An Interview with Alexander Lumans

Alexander Lumans was awarded a 2018 NEA Creative Writing Grant in Fiction. He was also awarded a fellowship to the 2015 Arctic Circle Residency, and he was the Spring 2014 Philip Roth Resident at Bucknell University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Guernica, The Walrus, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Off Assignment, Black Warrior Review, American Short Fiction, and Cincinnati Review, among others. He was awarded the 2015 Wabash Prize in Fiction from Sycamore Review, the 2013 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, 3rd place in the 2012 Story Quarterly Fiction Contest, and the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review. He has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, Arteles Creative Center (Finland), Jentel, ART OMI, VCCA, Brush Creek, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, among others; he’s also received scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. He teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Currently, he’s at work on his debut novel manuscript, which takes place in the Norwegian Arctic. He’ll read at the In Process Series on October 14.

First things first, this series is called “In Process,” so what have you been working on lately?

I’m down here in Taos, New Mexico at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, which is an artist residency that brings together twelve artists for a two-and-a-half-month span. I’m working on this novel that I started back in the summer of 2015. I started it because of The Arctic Circle Residency that I went on, and that was really the germ that started the sickness I am still working through right now. But it’s the best kind of sickness, the obsessive kind. I’m now doing heavy edits, making changes scene by scene. My goal for this residency is to finish that stretch and get through the whole manuscript, and then see where it’s at, how I feel about it, and then maybe get it to beta readers. I need to get it to my agent in January, not totally finished, but as she says, “Close to its fighting weight.”

Looking at your website, you seem like an accomplished short story writer. What are the challenges when transitioning to writing a novel?

I appreciate that compliment. I don’t necessarily think of myself in that way. I started writing stories in college. I was an English major with a creative writing focus, and I had some incredible mentors. Then I went to grad school, and that really turned the volume way up on short stories. I think stories, for me, have become experimental ground where I get to try things out I’ve never done before. They’re like beautiful little containers; you’re working within a space that’s finite, that you can shape however you want to shape it, and imbue it with whatever power and magic and belief that you want to. So I love short stories because it feels like the container has a manageable shape that you can hold in your hand, essentially. And transitioning to a novel is harder because the container is massive. I think a lot about structure and form, especially in short stories, and I’ve been trying to find what the structure of the novel is. I’m still struggling with it, but I’m also just writing it and saying, “It’ll pop up at some point.” I’m trusting the process. I think the short stories gave me ideas and strategies I can employ in the novel, but also I’m trying out new stuff I’ve never done before, and that’s really fun for me. So short stories gave me permission to explore more and more and more; they’re each like a little one-day lab, and the novel is like a year-long study. You have to become it, in some ways.

What does your writing process look like, turning the initial spark of inspiration into a fully fleshed-out story?

I love that initial moment of galvanizing energy for a short story, or novel idea, or chapter. My process is really about starting with an arresting image of some sort. I always like the term Charles Baxter uses, “widowed images,” which are images that stick with you from the day, or from your experience, that you have no idea why they got lodged somewhere in your cortexes. It’s not necessarily a problem, just a question of why it’s there with you. I usually use those images to start with. Just today, I saw a coyote lope through a field of alfalfa, and I have a feeling that that’s gonna stick with me for a while. Often I start with this widowed image, but I also like to start with words I want to use: words I like, or words I think are interesting, that I can say, “Oh, I want to write a story so I can use this word.” Character and plot, they come out of that.

Can you tell me more about The Arctic Circle Residency?

It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done by far, and I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything that amazing again. It is an absolutely singular experience. The idea is that you and thirty different artists of various mediums, practices, and styles, all fly to Svalbard, which is a Norwegian-owned archipelago, halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. You fly there, you get an orientation, you meet everyone else who’s going to be on the residency, and then you get on this tall ship: a three-masted Barquentine tall ship. It’s got a crew, it’s got a captain, it’s an internationally registered ship, and you sail around for two and a half weeks. You never know where you’re going to land, or what you’re going to do the next day, because it’s based on weather, it’s based on what the captain wants to do, even based on what the artists want (“We wanna go here!” “We wanna see this thing!” “We want to experience that thing!”). So every day was unpredictable, but you would make landings at least once, if not twice a day. That whole process itself was bonkers.

The other four people on there, besides the artists and the crew, were called Polar Guards. They’re stewards of the environment, but their main function is to protect polar bears and people from each other. Which means they carry high-powered rifles and flare guns, and they had to clear the area before we were allowed to go on the land to make sure there were no polar bears around, because polar bears are no joke. The Polar Guards told us, “If we say run, if we say go, if we say do this, do that, you better have already done it.” Because a polar bear can pop up at any point. On this archipelago, there are 3,000 people, and there are more polar bears than people. So you’re outnumbered.

The Polar Guards were also the most amazing people. They were these four, badass, young Norwegian women. After the residency, they stuck with me so much that a Polar Guard is now the protagonist of my novel. When I started the novel, it had eight points of view, all on a ship, sailing around Svalbard. As I started writing it deeper and deeper into that draft, the eight points of view shrank and started to disappear. So eight became four pretty quickly, and then four became two, and one of those two was the Polar Guard, and she just said, “Nope. This is my fucking book. Everyone else get out, this is my story.” Even I got out of the way. And she has since stayed as the sole point of view for the whole novel.

Aside from the protagonist, how did an experience like The Arctic Circle Residency influence your writing?

There were several places we went to on the residency that now feature heavily in the book as sites and scenes. So that’s certainly one direct connection. On the residency, everyone’s work, in some way, spoke to the climate crisis. That was the underlying current in all the conversations pretty much everyone had for those three weeks. And it was really powerful to watch how everyone’s work engaged with the crisis and commented on it and even challenged it. And as a result, my book very much engages with the climate crisis, particularly in the Arctic. Because the Arctic is the barometer for the rest of the world. What happens there first then impacts every other region in the world. People need to better understand the Arctic as a place, as a region, and as a home, that impacts rising sea levels via melting ice caps and loss of multi-year ice. It’s easy to think, “Oh, it’s the Arctic, it’s way up north, it doesn’t matter,” but that’s exactly where it all starts.

I noticed that a few of your stories (“Amchitka: Three Tests,” “There, There, There, and there,” “All The Things the Moon Is Not”) feature these sort of barren, isolated, lifeless environments; I was wondering if that was influenced by the Arctic and the climate crisis?

That’s a good observation. I hadn’t put that together myself, actually. Because “All the Things the Moon is Not” I wrote years ago, before I went to the Arctic, so this must have already been in my brain before I went there. I was already obsessed with the Arctic. It was my friend Amie [Whittemore], who teaches at MTSU, who sent me a link to the call for applications, and she said, “This residency is made for you.” I had never heard of it before, so after I looked into it, I thought, “Oh hell yes. I have to do this.” You had to have a project in mind [related to the Arctic], and I said I was already at work at one. I did already have ideas for the book, but I hadn’t written a word yet; I knew that whatever I wrote before the residency was going to be changed by my experience and time there. So I purposely didn’t write much ahead of time, and then I let the experience become the thing itself.

I was also influenced by several books, but H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness especially. And he’s very problematic — a terrible, terrible person — but you also have to acknowledge that those horrible parts of his humanity are also what enabled him to write with such horror, and such fear, and such austerity about the world. I can’t deny that At the Mountains of Madness was a big part of why I went to the Arctic. But I learned, by going there and learning more about it, that it wasn’t just about fear. There’s a poet named John Burnside, and he has a poem with this line, it’s something like, “High Alpine meadows teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, reminding us that we see so little of the world.”*

I find the Arctic a place where I actually feel less lonely than anywhere else. I felt connected to something in myself that I didn’t know was there before. It was one of those experiences that made me say, “I didn’t know how to ask this question before I came here.” It was an overwhelming sensation. Every day on the residency, you saw the most amazing thing you’d maybe ever seen, and then the next day would somehow show you something more amazing than that. Be it glaciers, be it wildlife, be it some of the oldest exposed geography in the world. It’s just an incredible landscape that’s heartbreaking in how rapidly it’s disappearing. One of my favorite facts about Svalbard is that there are so many glaciers and ice plateaus there, the Archipelago is still technically in the Ice Age. It’s both ancient and new at the same time, and I love that about it.

Aside from packing everything up and going to the Arctic, what is your advice to writers who are starting out?

One of the most important things is learning to trust your own instincts when writing. Of course, you first have to hone that. And you can only do that by writing, and writing, and writing, and writing. Trying out new stuff, challenging yourself, experimenting, and doing the hard work. In that way, you’ll develop a value system, you’ll develop your aesthetic. You’ll get a sense of, “Here’s what I love about stories, and here’s how I think I can do that myself.” Reading goes along with that as well. It’s just about pushing yourself into territories of discomfort, and not territories of “I don’t want to write about this,” but rather territories like, “I don’t know how to write this yet.” So try it out. All writing is an experiment. And everything you write, every word, also serves the next piece of writing. I believe wholeheartedly in that. I’ve written a couple of short stories while writing this novel, and those stories have helped me work out things I didn’t understand about the novel.

While I was on the residency, each of the artists would give a presentation about their project. There was one visual artist who put up this John Cage quote that is incredible. It goes like this:

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio: the past, your friends, your enemies, the art world. And above all, your own ideas. All are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. And then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

I prescribe to that. I want to leave the room. If you can aspire to that, and let the piece take over, let the piece live, let it be organically alive, that is the moment where art becomes more than artifice to me. If you can get out of your own head, the work can reach a new level of energy and excitement and oddity.

That might be my other piece of advice: get weird. Go to the realms that are dark, and strange, and uncomfortable at times. Allow yourself to be weird, because everyone’s weirdness is going to be different. You also have to give yourself permission to say, “I’m reading other authors, I’m learning from them, I’m seeing how they take on different challenges, but I’ve also got my own voice.” And you have to give yourself permission to speak in that voice and write in that voice.

*The full quote goes, “High Alpine meadows, like their near relatives prairie, desert and certain varieties of wetland, teach us to consider the world from a fresh perspective, to open our eyes and take account of what we have missed, reminding us that, in spite of our emphasis on the visual in everyday speech, we see so very little of the world.”

Matthew Parris is an MTSU graduate with a B.S. in English. They will be attending the Sewanee School of Letter’s creative writing program next summer.