A Conversation with Karl Iagnemma
Terry Huang:
Although MIT isn’t actually mentioned explicitly, it figures prominently in one of your stories, and the Michigan Institute of Engineering seems to be MIT in disguise. In the title story, Joseph says, to describe the MIE, “This is the set of words that I use when I talk about the Institute: hunger, numbness, fatigue, yearning, anger.”
The air of the story is pretty melancholy and bleak. A lot of times people describe MIT in this way. Were you thinking of MIT when you wrote that sentence? How much of MIT was really in the story?
Karl Iagnemma:
It was one of those things where the tone of the story seemed to fit the setting—which is what you often shoot for anyway, in writing. To have a confluence or a resonance between the theme, the tone, the setting, and the plot. These things should all stick to each other.
But the miner’s story and the history of Upper Michigan was as much what I wanted to write about as anything else. And it is a pretty depressing history. I mean, this is really beautiful country, and pretty rich country, by nineteenth century standards—they had a lot of natural resources, beavers and animals to trap, copper and iron, timber—and they sort of systematically, in a very American way, just took everything—
TH:
From one to the next—
KI:
Yeah. The beavers were there, and people wanted beaver fur hats, so they killed all the beavers. People wanted cheap timber, so they cut down all the trees. Then they took all the iron and copper. So now there’s not a whole lot up there. It’s still very pretty, but it’s a part of the country that’s, at least in the economic sense, depleted or used. That’s what struck me when I was reading the history of the place. And that’s where I think a lot of the bleakness of the story comes in. And that’s also the echo that comes in with the Swede’s story, which is the historical part of the story—he’s present during the rise and fall of the Upper Peninsula.
TH:
What got you interested in the history of the Upper Peninsula?
KI:
I have no idea. I think it was just by reading about the region. I read this fantastic history by John Bartlow Martin, who was a journalist, who went up to the Upper Peninsula for his honeymoon, and in a month he wrote a book about the history of the UP called Call It North Country. It’s just this fantastically great book. It’s a mix of reportage and first person narration—he actually gets into the voices, the imaginary voices of some of these characters. It’s a great, great book.
I think its pretty common for writers to be inspired by other writers’ work. If Call It North Country had been a flat, boring history, my writing might have taken a different route, because I read it at the time when I was—not actively searching for a voice, but trying out different ways of writing and different things to write about. I think the combination of that and also finally writing about some of the things that I do in my research work really struck a chord. It became much easier, and the work became better.
TH:
In the title story in particular, there seemed to be direct references several times to MIT—
KI:
Well, “the Institute”—
TH:
Right, “the Institute.”
KI:
—which is sort of a direct tip-off.
TH:
And then mentioning physical plant. KI: And the steam tunnels? Was that the one—
TH:
Yeah, the “sub-basement tunnels.”
KI:
And the people jumping off buildings—which is actually a very MIT phenomenon, but I wasn’t thinking of MIT when I thought of that, because that happens at campuses all over the country. That was directly taken from my ex-advisor, who had told me an anecdote about people at RPI jumping into snowbanks. I guess they actually did that, jumped off of buildings into snowbanks. I thought that was great. You’re either trying to kill yourself, or you’re having fun. Which is kind of a nice combination.
TH:
How high were they jumping from?
KI:
I don’t know, though it couldn’t have been too high. I imagine these snow drifts kind of settled against the building—so maybe the second story. Actually, I didn’t even get to use the best part of his anecdote. When the kids would jump off the buildings, their friends would spray paint big red X’s in the snow to mark the locations of the buried cars. I had that in for about six drafts and I finally had to cut it.
TH:
Why’d you take it out? Was it just extraneous, it wasn’t—
KI:
It just didn’t work. I didn’t find any place to put it.
TH:
I notice that snow, or at least cold weather, figures into a lot of your stories. Is that intentional, or—?
KI:
I think that was just a product of the setting. Have you ever been to Upper Michigan?
TH:
No.
KI:
It’s pretty cold. I’ve never been there in the winter, but I grew up in Lower Michigan, and you’d get the snow reports from Upper Michigan. They were just terrifying. Hundreds of inches every year. And apparently—you know we have snow plows? They have eighteen-wheelers, I mean they have rigs that are moving this snow. It’s just huge amounts of snow. And it’s not as bad as the nineteenth century, when the ships stopped coming in the winter, but people I have talked to who have wintered there get a similar sense of isolation.
There’s a great book by a guy named Ander Monson, called Other Electricities. It’s a very weird little book. It’s a series of vignettes set in Upper Michigan, and he’s mostly concerned with the atmosphere and the setting. It’s great. He really captures the frigidness, in every sense of the word. Isolation. Just cold. Really great book.
TH:
So, in one part of the title story, Joseph, after Alexandra answers his ultimatum, goes to the tallest building on campus, and tries to spell out her name using the lights of the classroom, which seems to be a pretty direct reference—
KI:
Oh yeah.
TH:
—to the Green Building—
KI:
That’s right!
TH:
—and the fact that it’s often the victim of hacks.
KI:
People do that on New Year’s, don’t they? And Fourth of July—I think I’ve seen people do that on Fourth of July, where they spell out something in the lights. God, I just realized that. I probably got that idea from the Green Building, but I didn’t really think about that consciously at the time. *
TH:
Really.
KI:
I have a vague memory of standing on the Mass Ave bridge watching the fireworks and looking back … oh, but you couldn’t see it from there ….
TH:
Oh yeah, one year they turned the Green Building into a VU meter for the Fourth of July.
KI:
Yeah! I’m sure there were a lot of other things, but I can’t remember right now.
TH:
Do you have any favorite hacks?
KI:
Boy, I don’t know. I’m trying to think of the biggest ones since I’ve been here. I was here for the beanie on the Great Dome. I was here for the—wasn’t there an airplane?
TH:
Yeah, there was an airplane ….
KI:
The Wright Brothers' airplane. Which was pretty fantastic, but which they disassembled pretty quickly. That one was really cool. That was when they really started cracking down—we haven’t seen anything in a while. I think the Institute has stiffened penalties for people who are doing anything remotely fun.
TH:
Yeah, since I was here—I started in ’99—they haven’t done anything really big. They’ve done a couple—for Star Wars …?
KI:
Oh yeah, yeah. C3PO. That was pretty neat. *
TH:
Yeah. And for Lord of the Rings, they put the ring around the Dome, I think.
KI:
Yeah, they wrote whatever the Lord of the Rings script was—and it actually looked pretty good. But, I don’t know, I think the students are too busy now. And also the administration is strict, which is really a shame. They should give credit if you successfully pull it off. You should get an A in the class of your choice.
TH:
They take a lot of work, too. A lot of time gets put into hacks.
KI:
I know. I mean, some of these things are engineering marvels. The Wright Brothers plane actually looked flight-worthy.
TH:
Yeah, that’s too bad.
Well, I noticed that the tone and the voice for a lot of the stories differed pretty greatly. Some of them seem really dim, subdued, and quiet, while others seemed more choppy and jumpy in terms of narration and style—the way the characters thought seemed to be different in each story. Did you consciously try to make the style different for each story? Do you have a set of favored voices that you like?
KI:
That’s a good question. I usually try to match the tone or the voice of the story to the content. Even if it’s a third person narrator, it’s usually, in my stories, a close third person, by which I mean almost a first person, but without using the first person pronoun. Closely focused on a single character or a small set of characters and seeing the world from their point of view.
And the tone really depends on what the story’s about. There’s a story in the book written from the point of view of an Indian agent told in the form of journal entries, and I tried very much to get the voice of the journal entries to match how I imagined this under-equipped, over-matched guy stranded in the Upper Peninsula in the mid-nineteenth century, early nineteenth century. And then there’s the story about the mathematicians, “Zilkowski’s Theorem,” which is a little bit more fluent, I guess you would say. Maybe a little bit more … not necessarily intelligent, but maybe a little bit more sharp—which, again, reflects the interior landscape of the characters. But all of the voices are contained within the set that is my range, basically. Which is not very broad, unfortunately. I mean, you don’t see any magic realism, you don’t see any really wacky experimental writing, which is because I’m not interested in writing like that, and also because I couldn’t do it very well if I tried.
TH:
I notice that in several of the stories several of the characters seem to be pretty religious, and some of those who aren’t very religious take note of their not being very religious.
KI:
That’s a good point.
TH:
Was that something you consciously put into the stories? Was it because of the time period that most of them were set in?
KI:
It’s partly a function of the time period, because in the nineteenth century religion was so much more of an everyday topic. It was also much more a part of the … well, I was going to say it was more a part of the social landscape. It is today, too—I mean, we’re approaching a sort of Third Great Awakening—but it’s certainly not part of the fictional landscape. You don’t read a lot of stories about religion or religious characters. The big exception recently, is Gilead, which is a great book. But it was an exception. If you extrapolated the state of America from the current crop of good literary fiction books, you’d think everybody was an atheist and made a quarter of a million dollars a year.
So I wanted to write about religious people in some capacity, partly because it fit the time that I was writing about, and partly because I’m interested in it and it seems to me that nobody talks about it, though it’s an incredibly rich subject. I mean, religion is the most fundamental motivation for some of the most incredible and passionate acts throughout history. And writers are always looking for interesting, sophisticated, and fairly nuanced ways to motivate a character. In the story about the mathematicians, you have religion that is—hopefully convincingly—driving this woman to change her life. To give up her Ph.D., and all these other things. It gives rise to the conflict of the story. So religion is a huge motivator and, speaking kind of cynically, is probably underexploited in fiction as a tool.
TH:
Religion has actually been behind so much development and innovation, in art, and was a motivation for a lot of scientists, in the past—
KI:
Scientists, true.
TH:
We think of religion and science sort of being at odds, but definitely a lot of scientists in the past, were very religious people.
KI:
Certainly in the nineteenth century there wasn’t an institutionalized debate between science and religion. The question was more along the lines of, “How can science be used to complement religion?” “How can science be used to explain religion?” One of the best quotes—I can’t remember who said it—was that science and religion “were two translations of the same text.” Science was seen as a tool to explain God’s creation, essentially.
Obviously there are specific cases where there’s direct conflict. Today there are fundamental debates between science and religion, but I think if you would’ve taken these debates back to a scientifically literate community many years ago, a hundred years ago, they would have framed the debate somewhat differently. The intelligent design conversation doesn’t necessarily have to be as adversarial as it is. But being adversarial—I think partly it’s the easy and provocative way to present the two subjects, as being in direct opposition. But I don’t know that they need to be.
I just finished writing a novel—a draft, anyway—and one of the major characters is looking for scientific evidence of a theory that will support the Scriptures, essentially. The story of the Bible. And that was a big endeavor in the nineteenth century.
TH:
How long did that draft take you to write?
KI:
Oh. Man. God, it was brutal. It took me probably … since I finished the last book. So—four years. It was a very long process. It was just—a novel is a really hard thing to do, that’s what I decided. And it’s much much harder than writing a book of short stories. I mean, writing short stories is hard, but hard in a way that you can get your head around. It’s much more about getting things exactly right. But a novel is just a much larger mental effort. I would have ideas that I thought were good ones, but after writing about them for fifty or sixty pages, I’d realize that they didn’t have the endurance that I thought they would have. I also started plots that didn’t really go as far as they needed to go, and developed characters that may have been sufficiently deep for the purposes of a short story, and then realized that I didn’t understand them enough to write about them over the course of three or four hundred pages.
So for me it was really tough, and I think it was due to a conceptual error—not really understanding how the form of the novel differed from that of a short story. It took me a long time to get something to start feeling like a novel. At this point I think I have something that feels like a novel, although there’s no guarantee that it’s a good novel.
TH:
Did you do anything to celebrate after you finished the draft?
KI:
Uh, no. I kind of wept from exhaustion. I finished it last weekend, and my mother-in-law was visiting the next day, so there wasn’t much time for celebration. And also the baby was probably screaming at the time. So, no, the emotion was relief rather than joy. I hope to finish it this spring. I guess it would probably be published next winter. I hope.
TH:
That’s pretty quick then.
KI:
Well, maybe that’s a little ambitious. Maybe it’ll be next spring. But it’s a much harder thing, writing novels. Though at the same time it’s much more interesting and challenging than writing stories. Writing short stories is great and fulfilling, and when you’re doing it there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing. But when you get to the novel you realize that you’re using all the excess brain capacity that you didn’t know you had.
TH:
I read an article about you in the Spectrum’s spring issue, and it said that you were at work at two different novels.
KI:
Well, that was because I was so depressed writing this novel that I actually started another one. And I’m under contract for this novel, but I was almost at the point where I was going to ask my editor, “Will you take this other one instead?” So in a fit of desperation, over about three weeks, I wrote fifty or sixty pages of this other novel. I haven’t worked on it since, but that’s the next thing I’m going to write. It’s based on one of the short stories from the collection.
TH:
Oh really. Which one?
KI:
It’s about a phrenologist.
TH:
Okay. With the same characters?
KI:
Yes. Half of the story is about this traveling phrenologist and the woman he falls for, and the other half is about a politician in mid-nineteenth century Detroit, trying to get elected on a platform of Know-Nothingism—anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was very popular for a few years and then sort of died away.
TH:
So are the stories going to intertwine? Are any of the characters connecting them?
KI:
Yes. They’re going to be these two interwoven narratives, I think.
TH:
And does it take place after “The Phrenologist’s Dream?”
KI:
Yeah, I had this idea for a novel that started exactly where the short story left off. Probably I should have kept writing that short story, if I’d known at the time that it was only the beginning. But at the time I thought it was just a self-contained short story. And who knows, maybe in retrospect, I’ll have wished I hadn’t touched it. But I almost see that story as being the prologue to this novel, or maybe the first chapter. The rest of the story starts from there.
TH:
I noticed that you seemed to be viewed as a scientist-writer or a writer-scientist…
KI:
Yes. Even though I’m an engineer. But that’s okay. It confuses the issue.
TH:
But in most of your stories, actually, science, engineering, and mathematics don’t play a huge part of the story—
KI:
That’s a good point.
TH:
—a lot of times they just seem to add flavor and atmosphere. They seem to define the way a character views things or approach things.
KI:
Yeah.
TH:
In a way the science seems kind of spiritual, and I think the religion sort of plays off of that too as a different kind of spirituality, a different way of thinking for the characters.
KI:
Well—that’s a good way to put it, that’s a good point. I think it very much more defines who the characters are. A lot of times science in my stories defines what the characters are doing and what the actual story is going to be. A lot of the conflict and the plots are derived from the fact that they’re doing research, they’re mathematicians, they wrote theses about these things. But I’m not at all interested in writing stories that are trying to describe some aspect of science. There are some writers who try to do that. There are some really good writers, I think—there’s not a lot, but there’s a few.
I don’t think fiction’s first purpose should be to try to explain anything. I hope that after reading the book, no one has learned anything. If I have instructed or given any kind of information, that would be terrible. Because what I really wanted to do was just tell a story about these people.
But I do think people expect sometimes, when they read the book, for it to be more focused on the science itself. For it to be explaining an idea or theory—which to me has always felt more like a product of science fiction. I don’t know how you draw a distinction between science fiction and literary fiction other than by saying that science fiction usually seems more concerned with ideas and things than it is about characters. Which of course isn’t always true. But maybe is generally true. And literary fiction about scientists, I think, is more concerned about characters. So yeah, the science really speaks much more to the characters’ motivations and who they are.
And spiritual, I mean, I guess I would hesitate to lump that—or describe science directly with that word, because that’s a bit of a minefield. I think it does give a lot of the characters a way to attempt to understand the world, which is what religion does. And that, to me, more than anything, is the way that science and religion are most similar. Most complimentary. Both of them are just systems for trying to understand who we are and what we’re doing here, how we got here.
Actually, one of the reviews that I got—probably the worst review I got for the book—was in the NY Times Book Review, which was sort of a bummer. But it was no big deal. What happened was the guy just read the book, I think, with the point of view that it was gonna be about science. It was going to be me trying to explain scientific ideas, which wasn’t what I was trying to do.
TH:
Are you going to continue to write about science and technically-minded people, or do you want to try something different in the future?
KI:
Well, I think so. At least for the near future. It just seems to me it’s the easiest thing for me to write about. It’s the thing that I’m most interested in. At least for now.You also don’t see a lot of people writing about this, maybe because people don’t have the background. Maybe also because people don’t think scientists are interesting. But sometimes they are. So maybe it’s kind of an underserved community that I’m trying to represent.
But the next novel is going to be about historical figures. There’s a short story that I’ve been wanting to write for a few years, another historical one. I think after that I want to write a contemporary story about research, which is an interesting thing with a whole set of conflicts that most people aren’t aware of.
TH:
Are you going to be focusing on novels from now on? You said you’ve started or thought about writing a few other short stories.
KI:
Well, I don’t know. There’s one short story in particular that I really want to write. And then there’s a couple that I drafted and never finished. So I think I’m gonna try to do those in between the novels, and I think that’s probably where they’ll stay. Short stories are really tough. I mean, it’s just a little bit depressing to write these stories. You just don’t get the sense that a lot of people end up reading them, which maybe shouldn’t matter—but if you’re faced with the choice of writing a novel, which you enjoy tremendously, and you think it might be read, or writing short stories, which you also enjoy tremendously, but the chances of people reading them are very slim, I think you probably naturally tend toward writing a novel. But, you know, I have these ideas for stories that I want to write, so I’m gonna write them. And if I get more ideas, I’ll do those too, but I don’t think the plan for me is to say okay, I’m gonna start with a blank page now and write a book of short stories next.
TH:
Yeah, you definitely have a sense that writers aren’t taken seriously as heavyweights until they start putting out novels.
KI:
Yeah. And I think that’s because people associate the short story with writing workshops, so it’s seen as an apprentice kind of task. For many writers it is—it definitely was for me. I couldn’t have started off writing a novel, but that doesn’t lessen its potential as an art form. And also, for whatever reason, I guess people don’t like to read short stories. Writers read short stories. Every writer I know has read tons of short stories, but a lot of the readers I know, even people who are really reading literary fiction—even they generally wouldn’t pick up a short story collection unless they know the writer’s work well. So it’s a little bit tough. I don’t know why that is.
TH:
So, about writing habits. Do you hole up when you write?
KI:
Yeah, we have a two-bedroom condo, and the smaller bedroom is the writing room. It’s now the writing and baby room. So, uh, the door is closed except when the baby needs to be changed. But yeah, I try to seal off. You know, wear ear plugs and block everything out.
TH:
Really.
KI:
Yeah. Otherwise I can’t hear the characters talking. It helps me concentrate.
TH:
Hm. The characters don’t talk in my head.
KI:
[laughs] Maybe they should.
No, that’s not true. But it helps me. When I’m revising, and I’m reading something, it just helps when it’s quieter, because I can sense better whether it’s working or not. When you’re being distracted you can’t tell at all. You might as well be reading a newspaper. But when you’re reading something with an eye for revision, the ear plugs help. I recommend it for all aspiring writers.
TH:
Do you have anything else that you do when you write?
KI:
You mean freaky habits?
TH:
Yeah, freaky habits.
KI:
Uh… no. I don’t have the internet on my writing computer, which is probably the best thing I ever did in my life. Disconnected that. I use Microsoft Word, and a dictionary program on the computer. I put in the ear plugs. Keep the blinds closed. My only trick that I do is when I’m revising, I’ll print out paragraphs with subtle changes on the same piece of paper, and then I’ll fold over the paper, and I’ll read one paragraph and I’ll flip it over real quick and I’ll read the same paragraph with revisions. You can always tell which one’s better. It’s kind of like being at the ophthalmologist, where they ask you, “Number one or number two?” You can always tell which one is slightly better. So that’s what I do. My wastebasket is filled with three thousand folded over sheets of paper.
TH:
Wow.
KI:
Yeah. Tree-killer.
TH:
Taking out the recycling must be tough.
KI:
[laughs] Yeah. It’s a chore.
- (return) Members of the MIT community often refer to the university as “the Institute.”
- (return) MIT’s Department of Physical Plant is now called the Department of Facilities, but former students will probably be calling it “phys plant” for a long time.
- (return) MIT has an extensive basement system that connects several of the main campus buildings. Though bleak and vaguely smelly, many people use the tunnels to avoid walking outside in the Cambridge winter. In On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, “sub-basement tunnels” are mentioned as a part of the MIE campus.
- (return) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
- (return) The tallest building at MIT, and one of the few buildings referred to by name rather than number.
- (return) A “hack” at MIT is a “clever, benign, ‘ethical’ prank or practical joke… both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community.”
- (return) On July 4, 1993, hackers converted the Green Building into a giant VU meter for the annual Boston Pops’ outdoor concert. Apparently, some of the light patterns did spell out something—“IHTFP” in morse code.
- (return) He meant R2D2.
- (return) The Great Dome is also popular with hackers.
- (return) Liz Karagianis, Hollywood Calls, Spectrum, Spring 2005.
Otium
