My grandfather, who went deaf and decided he wouldn’t get a hearing aid. He was a doctor, but also a hunter who wore bolo ties and was stoically quiet (my grandmother was not). And while writing, I was thinking of my grandfather who was a hunter. But I found myself swinging outwards in time to one of the older FBI agents. I don’t believe in mystical things like “the character took over.” I don’t buy that. Maybe it was anxiety and not wanting to just stay there with the two men as they staked out this house. And then while I was writing, I just naturally swam forward into the future. Originally I just wanted to write a cool stakeout story. So with the “Treeline,” I had these FBI agents on a stakeout. My anxiety and my personality as a human enters my fiction. And I tend to be the type of person who always goes over a story again and again in my head: what if this had happened, what if I had not stopped at this stoplight. Means: I figured out recently that every writer, no matter who they are, their personality somehow comes into the structure of what they’re writing. It’s a story replaying in someone’s memory a story that has stuck with them through many years. It’s a convergence of different narratives: what’s happening now-it’s not actually happening now. It makes you consider what it means that this is what this person is thinking about that this is what he sits by the lake and ponders so many years later. Things felt like they were happening now, but every once in a while I’d become aware that this all happened long ago that these stories are being told by a narrator reflecting on events from the past. I never felt in any way removed from the action. So much layering occurs, but it was so well done that I was never confused. I found you were incredibly effective at being located in a specific moment. Westover: One of the things that struck me about that story is the way you deal with time. You’re able to eventually go back and control it and edit and restructure if necessary. Writing a story, however, is a completely different act. We all tell each other stories and tell ourselves stories. I think of the physicality of the way we talk. Part of what I do when I write a story like “Treeline,” is to think of storytelling as almost like physics. David, I thought we might talk, in the context of that story, about how stories work in your inner narrative.ĭavid Means: That’s a tough question and it’s a profound question. It’s about a lawman who is reminiscing about something that happened in his life when he was younger. I discovered him while listening to the New Yorker fiction podcast-specifically the episode titled “The Treeline in Kansas.” I found it powerful for a number of reasons and it’s included in Instructions for a Funeral. Tara Westover: I’m a longtime fan of David Means. What follows is Means’s conversation with Educated author Tara Westover from an event at Books Are Magic. He transmutes a fistfight in Sacramento into a tender, life-long love story two FBI agents on a stakeout in the 1920s into a tale of predator and prey, paternal urges, and loss and a man’s funeral instructions into a chronicle of organized crime. Instructions for a Funeral finds Means displaying his sly humor and his inimitable way of telling tales that deliciously wind up to punch the reader in the heart. Thanks to his four previous story collections, Means has won himself an international reputation as one of the most innovative short fiction writers working today. “David Means is a master of tense, distilled, quintessentially American prose…Each story by Means which I have read is unlike the others, unexpected and an unnerving delight.” -Joyce Carol Oatesįollowing the publication of his widely acclaimed, Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia, David Means now returns to his signature form: the short story.
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