Q&A with Professor of English Steven Millhauser

Professor of English Steven Millhauser's new book, Dangerous Laughter, is on bookshelves now. Thirteen stories in all, they are described by one reviewer as "darkly comic…united by their obsession with obsession." Millhauser is the author of more than 10 works of fiction, including the novels Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer and Martin Dressler (winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction). His short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" was adapted for the 2006 film The Illusionist. This semester he is teaching Advanced Project in Fiction, which if you read the interview below means he is not currently writing. Or so he says.

What spurred this collection of stories? Did a light bulb go on one day? Or was it a concept that grew over time?

	Steven Millhauser

I don't imagine a collection of stories from the start. This collection, for instance, includes stories written over a period of ten years. I write a story, then I write another story. Times passes and I write another story. As they accumulate, I begin to think about a collection. In this case, I noticed similarities among certain stories. I began to think of them as clustering in groups, to which I gave titles. Most fun of all was to start off with a cartoon. I miss those cartoons of my childhood. It's always good to start off with a cartoon.

These are entertaining stories, but they are also thought-provoking. What do you hope readers take away?
If I truly wanted to present ideas, I'd write essays. What drives me to write a story is something closer to a picture or vision that I want to complete. I understand that this picture isn't without meaning, but the meaning is buried in it and works in subterranean ways. Yes, I'm being elusive here.

And how about you-do you see life differently now that you've written Dangerous Laughter?
The stories are the way I see life. They're a record of seeing. When I'm done with a book, I feel a mixture of sadness and exhilaration.

Reviewers, naturally, want to boil down your stories to common themes or ideas—an American faith in the very surfaces you mean to strip away, as one put it. How do you see this?
I'm deeply reluctant to summarize the meanings or themes or ideas of stories, especially stories by me. I do know that I'm often thought of as a writer of fantastic fiction, or fabulous fiction, and I don't see it that way. I'd argue that I'm a realist, though a strange sort of realist. I propose visions that challenge the way conventional realists present the world. Often I start in a way that seems more or less familiar, and then I sheer off into something else. My stories are meant to challenge the way you take in the world.

I have always heard that writers can only get great material by "getting out and about" to continually experience life. How do you keep your writing fresh?
Life comes flowing in at you wherever you are. You can't avoid it. In fact, unless you're an invalid, you can't avoid getting out and about. For a real writer, walking down Main Street is the same as hunting big game in Africa. The kind of writer who desperately goes about looking for material is probably a travel writer, or someone doing research, or someone deeply bored. How do I keep my writing fresh? That's like asking me how I manage to eat, day after day. All that eating! Doesn't it drive me crazy? The answer is that I get hungry every day. In the same way, I'm hungry to write. Writing is part of the way I'm alive. I'll stop when I'm dead.

What's your sense of today's college students-the ideas, the feelings that emerge from their written words?
The main sense I have of the students I teach is a humbling one. They all, in different ways, write much more skillfully than I did at their age. It continually startles me.

As a kid, what were your favorite books, movies? And now?
When I was a kid, I read all sorts of things, from children's classics to comic books. I remember being particularly fond of Bartholomew and the Oobleck, probably because it was so much fun to say "oobleck," and of Scrooge McDuck adventures. Now my taste has changed a little, but I remain a madly eclectic reader. I usually read four or five books simultaneously, fiction and non-fiction. I like the way they form a complex interwoven structure, a series of interrupted adventures that get connected to one another in interesting ways.

You once told an interviewer that winning Pulitzer wouldn't change you. Still true?
I wonder what people mean when they speak of something that might "change your life." How does a life change? My life changes all the time, because I'm a human creature stuck in time. My kids grow up. People I love die. In the world I live in, a little thing like a prize isn't going to make any difference.

What are you currently working on?
I'm currently teaching. When I teach, I don't write. But I've been dreaming my way into various questionable visions, which might or not find themselves worked into short or long stories.

Posted On: 2/19/2008

Tags: millhauser, short stories