?

DT: The big book for me in writing this one was definitely George Saunders’s book A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, in which he presents a series of short stories by Russian writers and talks about them with unmatched intelligence, insight, humour, delight. He’s answering all my questions, with wit and care, before I’ve even thought of them, and on every page he gives generous suggestions about how to apply his advice to your own work. So yes, reading that got me writing short stories again.

I’m currently reading three very different recent books by Ontario writers: Spencer Gordon’s A Horse at the Window, which is multifaceted, dark and brilliant; I love Martha Batíz’s short story collection, one that ranges all over the Americas and beyond, No Stars in the Sky. Then there’s Bruce Geddes, Chasing the Black Eagle – hard driving, deeply thrilling, and over all just spellbinding.

Finally, a friend of mine just put me onto the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han and I’m reading everything of his that I can find: short books about the internet, Zen, contemporary culture, what have you, that blow your mind.

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Damian Tarnopolsky is a writer, editor, and teacher, whose novel Goya’s Dog was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada/Caribbean). His short fiction has appeared in The Puritan, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, subTerrain, Audeamus, and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for the Journey Prize, as well as the CBC Literary Award. He lives in Toronto.

Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster is available here on All Lit Up.