Interview with Writer Kevin Clouther
This interview was conducted on December 6, 2019 by EIC Sarah O’Brien for Boston Accent Lit. This is the first in a 2020 Boston Accent interview series with writers.
Kevin Clouther is the author of We Were Flying to Chicago: Stories (Catapult, 2014). His stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, The New Orleans Review, and Puerto Del Sol among other journals, and he has contributed essays to The Millions, NPR, Poets & Writers, Salon, and Tin House. He holds degrees from the University of Virginia and Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the recipient of the Richard Yates Fiction Award and Gell Residency Award. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he is Program Coordinator of the MFA in Writing.
Boston Accent Lit: Why did you become a writer? Have you always been a writer?
Kevin Clouther: People have asked me how, but I’m not sure anyone has asked me why. The answer, I suppose, is that I don’t like anything—people, okay, but not things—more than I like books. The possibility of one day having my book in a library, of entering a conversation going back thousands of years, was enough to motivate me through all the failed stories, the curt little rejection slips, the hours at a time when I couldn’t get a comma right. I don’t know about always, but I’ve been a writer for a long time, longer than I haven’t been a writer—I feel fortunate to say that.
Boston Accent: You were born in Boston. Do you feel any connection to the city?
Clouther: I fly into Boston two or three times a year—most of my family still lives in Massachusetts—and I settle into the rhythms and mannerisms of the place easily. I lived in Mass until I was thirteen, but I haven’t lived there since, meaning I’ve lived two-thirds of my life someplace else. In Nebraska, where I live now, I talk and walk faster than most people; I seem more abrupt; my vowels remain unchanged (in the spirit of this publication, I’ll note that I had a strong Boston accent once upon a time).
My hats—this might sound odd—are a big thing. I’m always wearing a Red Sox cap in the summer and a Patriots snow hat—I have one with the little poof, which horrifies my wife, and one without—in the winter, which means people regularly ask me if I’m from Boston, and that’s what feels right, that I’m from there, though I’m not sure I’ll ever live there again.
Boston Accent: What role does intuition play in the writing and publishing process, if any?
Clouther: I try neither to undervalue nor overvalue intuition. In higher ed, there can be an emphasis on craft that strikes me as too workmanlike, even puritanical. I believe in putting in the time, to be sure, but there ought to be an element of mystery—this is art, after all, not bricklaying (well, maybe there’s mystery in bricklaying—what do I know?). That said, I get nervous when students tell me they only write when inspiration hits or that they have no real sense of why their characters do what they do. I’m happy when I surprise myself—I have a better chance of surprising the reader then—but, in the end, everything is in a story because I put it there.
As for publishing, I think so many of the good things that happen to writers happen from a combination of producing strong work and getting lucky; I’m not sure how much intuition comes into it.
Boston Accent: You earned your MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. How did that program influence your writing life, process, or style? If you could have changed something about your experience there what would you change?
Clouther: Iowa showed me how much you could care about writing and how hard you need to commit yourself to write something worth reading. The level of discourse among the teachers and students was very high. That, more than anything, was inspiring. Seventeen years after graduation, all my outside readers—not counting my agent and wife, who are valuable readers of my work—are from Iowa.
If I had a time machine, I’d discourage graduate student me from wanting everything to happen so quickly. I’d assure myself that doing good work takes time. I try to stress this to the students I have now, but patience is a hard sell.
Boston Accent: How does serving as Program Coordinator of the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s MFA in Writing affect the way you approach your own writing?
Clouther: Serving as Program Coordinator gives me frequent opportunities to talk with talented people about their writing, which helps me to think about my own writing differently. At the last residency, I sat down with Jim Peterson to ask how he’d accomplished something in a story, and that conversation helped me to re-conceptualize a stretch of my novel. But what’s really rewarding about directing the MFA in Writing is seeing the work that students produce. Helping other people to actualize their imagination and ambition might be the most gratifying work of my life.
Boston Accent: You often incorporate humor into your work. Do you have any advice for fiction writers hoping to add moments of comic relief or a humorous tone to a piece?
Clouther: Humor enlists the reader. If the reader is laughing, then the reader is necessarily engaged. If writers are funny in their lives, then I think it’s a mistake to shy from humor on the page, as I did when I was younger, erroneously conflating serious literature with humorlessness. Both Flannery and Frank O’Connor were funny; Shakespeare, as anyone who has seen one of his comedies performed well knows, was funny.
Dialogue, in particular, presents channels for humor—I’m thinking of Sam Lipsyte’s novels and Lorrie Moore’s stories. Their timing is as good as a comic’s, though there’s much to be learned from listening to comics. When I studied with James Alan McPherson at Iowa, he played us Richard Pryor records. One of the best conversations about writing I ever had was in a swimming pool full of comedians in Southern California. Comedians respect process.
Boston Accent: In an alternate universe in which you are not a writer or professor, what are you doing?
Clouther: I’m a lefthanded starting pitcher for the Red Sox.
Boston Accent: What is your favorite current writing project?
Clouther: Favorite! I’m not sure that’s the word I’d use, but I’m close to finishing a draft of a novel; excerpts have been published.
Boston Accent: Where do you find inspiration for your stories, and particularly for your characters?
Clouther: People tend not to believe me, but I make my characters up. The protagonists aren’t lightly disguised versions of me; I’m not interested enough in my own experiences. I’d rather use my imagination, which seems to me tragically minimized in the lives of people over the age of ten. The one thing I don’t make up is emotion. All the feelings my characters have are feelings I’ve had or observed in others. But the people having those feelings and the situations those people find themselves in are almost entirely the result of my imagination.
Boston Accent: What are you reading right now?
Clouther: I always try to read something canonical, usually something I missed (there’s so much I’ve missed), and something contemporary. The former is Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and the latter is In Praise of Wasting Time by Alan Lightman, whom I’ll be interviewing soon in Omaha [Editor’s Note: the event happened prior to this interview’s publication, on February 20, 2020]. He teaches at MIT, so he’ll be flying in from Boston, which brings us somewhere close to full circle.
Author and Teacher Kevin Clouther. Among other things. He wears many hats.