Peter Barlow, Storyteller Extraordinaire, on Writing and Publishing
Portrait of a patient perfectionist
The short story always has been my favorite genre to write and to read. Some years ago, Peter Barlow and I belonged to a Michigan writers’ group that met at a local bookstore. Each participant had a limited time slot to read their latest poems, short story, or novel pages for the group to comment on. Genres ran the gamut from literary fiction to Regency romance to action, humor, and memoir. Today, Barlow is the author of two remarkable story collections, Little Black Dots (2017) and Dancing on the Via Dolorosa (2021). (1)
The best writer of our lot in my opinion, Peter often sat smiling to himself as if amused by thoughts he had no desire to share. When the two of us recently reconnected, at another branch of the same bookstore, this was my chance to find out more about what went on inside his head…
How It All Began
Q. Pete, I have such fond memories of you reading your work to our group, and what always struck me was how “finished” your stories were. They never sounded or read like a draft. Would you agree that you’re a bit of a perfectionist?
A. One of my former therapists said I was a “ridiculous perfectionist” with my writing. She’s not wrong. It’s been true for a while. During my undergrad days at Miami-Ohio, there would be other students in my writing workshops who would bring something they’d cobbled together the night before. I’d be bringing in stuff I had been working on for six, seven months already. That’s not to say I haven’t done one draft and called it finished before. Virtually all of the short-shorts in both books, as well as “Sea of Tranquility” from the first one, are basically first drafts with minor edits, changing a word or three. But if I’m bringing something to a workshop or a writer’s group, I’m basically saying, “Okay, I’ve done everything I can think of with this. I can’t take it any farther on my own. Am I missing something? Is it a decent enough read as it is?”
Q. I imagine you must have started writing quite early, then. What inspired you?
A. I started writing when I was 15. I remember reading John Gardner’s Nobody Lives Forever, one of his James Bond novels — he took over the character after Ian Fleming died. And, you know, there wasn’t a whole lot to it. It was Bond goes here, does this, stuff blows up, he gets the girl, or at least that’s how I remember it. But I thought, “You know, I could do this.” Agatha Christie was in the mix too. There’s so much more to her than Poirot and Miss Marple. I don’t think people get that sometimes; she knew what she was about, she knew how to draw a good character, tell a good story that didn’t depend on a whodunit. One of the stories in Witness for the Prosecution, “The Fourth Man”, really fascinated me. It’s just so simple — four complete strangers meeting by chance in a train compartment, and it turns out they all know this girl that, were she alive today, probably would have been diagnosed as having DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). And that story really just… found me, you know? It hit me in a space that I just couldn’t ignore. Still can’t, really. In college, it was T.C. Boyle’s “Stones In My Passway, Hellhounds On My Trail”; it was Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters In the Snow”, it was Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”, it was Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, it was the whole of Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. All of those things found me, fed me, brought me forward. Donald Barthelme’s stories found me. Ray Bradbury, of all people, found me. Short fiction really found me.
What’s in a Name?
Q. When your first collection of stories, Little Black Dots, came out in 2017, I recognized several among them, including “Meeting Monica Seles,” which I vividly remembered you reading to our group. Your titles always manage to intrigue, and help make the stories memorable. How do you generate them?
A. Funny thing: “Meeting Monica Seles” was what I initially planned to call my first collection. It was something of a “welcome back” story for me. There was 18 months after I moved up here that… just nothing was coming (2). It wasn’t writer’s block — I know what writer’s block is, and that wasn’t it. It was, “I can’t write anything, I’m having culture shock.” I’d been with the writers’ group you and I met in for a year, and what I was bringing in to begin with was stuff I’d drafted two, three years earlier. I wrote that one in early 2000 and went, “Oh, yeah, that’s what that feels like.” And I wanted to honor it by giving it pride of place in the first collection.
A couple of things happened along the way, though: I got my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, I started turning out more stuff, stuff I liked a little better. I started finding and then refining my voice, allowing the Dirty Realists to come in and mingle with the Postmodernists and Absurdists and see what sort of mayhem that might cause. The five stories that ended up in my Master’s thesis (“Layover”, “Sea of Tranquility”, “Little Black Dots”, “At Chichén Itzá”, and “Lake Effect”) were thematically reasonably similar, but they all came from different places, and they all had their titles change between conception and publication. Hardly anybody knows that “Sea of Tranquility” was intended to be lighter than it is, and the working title for it came from a Right Said Fred album cut. It wasn’t supposed to be a really well-buried metaphor for something deeply personal. But I kept working on it, revised it, dug a little deeper, and the first title didn’t work anymore. It’s like that sometimes.
“Little Black Dots” started out life as “Camel Through the Eye of a Needle”; the Book of Matthew reference was there from the first draft, as was the first sentence, but almost everything else changed between Point A and Point B. I had this feeling, though, that of the five stories in the thesis, that one would have the most difficulty getting published because it’s the most atypical of the bunch (turned out I was right about that), so in order to draw attention to it I made it the title story instead. I think it works better anyway. That story’s about managing loss… most of that book is.
The Importance of Place(s)…
Q. Your stories cover a wide variety of settings. You take us from Detroit to wintry West Virginia and from Peru to Israel, and even to Belgium, my birth country! How do you choose these places?
A. Some of these settings come from personal experience. My first honeymoon was in Cancun, while we were there we went to Chichén Itzá — I climbed El Castillo back when you still could. Took a two-week trip to South America that hit both the Galápagos Islands and Machu Picchu, and they ended up in my stories eventually (“Another Sunrise” and “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” respectively). But… you know, the world is a big place. One of the things that draws me to shows like The Amazing Race and Anthony Bourdain’s two best-known series (No Reservations and Parts Unknown) is that they’re travelogues. We the viewers get to see places that we never would ordinarily. And just writing about here, where I am and where I’ve been… I just hear Peggy Lee in my head. You know, “Is That All There Is?” I think a lot of American literature is very insular. It doesn’t engage the world much beyond the country’s borders, which seems to be very limiting. People should look beyond their own environment. I want to encourage that. Verisimilitude is important too. I like to try and throw in some of the local language and have it checked by a native speaker. Google Translate rarely gets it right, I learned. There’s some Hebrew in “Dancing on the Via Dolorosa”, a couple of lines of Spanish in “Another Sunrise”, a few words in German in “Six Three Nine”. I had help on all of those; I don’t speak any of those languages.
I have no real issues with writing about places I’ve never been or subjects I don’t know much about to begin with. If I do my research right, if I present a quality story, it doesn’t matter. I’ve never been to Europe or Asia, but that didn’t stop me from writing either “Six Three Nine” or “Dancing on the Via Dolorosa”. I tried to find out as much as possible about the locations those stories are set in (Halberstadt, Germany, and Jerusalem, Israel, respectively) and if I can use what I find, great. The trick is to not let the research overwhelm the story that’s being told. The internet is a great tool for research. A single link can unexpectedly lead to a new idea; “Kum Ba Yah” is an example of that. [EK: In this fascinating story, an unsuspecting grandson becomes the heir to a precious musical artifact.]
…and Experience(s)
Q. There’s a wide variety of human experiences to be found in your stories. I did, however spot some recurring themes, like loss — through death or estrangement — but also reconnecting with a person or place from the past. Could you comment on that?
A. There’s a school of thought that a lot of writing is therapy, is us authors trying to work out some personal issue we have in print for God and his mother to see. I’m up front that there’s four stories between my two books that are directly about the death of my mother — I refer to them as the Trilogy (God bless Douglas Adams) (3)— and some of them are more obvious about it than others. I didn’t really know that “Lake Effect” was about my last days at the company I worked at while I was writing it, but when I read it back six months later (well after the job was gone) I figured it out. But then that’s part of why we write, isn’t it? We’re trying to mitigate whatever loss or hurt we’re suffering or that we’ve suffered. Writing about these things helps us deal with them, make some sort of peace with it, accept it as part of our being. We do it in the hopes that somebody out there in the world reads it and goes, “Hey, I’m not alone, someone else is suffering the same way I am.” I’m keenly aware there’s not much joy in my stories — a decent amount of hope, but not much joy — but I’m hoping someone is taking some solace in discovering that connection between us. I can only… hope.
Q. Yet quite a few of them do have a tinge of understated humor or irony. But not much laugh-out-loud humor. Sometimes the comedy becomes almost painful, like in “Liberty Bell.”
A. Oof… damnedest thing is that I have something of a love/hate relationship with that story. It was one of my grad school application pieces, and it got me my first Pushcart nomination, but it’s so… atypical of what I normally write. Not very representative at all.
Funny is hard. It’s subjective as hell — what I find funny you may not, and what we both find funny a third person may not — and it’s damn near impossible to do consistently in print because there’s nobody there to laugh at it while it’s being written but you. What I’ve found, though, as I’ve gotten older, is that I tend to do more exhausted funny… you know, you’re stuck in your routine, your eight-to-five, day in day out, nothing ever changes in the bigger sense. But then just this little small thing happens and you find that funny. It’s situational and perfect, and you can build moments like that into a story, but making them really be the big anchor moments is to misuse them. “At Lobuche” (from Dancing On the Via Dolorosa) started as one of those. I had this idea of a guy who just decided one day to try and stop the world from spinning, and it turned into a very mid-life crisis story. It wasn’t about that little action at all, but it started there. People in those sorts of moments laugh to keep themselves from crying; I find myself in that spot often enough to be both aware of it and made uncomfortable by it. A lot of what I found funny at twenty-five I don’t find funny anymore now I’m pushing fifty. I’ve learned to embrace that part of aging and try and express it somehow.
The Long and Winding Road to Publication
Q. Several of our writer friends went the route of so-called vanity presses and, when it became a thing, self-publishing. You, on the other hand, got your stories published by a host of literary magazines over the years, before bundling them for publication by small mainline presses, Chatter House Press and Adelaide Books, respectively. What prompted you to go that route? And what has been your experience with these publishers?
A. Honestly, there wasn’t ever a real debate about that, at least not for me. Part of the point about going back to finish my degrees was because I wanted to teach at the collegiate level, but I knew the degree by itself wouldn’t be enough. I wanted a healthy list of publications for my CV. But getting published in respectable lit mags is like a seal of approval. You’ve written something, and somebody else has decided that they like it enough to give you a little floor space. I can’t think of many higher compliments.
The books, though… I had no success in getting an agent, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. The rub of only doing short stories is that agents don’t want them because they don’t pay especially well. They’ll want you to a have novel ready to go at the same time before they will take you on, and I think I’m one of the few MFA holders that has zero interest in trying a novel.
Self-publishing not only was too expensive, but it seemed like cheating to me. I didn’t see the point of it. Honestly, it seems to me that if the world wants to read you, getting published by somebody else won’t be much of a problem. And independent publishers… they don’t just publish everything that comes across their desks. There’s a vetting process, same as with the lit mags. The rub is you have to market yourself, and though I have many positive features — great hair, sense of humor, I know my way around the kitchen — a salesperson I am not, nor can I afford one.
…and Sales
Q. Your books are available on Amazon. Barnesandnoble.com only had Little Black Dots last time I checked. I’m sure they’re in some of their brick-and-mortar bookstores, too. And independent bookstores will gladly order books they don’t have on the shelf. But how will the reader know what to look for? With small presses not having big marketing budgets — and even big publishers doing much less than before to promote their authors — did you ever consider taking on some of the marketing yourself?
A. Agents have taken over a lot of what publishers used to do, like organizing book tours and signings and such. But I don’t have an agent, so… I did a bit of marketing on Facebook, to no noticeable effect. Looking up my own book on Amazon got me some suggestions in my inbox to buy my own book; that amuses me greatly.
Us introverts are just not able to do that. I’m not much on asking my friends for reviews or anything either. I find it easier to do favors than ask for them. And I take the long view. Melville was not discovered until 100 years after his death, and I don’t really write for the fame and glory. It’d be nice, but it’s not the motivating factor.
Q. Do you have any new stories in the works?
A. Always. The pandemic has slowed me down. And I still have a day job, and I teach besides. There’s always something being worked on, though, and I’m not in a hurry. It takes as long as it takes. “The Match” (in Little Black Dots) was just under twenty years old when The Louisiana Review published it. The main character in “Mrs. Havermill Isn’t as Fast as She Used to Be” (in Dancing on the Via Dolorosa) was somebody I was trying to shoehorn into a story somewhere as far back as 1995. Patience, I find, is a virtue.
Notes:
(1) You can find both collections here: Little Black Dots (2017) and Dancing on the Via Dolorosa (2021).
(2) Barlow moved from Oxford, Ohio to suburban Detroit, Michigan.
(3) Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” Boxset is called a “Trilogy in Five Parts.”
