CutBank Interviews: A Conversation with Boris Fishman
by Daniela Garvue
Boris Fishman is the author of two acclaimed novels, A Replacement Life and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. His recent memoir, Savage Feast, is an excellent reflection on family, identity, and kickass food. He’s also the newest faculty member of the University of Montana’s creative writing department and my workshop professor. One thing that always strikes me about Boris, both in workshop and outside of it, is his willingness to ask: Where is this person coming from? What are they really trying to say?
In prior conversations with Boris, in workshop or over a dinner table (Seven-layer honey cakes! Homemade farmer’s cheese! Tea with jam! That beautiful question: Coffee or Scotch?), we’ve often discussed food, fiction, and a writer’s ambition. I was excited to pick up those threads for this interview.
Daniela Garvue: You said something in workshop last week that I’ve been thinking about. We were discussing Malamud’s The Assistant, which seems old fashioned in its effort to grapple with morality of big issues like antisemitism, the American dream, etc. And you posed this idea that lovely prose and authentic observation is not enough. I think you said, “I’m frustrated at contemporary writers’ lack of ambition. Because the best writing offers a perspective on how to live.” Can you speak more about that?
Boris Fishman: I want to distinguish between having your main character evolve in some way in the course of a novel (which much traditional fiction does to a fault, as has mine) and the kind of transformation you find at the end of The Assistant. Malamud is writing about nobodies in a nowhere place. The stakes are low. But the transformation that Frank Alpine undergoes in that novel is of a size equal to all the mystery of what it means to be human. And Malamud pulls it off. (Not least by what he leaves out – it’s barely 200 pages. You can write a Russian novel – as I very much believe The Assistant is; it has that directness and “simplicity” – without writing a Russian novel.) But by virtue of that, it speaks to far more than the moment and situation of the book – it speaks to the whole human experiment, and is restorative of faith in both fiction and being human. When I put down a novel like that, I’ve got more oxygen inside me than when I picked it up.
In 20+ years of listening to, and reading, American writers talk about their craft and their intentions with a given project, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard one even invoke these aspirations (unless they’re talking about the one genre where we allow them, namely those Russian novels), let alone admit to having them. And you see that on the page. No matter how “big” the terrain a contemporary novel takes in, its gaze tends to be small, small, small. Yes, it aspires to say more than what’s on the page, but even that “more” is meager. And it is in this sense that good prose and good insights aren’t enough. (And how few published novels have those.) Let me be clear: You will certainly sell a novel with only those qualities, and you will sell it handsomely. But it won’t last. Even the things that deserve to last don’t last. Like The Assistant.
DG: When you start on a piece, fiction or nonfiction, do you try to have that larger truth in mind? Or does it come from the story and its characters?
BF: It absolutely must come from the story and the characters, and the things you discover in the writing. I have begun with the big idea, and it has come out false every time. Those larger questions have to hum back there all the time, but they have to be in the last row of the bleachers.
DG: We’ve also talked in workshop about writing about charged moments. For example, one of my classmates is tackling the 2016 election and radicalization via the internet. Last semester someone in our workshop wrote about COVID. It seems particularly difficult to write about these things, but also dishonest to ignore them. What are your thoughts on writing about charged, contemporary moments?
BF: Go in through a side door. The story about the 2016 election was not about the 2016 election. It was about a young woman impersonating a right-wing military figure on the Internet in order to approach her conservative grandmother and force her to realize just whose bed she is sharing. And the election was exactly where it needed to be – all the way back there. (Even better if it goes unspoken – we all know what the elephant looks like.)
DG: How does your background and obvious love for nonfiction affect the way you write fiction? And are your writing processes similar for both genres?
BF: Chekhov said medicine is the wife, and literature the mistress. Replace those, for me, with fiction and nonfiction, respectively. For me, literary nonfiction can be as elusive a craft as fiction, the voice – in the best of it – as transporting as the greatest novel. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’” “Once I was attacked in the middle of Central Park; some young men searched my pockets, pointing a gun at my head, but they found only five dollars. They fondled me so much while they searched me that we ended up making love.” “Depression is the flaw in love.” “Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide.” These days, however, writing like this is even harder to find in nonfiction than fiction. Perhaps it’s always been this way.
Philip Roth – whose nonfiction I relish far more than his fiction – wrote, with his characteristic articulateness, in Patrimony, his memoir of taking care of his father in the latter’s decline: “It was I whose imagination kept running to the predictably maudlin while his had the integrity of a genuinely anomalous talent, compelled by the elemental feeling that can lend ritualistic intensity to even the goofiest act.” For me, that sums up the key aspect of some of the best fiction I’ve read: The author notices different things, applies attention at different points, phrases things in a different way. You have to notice/remember/conjure the idiosyncrasy that reveals the elemental nature of something. That’s hard to do, in ways large and small, across 300 pages, keeping your subconscious in just the right place all along in order to suffuse the proceedings with the necessary amount of that anomaly (which, in the best case, you don’t fully understand but can at least sometimes control).
Nonfiction is the opposite. For many people, novels seem to have a greater mystique because these people think it’s harder to imagine something that didn’t happen than to transcribe something that did. But this is a very uninformed way of considering the issue. In a novel, indeed, the impossible challenge is to conjure that anomaly out of the mess and noise of your brain. The challenge of nonfiction is how to ignore what happened – and all the sticky and limiting ways in which we immediately interpret and classify such things, particularly if we’re talking about personal history – sufficiently well to see it as something other than what most other people would see, how to dig down to, well, the same essence-defining idiosyncrasy you’re after when writing a novel. With nonfiction, there is so much you have to unlearn before you stand a chance of seeing it well. To me, that’s as hard as writing a novel.
DG: Can you talk a little about teaching? As a TA teaching an intro to fiction class, I’ve often wondered, "Who am I to say what’s good writing? I only know what works for me." How do you approach that question?
BF: I understand you so well. So often, I want to say: “What are we doing here? There are a thousand legitimate ways to react to this story.” So I try very hard to acknowledge my preferences and biases. For instance, last week in my undergraduate class, we workshopped a sci-fi story that left readers who weren’t already expert in the tropes of the genre totally in the dark. After issuing my requisite disclaimers – my experience is primarily with literary fiction; realism tends to resonate with me the most -- I talked about all the craft moves the story could make in order to bring in a far wider audience while losing none of its mojo. But the classroom was already full of students willing to wait – willing to proceed in the dark because they’d read enough sci-fi to know that some kind of clarification would eventually come. And there were even students who knew nothing about sci-fi who felt that way. And we now live in a world of such atomized, fragmented audiences – not to mention a world in which sci-fi is probably faring far better than li-fi, to coin a sad term -- that the story’s author can probably secure for himself all the money and honor he might want by writing for them alone. Perhaps it hardly matters that I would have put that book down by page 2.
I try to be open with my graduate students in the same way. I am offering a subjective perspective, hardly the final word. That said, because of what I’ve read, or written, or taught, or thought about, or lived, or see simply because I am coming at their manuscript from the outside – it is so important for a teacher never to forget how much easier it is to critique something than to write it -- maybe I can provide some insights they can use. But this is definitely only one tool in their education as a writer.
DG: You’ve written about the tension between the American east and west, especially in Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo. How has officially moving from New York to Montana (and spending your first winter here) influenced the way you think and write about that geographic/cultural divide?
BF: The most important thing that happens is all that deleterious and distracting noise you get in New York – the hype, the buzz, the awards, the contracts, the whispers, the envy – really does dissipate the farther out you get. Now, you may have the kind of constitution that allows you to ignore all of that even if you’re there. I didn’t. So, it has been invaluable for me to be here.
As for Montana itself, about ten years ago, I was in Cooke City, near Yellowstone, and went into a divey old saloon called Miners. The bartender and I got into a conversation. He was following the Grateful Dead to California, fell asleep in some woods for too long to re-join the caravan, looked around, and stayed. Cooke City had one stoplight, no cell service, no law enforcement, no paving, and 500 inches of snow a winter. Didn’t he miss a certain kind of…intellectual vibrancy, I asked him (patronizingly, though I didn’t mean to be). And he said something like: “You have to understand that things work differently here. Here, there’s nobody telling you this is what you should look like. This is what you should say. Here, it’s just a giant mirror, and nowhere else to look.”
He was right – painfully right. (You can get some of Raz’s wisdom yourself – he now co-runs Second Set Bistro, in the Florence Hotel, in Missoula.) And I feel like I’ve been skating down both edges of that sword. Things really slow down, and you get to look at yourself in a deeper way, for better and worse. Another line that comes to mind is from an old New Yorker story by Peter Hessler, who moved from Beijing to a small town in Colorado, quoting someone local: “Living in a small town is like playing checkers. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played at a higher level.”
Alice Munro put it well, too, in her Paris Review interview: “When you live in a small town you hear more things about all sorts of people. In a city you mainly hear stories about your own sort of people.” Indeed – in some ways, New York was one of the most homogeneous places I’ve ever lived.
DG: I can think of at least three separate occasions in which our conversations turned toward cookbooks, and obviously Savage Feast includes several recipes. How does your fascination with food relate to your interest in writing? Also, do cooking shows have the same allure for you, or is there something special about a cookbook?
BF: They are the only two things I’ve ever done where I haven’t noticed the time passing. (Of course, I notice time passing when the fiction-writing isn’t going well. Then all time is made of time.) Other than that, they have nothing to do with each other. I don’t like sitting. I hate screens. I love working with my hands, not that I know how to do very much outside cooking. Writing goes against all of that. And so, it’s like a burden I serve because it sets me aflame in the way that it does, like visiting a family member who drives you crazy but you’re unwilling to abandon.
As for cooking… Well, maybe there are more connections with writing than I’ve given credit to. They will never invent an app for that. Storytelling and cooking/eating are some of the most ancient, elemental needs and desires that we have, and as the world around us changes in ever more dystopian ways, it is so very grounding to engage in either. But there’s a different level of that with cooking for me, because you are using your hands, your body. That physicality, for me, feels indispensable. You’re making something out of nothing. For me, there is so much meaning, dignity, and fulfillment attached to that, to watching the people around your table erupt in the joy that only elemental pleasures provide.
As for shows vs. cookbooks, I will read and watch anything that teaches me something about cooking – I just watched one of Gordon Ramsay’s MasterClasses – but it can be easier to learn from a screen than visualize the steps from a cookbook. But in either, I want rigor and intensity – I don’t want the cooking shows that essentially function as armchair porn. I don’t want to walk through Italy with Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow. I don’t even want to read Bill Buford. I want Gordon Ramsay to show me how to get the corn starch into a hot liquid without it clumping.
Photo by Stephanie Kaltsas
Boris Fishman is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes, all from HarperCollins. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Saveur, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and many other publications. He lives with his wife and daughter in Missoula, Montana, where he teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Montana. Please see www.borisfishman.com for more info.
Daniela Garvue is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana. She hails from the central Nebraskan plains and won't shut up about it. Her stories appear in the Bellevue Literary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere, but her best work was carved into a desk in 5th grade. She enjoys following game trails, dressing up in her grandfather's bolo ties, and making pancakes.