12 or 20 (second series) questions with Becky Mandelbaum

Becky Mandelbaum is the author of Bad Kansas, which received the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award and the 2018 High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Carve, Electric Lit, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. Originally from Kansas, she currently lives in Washington and teaches at Hugo House in Seattle. Her first novel is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Learn more at www.beckymandelbaum.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I was pretty unprepared when I found out Bad Kansas would be published. I was 25 at the time, working in a gift shop on Mount Rainier, sharing a little mouse-infested room with three other girls. Everything I owned was smashed into my 1995 Camry. I’d just been dumped. I was making $9 an hour. Sometimes I’d cry at work. Then, one morning, I got an email saying I’d won the Flannery O’Conner Award. What the fuck? I’d entered the contest on a whim, because the submission fee was relatively low. There was no cell service on the mountain so I couldn’t even call my mom. Instead, I went into work and told the manager (who was 22) that I’d won an award and would have my first book published. She smiled and said, “How cool!” Then she told me to go fold T-shirts. It’s pretty much been that way since. I still don’t have a job with benefits. I move every six months. Most people squint at me when I say I write for a living. Some days I still feel like I’m failing or that I’ll never be a “real” writer—whatever that means. But what the book means is that I get to write another one, which is no small privilege. It’s everything, and for that I’ll always be indebted to Bad Kansas and everyone who helped it come into the world.

The novel I’m finishing now is much different than the stories in Bad Kansas, both in content and in tone. The novel takes place on an animal sanctuary in Kansas during the 2016 election and follows the broken relationship between a mother and daughter, exploring what happens when external forces cause communication to break down between people who love each other. It’s easily the hardest thing I’ve ever done. So much harder than the stories. But I also understand that when I wrote Bad Kansas, I’d had tons of practice in the short story form. A long trail of story carcasses paved the way to that publication. But this novel is my first. Unless you’re an asshole, everything is hard the first time you do it. Remember riding a bike? Or using the toilet? That stuff takes training and practice. So does writing a book.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I actually fell in love with poetry first, but eventually found myself drawn to fiction. I think this is because, ultimately, my primary fascination lies with character. Poetry feels like looking out a window with concentrated care and attention, examining every mote of dust and how the light shifts, thinking about what’s going on behind the screen of the world. This is certainly a worthy endeavor, but at the end of the day, I’d prefer to wander through the house, rummaging through the junk drawers and sniffing the trash, trying to figure out what kind of people live there. Plus, I love the craft of fiction: sculpting sentences, paragraphs, and scenes. I find it more architecturally interesting than poetry and more liberating than non-fiction. Maybe I’m saying fiction is easier.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Starting a project is the easy part. I love starting things—finding the opening sentence, figuring out what characters I’m working with. Exploring. Ending projects is the hard stuff. Sometimes I can finish a story in a week or two, other times it takes a few months. Sometimes I put a story away and come back to it a year later. As for drafts, my first go at a story is typically 50% there. For some reason, the third quarter of a story is where I most often flounder. When I revise, that’s usually the part that goes first. I always revise heavily and have learned to love cutting fat. I recently cut 10,000 words of my novel and felt high on it for two straight days.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

It begins with a sentence or a story I’ve overheard somewhere. My short stories usually stay short stories. The novel is something I’ve been working on since I was 19 and which I’ve rewritten three times now. As far as I can remember, I started it knowing I wanted to write a novel, that it was too much to contain in 20 pages.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

As an introvert and a woman of mercurial hormones, sometimes readings are joyful, stimulating, adrenaline-filled, community-building, heart-warming experiences that have no comparison. Other times I want to dig a hole in the stage, slip into it, and eat cake in the dark. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Although I never intentionally traffic in theories or ideas, my work, like any work of character-driven fiction, ultimately lends itself to larger themes. The novel I’m working on now, for instance, takes place during the 2016 presidential election. The reason for this is that I started re-writing it after the election, so it was on my mind and impossible to keep out of the book. What originally started as a book about a strained relationship between a mother and daughter, about how we treat our animals and what this says about us as a society, and about what we sacrifice when we commit to a cause greater than ourselves, is now also a book about politics and disinformation. It’s about the intersection of personal and political, about how, when emotions are involved, we only see what we want to see. I didn’t set out to address any of these topics, but the characters ended up grappling with them, so there they are. If there’s any underlying theoretical concern in my body of work as a whole, it’s probably: What do we do with this insane thing called living? The answer, I think, is always: There is no answer, but there are people.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

In my mind the modern writer has three roles. One is to reflect back to readers a new and arguably more useful way of seeing or understanding the world we currently occupy—to be an artist. The other is to entertain with story or language in such a way that convinces or reminds the reader of literature’s place in our culture, that keeps them hungry for books. At the end of the day, we’re competing with Netflix, so we need to deliver something that’s both meaningful and pleasurable. The third is to make space for, champion, and support other writers, especially those that have not traditionally received equal space or support.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think it’s essential. Most editors I’ve worked with are smarter readers than I am, so they see things I miss. Other times, their feedback is what I knew deep down I needed to do but felt too lazy, afraid, or reluctant to initiate on my own, without someone saying, “Go ahead, it’s the right thing to do.” It’s also important to have new eyes on your work. Sometimes the thing just becomes too familiar and you can’t see it for what it is anymore. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Marysue Rucci, is also a genius when it comes to line-editing. In addition to making my book stronger, her feedback has also taught me so much about craft. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

From Garth Greenwell’s recent commencement speech at Bennington College: “Hold [your writing friends] close; don’t lose touch; do the work of maintaining those friendships. Read their poems and stories and essays, honestly and generously; celebrate their success; help them see disappointments, which are inevitable, in the proper scale.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

The novel has always felt like a natural progression from the short story. Short stories are difficult because you have to contain a whole world in so few pages. It’s terrific fun, but also requires a lot of omission and distillation. A novel is a short story without the clock ticking in the background. Or maybe it’s a short story without fences—you’re free to wander around, explore greater territory. It’s more generous but, because of this generosity, can feel unwieldy. You can get lost in the field. A short story is also much easier to revise. You can hold a short story in the palm of your brain but a novel is just too big and amorphous.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I usually start writing at around 7am. I don’t keep a strict schedule though. I just try to find my way to my desk every day that I can. Coffee is my dearest ally.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don’t usually go seeking inspiration. I try to read every day so that form of inspiration is built-in. If my writing gets stalled, I just get up and take some space or work on something else. The writing will always be there in the morning.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Bath & Body Works cucumber melon lotion. Bradford pear trees when they get stinky in the springtime.  

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I really like that idea. For me, most of my work draws from an experience I’ve had or a person I’ve met. My novel, for instance, started after I volunteered on an animal sanctuary in Texas. That one week of work and observing the woman who ran the sanctuary was enough fodder for a book.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Dear Life by Alice Munro, 10th of December by George Saunders, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell are a few of my all-time favorite books. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is also stunning. I remember when I finished Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin I literally kissed it—it was this weird moment, alone in my room, where I just couldn’t handle how it made me feel and just, before I knew it, I was kissing the book. It was a really powerful moment. There’s nothing else like that connection you can feel to a book, the kind of tenderness and desire to be better, love better, to look at the world with greater attention and compassion. Only a book can do that.

Outside of writing, I love stand-up comedy. Creating an hour-long stand-up set must be one of the closest things you can do to writing a novel. In addition to basic story-telling, it’s all about style, tension, timing, pacing, structure, language, and metaphor. (For example, John Mulaney’s bit about Donald Trump being a horse loose in a hospital is one of the most expertly executed extended metaphors I’ve ever encountered.) It’s also about taking something familiar and flipping it on its head, shining a new light on it. A good comedian is often good because she knows how to trust the audience exactly the way a good writer must trust the reader—she’ll let the audience make the final cognitive leap with her, so they can land on the other side, where laughter is. I think writers can learn a lot from comedians.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Become fluent in another language, own a dog or three, see the northern lights.  

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve always loved animals and had an idea, from a very young age, that I was going to be a veterinarian. Then I realized I didn’t like all the busywork involved in science. If I could, I’d love to do something with animals—training them, caring for them, arranging little ones in baskets for calendar photos.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’m truly terrible at most things. I’m easily overwhelmed or bored. Whatever else I do, in the back of my head I’m always turning it into a story. I’m so grateful I found writing and, as an extension, teaching writing, because otherwise I think I’d be screwed.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I just finished Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill and Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, both of which blew me away for different reasons. I also recently read What We Do with the Wreckage by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, which is a beautiful collection of stories. As for films, a few months ago some friends and I watched Call Me by Your Name and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, back-to-back. I can honestly say it was the most interesting cinematic experiences of my life. Call Me by Your Name has to be one of the most beautiful films ever made, but the next morning I was like: Why can’t I stop thinking about Jumanji 2? What does this say about me? What does it mean? Is Dwayne The Rock Johnson our country’s most talented actor? Anyways, two thumbs up for both.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently finishing my first novel. I’ve also started tinkering with the novel I want to pursue next.

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