Stephan Eirik Clark

Anne Elliot, my comrade from my Zoetrope days, tagged me in a post a while back, one associated with the so-called Next Big Thing Project that asks writers to describe a work-in-progress or a book nearing publication. As writers don’t need much more prompting to start talking about themselves, I’ve answered the following set questions.

What is the title of your book? 
Sweetness #9. 

Where did the idea for the book come from?
I read an article that got me thinking for the first time about the importance of artificial sweeteners to the processed, ready-made foods of the post-war era. For example, you can go to the frozen aisle and buy a chicken-fried steak with a side of gravy that tastes just like grandma’s, but it’s only because some chemist in a lab coat has added just the right notes of flavor to your meal (and let’s be clear, this chemist is a genius — the canvas of the latter-half of the 20th Century being one inside our brains, where the neurons fire in the dark). If you took these additives away, your dinner would be a tasteless lump that you might not be able to identify in a blind taste test. Food, like farming, I saw, is not a fixed term — its definition depends on you. And are you willing to trust your health to an illusion? 

Into which genre does your book fall? 
I’ve heard it described as straddling the literary/commercial divide. It may be commercial because there are dead lab monkeys in it. It may be literary because maybe the monkeys aren’t really dead? Maybe it’s all just in his mind? Publisher’s Marketplace announced it as being in the GENERAL/OTHER category. If I could get into a public spat with Oprah about this (and generate a million sales as a result) I’d say, rather gracelessly, that I was writing in the “high-art literary tradition.” And if someone said dead or possibly-not-dead monkeys don’t exist in such a tradition, I’d point them to Pynchon, and then say monkeys-alligators, same thing.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
My main character, David Leveraux, is a walking British affectation, owing to a childhood spent partly in England. Back in the day, Kevin Kline would’ve been perfect. Readers who get to the end of the novel might agree with me when I say Ben Stiller might work (not the penis-caught-in-a-zipper Ben Stiller, the one who wants an Oscar). A low-key Steve Coogan would probably be great, too.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? 
More than twenty years after failing to blow the whistle on the side-effects of a new artificial sweetener, a flavor chemist wonders if he is to blame for the anxious, depressed, and weight-obsessed state of his family and American culture (with stops along the way in Hitler’s Germany, Nixon’s America, and pre-Y2K US of A).

How long did it take to write the first draft of your manuscript? 
About seven years. With interruptions along the way to write a collection of stories, a couple of screenplays, and a dissertation on grotesque literature of the post-war age. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 
Fast Food Nation got my thoughts going; the opening scene from Don DeLillo’s White Noise jump-started the prose.

Made my profile picture on Facebook the cover of my new book: Check. Resisted the urge to send out a mass-email to everyone in my address book, announcing the availability of my new book: Check. Visited Amazon daily, then twice daily, then hourly, to check my sales ranking: Checkcheckcheckcheck. What else am I missing? Oh yes, the book trailer. Let’s check that off:

My blogging abilities have diminished. Maybe five months ago, I meant to write something about Reed College — bye-bye, my soggy friend, I’ll miss you — and then, not long after, I meant to say a thing or two about Augsburg — hello, my snowy friend, I’m so happy you’d have me — but now even this sentiment has grown dated, as my first semester at the college is drawing to a close. More recently, I meant to post the final three blurbs collected for my forthcoming short story collection, Vladimir’s Mustache. But again, and again, and again, I did anything. Have I been thinking I’d get noticed and given a position with the SEC? The Justice Department? I can’t say, but I can try to make up for it. So here, all at once, a blurbapalooza:

From Jodee Stanley, the editor of Ninth Letter and first to publish my collection’s title story:

Stephan Clark’s stories span centuries and social classes, exploring Russian history in heartbreaking, breathtaking detail. Each tale in this marvelous collection combines an Old World gravitas with a contemporary edge, giving us characters that resonate as completely of their time, yet as familiar as our own friends and neighbors. You will find yourself lost, totally immersed in these stories – an experience you don’t want to miss.

From Ben Fountain, whose Brief Encounters with Che Guevara I loved:

Stephan Clark’s very fine story collection is a tour de force of historical imagination. Clark clearly knows the territory, and he brings it to life with an inventiveness and artistry that few writers can match. These wry, wonderful, often revelatory stories mark the debut of a truly gifted writer, and I look forward to reading more books by Stephan Clark.

And finally, from TC Boyle, boss of bosses and author of so many great story collections:

Elegant, classic stories that sift through history and paint a luminous portrait of an enduring cast of Russian characters. Clark is marvelously protean here, engaging multiple personalities and points of view, and his cold eye and ready wit shine through brilliantly.

My thanks to you all.

Introducing, Vladimir’s Mustache.

A webpage for the collection went up on Wednesday, complete with a blurb — the book’s first — from Brett Finlayson, who, along with Alexander Yates, helped make the collection’s longest story, The Castrato of St. Petersburg, much better prior to its being published in Salt Hill.

In addition to thanking Brett, I have to give a few words of appreciation to Sergey Maximishin, without whom I wouldn’t have this book cover. His photo shows a file of photographs of people executed during Stalin’s purges and is part of a longer photo story on Stalin that can be found here.

I considered a good number of images (and one illustration) for the cover, but nothing felt right, nothing separated itself from everything else, until I was directed to Sergey’s work by Carolyn Drake, whose photography is no less worthy of your attention.

I love how Sergey’s photo straddles two time periods, both the past and the present, and how, like a half-opened door in a horror film, it holds back as much as it reveals, making the viewer sit up higher in his chair, or lean off to one side, as if for a better view. It’s just great storytelling, really, and I’m so grateful that I was able to play a role in selecting it — which is one of the joys of publishing with a small press like Russian Life Books.

Now onto the galleys, which I suppose are a month or two away.

It’s a little after ten a.m. at Portland International Airport, I’ve had my shoes scanned and remembered to put my belt back on, and now I’m on the other side of security, waiting for my flight to LA to board. I’m not the only one going to MLA: I saw a professor of Spanish cursing, in Spanish, at the self-check terminal earlier this morning.

I had an hour to kill before my flight, so I did what all Americans do: looked for a way to spend a few dollars. Powell’s had an outpost just down from my gate, so I stepped in there and browsed the sales table. It was there that I found a discounted Best American Essays 2009.

But I should back up a minute. Last year, back when I was still in Russia, I learned from Jodee Stanley, the editor of Ninth Letter, that an essay of mine, “My Year of European Underwear,” which ran in Vol. 4, No. 1 of Ninth Letter, had been named a “notable work” in Best American Essays 2010.

Good news, right? Especially as this was the first time I’d been so named. Well, when the anthology came out last fall, I flipped to the back and saw it was my ghostly double who had in fact been recognized for the first time: Stephen Clark. Same story, same magazine. But the author of this piece was Stephen, not Stephan Clark.

Been happening all of my life, so I should’ve been prepared for it. But I still couldn’t stop looking at it. C.J. Chivers, they got that right. Billy Collins and Ted Conover, yes. They even nailed Sandra Cisneros. But that other guy . . .

So this is what recognition feels like? Needless to say, I didn’t buy a copy of the anthology.

But now cut to today, the PDX Powell’s, and there I am flipping through the back pages of the 2009 edition of this same anthology, looking to see who I should be jealous of, and who do I find but Stephan Clark? For his essay “The Reno Hotel,” which ran in Salt Hill.

I suppose in another world, Stephen Clark is very depressed. In this one, I bought a book.

A friend of mine recently wrote me an email to apologize for the long silence between us, catch me up on her latest travels, and inform me, oh by the way, at the end of a long paragraph, that she was pregnant. “You buried the lead!” I told her, before proceeding to do the very same thing in my next email to her by announcing that I’d had my collection of short stories, Kamkov the Astronomer and Other Stories, accepted for publication.

Russian Life Books will be the publisher. They’ve only recently begun publishing fiction, primarily Russian literature in translation. In the last year or two, they’ve come out with a translation of the soviet-era classic The Little Golden Calf and Peter Aleshkovsky’s Fish: A History of One Migration, which was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize.

Russian Life is an offshoot of the magazine of the same name, which itself dates back, through a couple of different incarnations, to Soviet Life magazine, a periodical first released in 1956 under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union (a similar magazine, Amerika, was published at the same time, under American sponsorship, and distributed in the Soviet Union).

More to come in the run-up to the book’s release, which is scheduled for next winter.