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[Means continues]... about his wonderful book, The Pound Era—to help understand how this stuff gets done. But it's fun to listen to writers try to speak in public. I just read a wonderfully clear essay about Cormac McCarthy by the writer Dagoberto Gilb, and in it he says the following: "...when I think of how writers are supposed to be, I think of Cormac McCarthy: don't say anything, don't be flattered by praise or disrupted by criticism, don't read anything they write about you, just do your work, because that's the thing. Which is just about everything I can't seem to do and wish I could." You know, that's how I feel, in a way, about doing an interview and trying to explain how one writes. There are some writers out there who just talk too much. You know they're building scaffoldings around the work, trying to hold it up.

LRS: Of late what distracts me from the work at hand is the process of getting my work out there, i.e., the time and mental energy I expend trying to place stories in magazines, query agents and presses (last month I decided against going to a writer's conference because, well, I thought it would be better to stay home and write), and yet I know it needs to be done. The task I guess is learning how to keep the business end of things (this includes facing rejection, etc...) separate from the work, or to keep the work in the forefront of my mind. As Gilb's essay suggests, easier said than done.

Means: My approach is to take it one story at a time, and to think of finding a home for that story. The main thing is to try to make the story so good—at least in the terms that you set up—that some editor, somewhere, will have to take it. Maybe even against her will. But the truth is, some of the better writing might be hard to place. All of that—the self promotion, the readings, writing reviews—is a huge distraction from the work, and for me at least I'd rather not do too much of it. I'm not an actor. I'm a writer. Writers, for the most part, like to be alone. Should be alone. That's why they do what they do.

LRS: Maybe an interview is most helpful if the answering part cannot only touch the reader, but you, too. What question would you like me to ask you?

Means: Oh, I don't know. Saul Bellow just died yesterday, so maybe something along the lines of: What do you think of Saul Bellow? That would give me a chance to talk about the fact that I met him once. I was working in New York, and he came into the office and walked down the hall past my desk and I stood up and shook his hand. He was dressed up in his dapper garb, wearing an elegant hat—actually it was in his hand—and I knew, right then, that I'd have to open up a conversation. My big chance was at hand. So I told him I was from Michigan and that I grew up near Ring Lardner's hometown, and we began to discuss Lardner for a few minutes. We shook hands again and he said he was looking forward to reading my work. (There wasn't any, but I didn't let on to that fact.)

My father didn't take me fishing that often, but he did sit and talk with me about Bellow. I went to Chicago three times last year, and I took my kids on a train from Kalamazoo, Michigan into the city one time—I think it was in July. Going by train is still the best way to see that hidden landscape, and entering Chicago that way, shuddering through the rail yards in Gary—I was happy to see that the USS plant was still spewing clouds of pollution, and we passed, parked on sidings, weird kettle cars that were full of molten steel, you could see the bright hellish bubbles of it, looking down from our vantage. That trip, and Bellow's death, reminded me of a trip into Chicago I took with my grandfather, as a kid. He was a dapper, self-made businessman of the old school. Having him take me around was very much like getting a free tour of a bygone city, a place that no longer exists except, thankfully, in The Adventures of Augie March.

David Means recommends:
Independent People by Halldor Laxness. It made me cry.
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. My favorite Faulkner.
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner. Also my favorite.
A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe. Deserves a Nobel Prize, and got one.
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod. This novel and Island: Collected Stories.
A Death in the Family by James Agee. This is a somewhat neglected classic. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. A contemporary novel that blew me away. Nightwork by Christine Schutt. Brilliantly dark stories.