Storytelling
A Review of the Books and Life of Writer Dan Chaon

My first personal encounter with Dan Chaon (his last name is pronounced “Shawn”) was when he appeared on the stairs of Mac's Backs Books and asked The Lit's book discussion group if it was safe to come down into the basement. He said it like he knew we were critiquing his work and it couldn't all be good, but we welcomed him as the artist he is. He emerged from the stairwell and sat down in the first chair available, the “hot seat,” and waited for his fellow writers to drill him. It wasn't the usual book store audience of readers--we wanted to talk about more than the story. We wanted to know HOW he wrote.

His first published short story, '"Sure, I Will'" appeared in TriQuarterly in 1986, soon after he graduated from college. Fitting Ends, his first short story collection, was published in 1996. His short stories have won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been included in the Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003. He was awarded the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Chaon teaches creative writing at Oberlin College, but he is a native of Nebraska who first taught writing as a graduate student at Syracuse. He came to Cleveland because his wife landed a job at Cleveland State. He taught at Tri-C and Cleveland State before getting his position at Oberlin.

I read Chaon's first novel, You Remind Me of Me, in May of 2007 (it was published in 2004). It was incredibly enjoyable. The book jumps around in time but Chaon pulls it off effortlessly. We have the young unwed mother at the Mrs. Glass House trying to figure out her future in 1966, the child Jonah being mauled by his unfit mother's dog and found by his grandfather in 1977, the teenaged Troy Timmens hanging out with drug using friends in 1977, the child disappearing from his grandmother's yard in 1997, the young man Jonah leaving home after his mother's death in 1993, Troy as a father in 1996 dreaming that his son has died. It works for characterization. The reader has to go with the flow because it doesn't make sense to try to figure out the plot--it's too disjointed. It creates suspense because we have a puzzle that needs to be put together. By the end of the book I was convinced that second chances should be taken, and I was a Dan Chaon fan.

Alienation, estrangedness, ghost-like reality, ambiguity, fantasies, secrets, and troubled relationships are the pieces that make up the fragments of being from which Dan Chaon creates stories. In an author interview in the back of You Remind Me of Me, he says, “It's a weird thing about the society in which we live that we regularly have such a superficial 'relationship' with people that we see every day, that the social codes of 'niceness' and so on are often so shallow. To me, the secret inner life is at the very heart of the contemporary American experience, and not just for serial killers and wackjobs, but also for ordinary people.”

The following year, in March of 2008, I read the short story collection, Among the Missing.... The collection was a finalist for a National Book Award and named one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association and a notable book of the year by The New York Times. In the story “Among the Missing” the mother who struggles with servitude doesn't want her son to fry his own egg, and responds with “her all-I-do-is-serve-people tone of voice.” In a typical Chaon-character inner monologue, the son explores the situation: “I realized that she must have an inner life--that she was a person who thought and felt and had memories and desires like the rest of us. But I sensed that there was something changed and hardened about that inner life.” The son couldn't know what she thought about, but he could remember “how, when she took out her curlers, she would let me put my fingers through the holes in those tight, tubelike curls.” Chaon's work is infused with keen observations of the reality of life, and way people think below the surface. Chaon's stories depict slightly off people who are not that much different than most of us, who face troubled relationships, secrets, and dysfunction in wide open spaces and lost towns while on a quest to discover who they are and how they connect with others.

The Lit discussion focused on his latest novel, Await Your Reply, which came out a couple months ago. The lives of three strangers are strewn about in chapters, seemingly without connection. Not until the end can we follow the connections, and start to see how internet scheming is a world that brings these people together. We were impressed by how the writer drew us in. There was a quality of us discovering things as the characters did, and as the writer did.

In Mac's Back's basement, the author said he tries to acknowledge life has its good and bad moments, much of the time with a tad of humor. He doesn't intentionally write dark and he doesn't intentionally write about the Great Plains, but he's drawn to the prairies and their spooky starkness because they represent, as our big cities do, the alienation of people in our society, alienation being one of his greatest themes. And like other writers, he struggles with the quality of his work, whether it's good enough, saying, “As a writer, I feel like I'm always teetering on the edge between colossal egotism and soul-crushing humility.”

I called Chaon on a recent Tuesday evening to talk about how he writes. When I asked him how he teaches writing, he said he tries to expose his students to a variety of writing because we learn to write by example. I then delved into what I wanted to know as a writer:

Cool Cleveland: Part of the excellence of your writing is your extraordinary descriptions of the ordinary. Is that a craft that can be taught or are some people just good at it?

Dan Chaon: Some people have a natural inclination toward being. With others, a teacher needs to nudge them and push them to think beyond cliche. You can teach your students various tricks and techniques, but the majority of learning to write is simply practice and hard work.

Was it difficult to write a novel after writing short stories?

Chaon: The first one took a long time and was a learning process. I used short story writing tricks so that the chapters are often like individual short stories. I starts out long-hand then draft on a computer. I like the pen to paper thing. I find myself dumping out the trash can to find paper. I'm very hesitant to draft on computer because it's too easy to delete things forever.

I've heard that we should always save our drafts.

Chaon: Some people find their way around that when they write on a computer.

Do you have a special time and place for writing? Or do you wait for the muse?

Chaon: Late at night. I have an office in the house on the third floor. I like the feeling of being the only person awake.

Would you say your stories are about alienation, ambiguity, troubled relationships, dysfunction and secrets?

Chaon: Yes--Alienation, identity . . . I'm interested in what makes people who they are, partially because I'm adopted. I grew up in working class neighborhood, and I have a different life than what they had. I'm super aware of the different ways in which people transform themselves, different ways in which people connect.

Have you always allowed the book and characters to be organic and become with you not knowing what's going to happen next, or is that a way of writing you've developed?

Chaon: It's dangerous--will it work out or not? I always wrote that way.

What drives you to write?

Chaon: I've always been interested in storytelling, making things up. I like the feeling of being in a different world and trying out a different life. The world falls away when inside a book. I want to escape and get away--there's a pleasure in it, losing yourself for a while.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Chaon [is] a remarkable chronicler of a very American kind of sadness, much in the tradition of Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and Denis Johnson. Like these writers, Chaon offers prose that's straightforward, chiseled with a Hemingwayesque clarity and deceptive simplicity . . . These stories are to be savored.” Do you agree with the sadness part, and would you compare yourself to those writers, as having straightforward clarity and deceptive simplicity?

Chaon: I try not to compare myself to others, but those writers are important to me. I love other writers; love them in a way that inspires me to want to write myself. My stories are sad but funny--there's a dark humor to them. It's what interests me, when people get lost or desperate.

When you read, do you find yourself paying attention to the way the writing is done, rather than the story?

Chaon: The best compliment is that the work is so engaging you stop noticing what the writer is doing.

I found Dan engaging on the telephone. You can meet the author at the Hudson Library on Wed 11/11 or find him at his favorite pub, Parnell's Pub, which is located next to the Cedar Lee Theater and in the pages of Await Your Reply. For more information about writer Dan Chaon, Google him, or check out his website: http://www.DanChaon.com. He's almost famous-- You Remind Me of Me is in movie production--and will impress you with quiet confidence about his humble celebrity.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Claudia Taller, whose passion for words has led to creation of the Lakeside Word Lover’s Retreats, an outgrowth of her work with Skyline Writers. Her favorite foods are red wine, salmon, ice cream, and chocolate. She loves to read, write, tour wineries, ride her bike, ease into yoga, and cook gourmet meals for friends. Find her at http://www.claudiatallermusings.blogspot.com.