(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - Hello and welcome to the Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Babette Fraser Hale, author of "A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers".

Thank you so much for being here today.

- My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

- Well, I'm really excited to talk about this book for a couple of reasons.

The first of which is hopefully our audience is aware that all the books we have on this show are either published by Texas A&M University Press, or by books in the Texas Book Consortium, which is a bunch of smaller publishers that we distribute for.

And while I've had a number of books from a number of different members, this is the first Winedale Publishing book so I'm happy to check that off our bingo card.

That was nice.

And also, it's our first book of fiction, so... - Oh, boy.

- Two firsts in one show, which is wonderful.

- Fantastic.

- So to start us off, short stories is a really broad way to describe this book.

So how would you describe the kind of writing that you do?

- Oh, boy.

Well, they're short stories, but they usually have a lyrical impulse at some point.

Sometimes the thing that gets me going or even suggests a story to me will be an image, or it will be a sentence that just pops up in my head for no reason that I can discern.

And then I sort of think, hmm, that's interesting and I pursue it.

I never really know what I'm writing about until I've been in it a while, and even I've finished, I do multiple drafts, I do awful lot of drafts, I mean, it's sickening how many drafts, and how many years sometimes it takes to get the thing right, or close to right.

You know, you do have to release it at some point.

And these started, I think the first one was published in 2011.

- [Christine] Okay.

- And then the book was published in 2021, and in between the others were written.

So I think that lyrical impulse would be part of the appeal of this book.

I mean, it's got a lot of characterization.

I'm very interested in why people do what they do, and the stories they tell to themselves about what they're doing while they're doing something which are never really quite honest.

And then the things that occur as a result of whatever decisions they made.

And probably, you may have a question along these lines prepared, but I tried to write novels for years.

I wrote three novels and a couple of 'em were agented and they didn't really do, they didn't get bought by a publisher.

But my agent told me that he thought I should start to write short stories and see what happened.

Cause for one thing, it will get my name known among publishers as someone who writes fiction.

I think he was wrong about that, but he was right about the short stories.

And I had been sort of blocked for years because the form of a short story, as I learned it, as they talked about it in graduate school, seemed somewhat rigid.

And I didn't feel loose and able to kind of keep going until I read something Alice Munro said, I think it may have been even after she got the Nobel, which did me a wonderful lot of good, I thought, hey, they gave that to her, okay, well it's okay to write short stories, you don't have to sit here and labor over a novel for eight years in order not to see it published.

So her comment was that she kind of like her ideas come to her, sort of like she's walking through a house and into one room or another room, sort of seeing what's in that room.

And that just, for some reason, the image of that just opened me up and "Drouth", the first story in this collection, it's got a very freeform structure.

I move back and forth in time.

I don't worry about that, you know, and the way I did that was, she freed me to be able to think that way.

And I laid it all out on the floor and I shifted.

I had it printed out, I shifted it section to section until I liked the way that the stories line, the sections of the story lined up.

And that's what you got there.

And that story was really liked by more people, more publicly than most of what I write.

- Well, you did have me right, I was gonna ask you about novels, but I was gonna compliment you while I asked you, because I found myself, I mean, like you said, these short stories, you're dipping in, maybe, to a room or to a moment, and then it's over.

And I found myself really wanting more of the story, which I guess is the beauty of a short story, you leave 'em wanting a little more.

I can't be disappointed with what you didn't write, you know, so, but I would love to read a novel, I'll just say that, because I enjoyed the characters in the stories and the places you create, I think they're very rich and full, so... - Thank you.

Thank you.

Actually, C.W.

Smith, who's a well-known Texas writer, and has a new book out "Girl Flees Circus", he today sent me an email saying he wondered if I could possibly expand "Wolf Moon" into a novel.

And frankly, it never occurred to me.

One of the things I like about stories is that I can be immersed in their lives, and learn what their lives are and how they interact, and get a sense of where they foul up and then leave.

I get the part that seems to me to be the most central of their lives, the one that we all have, we all make mistakes, and we usually have a central mistake that we can point at as we get older.

Sometimes we have many, and often many, but you know, these people, one or two maybe, and I don't know that I really have the Jonathan Franzen mood where you can really go at great lengths over the issues that the people have.

I just don't think I would be that interested in that, but I may try some of it.

I've been stymied on stories lately, I've been thinking maybe a novel wouldn't be a bad change.

- We could meet in the middle.

You could write a novella.

How about that?

- Yeah.

That appeals to me a lot.

- And then do a collection of novellas.

Problem solved.

(Babette laughs) Now you did answer one of my questions, which was gonna be when did you start writing these stories?

But then I can maybe shift that a little bit.

And are these all new to the book, or did they appear published elsewhere?

- Several of them were published, yes.

Southwest Review loved my work until they changed the editorship, and then now they don't.

(Babette laughs) And then I had one of 'em published in New Mexico, Bosque, and that's an interesting, you would not expect somehow to have New Mexico suddenly be really active in literary work.

But there were some people from Texas who went over there, and they've had a profound influence.

I'm sure that there was plenty going on before, but seems to me that they've added to it.

So where was I published before?

Well, that's really it.

I wrote some stories when I was in graduate school, and one of them was published in the student magazine, which at that time was called Domestic Crude, clever little title, being Houston, you know, oil.

And in one of the classes, Donald Barthelme was the Professor, and I had this story and I got to what I thought the end was and stopped.

He said, you've got a lot more here.

You need to go on with this.

And that became my first novel, and first novel, one of the first novels, I don't know how to count those.

- Now you've mentioned school a few times.

When did you start writing?

Has it always been a part of your life?

Or did you come into that in school?

Or how did that go?

- I think I started telling myself stories before I could write and I would draw them.

And just tell myself a story and illustrate it, there were no words.

So I'd been doing it a long time.

I mainly wrote like in essays in school, I was a journalist, I was on the paper and I went out, when I finished school, I did more student journalism and then I got a job with a newspaper, and I sort of was in journalism and scared of writing fiction because it seemed to me that English Majors, I was a Political Science Major, seemed to me that English Majors just were so much smarter and more clued-in and understood things in a greater depth, and I was intimidated.

But I read voraciously and I think really that's, and I've been writing fiction, trying to write fiction since I was about 20.

And I wrote it in college, I wrote, you know, just because I never could get anything to go very far.

And that feeling of running up against, it's like when you're an athlete and you run up against your limit, and you have the drive and desire to go much faster, but you can't go any faster when you're running.

And then you sort of learn that there's a place that doesn't want you to go further.

That's badly put, but that was how I felt about writing fiction, I just couldn't see where those stories, or those plots or how they could develop, and then all of a sudden, you know, they started developing and I don't have any idea how that happened.

And that happened with the novels.

I mean, I wrote novels.

It's like, you know, it wasn't a big deal to write all those words.

After years and years where I would get about five pages and just go... (Babette sighs) So, I don't know.

It's strange.

It's not something you're in control of, I don't think.

- That's what I've heard.

Yes.

I've tried and failed many times too.

Maybe if I keep trying, I can produce something.

I don't know.

- I tell you, you mentioned place.

I think what got me into stories and made it work to the degree it has, is that I was suddenly in a place where I could write.

When I was in Houston, there was all this intimidating business about the great short story writers who lived in cities who wrote short stories.

Houston wasn't that much of a city when I was a child, but it has become a really vibrant city.

And it seemed to me that I was plowing the same ground, and it was inhibitory and so Winedale, nobody's ever written anything about Winedale.

These stories are basically written within five to 10 miles of Winedale, which was originally a German community in between, almost halfway in between Brenham and La Grange.

And my husband and I had a house there, that we had we'd gotten in the eighties, and it was coincidentally around that time that the log jam in my head about writing began to loosen.

How much of it was my husband, Leon Hale, and how much of it was the place, and they all kind of blended.

And I kept seeing stories, which in Houston, all the stories seemed to me that they'd already been written.

Here was a place where whatever came into my head, I knew it hadn't ever been written, and I could go further with it.

And at one point got obsessed with the ceiling at the Wagner House and at the, University of Texas has a campus there called Winedale, and one of the things about these old buildings is that they had painted decoration by a guy named Rudolf Melcher, who was a German freethinker.

And I got really interested in that painter and it became a story, made up character, but I did use the ceiling, the ceiling's quite surprising.

- I did have to Google to see if that was a real thing or if there was that- the description of it in the book made me want to know more.

I like that you're talking about place, because I think that that's one of the things that was so appealing to me is somebody who grew up in Central Texas who, if I'm not familiar with exactly these places, the approximation that, you know, going to Brenham, going to La Grange, even if just driving through, these places, this feeling of these places is very familiar, and a little bit nostalgic too for me.

So I find them, and I would imagine most people, if not in Texas, especially in the Central Texas, the Hill Country region, we can all relate to this place and this draw to the place that we feel.

- And the fact that people from the city have been coming into rural areas, and they changed the rural areas, and then they are surprisingly changed by them.

No one ever gets what they hope for.

There used to be a tremendous amount of peace and quiet.

It's not so much anymore.

I think there's something about, there's almost an emanation from the area.

I've always felt when we go to Santa Fe, Santa Fe is nothing but tourists, but you can feel a kind of a spirit that's larger than that.

I feel that about the area that I'm in, the old buildings and the people that are drawn to the older buildings, there are certain type of person that I really understand.

And somehow putting them in this new environment, instead of in their city that they may have originated in, just seemed to unlock aspects of the character that I really enjoyed exploring.

I think place is terribly important in what you write, because I think that's where the stories come from.

I mean, otherwise you're just writing about yourself and you've put yourself into other characters, and that's not interesting.

I mean, that's one of the things I guess that bothers me about memoir.

Memoir has had lots of flurries of great popularity, but somehow if you're writing it in the first person, which most people seem to, you're limited by that first person, you, that I, that vertical pronoun sitting there.

And maybe when you're young, you're really fascinated by yourself.

But the older you get, the less fascinating you find yourself, and the more interesting you find other people.

And so, you know, the best way you can know another person, I think, is to try to write them into a story.

- What I wanted to ask, that leads me to a question about the perspectives of the story.

You have stories told through that you're not, it's not first person, but through the lens of different characters you've got young people, old people, men and women.

Is it a certain kind of character harder to get into?

Or can you slip into all those voices easily?

- I have no trouble with it.

It feels... what really counts again is the place, I like close third, I really like close third.

And if I think about it all those years I was sitting there, drawing pictures as a little kid, I was telling the stories in close third.

I didn't realize it.

In fact, I didn't realize that until recently.

I thought, hmm, that's why I do it.

And one's internal monologue, you know, we all have one.

I don't know, what's your internal monologue?

Is it close third?

Or is it I?

- It's you.

I talk to myself in the second person.

- I do too sometimes.

I do too.

Now, I've never tried that.

I've seen books written like that.

- That would be tough, I think.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

I think they're hard to sustain.

Yeah.

But you know, they can be great.

There are a couple that have been really well reviewed, but I like close third and I like the idea of entering the person and it's a person for me.

I mean, it becomes a person really fast.

The character becomes, I mean, it has an appearance and a sound and I can hear it, and of course that's the real secret of writing is that it's marvelously entertaining, cause you really don't know what's gonna happen.

You don't know which direction you're going in for sure.

And you can have the idea of where you're going, and find out that that was not in any way related to where you ended up.

That's sort of the surprise of it, that I find really fascinating.

- Well, you can see it as a reader too, because they're not predictable stories, they're not predictable, they're real people feeling, you know, they move in ways that you don't expect, they make choices that I think I wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't have said that.

But that's why it's interesting, that's why I wanna read more, because it's outside of my limited personal experience, as you say.

- Well, interestingly, when my novels were rejected, they were almost always because the main character, who was often female, wasn't likable, not relatable.

Well, you know, in a short story, they don't care whether it's relatable or not.

It's a person with a problem.

And my normal way of writing a story is to have this impetus, whatever it was, and then I write thin and for years I didn't understand that I was writing thin.

And by that I mean I was really writing the sketch of the story, and elements that would pop into it, but there was no, I had to make like 12, 15 passes before I got any density, and then as density amassed itself, the story became real, and worked or closer to working than it had for sure.

And I think that patience is so important, cause you have to let it come to you, you're not standing there with a whip, you really are not in charge.

You know, you're kind of a guiding light to it, but you're not in charge.

- You talk about patience and you talk about these drafts.

Do you space out, like if you write a draft, do you leave it alone for a little while?

Or do you just get up the next day and start working on it again?

- Well, it depends.

If I've got what I think is a full draft, I'll put it aside a while, because you just see so much more when you do, you really see a lot more.

All the flaws come and whack you in the face when you put it aside a while.

I always tell people who are writing novels that they're making a mistake if they think when they finish the first draft, that they've written a novel, cause they've written the beginning, they've written the first draft.

But I would put it aside for a month, at least, several months possibly, and then look at it and everything looks different, and it comes together in a really good way, often or not.

The thing about it is that you can have your idea... Oh, I've lost my train of thought on that, that's okay, it was way tangential.

- Well then I'll ask another question about perspective.

You talk about putting it away, but you also mentioned earlier that you would print some out and lay 'em down.

I would imagine that's also pretty helpful too, just getting away from the screen and laying it out in front of you so you can physically move the pieces around.

- I had to do that with "Drouth", because I had several years and I had them as discrete sections and I could not move it on the screen in the way that would let me feel how it worked as a whole.

And it was really kind of funny, be down on the floor, moving these things around.

But it helped tremendously.

And I think that's one of the issues with novels for me, I like a collage approach.

I'm very interested in the whole concept of collage, where you take a mess of different things, pull 'em together and in the way you put them together, you make something entirely different.

I find that's kind of the impetus of most of the stories I've written.

And when I'm writing a longer form now, I'm very much aware of that and I have the desire to put it on the floor.

But, but with a novel it's really hard to do.

I know some people put 'em up on bulletin boards.

I've tried that.

I mean, I can't get a bulletin board big enough to get the different elements up there.

And when I do, you know, then it becomes graphic, and that doesn't help me, the graphic part.

"Drouth" is the only one where I really shuffled the sections.

But the more I shuffle, the more I like that, I would like to do more like that.

Cause it's the way memory works.

- Yes.

As a reader you're revealing and then going back, the story presents itself in a non-linear and interesting way, which I enjoy that kind of storytelling, so that was fun for me.

- That's the only one that really does that.

I was much more linear in most of them.

- Well, and I also wanted, you talked about collage.

I think this kind of book is such an easy one to recommend to people, because people are so busy, and sometimes it's hard to sit down and read a novel.

With a book like this, you can read your one story for the night or for the day and then you can put it down, and if you get distracted by kids or work or whatever, you can come back whenever you're ready and the next story's there, you don't have to remember what you read, it's a perfect book for the modern problem.

- Well and also, because it's all about one particular area, it feels more like you're immersed in a world, I think one of the critiques I've read about short stories is that so often short story collections feel unrelated to each other.

And there are many that are related now, cause it's kind of become a thing.

But people say, well, you know, I can't get deeply immersed in the story because it's over before I can do that.

Well, but if it's all about a particular area, and these are the people who make that area alive, you get a feeling of connection that your world building comes in an aggregate form, rather than in a linear form, and maybe that appeals to me a lot too.

- I think that's, yeah, absolutely.

Because you don't have to memorize character names or places, but the feeling of the story, the place of the story is consistent.

- I loved Olive Kitteridge and I was amazed by that.

And I was also amazed by the success of it, because it wasn't, you know, predictable.

And I sort of think, you know, a lot of times, current literature is awfully predictable.

You know, the stuff that sells.

I thought I like her work, but I particularly like that because the stories weren't related in a totally obvious way.

And I'd like to do that.

- Well let's see that next then.

Unfortunately we are running short of time.

This has been a delightful conversation.

I could do it for another half an hour, but in our final couple of minutes, what would you hope people would take away from this book?

- Well that Central Texas is a very interesting place, that rural Central Texas is a very interesting place to be.

And one that is not separate from the ideas that we have about the whole world, that it really is connected to cities.

There's no stereotype that really operates, I don't think.

And yet we are all so busy that we kind of grab the stereotypes, but I think that maybe that's one thing I would say, and also that it is beautiful and they are beautiful things, and the things that are less beautiful there, and here I guess I could say cause we're pretty close to that area.

I just would like people to enjoy the stories and find the people interesting and wonder about their problems and maybe argue in their own minds about what the people do to solve 'em.

- Well, I would hope they do too.

I certainly did.

I enjoyed all these stories.

It was a pleasure to talk to you, to read the book.

Thank you for being here.

- My pleasure.

- And thank you for joining us.

That's all the time we've got today.

The book, again, is "A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers", and we'll see you again soon.

Thanks for joining us.

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