Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
The Philadelphia Inquirer called St. Louis author Richard Burgin “one of the most stimulating practitioners of the short story form”; his work has been called ingenious, masterful, brilliant, terrifying, lonely, dexterous, reckless, high-voltage, dark, and funny. The reviews are starting to trickle in now for Shadow Traffic, his 15th book and seventh collection of stories, released this month by the The Johns Hopkins University Press. Publisher’s Weekly called the collection “darkly captivating,” adding that “Burgin shows admirable range in this collection, which is hugely varied in both style and form, and while there are clear standouts, there’s not a single throwaway.” Varied is an understatement: the character’s voices are so diverse and distinct, you start to wonder if Burgin has undertaken some Zappa-esque project and hidden tape recorders all over the place, secretly capturing the voices of stoners, single dads, computer geeks, pollyannas, and sociopaths. Of course, there was no way for him to lift the voices from “Memo and Oblivion,” and “The House,” two surreal and suspenseful stories that we won’t spoil for you here. It is simply that, like any good writer, he contains multitudes. Burgin (who also teaches, edits, composes music, and helms the venerated lit mag Boulevard, published out of Saint Louis University) has multiple readings scheduled around the city in October and November; he spoke with us this summer about the new collection, teaching, and the state of the short story in the 21st century.
SLM: So, I hear you are prouder of this than anything else you’ve done; why is that?
RB: Well, of course it’s human nature, or maybe a writer’s nature, to think that the last thing you did was the best. [Laughs.] I guess I do feel it’s my best collection of stories to date. I hope I still feel that way a year or two from now.
SLM: Are there are more specific reasons, though, that lead you to feel that way?
RB: Well, I think it’s a better-balanced collection than some of my others in the sense that I’m often characterized as sort of a writer with a dark view of things. That word occurs often in reviews. This collection is more balanced, and has more hope and optimism.
SLM: There was one character in particular that I couldn’t get out of my head—Dash, the stoner character in “The Dealer.” Maybe because we’ve all met that guy, the outrageous burnout. I’ve heard some fiction writers say that they almost feel like they are channeling their characters sometimes. Is that your experience as well? Where do your characters come from?
RB: To me, characters tend to work best, and stories in general, when there is a mix of some basis of experience combined with imagination, kind of like a dance, where imagination’s in the lead, and experience follows. I would say that my fiction works best when 60 percent of it is imagined and 40 percent of it comes from my life. Of course, some stories are more autobiographical than others. Like it’s fairly same to assume that a story like “Memo and Oblivion,” that takes place in the future hasn’t happened to me. [Laughs.] It’s more of a Kafka-esque story.
SLM: Yes, and that’s something that set this collection apart, I think. You can definitely sense the influence of Kafka, and Borges. But a lot of contemporary writers seem very stuck in a realist, or domestic mode, and are very uncomfortable writing between genres.
RB: I don’t personally start off with the idea that I’ve got to write three realistic stories and one Surrealistic story or Kafka-esque story to balance it. Though I’m a professional academic, I try not to be too academic or analytical, or too self-conscious when I write. I try to have the material and the emotion and the emotion dictate the form, and just follow it as spontaneously as I can. I actually began as a novelist, but have had more success as a short story writer. That may be why my stories have novelistic qualities to them from time to time. They tend to be longer than other writers’ or take place over a longer period of time, or the characters evolve or change. I also sometimes have multiple points of view within a story, which is unusual; that’s usually a technique you see in a novel.
SLM: Yeah, I guess you don’t see it because they try to beat that out of you in creative writing classes, and say never to use the omniscient point of view in stories.
RB: There weren’t any MFA programs [when I was in school], so I just follow my own instincts, but I have found out that isn’t what you are supposed to do—they say to never switch point of view within a story. But nevertheless I persist, from time to time. [Laughs.]
SLM: I wanted to also ask about the short story form—it’s hard to separate the marketing hype from what’s actually going on. It seems like someone is always proclaiming that the short story is dead, and that writers should just stick to novels if they know what’s good for them.
RB: That’s another thing I did wrong in my career. [Laughs.] But there was a time when the reverse was almost true, when everyone was reading and trying to write like Bobbie Ann Mason and Raymond Carver, back in the 80s. There was a quote-renaissance of the short story, and publishers were publishing paperback originals of story collections. That was unfortunately, from my point of view, a very brief period and I could get to back to business after about 5 or 10 years, I guess. I’ve heard the same thing, the conventional wisdom we give young writers is begin with a novel and then publish a short story collection as part of a two-book deal, or something like that. I guess that’s a valuable thing that university and smaller literary presses that aren’t so profit-oriented can offer: an outlet for short story collections.
SLM: Speaking of literary presses, you’re still working on Boulevard. What does your involvement there look like these days?
Well, I did start the magazine, and I’ve been its only editor for the last 27 years. So I do everything from read all the material that you see in any given issue, to filling out grant applications, like the Missouri Arts Council for the Regional Arts Commission, dealing with distributors, proofreading, doing the income taxes…I pretty much do everything. I have a lot of people helping me, but I get involved in every area. St. Louis University is the publisher of it….that’s where I’ve been teaching since I moved to St. Louis.
SLM: What are you teaching? I know school’s just started.
RB: I teach creative writing. Well, it’s called “Advanced Fiction,” now. And I also teach a course called Reviewing the Arts, in which people write reviews of CDs, or movies or restaurants. It’s just how to review, I suppose [laughs]. I teach that in the spring, and teach creative writing in the fall. So I teach one class a semester, and it’s part of my job to do the magazine.
SLM: So are there students working on Boulevard?
RB: I teach independent studies from time to time, but never have had an undergraduate work on the magazine. We’ve had a number of graduate students, and even some faculty volunteering to read manuscripts.
SLM: I wanted to ask you about the French translation of your work, since that was the publication that directly preceded Shadow Traffic.
RB: Yes, I was really happy with that, because I got one of my best reviews in Le Monde. Or I’m told that it’s a very nice review by my friends who are fluent in French, which I am not! I went over there to give a number of readings in February, and then to my delight, that review came out, and I’ve gotten quite a nice response to it from Europe. It’s like a reader, it’s 11 stories, and then I have a story on the jazz pianist Bill Evans, an essay on Isaac Bashevis Singer, then a memoir about my own life, and then an excerpt from a book of interviews with Luis Borges. But the bulk of it is short stories. It was a real honor and thrill; I was very happy about it.
SLM: And then jumping all the way back to The Identity Club, which came out in 2006—that was a little unusual, because it came with a CD.
RB: That book came out from Ontario Review Press, which sadly doesn’t exist anymore —that was Joyce Carol Oates’ press. Her husband, Raymond Smith, was the editor. I had been sending her tapes of piano pieces that I’d written, from time to time. She’d been very encouraging about it, and I’d published stories in her magazine, Ontario Review, and I was thrilled one day when she wrote a letter and said that she wanted to do like a new and selected book of my stories, and would like to include a disc of my songs. So, naturally I said yes. [Laughs.] At the time, it was a bit unusual to have a CD as part of the book. So it was 20 stories and 20 songs, but the songs weren’t related to the stories, they had really nothing to do with them.
SLM: So what are you working on now?
RB: I’d like to do another book of stories. I’ve practically got enough for that. And I’d like to, just for my own eddifiication, they don’t make any money or anything, my own CD. In my music, I’ve rarely played; I’m a writer, a composer, not a performer. I’ve been thinking about a recording of some piano pieces of mine, or songs of mine, played on the piano, just for myself. I’m keeping Boulevard going, and thinking about doing a reader, like a best of the magazine, but yeah, I’m coming to the point where I’m very close to having enough stories for another book. I’m waiting to see what’s going to happen overseas with possible translations of other books in France and Italy, largely in response to the Le Monde article.
Richard Burgin reads from Shadow Traffic on October 11 at 7 p.m. At Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. The reading is free. For more information, call 314-367-6731, or go to left-bank.com or richardburgin.net.
