Brief Moments of Human Connection: An Interview with Andrew Porter

Sometimes you read a single story by a writer, and you become a fan for life. This happened when I read Andrew’s story “Hole” in his first collection, The Theory of Light and Matter. In my early writing days, Porter’s stories were a fantastic way for me to transition away from the minimalism of Raymond Craver and Tobias Wolff and into stories that sparkle with their patience that plumbed the depths of the humanity of characters. Porter’s new collection, The Disappeared, is a perfect circle of the brevity we would expect in the best flash fiction while displaying the depth and resonance of longer stories that have the same enjoyment as a novel. This collection marvels with Porter’s skill at creating honest and complex characters who I’m still rooting for weeks after finishing the last page. I love a book that entertains as much as it instructs, and The Disappeared is a book I’ll continue to read in the years ahead.

Tommy Dean: How aware are you of your own fears, desires, obsessions, or regrets while you’re writing? How often do these things become a part of your stories? Are they identifiable to the people close to you?

Andrew Porter: While I’m actually writing a story, I’m only vaguely aware of the way my own emotions might be influencing things on the page or how elements of the story might be related to things in my own life. For the most part, I try very hard not to think about where the story is coming from at all and definitely not why I’m writing it, at least in the earliest stages of writing. In my experience, once I start talking about a story—or worse, analyzing it—all of the mystery disappears, and often so does my desire to keep working on it. Later on, I’ll recognize where a particular story might have originated from in terms of my own life, or I’ll recognize certain patterns—obsessions, desires, fears, regrets, as you put it—but almost never during the actual drafting of the story.

TD: What story was written first, and which story was written last? Besides the general themes of the book, what do they have in common? How did you know this was the last story needed to complete the collection?

AP: The first story I wrote was actually the first story in the book, “Austin,” and the last one I completed was the final story, “The Disappeared.” I had written a version of “The Disappeared” at an earlier point—maybe halfway through the drafting of the book—but that was a very different version, in which the narrator’s friend has died from cancer rather than disappeared on a hiking trail. It took me a while to realize that it was important that the disappearance of the narrator’s friend was not a definite and permanent disappearance, as it was in the first draft, and more of an open-ended and unresolved one, as it is in its final form. In terms of their relationship to each other, the first story, “Austin,” raises the question in its final line, Where did you go?—a question that’s explored in all of the stories—and “The Disappeared” answers that question, in a way, by saying that in the end, we don’t really know the answer to that question, or too many of the other questions raised in these stories, but that we still need to embrace and appreciate these brief moments of human connection that we have, the people in our lives we love, and that at a certain point, we need to let go of these questions and move on.

TD: At what point did you realize you were writing a book and not just separate short stories? What emotion did you feel once you realized it was a book? How did you approach writing this collection versus your first book? Did your writing process change?

AP: When I finished the first story, “Austin,” I definitely felt I was on to something. It was different than anything I’d written before, and I knew that I was excited to keep exploring the types of questions, conflicts, and subject matter introduced in that story. I was also energized by the thought of writing a series of new stories set in the world I was currently living in—San Antonio and nearby Austin—a setting I’d never really explored or written about in short fiction before. If you had asked me then, I wouldn’t have said I was writing a new book, but I did sense that something was opening up for me, and what followed was a very fruitful period, one in which I wrote almost all of the longer and many of the shorter pieces in the book. At a certain point, I recognized three common elements in these stories: they were all set in either San Antonio or Austin, they were all about characters in their thirties or forties, and they were all about a disappearance of some sort. So, I used these three commonalities as constraints but also as guides for everything I wrote after that, knowing by then that these would be unifying elements in the book. In this sense, my experience writing this book was a little different than my experience writing my first book. With my first book, I just wrote about thirty stories and then tried to figure out which ones worked together the best and winnowed it down. There were a lot of unifying elements, but I didn’t recognize those elements until later. With The Disappeared, however, I knew at a much earlier point what would hold it together, what would hopefully make it feel cohesive.

TD: What does a rough draft of one of your stories look like? Do you write for perfection or in a dash? Do you over or underwrite? Do you find the right details and figurative language in the first draft or do you often add these during revision? What do you normally need to do to get to a final draft?

AP: My writing approach tends to be different with every story I write, and thus my rough drafts also tend to look very different depending on the story I’m writing. Sometimes the stories come quickly and don’t require much revision at all; other times, a story will take me several years and thirty or forty drafts.  For example, I wrote the first story in the collection, “Austin,” in five days, moving slowly and in a linear way—sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph—and when I wrote the final sentence of the final paragraph of that story, I was done. I barely revised it. With a story like “Rhinebeck,” however, the process was completely different. I wrote that story in a non-linear way, as a series of fragments in scenes, not knowing which ones might fit together and which ones I might cut. I really overwrote that story. I probably generated seventy to eighty pages of content before beginning to arrange it and winnow it down to its current shape. The ending eluded me for a while, too, so that one was a real struggle. It probably took me about three years to write. So, again, there’s not really a particular way I write every story. It just depends on the way the story reveals itself to me. If I’m lucky, the story will come quickly, but that’s not always the case.

TD: How do you know a story’s true length? Do you start out with a word count goal or let the draft take you where it wants to go? Was there any advice or pushback along the way to drop the Flash length stories? Were you asked to leave these stories out and write longer ones?

AP: The length of the story usually reveals itself during the revision process. I don’t think at all about length in the initial drafting of the story. As I mentioned earlier, some of my stories are quite long in their earliest rough form. To me, these are just pages of content, and I usually know that a certain number of those pages will be cut in the first few revisions. Sometimes I’ll have a second draft that’s literally half the length of the first draft. In the end, though, you can’t really control the story’s final length. It’s going to end up being the length it’s supposed to be, even if that means it’s going to end up being a length that’s particularly hard to publish, as was the case with a few of the stories in “The Disappeared.” In terms of your second question, I didn’t get any pushback about the flash pieces, although in the initial draft of the collection, I had a flash piece in between every one of the longer stories, and my editor advised against this. She felt it made the reading experience too repetitive and predictable (short-long, short-long), so I pulled a few out and added one other longer story (“Silhouettes”) at her suggestion and made some other small adjustments so that the order would feel a little more varied.

TD: Are there different craft moves or decisions that need to be made when writing flash versus longer short stories? Do you feel more comfortable in one form over the other?

AP: My process for writing flash pieces is definitely different. I tend to write those in batches, and I write them quickly, usually in one sitting. I think of the process of writing flash as one of experimentation and improvisation, and the process is usually pretty intuitive and playful. For example, at one point while I was writing this book, I just started taking certain words that I associate with the setting of San Antonio—trees, flowers, foods, etc.—and using those words as starting points (and titles) for my flash pieces. So, for example, I might pick a word like “Agave,” and that word would then become my starting point for that day’s flash piece. My prompt would simply be that word. So, that’s how some of the shorter pieces like “Pozole,” and “Chili,” and “Limes” emerged. They were just one of my daily prompts. But there are also many other pieces that I wrote that didn’t make it into the book, stories with titles like “Plumbago,” “Aloe,” “Milagros,” and “Mescal.” With flash, it’s very much about writing a bunch very quickly and then seeing what I have. For example, I might write one a day every day for a week, and then at the end of the week, look at what I have and maybe pick two or three that I want to clean up and try to publish.  It’s much more of a hit-or-miss thing with flash, and I don’t tend to revise my flash pieces very much, just a little adjusting and tinkering on the sentence-level.

TD: One of the things I love about your writing is the feeling of patience, of being told a story by a narrator or point of view that we can trust to take us some place resonant. How did you craft such concrete and specific but patient stories? How do you get readers to trust your narrators?

AP: Something I think about a lot is tone, especially when I’m deciding whether or not I want to keep working on a story. Usually, there’s something in the tone of the voice that makes me feel like this is a story worth investing my time in (or not). So, I guess that might be one way of answering your question. If I don’t trust or connect with the voice of the narrator, then I tend to move away from it. And I say “narrator,” only because all of the stories in this book are first person. But for me, it starts with that voice. Do I want to follow this voice? Do I trust it? Does this voice feel honest, authentic? Does it seem to have a story it desperately needs to tell? As for the patience, I think that’s mostly about the emotional pacing, which is something I also think about a lot, especially during revision. I often read my stories in different settings, at different times of day, sometimes out loud, sometimes to myself, all to make sure the pacing is just right from start to finish. You can have a great final line, but that line needs to be delivered at just the right moment to really resonate.

TD: Do you consider the first-person narrator as stand-ins for the reader? I ask because the narrators do act and feel like fully-rounded characters, but they’re often placed in an observational role in many of these stories. Who are these narrators talking to, and do you have an ideal reader?

AP: Short stories are so often about outsiders, characters that feel alienated or on the periphery of their own experiences for some reason—they’re “lonely voices,” as Frank O’Connor famously put it—and so I tend to like to tell stories through those types of lenses, characters who are observing rather than the main focus of the action. And yes, I think that type of character is often easier for the reader to identify with in some way, but that peripheral perspective is also usually connected in certain respects to the narrator’s own internal conflict and feelings of displacement, and so it’s often serving more than one purpose.

TD: In your story, “The Disappeared,” there’s a quote I wanted to discuss. The lead-in is that a character has disappeared and is thought to have died. His girlfriend says, “He’d look at one of your prints, and he’d feel that you were there. Even if you weren’t. Even if you were very far away” (204). Is there an inherent legacy in creating art? Do you hope to leave something behind that survives you? Are stories art, in this regard? Do they offer a kind of legacy?

AP: I think the impulse to make art, and especially to write books, is partly informed by our desire to leave something permanent behind. I don’t know if I would have said that when I was younger, and, even now, I don’t know if I’m comfortable with a term like legacy. But I can say that it’s a comfort to know that I have made these physical objects, these three books, that will like certainly outlast me, at least in physical form. And not to get too macabre, but if I were to be gone tomorrow, it also comforts me to know that these books will remain for my children to read and to continue to learn about me as they get older. These books are not me, of course, but they’re a window into one part of me, and there is comfort in knowing that that window will continue to endure after I’m gone.

TD: How important is it for you as the writer/creator to know the futures of your characters beyond the moments crystallized in each story?

AP: I actually love not knowing my characters’ futures, of leaving them open for interpretation. There’s the famous line by Grace Paley about allowing your characters to have the open destiny of life, and that’s something that I especially love about the short story form, that most stories end with that open destiny intact, that characters are rarely condemned to a specific fate at the end of a story, their future is usually still partially unknown. So even though I might speculate about it, I actually enjoy the not knowing. In fact, I sometimes think that the not knowing is often what allows the story to linger on in the readers mind, that leaves us still thinking about it long after finishing it, or that compels us to return to it years later and reexperience it again.

TD: These stories often provide a sense of history or backstory for each major character. How important is it for you to know so much about your characters? How do you know when/if you’ve included too much backstory?

AP: I’ll often overwrite the backstory in early drafts of a story, mostly as a way of getting to know the characters myself. Then, in revision, I try to cut out anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to the story. I think there can be such a thing as too much back story, certainly, but I also think some back story is almost always important, if not for the reader, then at least for the writer. If you don’t know anything at all about your character’s past, it’s hard to fully imagine them, I think, at least for me. And, of course, many of my characters find themselves trying to reconcile the events of the past with their current lives. There’s often a thematic relationship between past and present, and so the existence of back story is maybe more prominent in my work than the work of other writers. I don’t know. I just think, for me, it’s always one piece of the puzzle of the story. What’s happened before? What’s brought the characters to the point they’re at now? What are the pre-plot conditions?

TD: What’s a source of inspiration when you really want to write something, but the idea hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet? Who are the writers that you admire? The ones you constantly steal craft moves from?

AP: Writing this book, one of the writers whose work I was reading (and rereading) a lot was Sara Majka, whose debut collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In is probably one of the most important books I’ve read in the past decade. Other writers whose stories I turn to often for inspiration are Laura van den Berg, Kirsten Valdez Quade, Manuel Muñoz, Stuart Dybek, Maile Meloy, Denis Johnson, and Sigrid Nunez. I don’t know that I look to steal craft moves from them, but what I look for in their fiction is something more abstract—a tone in the voice, a mood, an atmosphere, an aesthetic. I often read before I start writing myself, and these are all writers whose work I might reach for and read for a few minutes before launching into my own fiction.

TD: How does your teaching of writing inform your own writing?

AP: In recent years, I’ve tried to integrate my writing process into my teaching a lot more. For example, I used to never write with my students during class. I used to just give them prompts and then read or look over my class notes while they wrote. When I taught a flash fiction course a few years ago, though, I decided to try to write short flash pieces along with my students. And what’s interesting is that almost all of the in-class writing sessions I did with my students led to published pieces of flash. In fact, a few of the flash pieces in The Disappeared were written during those in-class writing sessions. I don’t know why I never thought of doing this before—maybe it came from a desire to keep my teaching life and writing life separate—but I wish now I’d been doing it all along.

TD: What’s a lesson or some advice that you give to your students that all writers could benefit from hearing?

AP: The longer I’ve written, the more I’ve found myself believing in the importance of environment. I know a lot of writers say environment is irrelevant, or you shouldn’t let yourself get hung up on creating the perfect writing conditions, but in my own experience, I’ve really seen a direct correlation between the times in my life when I’ve been most productive and the environments I was working in during those times. For instance, for years in my twenties, I would always pick apartments that were located in great neighborhoods but that were flawed in some other way—too noisy, too small, terrible light. Yes, I was just around the block from that great coffee shop or used bookstore, but I was somehow never comfortable writing in those apartments. It took me years to understand that I have a real sensitivity to noise, that high ceilings allow me to feel less restrained creatively, that a large window in my writing space is always a good thing. I know we don’t always have control over our writing spaces, but I do think there’s value in paying very close attention to the things that allow us to be at our creative best and to seek out spaces that allow us to write in a regularly productive way.

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ANDREW PORTER is the author of the story collection The Theory of Light and Matter and the novel In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He lives in Indiana, where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.