press

3/19/05

An Interview with Gary Fincke
As published by the Emerging Writers Network  

The following is an interview with Gary Fincke, a professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of many collections of poems and short stories. He is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the George Garret Fiction Prize, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, The Journal Poetry Prize, and the Flannery O'Connor Award. He is married and has three children.

Dan Wickett:
Hello Gary, thanks for taking some time to answer a few questions about yourself and your work.

Gary Fincke:
No problem. I'm happy to do this.

Dan:
When did you first start thinking of becoming a writer?

Gary:
I didn't start writing until I was nearly 30, about the time I finished my PhD at Kent State, so I came late to this, but writing was always something I wanted to do.

Dan:
You've published many poetry collections and three short story collections. When you sit down to write, do you know if you're sitting to write a poem or a short story?

Gary:
Four short story collections, though I understand how some of them have passed under the radar—I write nonfiction, too, so it's even trickier, but usually I'm writing exclusively in one genre for months at a time—for the past 18 months, I've written fiction nearly all of the time—winning the Flannery O'Connor Award was a nice confidence boost, and I've finished another collection and am trying my hand at a novel. My poems also tend to be narrative, so there's a natural connection, and the poems sometimes show me the way into a story.

Dan:
Whoops—forgot about the Coffee House Press collection (I think). I only counted the three I have. How often do you start writing in one form and decide that the material is better suited for the other form?

Gary:
To elaborate a little—there are times when I keep both ways of entering material—even all three, including nonfiction, though that's much more rare these days, since the biggest change in my fiction over the past five years or so has been that the stories are very heavily "imagined" now.

Dan:
When you are putting together a collection, and determining the order, are there different elements to consider for a poetry collection as compared to those in determining the order of a short story collection?

Gary:
Yes—to some degree I frontload the stories with ones I think are likely to "turn heads," and after that, I think about point of view, tense, subjects, settings, etc. to give, for instance, the two or three coming-of-age stories that are in every collection some room to breathe—I always have twice as many stories available as there is room, so the biggest issue is to distance myself enough to sense which dozen or so are, in fact, the best.  

In poetry, at least for the last three collections, I'm thinking about the poems as a book—the order gives the poems a chance to build on each other, especially within groups of 12-15. Plus I always include a few poem sequences, where the order is absolutely essential. I wish I had had the confidence to do that 20 years ago, when my technique, if you want to call it that, was to put the poems in what I thought was the descending order of their quality, except for the last poem, which I always believed was leaving with a "bang." I'm a self-taught writer and self-taught editor as well—the trial and error method. It has some advantages, but I've always had to fail at something in order to learn.

Dan:
Quite a bit of your work, both poetry and stories, deals with those in poor health. Is health an area of interest for you, or more an area of topic that you find easy to mine?

Gary:
Mortality is probably the best word to use—I don't set out to "worry it" in my writing, but it finds its way into the work—and experience—asthma, for instance; lousy eyesight, for another—lead me there, especially the asthma—how many times can you feel as if you're about to suffocate before the sensation is indelible? These days, I try to stay away from the obvious health issues (mine), but I often find myself becoming fascinated with other "imagined" health issues—what can you do but follow your instincts?

Dan:
Aside from being a professor of English, you are also the director of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. What in the world does your daily schedule look like?

Gary:
It looks like a long column of items on a grocery store tab for a family of 15. I get my writing done by being an early riser—I want to be writing by 6 a.m., and I'm self-disciplined about that, though during the spring semester, I have to do "school work" several mornings per week. And yes, there's the teaching, which I love—we have 75 majors in an undergraduate writing program at Susquehanna—and the big time-consumer, running the program. I'm one of those people who are fortunate enough to love the work they do—I taught high school for six years; that's enough to know that what I do now with writing would be impossible if I still did that. I'm fortunate to always be looking forward to 5:30 a.m. because I want to do almost everything I'm going to do that day.

Dan:
You also used to coach the tennis team correct? How much more free time does it seem like you have since dropping that responsibility?

Gary:
21 years at Susquehanna, and it was a pleasure, but when the creative writing major took off, it was also impossible—the first year that I came home before 5 o'clock, it felt like I had extra hours in the day; by the second year, all of that time had been absorbed.   Except for not having those long road trips on Saturdays, I don't have any sense, now, of having more free time.

Dan:
You've published quite a few chapbook-sized collections of poetry, as well as a couple larger books. Is there a reason that you didn't hold off longer and publish most of your collections in the larger size?

Gary:
The early chapbooks were published because that's the way someone was willing to put my work into the world—a few of them were contest winners. Once I'd published two full-length books, I didn't "send out" chapbook manuscripts. The later chapbooks were solicited, and it was a joy to be asked. I'd guess that half the poems in the chapbooks found their way into the full-length books. The downside is that the chapbooks tend to be invisible, even though they were sometimes produced with incredible care.

Dan:
When writing poetry, do you prefer to write any specific types of poems in terms of form and/or meter?

Gary:
I don't think that way while I'm writing first drafts, but when I come back to those drafts, I do. Stanza breaks, line breaks, sound—most often, the lines themselves—-I've written the majority of my poems for the past ten years in syllabics—8-, 10-, 12-beat lines (or variations of those)—what that does for me is make me reconsider every word and the

order in which each one appears. Every once in a while I think I smother a poem by doing so, but nearly always that discipline reveals something new to me, and the poem is the better for it. Lately, I've been more aware of the meter of those uniform lines, but the initial impulse is always to write toward the heart.

Dan:
Pudding House Publishing put out a Greatest Hits collection of 12 poems a few years back. How interesting was it for you to go and choose 12 of your many poems? What was it like writing the introduction to the collection?

Gary:
Very interesting, and I thank them for the chance. Like most writers, I was more interested in my newer poems than my older ones, and it made me rethink why my finished work remained interesting to me. I find it hard to talk about my writing "in public."   I'm pretty sure that if we were in an ordinary conversation, I wouldn't say a word about my writing except to acknowledge that I do it.

Dan:
Another thing I'd think might be a little difficult after publishing so many works is the dedications. Most often, but not always, you dedicate your collections to your wife, or your wife and children. How do you decide who to dedicate each specific work to?

Gary:
There's no question that family is number one on my list of things that matter, so the only consideration is whether or not someone/something else has surfaced in a way that suggests a dedication. I don't have any mentors; I've never taken a writing class. Some of the people that occur to others, therefore, don't arise with me. My wife has been my only consistent reader over the years; my older son reads most of my stories with a keen eye these days.

Dan:
I would think that as a writer concentrating in short stories and poems that the bulk of your work first sees the light of day inside literary journals. Which are your favorite lit journals and why?

Gary:
Some journals have been good to me, which I appreciate, and some I admire despite seldom appearing in them. The names that come to me right now of places where I want to see my work appear are DoubleTake (unfortunately, probably gone), The Georgia Review , The Gettysburg Review , The Missouri Review , Shenandoah , The Idaho Review , The Cimarron Review , The Paris Review , and Poetry . There are more, of course. Poetry Northwest took a great deal of interest in me early on, but it's in limbo. The Beloit

Fiction Journal has always been a consistent supporter; so has The Literary Review . I think what I mean here is that I actually "read" these magazines (and a dozen more like them) when they arrive at the library or in my mail.

Dan:
You've seen your books published by university presses, as well as smaller presses. Were most of your publishing experiences similar in terms of help with publicity, garnering reviews, doing readings, etc.?

Gary:
No. I understand how difficult it is to get attention for poetry—Zoland Books tried very hard, and then they went out of business. One press didn't try at all, essentially dumping the book. I've lifted about ten poems from that collection and used them in later books

because it doesn't even feel as if the book was published. I'll be kind and say it wasn't a good experience. At the time, my vocabulary was mostly expletives. Coffee House, Missouri (twice), and Georgia—the three presses that have done my stories, all made a sincere effort to get me some attention. Georgia had the advantage of the O'Connor Award tradition behind it, and there's no question that book has gotten more "press" than any other of mine ( New York Times , etc.). 95% of my readings have occurred because of my efforts—the presses, for whatever reasons, have seldom produced any "action" in this area. Plus, I live 150 miles from the nearest "culture center" city, which makes things difficult.

Dan:
You were able to see the band Breaking Benjamin rise from a local band up to one currently on the charts as your son is the guitar player—a rise you chronicled in Amp'd:   A Father's Backstage Pass . It seems quite obvious that you enjoy not only watching your son do something he loves, but the music itself, from the book. Do you play any instruments yourself?

Gary:
Amp'd was something dramatically different for me to write—the book was agented early on, but the New York publishers thought it was "too literary," as if an intelligent book about rock and roll was somehow unfathomable. But Michigan State took it on shortly after Breaking Benjamin was signed by Hollywood Records. (my son had been in a band called Lifer, on Universal, before then). And yes, I love going to shows and would probably have attended nearly every one of the 70 or so I've seen even without doing the book. I played the trombone in high school and have always wished it had been the guitar.

Dan:
On their way up to a couple of hit singles, Breaking Benjamin opened for many larger groups. I know you saw many of their shows—which groups did you enjoy seeing and meeting the most?

Gary:
A band called Systematic that was opening, as well, when they traveled with Saliva—they were dropped by their label right after the tour, but they were good guys who put on a show. I was fascinated by Godsmack, because it was "grand theater," but they were less accessible. A band called Hed(p.e.) was wonderful on stage, though their recorded music didn't interest me. When the old band Lifer opened for Disturbed, I was mesmerized, but that band was completely inaccessible. In the end, the groups that were struggling to make it were always the ones that were most fun to hang out with—I think that's the story of rock and roll.

Dan:
And back to books, if you were a character in Fahrenheit 451 , what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?

Gary:
That's a good question—I've never even memorized four lines of my own work—but I have favorites among fiction writers—Andre Dubus's "A Father's Story" is one that I go back to, but he has dozens of stories that are extraordinary. Tobias Wolff, especially his early stories. Richard Ford's Rock Springs collection. A story called "Ralph the Duck" by Fred Busch. The poems of Phil Levine and James Wright, who were the writers I modeled at the beginning. Ed Hirsch. Rodney Jones. A collection called Rapture by Susan Mitchell. It would be a full-time job. There are others, of course.

Dan:
Thanks again Gary for sharing so much great information.

Gary:
It was a pleasure.