Grant Maierhofer Interview
[GS-INT-016]
Grant Maierhofer is the author of Peripatet, Shame, LRD and others. He is the founder and editor of Index Press, and a professor at Washington State University.
I've heard that your new book TRAUMNOVELLE has gone on quite the ride. Is that true?
In a way, yea, this book has kind of had an atypical trajectory. I think in some ways it’s on me, because I can be impatient with the publishing process, because my interest is in continuing to write and work on newer projects, so once the thing is done to my liking I’ll get a little stir crazy. Some of it, too, is the nature of small press publishing. I’ve had to accept over the years that the work that I seem to feel most interested in doing might never result in much in the way of readership, money, or whatever else is out there, so I have genuinely come to love the publishers that I’ve worked with in the small press realm. I’ve also had experiences where things just didn’t seem as ideal as I’d hoped, or the arrangement proved somehow less than ideal. In the past I’ve tried to just keep my mouth shut, but I think in many ways with my work I’ve realized that, if I’m kind of the only active advocate of any new projects I’ve got, and I don’t feel particularly welcomed by the whole agent, mid level, or small press that’s grown a bit beyond what I understand to be “small,” then it’s probably not the end of the world if I step in, ask for a book to be taken out of print somewhere, and seek out a new home for it. Traumnovelle also happens to be a project about which I seem to have fewer doubts about, wherein I sought to realize something that I’ve wanted to realize for a long time, and worked on it—the book was actually written alongside a group of 25 undergraduates in a course where each of us wrote a novella in a semester, following weird prompts I’d written and reading models of the form—and felt it come to fruition in a manner that I now feel good about, and thus I just wanted its final home to be ideal, its final form to be ideal. The book will be rereleased by Erratum Press, who published my book LRD earlier this year, and who I’m working with on an academic book as well, so thereafter it’ll be out, and available, and I feel very lucky to have found a place for it that feels right so quickly.
I resonate so hard with what you're saying. The word "small" has many definitions it seems. But you had a home for this novella and then decided to pull it?
Yea, that’s about the gist of it. It was under consideration for like half a year at FC2, and they rejected it in the end, so I sought out some new place, and in the end it just did not feel like a good fit and I was disappointed with the situation.
Was being in a group of other writers trying to complete a similar project simultaneously helpful?
I found it very helpful, yea, in multiple directions. Teaching creative writing is odd, and I’ve often struggled to find ways in which the work I do in my writing could directly lend itself to work I’m doing as a professor, and this course was one direct attempt at realizing that, so the struggles and the ways forward and the hacks and whatever could be points of discussion. I’m pretty skeptical of the “workshop” model of creative writing study, or at least skeptical of it as the only possible means of teaching writing, so the class was more like a literary salon or something, where people could share difficulties and hopelessnesses and triumphs and whatnot, and it was less like me leading things than us all being a community.
Were there any drawbacks to it?
With that, though, an undeniable drawback or difficulty is that not all writers will wind up writing novella-length works in their careers, as it just isn’t a great fit, or whatever, so there were weeks where I think maybe the potential richness of the course for everyone was dulled somewhat but the length constraint, but I tried to be very upfront about what the course would be, and thus this was minimized.
Can you share the kind of prompts you used (not the actual words of the prompts, but more how you created them)?
Prompts are another dimension where I’ve tried to find things that actually work for me, as the material in most creative writing textbooks just don’t do as much for me. Sometimes it would be experimental, constraint-based stuff like writing without a letter for the week, or writing from a minor character’s perspective. Sometimes I’d just share things, like one week I had everyone watch Jem Cohen’s Instrument, and see what it did for their work. Each week I’d write at least three possible prompts, though, so that they didn’t feel limited by them. I also had everyone do a “commonplace book” over the course of the semester, assembling quotes and inspirations and stuff from readings, as a kind of venting/support space for the semester, but also because they’d technically leave the class with two books, if they were into fragmented, Bluets-type stuff.
In Traumnovelle you number each of the paragraphs. The first time I saw that was with David Markson, but what gave you the idea of doing that? Was it something you tried and kept? Or was it something you decided after it was mostly written?
It was always broken up into individual paragraphs, and I think initially I’d used this open bullet point from a particular font because I liked the idea of the beam from the particle accelerator sort of boring a hole through the entire book, and I went back and forth between that, and numbers, because I liked the idea that although the book is more abstract, and I guess what I’d call expressive, rather than being a straightforward narrative, the form itself could impose a logical structure on it. Wittgenstein was a big presence throughout the writing of the book, and initially I’d considered kind of overlaying my text onto the Tractatus and having my book be the exact number of sections there, but after trying that on and realizing it didn’t feel quite as 1:1, and also how weirdly ornate his way of numbering is, I pared it down to something that felt more palatable. I think because I always had a sense of what the end project was essentially going to do, I thought most of the time in both big picture terms, and smaller ones, writing line-by-line but also thinking about how sections could work, and the form of the entire book could serve its purpose.
Well, I think it was a great choice. And I appreciate you talking to me about it. I think that's a great place to end it. You feel good?
Sure James, thank you!