FEATURED WRITER OF THE MONTH

Matthew Pitt's 2009 collection, Attention Please Now, is flush with protagonists from places as varied as L.A., Paris, Milwaukee, and even a mysterious fictional island. (Read our Editors' Picks review here.) They are middle-aged men, long-married women, surly teenagers, and newfound lesbians—yet each of their stories is distinct and painfully relatable. Pitt recently spoke to THE OA about telephoning married women, his Woody Allen impression, and his disdain for new media and how it plays into his forthcoming novel.

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: Did you start off writing pretty straightforward stories and then absurdity snuck in?

MATTHEW PITT: I love to enter a story at a weird angle. I just have a difficult time telling a straight story. I fell in love with Grace Paley in college and was able to hang out with her every once in a while, and soak up as much as I could from her. She's got that story, "A Conversation with My Father"—the father's dying, and he wants her to tell a simple story, and gives examples of the kinds of stories that he wants, and she tries to tell it to him, and it's always wrong. But she's trying to do it. Ultimately, she's got to tell the story that's the Grace Paley story. She's got to tell it because she has no choice. That's probably where I come down on that sort of thing—the stories start off weird and sometimes you find places that you can cut out because they're not really in service of the story or the characters, but on the other hand, sometimes in revision they get weirder. And you just let it go and enjoy the ride.

THE OA: When did you know that you were a fiction writer?

MP: I wrote a story in a gifted education class called "Tales of the Pretzel Force" when I was six or seven years old. It was a comic book, but it had these swashbuckling heroes who were searching for villains across the universe and they happened to be Bavarian pretzel–faced. I'd probably try to rewrite it now.

I don't think I knew what a fiction writer was at that point, but I was always obsessed with story—and with improvising what a person might be doing after they left the room—or empathizing with someone who was feeling a certain way, trying to think why they were thinking that way. I was writing short stories on the backs of quizzes, and passing stories around algebra and geometry class—probably making my teachers wish for early retirement.

THE OA: When did you first know that you were funny?

MP: I don't know. I do know that I was telling jokes at a pretty early age, and I was also kind of obsessed with comedians at an early age. So I was honing my Woody Allen impersonation when I was around ten or something.

There's no real appreciation for the art of the joke. You can really look at the structure of jokes and the structure of great sentences and there are a lot of things that draw those two together. You have to know how to build the pace, and you have to work on your cadence over and over, and you have to know how to flip a line or defy expectation in the right moment. And then it's rare that somebody really looks at your work on a sentence-by-sentence level, or a joke-by-joke level, and you don't really get the accolades for that.

THE OA: Sometimes in your stories there's a perfectly tragic plot going on, and it's like you can't help but crack a joke.

MP: I don't think I've ever inserted a joke and said, "Oh, it's time for a joke now. This would be an excellent time to tell a funny!" I think that's daft to try to will it into a story, personally. But then people will tell me that they're funny. I really am not trying to go for that, and maybe some of it is just the natural instinct to sort of leaven the dark moments in the stories a little bit. Nothing really happens that's so glowing that there's not some mote in the eye, there's not something that's wrong with the situation, even if it looks like everything's humming along.

By the same virtue, you can have these terrible moments and exchanges with people that can somehow end by cracking open into laughter. There's something absurd that happens beyond your peripheral vision. So it's just probably inauthentic to do one without the other. They have to function together.

I don't try for jokes, but I did work on a sitcom right out of college, trying to decide if that's really what I wanted to do or not. But those story arcs are so pat; they're so familiar—you need to get three jokes per page. You need to have a comic block at a certain point. And I was a kid, I was just out of college, and I felt like I didn't know and trust my own voice enough, and if I went down that path and started writing scripts, or writing that kind of material, that I would get stuck in the formula, and stuck in the loop of kind of answering that formula, instead of trying to defy it.

THE OA: What sitcom was it?

MP: Oh, God. Can I go off the record for that one? I liked the people who were on it, and I don't want to knock what they did and there were some writers who had some amazing ideas for that show, but the life gets pounded out of sitcoms. You often see that the first draft has more life than the one that is broadcast. It's a little sad.

It was Monday night counter-programming for females, for people who didn't want to watch Monday Night Football.

THE OA: Were there many female writers?

MP: There were. Considering how male-dominated the industry was, and still is, it was actually a pretty good blend. But I don't know that we would have made Susan B. Anthony proud or anything.

THE OA: You've mentioned that you let your stories "flower in the revision." Can you give an example of a particularly strong change that revision yielded?

MP: In "The Whole World Over," there's this island that is basically a kind of limbo, and the characters whom the protagonists are visiting are dead. The friends who are still alive might not be for long, and that's why they're allowed to have the visit. I just had it in my mind to have a story where you whisk a couple of people away and it seems like they're just visiting old friends, but everybody on the island is dead or has recently died. Then Kevin Brockmeier did A Brief History of the Dead, and I think that was a lot more successful than what I was trying to do. It was cool to see someone else doing the same sort of thing.

So I just decided to put it in there without commentary. And some people have picked up on it, and some haven't, and that's fine with me.

THE OA: It's definitely eerie. But to me, it feels more like Carver.

MP: I've heard that about that story before. I don't feel directly influenced at all by his work, yet I know what people are saying when they say that. I certainly take it as a high compliment, but maybe when I was writing it, I thought, "Yeah, I could play my hand, and actually just say what this is, but I want to see what happens if I just let it alone, and pull back instead."

THE OA: Your stories are very attuned to setting. What is your obsession with setting?

MP: That's another area that people mention, and it's not what sets the gears in motion for me—on a conscious level. It's there, but it's one element. And yet over the course of revision, I find my way into that place, whatever it is. Although one of the things that is hard for me to accept is that I'm not that kind of writer who cares about setting something in a city and then making sure there really was a grocery store at the corner of 5^th and 9^th in 1974. I don't care. Authenticity and verisimilitude are two separate beasts. You can find someone who's gotten the details right, but there's no soul. People from Milwaukee who heard me read "The Mean" told me how much it feels like Milwaukee. And I said, "That's great, because I've never been there. So, I'm glad it does."

There's a lot of artifice going on in any story to begin with—the dialogue isn't actually going to be real dialogue, the characters and the situations can be completely fanciful—so what does it matter if you change the city planning and landscaping?

THE OA: Do you ever write about places where you have lived?

MP: Yes. The first story ["Golden Retrievers"] is set in L.A., and I lived in L.A.—but I wasn't able to write about it. I wrote a first draft of that story while I was in L.A. and I show it to my classes sometimes, because after I left L.A., I rewrote the story. I think I kept maybe six words out of six thousand. I just wasn't ready to write about it yet. Maybe part of it is that I'm not really ready to write about a place until I leave it. I grew up in St. Louis, so sometimes the Midwest can make it into my stories—as with Milwaukee—but I don't think I've ever set a story in St. Louis.

THE OA: Why not?

MP: I don't know, except to say that I've been thinking lately about how much sometimes I marvel at authors and friends who derive their material from the world that they came from, and the experiences that they had, and I'm completely resigned to the fact that I cannot, for the life of me, plagiarize my own life. I've tried on occasion to include something that happened to me or someone I know, and I just put it in there and play with it fictionally, but it just feels flattened to me. It just feels like I'm making it two-dimensional. And it's weird, I can write nonfiction pieces about where I've come from, but something about constructing a fictional narrative doesn't lend itself to that for me.

THE OA: You trade off pretty comfortably between male and female perspectives. When did you start exploring the female perspective? Which do you prefer?

MP: I actually like writing female characters more. The novel has many more female characters than male, but the newer stories I've been working on tend to have more male characters. I always felt more comfortable getting into female characters and perspectives. I don't know if it's curiosity, or if I feel women examine their interior lives in a way that men don't do as much.

I read the last full-length play that Tennessee Williams wrote, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, in high school, when I was starting to write in women's voices. The play is set by the sanitarium where Zelda [Fitzgerald] is staying. At some point, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who's tormented, talks to Hemingway about writers, and he's saying, "We both know that we need to have a clear understanding of the duality of gender, every writer has to embrace the duality of gender." And I thought, "Wow, that's exactly it."

It's not that you say, "I want to feel what it's like to be a woman." You are just listening to all sides of things, and that means embracing the other. And if you're not trying to do that, then I don't know that you're the best witness that you can be as a writer. Make a go of it—and if you fail, God, at least fail from trying.

THE OA: In the story "Outpatient" in particular, popular media reflects the protagonist's inner turmoil, to the point that they eventually converge. In a few of your other stories, also, you employ popular media as kind of a Greek chorus. Can you elaborate on this preoccupation with media?

MP: I started writing "Outpatient" right after Matthew Shepard's murder, and that was probably my impetus for writing that story. I think there's even an allusion to Matthew Shepard in there.

That story was written before Facebook or before people could send texts to one another, and before they could stage a protest in front of somebody's house and get everybody within a ten-mile radius to be there within an hour—but that's kind of what I was thinking about. I'm interested in how the media exposes or talks about things and how they talk about it for their own agenda. The media and television news care about getting the story out there, but they're also selling the story that they want, and the subject can get lost in the shuffle and the subject can get betrayed in the telling, too.

THE OA: As popular media evolves, does it find its way into your stories? Is there ever going to be text messaging and social networking in your work?

MP: Actually, there's some of that in the novel. It plays with wikis and things that I invented, too, technologies that I just made up. But one of them has started to come true already—I better finish that!

THE OA: How do you advise young writers to go out into the world?

MP: I think it's good to get yourself into situations where you are moving away from what's comfortable. For a while I worked at a factory because my grandfather had worked at a tool-and-die factory until he was in his eighties. I wanted to know what that felt like, to just be in a factory that doesn't have air conditioning in a sweltering St. Louis summer.

THE OA: You've said that your story "The Mean" was inspired by a job you had reading medical documents.

MP: I was working on brochures and magazines for doctors and oncologists—looking at trials and placebos, and did shark cartilage help this patient, and if so, how many patients—and it was interesting to see what people were trying, but it also felt like they were just flinging stuff at the dartboard and hoping it stuck. How bleak and how sad is that? At that same time, I was thinking about this guy who's in a position of power and, for some reason, he's in a lot of pain and the only people who can help him are the kids that he teaches—the petulant, rebellious kids whom he teaches. The dropouts. And it seemed like I could marry those worlds a little bit.

THE OA: What do you think is the strangest place you've ever found inspiration?

MP: My story "Observing the Sabbath" pulled a little bit from my experience, in college working with the United Auto Workers, when I made calls on behalf of different progressive groups across the country. We called for Catholics for Choice a couple of times, and I think I was the only guy calling for Catholics for Choice, and I felt really conscious of that. I felt like I needed to be really careful and cautious in these situations, because a lot of times there would be a woman's name on your call sheet, you'd call a house, and if the husband answered the phone, you couldn't identify your organization. Sometimes they would both pick up at the same time, and the woman might say something like, "Oh, honey, I've got this," or she might say, "Oh, I'm glad you called. Can you call me back in ten minutes? I'd love to talk to you then." You would understand what was going on and what the subtext was. That was just amazing to me to think about these couples who were probably deeply in love and yet one of them had no idea what the other was giving money to.

There's just that one moment, and the rest kind of comes out of whole cloth, and you're just grateful for it. Then you have to go through draft after draft trying to earn the reward of what it's given you.