The following is an interview with Dave Daley, currently the editor of Five Chapters (www.fivechapters.com).
Dan:
Thanks, Dave, for taking some time out of the editing and posting schedule to answer some questions. Your bio notes you were features editor at Details Magazine. Was there much that you were able to do in that position that dealt with the world of literary fiction?
Dave:
That’s a great question. If only I had posed it to myself before I took the job.
Dan:
While at The Journal News, a newspaper out of White Plains, NY, you created Tag-Team fiction. This was essentially getting two writers to co-write a piece of fiction to include in the newspaper. To your knowledge, was this the only regular fiction series in the country at that time in newspapers?
Dave:
I’m almost entirely certain that it was. The New York Times magazine hadn’t yet started their Sunday serials and I have always wondered if they noticed what we were up to in the New York suburbs. Many of the editors live out there so it wouldn’t surprise me.
It was great fun. We’d match up two writers and pick one of them to kick the story off. He or she would write 500 words and pass it on to their partner, who would do 500 more and send it back for a second and final round. Jonathan Lethem and Aimee Bender did one, Gary Shteyngart, Audrey Niffenegger, Stewart O’Nan, Sam Lipsyte, Lara Vapnyar, Darin Strauss, Anthony Doerr, J. Robert Lennon. Amazing people said yes.
Dan:
Where did the idea come from?
Dave:
Really, it was stolen from my 12th grade English teacher who liked to have us start a story and pass it to the person on the left. When I went to White Plains as an arts and entertainment editor, I wanted to do great books coverage that didn’t involve the kind of 500-word newspaper book reviews that have so stultified the literary conversation. This was on my mind as I was driving to one of my last days at work in Hartford, and as I passed the exit for my old high school, those ridiculously fun stories popped into my mind.
Dan:
Are these stories archived somewhere? Was there ever any discussion of putting together a print collection of them?
Dave:
I wish they were. They were archived on the Journal News site for a long time, but sometime after I left, they disappeared. I’d love to find a way to get them back online. No one ever inquired about a print collection, which surprised me, especially since so many editors and agents and publishing types live in Westchester. Maybe they only read the Times. If they’re reading this…
Dan:
If you had to pick two or three combinations of authors that worked together that surprised you – the fact that they worked together, not that their work was excellent – which ones would you include?
Dave:
Ayelet Waldman and Sylvia Brownrigg did a really fascinating one. Every time the story went to Ayelet, this woman became sadder and more tragic. Shelley Jackson and Matther Derby pulled off a sci-fi story that I still can’t believe held together and made it into a daily paper. I would have imagined Meghan Daum and John Haskell as having completely different sensibilities, but it worked out great. Thisbe Nissen and Kevin Brockmeier. And I always liked to see what happened when couples did a story, or a mother/daughter team. Molly Ringwald and Panio Gianopoulos turned in one of my favorites. Katie Roiphe and her mom, Anne, did one, as did Ben Cheever and his son, John.
Dan:
How did you typically go about getting these folks to participate?
Dave:
Every year I go to the AWP conference and come home with piles of pictures of drunken authors in compromised positions. They get the negatives back for taking part in my silly ideas. No. No dirty secret. I kind of think authors like to be asked, that when they become writers they hope that they’ll get to do reviews and essays and op-ed pieces and be part of the conversation. It helps to ask when they have something to promote. And with something like Tag-team, it helped to approach writers with a partner in mind to get them excited. Great writers have been extraordinarily generous to me. I couldn’t do any of these projects without that.
Dan:
Was it during your turn at The Journal News that you curated the Twenty Minute Stories in McSweeney’s 12? How would you describe that experience? How did you go about deciding what authors to invite to participate?
Dave:
McSweeney’s 12 was published while I was at the Journal News, but assembled when I was still at the Hartford Courant. Dave Eggers was a very generous supporter of the books section I edited there and he wrote five 20-minute stories that we ran in the paper. They turned out to be such fun that Dave and Eli Horowitz were nice enough to turn over a large part of the quarterly to them. I’m not sure I ever enjoyed a project more. Essentially I made a dream list of contributors, wrote a lot of letters and opened the mailbox every day amazed by who replied. There were probably 110 authors who did three 20-minute stories each. We published about 40 of them in McSweeney’s 12, and I still have a shoebox with all the other ones, unpublished mini-stories by some fantastic writers.
Dan:
October 16, 2006. The first fifth of Arthur Phillips’s “Groundhog Day” goes up and Five Chapters is live. How long had you been planning it out and how many stories did you already have lined up by the time you went live?
Dave:
You know, I threw the idea of a serial fiction site out over lunch with a friend, and he said “why not do it?” This would have been sometime in May. And again, writers were unbelievably kind to hand over stories to a site that existed only in my imagination. Arthur Phillips, Jennifer Egan, Jess Walter, Lauren Grodstein and Josh Emmons were in hand before it went live, and perhaps a couple of others I am leaving out. Jess had just been nominated for the National Book Award, Arthur and Jennifer are beloved – the fact that I could tell people that writers of that caliber were on board meant everything as I tried to collect stories for an as-yet-launched web site.
Dan:
I am reminded by my own post that you targeted literary bloggers as one means of getting the word out. What other methods have you employed?
Dave:
Relentless spamming. I have an email list that goes out every Sunday to most anyone who has ever made the mistake of giving their email or responding to me in the past. I’m sorry about that. Feel free to just delete it. I’ve advertised a little on Galleycat and on ArtsJournal. That might have just been preaching to the choir, though. Really, bloggers have been the most important – I send out emails to as many media folks as I can in hopes that they’ll open one and discover the site and write about it, or link to it. The New York Times and LA Times have, which was very cool. New York magazine made one of the stories an online pick of the week. Largeheartedboy.com is amazing – he has the link to us up every Monday and that sends more traffic to the site than almost anything else. I’m sure I am leaving out other people who have been very supportive.
Dan:
How far in advance are you usually? In terms of having stories accepted, completed and sectioned into five pieces ready for posting online?
Dave:
Right now, I have a pretty good sense of what will be on the site through the end of June. Some of those stories are in hand, some of them are divided into chapters, and some have been promised by the writers and yet to arrive. I’m a newspaper/magazine guy, so I kind of like the thrill of not being overly planned and being on the edge. And I think the authors, who are used to the crazy long lead times of publishing, enjoy it when I accept a story and tell them it will be up in two weeks. It’s a different experience.
Dan:
Was there any sort of thought process into which author you wanted to be the 75th? Or will there be for the 100th author? Or do you just put the stories online as you’ve accepted them?
Dave:
When I realized 75 was around the corner, I definitely wanted it to be a special story. Kate Christensen’s story was in hand, and I’d been holding it for May when The Great Man comes out in paperback, but asked her if we could move it up. I’d always wanted her for Tag-team and it never worked out, so I was pretty excited when this story came in over the email. She’d also just won the PEN/Faulkner award. I’m sure being story 75 on FiveChapters is just as exciting. Ha.
Dan:
Not to try to get you into too much trouble, but is there one author that you’ve published that you were most excited about getting work from? And, is there one author out there that you’d just about kill to get a story from?
Dave:
All of these authors are hand-picked so I’m incredibly excited to have published them all. But one who comes to mind that was really cool was Katherine Hester. She wrote a story collection I loved called Eggs for Young America that was published in the mid 1990s. It won one of the big story awards, got great reviews, and then she seemed to disappear. All I could find online was that she had lived in Texas and moved to Germany. I kept Googling though, in hopes that some lead would come up, and after years of searching for her, one day I came across her parenting blog. There was no contact info, so I left her a crazy note in the comments and tried not to sound like a stalker. She wrote back with an excellent story that we published in February.
Ah, I could rattle off the usual suspects, but I suspect I won’t have that Don DeLillo or Philip Roth story anytime soon. But someone I’d really like to have on the site is John Jay Osborn Jr., who wrote The Paper Chase and many other novels in the 70s and 80s, but hasn’t published any new fiction in some time. He’s been very patient and sweet with my pestering emails and I think it might happen at some point.
Dan:
In a bit of self-serving on my end – what do you think of Dzanc Books and the Best of the Web anthology series they’ve (we’ve) instituted, the first effort of which, Best of the Web 2008, will appear in mid-July?
Dave:
Roy Kesey! Yannick Murphy! Allison Amend! More, please. It’s great work. I haven’t seen the anthology but what I would say is that there is great writing on the web. People know about the political blogs and the journals like Slate and the music sites but I’m not sure people know how much interesting cultural criticism and fiction is out there – or maybe it gets lost in a sea of soul-sucking snarky gossip blogs. And if the Best of the Web series cuts through the chaff and highlights all the excellent work out there, that’s a real service. You’ll have the franchise like Best American Short Stories in no time. Put FiveChapters in!
Dan:
Okay, back to you – what do you have in store for readers post issue 75? Any specific authors you can divulge, or, have you given any thought to how long you plan on keeping Five Chapters going?
Dave:
After Kate Christensen, we’ve got new stories by three debut novelists – Nathaniel Rich, Ed Park and Andrew Foster Altschul. Some of the writers scheduled for May and June include Julia Glass, Darin Strauss and Ron Rash. As long as writers like that keep sending me stories, there’s no reason to stop!
Dan:
You’ve come up with, or at least utilized, so many creative ideas, as noted above, 20 Minute Stories, Tag-Team Fiction, Serialized Short Stories Online – is there another great idea rustling about in that head of yours ready to be thrown at the reading world any time soon?
Dave:
What I’d like to do is expand FiveChapters – these stories ought to be downloadable as podcasts, we ought to have an RSS feed, there ought to be author interviews to go along with the stories. Hopefully some of those things will happen over the next year.
Dan:
Lastly, what work(s) would you memorize for posterity if you were a character in Fahrenheit 451?
Dave:
I should go with short stories: I’d say John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and “Builders” by Richard Yates.
Dan:
Thanks again, Dave, for taking the time to answer these questions, as well as for being a huge part of helping such great work find a home these past 75 weeks.
Dave:
Thank you for helping turn people on it! All the old stories are in the archives, so come on over to FiveChapters.com and catch up if you’re just learning about the site now.
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