What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Gary Amdahl

fiction writer

Gary Amdahl is the author of Visigoth, winner of the 2005 Milkwood Editions prize for fiction. The collection of short stories has just been published. Born in Jackson, Minnesota, Amdahl had several plays produced in the 80s, wrote reviews in the 90s for The Nation, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and other periodicals; and won a Pushcart Prize for "Narrow Road to the Deep North" (in the Visigoth collection) in 2000. He is married to writer Leslie Brody (Red Star Sister); together they authored A Motel of the Mind, a collection of essays, in 2001.

 
I am just finishing a novel called The Daredevils. It's longish, about 500 pages, set in 1916-1917, in San Francisco and Minnesota. The principal characters are a young woman who grew up as a child laborer in a Connecticut mill, associated with the Wobblies, trying to live an ideal anarchism rather than manipluate a political syndicalism; her lover (38), a motorcycle racer and Wobbly; and a teenaged San Francisco aristocrat being groomed for political celebrity in the Teddy Roosevelt mode, but who would rather be an actor.

 
I take it from your bio that you no longer do much work in theater. Can you talk about the transition from writing plays to writing stories and novels?

My last play was produced in 1989, but I will return to the theater or die trying. I was not a great playwright, mainly because I had a very poor understanding of what actors really did on a stage. I came from an empnhatically literary position and assumed the actor's job was just to say what I had written down. When writing for the stage, however, what is most important is to give actors something to do. I don't mean "run across the stage and pull out a revolver" or any simple sort of stage business; I mean they have to have a sense of what is being built on the stage, the structure of action that the audience must see almost immediately -- if they don't, the play will fail, no matter how enchanting the language. But to answer your question about the transition from stage writing to book writing: the biggest difference is that in a novel or a story, you can write everything you need to write. In the theater, the more you write, very often the worse it is. In a book, you have no other recourse: if you want something understood, you write it out. If you write yourself into a corner, you can write yourself out. Plays require architecture and carpentry; the thing has to be sound. A novel is more forgiving of uncertainty and (even awkward) explorations.

 
What led you to this project?

A story about a motorcycle racer has been forming in my mind and notebooks for twenty years; I was so entranced by the prospect of racing motorcycles for a living that I almost failed to graduate from high school. I also have read a great deal of anarchist literature -- Proudhon and Kropotkin and Berkman and Goldman and Bakunin -- all the big names and lots of less well-known ones as well, especially precursors, like Winstanley and Godwin. I was also active in the theater.

It took a while for it all to coalesce in the novel as it now stands, but the intention has been clear to me for a long long time.

 
What's been challenging about this project?

Trying to make my depiction of life as it was lived a hundred years ago persuasive, and yet not turn it into a conventional "historical novel" with lots of carefully researched details overwhelming the profundity of character. A secondary problem has been reconciling the deeds of actual historical persons with fictional characters, the result being an almost total absence of historical persons: each draft has erased more and more verifiable and documented history, and introduced more imagined history.

 
Is "The Daredevils" the first novel you've written, and assuming it is, was it challenging to work at that length after writing short stories for several years?

I wrote long from the start. The title story in the Visigoth collection was once part of a novel, the first one I tried to write, and two of the novellas I've published ("Free Fall" in Visigoth and another, I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster: a story of Chicago in Santa Monica Review) were both two-hundred-pagers at one time. I have two other novels on the shelf. They're in terrible disarray, but have survived, and I will start in on one of them when I find a publisher for The Daredevils. I also have two stories I'm working right now--while I'm working on the novel. They are both turning into novellas (Peasnts: a story of Russian sensibility written in the French manner, and Conversations in California, an homage to Elio Vittorini). My natural mode is long. I work intuitively, searching for the sense of inevitability that all good writing requires; and what I find difficult is seizing upon a story that has the inevitability present right from the start.

 
What has been the most rewarding part of working on this project?

The bliss of making a world strong enough and lively enough to balance the weakness and dullness of the one I actually live in.

 
When do you expect (or hope) to finish, and what's next for the project? Do you have a book contract, or prospects?

I'll be done in a month. I'm hoping that Visigoth will attract some attention, and generate some interest in the novel. I will be reading at BEA, at Bookslut, at the LA Times Book Festival, and a few other places. I like readings -- I probably should have thrown myself into acting as well as writing, but I couldn't find the emotional energy to do both.

Links

Jan. 2006 interview on AuthorTrek

See more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 23 Mar 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco