Dave Madden saw his debut collection, If You Need Me I'll Be Over There by Break Away Books via Indiana University Press. I love the selections editor Michael Martone has made for this series over the years and have enjoyed the couple of stories I've read from this one so far.
EWN: Your short story collection, If You Need Me I’ll Be Over There, was published in 2016. What story within the collection had the earliest publication history outside of being in the collection, and what was that history?
Dave: “An Uneven House”, about a house for bygone newlyweds where the floor doesn’t work right, got published in 2005 by Beloit Fiction Journal. The history of the story is unspecial: I wrote it for a graduate workshop after dreaming about living in such a house. Workshop pointed out how I opened with a superfluous scene. Consensus was that I should cut it and just open on backstory. I made the revision, submitted it to about five or six journals, and BFJ took it. A decade later I looked at the story and found it to be chiefly terrible in its treatment and understanding of women, so I made this a feature of the male protagonist, and I wrote a new opening scene. I was never easy with opening in backstory.
EWN: How did the publication of this particular collection come about? Were you solicited by the publisher, win a contest, agent submission, etc.?
Dave: My book came out with an Indiana University Press imprint called Break Away Books, which looks to publish creative work about the Midwest. I lived for 7 years each in Pittsburgh and Nebraska, which if not Midwestern at least touch the Midwest. Michael Martone, the series editor, put out the word that IUP/Break Away Books was looking for nontraditional writing on the region. I’ve got a lot of queer people in my stories, which felt nontraditional from the Midwestern writing I’ve seen, and once I saw the stories working geographically together, I sent the press my book and they very kindly accepted it.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as an author? Primary form to work with, or something you write when an idea hits, or …?
Dave: Not a primary form. It’s a form I struggle with more than any other—the smallness of them, the brevity, the rigidity that comes from them being perhaps the most analyzed literary form in the CW academy, where I grew up, in a sense. And yet I like imagining the lives of other people. I like writing in voices other than my own. The short story seems to be an ideal form when what I want to do is explore a voice and a character.
EWN: Where do short stories fit within your life as a reader?
Dave: To be honest, I read them very rarely, about which (now that your question has confronted me with this fact) I’m not sure what to think. They are ideally suited for my reading sessions, which these days tend to be in bed, just before lights-out. Novels are harder to read this way, in 30-min bursts interrupted by a stretch of days. Also, I’d much rather read a short story than an essay before bed, leave my brain imagining worlds and other people rather than think over ideas and histories. A tiny place to dream before dreaming.
EWN: How will you be celebrating National Short Story Month this May?
Dave: I have a number of new(ish) collections that have been piling up on my bedside table: Marie-Helene Bertino’s Safe as Houses, Ted Wheeler’s Bad Faith, Xhenet Aliu’s Domesticated Wild Things, to name a few. May always means the end of my spring semester, and so now that I’ve got a little time on my hands I hope to celebrate by digging into these promising collections.
EWN: Thank you very much for your time!
Dave: Thank you, Dan, for all you do for writers.
Dave Madden is the author of the story collection, If You Need Me I'll Be Over There, and a nonfiction book on taxidermy. His shorter work has appeared in Harper's, Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere, and he's received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony as well as the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He teaches at the University of San Francisco.
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