By Dan Manzanares
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Alexander Lumans[/caption]
Ask folks about Alexander Lumans and you'll get an earful of enthusiastic praise. Not only do his students love his workshops, they love him. Lumans, as everyone calls him, is well known around Lighthouse for being wise (see his writing advice at work here), and funny, and kind. If Lighthouse held weird popularity contests, Lumans would certainly be voted "Best All-Around Guy to Sip Whiskey With While Dissecting the Meaning of Life."
He's also incredibly accomplished, having earned fellowships or scholarships to the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, ART342, Norton Island, RopeWalk Writers Retreat, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He received the 2013 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize and the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review. Plus, his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, and The Normal School, among others. Lumans is leading several workshops this spring including the 8 Week: Intro to Writing the Short Story starting March 24, 4-Week: Fiction 101 starting March 25, and 8 Week: Advanced Short Story Workshop starting March 26.
Read on to learn more.
Let's start with the basics, the question with which every interview gets kicked-off. If your workshop were to be paired with a drink, what drink would that be, and why?
The initial urge is to answer with my favorite drink, but I won’t. (If you want to know, you’ll just have to take a class with me and find out). If you want to go simple, my workshop’s drink pairing would be a Hot Whiskey: lemon, brown sugar, cloves, whiskey. It has all my favorite elements. Whiskey is the character, cloves are the plot points, lemon is the language, and sugar is the voice—I know that doesn’t make a complete story, but they are the elements I tend to most value in a story. I also found this “Call of Cthulhu” cocktail that sounds so amazing…I might have to retract the Hot Whiskey choice and just say that’s my workshop pairing: a Call of Cthulhu. Tentacles carved from a lime shell? Come on!
You presented at Making the Mountain a few months back. I was fascinated by what you had to say about incorporating 'the sublime moment' into your writing. Talk a little bit about that, please. Then, tell us, how does a writer go about hunting the sublime?
This goes back to one of the big lessons I learned in grad school from my mentor Pinckney Benedict: that powerful images make or break the story. And I don’t mean a litany of images about beautiful hummingbirds carrying iridescent ribbons into a blooming cherry blossom trees while the sun sets over a dolphin hugging a whale shark. I mean an image that stays with the reader. Forever. A detail, a moment, a whole scene can be an image. But in order for that image to have such sticking power, it has to be a sublime image. As I said in my presentation, the sublime can be defined as “the pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy the observer.” And that hurt can simply be defying explanations: that which harms the rational mind. I learned to hinge stories on these sublime images that transcended the narrative scope: a bog church with Spanish moss hanging from its eaves like snakeskins, an elephant raging in a barn, a moon covered in yellow mold.
As for how the writer hunts the sublime, that might be the best part: you don’t have to hunt it. It hunts you. It will find you as long as you make yourself available to noticing sublime moments in everything around you. I call them Moments of the Day. Just yesterday, I saw a small pink poster on a telephone pole that simply advertised “The first day of Spring is here!” along with crudely drawn pictures of a cat and flowers. I cannot explain why this stuck with me (one of the hallmarks of a sublime moment). But I know that somehow the image of that poster is going to find its way into a story of mine.
You have strange items on your writing desk, so I've heard, and you go to strange places to write, as in your upcoming residency in the Arctic Circle. That's it, no question. J/k. Are you inspired by oddities, and if so, what makes something odd, and how do you write about oddness without it becoming cliché?
That’s a hard question. The line between oddity for oddity’s sake versus oddity that makes itself undeniable (and therefore important to the story). It partly has to do with its rendering in the work. Lovecraft would spend massive paragraphs of Cyclopean language to describe just a small statue or architectural detail, and in doing so, he’d make it so well rendered that it couldn’t not be a believed-in thing. You can make anything odd. This isn’t to say it’s as easy as making your head cheerleader character also secretly a Dungeon Master in her spare time; rather, deep investigation into nearly anything renders it “odd” because we live so much on the surface. To ask pointed questions of the accepted things—How do we actually have conversations every day? Why are the flatirons shaped like that? What’s the purpose of a vulture not having feathers on its boiled-looking head?—is to practice in odd-making. “Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.” (Flaubert); something is only odd if it's unexplored or misunderstood. I want a story to convince me to believe in the oddity because the story operates according to the rules its narrator/plot/voice set forth, either proving or disproving its own in-house truths. It, of course, helps that I, like Mulder, want to believe because, as Camus says, “The absurd does not liberate; it binds.”
Let's end our journey together in the same way all interviews end, with a nod to the M68 globular cluster in the Hydra constellation. What must a story do to have staying power, a lasting light, or should a writer not worry about that sort of thing and focus instead on simply rubbing two sticks together to see what sparks?
(Besides seeing my answer for question 2) I’ll always remember this one ending that I read in my first fiction writing class in college (and it’s an ending I’m always trying to write): T.C. Boyle’s “Tooth and Claw” (from the eponymous collection). At the end (after the narrator has lost a possible girlfriend and tried to free a wild serval he locked in his bedroom—I know, perfect setup, right?), he narrates, “I steeled myself, pulled open the door and slipped inside. And then-and I don't know why-I pulled the door shut behind me.” This last line chills me. Every time. It’s holding two dissimilar modes in one suspended moment: internal indecision and decisive action. And it’s not a flat-out epiphany of something like “I would never play dice games in bars again.” That admittance of “not knowing why” is so stunning. Maybe it gives me hope that actions don’t have to have clear or understood motives. And then the door slamming shut—it’s, ironically, opening up the next moment of this narrator’s life, but it’s also telling us we’ve seen all we need to see as readers.
I don’t think that answers your question. Let me try again. Worrying about lasting power is a false goal because you can never predict what a reader will take away. Worry, instead, about what keeps you yourself reading (and writing). And if that’s the sparks from flint struck on tinder, or disrupted starlight in a coffee cup, or long shadows on an empty football field covered in snow, trust your instinct because, as Marilynne Robinson once described Melville’s narration in Moby Dick, your instinct should be like “light on water: wherever it rests, it sparkles.”
Lumans will be teaching 8 Week: Intro to Writing the Short Story starting March 24, 4-Week: Fiction 101 starting March 25, and 8 Week: Advanced Short Story Workshop starting March 26. Stayed tuned here for more lightning interviews with instructors joining us in the spring!
Dan Manzanares is Lighthouse's Creative Curator. He's a published poet and an aspiring novelist.
