Richard McCann Interview

Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a wonderful, quiet collection of interlocking short stories that describe the coming-of-age and subsequent life of a gay man. Richard's work has appeared in Plowshares, Tin House, The Atlantic Monthly, and many others, and his stories have been included in a number of anthologies. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he codirects the graduate program in creative writing at American University. He is currently working on a memoir entitled The Resurrectionist.

SE: In all the stories, your narrator is a gay man who has had great trouble dealing with his homosexuality and other aspects of his personality. His personality struggles have brought him much hardship, and perhaps these stories are about nothing so much as the narrator's pain. That's depressing. Am I right in finding some hope in the fact that the narrator has succeeded so thoroughly in parsing his feelings on paper and examining the difficult periods in his life? Is that indicative that perhaps he eventually finds some measure of stability?

RM: I don't know that I would say the stories are ultimately about "the narrator's pain," although certainly there are sorrows abounding in MOTHER OF SORROWS.  I'd say they are about the difficulties of establishing individual identity within a family, and, above all, that they are about loss.  The narrator's homosexuality is one way in which he experiences himself as an outsider and one way through which he discovers that family love is often fragile and even sometimes conditional, which goes in opposition to the sentimental notion that family love is unconditional--"the place that when you have to go there, they have to let you in."  But I think the narrator's homosexuality is a vehicle for a discovery that belongs to many people, gay or straight.  Does the narrator achieve a stability?  I don't know, Scott, though it's a good question.  In the end, he has certainly established for himself a kind of found family, which provides him (as it does others) with moments of great and surprising solace; and in the end, he's a survivor, albiet a provisional one.  Though are we all, for the moment, provisional survivors?  I like what Annie Dillard once wrote:  that we are all of us just "bivouaced" here.

SE: In "The Diarist," the narrator is looking back on when he was 11 and had a deep, unfulfilled longing to write in his diary during a summer trip with his father and brother. In the story, he is examining "all the things I never wrote down in my diary." Obviously, now, as an adult, he can finally fulfill that longing to write about the summer. What has changed in the narrator that he can now write about these things whereas when he was a teen the words would just not come?

RM: A great question. It wasn't until I was halfway done with that story that I realized that it was in some ways an exploration of the difficulties that I msyelf have sometimes faced as a writer and that sometimes slowed me in working on this book.  In "The Diarist," the narrator can't write in his diary, I think, because he has lived so long with secrets that he has no authentic self to write from.  Whenever he attempts to write, he discovers his own speechlessness--a speechlessness that's derived, I think, from the fact that he has constructed a "suitable" and "good" self, at the expense of a self that could tell its own truth.  In a sense, he doesn't exist yet.  But writing--for me, at least--is an act of calling onself into existence.  That was part of the work of MOTHER OF SORROWS.

SE: An irony in "My Brother in the Basement" is that while your narrator is gay and tormented by being in the closet, his brother is gay and out, and is still tormented, albeit in different ways. When you write, do you look for a solution to a dilemma like this, or do you just try to describe it as truthfully as possible?

RM: I don't look for a solution to a dilemma like this; I try, as you imagine, to dramatize that dilemma as fully as possible, and with the full complexity that I believe life itself to possess.  My interest is in making my reader feel him or herself to be inside an experience--to feel the enormity and complexity of lived life--rather than to provide a solution to things that are ultimately solved by each person through the act of living one's own life. 

SE: In "The Universe, Concealed," you write that "all inquiries into the nature of the soul are essentially obsessive and autopsical." Why are we obsessed with slicing ourselves open?

RM: The narrator says this line in a way that's half--but only half--ironical, given that he and his best friend, Helen, are essentially (as you note) conducting autopsies on thier own lives and memories.  In "The Universe, Concealed," I was working with some Jewish texts and ways of thinking, some of which suggest that there are things we simply can not know--that we live with much that is concealed to us.  Still, I think we have the human urge to attempt to know what moves under the surface of things--under the surfaces of ourselves, for instance, and those around us--and as a writer, I know I have the habit, like many writers, of attempting to "get" at causation and motive.  In my own case, I often have this urge often feels obsessive, and, in a sense, it is autopsical, because it's the urge to construct answers about human character by looking back at what happened, just as a medical examiner tries to ascertain a story through the facts remaining.

SE: You've said that Mother of Sorrows is "derived from the complicated interaction of memory and imagination." Would you say that the interaction is based on imagination filling memory's gaps? Is your impetus to write, especially about things that are difficult to you, based on a desire to understand and take control of your own past?

RM: Initially, I believed that I was writing MOTHER OF SORROWS to find my own perspective and my own way of telling family stories; I wanted, that is, to free myself from family myths in order to discover what I took to be my own version of "what happened."  In the end, however, I see this was a more complicated effort:  that the effort to free myself from my family's myths was also a way of holding tight to my family in words forever.  The act of remembering is of course to some degree an imaginative act--if we consider "remembering" not simply as "reporting memories" but rather as re-membering what has been dismembered by time.

SE: Vladimir Nabokov said that in Speak, Memory he wanted to trace themes from his life. In several of the stories in Mother of Sorrows, this seems to be exactly what you are doing. They are not plot-based stories so much as accumulations of pieces of a theme from a certain period in your/your protagonist's life. How did you arrive at this mode of storytelling?

RM: I was a poet long before I turned to writing prose, and when I turned to writing prose, I was first interested in nonfiction--in the personal essay, in particular.  This is to say that as a poet, I was already interested in fragmentation and how we build things back together in fragments, the way we build mosaics, say.  As I was working on MOTHER OF SORROWS, I was also aware that certain themes--loss, for instance, and the tyranny of fixed identity--were emerging, and I wanted to tend to what was emerging on its own.  I do see these as stories; but I like to think a story has room for more than narrative--that it has room, too, for meditative passages, and for thinking.

SE: I've heard from other authors that their novels, which happened to have a gay lead character, have been turned down by some publishers because they had enough "gay fiction" at the moment. Have you had similar experiences? What do you think of publishers regarding fiction with substantial gay characters as "gay fiction" as opposed to lumping it with the rest of literature? Also, what's your take on anthologies that collect fiction into categories instead of just letting it all stand as literature? Is it good because it allows people to identify what they want to read, or bad because it creates the idea that fiction is artificially segmented?

RM: When I was younger, I knew people who couldn't get their work published because of its gay content; now I think that's not so much the case as it is that their work gets labeled as "gay writing"--this being another kind of dismissal.  I'd think to think that Proust might have been relegated to a section of the bookstore marked "gay"--or Mishima or Williams or Whitman.  "Gay literature" doesn't constitute a genre; it constitutes a marketing category, and, like all marketing categories, it serves to deliver the products to interested consumers while, at the same time, limiting the reception and meaning of the product.  In the past twenty years, as identity politics has held a greater and greater ascendency, I think we have all lost a crucial awareness that one of the great projects of literature has to do with imaginining each other.  While I applaud and value the creation of speciality bookstores and publications--I remember when one could barely find gay books, after all--I am depressed by the ways in socially-constructed identities are now given their own sections in bookstores, as if we could not possibly be interested in one another.  In this regard, the term "gay writer" always seems to me a reduction; although it allows gay writing in some ways to be visible, it is also a way of rendering it invisible, by segregating it unto itself.  In this way, the creation of the category "gay writing" mirrors the cultural obsession with the creation of categorical identities--in the end, strict categories of identity strike me as an impoverishment to us all.