Roy Kesey was born and raised in northern California, and currently lives in Beijing with his wife and children. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in more than fifty magazines and anthologies, including McSweeney’s, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, PRISM International, Quarterly West, Night Train, the Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology, The Future Dictionary of America and New Sudden Fiction 2007. His story “Wait,” first published in The Kenyon Review, was recently chosen to appear in Best American Short Stories 2007. His dispatches and essays appear at reasonably regular intervals on the McSweeney’s website, at The Nervous Breakdown, and in the Columns section of That’s Beijing; he also maintains a blog-like entity at MySpace. He’s the author of Nothing in the World, a novella published by Bullfight Media in 2006, and of “All Over”, a collection of short stories that will appear as Dzanc Books’ debut title in October 2007.

Your work has appeared in over fifty journals and anthologies, many of which are coveted publications among writers. To be honest, while this drives me to write more and, hopefully, better, it also depresses me just a little. Were you this successful from the beginning? (Please, god, tell us no!) How long did it take before you saw achievements for your efforts?

The great thing about you, Kelly, is your sense of humor. Successful from the beginning! Here’s a number: 118. That’s how many submissions I logged before my first story found a home. For years, (five or six of them, if memory serves,) I did absolutely everything wrong. I wrote stories with slow starts and easy endings and terrible titles. I submitted sporadically, and mainly to the glossies. I misspelled the names of magazines in my cover letters. Over and over and over.

And after years of this, (might have been seven, actually,) I finally buckled down and did the work I should have done at the beginning: seeking feedback from people smarter than I am, digging deeper into the material, and doing the research, (both in terms of the stories themselves and in terms of markets to which to send them.) And the result was that the acceptances started to trickle in. Slowly. Which is still pretty much how they come. And each one is a celebration.

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Your debut novella, Nothing in the World, which was published by Bullfight Media in 2006 and is currently sold out, is about a young man, Josko Banovic, who enlists in the service after the Serbian army attacks his native Croatia. Along the way, he is gravely injured, and as he makes his way through the ruined countryside searching for his sister, he is propelled onwards by the singing of a mysterious girl. Her enchanting song is a powerful and fundamental aspect of the novella. Was it this idea, this sound, this image, that spawned the story, or was it something that crept up on you while writing?

First, the good news: I’m on the verge of signing up to do a few more books with Dzanc, and one of those will be a reissue of Nothing in the World, which pleases me no end. When Bullfight closed its doors just as the first run was selling out, it really wiped me out–all that work, and so little to show for it. But at some point in the not-too-distant future, the book will be available again.

As for my door into the story, there were really four images that got me going, all of them poached from real life, from my time in Croatia during the war in the early 1990s. One was that of a soldier setting a human head on a café table (not something I witnessed firsthand, but I was in Split, just a couple of blocks away from the café in question, when it happened); one of a funeral, (which, sadly, I did witness firsthand–this one didn’t make it into the final version of Nothing in the World, but it does appear in a short story called “How Things End,” which is in the current issue of The New Orleans Review) one of a story I heard second-hand about an antiaircraft unit based on the coast that allegedly shot down two Serb jets in the space of thirty seconds or so; and one of a young and very damaged man I ran into on the bank of the Cetina River. It was the last of these that gave me part of the book’s ending, and the first that gave me a character and an entrance into the narrative as a whole.

Those four elements all appeared in a single story–not a particularly successful one, mind you, (but that didn’t stop me from sending it out–Cf. my answer to the first question…)–which later became a sort of patchy outline for the book. The mystery girl and her song didn’t show up until about a year later, when I was having my first go at writing the novel that later became the novella that got published.

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“All Over,” your collection of short stories forthcoming from Dzanc Books in October, includes “Wait,” originally published in The Kenyon Review, and chosen for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2007. Indeed, “Wait” is one of my favorite stories in this collection. It’s insanely entertaining, not to mention horrifying! I also love “Instituto,” however. The concept behind it is brilliant. Which is your favorite story in the collection? Which one are you most proud of?

Picking a favorite is hard sledding for me, as I imagine it would be for most writers. “Follow the Money” was the hardest one in terms of logistics, and I was happy to see it come together. “Wait” was among the most fun to write and rewrite, especially once I knew I had the ending right. “[Exeunt.” has my favorite first line. “Instituto” and “Fontanel” were both logistically challenging and a great deal of fun in terms of voice. And I have a soft spot for “Hat,” which is the oldest story in the collection. I’d never written anything like it, and didn’t know where it had come from, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it. It sat in a drawer for a year or two, until I discovered McSweeney’s, and realized that it might be a good fit for them.

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Explain the significance of the cover for “All Over.” Why cigarette butts? Also, where did the title for this collection come from?

The genius behind the cover is Steven Seighman–graphic designer, editor of Monkeybicycle, and an extraordinarily patient man. He read the book and started pitching ideas, and together with the folks at Dzanc we started experimenting with different elements in different sizes and shades. Given the title, we talked about using a map as one of the main panels, but it never quite earned its place as map-qua-map. Then someone came up with the idea of having the title be formed of letter-shaped ‘holes’ in the painted wall, as if you were looking through the wall at the map–and that ended up being my favorite part of the cover.

As for the cigarettes, I think we (Steven first, since he found it, and then the rest of us) were drawn to the image because in it the photographer, a guy from Baden named Patrik Affentranger, accomplishes something that seems impossible: he takes a loaded ashtray (which is, let’s face it, an aesthetically unpleasant thing) and, using only color and line and depth of field, makes it beautiful. There are also of course connections to certain aspects of the title. And we liked the way the rust-holes in the wall look almost like cigarette burns until you take a closer look. Et cetera.

The title itself came from the conjunction of a lot of different things that this book is involved in exploring: endings, peripateticism, coverings. And et cetera.

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I’ve heard that you will go on tour for “All Over.” Care to share your tour schedule with us?

I’d love to, but unfortunately we’re still in the process of hashing out exact times and places. It will start late in October and end early in November, I know that much. There will definitely be readings in Ann Arbor, Chicago and Urbana-Champaign. Iowa City, most likely, and I’m hoping for Memphis and New Orleans. New York and San Francisco, if all goes well. Some other places still in the mix. And of course Ukiah, my hometown. Then when I get back to Beijing I’ll do a reading or two here, and I imagine that will be that.

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Dan Wickett, the man behind Dzanc Books, is extremely generous and hard working. He is, in my opinion, a man with awe-inspiring vision. What has it been like working with him? What have you learned about the publishing industry and small presses?

I totally agree–Dan is terrific, and working with him and Steve Gillis and the other people at Dzanc has been great. I don’t know to what extent I can generalize from my experience with them to other small presses and the wider world of the publishing industry as a whole, (about which, let it be said, I understand almost nothing,) but Dzanc has been very attentive, very much inclined to have me be a part of every decision that needs to be made, and that’s a splendid thing.

The thing I like best about Dzanc is its willingness–its total commitment, in fact–to finding authors and titles that are, for whatever reason, slightly outside the parameters of the big publishers, and then throwing themselves behind those projects with a breathtaking amount of enthusiasm and savvy. This shows in terms of the writers they’ve already signed–people like Yannick Murphy and Peter Markus–and I’m proud to be a horse in that stable.

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What’s next for Roy Kesey? Any collection or novel in the works?

The next book I’ll do with Dzanc will be a novel–I think we’re shooting for an early 2009 release. So right now I’m working through what I’ve got of it, figuring out where its strengths lie, that sort of thing. I need to rebirth it fairly radically, which is something I’ve never done before, and for a few months that was pretty intimidating, but it seems to be going well so far.

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Intimidating?! I didn’t know that word was even in your vocabulary! Ah, there is hope for me yet… Can you tell us anything more about this novel? Characters? Plot? Your favorite line from it so far?

If I were at the polishing stage, all of those questions would be easy to answer, but given where I am at the moment… Let’s see. It’s set mainly in northern Peru in the late 1990’s, with the ‘97-‘98 El Niño playing a pretty cool role. It deals partly with history–how we use and relate to it, and the problems that arise from doing so. As for characters, mixed in with the human types there are lots of lizards–big fat lizards. If you want to know how the book is going to turn out, you should probably ask them.

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Which writers do you think are underrated?

Lucy Corin should be a household name, and I hope she soon will be. Ditto for Mark Richard–I thought Charity was terrific. Then there are the usual suspects for a list like this, all of them great stylists, and greatly deserving–David Markson, Gary Lutz, Michael Martone. There are a bunch of writers who are well-known in litfic circles, but they should be even bigger–Steven Millhauser, Andrea Lee, Padgett Powell, Pinckney Benedict, Madison Smartt Bell. And when Nicola Mason’s first collection comes out I’m going to buy ten copies.

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What is the most exotic thing you’ve ever eaten?

Bear in mind that I’m not proud of all these. But it would most likely be something from the following list:

Rattlesnake, toucan, monkey, wasp pupae, guinea pig.

Guinea pig was by far the most delicious.

I also once ate a pretty big beetle, but that was by accident.

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Contact Roy

For more information about “All Over” visit Dzanc Books.

Read:

“Probably Somewhere”
published by Zoetrope All-Story Extra

“The Warp and Weft of My Recent Days”
published by The Madison Review

“Invunche y voladora”
published by The God Particle

“Martin”
published by Quarterly West

“How it Happens That our Senses do not Perceive Certain Bodies”
published by Night Train

“Drop”
published by SmokeLong Quarterly

“The Holidays Here”
published by The Mississippi Review

“Canoe”
published by Dragonfire

“Pájaro Loco”
published by Backwards City Review


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