As Dzanc Books author Roy Kesey is bouncing merrily across this country, in a two weeks from hell version of the book tour, he's been reading the story "Interview" from his collection, All Over. The story involves some 56 replies to job interview questions. No questions, just the responses. It's a great read, and even better possibly seeing Roy read it aloud. Roy was kind enough to provide a little background on this particular story for the EWN:
“Interview” owes a fairly huge (and, I hope, clear, or else I shouldn’t have cut the epigraph) formal debt to Donald Barthelme’s “The Glass Mountain.” As it happens, there was a period in my early thirties when I would dip into 60 Stories like it was God’s own guacamole--great huge handfuls at a time, smears down the front of my shirt, pushing the bowl across the table to friends and grunting, You have to try this guac. And within that period, there was a much shorter period when it seemed like every time I dipped in, I’d see a trick I wanted to try.
It’s embarrassing to admit that it took me so long to discover his work, and painful to think of certain less enjoyable books I limped through when I could have been reading him instead. But in a way, I’m glad I didn’t come to Barthelme any earlier--if I had, I’d have become a hopelessly shoddy clone. Even as it was, resisting the urge to mimic his voice was sometimes beyond my strength; I threw those stories away, but didn’t regret writing them. In other, luckier moments, I had the common sense to try only to sort out the mechanisms that allowed him to pull certain rabbits out of certain hats, and then to explore how those mechanisms might work with my own particular weasels and wastepaper baskets. Sometimes it came off and sometimes it didn’t. In the end, “Interview” borrows little more, I think, than the sequential numbering and a touch of mental/social stance--which, let me be the first to say it, is plenty.
In terms of the content, several years before writing the story, I had taken a job as the director of a language center at a university in northern Peru, and at some point it became clear that we needed more professors who were native English speakers. We couldn’t offer much in the way of salary or benefits, so I was leaning hard on the “Come to Exotic Peru!” angle. Also, I had no idea what I was doing. I put advertisements up on a couple of list-servs, and was flooded with applications that I duly sorted and spindled.
I originally planned to do the interviews by phone, and then received word from above that they all had to be in person. Most of the applicants were from the U.S. and Canada, so I worked up a preliminary list and itinerary, gave it to my boss, and was in turn handed a frighteningly large stack of U.S. currency, and told to go try to find some teachers.
Which I did.
But I wasn’t very good at it.
I drew up a numbered list of questions, most of them so vague (What’s your theory of teaching? No, yes, I know, but your theory of teaching? Your teaching theory? What is it?) that they were impossible to answer in a way that would give me any more information than I already had from the candidates’ resumes. My only immediate hire from that trip was a guy who was later fired for gross misconduct, then submitted a misguided application for political asylum to the Peruvian government, was subsequently deported, and in only one of several bizarre coincidences, served as a case study that my wife had to analyze at the Diplomatic Academy five or six years later.
More to the point of “Interview,” though, was what happened in the course of other people I talked to on that trip. I did a number of pre-interview chats over the phone to narrow the field, and in the middle of one of those phone calls, an applicant offered that his previous job had ended when he was made the scapegoat for a scandal he’d had nothing to do with. Before I could respond to that, he said, “And the funny thing is, the same thing happened in the job before that. And the job before that!”
That guy didn’t get an in-person interview, but I will always be grateful for the material and voicing he gave me. That, combined with the structure I ripped off from Barthelme, gave me something that, at the beginning, was nothing more than a reasonably amusing job interview with the questions suppressed but figure-outable. Over the course of a dozen drafts, it morphed into what it is now, something weirder and bigger and sadder, or so I allow myself to hope.
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