{"id":3484,"date":"2017-04-24T19:53:56","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T19:53:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=3484"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:56:31","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:56:31","slug":"driven-by-voices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2017\/04\/24\/driven-by-voices\/","title":{"rendered":"Driven By Voices"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Invisible Men,<\/em>\u00a0Professor Eric Freeze\u2019s latest short story collection, the award-winning writer and Wabash professor channels a wolf, a widower, a bodybuilder, a pedophile, and a young girl struggling through the trauma of being molested. WM<\/em> asked him where his ideas and voices come from.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"Carve Magazine finds in Invisible Men \u201ca half-human, half-animal state of being\u2014the place within us all where the rational and the instinctual collide.\u201d In one story, the narrator is a boy who transforms into a wolf. How did you come to that story?<\/em>
\nFreeze:<\/strong> That one actually came from a dream. As a kid I had this recurring dream for several years. I dreamt that I had been bitten by a wolf and that I would turn into a wolf whenever I got angry.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where it started\u2014I had a fascination with wolves.<\/p>\n

Lately I\u2019ve become more interested in fabulism and genre elements. \u201cLone Wolf\u201d is a first-person short story with an unreliable narrator who in his own mind has gone through this change, so that allows me to bend reality quite a bit through his perspective.<\/p>\n

From there I was just trying to figure out who would be this kid. What are some of the underlying psychological reasons for him doing this? I see him as sort of an overgrown Calvin and Hobbes character, who is really precocious, has a big imagination, but other people misunderstand and misread him.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a good kid, but because of the way his exterior persona manifests itself in this world, he\u2019s seen as being disruptive, as a bully\u2014all these negative things.<\/p>\n


\nHave you written a lot of stories from your dreams?
\n<\/em>I think this is the first one.<\/p>\n

Dreams are really powerful because they are your subconscious using story to try to make sense out of something that\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n

And that story was so driven by voice. I started a draft of it and it really wasn\u2019t going anywhere. Later I went back to it and redid the voice, and once I had the voice down, it pretty much wrote itself. I put the story in present tense, upped his vocabulary, made him kind of nerdy, and kind of overwrote him, made him a little more unbelievable in his erudition.<\/p>\n

Many of the characters in your stories are outsiders, and you have real empathy for kids living in the margins. Was that you as a kid?
\n<\/em>Not really. But I seem to always have been the guy who was nice to everybody, so I knew a lot of kids like this. And I was a band geek.<\/p>\n

The writer Pam Houston calls \u201cDuplex,\u201d the story that opens the collection, \u201ca chilling thought experiment.\u201d<\/em>
\nThat story is probably the best thing I\u2019ve ever written. It started as a story about a girl who moves with her mother to the States, but there was nothing at stake. The girl was adjusting to the move, her father died, and the only thing that was really at stake was the father\u2019s absence.<\/p>\n

So I almost, just to see what would happen, I decided to have this other voice\u2014this guy who finds a dead body. And alternate them and see what happened.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never written a story with a dead body in it. So this was a way for me to play with the genre elements, like a whodunit.<\/p>\n

So the story began as two separate stories?<\/em>
\nWhen we had Dan Chaon visit Wabash, he talked about writing his novel Await My Reply. He said he had no idea how the alternating separate stories were going to connect. He just trusted the process, that they would come together. And it comes together amazingly.<\/p>\n

But it was a process of discovery. He wrote the book to find out how the stories were related.<\/p>\n

So I tried to approach \u201cDuplex\u201d the same way: I had these two alternating stories and I didn\u2019t really know how they were going to interact. And through writing it I realized that this is a story the girl is telling herself about the trauma of being molested.<\/p>\n

It was amazing to me! It was just like discovering the end of a mystery. I didn\u2019t know how they were going to work out, and they just gradually did.<\/p>\n

\"\"She seems stronger, the voice more confident and personal at the end. How do you get that strong female voice in your writing?<\/em>
\nWith female characters, sometimes I\u2019ll actually<\/em> mimic the syntax of a woman writer. I\u2019ve done that with Pam Houston, also Alice Munro\u2014she is so subtle and is a very interior writer, and writes psychological realism better than anybody writing today.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not how I got the voice in \u201cDuplex.\u201d The girl\u2019s voice does come in more strongly at the end because she takes more responsibility for the story.<\/p>\n

In the very last section she tells the story about her father, and that was a way for me to get to that absence that had been in the original short story, but in a much, much stronger way. Because this is a girl who has something horrible happen to her, yet she preserves the memory of a good man\u2014her father.<\/p>\n

That for me was the most gratifying thing about the story\u2014that even somebody who has gone through that kind of trauma can still maintain positive feelings toward another man.<\/p>\n

I like that story so much because it was such a surprise for me. It ended up resolving a lot of the things I didn\u2019t even know needed to be resolved.<\/p>\n

In the story itself, or for you personally?
\n<\/em>In the story itself, but also for me personally.<\/p>\n

I call the collection Invisible Men<\/em> because I realize there are these kinds of men who often don\u2019t get recognized in literature. Like, how do you write a short story about a good guy, right? It\u2019s so rare to find stories like that.<\/p>\n

I think men are still overrepresented in literature, and there\u2019s the feminist in me that recognizes that men probably don\u2019t need any more attention.<\/p>\n

But there are certain kinds of men who get a lot less time on the page. Very rarely do you find men who are decent people.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are plenty of men in this collection who aren\u2019t decent people.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Eric Freeze is an award-winning author of literary fiction and non-fiction. His book of short stories, <\/em>Dominant Traits, was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award and his book of essays, <\/em>Hemingway on a Bike, won the 2014 Association of Mormon Letters award for creative nonfiction.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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