SOL Books

Interview with Michael Loyd Gray, author of Well Deserved

The following thread is a question-and-answer session with Michael Loyd Gray, whose novel, Well Deserved was a SOL Books Prose Series selection.

Posted on September 1st, 2008 under Interviews with Authors, Well Deserved • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback

13 Responses to “Interview with Michael Loyd Gray, author of Well Deserved”

1
bahoena:
September 1st, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Michael, once a again, congratulations on having Well Deserved selected for out Prose Series, and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed on our blog.

To begin, there’s the typical question I ask in order to get things rolling: where did you draw your inspiration from for this story? Was it a place or a time in history?
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mlgray:
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:05 am
Thanks very much, Blake. It’s a terrific honor to receive the award. I’m thrilled by it.

Yes, the inspiration definitely stems from a special time and place, the late 1960s. I was a teenager and spent summers on Lake Mattoon, about fifty miles south of where I grew up in Champaign, Illinois. I live in Michigan now, but probably no other time or place in my life has affected me more. Vietnam sort of hovered over us like a creeping fog, and great music — The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and many others — created a wonderful soundtrack for those tubulent but really exciting and vivid days. I enjoyed them a lot. I don’t regret the 60s at all. I sometimes miss them. We were rebellious and questioned authority and I think overall, rightfully so.

But back to writing. Clearly I began to create Lake Argus and the town of Argus with Lake Mattoon in mind as a starting point. But only as a starting point. The fact that I wrote the novel so many years after those days was good because I wasn’t then just drawing on sharp memories. I had mostly fleeting images of Lake Mattoon and so once I had the first character, Jesse, and had placed him into the opening scene on Lake Argus, my memories of Lake Mattoon were set aside and I was living on Lake Argus in my mind and seeing Lake Argus and the town of Argus evolve through the eyes, first, of Jesse, and then the other three main characters.

I structured the novel through the four revolving points of view because for some time I had been intrigued with multiple points of view and how they can expand the universe of a novel. I had read The Tent Peg by Aritha Van Herk, and, of course, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Multiple points of view always just tickled me and I discovered that writing them in Well Deserved was a lot of fun for me.
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bahoena:
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
As I was reading Well Deserved, I was wondering how closely the soundtrack of the book resembled your own music collection. I know I could pick out many of those tunes from the record collections of my aunts and uncles, who were also teens at that time. A character’s musical selection, such as Jesse’s, is one device to help place readers in a moment of history.

Making one of your characters a Vietnam vet., as well as having lived through that era as a teen, do you see a political side to your story? Or was it another way to help capture that era of time?
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mlgray:
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
As for how much of a political posture Well Deserved assumes about Vietnam, I’d say probably not very much, even though I opposed the war. I was actually called up around 1971 or so — my lottery number was a dismally low 61, I think — but rejected because of a badly broken arm that was still in a cast. I can’t say whether I would have been sent to Vietnam because by ’73 American involvement was on its last legs.

But the Vietnam War is indeed necessary and useful background in Well Deserved, and the character of Dominick Cruikshank has just returned from the war as the novel begins. He has only been back a month or so, if I recall correctly, and so the war is still painfully fresh and he likely can still summon up the smells etc. Through Dominick the war is certainly presented as harsh and terrible and something to be avoided.

So, I’m not sure why I chose not to particularly make the novel anti-war. I guess I was more interested in having Vietnam, through Dominick, as a piece of authentic background and instead I was more interested in focusing on the interconnected relationships of the four main characters. The war does provide a linkage of sorts between Dominick and the town police chief, who served in the Navy in Korea, but did not experience combat. I like how that link spices up the dynamic between the two men and I think the police chief does become a sort of father figure for Dominick, who resists the connection at first.

Through Dominick most readers would get that the war was awful and that to some degree he comes home a little damaged from it and will need more time to decompress. That by itself is an anti-war conclusion and so the novel does have its thin anti-war strand.
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bahoena:
September 4th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Well Deserved is a story of how four people connect at a specific conjuncture in each of their lives, and so far you’ve only mentioned three: Jesse, Dominick, and Art (the police officer). What of the fourth character? What of Nicole? What’s her role? Is it as important of a role in the story as the other three?
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mlgray:
September 5th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
If readers were to measure the time Nicole and Carolyn spend on stage against that of Jesse, Art, and Dominick, they might indeed wonder about the importance of the two female characters. But they are indeed important. Nicole gets a number of good scenes to help establish her character. She’s pretty sure of herself and her future plans, and even a little too sure; but that’s part of her charm. Both women are strong, independent, and the equal of the men. I wanted the women to have those qualities.

But ultimately the story is about how Jesse, Art, and Dominick are the ones who by virtue of inevitable circumstances must play active — and dangerous — roles in the critical event that affects and eventually shapes the future for all four characters. The three men need more on stage time than the women in this story. Jesse, Art, and Dominick really do seem to emerge as a sort of family, with Jesse as the younger, indecisive, errant brother; Dominick as the older, wiser, world-weary older brother back from war and damaged; and Art as a man who is far more complicated than most people around him would know, and a sort of surrogate father to Jesse and Dominick.
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bahoena:
September 7th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Now that we have all the characters established. What of working with multiple narrators. As a writer, what are some of the benefits that you see in using this method of presenting a story?
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mlgray:
September 8th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I’m going to go with entertainment value as a big part of why I used multiple narrators. When I write I do think about how readers will not only perceive it, but whether they will enjoy it, too. Those revolving narrators open up the novel and allow readers to view a scene from different vantage points. They allow readers to examine what happened from different angles and helps, I hope, to gain perspective on what happened.

I worked with Stu Dybek in the MFA program at Western Michigan and I recall he said my work sometimes has a cinematic touch. I think that’s true enough. When I approach a scene I do tend to think in terms of what a camera would see and how things are positioned. I try to “see” the scene as I do it. I wrote the screenplay version of one of my other novels (Not Famous Anymore) just before I wrote Well Deserved. Maybe that was an influence somehow. When you write a novel you really are something like a film director, if that makes sense. I see Well Deserved as a film, too, and have been thinking for some time about writing a screenplay version.
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bahoena:
September 9th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
The uses of multiple narrators has become quite popular of late, especially with movies like Crash and Babel. It works equally well with both the literary and film genres, and as you said, gives Well Deserved somewhat of a movie feel to it.
So what is your approach to writing a story with multiple narrators? There’s not a simple chronological or linear order to things since you often show events from different narrators’ perspectives.
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mlgray:
September 10th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
I think I decided to use multiple narrators after I wrote the opening chapter that introduced Jesse. As I wrote that first chapter I don’t think I had yet decided to structure it that way. What I had at that point was a clear picture of who Jesse was, where he was, and why he was there. So, after writing the first chapter and getting Jesse well established on the pages, I almost immediately had in my head the character of Dominick. As I thought about how to start the second chapter, Dominick’s chapter, I decided it would be fun to turn things around and have Dominick speculating on the identity of Jesse as Jesse speculated on Dominick’s identity. From there I knew I wanted the novel revealed through multiple narrators. It wasn’t planned ahead of time.

As for approach, at the end of each chapter I first determined which character logically came next on to the novel’s stage and then I decided how they would view the events that had just happened in the previous chapter. How I made those decisions, of course, is not so easy to articulate. As I created and established each of the four main characters, I learned who they were and how they would react in certain situations. I got to know them and that helped, along with my subconscious, to help guide them through scenes and to determine their behavior and dialogue. I’m a believer, like Hemingway, in the wise counsel of the subconscious, and I see it, like he did, as a spring that bubbles up and supplies ideas and directions.
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bahoena:
September 11th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Did you run across any pitfalls or struggles with using multiple narrators, or did writing just become instinctual once you got the engine warmed up?
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mlgray:
September 12th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Once I got going and was comfortable with the approach it went pretty well. I think multiple narrators made telling this particular story more interesting than had I just used first person, for example, through one of the four main characters. With one point of view the story would have not had the added dimensions.

I guess the thing I always had to be aware of was what had happened in a previous chapter before writing the next one — making sure I knew how it had to logically affect the character who would “tell” the next chapter. Sort of like the concept of continuity in a film. There I am again, realizing the cinematic touches that do likely apply to my work sometimes.

The novel I just recently completed is written in third person through the viewpoint of a main character, and it, too, was fun to write because I like the story and the main character. Maybe a future novel will take me back to multiple narrators. It all depends, really, on how you come to realize your story can best be told.
13
bahoena:
September 13th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
There is on set of chapters that I’m quite curious about in Well Deserved. In near the middle of the book, you have four chapters, one for each character, that consist of a series of one sentence paragraphs, almost like of list of thoughts. What prompted this series of chapters?