by Kate Barrett
I only just met Christopher Merkner last week, even though Lighthouse hired him to teach over a month ago and his class has been available for registration for weeks. Let me just say, I am really excited. Maybe it’s weird to conclude this from an interaction that lasted somewhere in the ballpark of 15 minutes, but Chris strikes me as one of the nicest people on earth. That’s right—the whole planet. You might cry hyperbole here, but read on. I dare you not to melt a little when he talks about holding hands with his wife and kids.
What are you currently working on?
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Christopher Merkner[/caption]
My wife and I have a mutual writer-friend who says she has never really written a poem or an essay outside the context of the book she’s imagining it inhabiting. For me, that’s kind of a remarkable concept, because for most of my career I have taken one piece—one story—at a time. Though I have no major qualms with the outcome of this, as my first book came out last year, very happily, I’m still not sure I’m in love with my approach. So I am currently working on making two books, two interesting and formally interesting whole texts, one that probably looks more like a novel and another that probably looks like a collection of fictions. I like what Kyle Minor did most recently with Praying Drunk, and I feel this way about the books of most of my favorite authors (Michael Ondaatje, Jenny Boully, WG Sebald, R Erica Doyle, Selah Saterstrom…). These writers seem to be working with this intention of putting in the hands of a reader a very big experience, a big peculiar and memorable experience that reaches broadly and, at the same time, hits us in very specific ways. That’s what I am working on; that’s the current project.
Do you have a particular writing routine? What is it?
I am committed right now—and have been for a few months—to writing five hundred words a day—no more, no less. That’s the destination daily. Some days, this takes me fifteen minutes; other days, it stretches hours. My friend Josh Russell got me on this regimen, and I am grateful to him for it. It’s been a good plan for me at this time in my life.
Where is your favorite place on earth?
My favorite place on earth is inside my memories of our kids when they were younger. Let me make the obligatory clarification/overture that I love our kids more and more each and every day, because of course I do, but when I slip into a time before, even if it was a week ago, or yesterday, I am absolutely in my favorite place on earth. To be here on earth, with my amazing wife and these amazing kids, thinking of then, before, when the kids lived in a way that never, never fails to feel perfect? That may not be the ideal place to exist on earth, necessarily, but it happens to be my favorite place on earth.
What kinds of things do you collect? (I think everyone collects something, but maybe that’s just me.)
The Merkners are—and have been for about three years now—in a perpetual state of shedding, so this question is tricky for me. But for all that we’ve given up, given away, and left behind over the past few years, I can say that I continue to collect a good bit of Swedish and Swedish-American kitschy bits: flags, books, pictures, recipes, songs, keys, just odds and ends, things that at some point, in some way, had the hands of a Swedish person or Swedish-American person’s hands on them.
What’s your worst habit?
Wondering why people are so often unkind to other people. It’s a nasty thing to think about, and it brings nothing good of itself.
If you had to sum up how it feels to be happy, what would it look like?
This past year—and even still now—I have spent an unthinkably significant amount of time away from my wife and kids. That is the precise opposite of what I would sum up happiness to be; that is the sum up of the opposite of happiness. The sum up of happy, I think, would be holding hands. Or maybe that’s the sum up of sappy. I don’t really know the difference: I love my wife’s hands, and I love to hold them, and I love reaching back to grab one of the kids by the hand when we’re out and about, and I love to just holding it out behind me, or out to my side, and then have one of them coming up to take my hand in theirs: that is the sum up of happy for me.
What’s your favorite kind of arctic wildlife?
The kind they responsibly film and reproduce for television programming on National Geographic, so my kids and I can watch it and marvel. I could watch the walrus for hours. I mean, c’mon, those whiskers! And those tusks—and that word, “tusks”! and the word “blubber”!
Who is the best author no one knows about? What book of theirs should people read and why?
I never know who people have read and who they haven’t. I think this is a dooming question! Let me say it this way: I think everyone should spend some time reading Meg Pokrass (Damn Sure Right), David Leavitt (The Marble Quilt), Padgett Powell (The Interrogative Mood), Josh Russell (My Bright Midnight), Margaret Luongo (If the Heart is Lean), Imad Rahman (I Dream of Microwaves), Tara Masih (Where the Dog Star Never Grows), Spring Ulmer (Benjamin’s Spectacles), Josh Harmon (The Cold Season), Luke Rolfes (Flyover Country), Danielle Dutton (Sprawl), Greg Howard (Hospice), Sara Veglahn (The Mayflies), Chris Narozny (Jonah Man), Erik Anderson (The Poetics of Trespass). These are good people writing good books.
Christopher will be teaching the 8-Week: Online Intermediate Fiction workshop starting March 30. Stay tuned here for more lightning interviews with new instructors joining us in the spring!
Kate Barrett is Lighthouse’s Program Coordinator. She writes short fiction and dabbles in poetry when she’s feeling bold. Before coming to Lighthouse, Kate worked in various capacities for the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming. If she’s not writing, you can usually find her biking, running, snowboarding, eating tasty things, petting dogs, or demonstrating her awesome powers of at-will napping.
