Douglas Trevor is the author of the recently released novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space(University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. Trevor's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, The New England Review, and about a dozen other literary magazines, and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan.
An excerpt from his book Girls I Know appears in Issue Forty-Six of The Collagist.
Here, Douglas Trevor answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Girls I Know. Enjoy!
1. What is writing like?
[Longing, slipping away from the world, letting someone, somewhere, down.]
He kissed her back. Behind them, at the circulation terminals, students combed through electronic databases and recalled items that had been checked out by other users. Walt heard the same cart with the squeaky wheel pass behind them. He told himself that she was just a stubborn New Yorker with a dumb idea for a book, and that he was just a sentimental Vermonter who thought the world would be a better place if everyone could simply appreciate the same set of poems. Poems, incidentally, all written by white New Englanders. He told himself that the two of them were ridiculous, making out in the middle of the library. He thought of Flora. But he didn’t stop kissing Ginger. In spite of where they were and how different they were, he didn’t want this moment to end.
2. What isn’t writing like?
[Waiting for the phone to ring.]
He waited for Ginger to call him but she didn’t. She was just giving him the space he had requested, he knew that, but he couldn’t bring himself to call her, or his family, or any of his friends. He knew that these people might very well ask him if he was finally making progress on his dissertation, now that he was back on campus. And he wasn’t making any progress. He was still just reading poems, still feeling blocked as a writer. It wasn’t enough for him to tell himself that he was reinvesting in The Poetics of Yankee Peerage. The days were too long, and besides, simply working on a doctorate didn’t seem like an appropriate response to what he had witnessed in the Early Bird. But he had no idea what would.
3. When you do it, why?
[When there is a story to tell.]
“He took me to his house all the way up near Oquossoc, me screaming the whole way, pounding on the window. No one in any of the cars we passed looked over at us. When we got to his place he locked me in his basement. A couple times a day he’d give me food. There was a sink and shower down there. I’d go to the bathroom in the sink. A few weeks later he came downstairs with a mattress and another man. The man gave him money to rape me. I don’t know how much. I found out later that the guy had taken out ads in porn magazines. ‘Young Girl Who Likes Pain.’ It took me a month of getting the shit raped out of me to figure out a way out of there. I ended up knocking the door down with a section of pipe when he was gone one day.
“I didn’t feel like I could go home after that so I moved to Waterville, then Berlin, New Hampshire, then Manchester. I did tricks, worked in a convenience store for a while. I didn’t look like I was thirteen no more. I got arrested for stuff, nothing serious, mostly just cuz I had nowhere to go. Then I started doing speed and LSD and other shit guys would give me to fuck them or suck them off. I’m eighteen now. I take Concord Trailways down from Manchester Sunday afternoon and waitress and dance here through Wednesday. I can’t dance on the weekends because they say my tits aren’t big enough and I can’t afford no enlargements. So I work and buy my shit down here for the week. One of my girlfriends looks after my boy while I’m gone in exchange for speed. I had him two years ago: Jayce. I work down here so it won’t ever get back to him, how I make money.”
A guy sat down at the booth behind them and their waitress stood up, picked up her tray, and went to get his drink order. As she walked off, Ginger wrote madly. Walt didn’t say anything; he just watched her hand fly back and forth across the page.
4. When you don’t, why?
["How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world" —Hamlet]
A short time later, they climbed back into Ginger’s car. She turned the key in the ignition, but rather than immediately hit the gas, she sat there for a moment, slumped over her steering wheel, the collar of her sweatshirt drooping so that Walt could glimpse the base of her neck, the ridge of her collarbones.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
She rubbed her eyes, yawning. “I haven’t slept in days. I mean days. And all the sudden, I feel a little down. Why is it always so overcast here? Honestly, I can’t believe the Puritans stayed. I can’t believe they didn’t all just go back to England and become Anglicans.”