John Fulton Reading
With Joshua Henkin
Brookline Booksmith
Tonight, October 22, 7:00 pm
Free
Fulton's Official Site

John Fulton doesn't go for sly pop-culture references or verbal pyrotechnics in his short-story collection The Animal Girl. Instead, he zooms in on the emotions of his older characters who are attempting to find love. With Match.com and eHarmony, dating and romance seem easy and ordinary topics, but Fulton throws obstacles in the paths of his characters, and their reactions feel authentic and realistic.

These obstacles involve an impending or a recent death, and the stories are a reminder that just because a person is dying or grieving doesn't mean their capacity for love has died, too. In "Hunters," which won a 2006 Pushcart Prize, a woman succumbing to breast cancer decides at the last minute that she wants to attempt a no-strings-attached romance. Bostonist's favorite story, "The Sleeping Woman," revolves around a smart-cookie entrepreneur who meets the right guy, only to discover that his wife remains in a vegetative state following a car accident.

Fulton, who also teaches at UMass-Boston, answered questions about his approach to the book and weighed in on the eternal "to MFA or not to MFA?" debate.

Interview after the jump! Image of the book cover from Fulton's website.

Did you go into this collection with a theme in mind?

In my experience, you don't really choose your material. One way or another it chooses you. My work goes through stages that are a bit like obsessions. I kind of obsess over a certain constellation of characters and situations and write about this until I've worked through it. A lot of the stories are this combination of loss and something else going on, usually having to do romance that is incompatible in some ways with grief.

So the obsession came about as you were working? It wasn't, "I'm going to write about grief and love."

It wasn't that. What I try to do is get a story that excites me. Oftentimes, that means I find two or three things that just don't fit. I step into a character who is going to do something that a normal person wouldn't do, something most people wouldn't do. When Kate is told that she's dying [in the first short story, "Hunters"] and this is the second time and the first time she was told she was going to die and she didn't, instead of telling people, she didn't tell people, and she decides that what she wants to do with her remaining time is start a romance.

That gives me two stories that often don't go together--one about grief and loss, and the other about that awkward and at times humbling process of the romance.

Regarding Kate, you go into such detail, so where did you get started with your research about the illnesses, and how did you get into the head of someone who knows that she is dying?

The thing about cancer--she's got breast cancer, and she's in the late stages of it--so many people have it. It's almost hard not to know about it. I remember reading an article in the "New Yorker" about a doctor on the real difficulty of not just [cancer patients] them as objects but of sympathizing with them. That was really important in the writing, especially if the character is dying. You have to do them the justice of that experience.

There's a lot of things that I don't know. Other people have asked me about the story--"How do you know so much about this woman who's dying?" I'm a man, and I'm not dying, and certainly I don't know what it is like to go through something like breast cancer from all sorts of perspectives. But one of my writing teachers a long time ago said, "Write about what you don't know about what you know." I think that's what I try to do in a sense.

I know a lot about Kate in the sense of her demographic. She's an educated woman in her mid-40s, upper-middle-class. I wasn't a parent at the time, but I felt like I knew enough about what parents go through to feel like I was on solid ground. But I don't really know a lot of the other things, like what it's like to die, what it's like to be a woman with breast cancer, or what it's like to be a woman in a romantic relationship.

The part that I don't know is what keeps me interested as a writer. A lot of the stories in the collection are written from the perspective of women, whether they're teenagers or whether they're older. To me, that's like the "what I don't know about what I know" that keeps me interested.

Moving on to "The Sleeping Woman," in terms of your approach, there's a lot of similarities in your story and what was going on in the Terry Schiavo case. When I was reading the story, I couldn't help but think about that case.

I'm a slow writer. I had the idea for that story a long time before I was aware of Terry Schiavo. I think it was in 2005 that she became a political issue and she died and the Bush Administration and Congress were trying to pass legislation to keep her husband from pulling the plug--which was really maddening to me because that's when I was really starting to get into that story. That story came to me from a couple of films I saw years before, one called The Dream Life of Angels (1998), a story about a couple of young women in French-speaking Belgium. And then Talk to Her (2002) by Almodovar. Both of them feature characters who in some way are in vegetative states, at least in a coma. What fascinated me about those films is the way that absent characters were in some way at the center of the narrative.

When I started to write that story, I was writing a romance, but I can't just write a straight romance. There has to be something to complicate it, something that doesn't usually fit with romance. Having seen those films and being fascinated by the way an absent character can shape a narrative, I started to write that story. And then Terry Schiavo came along. I didn’t want to fall completely into a Terry Schiavo narrative. What I was interested in was the love story that was complicated by the fact that one of the couple had a wife who was neither dead nor alive. And any time you get into a romance with an older person, it's always complicated by the romantic past. This story literalizes that romantic past in a certain way. It's not that he has an ex-wife or a dead wife; he has a wife who is in a certain state that no one knows quite how to deal with.

There was one scene in "The Animal Girl" where Leah breaks into homes that are going to be sold. She goes in there and drinks from the liquor cabinet--did that just pop in your head?

I'm not quite sure how it came into my head. I had a teenage girl who was trying to ruin her father's romance with this woman, Noelle--

--Who was very sympathetic--

I felt like she had to be sympathetic because I wanted to make Leah's dislike for her difficult for Leah. I didn't want to make it easy. She couldn't be the evil stepmother. Leah feels an ambivalence about her disruptive behavior. At the same time, she can't accept that her father is moving on just a few years after her mother has died. What kind of bad behavior can this adolescent protagonist display then, and what could really be dangerous? Danger is really what stories need. That's what the reader wants, that something is going to explode.

I figured out that Noelle would have keys to all of these houses, and Leah has a lot of time on her hands and has to figure something bad to do. It's also an obsession the story has with families and homes and isolation. Leah is in a home that's been completely disrupted--when Noelle moves in, she brings all of her stuff. Leah's on the outside, so when she goes into those homes, she's always this kind of intruder. She has a weird, voyeuristic relationship to the houses. Some of them are still furnished, and she can look at these people's lives and families from the perspective of someone who feels alienated from her home.

There's a Carver story--I forget what it's called--it's about this couple who agrees to watch stuff and water plants for the neighbors. They start to go into the apartment, go through the stuff. There's an envy and wish fulfillment in their relationship to this place. I think they have sex in the apartment. It's clearly a complicated relationship they have with the place.

To some general author questions. There's always a debate over whether or not having an MFA helps you or hurts you. What is your perspective since you got an MFA and went into academia?

Anytime an art goes into the academy, there's some justified worry that there's a homogeneity that the art could succumb to. There could be a kind of factory mentality to the production. Institutions could say that a certain kind of approach to writing is better than another. In my own experience, the art can't really support itself commercially. Writers can't live off writing alone. There's a small percentage of writers out there who do, but it's pretty tiny. I think it's a great thing that the academy has decided to support the arts and that these MFA programs exist.

In my own experience, I had two years to do nothing but write for the most part, I was paid for that, not very much. But also I got to meet these wonderful authors who I couldn't have had access to otherwise. Like I am now, I am incredibly busy. There's the time requirements of the writing itself, the necessity of paying the bills, and that's what they were doing. It's not like the old days. What you'd do as a writer is you would contact a writer and say, "I really admire your work. Can we hang out?" That's what writers did. They would hang out. That access isn't there or isn't easily there outside institutions.

So the new process of finding mentors is to apply to these graduate programs. You get accepted, and you have access to a community of mentors and peers. To me, that was a really important experience. I don't think everybody needs it. I think it was great for me. I think I learned how to write more quickly than I would have otherwise, but probably without the program, I would have gone on to get published and write. It just would have taken longer. I do think that it's important for these programs to have diversity as far as aesthetics and approaches go, a kind of openness to the different ways of writing.

We hear you're working on a new novel. How is your novel going?

It's going okay. I actually have more than one novel, but it's based on the last novella, "The Sleeping Woman." I have a big, fat, messy, messy draft of it that needs a lot of work that's in the shop right now. I'm taking some time away from it so that when I come back to it I have a sense of what to do in the next draft. A novel is a lot different from story collections because it's so big. I think it's going all right, but we'll see.