SRHS alumni author David Vann: An interview

 Santa Rosa alumni and successful authors David Vann and Scott Gummer are returning to their roots in November to share with us the stories they've written.
David Vann has published A Mile Down: the True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island.
The first novel details Vann's struggles with a long ocean voyage while trying to understand his father’s suicide. The second is a collection of stories that also touch on the themes of depression and suicide. Caribou Island depicts a couple that is falling apart in the harsh Alaskan landscape. His newest book, Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter, examines the 2008 mass murder at Northern Illinois University as well as Vann’s background with guns.
Scott Gummer is the author and editor of many books and articles including pieces on sports teams such as the San Francisco Giants, Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Phillies. His newest book, Parents Behaving Badly, is a story about the culture of Little League.
The authors will read passages from their own books on November 14 at 7:00 PM in the SRHS Auditorium.
What follows is an interview with David Vann.
SR: What do you plan to read for us in November?
DV: I don’t know actually. My books are coming out in 16 languages in 50 countries, so I do a lot of interviews and readings in all kinds of formats. I pretty much just wait until I show up to find out what they want. I don’t prepare anything ever. It’s just like my writing. I think it’s better if it’s unconscious. I’m prepared in that I know the books. It’s pretty easy for me to talk about my books—because I wrote them. It’s nice to just have a discussion and let it go wherever it’s going to go.
I know I’m sharing the time with another writer, and so I imagine they’ll probably have us each read a little bit from a couple of our books and then ask us some questions. And then let the audience ask us some questions. If students go to that reading, they can ask us questions.
SR: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
DV: I had a class with Grace Paley. She’s a wonderful short story writer. She said that every good story is at least two stories. And that’s still the best advice I’ve heard about writing.
I think that’s the one rule you can’t break. I think you can break all the other rules. There are always examples you can find of authors breaking various rules.
For instance, you don’t really have to have a protagonist that we care about. You don’t have to have a dramatic arc. You don’t have to have an antagonist. And you don’t have to work in a particular way with your scenes or narration. All the rules that people come up with—you can find examples of successful works that don’t follow those rules. But the one rule I’ve never found an exception to is the idea that every story has to be at least two stories. That means that there’s subtext. We’re focused on one story on the surface, but then there’s another story that comes out from behind that, and that becomes the more important story. That’s the way we read and the way we write, and the way we’ve done it for a couple thousand years.
An example of a piece that just has one story on the surface is if you just give an account of what happened during the day, but it isn’t about anything. This describes most blogs, most journal entries. They’re unreadable. No one wants to read it.
So that’s the advice I’d give, to make sure that when you write about something, you’re actually writing about something else.
SR: What did you hope to accomplish with your books? What emotions motivated you?
DV: Let’s just start with the first three stories. My father cheated on my mother in Ketchikan, Alaska for instance, and I really did trash the neighbor’s house and the contents of their refrigerator. But then the story becomes fiction. My father didn’t kill himself on the back of a fishing boat, for instance. The story takes off from the true details. And that’s true for the first three stories.
The next story is really a short novel, Sukkwan Island. That one is entirely fictional because I never went homesteading for a year with my father. And I’ve never seen Sukkwan Island, the place where it’s set. I’ve never been there. I was born in Alaska and grew up there, but my parents divorced and I ended up in Santa Rosa with my mother and sister. Then my father asked me to spend a year back in Alaska with him. I said no and soon after he killed himself—when I was thirteen years old. I felt very guilty and I felt that if I had said yes, then maybe my father would still be alive. I think what I was really doing in writing Sukkwan Island is a kind of second chance to go back and say yes.
It was basically my dad’s suicide when I was thirteen with the guilt I felt and the anger and the shame, and the sense of doom to repeat what he had done. The shame I had was from when I was thirteen years old to sixteen years old. I told everyone that my father died of cancer. I didn’t tell anyone that he died of suicide because I didn’t want anyone to know. It seemed like a very dirty, shameful thing and it seemed like it became my shame.
SR: What was the writing process like? How long did it take?
DV: My writing process for Legend of a Suicide is not something that anyone should emulate. I took 10 years trying to write about my father. I threw away everything for the first three or four years. Sukkwan Island, most of the book, I actually wrote very quickly right at the end. I wrote about half of it in just 17 days as I was sailing from California to Hawaii, my first offshore sailing trip. But the rest of the stories I agonized over forever.
For my next novel Caribou Island, I worked every day, every morning for two or three hours. The first hour I’d read through the previous pages. The second hour I’d write a new five hundred words—about two pages. That’s the key, the momentum, the working every day. That’s what I recommend. My last couple of books I’ve written in five and a half months, and they’re published almost exactly the same as the first draft. There’s very little revision, and that’s just kind of the way they come out: five and a half months.
I was also told that ideas are important — you have to know where you’re going in the story or what it’s going to be about or what the significance is. To me, an idea is the worst thing that can happen to a writer. It just limits and makes the story small. So really, everything I had learned was not true.
I think everyone’s writing process is different, so writers have to figure out for themselves what works, but for me it’s all about seven days a week, every morning, and the momentum of that—and not knowing where I’m going. Those are the things that I need.