By Patricia Ann McNair
In his latest collection, Maximum Speed, Kevin Clouther writes about a group of people whose lives entwined when they were teenagers growing up in Florida, and then again more than two decades later when their shared past begins to haunt them. These stories weave through time and place; through friendship, family, and estrangement; through those moments in and beyond control. The writing here is rich and propulsive; Clouther’s attention to language and story is seductive.
We recently shared a correspondence in which we talked about Maximum Speed, the terms of the short story, mothers, ghosts, and a number of other things. The conversation below was culled from that correspondence.
PMc: “Billy didn’t like talking about his eyes, but he must have said something to somebody because everybody knew. That he was going blind was understood, though how soon was a source of disagreement.” These first lines of your collection of linked stories are so evocative. I felt as though you were telling me so much about one of the collection’s primary characters while also setting the stage for what is and isn’t known, said, and seen behind the captured narrative on the page. I am always curious about how someone comes up with great first lines. How and when in the process of writing these stories did you decide on these two sentences?
KC: In 2018, a photography magazine, Don’t Ask Pictures, asked me to write flash fiction on a found photograph. I was given a low word count and quick turnaround, and these constraints were so unlike my typical plodding process that I got straight to work. Once I imagined the white shape in the photo as a visual impairment, the story opened for me. It wasn’t until years later, when I wrote “A1A,” that I decided to revisit Billy as a character.
PMc: If I am understanding correctly, those first lines were the starting point for the flash and then the longer story. Were they always the starting point for the collection as you began to make it? Did they ever change at all?
KC: The first lines never changed, but it wasn’t until deep into revision that I settled on “The White Ball” as the first story of the collection. I don’t generally write in a linear fashion because I frequently arrive at a scene I don’t know how to write, and rather than suffer through it, I jump to a different scene. Maybe for that reason I don’t feel wedded to starting a story–or book–where I started writing, even if I end up doing precisely that.
PMc: While these stories cover years and years of these characters’ lives, it is their young, teen-age years that especially resonate throughout the book. What is it about young adult characters that draws you–at least in this collection–as a writer?
KC: I teach creative nonfiction in addition to fiction at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and I’m always warning my students about how much we forget. I don’t think this can be oversold: we forget almost everything! I wanted to get the feeling of being a teenager onto the page before I forgot, and when the pandemic descended, I had more time than usual to write.
Meanwhile, the Constance Garnett translation of the Ivan Turgenev novella “First Love” had left an impression. It convinced me that the emotions people have when they’re young can be as powerful as, if not more powerful than, the feelings people have in their adult lives. Of an encounter between the protagonist and a young woman, Turgenev wrote: “[T]he sensation of beatitude which I then experienced has never since been repeated in my life. It hung like a sweet pain in all my limbs and broke out at last in rapturous leaps and exclamations. As a matter of fact, I was still a child.”
PMc: Mothers, too, are essential to these stories, the way they are both good and bad at mothering, the way responsibility from them and responsibility for them shifts between mothers and their offspring. I was moved by the compassion that arose for Patty, Billy’s mother, despite her own failings and missteps. I am not sure I have a question here, but perhaps you can talk some about mothers on the page. Your pages and those of others.
KC: Mothers appear on page one of Maximum Speed. To different degrees, the main characters all think about their mothers: Andrea and Nick and Billy at length, Jim more quietly, though he has thoughts. There are other mothers too: Andrea’s husband’s dead mother, girls who borrow their mother’s bracelets or rings or perfume, grandmothers, a motherless egg, et al. And, of course, there is my mother, and there is my wife, who is a mother to our children. I’ve been blessed by mothers, so they’re interesting to me. I have many favorite literary mothers, but among books published in my lifetime, I’m wowed by Jenny Offill’s The Dept of Speculation and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and a lot of Alice Munro stories. Deborah Eisenberg’s story “The Girl Who Left Her Sock on the Floor” is a masterclass on writing about mothers.
PMc: It is exciting to learn from the work of other writers, isn’t it? As I read Maximum Speed, I felt I was learning something about structuring a book of short stories. I wonder if you think of this collection as linked stories, or as that more inclusive label, a novel-in-stories? How did you decide on this book structure? Are you a reader/lover of short stories?
KC: I consider the collection a book of linked stories and not a novel-in-stories. I love the short story on its own terms and hate to see it camouflaged. Maybe that’s because I’ve read too many books that wanted to be story collections but were stitched together as novels for the sake of the market (to the credit of Cornerstone Press, nobody in editorial ever suggested anything like this to me). If I tried to write this book as a novel, I believe it would be completely different.
I wrote and revised each story as a short story. Eleven of the fourteen stories appeared in journals as stand-alone fiction. When I’d written about half the stories, I got serious about how they might talk to each other, settling on an AB structure where the recurring characters are alternately seventeen and thirty-nine-years-old. I chose those ages because they precede years when something big is supposed to happen, which can manufacture an acute pressure.
PMc: You mention that you love the short story “on its own terms.” I am with you here, but am curious what you consider the terms of the short story. And are there terms you try to follow when you write stories? Are there examples of these terms in the stories of this collection?
KC: In Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, Rust Hills wrote that “there is a degree of unity in a well-wrought story–what we have called an ‘harmonious relationship of all its aspects’–that isn’t necessarily found in a good novel, that isn’t perhaps even desirable in a novel.” I find that last part well put. I don’t expect–or want–compression in an Elena Ferrante or Zadie Smith novel; I want to get lost in a wild and expansive world.
I’m not sure I ever get lost reading a short story. Everything is moving, whether I’m thinking about it or not (better if I’m not), toward the last image or thought or dialogue or action. The ending makes the story whole. I don’t feel similarly about, say, Moby Dick, where so much of the pleasure comes from wandering off course. Novels sometimes feel reluctant to end. They’ve built so much momentum that it’s hard to stop.
It’s difficult to talk about your own work… Of all the stories in the book, I think “Assassin” comes closest to the kind of ending I’m talking about here.
PMc: We need to talk about ghost stories, Kevin, don’t you think? I don’t want to give away too much, but some of your characters are haunted by others. Perhaps more accurately, most of your characters are haunted–psychologically, and by past events–but there is a visitation in these pages, and “contact” through a medium. Are you a believer in ghosts? A believer in ghost stories?
KC: Oh, I believe in ghost stories. Hamlet, elementally, is a ghost story. Let me celebrate a recent one, Mariana Enríquez’s “My Sad Dead,” which appeared in The New Yorker last year. The protagonist is a medium in Buenos Aires. She says, early in Megan McDowell’s translation, “Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t crazy–I’d considered the possibility, as anyone would after seeing her dead mother climbing the stairs–and I also realized that my mother wasn’t the only ghost.” From this point forward, the author has me.
I think of a ghost as someone who can’t–or won’t–vanish. I met a ghost only once. He appeared at the end of my bed, and we had a brief conversation. This was twenty-five years ago in Virginia, and I don’t remember what we talked about, only that he had a Dutch accent, or so it sounded to me then. After I moved, the next person who lived there told me–unprompted, as I’d forgotten about the ghost (I was young and full of important things to do)–that he’d spoken with a ghost there too. I don’t know what the ghost wanted, so I’ve never written him into a story.
PMc: “One ghost and Andrea was hooked. She had to talk with more.” This is how your story, “Medium,” begins. It seems as though you are not unlike your character Andrea, in that this one ghost from your past may have brought you to talk with more through your collection, Maximum Speed. Is it too much of a leap to think these stories are a way for you to revisit your own ghostly encounter? Is this your first ghost story as a writer?
KC: At the University of Nebraska MFA, we just graduated a wonderful CNF writer, Gina Wagner, who wrote in her thesis that “the veil between this world and the next is thin, and when we are open, the spirits of our loved ones can draw near.” I think it’s that idea, more than any personal experience, that animates me. A few years ago, I published a story in Joyland where the pregnant protagonist orders mozzarella sticks with a stranger who’s carrying her mother’s ashes; I don’t know if it’s a ghost story, but it’s haunted. I wrote that story shortly before I started this collection.
PMc: I stumbled on a quote attributed to John Malkovich: “… the ghosts you chase you never catch.” That made me think of what a writer friend of mine says, that at the heart of all fiction there is yearning. Is this true in the works of this collection?
KC: I hope readers feel that. I would be pleased if they did.
Kevin Clouther is the author of the story collections Maximum Speed (Cornerstone) and We Were Flying to Chicago (Catapult). His stories have appeared in Confrontation, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Joyland, and Ruminate, among other journals. 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 Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha Writer’s Workshop, where he directs the MFA in Writing. He lives with his wife and two children in Omaha.
Patricia Ann McNair’s short story collection, The Temple of Air (stories) was named Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year; Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award from Southern Illinois University; and Finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction. A second edition of The Temple of Air is forthcoming in 2024. McNair’s collection of essays, And These Are the Good Times, was a Montaigne Medal Finalist for Most Thought-Provoking Book of the Year. Responsible Adults, short stories, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards. Her work has been published in Rumpus, LitHub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, RiverTeeth, Hypertext, and many other journals and magazines.
Hypertext Magazine and Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion.
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