Andrew Farkas is the author of a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press), and two short fiction collections: Sunsphere (BlazeVOX Books) and Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review,North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Western Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, including one Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXV and one Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama, an M.A. from the University of Tennessee, and a B.A. from Kent State University. He is a fiction editor for The Rupture (the new iteration of The Collagist) and an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
Kristina Marie Darling: You’ve had quite a year, with a novel and a short story collection launching in close succession. Tell us more about your journey to this double book launch. What practical suggestions do you have for emerging fiction writers who are striving to find a home for their work?
Andrew Farkas: In 2008, I had two short story collections ready to go: Sunsphere and Self-Titled Debut. I thought the former was going to get published first because I’d heard various rumblings that a press was going to take it. Didn’t happen. Instead, over the next ten years, I’d submit Sunsphereand a different version of that book to who knows how many presses. I got lots of positive rejections and finalist placements, but that’s all. Self-Titled Debut, on the other hand, I sent to one contest, it won and got published in early 2009. While I was trying to get Sunspherepublished, I wrote about half of another book of short stories when I finally decided to start working on a novel: The Big Red Herring. It took me six years to write that novel. Last year, 2018, I’d been done with Sunsphere for ten years and The Big Red Herring for three years, when in the space of three months, BlazeVOX accepted the former and KERNPUNKT accepted the latter. I couldn’t be happier!
Thinking about this story, here are my practical suggestions. When you finish one book, as soon as you can, start working on the next. You might get published in no time at all (like I did with Self-Titled Debut), or it might take a very long time indeed (a decade for Sunsphere). But if you’ve written a number of books, then any one of those could hit for you. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard on your books. You absolutely need to. But when the work is done, celebrate a little, then stare down the new project in town. Next, you need to be able to persevere. Convince yourself you’re in on a long con, like in The Sting (1975) or House of Games (1987). There’s always a time when people will think you’re out of it. Don’t discourage them. Or, make it a point to discourage them unconvincingly. But imagine how they’ll react when they realize they were wrong the entire time … as you continue writing, continue submitting.
KMD: Your story collection, Sunsphere, was launched by BlazeVOX Books, one of my favorite indie presses. As a writer, what are some advantages to working with an indie press as opposed to a larger publishing house?
AF: Full disclosure: I’ve never worked with a larger publishing house. Whatever I say, then, is based on outside observations. So, it seems to me that bigger publishers, the New York City media conglomerates, are rather like Hollywood film production companies in that they’re only really interested in blockbusters. Even when NYC publishes someone whose work is more literary, it’s only when that person already has an established national or worldwide reputation that’ll lead to sales, or when a book has done remarkably well with a small or mid-major house (which leads to NYC picking it up to boost the sales even more). Indie presses, on the other hand, are only concerned with curating great work (granted, each press defines “great” in its own way), even if that work isn’t going to make anyone rich. I would say, then, that working with an indie press is heartening because you come to realize that there are people who truly care about good literature; they care so much they’re even willing to volunteer their time to make sure there are different kinds of written work in the world, instead of the near homogeneity we see in the big money enterprises. Working with indie presses, you see immediately that everyone’s there because they love the art of literature, with all of its challenges and oddities and demands on readers’ gray matter. I am therefore deeply indebted to Elisabeth Sheffield at Subito Press, Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVOX [books], and Jesi Buell at KERNPUNKT Press not only for publishing, but for encouraging me to continue on, for showing me there are people who not only care, but care very deeply about literature.
KMD: Sunsphere makes fascinating and imaginative use of the materials of history. In what ways can writers benefit from looking beyond autobiographical experience, and embracing research as part of their creative practice?
AF: Samuel Beckett said that the difference between him and James Joyce was that Joyce was a synthesist who wanted to bring everything in, while Beckett was an analyst who wanted to leave everything out. Although I’m far more interested in Beckett’s writing, I suppose I’m more like Joyce: a synthesist. If you feel yourself inclined toward synthesizing, you need to open yourself to everything. When you do, you’ll find things you never guessed would interest you. In Sunsphere, for instance, I use some of the history of the 1982 World’s Fair, an event I knew nothing about until I started researching it after I visited the Sunsphere for the first time when I moved to Knoxville in 2002. I was already intrigued by a symbol of energy (the Sunsphere) that, at the time, towered above a ruinous park. But then I learned about Jake Butcher, the corrupt financier who brought the exposition to Knoxville and then went to prison afterwards. As my research continued, I saw more and more connections to the ideas of energy and entropy I planned to use in the book. If I would’ve stuck with my own experience, I probably could’ve gotten one story out of the Sunsphere. With historical and scientific research, I got an entire collection. There are even three stories I ended up cutting, and more that I never wrote (but thought about writing).
KMD: Though archival and research-based in some ways, Sunsphere also pays homage to Knoxville, Tennessee, a city you do have a personal connection to. How do you balance research and lived experience in your writing practice?
AF: More so in my recent foray into creative nonfiction, I think about this question a lot. Except maybe for those who live obviously exciting lives (someone like Hunter S. Thompson did, I guess), or especially “significant” lives (like famous people who happen to also be writers), other authors constantly wonder, “Why would anyone care about me?” Consequently, in my creative nonfiction, I always include something that happened to me and something from outside of me in almost equal measure. For instance, my essay “Noir Girl,” that appeared in North American Review, is about an experience I had with someone I briefly knew in Billings, Montana, but it’s also about the division between film noir and neo-noir. In Sunsphere, I was actively not writing about myself. So even though I was using Knoxville, Tennessee, and the Sunsphere, I felt like everything in the book had come from outside of me (the city, the World’s Fair, the scientific research, etc.). I suppose in fiction I have that Thomas Pynchon penchant for obscuring myself as much as possible. Even the name I publish under, “Andrew Farkas,” isn’t exactly me, since I always go by “Andy” (I even have my students call me “Andy,” instead of, say, “Dr. Farkas”). Much like Jorge Luis Borges’ essay, “Borges and I,” when I look at my work later, I like to be confused whether “Andy” wrote it, or “Andrew Farkas.”
KMD: What was the greatest risk you took when writing Sunsphere?
AF: Since realism is the dominant literary form, writing a collection of experimental short stories was already a risk. But I think the greatest risk was actually writing a mixed collection. I didn’t even think about that until Ilana Masad interviewed me for The Other Stories podcast. So, the fact that Sunsphere is made up of stories in various genres and styles probably makes it difficult for some people to think about. For instance, “The City of the Sunsphere” is definitely science fiction, while “White Dwarf Blues” is a parody of a drug noir. In the former, the Sunsphere is transformed into a miniature pulsar; in the latter, nothing supernatural happens. “The City of the Sunsphere” is very serious (with an occasional small joke for pressure release), while “White Dwarf Blues” is intended to be funny throughout. I think this used to be common in short story collections, but it seems less common now. For me, I tend to gravitate towards collections that explore where fiction can go. Now, I don’t have a problem with someone mastering one particular style, but while mastering that style, why not deal with different types of subject matter? Or stick with all of the same subject matter while writing in many different styles? I suppose, since the novel is far more popular than the short story, we want collections to act like novels, undercover novels that don’t reveal their true colors until a dramatically appropriate time.
KMD: What are some of the challenges and rewards of writing short fiction? How are these different from the trials and triumphs of novel writing?
AF: Whenever I talk about, say, Dostoyevsky, or any old Russian novelist, I often hear people say, “I’m not reading that. It’s just too long.” I’m surprised, then, when I recommend reading short stories that people often aren’t interested. What they don’t say, but what I think they believe is, “I’m not reading that. It’s just too short.” I think what people are looking for is a sustained narrative that takes the reader to a point of mental comfort, but doesn’t stick around too long after that point. I know these characters, I know the plot, I know the constant style, I’m sure the conclusion will bring all of the strands together coherently and pleasantly. That’s perfectly fine. But for those who want a different experience too, short stories are there, capable of blindsiding you, flashing enigmatically before you, vanishing without a trace leaving you to wonder what you just read. Unlike the tranquility that’s reached reading Freytag-based novels, short stories operate more on the level of Zen koans. Reading them again and again and again, you might have a different idea of what’s going on each time. Short fiction has a much better chance of leaving you with that “my mind’s been blown” feeling because you don’t have nearly as much time to hang out with the characters or look at the plot. The challenge for me, then, is how to achieve that mind-blowing effect so the reader will want to go back and think about the piece in question over and over. One of the ways I continue to pull readers along is through humor. Even though there aren’t always conventional plots to follow in my stories, or characters who resemble people you could meet, I like to think I make people laugh enough that they want to see what the next line that makes them laugh will be. I also tend to take up philosophical ideas, so anyone interested in thinking about the world in that way will continue on to see where I take the idea in question.
Now, the biggest difference between my novels and my short stories is architecture. Before The Big Red Herring, I briefly worked on a novel that I realized was mostly just an excuse to write another short story collection. When I started Red Herring, I set myself the challenge of connecting everything in the novel. I still wasn’t interested in writing a conventional realist book, but there actually had to be girders and guy-wires and rivets and bolts holding it all together. So, I decided on a postmodern murder mystery set in an alternate history. Even though I figured out how to make everything gel, it still wasn’t until the final draft that I worked on the unification material. Since books like Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbowwere influences for me, I was never going to write a novel that systematically marched from point A to point B to point C, etc. On the last draft, though, I still forced myself to play foreman, going around and making sure that everything held together, even if only in an M.C. Escher sort of way.