Interviewed by Christine Rice
For nearly 20 years, John McNally has been busy writing novels, books on craft, essay collections, short story collections, articles for major publications, screenplays. He’s that prolific. He’s the writer other writers admire – the writer other writers want to be – because of his versatility, dedication, and attention to craft.
So that’s why the title of McNally’s latest book, The Promise of Failure, threw me. Damn, I thought. This guy has some nerve writing about failure. And then I read it and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I dog-eared every page and annotated the margins with YES! and THIS IS ME! and REMEMBER THIS. McNally nails the universality of being a writer – including nearly every emotion I’ve ever felt when writing or sending out manuscripts or opening a rejection email…right down to identifying parts of the business I didn’t even recognize as issues until I read the book.
And when I asked him about that, about having the chutzpah to write about failure, of successfully walking that line between sounding ‘whiny’ and writing honestly about ‘craft and failure,’ he answered:
There’s a fine line between being vulnerable and being a victim, and I tried, as much as I could, to err on the side of being vulnerable. The larger point of the book is that failure is multifaceted, both useful and hurtful, necessary and stultifying. I wanted to hold failure up to the light and see how many ways I could turn it.
This answer – about vulnerability, about holding something up to the light – also applies to McNally’s recently-published essay collection The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex and, when you think about it, the majority of McNally’s work including The Book of Ralph, Lord of the Ralphs, After the Workshop, among his other publications (find a full list of publications HERE).
After a trip to Southeast Asia and fighting a bug that took him out of commission for a week, John and I finally had a chance to connect via email.
Christine Rice: Hi, John.
John McNally: Thanks for taking time to interview me, Chris. I really appreciate it.
CR: Of course. I’m looking forward to hearing more about The Promise of Failure and what you’ve been up to.
Tell me about your trip and that adorable elderly dog you posted on Instagram.
JM: I just spent six weeks in Thailand. I’m 52, and this was my first time outside the U.S., except for two trips to Canada. I fell in love with Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and, in particular, with the Old City, which was a walled, moat-surrounded area in Chiang Mai, with all of these narrow, twisting alleys (the alley-like-street is called a soi) where at first there’s nothing and then, seemingly out of nowhere, there’s a tiny restaurant, a bar with eight stools, a tattoo parlor, a massage parlor, a fruit stand, and maybe even a paleo restaurant. I became obsessed with fruit shakes, which are really just ice and fruit blended together, but after a hot and muggy walk, what better than a fresh fruit shake and a fan turned toward you to cool you down? That dog was a 19-year-old that lived where I was staying. She slept outside in the shade and, despite arthritis, would still get up and make her way to the street if there was some commotion by another dog down the way. At night, the guard would be asleep on the bench, and the dog would be wrapped up in a blanket, presumably by the guard.
CR: That dog was adorable. I was hoping you might have stowed him in your carry on and brought him home.
In The Promise of Failure’s acknowledgements, you write briefly about being part of the faculty at Pacific University’s MFA program. Can you talk about that experience and why being part of Pacific University’s MFA program has been so transformative?
JM: When I started teaching at Pacific seven or so years ago, it was my first time teaching in a low-residency program, so I had no idea what to expect, but I immediately fell in love with it. First off, it’s an intense (and intensive) ten days that everyone spends together in January and in June, and as a group, we attend everything – dozens of craft talks, dozens of readings. I teach a workshop. We all eat together. From 9 a.m., when the first craft talk begins, until 9:30 at night, when the final student readings are wrapping up, there’s very little downtime. As a kid, I never went to summer camp or anything like that, so this is my camp. It’s difficult not to become good friends with any number of people, both faculty and students. The January residency is in Seaside, Oregon, on the coast, and it’s a particularly memorable residency for me because it’s such a surreal place to be that time of year: it gets dark early, fog rolls across the beach – a tourist town empty of tourists. The new book grew out of these craft talks I would give, but I wanted them to be more than just nuts-and-bolts craft talks. I wanted them to address bigger issues for which there may not be resolutions, or at least easy resolutions. I wouldn’t have written this book if not for my involvement with Pacific University.
CR: I’ve read two of your books in the past two years: The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted To Have Sex: The Memoir of a Fat Kid and The Promise of Failure. In this latest collection, you talk in great length about the benefits of moving from one project to another – or setting a story or essay aside until you are ready for it – but I’m wondering how you feel now that you’ve probably spent the last few years revising, working with editors, promoting, etc. That’s a lot. I know that the revision process of my book took it out of me. And then promoting it seemed like a full-time job.
JM: Oh, I definitely get burned out. I alternate between being highly visible (promoting a book by giving a reading or hawking it on social media) and burrowing underground to write, disappearing. I prefer writing. I mean, I love giving readings, but it’s difficult when you’re doing it day in and day out, when you’re driving from one city to the next, and when you’re not sure if anyone’s going to show up (or if the bookstore has copies of your book). With the last book tour, I decided that I’ll probably do less promotion from now on. Even when my publisher was a division of Simon & Schuster, I would double the amount of signings that they arranged for me because I wanted to make sure the book was getting attention, but I was in my thirties back then. I don’t have that kind of energy anymore. That said, I could muster the energy for the right advance from a publisher. I can be persuaded.
CR: The right advance can work wonders.
In the chapter “The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Redux,” you write:
I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I honestly believe that writing my second book The Book of Ralph, kept me from acting on darker impulses.
During the writing of this comic novel-in-stories, you were “in the throes of the worst depression” you’d ever experienced. And you write:
My second marriage had hit a critical juncture, and I was deeply, irretrievably (or so it felt) unhappy. This wasn’t my first experience with depression. I’d had problems with depression since grade school, and over the decades the depressions would become more prolonged, more debilitating. I was thirty-seven that year. I’d recently begun a new job, my first tenure-track position. But everything felt as though it were swirling down the drain. My only reprieve was writing.
Have you ever felt that intensely about writing since…that the writing ‘saved’ your life? And is The Book of Ralph your favorite child? Or do you love all your publications equally?
JM: I don’t re-read my books, and my view of them tends to grow darker the further away I am from them, so I can’t say that I love any of them. My attachment to certain stories or books is usually connected to the experience I had writing them. I’ll remember how certain stories came easily to me, and so I’ll have a fondness for them. Or I’ll remember where I wrote a particular story, and it’ll evoke a feeling in me about that story. As for the intensity of writing The Book of Ralph, I don’t think that I’ve experienced anything similar to that. I’ve gone through depressions since then, and a few bad ones, but I probably wasn’t writing during them, and I certainly wasn’t deep into the writing of a book. While in some counterintuitive way my depression probably served The Book of Ralph well, it’s not an experience I’d want to go through again.
CR: With the recent suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain and, subsequently, more coverage and public discussion of depression, I keep thinking about how much we don’t know about our friends and acquaintances. What is that person going through? I mean, really? Not on the flimsy social media level but what they’re struggling with, working through, failing at?
I know you, really, only from social media. We have a mutual friend, the writer Cyn Vargas, but we really don’t know each other. From your posts, I would assume that you’ve got things pretty well together (which…you do).
This latest collection of essays was written before these very public suicides but can you comment on how social media can trick us – the audience and the creator – into thinking that things are okay when they really aren’t okay at all?
JM: My social media persona – and it is a persona (although not a dishonest one) – is well-curated. I rant about politics, which I rarely talk about in real life. I post about tacos, which I don’t eat as often as one might think. I do listen to music and buy albums as much (or more) than you might imagine from my Facebook posts. And I am fond of animals and have three cats. But what else do people know about me? I leave a lot off Facebook. I never post about relationships I’m in. I occasionally post about depression or a general dissatisfaction about something, but if I’m going through a serious depression, I don’t write about it. I tend just to disappear; I go off the grid. I rarely write about my job. I occasionally post about writing, but in truth I rarely talk about it unless I’m in a classroom. I’d much rather talk about music or movies. When I was going through a divorce seven or so years ago, I didn’t post once about it. Not once. Even in real life, you never really know what someone else is thinking, which is why people are stunned when someone you wouldn’t expect to have an affair has an affair, or when someone does something that is “out of character.” The phrase “out of character” is interesting to me because “character” suggests a fictional construct. Which is what our view of someone really is, right? We are our own POV narrator; everyone else is a character in our lives since we’re not privy to their thoughts and can only guess at their motives. Social media is just one more remove from that reality.
CR: “Out of Character” might be the title of the next chapter of my novel. I suppose everyone has their own ‘made-up’ narrative about others but as writers, we might imagine it more fully, create characters, turn them out on the page.
Back to The Promise of Failure…
Years ago, I remember sitting in the faculty office when a young colleague – who had recently published a book – started complaining to me about his ‘career’ and I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Really? You’ve got some nerve complaining about that to me when you just had a book published and my agent just dropped me from her list.
So…I guess what I’m saying here is that, while reading this latest collection of essays, I kept waiting for this book to fall into the ‘whining’ category but, of course, it never did. You really balanced these essays with deep research and introspection and by sharing insights into your writing process that are, in many cases, universal. In other words, you addressed, head on, the fears and obstacles writers face but rarely write about.
I really appreciated that. I also know how difficult that is to pull off. Did you ever think about sounding ‘whiny’ while writing these essays? Did it trip you up at times? Or did you consistently approach the topic of ‘failure’ as an opportunity (as you mention in the later part of the book) to be mined?
JM: I was definitely aware that it might sound whiny. And that’s the last thing I would have wanted, so I’m glad that you didn’t find it to be whiny. If I complained about something in the book, I tried to provide a larger context or some distant irony or an acknowledgment of my pettiness. There’s a fine line between being vulnerable and being a victim, and I tried, as much as I could, to err on the side of being vulnerable. The larger point of the book is that failure is multifaceted, both useful and hurtful, necessary and stultifying. I wanted to hold failure up to the light and see how many ways I could turn it.
CR: You write about a faculty member who physically bullied you. I found that fascinating and, from my experience in academia, entirely believable. After reading that particular section, I started thinking about all of the ways I’ve been bullied – by men and women. And then I started thinking about the levels of bullying – from peers and coworkers to the insanity of those in power. It’s kind of fascinating, isn’t it, how something we think of as ‘confined to the playground’ continues to impact our lives?
JM: I can’t remember if that bullying episode is in The Promise of Failure – see how much I distance myself from my own writing once it’s published? – but I do write at length about it in The Boy Who Really, Really Wanted to Have Sex. I saw a lot of examples of hazing by some colleagues in my last job, and I despised it, but I also resented that no one would do anything about it when I reported it. Short of punching this guy and losing my job, it left me with few options. What it did do was sour me on academia, and I lost respect for a lot of people (the hierarchy at my university) at my previous university. They didn’t do the right thing. The moral thing. They were cowards. And it turns out, this professor who was knocking into me in the hall and then laughing derisively had a history of doing this to other colleagues from before my time there. My only satisfaction is that he was a miserable person. And he’s dead now. He lived a small, bitter life. And I remind myself daily never to become him.
CR: I love that you push yourself to shatter self-imposed boundaries. In other words, if you think of yourself as a novelist, write essays. Or write a screenplay. But you also point out that it’s important to identify what kind of writing drains your soul. For example, you found writing ‘critiques’ soul draining.
And, I’m not sure if it was in that same chapter or later (later…I think), you go into great detail about George Carlin and Richard Pryor and how, at some point, they must have found the material they were performing disingenuous, how they dropped out for a while, retooled, and came back stronger than ever. I always find reinvention fascinating…especially at that level of fame. Not many people can pull it off. But Pryor and Carlin did. They listened to their intuition and then nailed it.
From reading your last two collections, it seems as if you have come to really trust your intuition. And your intuition, from when you were a child, has always seemed pretty sharp. It’s interesting because the cliche is that ‘intuition’ is somehow stronger in women but my husband has a really strong sense of intuition. Can you talk about how your intuition has developed (or how you have developed your intuition, maybe?) over the years?
JM: My mother had a strong sense of intuition, and I was especially close to her, so perhaps I inherited or learned from her how to hone it. As for writing, I can’t say that my intuition has led me to writing more commercial work, but my more recent work may be more meaningful to me because I’m writing about things that matter to me. A question I raise in my book – a question that one of my teachers pissed off our class by raising – is, “What’s at stake for you?” My last two books are memoirs, so the stakes are more apparent, but even in the fiction I’m writing that has seemingly nothing to do with my life, I need to be able to answer that question at some point. I may not know right away what the answer is, but through intuition I can feel whether or not the book or story or screenplay has stakes that are personal. And if it doesn’t, I lose interest.
CR: Can you tell me a little bit about the thriller you’re writing now?
JM: Oh, I’ve put that aside to work on another book – a big, unwieldy book that is either a great idea for a book or a terrible idea for a book. I’m still not sure. I want to return to the thriller, but this other book (a novel) has consumed me for the time-being. And I’m holding it close. I haven’t told anyone what it’s about for fear of losing interest in it, as I sometimes do once I start talking about a new project. Once I start talking about a book I’m working on, it sounds ridiculous, I get embarrassed, and then it becomes harder to work on it.
CR: Yes. I agree. Every time I started talking about this speculative novel I was writing, I started to lose interest. I’m taking your advice on that too.
You have a great love of music. Do you listen to music while you write? I can’t but I know a lot of writers who do listen while they write.
JM: I can listen to music when I revise, but I can’t when I’m writing first draft material. In fact, most noise will drive me crazy. A neighborhood dog indiscriminately barking; someone sawing something across the street; a leaf blower: all of it makes me grind my teeth. But ideas or solutions to problems in my writing will come to me when I’m just sitting and listening to an album. The writing process is rarely logical, so I spend a lot of time listening to music in a trance-like state, and that’s when I’m most likely to have those “aha!” moments. Those moments rarely happen when I’m staring at the computer screen.
CR: You write about traveling and how magical things happen when you travel. Did anything magical happen on this last trip?
JM: Each day in Chiang Mai I would talk to new people. Or, rather, they would talk to me since I’m an introvert. Someone in a restaurant would see me walking by each day and begin asking me questions: Did I live in the area? Where was I from? And they might teach me a word or two in Thai. A bartender would know my order. The owner of a restaurant and I would talk about collecting vinyl records. The proprietor of the café where I ate breakfast would show me photos of her dog. Anyway, on my last night in Chiang Mai, it was around one in the morning, and I was walking back to where I was staying, and it was as though everyone I knew had come out to say goodbye. A French ex-pat owner of a tiny, narrow bar wished me well as I passed by. The Thai bartender of an Irish pub, getting on his scooter, told me that he hadn’t seen me today and wondered how I was doing. Along these narrow roads, I had made more friends in six weeks than I had in five years in Louisiana, and they were appearing like characters in the final dream-like scene of a play to see me off, until I made it back to the sleeping, nineteen-year-old dog and old night guard asleep on the bench. I’m not sure how magical it was, but it already feels like something I had imagined, and I want to return to it for another six weeks or longer. Maybe forever.
________
Read an excerpt from The Promise of Failure HERE.
