In 2009 I happened upon the experimental story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by William H. Gass. It was in a used copy of Norton’s anthology of Postmodern American fiction that I’d purchased as part of my preparation to write my dissertation for the Ph.D. in English studies at Illinois State University. I was smitten. A few weeks later I attended the AWP Conference in Chicago during which there was a celebration of Gass and his work. It was the first time I heard him read (before encountering him in the Norton I don’t believe I knew of him at all). I had no sense then that those chance encounters would change so much in my writing and in my life.
I ended up focusing much of my dissertation on Gass’s work (instead of Pynchon and Gaddis as I’d planned), and I became a Gass devotee (disciple isn’t too strong of a word). Gass’s poetic style and his views on writing, art, literature, teaching—everything—have had a profound impact on just about everything I do. I had published a few short stories before finding the Master, plus I’d written a novella and a novel, but his influence has been so profound I think of my creative writing as pre-Gass and post-Gass, and I’m half embarrassed of my pre-Gass efforts.
Perhaps in part because I had been so ignorant of William Gass (I completed my doctorate as a kind of midlife crisis and was in my forties when I read “In the Heart”), I became devoted to not only him and his work but to others discovering him as well. So for the last decade I’ve been writing reviews and articles about Gass, and delivering conference papers on the Master’s work (a practice that one of my students dubbed “preaching the Gass-pel” and I promptly stole).
In brief, Gass, who passed away in 2017, was more interested in the language that he used to tell a story than in the more traditional elements of plot, characterization and setting. The story’s structure was also high on his list of priorities, and he produced some grand experiments in narrative framework, especially in his masterpiece The Tunnel, which famously took him 26 years to complete.
Unlike my literary idol, however, my mind tends to think along more traditional lines when I write fiction. I have embraced Gass’s love of language and experimentation, but I still tend to think in terms of plot, characterization and setting when I’m first drafting a narrative. And I know that when it comes to those elements I can identify a very different source of inspiration: Mary Shelley and especially her novel Frankenstein, a book which I’ve taught to both high school and college students every year for the last 22. Mary Shelley, in fact, appears as a character in my most recently published novel, Mrs Saville, which is a sequel to Frankenstein, and a character based on Mary Shelley is a protagonist in my 2014 novel An Untimely Frost.
Those are overt examples of Mary Shelley’s influence, but I know she and her creations seep into my narratives in all kinds of strange ways. Only recently have I recognized that even my current novel in progress, “The Isolation of Conspiracy,” from which “The Artist Spoke” is excerpted, owes a great deal to her. In part the book is about how a minor, quasi-surgical procedure can have a profound impact on both the receiving individual and society as a whole. I’ve been working on “The Isolation of Conspiracy” for four years in fits and starts—and five other chunks of the book have appeared here and there—but it’s just been the last few months that I’ve connected the dots between this novel and my personal wellspring, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
And that’s all right: there are certainly worse chromosomes to have coursing through one’s creative blood.
