Conversations with Andre Dubus

Interview with Andre Dubus

247 Interview with Andre Dubus Greg Garrett / 1999 Art and Soul. 23 February 1999. reprinted in Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking. ed. ross gresham. new orleans: Xavier review Press, 2003. 276–77. reprinted with the permission of the author. Greg Garrett: Many of the stories in Dancing After Hours are told from a female point of view. Do you ever worry about taking on that challenge of writing across the gender line? Andre Dubus: Writers should write the stories that come to them. I don’t think it’s experimental to write from the point of view of a woman. I think it’s just imagining. GG: Can you tell us a little about your writing habits? The where and when of your writing? AD: I’m retired now, so it doesn’t matter when I write. I can get up at noon and still write before dinnertime. When I was a teacher, then I had to keep a schedule. But I don’t just write when it comes to me, because that might just be a few nights a year. GG: How do you go about creating characters for your stories? Do you start with real people, or are they made up entirely? AD: I don’t use real people. I did once, when I was young. I used a friend of mine. But I realized that as well as I knew this guy, I didn’t know him at all. I don’t know if anybody knows how any body else feels. I have no idea what it feels like to be my kids. I have no idea what it felt like to be my parents. I do use bodies I’ve seen, like you might use a paper doll. But for me the character becomes real on the page through the imagination and through whatever gift it comes from. I don’t know what characters are going to do. I have to work to discover the character, and I do that by becoming the character and experiencing 248 conversations with andre dubus that life. If I say that I know exactly what a character is going to do, then I’ve killed that character. The character has to surprise you, the way you should have a sincere conversation, not a rehearsed one. If you plan everything, it isn’t a conversation. You’ve planned how you will feel and how you will react. GG: One of your great strengths is dialogue. How do you go about writing dialogue that is so real? AD: It’s probably not real; maybe it tries too hard to be real. You should never write realistic dialogue. We all talk too much. Look at the short stories of Fitzgerald or Hemingway—they write lines that sound like human speech but it’s purified. No one says that little. I try to get a poetic rhythm going and I try to write literary dialogue. We’re not trying to be real. We’re trying to be better than real. We’re trying to be true. GG: What is the relation between your beliefs and your writing? Are you a Catholic writer, whatever that means these days? AD: When I’m making up those characters, I generally know before the story when I’m about to become a character who’s religious or not or something in between. But I never know the answer to the question about Catholicism and my writing. I’ve been a Catholic all my life. That’s the way I see the world. We all share in the universals, but my worldview is shaped by my being a Catholic just like yours is shaped by being a Baptist. GG: How do you decide whether you’re going to write fiction or nonfiction? What makes you decide to write an essay? AD: Usually when it happens to me, I write an essay. To tell the truth, I’m not interested in writing about my personal life, but sometimes I feel that it’s something that needs to be told. I’m very excited about being alive in my personal life, but I don’t want to bring it to my desk. There I want to be someone else. Some people have to write close to the bone. That is their demon. My fictional angel wants to take me somewhere else. ...