Tom Bissell is a very detail oriented journalist for magazines such as Harpers Magazine, The Believer and others. Being such a stickler for such things you wouldnt think that he would be able to produce good works of fiction. Well hes proving that wrong with his short story collection God Lives in St. Petersburg which is a collection of works all connected by the theme of Americans adrift in Central Asia.
Buy God Lives in St. Petersburg
Daniel Robert Epstein: Your book is unusual for a book of short stories all written by the same author in that all the stories are so closely connected by theme.
Tom Bissell: I had no intention of doing it but it seemed to happen by accident. That seems to be the only way that can happen and have it still be tolerably organic.
DRE: Did these stories happen as a result of your work as a journalist?
TB: I wrote the lions share of these stories before I did any journalism when I was a Peace Corp volunteer. I never really had an intention to be a journalist, it just sort of happened. It came about because a friend of mine at Harpers' Magazine read some of these stories to possibly publish them but that didnt happen. But he was able to convince the higher ups there that I had a nice sense of story and that they should give me a chance to write a piece of magazine journalism. That led into a whole career of writing magazine pieces and after that got some steam then I was able to place some of these stories.
DRE: How do these stories relate to your experience in the Peace Corp?
TB: Well all of the stories at their core have an American who feels emotionally desperate. That was pretty much in line with my experience as a Peace Corp volunteer. I was a really young 23 year old kid with zero experience traveling. I was in these strange vaguely hostile places and when I quit the Peace Corp early and went back home I was really defeated and crushed. Then I was determined to put it behind me because I was embarrassed to let people know I was even there let alone that I quit. The inevitable question of How did you like it? always came up. I wasnt eager to disclose it because I was a sissy quitter but yet my imagination wouldnt leave those places. So I started writing these stories and I had no idea that when I wrote the first one in 1997 that it was going to take eight years for a book of these things to come out. If anyone had told me that I might not have started them [laughs].
DRE: It was really quite cathartic then.
TB: Yeah it was. Before I joined the Peace Corp and had this shattering emotional experience I think I was a pretty talented writer but I sounded like any number of talented young writers. So it was going over there and experiencing this failure and this part of the world that sent my imagination off in a way I could have never anticipated. Ultimately I really benefited and it gave me something to write about that wasnt like every other writer in America.
DRE: Was the soul shattering part of what happened over there something you saw or was it just coming to a realization?
TB: My first book, Chasing the Sea [Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia], deals partly with the memoir part of my Peace Corp experience. It explains a bit about why I fell to pieces but there isnt really a good answer for it. It was this growing realization that the world is huge and scary. All the things that one clings to as a young person break upon the rocks of an experience like that. Maybe Im just sensitive but for me it was really hard to live all by yourself in a place that far from home. Now of course I would jump at the chance and have a great time.
DRE: Were the pieces included in the new book the first fiction you had written?
TB: I had written two or three novels in college and I worked for five years on a novel from age 21 to 26.
DRE: How much was published?
TB: None [laughs].
DRE: Why does the short story format work for you?
TB: I love short stories and I read a lot of them. No one really understands writing. Ive been teaching writing lately and that has really been driven home very profoundly. I really have no idea why something works and something else doesnt. I just know it when I see it. I feel like short stories is something Ive begun to understand.
It seems like a lot of short stories are written because the authors are warming up for a novel which seems like an idiotic way to write short fiction. Im really big into modes of writing. The notion of what I am writing is ever present in my mind. A short story is great to write because you can write then pretty quickly and often quicker than a magazine piece of comparable length. Its like the literary equivalent of sprinting. I like the idea of capturing a crystallizing moment in a made up persons life. Whether its the moment of death like in the story Death Defier or a moment of complete moral collapse in the title story. I think short stories accommodate a story like that really well.
DRE: Death Defier is the story that really touched me. Is that all made up?
TB: I covered the war in Afghanistan for a magazine and I was supposed to write 6000 words and instead I wrote a 228 page article [laughs]. No one wanted to publish it. I found out that for someone who has never been involved in a war before, every detail just became fascinating. I was gripped by the tiniest things such as the way people were selling the food that the army was dropping. The way tension was hanging in the air at all times was just electrifying and scary. I wrote such a long piece because essentially what was interesting to me wasnt that interesting to anyone else. No one would want to read a moment by moment description of someone learning that war is hell. I realized that I had deal with this material somehow and so I wrote a story about someone who is the opposite of me, a person that has seen so much war that its all normal for him. I wondered how someone would get to that point. That was the challenge.
DRE: What made you join the Peace Corp in the first place?
TB: Im essentially an oversensitive do-gooder at heart who believes in helping people. I had a desire to help and just as importantly get the fuck out` of the Midwest.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy God Lives in St. Petersburg
Daniel Robert Epstein: Your book is unusual for a book of short stories all written by the same author in that all the stories are so closely connected by theme.
Tom Bissell: I had no intention of doing it but it seemed to happen by accident. That seems to be the only way that can happen and have it still be tolerably organic.
DRE: Did these stories happen as a result of your work as a journalist?
TB: I wrote the lions share of these stories before I did any journalism when I was a Peace Corp volunteer. I never really had an intention to be a journalist, it just sort of happened. It came about because a friend of mine at Harpers' Magazine read some of these stories to possibly publish them but that didnt happen. But he was able to convince the higher ups there that I had a nice sense of story and that they should give me a chance to write a piece of magazine journalism. That led into a whole career of writing magazine pieces and after that got some steam then I was able to place some of these stories.
DRE: How do these stories relate to your experience in the Peace Corp?
TB: Well all of the stories at their core have an American who feels emotionally desperate. That was pretty much in line with my experience as a Peace Corp volunteer. I was a really young 23 year old kid with zero experience traveling. I was in these strange vaguely hostile places and when I quit the Peace Corp early and went back home I was really defeated and crushed. Then I was determined to put it behind me because I was embarrassed to let people know I was even there let alone that I quit. The inevitable question of How did you like it? always came up. I wasnt eager to disclose it because I was a sissy quitter but yet my imagination wouldnt leave those places. So I started writing these stories and I had no idea that when I wrote the first one in 1997 that it was going to take eight years for a book of these things to come out. If anyone had told me that I might not have started them [laughs].
DRE: It was really quite cathartic then.
TB: Yeah it was. Before I joined the Peace Corp and had this shattering emotional experience I think I was a pretty talented writer but I sounded like any number of talented young writers. So it was going over there and experiencing this failure and this part of the world that sent my imagination off in a way I could have never anticipated. Ultimately I really benefited and it gave me something to write about that wasnt like every other writer in America.
DRE: Was the soul shattering part of what happened over there something you saw or was it just coming to a realization?
TB: My first book, Chasing the Sea [Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia], deals partly with the memoir part of my Peace Corp experience. It explains a bit about why I fell to pieces but there isnt really a good answer for it. It was this growing realization that the world is huge and scary. All the things that one clings to as a young person break upon the rocks of an experience like that. Maybe Im just sensitive but for me it was really hard to live all by yourself in a place that far from home. Now of course I would jump at the chance and have a great time.
DRE: Were the pieces included in the new book the first fiction you had written?
TB: I had written two or three novels in college and I worked for five years on a novel from age 21 to 26.
DRE: How much was published?
TB: None [laughs].
DRE: Why does the short story format work for you?
TB: I love short stories and I read a lot of them. No one really understands writing. Ive been teaching writing lately and that has really been driven home very profoundly. I really have no idea why something works and something else doesnt. I just know it when I see it. I feel like short stories is something Ive begun to understand.
It seems like a lot of short stories are written because the authors are warming up for a novel which seems like an idiotic way to write short fiction. Im really big into modes of writing. The notion of what I am writing is ever present in my mind. A short story is great to write because you can write then pretty quickly and often quicker than a magazine piece of comparable length. Its like the literary equivalent of sprinting. I like the idea of capturing a crystallizing moment in a made up persons life. Whether its the moment of death like in the story Death Defier or a moment of complete moral collapse in the title story. I think short stories accommodate a story like that really well.
DRE: Death Defier is the story that really touched me. Is that all made up?
TB: I covered the war in Afghanistan for a magazine and I was supposed to write 6000 words and instead I wrote a 228 page article [laughs]. No one wanted to publish it. I found out that for someone who has never been involved in a war before, every detail just became fascinating. I was gripped by the tiniest things such as the way people were selling the food that the army was dropping. The way tension was hanging in the air at all times was just electrifying and scary. I wrote such a long piece because essentially what was interesting to me wasnt that interesting to anyone else. No one would want to read a moment by moment description of someone learning that war is hell. I realized that I had deal with this material somehow and so I wrote a story about someone who is the opposite of me, a person that has seen so much war that its all normal for him. I wondered how someone would get to that point. That was the challenge.
DRE: What made you join the Peace Corp in the first place?
TB: Im essentially an oversensitive do-gooder at heart who believes in helping people. I had a desire to help and just as importantly get the fuck out` of the Midwest.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Your book is unusual for a book of short stories all written by the same author in that all the stories are so closely connected by theme.
...which is one of the most false generalisations about short stories i've read. Unifying themes are more often that not integral to short story collections.