Scott Gould is the author of five books, including The Hammerhead Chronicles, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Fiction, and Things That Crash, Things That Fly, winner of a 2022 Memoir Prize for Books. His newest collection, Idiot Men, features a cast of unmistakably Southern characters—messy, chaotic men who are rendered complicated inner lives by Gould’s carefully-considered prose.
I was one of Scott Gould’s students at The SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, and I reached out to him over email to discuss strange publishing adventures, characters with edge, and the balancing act between humor and seriousness.
NELLIE HILDEBRANDT: I have so many questions I want to ask about Idiot Men, but just to get started, I’d love to know about your experience putting this collection together. You’ve had a book released every year for the past four years—The Hammerhead Chronicles came out last year, Things That Crash, Things That Fly the year before that, and Whereabouts the year before. I’m curious what felt different this time around, especially since some of your last books were released during the pandemic. Has your writing process evolved with each book? Does it feel different coming back to the short story form after the release of your novels?
SCOTT GOULD: Idiot Men was actually supposed to come out during the pandemic. It’s got a weird publishing history. I guess you could file it under “Curious Adventures in Indie Press Publishing.” Here’s what happened . . .
Back in December of 2020, I saw that this new press was starting up in Georgia, and they were having a short story collection contest. They were offering publication and $1000. So I thought, Hey, I could use a thousand bucks. The only problem was, I didn’t have a collection of stories. I mean, I had a lot of stories—a good number of which had been published in good places—but they weren’t gathered together. So I printed them all out and laid them on my dining room table, and I couldn’t spot any theme or any sort of connective tissue between the stories. They didn’t seem to hang together. Some of them were written years and years ago, some were relatively new. Three of them were about one character, Gable Massey, so those were linked, but the rest were set in different locations, with different voices telling the stories, different situations. Definitely not a linked collection.
Then it sort of hit me. The stories all featured men who were making bad choices or dealing with the aftereffects of their bad choices. I remember thinking, These guys are all pretty much idiot men. Then I thought, Okay, I’ll do some revising and put them in a logical order and call the collection Idiot Men. Barely made the deadline for the contest.
Fast forward a little bit, to January 2021, I believe. The collection wins the damn contest. I get my thousand dollars, and I start working with the brand-new press on this collection. The publisher assigns me an editor, and we start working through the stories, making them better, tighter. She was really helpful at smoothing out some of the rougher edges. The publisher designed a cover and advanced reader copies were printed. Had a publication date: Oct. 26, 2021.
Then the publisher started disappearing at important times. He’d drop off the radar for three or four days, right when we were supposed to be making important decisions about stuff. He missed some deadlines. A few weeks before the publication date and the book launch, I wasn’t sure we even had books printed and ready for sale. The publisher would pop back into the world and tell me everything was okay, then disappear for a while. I was getting super nervous and anxious. Then one Sunday afternoon, I got a call from the woman who edited the book with me, and she said something to the effect that I wasn’t hearing from the guy because he’d been in county jail, that he’d been arrested for stalking and making threats and had been arrested. Turns out, he had a pretty serious substance abuse problem. Then a couple days later, he sends me an email and apologizes for being out of touch. He said he’d been in the hospital with Covid for a couple of days . . . when he’d actually been in the county lockup.
I immediately tried to get out of the contract, but he was aggressively adamant that he was going to publish the collection, even though he had a trial date coming up and all that stuff. I talked to an attorney, and he told me the contract wasn’t binding anymore, because of all the deadlines that the publisher had missed, but still, the guy wouldn’t let me out of it. And we were doing all this bizarre negotiation while he was in rehab, which was his next stop after jail. I didn’t feel like I could shop the collection around to any other publishers unless we had a formal termination agreement . . . which I finally received after a lot of backing-and-forthing. It was pretty awkward. I don’t like conflicts. I hope that the publisher is doing well. I haven’t heard from him since then.
Anyway, once I was free from that press, I thought, Well, I’ve got a collection now, so I should send it around. The first place I sent it was Vine Leaves Press, the publisher of my memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly. They took the collection, and here we are. It’s been a fantastic experience with them. Very supportive, very helpful during the editing process. They’re great people.
So to get to your actual question about the experience of putting this book together . . . the only reason I put the collection together is because of a contest and a new, indie press and a thousand dollars, which I guess is as good a motivation as any. Most of the stories had a track record of publication with wonderful literary magazines, so I felt the content was worthy. What I couldn’t have foreseen was the jail time, the attorneys, the awkward email exchanges and the eventual wonderfulness (thankfully) at the end of the journey. It’s just weird that it was supposed to be published two years ago. Timing wise, I supposed it’s fortunate that it was delayed. It wasn’t squeezed in between two other books.
As far as the difference in the process . . . when I began revising the stories, I was reminded how distinctly different the mindset is for writing a story versus working on a novel. For me, short stories are always sprints. You attack them with a burst of energy, then relax, then return to them with another burst of energy. Novels are marathons . . . maybe ultra-marathons. You have to settle in for the long haul. You have to pace yourself, conserve your energy, plan when to use it. Before late 2020, when I put this collection together, I hadn’t been in the short fiction state of mind in a few years. I’d been busy writing novels and a memoir. It was fun to think at another speed. And frankly, it took some getting used to. My brain was accustomed to the marathon pace, to the grind of planning a narrative and characters that I had to sustain for 100,000 words. I had to switch to a different gearbox when I sat down with the stories. I had to create a narrative in a framework of, say, 5,000 words. That’s a huge difference, a different psychology.
NH: That’s such a bizarre publishing story—it’s funny how that experience kind of fits into the tone of some of these stories, or even feels like it could’ve happened to one of these characters.
I sometimes think growing up in the South, we see or hear about an inordinate amount of bizarre events. That definitely tracks with this collection; characters get themselves into a number of crazy situations, and as a reader, I believe all of them, because they’re so specific they feel like they have to be true. I’m curious about how much of this collection borrows from outlandish things that happened to you or that you heard of happening, and how much is just totally made up?
SG: The South is definitely fertile territory for strange characters and strange situations, right? Then again, I guess every region of the country has its own particular brand of bizarre. I do tend to draw from what I see around me or what’s happened to me, but those characters or situations are only real starting points to begin creating the fiction. I’m not sure there’s a definite boundary between fiction and nonfiction—at least I hope there isn’t. No one ever completely makes something up; you’re always drawing from your memory or your experience or the people in your life. You know that old creative writing workshop cliché, “Write what you know?” I don’t really buy into that a hundred percent. Instead, I tell students something else. I tell them to write what they know well enough to lie about. And that’s what I do in my work. So yeah, my father and I used to fish some out in Utah, and we’d drive through this little town called Manila, and we’d pass a bar there called Sportsman Liquors. I’ve never been in that bar or stopped in that town. But I thought, “I want to write a story that takes place in this lonely town, in that dive-looking bar.” And that’s the point where I can start telling lies. I guess I like to put creative corrals around me from the start. For instance, I’ll tell myself: write a story with the most despicable character I can think of, but make the reader stay with him until the end. And one time, at a rest stop, I saw this truck driver walking a cat on a leash—and I thought, “I gotta write a story about that dude.” Or I’ll pick a couple of objects and write a story that features those things, like an El Camino and a colon-cleaning machine. I like to see what happens. I like telling some lies (I don’t have an El Camino or a colon-cleaning machine, by the way).
NH: I love your advice about writing what you know well enough to lie about—I remember you saying those exact words in class.
Some pretty dark things happen in these stories. I’m thinking particularly about the ending of “The Smells at Certain Heights,” or the dog in “Taps on the Forehead.” At the same time, the narrator might be making some kind of quippy remark, or thinking something so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. How do you describe the relationship between humor and seriousness in this collection? How did you find a natural balance between the two?
SG: I don’t really know how to explain my formula for the relationship between humor and seriousness. I can say that I’m very attracted to a darker brand of humor. I suppose that’s why I love Coen Brothers movies so much. I truly enjoy the process of taking a reader to a place where they’re cringing a bit and metaphorically shading their eyes from the scene, and at the same time, chuckling about what’s in front of them. When you’ve put a character or characters in a situation that makes the reader say, “Hey, I’m laughing and I know I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but I’m laughing all the same,” you’ve done your job as a writer. You’ve connected with the reader on a level that surprises both of you. In those cases—when the reader is laughing about something dark—you, as a writer, have completely manipulated their emotions. And I think—I hope—that’s what readers really desire, even if they won’t admit it. I mean, don’t we like stories to take our emotions to unexpected places? And maybe laughing when you shouldn’t is one of those places? And you’re right, the relationship between humor and seriousness is a balancing act, and I get it wrong sometimes, mix the ingredients wrong. The darkness becomes too dark for the humor to break through. Maybe it’s an instinct that comes from experience and lots and lots of revision? I realize some readers won’t enjoy the formula. I mean, I recently had a reviewer refuse to write about this book because of the dog scenes in “Taps on the Forehead.” For her, the formula was uncomfortable. But I can’t worry about that. That character, in that situation, was doing exactly what I thought he should. I have to trust that instinct.
NH: Speaking of the Coen brothers, what non-literary influences do you find have shaped your aesthetic?
SG: Non-literary influences . . . I already mentioned the Coen brothers, but there are other film directors who seem to seep into my influences file, like Robert Altman and Mike Nichols. I love the way they frame a narrative. I’ve always thought of writing as a type of cinematic exercise. If you’re not seeing the scenes you write being played out in your mind’s eye, you’re selling the narrative short. I love the way music weighs in on the writing process. I’m a Lyle Lovett fan. I mean, geez, he rhymed “fly swatter” and “ice water” in a song. That’s a hall of fame rhyme. I’m a fan of songwriters who are wordsmiths, like Steve Earle and Kathleen Edwards and Jason Isbell and Gillian Welch. Weirdly, I think I’m influenced by standup comedians. My fiction teacher way back in the 1980s, William Price Fox, told us, “If you can tell a joke, you can write a story.” Listen to the rhythms of a really good comedian, how he or she constructs a joke. Listen to Nate Bargatze or Michelle Wolf. You can learn something about narrative rhythm and timing by listening to a standup.
NH: An aspect of the collection I find really striking is the way it depicts characters dealing with lost pride or some perceived humiliation. And I think it’s fitting that even at their lowest point, they are often still judging the people around them as being lower—I’m thinking particularly about the way the narrator in “Taps on the Forehead” looks down on Trudy for still waiting tables. There’s also the narrator in “The Smells at Certain Heights,” who notices Lester’s use of big words to seem smarter, or, similarly, how the narrator in “Word of the Day” rolls his eyes at Brandy’s attempts to expand her vocabulary. Am I onto something here? Do you find yourself drawn to characters who resent the ways others try hard, even when they are arguably trying the hardest?
SG: I think you may be onto something here. Many of the protagonists in this book, the idiots, are men who have hit low points, so their behavior is rooted in their need to get themselves out of those ditches, most of which they’ve dug themselves. And when they’re not successful (which is, of course, a catalyst for the plot) they strike out against whatever or whoever is around them. The source of this lashing out might be jealousy or insecurity or desperation or in some cases, some strain of sociopathic evil. But whatever the case, these protagonists see the people around them and say, “You’re part of the reason I’m in this situation, so I’m going after you.” I’m not sure I’m necessarily drawn to these sorts of characters, but I do know (after all these years) that characters like this are fertile ground for narrative. What’s that creative writing mantra? Only trouble is interesting? Well, these idiots bring a lot of trouble with them. I don’t really care about writing characters you like. I want to make characters who have an interesting story I can tell.
NH: Along those same lines, I’m curious about the gender dynamics at play in these stories. The men and women have interesting relationships—many of the women have left their boyfriends or husbands for other men, or are just generally being obsessed over by the narrators. There is also that moment in “Gable Massey Makes a Movie” when Fred Randall worries that if his wife dies, he won’t have anyone to prepare him dinner, and that moment feels particularly emblematic of the ways the men both rely on and distance themselves from the women in their lives. Are gender dynamics something you’re interested in portraying in fiction? Or do they just naturally work at a kind of unconscious level, when you’re dealing with these types of dysfunctional characters?
SG: Of course, gender dynamics are at play here. You write a story and you have a man and a woman in it, you’ve got gender dynamics. And as you suggested, those issues might be rising unconsciously in the stories. But I’m always going to be true to the characters and their situations. I want characters to reveal themselves through their actions and their words. When Fred worries about his wife not being around to cook dinner, he’s not making a statement about the general nature of the relationships between men and women. Rather, he’s saying that he fears loneliness and he’d miss her and he loves her, but that is the only way he can express it. (Of course, this is right after he considers smothering her, so there’s that . . . ) Fred ain’t ever going to say he loves his wife, but in his own way, he realizes that he does. At least, it’s his version of love, which may or not be palatable to most folks. But you see, that’s just my interpretation of Fred. A reader might have a different one, and that’s fine with me. I enjoy talking to people who see my characters in a different light than I planned. Makes for good, sane conversation. Do I worry about how some readers might view my characters and their actions? I think about it, but I don’t worry. Worry makes you write characters without any edges. And characters with no edges create safe stories. I’m not a fan of safe.
NH: Now that you’ve published a memoir, two story collections, and two novels, which form feels most compelling? What form will your next project take?
SG: I’ve finished a novel that’s set in the mountains of north Alabama in the spring of 1910, when Halley’s comet came through and everybody thought the world was going to end. Time to start looking for a home for that one. The idea that’s been banging around my head for a couple of years is a contemporary, Southern version of Tom Jones. That could be fun.
