CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT:
Interview with Dan Garner

Rappahannock Review Fiction Editors: Your sentence anatomy reflects a lot of different—and often eccentric—design choices. Can you tell us about that aspect of your craft?

Dan Garner: My friend and fellow writer Sam Leuenberger says that a successful poem is one that surprises in the manner of the punchline of a good joke… I think the same thing applies to sentences… I’ve taken a lot of writerly instruction from masters of the craft like Joy Williams, Barry Hannah, David Markson, and Roberto Bolaño (to name a few—there are many others), whose sentences are characters in their own right… What I mean is that, especially in a first-person narrative like this one, how the character describes the world around them is key to understanding who they are and the possible courses of actions they might take. Subjective images are always more compelling than objective ones… “The brown and white eagle was flying” says a lot less than “The brown and white eagle screamed through the sky like a bullet.” In the latter you get to know the observer a bit, begin to predict how they might interact with their peers, how they might react to difficulty. For instance, if to them an eagle is like a bullet, they’re probably a little martially inclined, maybe not someone you want to get in a barfight with. In a first-person narrative like “A Bitter Plague of Kyles,” Lerner’s bizarre internal monologue creates suspense for the reader about how he’ll handle the dilemma of living. At least that’s my intention.

RR: How did you navigate such syntactic complexity while maintaining a narrative and its characters?

DG: I’ve kind of always had this philosophy that sentences in succession either achieve their own internal logic or they don’t. A successful story is one where that mysterious logic appears, usually born of the voice. If the voice is interesting, the character can say pretty much anything, and readers will follow along, I think, especially if the world in which the character’s saying these things is semi-recognizable. As a fiction writer, this is tons of fun, and it doubles as the tool for the introduction of conflict. The resolution of this story, for instance, hinges on Lerner’s personal beliefs being called to account (in a dream) by the cinephile from the DMV. He externalizes his internal monologue, and she awakens him (somewhat) to the solipsism he’s locked himself into via his solitude and rage. Yeah, a voice may be funny, but it could be funny and horrible and mostly dead, like a beheaded chicken still staggering around the yard. It requires an encounter with another voice (or voices) to check its pulse… It’s good that a character like Lerner doesn’t have access to the nuclear football. Yeah, he’s socially conscious and he says things in ways that might destabilize a certain type of conventional person’s preconceptions, but he’s more than a tad self-righteous. Does Lerner need to be the spokesperson of a mass movement? Probably not. To some extent, this story is born of the often incisive, but simultaneously paper-tiger cynicism rampant in certain circles of the internet. People like Lerner really exist, and they’re mostly sad, bitter, and convinced of their own intelligence, which is at total odds with their lack of audience. Or even if they have an audience, they seem to be hamstrung by an inability to suggest anything that isn’t a joke, that is actually a workable platform for social change.

RR: Every author draws on inspiration, be it a personal event or another author’s work. What motivated you to write A Bitter Plague of Kyles?

DG: For years, I worked as a bike courier in Chicago. Riding around the city ten hours a day delivering food, sometimes packages. And I would see entire neighborhoods change due to gentrification. Like, one day it would be working class people, starving artists, crackheads. Then, seemingly the next there’d be these prefab condos springing up everywhere like weeds… So the rant aspects of this piece—and the piece is undeniably a rant, albeit hopefully a comic one—probably came from some personal bewilderment. Also, as I’ve already mentioned, I was trying to say something about our cultural moment on the internet…Being chronically online and the way your brain starts operating in niche hyper-referential feedback loops…The internet is this kind of thing every waking hour of the day so that it’s inevitable your brain explodes. The story is about someone whose brain is actively Exploding. Oh, and if you haven’t read the Donald Barthelme story “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” you should. The wackiness of some of my own fiction owes a lot, I think, to the fact that I chanced on that Barthelme story shortly after college and realized it was possible to both dance with language and do social analysis.

RR: Is there a backlog of drafts that didn’t make it to the final cut? If so, what’s one addendum you had the most difficulty cutting?

DG: Yes. I rewrite compulsively. I do more rewriting than generation, I think. The first version of this thing probably came into existence back in 2019. It was a five- or six-page directionless diatribe of the sort I hinted at already. It was more unsavory, mean-spirited. Lerner was a totally unredeemable dick. I put it down for a couple years, revisited it briefly in 2022, and again last year, which was when I really got momentum. I think some of the stuff going on in our country made me wonder what it would be like for Lerner to encounter some of his immigrant neighbors. I cut a bunch of the nastier elements. Introduced characters who challenged his misanthropy and some of the more dangerous undertones of his thinking. With this story, I don’t think I had trouble cutting things. The problem was figuring out how Lerner would be forced to confront his bents. I had the voice I wanted, but I needed a harmony equal to the melody so that Lerner would become aware of himself. Even lonely, hurting people in squalid rooms can diminish or enrich the lives of others around them.

RR: What’s your favorite environment to write in?

DG: My apartment while wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. I’m not a coffee shop or library guy. I like to get up and walk around my room while I’m writing. Sometimes I talk to myself. I don’t think about it too much but during my actual moments of writing, I probably look like a crazy person. Even if I could let my hair down in a public space to do the work, I’d probably get security or the cops called on me for walking in circles and chanting under my breath… I ought to invest in whatever company makes those little orange foam earplugs. I go through a ton of those. I’m also a huge sticky note person. I’ve got sticky notes everywhere. Phrases, details, plot possibilities, half-remembered dreams, quotations from works by other writers I’m reading. There’s no rhyme or reason that anyone else could work out, I don’t think…  You can’t really take all your sticky notes with you to the coffee shop. My favorite is the one I’ve had for years from Kafka… “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” I think about that one a lot.