An Interview With Author Christian TeBordo
Interview with Christian TeBordo on writing practices, narrators, inspiration, and his newish collection of short stories The Awful Possibilities, from Featherproof Books.
Carrie Seitzinger conducted this interview over several rounds of email with author Christian TeBordo, who is located in Philadelphia, PA.
When Matty and I both read The Awful Possibilities, I really wanted to be the one who got to conduct the interview with Christian TeBordo. The book seemed to be both unique, as in fresh, as well as unusual. Stories written about situations I’d never thought before, let alone things that other people had tackled in fiction.
Once in a while a work seems so kissed or vomited on by genius that, as a reader, you just don’t know what to say. Thus, for me, writing an introduction to this interview was by far the most difficult part.
Christian TeBordo’s collection of short stories is too lucid to forget, especially in detail. His characters exist somehow as fully formed human beings, and yet he never takes sides with them. He remains an omniscient pilot; just as capable of writing the character of a creepy child, as a degenerate old man. The inclusion of the funny and strange postcards that dot the landscape of the book is another quirky detail that resonated with me.
All in all, I felt compelled, as if from somewhere unknown, to ask Christian TeBordo a handful of questions so that I might understand both the book and the writer a bit better. The interview below exists in its entirety, unedited.
Carrie Seitzinger: I am fascinated by the points of view of the narrators in your stories. At times it seems like they don’t know or can’t remember the truth, leaving the reader to take nothing they are given for granted. How do you view the role of the narrator? What are your thoughts on your narrators’ accountability?
Christian TeBordo: I think every writer would agree that the narrator gives a story its voice and perspective, but I’m probably more self-conscious about it than other writers. Some writers just use the narrator as a vehicle to move a plot forward or to get various combinations of characters together, and I like plot and character as long as they’re done well, but the narrator’s the only thing that has to strike me as real.
It’ll sound less abstract if I use an example from real life. I don’t usually get into celebrity scandals, but I’ve been fascinated by this Charlie Sheen meltdown because of the weird language he’s using. Whether he’s still on drugs, bipolar, or it’s next-level performance art, it’s a real person saying those things. So when he says he has “tiger’s blood,” my reaction is not to say, “Actually Charlie, people don’t have tiger’s blood;” it’s to wish I knew, or try to get a better sense of, what would possess someone to say something like that.
To bring it back to fiction, my narrators aren’t accountable for the events they describe, many of which are preposterous. They’re just accountable for having the type of voice that would describe those events in those ways. This is as true for second and third person narrators as first, since when you get down to it, all narrators are first person narrators.
Seitzinger: Having taught, and gone to grad school yourself, how do you weigh the value of an MFA program? What kind of writers most benefit from it? Do you think the same success could come to another writer using their time in other ways?
TeBordo: I think MFA programs can be a good thing, depending on your expectations. I pretty much agree with the standard line about them giving you two or three years of (hopefully fully funded) time to write. That’s a great luxury and one I continue to be grateful for. At the same time, I tend not to believe people who talk about having realistic expectations. Everybody says they’re cool with the time and the community, but how many people (myself included) wanted only that?
Even the best programs don’t give you a decent shot at a teaching job or a big advance anymore, so my advice to anyone considering an MFA is to pay close attention to the faculty at the schools you’re interested in and try to find a mentor, someone interested enough in you as an individual writer to coach you, not just through the degree, but into whatever it is you hope to do with it. I got lucky that I went to a program with really generous teachers (Syracuse), because I was too young to know on my own that that was what I needed. That said, I was never anybody’s golden boy. Try to be someone’s golden child.
A writer can be successful without an MFA, depending on how you define success. Almost no one lives on books alone, and it’s very hard to get a teaching job without a terminal degree. But if you just want to write and publish, that’s more accessible than ever. And there may be an advantage. I’m not one of these people who thinks MFA programs are lit factories, but there’s no denying that workshopping can influence writers too much, make them too risk-averse.
Someone who hasn’t been through that might have a fresher approach. On the other hand, the business end is hard to learn on your own. I got tips on journals to send work to, and even what to put in a letter, from classmates who were already publishing. It might be more trial and error if you don’t have access to someone who’s already done it.
Seitzinger: How much of your fiction stems from nonfiction? What characters or scenarios from your novels and stories are you most fond of or closest to?
TeBordo: That’s a tricky one. The only thing I ever wrote that used any concrete details from my real life was my last novel, We Go Liquid. It was about a boy who gets spam from his dead mother’s account and buys what the spam offers as a way of trying to keep in touch with her. I wasn’t a boy when my mom died, but I did get spam from her account. That’s as autobiographical as I ever got.
But I definitely borrow voices I overhear in real life — for example, the narrator of “The Champion of Forgetting” was based on someone I overheard in a McDonald’s in Syracuse. And the postcards that are scattered through The Awful Possibilities were originally written as love notes to my wife. Both the former and the latter are totally fictional event-wise, but I think they express the truths behind their situations.
I’m not particularly fond of or close to my characters. They all have some elements of me or else I wouldn’t have been able to make them up, but I never really lose track of the fact that they’re still made up. It would make it harder to have them do bad things to each other. That said, there are stories where the voices more closely resemble my own. I never planned a school shooting or joined a black militant group, but the narrator of “SS Attacks!” and I both liked rap and ranting as teens.
Seitzinger: For you, what is the difference between the energy you put into writing a novel, versus how you went about putting together a collection of short stories? Did you take time off from novel writing to put the short stories together, or were you always sitting on a group of stories while also working on a longer piece? What has been the difference in how the novels versus the story collection has been received by your peers, by critics or just in terms of what generated the most interesting reaction?
TeBordo: The actual energy I put into composition is pretty much the same for novels and stories. I’ve never outlined anything and I almost always write linearly, sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter.The only difference I can think of on this level is that sometimes with a novel I have to slog through a passage because I know it will pay off later, whereas with a short story I can (and should, I think) keep everything popping all the time.
I think that might be key to the way I understand people’s reactions to my fiction in general. I’ve definitely had more success (critical and commercial) with The Awful Possibilities than with any of my novels. Part of that probably has to do with a kind of slow building of audience over the course of several books, the fact that it’s getting easier to reach people online so you don’t need to live in New York or be reviewed in the Times to get the word out, and of course, that Featherproof put the book out, and their reputation is well-deserved. But I also think people might be more willing to put up with my particular approach to fiction for the half hour it takes to read a short story than over the course of a week or two with a novel. I guess I’ll have a better sense of it once I put another novel out.
Either way it won’t change how I go about things. I work on novel drafts and stories at the same time until one becomes so interesting to me that I have to finish it to the exclusion of everything else. But when I’m focused on a novel I usually can’t wait to get done and work on stories again.
Seitzinger: Who are the most influential writers that you’ve found in your own practice as a writer, either in terms of how they’ve directly influenced your work (your approach, your characters, whatever risks you allow yourself to take), or indirectly? What have you been reading lately and what led you to that writer’s work?
TeBordo: I could list probably a hundred names of people I think have influenced me deeply as a writer and then come up with a mostly different list of a hundred tomorrow, but the ones that always pop into my head are Kierkegaard and Nietzsche because they were great stylists (and maybe underrated as influences on fiction) and for the way they played sections of their books and even whole books off of each other dialectically; Flannery O’Connor because I sweat her rhythms and am sympathetic to her vision of the world; and Barry Hannah and Padgett Powell because I’d never encountered sentences like theirs before and because whenever I feel like the short story is irrelevant I can just go read something by one of them and I realize that it can still be fresh and maybe life-changing, as corny as that sounds. In the last couple of years I’d have to add Roberto Bolano — I like all his stuff, but it was 2666 that completely threw off my sense of scale and scope. His influence has manifested itself in the form of a really shitty three year writer’s block.
Lately I’ve been going through a bit of a dry spell reading-wise. I spent the last three months reading Atlas Shrugged on and off as research for a story I want to write. It’s hands down the worst book I ever read and I’m pretty sure it made me dumber. But I took breaks here and there to get my brain back, and I really enjoyed Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks (basically recommended by the entire internet), Gina Frangello’s Slut Lullabies (picked it up at AWP), and Roy Kesey’s Pacazo (for review). I’m sure I’m forgetting really good stuff, but my baby is asleep and I don’t want to wake him up by digging through my shelves.
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Thanks so much to Christian TeBordo for taking the time with this interview!
Christian TeBordo work has been published in 3rd Bed, Avery Anthology, Ninth Letter, and Sleeping Fish, among others. He is the author of three novels: The Conviction and Subsequent Life of Savior Neck (2005); Better Ways of Being Dead (2007); We Go Liquid (2007); The Awful Possibilities (Featherproof Books 2010).
TeBordo was born in Albany, New York in 1978, and earned his BA at Bard College and his MFA at Syracuse University. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife Kathryn, a choreographer. He teaches at Temple University, and plays bass guitar in a noise-pop band called The Failed Alliance.
Christian TeBordo published “I can only hope that he still believes in redemption” for Smalldoggies Magazine. You can read Christian TeBordo’s short story here.
Find out more at Christian TeBordo’s official website.
(Photos Via: The Author)