Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball is the author of The Way the Family Got Away, How Much of Us There Was, and the recently released Dear Everybody. Dear Everybody is the story of Jonathon Bender told through a series of his own suicide letters, as well as his mother's journal entries, his brother's narrative, and other media. Michael's short story "Sarah's Eulogy for Jonathon," a selection from Dear Everybody, can be found in the second issue of Keyhole Magazine.
Jonathan Bergey
How did you develop Dear Everybody from the initial idea to completion, from the concept of suicide letters to its final form, which ended up including not just the letters but interviews, newspaper clippings, journal entries, and a narrator?
Michael Kimball
It went through a few different, very distinct stages. The whole novel actually started as just one letter, which then morphed into about 100 letters. At that point I actually thought I just had a longish short story, something like that, and that the thing was done. A few months later it happened again—I wrote another 100 or so letters, and so I just had this bigger bunch of letters. But at that point it started to open up a bit. I added an introduction to it. I added the last will and testament, a couple other things. So there began to be this frame around it. And it was really after I sort of recognized the possibilities of the frame that other things started to open up. And then I got to the newspaper articles, the encyclopedia entries, the psychological evaluations, all the weather reports, year book quotes, all that other stuff.
JB
Did you write it chronologically or was it kind of random?
MK
It was written probably as un-chronologically as it could have been. It was one of the really difficult parts of making the book. I wanted to impose some sort of form on it, and chronology just seemed like an obvious one. But it was really kind of incredibly difficult to take the 400 or so pieces and put them in order. And I remember a couple days of just laying every single piece out on its own, every single piece on its own piece of paper. They had sort of covered the dining room, every sort of flat surface, and I was just moving things from year to year, trying to sort it out.
JB
At times in the book, Jonathon’s memories conflict a bit with the memories of his brother Robert, who is the book’s narrator, kind of leaving the reader to decide what may have really happened. Was there any significance in choosing this approach? Is there a brother that you tend to side with?
MK
I think it’s easier to have a lot more sympathy for Jonathon than Robert. But to some extent I wanted it to be irresolvable. They’re both unreliable in different ways. And there just seems to be something perfect about that. You know, everybody’s memory of the same event can be very different. Just sort of taking that and playing with it. The idea for that actually came from my wife’s family. My wife has a very different memory of her childhood than her older brother does. He remembers it as just being wonderful. She doesn’t. They had different childhoods of course, but it was the same family, the same circumstances, all that stuff. And it’s that distinction that always stuck with me.
JB
Does Jonathon’s childhood reflect any of your own childhood experiences?
MK
Yeah, there are quite a few details that are my details as well as Jonathon’s details. I have distinct memory of running away and then returning home before dinner. Lots of little things. The scene where he puts his head through a glass window in a door—I watched that happen to a friend of mine. There are all kinds of details like that. Ultimately by the time I’m done with them, they’re no longer mine, they’re Jonathon’s, they’ve been rendered in some particular way to make the fiction.
JB
What is the significance of Jonathon being a weatherman?
MK
There’s this really great book by Daniel Schreber, called Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. And he’s 19th century German. He was probably schizophrenic but he was very articulate about his schizophrenia. There are these really great passages in the book where he talks about the weather, and how the weather is influencing his life. I wanted to take that a step further and do something else with it. So it just sort of seemed to fit perfectly. I guess I would say it’s more of an external significance than an internal one.
JB
The subject is funny at times, though a lot of it is also rather melancholy. Does writing such a story affect your mood while you’re writing it?
MK
Yeah, it does. And it’s been like that with every book in one way or another. You never quite know. I mean some of the really melancholy things are also kind of funny, and there’s a kind of dark humor there, and as tragic as it is you can’t help but laugh. And then there are other times, especially in the early stages of the book when I was writing lots and lots of the letters, where I almost felt transported. You just get swept up in this rush of material, and it can take a while after you stop writing before it feels as if you’ve returned to your reality rather than the fictional world.
JB
Did you do any research for the story?
MK
Yeah, I did a lot of research. A couple different things. One, I learned a lot about weathermen. I learned a lot about meteorology, and what sort of courses you would take, and just sort of all of that stuff. Then the other thing I did a lot of research on was clinical disorders, and what do you actually need to get a DSM-IV designation for a certain clinical disorder. So I did a lot of research on that. Then I actually took the character, worked out all of those traits, and I went to 3 different clinical psychologists and asked them how they would diagnose him. So all of that became part of the fiction in different ways.
JB
Did they all agree on the diagnosis?
MK
They did. Well, one gave me two diagnoses, and one of them agreed with the other two people.
JB
Did any of that research alter Jonathon’s character?
MK
It didn’t really alter his character. Though I was initially working, at least in my head, with a different diagnosis at first. And so the diagnosis changed, but the character didn’t change.
JB
You’re working on another book project already. Tell us about that project.
MK
It’s called—working title right now—Friday Saturday Sunday, and the whole novel takes place over those three days. It’s a few hundred pages on just a few days. Two people meeting, and basically you get their whole lives, as well as everything that happens to them in those few days.
JB
Another project you’ve been working on is called Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a Postcard). Tell us about that project and how it came about. And are there any particularly interesting or funny stories with that project?
MK
That project happened by accident and has just been so much fun. It started out with a friend a mine—who you all know at least by e-mail—Adam Robinson, who does Publishing Genius and the outdoor journal, Baltimore Is Reads which is franchised to Nashville now. He was curating an evening at an arts festival here called the Transmodern. They do lots of performance art, especially, but all kinds of stuff. And I was there on the night before his night and he asked me why I wasn’t doing anything. I said, well, I’m a writer, you know, what do you expect me to do? We were just joking around about things that writers could do that would be performance. Somehow, I still don’t remember quite how I said this, but I said I could write people’s life stories. And I had just gotten a bunch of postcards for Dear Everybody. So I had all of these postcards that I didn’t have anything to really do with but give away. I said I could do it on postcards, and we just sort of laughed about it and left it there. But then the next morning he called me and said, “you’re doing this right? I made you a spot. I have a table for you. It’s all set up.” So I ended up agreeing to do it. I just thought I’d write a couple of these things. I sat down, wrote the first one for an artist who was in the space there, had a studio there. I looked up and there was already a line formed, and I ended up doing it for over 4 hours that night. It was a ton of fun, but it was also completely exhausting. You know, interviewing people and writing them—I wrote them their postcards right there on the spot. That was the sort of performance part. You know, that was sort of it. I didn’t have any thoughts of doing anything else with it. But a friend of mine here—they’re in New York now—they were really interested in the idea, they wanted to publish a book of them. One of the problems was I’d already given all the postcards away. I didn’t document it in any way—I wrote them down and gave them away. So I did it again in another big festival, Honfest, here in Baltimore. And then I also started doing it online where people can give me their phone number. I’ll call them and do the interview, then write them up their postcard and send it to them. So it’s been continuing through those different forms.
I’m somewhere close to 100 now, and I find it absolutely fascinating. I find people absolutely fascinating. I guess maybe you get to this as an interviewer, if you ask enough questions people just start talking. You know there’s always a point where that sort of happens and you realize they’re finally telling you the import thing, the thing that matters most to them, or that they care about most, or however you want to frame it. So I love that part of it. There are just some great stories, and then there are also stories where people had a really difficult life, and trying to figure out how to frame their life for them, to take care of these difficult details that they’ve lived through. It’s a very difficult and interesting challenge at times.
JB
So does that make you the next Barbara Walters?
MK
Probably not. She asks really easy questions. Right? Yeah, I don’t ask easy questions. That thing that can sit between two people and everybody knows it’s happened, I’m going to ask the question about it.
JB
When you began writing, you began writing as a poet. Is your approach to writing a novel similar or different to your approach to writing poetry?
MK
That’s interesting. I guess the thing I would say is that there are things I learned from writing poetry that still very much inform the way I write prose today. As a poet, my poems are just these sort of tiny little things and nearly everything is stripped away. As a fiction writer I’m still working with that aesthetic, I’m still working with sentences that are stripped down, sentences that use a limited vocabulary. With a poem, they were lyrical in some way, or after a feeling—they gave you some sense of human experience, in a way. And I’m still trying to do that in fiction. In a lot of ways, the letters in Dear Everybody are little prose poems.
I was trying to capture a specific experience and sort of capture Jonathon’s relation to another person in one piece. There’s a story—no matter how long the letter is, there’s a story within each piece—and I just tried to compress as much as you can into that small space.
JB
Do you have strict writing habits? Do you write on a daily basis?
MK
I generally write on a daily basis. I’m kind of at an odd spot right now, because I’ve actually finished Friday Saturday Sunday. And for the first time in maybe 5 or 6 years, I’m not working on a big project. I’ve been doing the postcards. I’ve been writing a few articles. But I haven’t been working on a big project. And when I’m working on a big project it is really consistent. I’m working every day. It doesn’t have to be the same time every day, though it’s generally in the morning and/or late at night. But it’s always very consistent, in terms of every day.
JB
Are there any particular writers who’ve been influential in your writing?
MK
Yeah, absolutely. You know, at different points William Faulkner is still one of my big touchstones. I go back to him over and over. Gertrude Stein was for the longest time, though I haven’t read her in years. Wallace Stevens, also. I’ve always felt as if his poems—there’s something very fiction-like about his poems. Also people like Beckett. I guess I would say Carver. Well, Carver is a little uneven, but there are great Carver stories that I go back to over and over.
JB
What have you been reading lately?
MK
I read a great book—it was a first novel—Ovenman. Jeff Parker. I really liked that. I’ve been reading a bunch of things for a Baltimore anthology that I’m editing with a friend of mine, Jen Michalski. It’ll have Douglas in it, it’ll have Stein. And then people who have been through Baltimore, like Barth and Stephen Dixon. And then a lot of contemporary people—well not that Barth and Dixon aren’t contemporary.
JB
Any thoughts on the current state of literature in America or reading in America?
MK
Let’s see, that’s a big question. One of the things that I find most fascinating, and it seems like it’s happened relatively recently—and I don’t know if this is MFA programs, or if it’s the Internet in having more good outlets for work—but it just seems to me that there is a ton of really great stuff being written and published lately. I read the most amazing things online at journals. In print journals. You know, when I first saw Keyhole I was just really impressed at your first time out how well you had done. And I’ve been really surprised there are some younger writers that I’ve been really impressed by. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of Blake Butler’s work. He’s doing some great stuff. Josh Maday. He’s been doing some really good stuff. There’s just a whole lot of writers out there like that—Elizabeth Ellen. And I’m just sort of surprised by how much of it there is. I feel like when I was starting out, the good stuff was much more difficult to find. So I’m sure that the Internet is involved in that in a basic way.