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Austinist Interview: Philipp Meyer reads American Rust at BookPeople
We prefer take Meyer at his own word, as another Austin original. Most of American Rust was written here, while Meyer was on fellowship with the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. Prior to reading at BookPeople this Friday, Meyer took some time to talk with us about the book, his writing process, and what the future holds.
You grew up in Baltimore, lived in upstate New York and New York City, and moved to Austin around the time you started working on American Rust. What drew you to write about a dying steel town in western Pennsylvania?
There are several reasons, maybe all equally important. The first is that while Baltimore, like the rest of the formerly-industrial northeast, has been hit hard by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, it has a much more complicated story than the Monongahela Valley. In Baltimore, the decline began earlier, and there were many different industries that began to go under at similar, but not exactly the same, times—textiles, steel, ship-building—and there were also a myriad of small factories and shops, light and medium manufacturing, that began to go under as well. And then the docks and port became more and more automated, which cost further jobs.
Baltimore also has this series of complex migrations—African Americans moving from the South into the city and later the “White Flight” that occurred from the 1960’s-1980’s. Whereas the Southwestern Pennsylvania area was devastated by the collapse of a single industry (steel), in a time period most people agree on (the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties being the most intense periods of job loss). Of course, the fallout continues even now—the steel mill at Allenport, which was open at the time that Isaac walked by it in the novel, was just shuttered a few months back, in late 2008.
Another big reason is that I find it much easier to write about places I’m not from. Something about the rhythms of daily life makes it difficult for me to be as observant about my home as I am about other places. Writing well is all about nailing those precise two or four details that describe a place or describe an emotion and transmit that feeling to the reader. The places I’m most comfortable and familiar with I tend not to observe as closely as other places. Some deep-seated animal instinct, I imagine—you get comfortable, you feel safe, you stop observing.
A third reason I wrote about the Mon Valley is that it’s just what I felt I had to do—I think 99% of writing is about trusting your instincts. Your intellect is always a couple of months or years behind, it seems. I just knew the story was set in southwest Pennsylvania, not Baltimore. Maybe another way to say it is that the story I needed to tell could not have been set in Baltimore.
What kind of research did you undertake in the course of writing this novel? What were some of the conversations you had?
There was a lot of stuff specific to the Mon Valley: I spent a lot of time walking and talking to people. I walked the train tracks a lot. Obviously I spent a lot of time driving the entire area, over and over, just to make sure I got the setting correct, so I wouldn’t have a one dimensional movie-set sort of feeling for the area. I wanted to make sure that I’d always know what was over the next hill, and then the several hills beyond that one.
But the most important thing was walking, whether it was talking to random fishermen I met along the river, or talking to random people in bars, or just sitting in a corner in a bar where I could overhear people’s conversations. I also did a lot of formal interviews, maybe 20, with current and former steelworkers, public officials, cops, older folks who’d seen the peak of the Valley’s industrial might, and seen the decline as well. I thank a lot of those people in the back of the book, but many of them didn’t want to be mentioned. The key with all of it, as it is for anything you write about, is listening.
But another thing I drew from was my childhood. This is basically where the inspiration for this story came from. When I was five, my family moved from New York City to this blue-collar neighborhood in Baltimore so my father could be walking distance from to Johns Hopkins, where he’d been accepted for graduate study. The neighborhood (called Hampden) had been solidly middle class for maybe 60 or 70 years, but by 1970 it was getting hit hard by all the job-loss in manufacturing.
Tons of characters, events, etc, from that neighborhood (my parents still live there, and I lived there until I was 19) made it into the book. The killing that takes place early in the book was inspired, at least thematically, by an event from my childhood in which a neighbor who everyone liked got involved in a killing in a crowded bar. In order to protect a friend, this neighbor shot and killed a guy in a barfight. Everyone agreed that the shooter was a good guy and it was self-defense and that the dead man got what was coming to him. Still, the neighbor was sent to prison, where he died of some health complications much later. Things like that were somewhat common in Hampden. A guy was shot and killed by the police in the basement of our house about a month before we moved in. The violence was regular but it was rarely random. On one hand I was constantly getting jumped by other kids, but I never thought I’d get shot for my sneakers or anything.
There was also a really strong community—everyone knew who the bad apples where, as most people had lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Most people accepted us (my graduate student father, artist mother, and my brother and I), immediately. They told us who to watch out for, to never give money to the one neighbor who always came around collecting money for charities—turns out she actually made all the charities up and kept the money for herself. That the other neighbor’s son was a heroin addict and everytime he got out of jail, it was best to lock your doors—which people didn’t always do. Etc, etc.
The narration of American Rust shifts frequently between characters and takes an innovative, stream-of-consciousness approach to free indirect discourse. How did you develop your style? Were you reading any particular writers for inspiration?
I definitely developed it by reading other writers. We’re always standing on the shoulders of the ones who came before us. The writers I’m most consciously aware of learning the stream of consciousness stuff from are Joyce (but really just in Ulysses), Faulkner, Woolf, and James Kelman.
For the most part, you wrote American Rust while on fellowship with the Michener Center for Writers at UT. How did studying at the Michener Center affect your work?
I am extremely grateful to the Michener Center, and it’s pretty obvious to me that in the next few years it will emerge as THE powerhouse of writing programs in the country. Three years of very generous funding, no teaching requirements, a flexibility in scheduling your courses that is probably unmatched anywhere. I don’t have much interest in literary criticism, so I was able to take classes that allowed me to avoid it. Other students, who wanted to take a ton of literary criticism, were able to take it. And the faculty, both permanent and visiting, were great. It really is an amazing, perfect place. It is a program designed to turn out working artists, which is an enormously difficult goal that requires a great deal of sureness of mission. But the Michener Center accomplishes that goal admirably.
Were there any particular places in Austin that you liked to go to write or to think about your book?
Once in a while the UT library. But mostly my house, wherever it was that I lived. I think there is an enormous danger in only being able to work in one sort of place, under some specific set of conditions. Mostly I think that just leads to avoiding work.
Whenever I found myself getting finicky about where I worked, I’d always remind myself that Dostoyevsky did five years in a Siberian Labor Camp followed by five years as a private in the Russian Army. I’ve led an insanely easy life compared to that—who am I to worry about the neighbor having his TV turned up too loud, or my coffee being cold? In the end, the point is the work. You have to produce it.
I've heard that you're working on a new project that is partially based in Texas. Anything you can tell us about it at this point?
Unfortunately not. It’s set in West Texas and deals more with the upper class than the working class. I have a feeling about it the same way I had a feeling about American Rust. That’s all I can say, really. In three or so years, I hope to be finished writing it.
