Author Q&A: Dan Chaon

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Author Dan Chaon

Updated: March 13, 2012 8:05AM

Before publishing his critically acclaimed novels You Remind Me of Me and Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon (a 1986 Northwestern grad) made his literary reputation as a writer of dark, mysterious and disturbing short stories that packed a powerful metaphysical punch, not unlike the pulp stories he admired as a child reading anthologies branded with Alfred Hitchcock’s name. His first collection of stories, Among the Living, was nominated for a National Book Award, and his third, Stay Awake (Ballantine, $25), has just been released.

Chaon answered a few questions about secrets, reinvention, the “lullaby of normalcy,” and the mystery beyond the borders of a photograph.

Q. Why are you drawn to writing short stories?

A. Part of it has to do with the way my mind works. I’m attracted to the small, mysterious, slice-of-life moment that isn’t necessarily fodder for a novel but still feels compelling.

I was also a big short-story reader as a kid. I was particularly a fan of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies, like Stories You Shouldn’t Read in the Dark. I always try to recreate the feeling those stories left with me, that strange sense of unease and mystery. Mine aren’t necessarily horror or thriller stories, but they have some shared DNA.

The stories in this collection were written over the last decade or so in between working on longer projects. So, it was interesting when I started to put them together how much they felt inter-connected in a lot of ways.

Q. You’ve written two novels. How are they different from writing short stories?

A. You have to create a character who is going to have a transformational experience over a long period of time. You’re also creating a more complex and solidly grounded world in a novel, whereas stories can have more unexplored edges, and those can be particularly powerful. A short story is kind of like a photograph, but you can get the sense of something happening beyond the edges of the photo. And that can have a lot of mysterious power.

In a novel, you can’t get away with leaving things open-ended, but I think that’s one of the things short stories do really well. I love not quite knowing the answer at the end of a story but still being left with the feeling of something having been transformed.

Q. In your stories, you seem to be fascinated by the idea that people have secrets, that their lives might have dimensions that aren’t apparent even to themselves.

A. I’m fascinated by the idea that in some ways, even the people we’re closest to are not completely knowable, that we can never see things precisely from their point of view. Even if you’ve been married 30 years, for example, your spouse certainly has the capacity to surprise you.

I think it’s especially interesting to look into the inner lives of people who might not seem particularly complex — like a long-term failure-to-launch guy working as a supermarket cashier. The sort of people that are often overlooked or dismissed.

I’m also interested in extreme psychological states, the kind where we seem to be halfway in reality and halfway in meta-reality or fantasy. When people are in situations in which they aren’t necessarily able to trust their subjective points of view.

Q. This all seems to suggest you’re drawn to the mysterious aspects of life.

A. I think a lot of times when we’re dealing with life, we skirt along the surface of things. So we get into ruts where things appear to be normal or routine, until something shakes you up and suddenly, when you look around, everything seems strange.

I love that moment when we suddenly wake up for a moment from the lullaby of normalcy and the world seems rich and mysterious again.

Q. Is it true that some of your stories are based on actual events?

A. Some of them are based on news stories I’ve encountered, but I wouldn’t say they have any sort of non-fictional or biographical element. For example, the two-headed baby that’s described in my story “Stay Awake”— I know I actually saw that baby on a talk show. But I haven’t been able to trace it back. I also went through a period when I was fascinated by mothers who murder their children. Not only by the women themselves, but what happened in the aftermath. And that was certainly the inspiration for the story “I Wake Up.”

Q. Personal reinvention seems to be a major theme in your writing. Where does that come from?

A. Well, it’s a big part of contemporary life. We’re all involved in that process, now more than ever, reinventing ourselves for our Facebook page and our Twitter feed and all that stuff.

But I also think it has to do with experiences I had growing up. I was adopted as an infant, so from the beginning I had a sense of myself as someone who could have ended up in a whole variety of life situations. And, over the years, as I moved from being a rural kid in western Nebraska to being a student at a big-city university, then becoming a college professor … I’ve always been aware of moments of reinvention and moments of transformation. I’ve always been aware of how that has played out in my own life.

Q. Do you think people can successfully reinvent themselves?

A. We all try, don’t we? But I think some aspects of ourselves are easier to reinvent than others. There are some core things about ourselves that we can’t get away from. Really, a lot of my stories are about that: What can we get away from and what can’t we get away from? What chases us through our lives, and what can we transform?

Everybody in this collection of stories has been successful in escaping at least parts of their past, until they find there are some things so essential to who we are that we can’t get rid of them.

Bruce Ingram is a local free-lance writer.