Monday Interview: John McNally

It seems like an easy jab: those who can, do, those who can’t, teach. It’s also easy to fall into the mocked side of that dichotomy. How many writers take up a full-time teaching gig — for whatever reason — and maintain the same pace and quality they did before? Grading endless stories instead of writing your own clearly takes its toll. Unless you’re John McNally.

Now, I’m sure John would be the first to say that he would rather be writing during the times that he is teaching or grading students’ work, but he hasn’t let his duties as a faculty member at Wake Forest University or other teaching stints dull his progress. He just issued his fifth book in the past decade, the satirical After the Workshop. In addition, he has edited six anthologies, taken a crack at screenplay writing and continues to write and place short stories.

Given that output and work ethic, it seems we can put to rest any supposition that McNally’s characters are thinly veiled versions of their creator. After the Workshop‘s Jack Hercules Sheahan may share a bit of McNally’s resume — Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate and one-time media escort for traveling writers — but unlike McNally, Sheahan has debilitating writer’s block that has relegated his one-time debut novel in progress to a box tucked out of sight.

Sheahan is the latest McNally protagonist with more talent than ambition. These are working-class guys who have nothing handed to them… or if it is, it will probably just make things more difficult for them. But McNally renders these tales with considerable empathy and boatloads of sharp humor that allows him to tackle topics much deeper than he might otherwise be allowed.

McNally has been involved in academia for 27 years, either as a student or a teacher, and brings the lessons learned during that time to bear on his next project, his first non-fiction book, The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist. That book, forthcoming this year from University of Iowa Press, will perhaps offer some insights that will allow readers to better understand how it is possible for McNally to continue to crank out such top-notch fiction while his attention is pulled in any number of directions.

Caveat: I met John when taking a course he taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. I signed up for his class on short fiction after reading and loving Troublemakers. I was not disappointed; John was an insightful, funny and personable instructor, and it has been a pleasure to stay in touch with both John and his work since.

Note: McNally reads from After the Workshop at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City on Tuesday, March 9 at 7 p.m. I am hosting the reading, and will lead a Q&A with John after he reads. Listen online here.

TIRBD: While many novels have been written about writers and writing, none that I know of take on writing programs in general, and specifically the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as directly as you do. That, coupled with the fact that you used real Iowa City institutions and geography made this really resonate. Was there ever a moment where you considered fictionalizing things more, and why did you decide instead to choose this path?

JM: When I was in the Workshop in the late ‘80s, I read a lot of books set in Iowa City, like John Irving’s The Water-Method Man and W.P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and I still remember that shock of recognition I experienced every time a real place appeared in one of the books. In my first novel, The Book of Ralph, I used a lot of real places as well, but I never named the city, except to say that it was on the southwest side of Chicago, and I’ve since regretted it. With this book, I didn’t want there to be any ambiguity about place.

There is a real love-hate relationship with the Workshop here, and you’ll surely be asked how much of Jack is you given that your own time in the Workshop is so prominent in the promotion of the book. So, how much is you, how much is friends and acquaintances and how much is made up of whole cloth?

As with most of my fiction, my starting point is often autobiographical, but it tends to veer quickly away from that. I was a media escort in Iowa City; I graduated from the Workshop; I kicked around for a number of years before my first book was accepted. But I never experienced the writer’s block that Jack does, and I didn’t remain in Iowa City after graduating. (I moved back about seven or eight years later.) Jack is a slightly more pathetic version of who I was. But we shared the same fear that this whole thing – being a writer – wasn’t ever going to come to fruition, and there were many times, back when I was driving writers around as an author escort, that I questioned my reason for being, as Jack does. As for other people and places, I can say that some of the scenes grew out of conversations I was privy to, and some of the characters are composites of types of writers I’ve met, but that’s true of almost every book I’ve written. In The Book of Ralph, Ralph is a composite of three kids I knew, and yet everyone I grew up with thinks they know for sure who the real Ralph is. I’m suspect the same thing will happen with After the Workshop.

One significant way you differ from Jack is that you have published several books, with five novels and story collections of your own and several anthologies. Was there a point at which you were in Jack’s shoes, unable to finish something and wondering if you ever would? If so, what pulled you out of that? Are you ever scared that could still happen?

I have rarely had writer’s block. I’ve had stretches of not being able to write because of situational things in my life, but it wasn’t because I didn’t have anything to write about. Unlike Jack, I was always able to finish the books I was working on, but I wrote two novels before my first book was publi
shed, and I’ve since written two novels that haven’t seen publication. So, my fear isn’t so much that I’ll be blocked as it is that I’ll write another book that won’t get published. In that regard, I could empathize with Jack’s wondering what the hell his life is amounting to and what, if anything, he can do about it.

You’re becoming quite adept at poking institutions that don’t welcome the provocation. First came the Bush Administration in America’s Report Card (and, of course, ACT), and now the fabled Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This makes for edgier fiction, to be sure, but are there repercussions that ever make you doubt the wisdom of that course?

My way of thinking (and, I’ll admit, it’s probably not sound) is that you’re only going to suffer repercussions if you have something to lose. I suppose the Workshop will never ask me to teach there as a Visiting Writer, but you know what? It’s not something I’ve pined for, and there’s a 99.99 percent chance it wasn’t going to happen anyway. I haven’t been waiting by the phone, in other words. Also, my intention in writing the novel wasn’t to take down the Workshop or the publishing industry. It was to write about a guy with a crappy job who’s questioning his purpose in life. In doing so, I hold up a few institutions and gently poke them, but I honestly don’t think I’ve poked fun at anything that can’t take it. Oh, and I’ve gotten pretty good at building bookcases these past few years, so if the whole writing thing dries up as a result of some serious miscalculation on my part, I’ve got a fallback plan.

Humor again plays a part in your work, deployed most effectively as a way to deflate some of the odd inner workings of the Workshop and the publishing world. As a graduate of the Workshop and someone dependent to an extent on the publishing world, did you worry about biting the hand that feeds, and did that lead you to temper things at any point? Did the humor let you get away with more than you might have otherwise?

Humor lets you get away with a lot. In both satiric novels – After the Workshop and America’s Report Card – I’ve had to trim back places where it seemed too rant-like. In After the Workshop, I tried to leave no stone unturned. I wanted it all in there. But what happens is that the first draft had passages that were too essay-like, passages that lacked humor and didn’t do anything to service the story or the characters, and so those had to go. As for biting the hand that feeds me…no, I’m not worried about that. I never tempered anything in the book for that reason.

You mentioned the last time we did one of these Q&As that your next book would be your Gravity’s Rainbow. Is this that, or did this pop up in the middle? And to that end, when you start something, do you finish it or do you let the heat of inspiration pull you in a different direction when a new idea surfaces, no matter what it might interrupt?

I said that? Yeah; well…my problem is that I work on too many things at once. There’s a long, complicated novel that I’m working on, but when the idea for this novel was presented to me (I was having a conversation with my then-agent, telling her about my days as a media escort, and she said, “You should write that book.”), I sat down and wrote a few pages to see if there was anything there, but once I started writing, I didn’t stop until I was done. (Well, okay, I did stop to sleep and eat, but I kept knocking out a few pages a day.) With this book in the bag, I returned to the big novel again, but I’ve since had an idea for a short novel, so that’s what I’m working on right now. It’s unlike anything I’ve written, and I’m having a great time with it, so I want to keep going with it to see what happens.

Your next book is The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist. You have taught writing for years. Was the act of writing down your thoughts and ideas illuminating at all? Did the process of organizing potentially disparate notions cause you to rethink any long-held beliefs?

What it illuminated was just how damned hard it is to write a nonfiction book. I walked away with an even greater respect for nonfiction writers, for whom I already had enormous respect. I’m not sure it made me rethink any long-held beliefs, though. It’s a highly opinionated book, and after spending 27 years in academia as either a student or a teacher, and almost as long writing and sending work to magazines while writing books, I’ve formed a lot of opinions. The book does come with this warning: “You may not agree with me.” At some point down the road, I’ll probably update the book, and I suspect some of my opinions will have changed in the interim, so I’m looking at it as an amorphous project, and I’m granting myself permission to disagree with myself when the time comes.