A Bit of Magic: An Interview with Jim Peterson

“You sort of have to let go and trust your own weirdness, and believe that there’s some reason the story is coming to you that way.”

Jim Peterson has published a novel — Paper Crown, Red Hen Press 2005 — and seven full-length poetry collections, most recently The Horse Who Bears Me Away from Red Hen Press in 2020 and Speech Minus Applause from Press 53 in 2019. His collection of short stories, The Sadness of Whirlwinds, was published by Red Hen in November 2021. He has won The Benjamin Saltman Award for poetry from Red Hen Press, a poetry fellowship from the Virginia Arts Commission, and an Academy of American Poets award. His plays have been produced in regional and college theaters. He retired as Coordinator of Creative Writing at Randolph College in 2013 and remains on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives with his charismatic, three-legged corgi, Mama Kilya, in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Your use of fantastical elements that exist within a more grounded and realistic world adds a beautiful complexity to your stories. What inspired you to write with this style?

When I was a teenager, there was a very popular show called The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling was the guy who came up with the idea, and it was all about the mysterious, odd events that happen and alter two things: a person’s sense of who they are, and a person’s sense of what is real — what is reality? So, that’s what I want to work with: identity, and just what the heck is going on here? What’s real and what is not real, or is anything not real? Just questions like that. Additionally, and this is just the honest truth, I had a hard time writing a natural sort of story when I tried to write realistically. I felt that my stories didn’t work; they were boring, and I was bored by them. I figured if I was bored by them, other people were gonna be bored by them too, so there was the hope that I could cultivate an approach that was fun for me. I wanted to write stories that made me laugh, that surprised me. They might scare me, but they were entertaining me as I was writing. I often don’t know what’s going to happen when I’m working on a story. So, some of these strange things that happen come as a surprise to me as I’m writing. Another part of what inspired me was the writers that I encountered who seem to approach their writing in that way. They had found a way to entertain and surprise themselves.

Would you say that you cultivated this style in college, or did you come upon it later in life?

When I was in college I was too intimidated. I was too busy trying to write something great instead of writing what actually wanted to be written through me. If you’re a writer, something wants to be written through you. You can resist that by just trying to conform to what you think is expected. You sort of have to let go and trust your own weirdness, and believe that there’s some reason the story is coming to you that way.

What is your number-one tip for revision for a student who is going to start revising a big work? What’s your number-one tip to get the ball rolling?

I really understand why students have trouble. I understand because I had trouble with revisions. When I was a young writer, I couldn’t see what wasn’t working in my story. I could read it 100 times over and over, and it sounded like a masterpiece to me. So, why didn’t everybody feel like it was a masterpiece? It was because I had not yet developed my ear for language, for how the language is moving. I like to read my stuff out loud, so I want to be able to feel like the language is moving in a beautiful, fun sort of way. It’s moving in an interesting way that suits the story, and this takes an ear that you just don’t have right away. It just takes time. You get it from reading a lot: reading great writing, reading as many short fictions as you can find; that helps develop your ear. Some students don’t want to read a lot; they just want to write a great novel and be famous. So, that’s my tip: Develop an ear that can detect where things are going wrong in a story.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, give them any advice, what would that be?

Write more. It’s so easy to get discouraged, and I think one of the lucky things for me is that I didn’t know how bad I was. I actually just kept writing a lot of stuff that wasn’t good at all, and nobody would tell me. The result was that I kept writing, and there’s something going on when you’re writing if you just keep doing it. I’ve often told my students over the years that you have to write badly in order to write well. That sounds so counterintuitive, but you’ve got to write the BS to learn to detect it. At first, you’re writing BS and you don’t know that’s what you’re doing. Then it slowly starts dawning on you. Do you know what to do then? You keep writing. Because then you can start moving the BS to the side and creating a story that’s going to have some substance to it. This is where the writing is getting better, the ideas are getting deeper, and everything starts happening. You’re going to write badly, but shouldn’t let it upset you. You can’t let the little failures hurt you. You have to find a way to accept the rejections, learn from them, and keep at it. Your time will come if you have a little bit of talent. You’ll find editors that want to publish your work, and from there now it starts growing — it starts building from there.

Your characters, from Sarah in “Echo” to Mrs. Roberta Walters in the epilogue, are all very three-dimensional. Do you base your characters are real people? What’s the process you go through to create them?

It’s so interesting, that you picked up on that in “Echo”; it’s probably the most autobiographical story in the collection. I was married to a horse trainer for 44 years, and this story, along with some of the characteristics of the characters, is based on her and me. It’s fiction, the story, but Sarah has some of the characteristics of my former wife who was indeed a really, really good horse trainer who taught people to ride. She was very well known, and she was terrific. I would sometimes help her out at the barn when she needed it; I’d clean stalls and stuff like that. She had people that worked for her, but sometimes she needed extra help. So you can kind of see all of that in this story now. This business about being an alcoholic was made up because I was looking for something to create tension between the characters. So, this is one of my more realistic stories. It’s very detailed about the birthing process of the foal; all of that is just based on actual stuff, but there’s definitely a bit of magic. I won’t give it away, but a lot of the stories have a stronger component of magic in them.

Do you have any muses that encourage your writing? Whether that’s people, ideas, or memories?

A lot of times it’s just somebody you encounter in a situation. You don’t know them, you encounter them for an hour or half an hour, 10 minutes, then you never see them again. Something happened in that encounter that continues to linger in your mind, and so you start getting it down on paper to see what it is. You find out what you have only when you start writing; it percolates in your mind in a way that it doesn’t if you’re just thinking about it, and sometimes a character is there based on the person you met. The good thing is, you don’t know them that well, so you’re not being held to accuracy about this person; they’ve just inspired something. Another way the muse can happen for me comes while talking to friends. You’re just laughing and having a good time, and they’ll get some weird idea and tell you about it. You don’t say anything, but you know you’re going to get that down when you get home and see if that turns into a story. A good way to find a muse is by having other writers as friends, who you can talk to about ideas. Lastly, as a writer, the stories I read are often muses for me. A recent muse that has made a lot of difference in my work is the poet James Tate. He died within the last five years or so, and I didn’t like Tate’s poetry for most of my life, even though our time in the world overlapped largely. His early poetry was very successful, but his work just didn’t appeal to me very much until the last four books. I stumbled upon one of these books, and now I’ve got all four stacked up behind me. The first one really caught my interest again, and all of a sudden his very difficult-to-understand poetry was clear as a bell, and it wasn’t because I had gotten smarter, but his work had just changed and had become much more narrative and kind of surreal, almost absurdist and funny, but also scary. I realized these last poems of his are actually stories in the magical realism or absurdist styles. He called them poems, but they don’t read like poetry. They were fictions, and I became very happy reading them. They fed in me that urge to write out of strangeness rather than out of the ordinary alone. These pieces became a real muse for me.

What emotions and ideas do you hope to instill in the reader through your writing, and how do you go about doing it?

I don’t honestly think about that at all. When I learned not to think about it, that’s when I was able to do what I wanted to do. The story has to start happening. The story has a life of its own, and that’s what I have to trust. So if I’m ahead of the story. If I’m out here in front of the cutting edge of action, it ain’t gonna work. In other words, if I know more than the reader, then I’m not surprising myself, so I’m not going to surprise the reader. I have to create the story as it comes to me; so, I’m writing the next line and I’m listening. It’s like I’m paying attention to something, instead of forcing it. At a certain point in the story, it will begin to dawn on me. Not what I want the story to be, so much as what the story wants to be. And isn’t that great? To me, this writing thing is a great mystery. Here’s another truth that I discovered along the way: whatever I have to offer philosophically and emotionally, I can’t escape those things. They’re going to come through me organically whether I want them to or not. So I don’t have to think about them ahead of time to write a story. As I’m writing the story, the issues that are important to me are going to seep through. The advantage of looking at it that way is that they come through more subtly. Whereas if I’m trying to force the story into a certain shape, it becomes too obvious to the reader the direction the story is taking, and they stop reading. This can be seen in my first story in the Sadness of Whirlwinds, “Pablo.” I didn’t know where that very first story was going to go, what was gonna happen, and I was certainly hoping that the reader didn’t either.

What story was the hardest for you to write in The Sadness of Whirlwinds?

The one that’s coming to mind is “Keeva of Lomasaya.” It’s the penultimate story, and it’s the longest story in the book. It’s the most ambitious. It’s the one story in the book where I really build a world. I create a country that doesn’t exist, and it’s a very odd, strange country. I wrote the first draft of this story 30 years ago. When I was working on this manuscript, I remembered the story and I went back to my archives and found it. It was about 10 or 15 pages long and was just about a guy who goes to a strange country where they raise children in an odd way; that was it. I liked the idea that I had of this country, this strange place. The central theme is the way people in this country raise their children, and the way they think so differently about romantic relationships and marriage. All of that is just totally upside-down from how we think about it. I liked the story, but it was flat. It was basically just a description of a place. So, it dawned on me that I needed another character. My main character didn’t have a foil; there was nobody for him to push and pull against, to work off. I’m a romantic at heart, more than I’d like to admit, and so I brought a beautiful woman into the story, Keeva. She was not in the original, and she turns out to be the other main character. That was difficult, because I had to take this 10 or 15-page thing and start re-working it. As I re-wrote, it just kept growing expanding and it became almost a novella, and then I really had to keep working on it. Some of my stories are stories of ideas that I have to discover through writing. This is certainly one of those.

Tell us more about your book, The Sadness of Whirlwinds. What would you tell someone who is considering giving it a read?

The Sadness of Whirlwinds explores the world as we know it, but tinged with magical possibilities that challenge our expectations. A small dog leads a man into the backyard of a blind woman who has drawn him forth from a forgotten past. A man becomes trapped between walls in his favorite restaurant. The author of a book of questions meets the author of a book that has the answers. An encounter with Mr. Death offers insights into Mrs. Birth. A woman unhappy with her life enters into an exploration of the world of whirlwinds. A man decides he must leave his dog lying beside him on the couch in order to enter the Inward City. A man travels to the remote and eccentric country of Fallada and meets the beautiful, bewildering woman known as Keeva. A woman must break through the boundaries of her comfortable grief in order to face an irascible man and unravel the mystery of her stolen dog. These and other explorations into the unknown make up the character of this new collection. Mysterious and challenging, these tales invite readers to their own inquiries into the nature of reality.

Oliver Wright is a writing minor at MTSU who has a passion for all things storytelling. Having always been fascinated by the human psyche, he enjoys writing short stories and flash fiction that take a close look at the complexities that exist within our experiences as individuals. When he’s not journaling or plotting out his next story, you can find him either working with his non-profit H.U.G.S. or reading a good book in his Murfreesboro home.