The stories in Manuel Gonzales’s first collection, “The Miniature Wife†(Riverhead), are shot through with outlandish events relayed in an understated tone. In the first story, passengers in an airplane circle above the same city for more than 20 years. In the title story, a husband accidentally shrinks his wife to the size of a coffee mug. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Gonzales discussed his use of the supernatural, the writing center he runs in Austin, Tex., and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
How old were you when you started writing stories And did they always have the magical bent that these do
The first serious attempt I made at writing was during he summer after my sophomore year of college: a long-winded first few chapters of a novel about a guy who woke up one day with superpowers but didn’t know how to use them or why he had them. When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I set out one summer to write a fantasy novel, something dense and grand like Terry Brooks’s “Sword of Shannara†series, but I had this notion that all I’d need to do was take one of the longish Dungeons & Dragons games my friends and I had been running and just transcribe that into what would become a best-selling book. I was wrong.
Your use of werewolves, zombies and other mythical creatures is always married to a sense of realism. What do you think of the current appetite for much less realistic versions of these myths in pop culture
I’ve been a longtime fan of ! the less realistic sci-fi and fantasy tropes, ever since my dad made us watch “Day of the Triffids.†What’s interesting to me is how wildly that appetite swings from the reinvention of the vampire into a young adult romance fantasy to a gruesome and serious end-of-the-world zombie scenario with “The Walking Dead,†and everything in between.
At Columbia, you studied under Ben Marcus, another writer known for fantastical work. Did working with him have any specific effect on your fiction
Taking his classes had a big influence on my work, but less because of his own fiction, which I love, and more because of his vast knowledge of writers and great fiction. Through him, I learned about Gary Lutz, George Saunders, Raymond Roussel, J. M. Coetzee, Brian Evenson, Deborah Eisenber, Richard Yates, Dawn Raffel, Evan Connell and W.G. Sebald’s novel “The Emigrants.†Also, in his class, I learned how to write a scene, which is kind of important.
Who do you consider your biggest influence who doesn’t work at all in the vein of magical realism
Joseph Mitchell, who wrote for The New Yorker starting in the 1930s, and branching off from him, Susan Orlean, Ian Frazier and Lawrence Weschler. Two of the oddest stories in the collection are the ones about the guy who talks out of his ears and about the African continent sinking into the sea, and I think the only way those worked for me as a writer was that I structured them like a nonfiction profile, which is one of my fa! vorite fo! rms to indulge in as a reader and a writer.
You have a Tumblr site where you write a brief new story once a week, inspired by a photograph taken by a collaborator. How is that project useful to you Do you plan to lengthen any of those stories in the future
The Tumblr began as an ill-conceived notion to make me famous, and has become a great writing tool and a fun game for me to play. It’s an exercise, mostly, the stories written the night before or the morning of the Friday “deadline,†so it forced me to write quickly, from different points of view, and offered me a break from whatever else I was working on. There are a couple of the posts that I’ve thought about lengthening â€" one about a guy who learns he’s actually a robot, but a mediocre robot, for instance â€" but sometimes it’s hard for me to imagine them longer than they are now.
The Tumblr site sas you will do this “For a year. (Maybe longer.)†It seems to have been running for just over a year. Do you plan to keep going
We are going to keep going, but the format and the frequency might change. We’re also thinking of bringing in more artists â€" musicians, other photographers, other writers â€" and making it more of a collaborative project.
Animals feature heavily in the book. Are you conscious of returning to certain preoccupations over time
Animals kind of freak me out. Birds, a lot of times, seem to swoop too close to my head. My wife begs to differ. But animals seem strange and unpredictable to me â€" rats, mice, squirrels â€" and wild beasts have recently been turning up in my hometown of Plano, Tex. Packs of coyotes roam the streets at night, as well as a bobcat or two. I can’t say I know what they mean to me, but they do crop up from time to time.
Youâ€! ™re the executive director of Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center in Austin for kids ages six to 18. What do you think is the most important thing to teach a six-year-old about writing An 18-year-old
You teach a six-year-old and an 18-year-old the same thing but to a different degree and by a different process, namely: Find your voice; tell your story. Many times, people will misread that last bit to mean, “Write about things that have happened to you,†and while I’m all for kids writing rigorous accounts of their lives and will support and encourage any kind of writing, I like to impress on the kids and the volunteers that “tell your story†is as much about the story you feel compelled to tell, even if it has nothing at all to do with your life â€" because if you’re compelled to tell it, you’ll also be compelled to make it good.
Is there anything about Texas in partcular that fuels your imagination
A lot of the suburban landscape of Texas finds a place in my stories because I grew up there and I’m at ease with those places as a writer, but also because, as a kid, I always hoped something truly interesting would happen there. Sadly, interesting things never happened, so I make them happen in my fiction and then watch my characters suffer the consequences.
