40th Anniversary Literary Retrospective: An Interview with Christopher Coake

Christopher Coake is the author of You Came Back (Grand Central Publishing, 2012) as well as the collection of short stories We’re in Trouble (Harcourt, 2005), which won the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. In addition, Coake was listed among Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists in 2007. His stories have been published in several literary journals and anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2004 and The Best American Noir of the Century. Recently, Coake took some time to talk with Nick White, The Journal’s Fiction Editor, to discuss how his story “Sketching Firestorm,” which first appeared in Issue 24.2 (Autumn/Winter 2000), was not only his first publication, but perhaps his most important.

Nick White: Where were you in your career/work when “Sketching Firestorm” came out?

Christopher Coake: I was actually living about two miles away from The Journal office when the story was published. Donald Ray Pollock and I had a similar experience, in that The Journal gave us our first professional publications—and then Michelle Herman found out our personal stories, learned that we were both aspiring and serious writers, and began trying to talk us into getting our MFAs at Ohio State. She was successful, too—so my story came out just a few months before I began the program.

I’d submitted this story to something like twelve other journals, on and off over four years. It was literally the only publishable work of fiction I’d ever produced, and I’d been clinging to it as proof to myself that I could be a writer. If The Journal hadn’t taken it, I’m not sure what my path would have been. I can say that the validation I got—and Michelle’s ongoing interest in my work—made an enormous impact on me. I could imagine quitting, before that story was accepted. Afterward I couldn’t.

NW: If you could say something to your younger writer self who wrote this piece, what would you say?

CC: “That’s a good start, buddy, but this is the last story you’re going to write for a long time, if ever, while secretly wishing you were David Foster Wallace. Now relax, go to school with a clear conscience, and figure out what you really want to say. It’ll be all right.”

NW: How does “Sketching Firestorm” compare to the work you’re currently doing/planning to do in the future?

CC: As the previous answer suggests, “Sketching Firestorm” is much more postmodernly playful than a lot of the stuff with which I’ve been successful since. One of the things I learned about myself while at Ohio State is that I’m better at portraying complex emotional states than I am at wild formal experimentation. I love that sort of thing, and my first book, We’re in Trouble, experiments a lot in terms of structure and time. Lately, though, I’ve been much more interested in simply telling a good story—which, as it turns out, isn’t so simple after all.

NW: Did you learn anything about writing/yourself as an artist while writing this piece?

CC: Yes. This was the first story I wrote that really worked, on all the levels I was aiming for. And it works that way because I finally was able to get some of my personal disturbances on the page without feeling overly beholden to my own biography. In other words, I was in that state of composition where I was in the perfect balance between control and access to the subconscious. If that makes any sense. I suppose what I’m saying is that this was the first story I wrote that felt like good writing when I was writing it—and which was then confirmed for me as good by others. This story kinda calibrated me.

NW: Has your writing changed much (or any) since writing this story? How so?

CC: I can honestly say I’ve written very little like “Sketching Firestorm” since it appeared. But it’s a story about love under threat, about the inevitable loss that comes along with love, so thematically it’s right in line with everything I’ve written since.

Michael Larson was born and raised on a horse farm in the small town of Rainier, Washington. He earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College, before moving to Mutsu, Japan, where he lived and worked as a middle-school English teacher for two years. He is currently in the Creative Writing MFA Program at The Ohio State University, and serves as online editor for The Journal.