Jen Michalski: Congratulations on The Lost and the Blind. Heartbreaking Can you give us a bit of the book’s history and how you ended up working again with Running Wild Press?
Curtis Smith: Thanks, Jen. This originally started as a short story—the first chapter was placed with a lit journal—but then the journal hit a funding snag—and then Covid hit—and the story was left in limbo. Which was OK with me, because unlike most stories that I write and forget, I kept thinking about this one—and I guess that was my subconscious telling me there was more to explore. So this became my Covid project, and perhaps not in content but in tone, it contains some of the stress and uncertainty of that time. Once I decided to make it a novel, it came together relatively quickly. I guess I’d been imagining it for so long that I was pretty certain where it should go.
Running Wild put out my previous novel, The Magpie’s Return, and I was happy with that experience. I was allowed to submit ideas for the cover art and the editing experience was respectful and smooth. The book got a nice number of reviews, which isn’t always the case with indie releases—and the editor, Lisa Kastner, really works hard to get some visibility for her authors and titles. So I sent this book there—and I’m happy with how it’s turned out. The cover looks great—and I got to pick the voice for the audiobook, which was pretty cool. The book will also be featured on BookBub its first week—which might give it some more exposure.
JM: That’s great! Congratulations. You know, we just ran an interview with Robert McKean, and he’s written several books about another part of Pennsylvania, a fictional town called Ganaego in Western PA, and I got the sense, reading your last two books in succession (The Magpie’s Return and The Lost and the Blind) that both books were also in the same town, and maybe near the same timeline (there’s a fictional jungle war just staring in The Lost and the Blind, and The Magpie’s Return feels like it could have happened a few years after, with domestic discontent with “forever wars” and the government). Do you feel, like McKean, that you’re writing different parts of the puzzle, or do you treat every project as a separate, unique entity?
CS: I do have a default setting—a kind of mid-sized town that’s seen better days. A place where the people have been forgotten, their old industries gone, the new sources of money flowing to different zip codes. The novel I’m working on now is set in Philadelphia (I grew out just outside Philly), but the main character returns home for a bit—to a town like the one in The Lost and the Blind. I’ve lived in the central part of the state since I was 22—and I have a lot of family from the coal region—and I’ve been greatly influenced by the tides I’ve felt in these places.
Your question is difficult to answer. I see each piece as unique—for no other fact than my stories feel kind of dead when I’m done with them. When I start a project, I often try to push myself in new ways—either stylistically or in terms of process. But I also feel everything I write is part of figuring out the larger puzzle—the trying to understand both myself and my world.
And The Lost and the Blind and Magpie, even though they’re very different stories, have always felt like companion pieces to me. Maybe it’s the age of the narrators—or maybe the fact that these two projects came one after the other (Magpie was released during the pandemic’s first summer—and Lost and Blind was mainly written during the pandemic’s first year and a half). But more so, they share a vibe and a kind of world view.
JM: Yes, you’re right; they do share a vibe! Speaking of which, for many years, you were a high school teacher, now you teach creative writing at Elizabethtown College, and your son is in his late teens, right? Do you feel like their worldview has informed your writing more recently, because of this exposure? Or is it something unresolved? I know that I often write younger characters because I feel like I’m trying to figure something out that I couldn’t figure out then, and now I have the benefit of hindsight/maturity to understand it better. Of course, Mark, the narrator in The Lost and Blind, feels very mature already, and very discouraged. He’s been through so much already at 17.
CS: This is my 41st year in the classroom—and I think my dealings with young people, as a parent and a teacher, have made a huge influence on me and my work. I feel a keen responsibility to help those about to step into the adult world (a world we’re not leaving in the greatest shape, which is a shame, given the promise and opportunity allotted my generation), but the more I consider the world, the less certain I am whether it’s more horrible or beautiful—and I think these two combatting threads run through much of my writing.
I agree about writing younger characters. I’ve written nonfiction about my current life—but I don’t know if I’m perceptive enough to write a novel about someone my age. I think this will be my last (at least for now) teen narrator. I’ve recently signed my next novel—and that main character is in his mid-forties—and the main character of the novel I’m working on is in her late twenties. Still—that’s pretty far removed from where I am now—and having been given time to look back, I think I can understand those phases of life better now than when I was living them. I’m afraid if I wrote a 63-year-old character, he’d be groping through the dark just like the present-tense me.
And yes, Mark from this new novel isn’t your typical 17-year-old. He’s the most mature, most responsible person in his household. He’s the kind of youngster who lives through dysfunction and in response, tries to create order and peace rather than add to the chaos. It’s not an easy task, especially not for a kid.
JM: I noticed there wasn’t a lot of backstory, the how we got here with Mark’s mother and her addiction. And yet the descriptions throughout the novel are not sparse—Mark is very noteful of the fields, the breeze, the cornfields, the macadam. What was your process for deciding what types of details to include?
CS: It’s a balance. If I can get away without any backstory (or just hinting at it), I’ll opt for that. I’m always mindful of where to draw the line between painting a realized world and where too much description might bog the story down. I like to consider each scene through a filter—whatever the filter of the moment is for my narrator, be it fear or wonder or love—and then pick my details accordingly. I think a lot of the details here are internal—how Mark sees and processes the world. He’s a quiet kid—and he’s had to be observant and aware to survive.
JM: There are also a lot of observations that are sentence fragments. Is this a syntax that was used particularly for Mark, and why?
CS: I admit I have a thing for fragments, so no, it’s not a stylistic choice targeted directly at my main character (although I think it suits him). I think fragments, when used correctly, convey the way we think and process information. And more so, I like how they can change up a passage’s rhythms. Using them allows me to cut out words and whittle down to the essence—and in doing so, it can lend things a little punch. I’ve always liked that boundary between lyricism and minimalism.
JM: There are several points throughout in which the bottom kind of drops out of Mark’s life—his already-thin support systems. And yet, your writing always lulled me into a false sense of security in which I was entirely surprised when they did happen. I know this began as a short story, so I might have already answered my question, but are you a plotter or a panster in terms of story?
CS: I’m a total plotter—although I’m always tinkering with the process. I do try pantsing every so often, but it devolves into planning. I find a lot of joy and engagement in the planning process, and it often takes me months. Things come to me in whispers, and I need time to understand the bigger picture—elements of plot but more so, my characters—what moves them, how they see the world. Once I know I’m diving into an idea, I’ll buy a new journal for the project. I then go through and devote each page to a different idea—scenes, characters, images, threads, whatever. When I fill that notebook, I’ll then start putting things together—usually in a three or four-act structure. I’ll start with identifying where the acts begin and end—then I’ll try to find the rhythms and movements within those acts. Seeing it all laid out on paper allows me to consider how to handle the building and releasing of tension as the book moves forward. Next I’ll get cardstock and outline scene by scene—and then before I write, I’ll usually revisit these scenes and add more detail.
Then I write (longhand). I spend those months planning to see where I’m going, and I also plan for this stage, because having the big picture mapped out frees me to focus on words and sentences and language. For me, story is a separate entity from the language I need to make it real. I’m a sentence person—and then a paragraph/scene person—and wrestling with the idea of where something is going while also trying to determine the right words/rhythms doesn’t work for me. During this first draft, I often find things I hadn’t considered before—and sometimes the project veers off in different, unexpected ways. Nothing is set in stone—and sometimes I throw out whole sections/movements—but all the work I did before wasn’t a waste because I needed that work and understanding to get me to that point where I realized I might not be on the right track.
I talk to my students a lot about process—and I stress that we’re all different—and I try my best to introduce them to various strategies. In class we split our time between planning and plunging (and sometimes working the middle ground between them). It’s important to understand our unique proclivities—and then work with them instead of against them—and it’s also important to be aware of other ways of doing things because one’s process now probably won’t be one’s process forever. I’m very conscious of this—I don’t want to fall into a pattern of doing things the same way for every book. That doesn’t interest me. I want each book to be a little different—the last thing the world needs is another book from me—so I need to make it worthwhile for myself—and the only time to do that is during the actual writing. So while I may forever be a planner, I’m always examining and tinkering with the how and why of getting words on the page.
JM: You have a new novel coming out in 2024 or 2025. Can you tell us a little more about it?
CS: It’s title is Deaf Heaven (lifted from a Shakespeare sonnet). I was coming off The Lost and the Blind and the one before (The Magpie’s Return)—both of which featured teen protagonists, and I wanted to write anything but a teen character. I’d been watching a string of film noir offerings and decided to try something similar—something short and punchy and dark (I talk to my classes a lot the different ways we access our stories—and I think this is my first novel that I entered through tone/mood). It’s a story about a basically good man who gets away with murder but loses his soul. Once he realizes he’s off the hook, his relief is quickly replaced by emptiness, and he goes on a downward spiral, losing all he’d hoped to hold onto. But when I got to what I thought was the end, I wasn’t satisfied. I sat on it for about a week or two and then realized this person should lose his soul—but then fight to get it back—so I added another act of his fumbling attempts at redemption. It’s not a perfect redemption—but I liked this last act for a few reasons. One, it surprised the planner/plotter part of me and reminded me again that oftentimes stories stand up for themselves and tell us where they want to go. And two, this new act’s tone and pace were so different than what came before. The whole thing is a bit of a departure for me—which was fun.
Jen Michalski is the author of three novels, The Tide King and Summer She Was Under Water (both Black Lawrence Press) and You’ll Be Fine (NineStar Press), a couplet of novellas, Could You Be With Her Now (Dzanc Books), and three collections of fiction, her latest of which is The Company of Strangers, which was published January 2023 by Braddock Avenue Books. She’s also the editor in chief of jmww.
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