Open Line
Author Interview

On Open Line: Ellen Hawley in conversation with Deidre Pope

Q: As a poet, I constantly face the issue of readers considering the speaker in the poem to be the author herself. Do you find this to be true in fiction? Obviously Annette, the main character in Open Line, has some of your background and experiences—coming from New York to live in Minneapolis, hosting a radio show. How do you feel about the possibility of readers thinking you’re Annette?

A: An editor recently returned a new manuscript to me with some very astute criticisms and some suggestions for a rewrite. One of the possibilities she raised was rewriting the novel as memoir—something I can’t do, since it’s very much fiction. So it’s not just readers who assume that fiction (or poetry, or falsified and highly popular memoirs) must be true, but people who work in the lit-biz as well. Half of me considers that a compliment—I convinced a damn good reader that this story actually happened. The other half wants to reach for the phone and blither until I’ve told her every possible way that the character is not me. And that’s with a character I wouldn’t mind being mistaken for. I never stopped to think that anyone would mistake me for Annette, who I like for her fast mouth and her energy but who, even I have to admit, is a terrible excuse for a human being. Me? Annette? No, no, no.

We do overlap, though. As you mentioned, I used to host a late-night call-in show, KQ Scope, in the Twin Cities. I had a terror of dead air time. I grew up in New York and moved to Minnesota. I don’t know any more about wine than she does. As far as I can remember, that’s about the extent of the overlap. But you can’t write without drawing on parts of yourself and on your experience of the world. If you try to leave that out, you have nothing to work from. So yes, Annette grew out of me, but that’s very different than saying that she is me.

Q: You can’t really read Open Line without thinking about the role of talk radio hosts and shock jocks in this culture. Do you think they have an obligation to their listeners beyond providing entertainment? Is Annette irresponsible?

EH: That we can ask the question at all, never mind treat it seriously, strikes me as a symptom of cultural insanity. Of course radio talk show hosts have a responsibility. Of course Annette has one. Doesn’t any human being? What kind of a culture do we live in if we can question whether we have any obligation to each other beyond, possibly, being entertaining?

Q: What on earth were you smoking when you came up with the idea of someone claiming that the Vietnam War never happened?

A: I started writing Open Line well before the Bush administration told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was importing yellowcake uranium from Niger. As American politics became more bizarre, though, and official fabrication followed official fabrication, the story began to seem more and more contemporary, more and more relevant. Without any conscious decision on my part, it turned into a commentary on American culture, and I began to think I’d better get the book into print fast, before the bizarrity of American politics outran my ability to satirize it.

Having said that, I might as well admit that I didn’t set out to write about anything that serious. All I started with was a radio talk-show host quitting her job. (As far as I can remember, quitting my job was an appealing proposition right about then.) I knew she was going to say something outrageous on the air, but I didn’t know what. When I thought of having her claim that the Vietnam War never happened, the energy and the pure insanity of the idea took over and instead of quitting her job she rode the claim to fame and disaster.

But there’s another way to answer the question: Midway through the first draft of Open Line, I began to wonder what possessed me to have someone suggest that the Vietnam War—which was pivotal in my life and in the lives of my generation—had never happened. Then I read the section of Stanley Karnow’s magnificent Vietnam: A History on the Tonkin Gulf incident—a non-event that the Johnson administration used to stampede Congress into endorsing the war. And it hit me: Of course we’re all crazy. Of course we’re ready to believe in conspiracies. They’re lying to us. Never mind who “they” are. Not knowing only makes our paranoia more pervasive. We live in a world whose most important workings we know nothing about, but we do know—or sense; or believe even in the absence of knowledge—that we’re being lied to about those workings. And we’re right.

Q: Stan certainly seems to believe that. He seems like such an earnest, straight-up guy, and because of that I probably take him more seriously than any of the other characters, even though his ideas and sense of his organization’s abilities and reach don’t always seem in touch with reality. Still, there is something appealing about his commitment to his ideals. How do you feel about the Stans of the world? Are you sympathetic to fringe political groups?

EH: I’m not sure fringe/not-fringe is the most useful division here. I’m more interested in the content of an organization’s (or person’s) beliefs and approach than in how mainstream it is. Many a small, and apparently irrelevant, organization has turned out to have a huge impact on events. When I was copyediting an encyclopedia entry a couple of years ago, I learned that, in developing his approach to nonviolent resistance, Martin Luther King, Jr. was influenced not only by Gandhi but also by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (through Bayard Rustin, if I remember correctly). That’s an organization I’d always thought of as small and all-white and too pure to have any real impact in the world. And that influence was pivotal to King, and through him to the Civil Rights Movement.

A less hopeful example: Groups we once considered to be on the right-wing fringe have been able to shift the national conversation so far in recent decades that for an American politician to defend the theory of evolution has become an act of courage. Solid, mainstream science has been pushed to the fringes. What we’ve been calling fringe groups can stay irrelevant or can, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly become central elements of a country’s politics. Depending on what they contribute, that’s either hopeful or terrifying.

So I try not to dismiss an organization just because it’s not, at the moment, mainstream. (Emphasis there is on “try.” I’m human. I can be as much of a snot as anyone. It’s easy to dismiss people, organizations, beliefs just because they’re out of fashion or power.) The question for me isn’t whether fringe groups as a whole are necessary. I consider some of them deeply dangerous, others a royal pain in the neck even though I agree with their goals (or some of them), and still others profoundly important.

Q: What about Stan, though?

A: Well, for starters, I disagree with almost everything he believes in: that America’s the center of the universe and the source of all things good and righteous; that the central problem of the age is big government; that individual liberty is the same as economic individualism; that collective liberty is irrelevant since only the individual matters. Immigrants, gays, and people who so willfully fail to be white give him hives, and he’s none too comfortable with the idea that women are fairly ordinary human beings. And on and on and on.

But. The appealing thing about Stan is that he does believe in something, and he’s deeply committed to it, when it’s so much easier and more fashionable to sit back in ironic splendor and contemplate the collapse of the world. It happens, of course, that what he believes in is completely insane. This is a man who’s capable of looking deeply into the minutiae of Vietnam War history and finding evidence that the war never happened. There has simply got to be a diagnosis for that.

Or—and the book doesn't answer this question—is he deliberately faking the evidence? Has his commitment to his organization, to power, and to his view of individual liberty led him to deliberately mislead the public and everyone around him? The struggle to change society (or to keep it from changing) can be morally compromising. Maybe that’s inevitable. Even remaining pure can be a moral compromise—a refusal to make the hard decisions that having power demands. So Stan’s a complex character, and one who interests me, although I wouldn’t say I like him.

I’m troubled, though, by the possibility that because Stan is almost the only non-cynic in Open Line readers will set aside the content of his beliefs and be drawn to him. A person can be personally likeable and politically a monster, and the tendency of our culture, I think, is to set the second aside in favor of the first, although the public person can do far more damage than the private one. Maybe it’s because politics seem so far outside of our grasp these days that we put a premium on the personal. I don’t know. In rewriting the manuscript, I looked for ways to steer readers away from that, but I couldn’t do it without being heavy-handed. I’m going to have to add this to the list of reader reactions that a writer can’t control.

Q: How did the Vietnam War affect you?

A: I come from a family of political activists, so the Vietnam War wasn’t my first political experience. As a kid, I picketed the Woolworth’s in Harlem weekend after weekend as part of the Civil Rights Movement’s drive to integrate Woolworth’s lunch counters in the south. I was in junior high then, I think, so this was the first political action I undertook on my own initiative. Later, I got arrested with the Congress on Racial Equality when it held demonstrations at the New York World’s Fair.

During all of that, I was too young to take as active a part as I’d have liked. You had to be 18 to go south as a Freedom Rider or an organizer. And I was white, and very aware of the ways that limited my usefulness as an organizer. By the time the Vietnam War had moved into the center of the country’s awareness, though, I could take as full a part in the opposition as I was capable of.

I’m not a gifted organizer, although it took me a long time to figure that out, but I played a minor role in several anti-war groups, starting when those of us who opposed the war were a small, despised minority and continuing when (to my amazement) we became a massive political force. That change happened surprisingly quickly. I’d never been part of anything that came so close to being a political majority before.

Maybe it’s the war’s importance in my life that made me slip it into the blank space when I was looking for some bit of history for Annette to erase. I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but that makes sense.

Q: I promised you I wouldn’t make any literary references in this conversation, but I was reading a poem sequence called The Monarchs (as in butterflies, not royalty), by Alison Deming while I was reading your manuscript. This excerpt struck me:

A favorite terror, one we practice
story after story, tells about
an alien intelligence inhabiting
our neighbors’ minds. They talk to us
about bingo, garbage, and their kids,
earning our trust, while inside
they beep and glow with an evil plan.

Do you think we as a country have become completely paranoid? It seems to me we used to trust our government. Now people who believe in conspiracy theories are mocked for that paranoia, but it also seems to be a general cultural consensus that the government lies, covers up, and does bad things. The war in Iraq might be a good example of this—folks were all let-freedom-ring about it in the beginning, and now hindsight suggests that the aliens earned our trust with sleight-of-hand, while executing their evil plan, so to speak.

Where does that leave us as a democracy? Are we more inclined to believe Annette, no matter what she says, because we need an outlet for all of our unproven but deeply felt suspicion?

A: Way back in the dark ages, during the Watergate hearings, I remember thinking that Americans would never again take what the government told them on faith. Okay, “never” was an overestimate, but I do think I was on to something. Where I was wrong is that I assumed this would be an unalloyed improvement.

Silly me.

I grew up during the McCarthy period, when unquestioning trust in the government was the rule of the day. In the early stages—and the middle stages—of the Vietnam War, many Americans talked with pride about having faith in the government. The end of that unquestioning faith is, surely, a good thing, because all through that period of blinkered faith awful things were being done out of sight, and we were being lied to left and right. But nothing is pure in life—or if it is I’d like to know about it. There’s a price to pay for knowing that we’re being lied to. Or maybe I should say half-knowing, because my sense is that most people don’t follow the news carefully and of the few who do most don’t follow it in depth. So when Colin Powell showed the UN pictures that he said proved Iraq had the famous weapons of mass destruction, maybe we thought they looked unconvincing and highly dependent on his interpretation, but what did we really know about them? Not much. Where could we turn for more information, other information, better information? How many of us have a reliable source? We guess. We trust our notoriously unreliable guts.

Paranoia thrives in the absence of information, and for all the news sources we have buzzing around us, we still seem to be short on information lately—real reporting that digs below the official nonsense that’s thrown at us. The newspapers, the TV news, public radio—how often are even the best of them able to do genuine investigative reporting?

It’s tempting to theorize about us-as-a-culture, and as I answer you I’m starting to fall in love with my theories, but I’m not sure I know what I’m talking about. Whatever I come up with is as grounded in fact as Annette’s theories. It’s too easy, and too tempting, to string together a series of observations about the culture and assume that because they sound good, the links are both real and causal. I’d better stop before I do that.

Q: Though it speaks to serious subjects, this book is really funny. There were places I actually laughed out loud. Did you set out to write with humor or is it just part of your style?

A: I can’t set out to write humor. That scares anything funny right out of me. I have to turn my back and hope it sneaks up on me.

My belief is that humor and tragedy (or drama, or you-name-it) are not entirely separate forms; that humor’s part of life, or damn well should be. I don’t see the point of fencing it off. I don’t think it’s entirely absent from anything I write. At least, I hope it isn’t.

I read an article a while back about writing humor and realized that if I had to teach humor writing I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t know what makes something funny. I couldn’t divide humor writing into useful categories. The only thing I can do is try to keep myself amused. Sometimes it works.

The first time I ever wrote satire, it snuck into a short story I was working on about managed health care. My partner worked in managed care at the time, and like everyone else in the field she was coming apart at the seams, so I wrote the story as a sort of gift, since there was nothing else in the world I could do to make the situation better. Halfway through the story, I realized that I loved the form. I could do anything I wanted in it. If I wanted to have Richard Nixon march in naked and playing the tuba, I could.

So far, the idea of picturing Richard Nixon naked has been enough to put me off testing that theory, but I think it holds.

Q: How is this novel different from your first, Trip Sheets, which has been called “a curiously delayed coming-of-age story,” about a female cab driver’s personal and professional dilemmas?

A: Trip Sheets marks a transition for me. I went into it as a short story writer and came out of it as a novelist, which is another way of saying that I wouldn’t write it the same way today as I did then. But if I’d insisted on beginning it as a novelist, maybe I couldn’t have written it at all. Material makes demands of its own, and if you don’t listen to them you don’t get to work with that material.

I think that having published one novel gave me the confidence to fool around more. It loosened me up. I don’t feel as careful as I did then, or as much like I have to play by someone’s rules.

Q: You know how people like to categorize books. Let’s say you have to come up with the categories where Open Line will “live” and be defined. How do you see it?

A: Hoo boy, do I ever not have a clue where to shelve it, but then that’s the nice thing about fiction—it can go in that nice big nondenominational fiction section. When I began sending the book out, I called it political satire in my cover letter, and that’s still the best description I can come up with, even if it’s less than perfect.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Most immediately, a couple of essays for my web site. (I’d like the site to have some actual content—something to make it worth looking up.) Beyond that, I spent last winter trying to begin a new novel and had a terrible time of it. I’m not sure why, but some books are like that for me. Now life seems to be conspiring to keep me from going back to it, and I’m not sure whether I’m grateful for the break (maybe when I go back to it I’ll have a solid sense of what I’m trying to do) or frustrated because I don’t have time to write. I also have a rewrite to tackle before I get back to that new novel—the manuscript I mentioned earlier that led an editor to ask if it could be rewritten as a memoir.

Q: Anything I didn’t ask you that you’d like to say about the book?

A: I’m tempted to rant about how strange the process of publicizing a book is, but what I know about that now is probably nothing compared to what I’ll know once the book comes out. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the question of form—the ways in which it’s necessary and the ways in which it’s arbitrary and false and completely unlike real life—but let’s not get into that. One of the essays I want to write for the web site is about that, and I’m still thinking my way through the topic. I appreciate the question, though. Wish I could rise to the occasion.

Q: At least now we know what to ask you in the next round of interviews.

Deidre Pope is a poet and program director for a non-profit organization. She has published a natural history book for children and numerous poems in journals and anthologies. She lives on a small acreage in Scandia, Minnesota where, she is only slightly chagrined to admit, she does not listen to talk radio.