An Interview with Steve Adams

 

We're excited to welcome Steve Adams to the blog. His debut novel Remember This releases October 11th with University of Wisconsin Press. The book follows John Martin, a talented graphic designer employed as a word processor for a prestigious New York investment bank, as he enters into an affair with his married boss and is suddenly forced to confront his serial history of relationships with otherwise attached, emotionally complex women, and his damaged past concerning his family and three older sisters. 

Though Remember This is your debut novel, forthcoming this October, you have had stories and essays published in many venues over the years. When were you first bitten by the writing bug? 

 

It’s a much longer story, but I was twenty-five, in Austin and pretty lost, studying acting, jazz guitar, generally flailing about, just trying to find a place to put this “stuff” that was inside me and to get my feet under me. Strangely I’d never been exposed to modern poetry, and in a dance/movement class in the theater program our teacher had us spout modern poetry while leaping about (like fools, I’m sure). But the words struck me. I couldn’t believe I’d not been exposed to this amazing art form. So when they kicked me out of the acting program for stinking as an actor, I stumbled away and on a whim took a poetry class where I had the immense fortune of landing in an undergrad poetry class taught by the amazing, and still working, Albert Goldbarth. It was one of the best breaks of my life, and he even gave me a blurb for my novel. My life entirely changed direction at that point.

 

Can you share with us the experience of having been published for the very first time? 

 

It was pretty intense. After years of writing poetry, and then one-act plays, and moving to New York to see my one-acts produced, I took off to LA with dreams of cracking the big time as a screenwriter. It was a total washout and I soon decided it was time to give up writing and finally live a sensible life. No luck there! I didn’t last three months before I was so emotionally uncomfortable from not writing that I started writing prose for the first time just to blow off steam. I was thirty-eight then and realized immediately that after all this time I’d finally found my form. I wrote a half dozen short stories, one after another, and the first one to land won Glimmer Train’s New Writer’s Award, and—I promise I’m not making this up—I was staying at the motel across from Graceland in Memphis when I found out I’d won. I’m not making this up either—in NYC my last play to be produced there before I left for LA was a one-act called “Velvet Elvis.” Elvis has been my patron saint ever since. 

 

You write both fiction and non-fiction. Which comes more naturally? Why do you think that is? 

 

This is a tough question for me to answer, only because I don’t have a clear response. But the way my process works is my stories generally find me. Which doesn’t mean I don’t go out looking for ideas. But when one hits me, the fiction ones and the nonfiction ones just feel different. For one thing, my nonfiction, except for my writing process essays, is almost exclusively narrative driven, and so for me that means memoir. Of course you can always turn a true experience into fiction, but for me the true experiences always want to be written as memoir, because there’s the “truth” of the true story I want to uncover and get at.

 

When writing fiction, what comes first for you, the story or the characters? 

 

Honestly, I’m always looking for both, and with my stories that work it feels like they somehow happen at the same time. If a true character appears, that character will have a drive or a need or a want that’s unfulfilled, and that creates the trajectory of the story they’re going to follow. I think that’s why it feels they happen almost simultaneously. Though I’m not going to lie—I keep my eyes open for a purely brilliant narrative all the time. I’d kill for a premise as clear and solid as The Hunger Games.

 

How did the idea and storyline begin for Remember This? 

 

New York City is a very important place for me, and I probably feel like I belong there more than any other place, even during hard times. I lived there for sixteen years broken up into three forays over three decades, and in 2008 the economic collapse wiped out my job. As there was no work to be found in the city, I had to leave. I had several months of unemployment until my lease was out, so I spent those months wandering my beloved city, revisiting every place of importance to me. And, as I always do, I wrote. I started to write about what I was experiencing, that clock ticking on my life there. But I knew that alone wouldn’t sustain a full novel, so the idea came to me of a young man involved in an affair with a woman who is likely the love of his life, a married woman with a child, who is also his supervisor in the office where they work. They have two months together while her husband is out of the country. When John’s not with her he wanders the city much as I did, obsessively, taking it all in. And those two loves of his—the city and the woman—reflect each other, as the days wind down.

 

What was the most challenging part of the writing process for you? 

 

I am a writing coach and writing is a way of life for me, and also I know a lot of tricks to keep going. But if we’re talking about this novel, it was probably figuring out the structure. This was also one of the most exciting parts of writing the book, because I have two storylines: one current (the two-month affair in 1988 NYC), and one past (my protagonist’s childhood in Texas). The chapters are relatively short, and I grouped them together in sets of two and three, however it felt right organically. And I spent a good amount of time working with arranging these time periods so they’d click together, and build, and echo, and create emotional resonance. Once I realized I had—and I hope this doesn’t sound obnoxious, but—a beautiful, meaningful structure, I mean, man, that was a good day. There are so many elements that go into a successful novel, but it’s hard to think of anything more important than structure.

 

In what ways did the book change from first draft to the final manuscript? 

 

As I’ve said, the book has two storylines, the main one in 1988 AIDS-haunted NYC where my protagonist, John Martin, is an adult, and the second one nested inside, tracking John’s childhood with his three older sisters in Texas and how that led him to become who he is at this point, a man with a specific wound he’s unaware of. Anyway, my original draft just covered the main story—John wandering the city, in love with this woman and this city he is going to lose. After I finished and a few people read it, I realized this one storyline was not enough to sustain it, and I got this vision of him as a child in a very particular family in Texas with very particular issues. And so I wrote that storyline and inserted it, having the book toggle between the two stories. It made all the difference, giving a why to go with the what of John.

 

Which character, if any, do you most relate to? 

 

It would be John. We’re different, of course, and don’t have the same problems, but like him I moved to New York City and came into myself there. I would be there now if I could afford it. He and I share some history too, particularly hanging around the dynamic music scene in Austin in the early 80s. It was fun to pull some of those details into this book in its Austin section.

 

Which character was the most difficult to write?

 

This may sound obnoxious (again), but I didn’t find any of the characters hard to write. I didn’t struggle with them. In fact, it felt like they were teaching me about who they were. The hardest part of writing this novel was getting the structure right, making those two storylines line up. I had to make multiple runs at that, but once I had it, it clicked into place. I’m as proud of the structure of this book as anything else I’ve done.

 

What’s the most valuable advice someone has given you about writing?  

 

Writing is the best teacher of writing. So just write. Show up regularly, and produce pages, good and bad, it doesn’t matter. They will lead you somewhere, while at the same time teaching you more about how to write. As you know I’m a writing coach and I give variations of this advice to my clients all the time.

 

What’s a book you’ve read that you wish you had written? 

 

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I’ve only read it once, but the whole experience of it was magical and overwhelming. I have no idea how she pulled that off.

 

1.     What are you reading right now?

      In trying to take some weight off my reading load during this intense publicity process, I’ve turned back to my first love, poetry. Right now I’m rereading one of my favorites, William Stafford, and his collection, The Way It Is. At the same time I’m reading a book from my beloved mentor, Albert Goldbarth. Just reading a poem or two every morning and not having to carry a full-length narrative in my mind at the moment has been supporting me.

 

Steve Adams’s creative nonfiction has won a Pushcart Prize, been listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays, and has been published in The Pinch, The Millions, and elsewhere. In fiction, he’s won Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers, and his stories have been anthologized and published in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He’s been a guest artist at UT, a resident artist at Jentel, a scholar at the Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony, and his plays have been produced in NYC. He’s a writing coach and editor, and his website is  steveadamswriting.com. Remember This, his debut novel, will be featured at The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville the weekend of Oct. 14.