FEATURED AUTHOR OF THE MONTH

A first book composed of three novellas might be an unusual formula for literary success, but it appears to be working for Josh Weil. In the eleven months since his debut collection, THE NEW VALLEY, was released, Weil has earned the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and been selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” emerging authors. For the 2009-10 academic year, he has taught creative writing at Gilman, a boys’ school in Baltimore, as the school’s Tickner Writing Fellow. Coinciding with this month’s release of THE NEW VALLEY in paperback, we ask Weil about his use of the novella form, his mountain hideaway, and his ambitions, both literary and otherwise. Given his work ethic and his early accomplishments, we expect Weil to fulfill his dreams of becoming this country’s preeminent cherry-farming, great-American-novel-writing, literary-outdoorsman. Read our Editors’ Picks review of THE NEW VALLEY.

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: Why do you write? 

JOSH WEIL: I wish I could say it was to bring important issues to light, or to find some kind of truth, or to communicate with readers in some way—but, really, it’s completely selfish: I know of no rush, no high, like it. What an amazing thing, to be able to create a world where one didn’t exist, to give birth to people who weren’t there before, to know the inside of someone else’s mind, to feel them think through you. That’s why I write.

THE OA: What is the hardest part about writing? The easiest? 

JW: The hardest part is unquestionably getting my conscious mind out of the way and letting the subconscious part—what Robert Olen Butler calls the place from which we dream—take over. That gets harder and harder the more that I write, the more I read, the more I'm critical of my own work.

The easiest part is coming up with the ideas. I’ve got notebooks full, and I still get just as excited when something hits me that feels like it needs to be told.

THE OA: If you weren’t writing (and teaching), what do you think you might be doing? 

JW: Well, I told myself once that if I didn’t get a book deal, or at least a good agent, by the time I was thirty, I’d go to school for landscape architecture. And I came awfully close. Sometimes I think I’d have been pretty happy doing that. And there have been times when I’ve seriously considered apprenticing myself to a furniture maker. But my dream has always been to have an orchard. Cherries. I’m still aiming for it.

THE OA: How did you land on the novella form for the three works that make up THE NEW VALLEY? 

JW: You know, the form kind of chose me. Or at least the story did, and the story chose the form. When I wrote “Ridge Weather,” the first novella in the collection and the first one I ever wrote, I didn’t even really know what a novella was. I just got hit with this idea and sat down and started writing, and when I was done, I had an eighty-page thing. It was only then that I started thinking about other novellas to go with it.  But I think I was naturally pulled to the form because of my work in film (I studied to be a film director and wrote quite a few screenplays). I think you can fit about the same amount of story into a movie as you can into a novella; they just feel similar—sizewise and scopewise—to me.

THE OA: Can you recommend some of your favorite novellas? 

JW: “The Beige Dolorosa” by Jim Harrison, “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, “Enchanted Night”  by Steven Millhauser.

THE OA: You wrote most of THE NEW VALLEY from a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where these three novellas are also set. How did that experience influence the book? 

JW: I wrote every word of the book there. And I don’t think that I could have written any of it if it hadn’t been for that place. I’ve been going there—sometimes for long hauls, months at a time—since I was nineteen. There’s nowhere in the world that I know as well as those acres, those pastures, those woods. And I think there's something about the isolation that allows for a kind of intensity that I have trouble finding elsewhere. That was even more important to my writing, and especially to the novellas in THE NEW VALLEY, than the actual geography. It was being holed up with nothing but my thoughts, my routines, myself, that affected the writing in that book more than anything else.

THE OA: “Stillman Wing,” the second novella in THE NEW VALLEY, is sprinkled with your own artwork: highly detailed, technical diagrams that fuse tractor parts with parts of the human body. Did the story begin with a drawing or with text? How did you go about combining these elements? 

JW: Oh, it was definitely the text, at first. But I realized sometime into that I wanted to break up the sections in a way that would signal a shift in the treatment of time (because each shorter section drifts outside of a naturalistic progression of the days and months) and yet would be more fluid and slippery than a chapter break and heading. Also, I was deeply influenced by W.G. Sebald and the way the images he uses work their way both forwards and backwards into the text, so I started thinking about using images from old tractor manuals and advertisements. I’d look at the diagrams in these antique pamphlets, and they looked just like cross sections on the posters in doctor’s offices, and my brain went ping. Because that just fit the novella so well. So that’s what I was going for—a kind of doctor’s-office diagram of a machine. At least, that was the initial inspiration for the drawings.

THE OA: The protagonists of the novellas in your book are a lonely cattle farmer, an elderly gentleman descending into dementia, and a mentally disabled young man. Presumably, these characters lead very different lives than your own experience. While the work of many young authors contains autobiographical elements, what made you choose such a departure from the personal/familiar for these characters? 

JW: Wait, you’re saying you think I’m not like them? I have a sneaking suspicion that my friends would be quite comfortable describing me as a dimwitted old fogey of a loner. No—it’s true, the trappings of their worlds, the specifics of their characters are pretty different from my own. But I’ve always hated that “write what you know” crap. Eudora Welty said, “Write what you don’t know about what you know,” and I think that’s a lot closer to the truth. But I probably go at it inversely: I believe in writing what you know about what you don’t know. Or at least starting from that point. What I mean by that is that if a writer understands some core truth about a character, has some deep connection and knowledge of the wound that drives that character’s actions, then the rest is just painting the world around that. And, for me, I’ve always been drawn toward painting worlds different from my own. I think if I had to write a story about a thirty-something-year-old, middle-class guy teaching creative writing to high-school kids and answering questions for magazine interviews, I’d break my head against a wall. Though, actually, I should amend that: If I had to write a novella or a novel about it, I’d do the head-breaking thing. But my short stories—because they feel less dependent on plot, less demanding of the full creation of a world—often hew much closer to home.

THE OA: Tell us about the novel you’re working on now. 

JW: You know, until I know if it’s going work, or not, I don't want to put too much out there about it. But I will say it’s totally different from THE NEW VALLEY. It’s set in Russia, and it’s kind of a fable, and I better leave it at that.  

THE OA: Has your experience teaching high-school creative writing this year affected your approach to your own work? 

JW: Honestly? Probably not. At least I hope not. If it has, then it would be this: I’d be more conscious of the tools you use as a writer, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. I feel like I’ve spent a decade trying to get those ideas ingrained deeply enough that I can forget about them when I write. But it’s definitely affected my approach to teaching, and in all good ways. There’s something a little magical about teaching kids just on the edge of leaving their childhood behind, of beginning the part of their lives that will decide more than any other, I think, who they become as adults. It’s an age of discovery, and it’s a real gift to be able to be a small part of that.

THE OA: What’s on your summer reading list? 

JW: A MERCY by Toni Morrison, FARMER by Jim Harrison, CITIES OF THE PLAIN by Cormac McCarthy, and the stuff I’m most excited about: a couple of manuscripts by friends.

The OA Ten

1. What superstitions do you have? 

When things are going really well I have this totally unfounded belief that I’m building up badness: I’m going to be punished somehow, by someone, with some hard thing hitting.

2. What would you like to change about yourself? 

I’d like to be six inches taller. Make that seven. Also, I wish I was more able to commit wholeheartedly to a decision without second-guessing it. And if I could ride a horse like an Apache warrior—you know, slipping to the side and riding horizontally and firing off arrows at full gallop—that’d be cool, too.

3. What are you still trying to accomplish in your professional career? 

I’d like to write something truly great.  But, in the short term, I’d settle for feeling like I had a career that could be called professional.

4. What is your hidden talent? 

I can kinda groove-out on the dance floor.

5. What subject causes you to rant? 

Reason vs. Faith.

6. What is the biggest mistake you ever made in your professional career? 

I don’t really believe in mistakes when it comes to writing. I think one failed project gives birth to another that might not have come about without the failure first. Same thing with career moves: A previous agent of mine went out with a novel before THE NEW VALLEY. It wasn’t ready, and it didn’t sell, and I’m so glad it didn’t. I’d hate to have had for a first book anything but the one I did. That said, writing a 1,300-page novel as my first serious attempt at a literary book probably wasn’t the most practical move.

7. What is one thing that you used to dislike that you now like? 

Oysters.

8. What profoundly underrated book, album, or movie would you like to champion for us? 

There’s a documentary film by Jana Sevcikova, a Czech director, called OLD BELIEVERS. It’s simply an observance of the daily lives of an isolated community of religious fundamentalists in rural Slovakia, and it probably had as great an impact on me—on my aesthetic and my ideas of pacing and of deep emotion portrayed with restraint—as anything else I’ve seen or read. It has what might be the most affecting final shot I’ve ever witnessed and some of the most gorgeous black-and-white cinematography I’ve ever seen. And almost nobody knows about it.

9. What is your favorite line from a song? 

Favorite stanza:

I never saw the morning ’til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine ’til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody, until I needed a song.

                                                - Tom Waits, “San Diego Serenade”

If it has to be a favorite single line:

One monkey don’t stop the show.

                                                - Gillian Welch, “One Monkey”

10. What is your earliest childhood memory?  

The first one I think I remember is this: When I was three years old, I lived with my family in a village called Bunda in the East African country of Malawi.  I’ve been told I used to love to accompany my mother to the market and that I was fascinated by the dead fish with their round, slippery eyes. I think I remember touching them, slowly sliding my fingertips over eyeball after eyeball. But the first memory I'm sure I have—not something that anyone told me about—was when I was maybe five years old and we were living in Maryland. I woke up at dawn. The house was silent; everyone was asleep. It was spring, and the smell of the cherry blossoms was in the air. I walked down the stairs and out the front door and wandered alone down the neighborhood street, looking at the pale flowers in the bluing light, just wandered away on my own, drawn by the blooms. I remember the feeling of that.