Conversations with Andre Dubus

An Interview with Andre Dubus

208 An Interview with Andre Dubus John Smolens / 1994 AWP Chronicle 29.1 (september 1996): 1–6. reprinted in Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking . ed. ross gresham. new orleans: Xavier review Press, 2003. 244–54. reprinted with the permission of the author. I first met Andre Dubus in 1970, while he was teaching literature at Bradford College, which is north of Boston in the Merrimack Valley. At the time, Dubus had recently published a novel, The Lieutenant, and was working on the stories that would eventually become his first collection, Separate Flights. For years the stories, novellas, and collections kept coming and Dubus’s reputation grew; as the Village Voice said, “Like some of the most satisfying storytellers of the past (the Russians come to mind—Dubus has been compared to Chekhov), he is munificent, spinning out whole lifetimes . . .” In July of 1986 Dubus was involved in a car accident that has resulted in numerous operations and the loss of one leg. Since then he has published his Selected Stories; a book of essays, Broken Vessels; and most recently a collection of stories, Dancing After Hours. In 1996, he received the Rae Award for lifetime contributions to the short story. He has received many other awards including the PEN/Malamud Award, and fellowships from both the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. In July of 1994 I visited with Dubus at his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts , and, as in the past, we talked into the night while eating steamers and watching a Red Sox game. John Smolens: You’ve recently signed a contract with Knopf for two books, a collection of stories and a collection of essays. Do you find writing essays different from writing short stories? Andre Dubus: At best they feel nearly the same. But for me, the essay has a unique problem. When I’m writing fiction, I never really know what’s going to happen in the story, spiritually or psychologically. And that’s what keeps John sMolens / 1994 209 me going, keeps me excited—whereas with the essay, I sometimes have to force myself through the boredom because I know the action; there, the challenge isn’t so much discovering the action but setting the action down right so I can discover what truths might be in there. Smolens: My undergraduate students read Broken Vessels last spring and were really taken with the way the essays moved from pre-accident to postaccident . It was a pleasure to see that they didn’t respond to Broken Vessels as a “book of essays,” but as an account of someone’s life. Dubus: Some of them go back a long way—I hadn’t read them since I went over the galleys for old issues of Boston Magazine. I was supposed to give them an essay a month, so I wrote some of those early ones pretty quickly— a lot more flippantly than I do with essays now. Smolens: “Out Like a Lamb” touches a religious nerve that is evident in much of your work. Early in the essay you talk about growing up with the image of humans being a sweet, lovable flock of sheep in the arms of a tender, caring Christ. But as a result of caring for sheep on a farm in New Hampshire, you concluded, “We were stupid helpless brutes, and without constant watching we would foolishly destroy ourselves.” Dubus: Well, I didn’t understand that essay until I read Toby Wolff’s introduction to the book. I took my daughter Nicole to a horseback-riding lesson when she was a teenager. I had set aside the third or fourth Sunday of each month to write those columns—I was often thinking, I don’t have any idea what to write about! And one Sunday on the way back she said, “Write about those sheep.” Smolens: There’s one passage in that essay where, out of anger and frustration , you and the rest of the family are tackling the sheep as they try to escape and throwing them back into their pen. It’s a moment of embarrassment , pain, and humor. And then a few pages later there’s the grief of finding one of the sheep dying. Dubus: And the fear of the owner finding out why it died! An artist friend of mine asked, “Why didn’t you take the dead sheep to the butcher and eat it?” And I thought, God, I never even thought of that as a solution...