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McNally appears on Submit! and So, Is It Done?
Click here
to see and hear John discuss discovering voice
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John McNally Abridged
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| Introducing John McNally by
John McNally: T.C. Boyle used to stroll up to me at parties and offer this sound advice: “Bury your enemies, John. Bury your enemies, and bury ‘em deep.” It was the fall of 1988. Boyle was a Visiting Professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was hard at work on East is East, and I was his research assistant. My primary task was to locate as much information as I possibly could about the pygmy sunfish, a fish for which, I would learn later, not much information existed. The theme of vindication threaded our conversations that semester. When I arrived at the Workshop in the fall of 1987 without funding, I was told by a second-year student (a student who is now a bestselling novelist) that I shouldn’t worry, that everyone got funding their second year—everyone, she added, except for those who clearly don’t deserve it. But in the spring, when financial aid was doled out, I was one of three fiction writers who didn’t get funding. One of three. Over and over, I asked myself, What the fuck happened? But the answer was already there, sitting in front of me, fat and dejected: You, Mr. McNally, are one of the undeserving! Had I not worked hard enough? Were my stories shit? Was it because I had gone to Southern Illinois University instead of Harvard or Johns Hopkins for my undergrad degree? Who knew? That summer, a visiting editor read my work, liked what he saw, and spoke to the powers that be, and so by the fall I had been awarded a skimpy research assistantship. Enter T. Coraghessan Boyle. Tom to his friends. Read the full article at http://www.southeastreview.org/onlineissue1/mcnally.php Catch up with John At: www.bookofralph.com Early Praise for America’s Report Card John’s Other Books From The Cutting Room Floor: Interview Excerpt
Not Used On The DVDs One of the things I tell my students is that every story has its own gestation period and that you often never know how long that’s going to be. It may be six weeks. It may be a year. It may be six years. And the thing that I’ve realized over the years is that the story that I’m working on is smarter than I am. That it’s trying to teach me something. And I need to be attuned to all of the nuances that are going on in the story, because essentially when you write a story it’s coming from your subconscious. And there are all sorts of things lurking in there that you’re not consciously aware of. And for me that is what ends up providing the subtext for the story. But I don’t know what that is because I don’t know what my particular obsessions are at that particular time in my life. I don’t know what sorts of themes I’m developing. And so for me revision is a process of discovering all of those things. And as I said, since the story is trying to tell that to me in some ways I just have to keep working and hammering at it and trying to bring those things out more. And at some point I’ll start seeing, hopefully, why the story is in existence. Why I decided to write that story. Interviews with McNally: An interview with Virginia Quarterly Review about his writing process May 2004 interview with McNally posted on Emerging Writer's Forum A fun, slightly off the beaten track interview with McNally that
started because he wanted this blogger to read his book Group interview with McNally, Larry Brown author of Fay,
Dan Chaon author of You Remind Me of Me, and Susan Straight
author of Aquaboogie on what it was like growing up working
class and how it affects writing. Audio Files John McNally Reading for Chicago Public Radio. Scroll to March
18, 2004 Excerpt of Works: Read a segment from The Book of Ralph here: http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=HARDCOVER:USED:0743255550:13.20&page=excerpt
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