An Interview with David Shields
by Tina Carlone

David Shields lives in Seattle where he teaches in the English department of the University of Washington. He is the author of two novels, Heroes and Dead Languages, a collection of connected short stories, A Handbook for Drowning, and four works of non-fiction: Remote, “Baseball is Just Baseball”: The Understated Ichiro, Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, and Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader.

I first read David Shields’ work early last year on a suggestion from a writing instructor. I picked up his latest book Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography, and for me, it was a revolutionary reading experience. As a writing student, I was fascinated and moved by Shields’ exploration into the impulse writers have to mine their own lives for material. It is a profound collection that perfectly blends reportage with flashes of memoir, all the while examining the fuzzy boundaries between fiction and non-fiction.

In the prologue to Enough About You, Shields writes that his book is an attempt “to make the case that the only real journey is deeper inside and the only serious subject is the mystery of identity.” David Shields shows the reader how in the process of writing about our own lives, memory can be corrupted by all kinds of motives. Memory and creation and imagination flow in and out of one another. They rarely exist independently.

Q: Enough about You was the first book of yours I read, quickly followed by Remote. It was very interesting for me to go into reading your earlier novel, Dead Languages with those books in mind. I noticed almost immediately that you were playing with the same conventions that are full blown in your more recent work such as, the pointing out of exaggerations, openly questioning the validity of the narrator’s memory of events/character actions, the use of newspaper articles and excerpts from various pieces of literature to illuminate character, etc. Was the use of such methods a compulsion you had very early on in your writing, or did it evolve slowly as you began to explore different ways of telling a story?

Shields: I would say that the use of countervailing texts to question the absolute authority of a single perspective has come to be more and more important to me. In, say, Heroes or Dead Languages, there might be a little of that, but book by book after that, and I would say with escalating intensity, I've come to be very interested in having multiple perspectives in a text. I like to question the nature of memory, the nature of any subjective stance, show how partial and willful it is, as a way to suggest how partial knowledge is, how "fictional" any version is. I'm also very interested in the texture of having many texts operating within a text—a documentary feel, an autobiographical feel, a memoir, a fiction, a narrative, a fantasy; it seems to me life feels like this—multivalent—and one wants the book to reflect this. Books that don't do this strike me as actually quite hard to read since they seem to me so old-fashioned, so beside the point.

Q: I’m curious as to how this interest evolved? Did your experimentations with form, from book to book, serve the particular stories you were telling?

Shields: I do think I got closer to figuring out how I wanted and needed to write. A big influence, too, was noticing what sort of work truly excited me—anthropological autobiography by George W.S. Trow and Renata Adler, performance art by, say, Spalding Gray and Sandra Bernhard, stand-up comedy by people like Rick Reynolds and Denis Leary, and especially documentary film of a self-reflexive nature by people such as Ross McElwee. It took a while, but finally my work caught up with my aesthetic. For the longest time, my work was caught in a time capsule of past perceptions. Remote broke the time capsule.

Q: When you went from writing the fiction of Heroes, Dead Languages and A Handbook for Drowning, and into the writing of Remote, did you have a sense that you’d found a method of presenting ideas that made much more sense to you? Did the writing you were doing before Remote feel stifling to you, or was it more of a gradual process?

Shields: My first novel, a book called Heroes, is a pretty traditional, linear, realistic novel. Dead Languages is more formally interesting, more self-reflexive, funnier, more idiosyncratic, but it is finally a bildungsroman, a growing-up novel, that uses that form as a way to explore ideas about stuttering/language/communication. A Handbook for Drowning pivots between essay/story, and some of the pieces in that book feel fairly conventionally fictional, while others make a rather essayistic gesture. That book is a transitional book for me. The book that is really my Alice-Down-the-Rabbit-Hole book is Remote. I tried to write it as a novel, but I couldn't get the other character, the narrator's girlfriend, to emerge as a character; I realized I was more interested in the internal drama of my own ambivalence toward mass culture than in staging an outer drama in which two people embodied this conflict. With that book, I realized how much a certain kind of sideways nonfiction, writing at the edge, plays to my real literary interests and strengths—meditation, mediation, reflection, analysis, mixing of cultural and confessional. Black Planet takes this strategy and extends it or perhaps focuses it; the Ichiro book is kind of a one-off found documentary text; and I think of Enough About You as taking the issues I've discussed in this paragraph and exploring them.

Q: As you moved away from the idea of using fictional characters to tell the story of "ambivalence toward mass culture", and realized you could use yourself as the conduit through which to tell this story, did it feel like a revelation to you?

Shields: Yes, Remote was a revelation to me—the single most exciting (and terrifying) moment of my writing life, when I realized it wasn't a novel and I had to figure out what it was—it took me a few weeks to realize it, but once I did, I knew I was on a very exciting track for myself. Throughout my reading and writing life, I'd always thrilled to the meditative moment—not the plot turn, the dialogue exchange, the scene-setting, none of this has ever really interested me—what I like are the epiphanic moments—why not build a whole book of them?

Q: Are you hoping to change perceptions of storytelling—to open up new worlds where a beginning writer might feel more comfortable experimenting with form?

Shields: I do want to change perceptions of storytelling—I do think this is the most exciting way to read and write. It's much closer to how we experience life, especially now, and it seems preposterous that there's a sort of standard mode to which we're all supposed to subscribe. I don't view that as the norm and what I do as the "experiment," but rather what I and others do as an evolution of the form, what's next.

Q: In regards to Remote as well as Enough About You, I'm curious how collage pieces like this come together. Do you write the sections individually and then piece them together by theme, or do you start out with a basic idea of what you want to discuss and build it from there?

Shields: Different collages come together differently, of course. Sometimes I realize how different pieces can be braided together and form a whole. Most often I have a general idea—say, "Properties of Language," in Enough About You—a meditation on the nature of language—and I find/compose/revise/combine/recombine pieces in such a way that not only are they all related but they also have, I hope, a sort of momentum. Perhaps some writers are narrative in nature and some are lyrical in nature—that is, storytellers as meditators, and I'm obviously in the latter camp.

Q: After reading Dead Languages, I went back and reread "Letter to my Father" in Enough About You with great interest. There is a certain difficulty there when a writer struggles to create honest portrayals of the people in her life (even when these portrayals reside in a "fictional" story). Some of them will inevitably want to read your work. What advice would you give writers who want to write close to their lives, yet worry about the outcome of such disclosures?

Shields: My glib response to your question is "Don't." ie, don't worry. It's hard not to write well without worrying about how Uncle Howard is going to respond to what you write. Also, too, I've found that no matter what one writes, the people closest to you are not going to respond to the work in the way you want them to: they view it not as a work but as an inaccurate and insufficiently awe-struck reflection of them. Given that, it's crucial to be loyal to the work. Write as well as you can, and if the work is unfair—if it presents the author/narrator as Candide and everyone else as fallen—that will come out in the wash, and the work will be self-indicting—your self-promotion will be off-putting. But if the work sees everyone—including self or a self-based figure as a complex human being—then I think that's all you can do.

Q: What are you working on now?

Shields: My book-in-progress is called Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. There's less about me in this book. It’s more about the culture, but it still is taking the strategy I learned in Remote—to take your ambivalence and dramatize it.

Q: Finally, as a writer who has examined pop culture and our obsession with celebrityhood, I'm curious what your take is on the writing communities that have evolved on the internet, particularly live journals / blogs, fan fiction, and newsgroups? How do you think, if at all, this will change writing?

Shields: I must admit I've seen relatively few blogs, live journals, fan fiction, and newsgroups. When I wrote Black Planet, I visited a lot of newsgroups to see what fans were saying, and I found that interesting. Theoretically, I find these forms fascinating, though—I think they move writing in a more decentralized, more democratic direction—away from seeing a few conglomerate publishers as the locus of American writing and toward seeing writing taking place anywhere that an insight occurs, and this insight can occur anywhere: looking at a page of the yellow pages, writing a lyric poem, or writing a letter.

Click here to read the short story "A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire," along with a brief essay about its creation.

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To learn more about David Shields, read excerpts of his work, and purchase books,
visit his web site:
http://www.davidshields.com