Matthew Zanoni Müller and I first met in 2008 as wide-eyed incoming students at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. After graduating, we kept in periodic touch over texts and email, over Zoom, and––in true writerly fashion––over noisy lunches at AWP. While it’s easy to feel unseen in the vast sea of publishing, what a joy it’s been to swim alongside Matt Müller, commiserating over setbacks and cheering on each other’s successes. This is the second book of Matt’s I’ve had the good fortune to read and celebrate and I’m thrilled to share our recent email exchange here in Gulf Coast.
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Karen Tucker: Congratulations on this outstanding story collection. I finished reading First Aid for Choking Victims, felt lightheaded in the best possible way, stood up and stretched, refilled my glass, and started reading your book all over again. Before I ask about your seemingly effortless skill with interiority, detail, imagery, and more, I'd love to hear how you came to choose these stories. You're a prolific writer who has published in numerous literary journals. What drew you to selecting these particular pieces for your debut collection? Do you see them sharing connective tissue or being in conversation with each other in some way?
Matthew Zanoni Müller: First of all, thank you for the kind words about these stories and for your interest in reading them. Most of these stories came to me as I was living in the Hudson Valley in New York, working a variety of jobs, and teaching as an adjunct at a community college. I was more or less without a writing community after I had finished my MFA and I began to realize that if I never wrote again, no one would notice. At least not in the larger world. There was something freeing in this.
So, I just started working on these stories, largely set in rural places, about people who were just a little bit outside of things and looking in on life. And how, for whatever reason, they were gripped by something that they couldn’t look away from and were taken away in that swell. Sudden moments of intensity: a storm, a love affair, a death, etc. So, they’re bound by that. They’re also bound by generally being set in the same area I was living in at the time, and having a similar atmosphere. This was something I was particularly interested in. Creating atmosphere and letting that drive the momentum perhaps more than a plot would.
KT: Your first published book was the memoir Drops On the Water: Stories about Growing up from a Father and Son, co-authored with your father Eric Müller. How would you describe writing fiction versus writing creative nonfiction? And how has your writing practice evolved over the past ten years?
MZM: Writing that book with my dad was a total gift. We egged each other on and each week had new little memoirs to share with one another. I think for me the big difference is that in memoir you’re trying to get something right about a person, an event, a feeling. You’re trying for accuracy. In fiction, I think, for me anyway, I’m more interested in the concept of the story. I’m trying to get the idea across. And this could be a feeling, a character’s experience, or some little insight about a life experience. The job then is to write into that reality as deeply as possible in order to bring it to life. In terms of my writing practice, it’s definitely changed over the years and has, as I imagine is true for many people, been very dependent on whatever job I may have at the time.
When I was writing the book with my dad, I was fresh out of college, interning at a writing colony one day a week, and working in an architect’s office the other days. I had the weekends free and used those to write. By the time I was writing this collection, I was squeezing in time in the evenings mostly, and then, once I became a full-time professor, I mostly used my summers to try and do a pass of revisions through the collection.
Now that I’m in administration, most of my writing time comes in the early mornings or on Saturdays. This is actually somewhat similar to when I was drafting these stories, some of which I actually wrote by showing up early to work and typing away for the twenty minutes I had all to myself in the adjunct office before anyone showed up. Just having those twenty minutes a couple times a week was enough to actually make a lot of progress. So, it’s all about just trying to wedge in little moments of writing time.
KT: Regarding your characters' experiences, you say you aimed “to write into that reality as deeply as possible,” and wow, did you pull it off. I can't remember the last book I read that rendered human thought and longing with the level of intimacy you've captured in this collection. To be blunt: how do you do it? Is it something you aim for even in the earliest exploratory drafts or is it something you shape in revision? What role does point-of-view play, given that these stories exclusively deploy third-person limited narration? And since roughly half the stories feature women protagonists, what was it like to write across gender?
MZM: I wish I could say that I started out with a clear intention to burrow deeply into a character’s experiences but there was very little planning and intention involved in the crafting of these stories. Not for lack of trying. I do think that most of my revision process came down to listening, as closely as possible, for the right notes to strike. I did a lot of learning in this collection and I feel that it has made me a more efficient writer, but nothing in this collection was efficient or came easily. All of these stories went through far too many drafts. They ballooned out of control and then were reined in and in other cases I just more or less lost control of them completely.
But I’ve always loved the experience of swimming deeply in another’s point of view, of occupying the space of a deeply lived reality. I sometimes find myself sort of floating over the surface of life, and fiction gives me the opportunity to dive under, to dip below the surface and spend time in a more charged and fully lived reality. It’s always how I’ve felt most comfortable writing––deep in psychic space.
In terms of writing across gender, I certainly had a lot of apprehension about this! I didn’t think about it much in the initial drafts, as the story just naturally chose its characters, but I thought about it a lot in revision and tried as hard as I could to get it right. I’m sure there are places where I don’t, but I hope that people will read these stories knowing that my intention was to try to render human experience as truthfully and thoughtfully as possible.
I think the point of view question is an interesting one because the limited-third person allows for this closeness but still employs the distance, or objectivity, that third person allows for. The characters are named, they’re held up, in a sense, as studies, and we observe their behavior, but, as the stories go on, we get closer and closer and deeper and deeper into their interiority and that outward barrier leaves us only to come up again, usually in moments of highest tension when we’re shocked back into an objective awareness of this thin barrier of distance, which allows us to see them more clearly, often as they are themselves coming to some realization about themselves or the world. Or that’s the hope, anyway.
KT: Years ago, you told me about watching the movie Die Hard with a group of childhood friends and the uncomfortable realization you had in the moment. Can you share that experience here, and do you think it shaped how you craft antagonists in fiction? Or maybe a better question would be: do you think it plays a role in the fact that although your stories have all kinds of wonderfully complex tension, they rarely, if ever, feature an explicit antagonist?
MZM: Oof, yeah, this is a tough one. You know, it’s funny, in earlier drafts of the “Watch Me” story, the mother was far meaner than she is now. I think I thought that I had to have mean characters to bring conflict into a story. It wasn’t until I gave her the space to be more naturally herself and, to my mind, more realistic, that I think the tension lines in the story really became clear. It doesn’t take these strict dualities for experiences to still be fraught or complicated or multifaceted or interesting.
The antagonist in the third Die Hard movie is German, and therefore easy to hate. We associate him with Nazis and his casual cruelty and sarcasm are all wrapped into that. And yet, I am German, and I would hate for people to associate me with all that’s bad about the history of Germany. This is something that movies often do. How many Muslim terrorist villains did we see after 9/11? So, if there’s anything I’m trying to do in rendering character, it is to render complexity.
I do think that this can get tricky with auxiliary characters who, by dint of not getting much airtime, can come across as stick figures. This can also happen when a character is seen in one very specific light by another character, who has shrunk them down to one main character trait. And yet, even in those descriptions, I try for one small note of human complexity, to the best of my ability.
KT: Ah, I'm so glad you brought up “Watch Me.” It's a wonderful example of how steering a narrative toward more subtle frictions can create obstacles that are even more slippery for characters to navigate. For example, if blunt anger had remained the primary driving force for the mother character, as she originally appeared in your first draft, she might have been easier for her daughter Abby, the story's protagonist, to handle. Certainly Abby's choices would have been simpler: fight her, walk away from her, or perform the role of obedient child. But because you've fashioned the mother character with a complexity that's in no way predictable, Abby finds herself uncertain how best to respond to her mother's behavior. Instead, Abby views this experience as “…a danger flaring around them, caught up in the glare of the sun…” As a result, the mother retains the power in the scene.
So, here's my question. In a 2020 interview in support of her story collection The Office of Historical Corrections, author Danielle Evans draws an explicit connection between power negotiations and the “intimate knowledge of self.” Your fiction reveals this to be true, not only in “Watch Me” but in most of your stories, most visibly in “Hank,” “The Sunfish,” and your tour de force story “I Want You To Tell Me.” How do you see power and intimacy playing out in your fiction? What are you thinking about when you craft scenes that feature shifting power dynamics between characters?
MZM: Thank you so much for this question. This is probably one of the central preoccupations of my work. I love how you point to those negotiations that, so often, characters lose. I am interested in those losses, in how they happen, in the ways in which they can be both personally derived or socially or politically determined.
In “Hank,” for example, the smallness of his fear is counterbalanced against the largeness of his physical frame. He is a man who is trying to enact masculinity in a world that expects him to behave in masculine ways, while having this fear that weakens and undercuts his ability to do so. To him it is big, but to others, it is small. He knows it, and yet can’t overcome his fear.
In “I Want You to Tell Me,” the main character sees the source of her power in her intelligence, her artistic genius (as yet undeveloped), and the future accolades stemming from this genius. Pushing up against this is a deep fear in the essential meaninglessness of all things and, especially, her existence. People who do not struggle against this meaninglessness are more or less incomprehensible to her. Or, at the very least, boring. And yet, when she notices that others may have some grasp on a truth that she herself cannot reach, she becomes desperate to know what it might be. The dynamic shifts. Her class, her education, her charm, all work toward trying to get it from someone else. In this case, her boyfriend’s father.
What ends up being both disastrous and thrilling for the “Hank” character, is that when his powerlessness is revealed, it also, seemingly, reveals his entire self, or, at least, the self he has hidden from the world for his whole life. The opposite is essentially true in “I Want You to Tell Me,”, in that she remains unperceived at the end of that story, which drives her into a kind of horror at her own place in existence (though one could argue that it may also shock her into a closer relationship to a new reality).
KT: “Watch Me” is also a brilliant example of a story that elegantly expands and shrinks the narrative distance. I'm fascinated with what you said earlier, about the value of backing away during peak moments of tension so that readers can experience the characters more fully. I've never thought about it in this way, but I think you're so right. Can you talk more about this?
MZM: Oh gosh, I wish I had something clear to articulate here; I guess I’ve just grown a bit suspect of moving every story toward a moment of crisis or confrontation. While these moments can reveal something about a character in the choices they make, they can also wash over the complexity of reactions that may be occurring inside a character’s consciousness. Taking a moment to see how a specific event is resonating inside a character is, to my mind, more interesting for the ways in which we can begin to see the complex development, progression, or creation of a person’s worldview, especially in someone as young as Abby, from “Watch Me.”
So, I guess I’m more interested in the effects of an action on a person’s inner life than I am about how they react to those actions. I also think that while there are certainly moments of crisis and confrontation in everyday life, there are far more moments of avoidance. Leaving room for that avoidance, and burrowing into how that might affect someone, seems like a worthwhile avenue for fiction.
KT: The first story in your collection, “Mr. Perfect,” features a character named Matt. He isn't you of course, but the name does invite readers to draw connections between author and character. Would you mind sharing your intentions for this choice?
MZM: There was a story in the papers when I was in high school about an athlete who jumped off a bridge into the Hudson River. I don’t remember the details, or which school he went to, only that they described him as having a kind of perfect life in that he was well-loved, successful in school, and very good at sports. I went to a much smaller school than he did, but I also got a lot out of my classes, loved playing sports, and while my social life was certainly complex, as I imagine it is for all high school students, I was generally well-loved. I think what interested me in that story at the time was how someone who seemingly had everything, could still find something unbearable about living. Or, perhaps, was unable to find the solution, or the direction, or the guidance he needed to make his particular situation tenable.
The story I wrote I think probably fails, because it doesn’t fully get at the scope of the complexity I was hoping for, but it does point to some of the struggles, and some of the essential unknowability of what drove him to his death. I also had someone close to me die when he was in high school and often thought of us as being similar in many ways, though we went to different schools. I think of him often, and his memory has preoccupied me, as has the question of what his life meant, since he died so young. I guess what I’m saying is that I saw some aspect of myself in these people and wanted to connect to that in the story. To connect to them and to the struggles they were facing in their lives, young as they were.
KT: Thank you for the narrative intimacy you've shared with readers and with me––both in your story collection and in this conversation. To pull back a little and widen the frame: what advice would you give emerging writers who are working on their debut story collections? What helped you navigate the inevitable speed bumps and setbacks? Is there anything you would encourage writers to focus on or remember as they push forward with their art?
MZM: I wish I had good advice to give, but really, for me, it was a kind of stubborn compulsion to keep going that helped me to eventually complete this book. There were many times where I doubted the stories and thought that I should stop working on them and just move on. This idea became particularly alluring whenever new writing projects would come up. But, these stories kept calling me back, kept preoccupying me, and so, I just stubbornly plowed on. I should also say that I made choices in my life, wherever possible and healthy, to put my writing first, or at least, to find space for it. That did mean sacrificing other activities. While my friends were out kayaking on a river in the summer, I was in my room working on a revision. I often questioned this choice, as writers have to live in order to write, but then again, they also have to write in order to be writers. So, I’ve by and large always chosen writing, and I think, if you do that, you’ll find a way. It just won’t be out in the sunshine with friends, haha.
KT: My final question is a two-parter: What books––story collections, poetry collections, novels, nonfiction––inspired you as you worked on First Aid for Choking Victims? And what writing project(s) are you working on now?
MZM: Oh gosh. So many. It’s hard to quantify here, since I spent so many years on these stories and also taught so many stories during that time. I do really love Elizabeth Strout’s story collections and I think mine shares some similarities in terms of the rural settings and the focus on interior lives.
I also love Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage for similar reasons and for the edge of danger lurking in her stories. At one point I had a pretty long commute and I had an audiobook of Henry James stories I was listening to, which had probably an outside effect on the story “I Want You To Tell Me.” In fact, I had to sort of tamp down the poor imitations of Jamesian sentence styles that I couldn’t pull off.
In terms of current work, I’m moving between two novels, one set in Cape Cod in the summer before 9/11 and another about a German immigrant artist who moves to Oregon in the late eighties. The first is a love story with some reflections on class and immigration and the second is obviously an immigrant story but also reflects a great deal on art and the artistic process and how those square with familial and social pressures.
The fun thing with both of these books is that they have very different main characters. The Cape Cod book is told in first-person point of view by a sixteen-year-old boy and the second is in third-person and follows a German woman in her mid-twenties who has two children. I work on one for a spell and then, when it needs rest and reflection, I move back to the other. In the meantime, I’ve amassed just about enough stories for another collection, so that’s exciting.
Thank you so much for this interview and for all the thoughtful questions! It’s been so fun!
