The Interview

The Coming Storm

Introduction

Excerpts:

From Chapter One

From Chapter Two

From Chapter Three

From Chapter Four

An Interview with the Author

Paul Russell An Interview with the Author

A Few Words with Paul Russel, Author of The Coming Storm

Q: Do you consider your work to be "gay fiction," "fiction with gay characters," or something else? Do you think there is really a distinction to be made and, if so, what is it?

A: Alas, I really don't know what "gay fiction" is, exactly, even though I teach a course on gay fiction at Vassar where we ask precisely that question. Writers as different as David Bergman, Christopher Bram and Reed Woodhouse have addressed this question of literary taxonomy in interesting and provocative ways, yet the answer remains elusive. My sense is that most straight people don't particularly want to read about gay people, and so fiction with gay characters -- or at least a critical mass of such characters -- tends to be read only by gay people; so I suppose in a sense that's what "gay fiction" is: books that straight people don't particularly want to read. Of course there are always exceptions: one of my most loyal fans is an 85 year old British woman who is straight. One could not ask for a more perceptive and sympathetic reader than she. I don't set out to write gay fiction. I write out of my dreams, obsessions, desires -- and as nakedly as possible. As a secretive and private person, I cringe to think of what I reveal about myself. But it was only when I stopped censoring those dreams etc. that I was capable of writing anything remotely worth reading.

Q: What writers and what works do you feel inspired you as a write? Is there any specific inspiration for The Coming Storm?

A: Thomas Mann is the literary forebear whose spirit hovers most visibly over The Coming Storm. I'm fascinated by the tension in Mann between what he saw as the anarchic homoerotic impulse and the bourgeois need for order and control. Certainly the character of Louis, my closeted headmaster, enacts in many ways the uneasy compromises of Mann's own life -- with the important exception of productivity. Mann channeled the anguish of the closet into an immense literary output, while Louis remains painfully constipated.

Q: What role do you think books (especially fiction) play or continue to play in the gay community?

A: I know that, for myself, books have taught me to think thoughts and feel emotions I might never otherwise have had. I think books are revolutionary that way. And gay fiction promises to do what its enemies fear the most, which is to bring into being a world that might not otherwise exist. In that sense, our enemies are right to want to silence us. They understand how powerfully suggestive fiction can be in terms of creating identities, desires, pleasures that had not existed until someone came along and made them up. Wagner once wrote, about "Tristan und Isolde," "Because I have never tasted the true bliss of love, I shall raise a monument to all those dreams wherein love can drink to the full." Of course Wagner was a nut, and a dangerous one, but also a sublime one who understood the ability of art to articulate wild and incorporeal dreams as if they were as substantial as reality itself. The famous Tristan chord introduced into the world an utterly new way of feeling (and hearing) a particular species of desire. Gay fiction can do the same. Gay people have access to a much more profound identity because fiction first dared imagine that identity for them -- before it ever actually existed. Gay writers have built -- and continue to build -- the homosexual identity available to all of us, word by mad, painstaking, inspired, sexually-charged word.

Q: Of your published novels, which is your favorite? Why?

A: I suspect a writer always has to think that his latest work is his best -- that's, after all, why Hemingway woke up one day and put a gun to his head. I do have to admit a fondness, though, for my third novel, Sea of Tranquillity, which I feel was the most ambitious of my novels, not necessarily in a technical sense, but in its scope, its vision. The Coming Storm is, both literally and metaphorically, more down to earth, and that can certainly have its pleasures, but there was a shivery kind of euphoria that accompanied the composition of certain parts of Sea of Tranquillity that I still cherish. And of all my characters, I think Jonathon Cloud in some ways meant the most to me.

Q: How much of yourself, if any, do you put into your characters?

A: I put everything and nothing of myself into my characters. All my characters are pure invention; at the same time they are composed of many shards and fragments taken directly from reality. I'll steal a gesture from one person, a habit of speech from someone else, an anecdote I heard somewhere and partially misremember, some half-recollected memory from my own past, a few fond fantasies about what other people think and feel as they move through the world, put them all in a box, shake a few times, and voila, there's a character. (Well, would that it were quite that easy!) In a sense, nothing about my characters is invented, while at the same time they do not resemble in the least any single flesh and blood human being.

Q: What is the most difficult part or aspect of writing the novel? (for example, imagining, starting, rewriting, stopping, etc.) What do you find easiest and most challenging? What do you find most rewarding?

A: Beginning is the most agonizing part of the process for me. Some writers talk about the wonderful sense of infinite possibility that confronts them at the beginning of a new project. I envy them. All I get in the beginning is the queasy sense that I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm living with these creepily half-formed characters, and I have no intuitive sense of how they might act or what they might say, and for every step in the right direction I make a dozen missteps. Later, after I've settled into a sense of who my characters are, I can trust my intuition to make the right choices. Then I start to relax and enjoy the process. A little. I'm always anxious when I'm writing, and when I'm writing I'm worrying about the book all the time: while brushing my teeth, while driving to the grocery, while lying awake in the excruciating hours of the middle of the night when the whole book seems ridiculous from start to finish. And I'm always prowling for new material, fresh details. I scavenge daily life for what I need. If I'm talking to you, I'm also listening to everything you say and wondering, Can I use any of this? I like the long middle of a book, when I'm over the initial anxiety of whether this material is actually going to work as a novel and not yet too worried about the necessity of ending the whole thing. I certainly understand writers who, once they've created a fictional world, write sequel after sequel. And I think one of the reasons why I'm primarily a novelist rather than a short story writer is that, with a novel, once you've begun, once you've pitched your tent there, you can stay awhile and enjoy the view. With short stories, no matter how fetching the landscape, you're always having to strike camp and move on.

Q: Is your writing driven by the characters you've imagined, the plot, or something else? Is the process of writing the same with each book?

A: I definitely begin with characters. I'll find myself ruminating on a particular character I'm fascinated by long before I actually start the book. Usually I'll have two or three characters in mind, and then I start trying to put them into interesting relationships with each other, and see where that goes. I don't plan my novels out as far as plot goes: I write page by page, always asking myself, Given these characters, how would they react to this or that, what would they say, what would they do? How do their desires propel them, how do their fears thwart them? All you need to generate a plot is two characters with conflicting wants.

Q: What else are you working on?

A: I've got a new novel underway. It takes place in a little town in upstate New York, where tensions are rife between the locals who've been there for six generations and the newcomers, often gay, who have been moving in. I think at this point it will involve the points of view of two characters, one a middle-aged gay man, a landscape architect who has recently been brought back from death's door by the miracle drugs only to find that his boyfriend takes his return to some degree of health as a chance to bolt from the beleaguered relationship; the other is a 19 year old local boy who, under the somewhat sinister influence of his adored older brother, gets involved in a scheme to take advantage (emotionally, financially) of the gay man's vulnerabilities. The challenge here is to get inside the head of a straight -- or perhaps not so straight -- "redneck" and render him as convincingly and sympathetically as I do the gay man who is his not unwilling "victim." Of course, I may throw all this out and begin again tomorrow.