Daniel Wallace probably doesn’t need an introduction; his novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions is widely known and celebrated and it was adapted to film and later to a Broadway musical. In addition to his six novels, he’s written a memoir This Isn’t Going to End Well and a children’s book, The Cat’s Pajamas, which he also illustrated.
With Beneath The Moon And Long Dead Stars, a collection of flash fiction stories, if readers are expecting something in the magical realism genre or something whimsical, that’s not the case here; albeit Wallace’s work does have some dark elements. The collection is magical just without the whimsy. It feels more like an exorcism, or a contemplation on the temporality of life. It’s as though Wallace had a Kodak instamatic camera and took snapshots capturing the most profound yet ordinary moments in time leaving the reader holding the ashes.
Dawn Major: Your characters are runaways, divorcees, honeymooners, husbands and wives, and even missing persons who are often salvaging what they can from the fallout of their decisions or what life simply dealt them. They are oxymoronic, simultaneously at the end and the beginning of something. Even though some of these stories can be quite stark, oftentimes there’s a glimmer of hope for your characters and they realize the moments that they should hold.
Dawn Major
In “A Walk on the Beach” it’s a moment between a wife and her husband who suffers from dementia:
Now a laugh from him, and a laugh from me. I wanted to tell him how happy it made me that he’d kept his sense of humor, but then he would ask what I meant. Tell me, he would say, about the things I’ve lost. So I didn’t say anything and just listened to our laughter carried away by the wind.
In “A Night Like This,” the moment is when your character, a recent divorcee, faces the realization that marriage is over. It didn’t happen at the signing of the divorce agreement. It’s not real until he gives it a go with another woman and does a pretty miserable job at it. Really funny story. He has an epiphany and the story transforms from one that could end sadly to one that offers hope:
I was fucked up, and here I was carrying on—like a soldier, or a dark and quiet hero, and that was kind of funny. It was a cool night, a starry sky, and I drove without a thought of where I was going through the dark parts of town, the lights in the city glowing in the distance. The wind slipped through my window and was soft against my skin. It felt good. The wind felt good. It was like feeling like you are in a movie, that your life is a movie and this is one of the good parts, where the sweet music starts to play.
I love this character. We’ve all been this character, one who is shedding old skin for new and experiencing how uncomfortable that transformation can be. This was such a beautiful scene, too, especially with what you did with dark and light imagery here. It made me think of him as a mariner without a compass using the stars to navigate his new life.
Let’s discuss the Alpha and the Omega in your stories. Why was is important for you to explore beginnings and endings? Is this an exploration on temporality?
Daniel Wallace
Daniel Wallace: Thank you! Stories of the length most of the stories in this book are go by a number of designations: postcard, minute, furious fiction; fast, quick, skinny, and micro. My own name for it – Big Bang Fiction – has yet to catch on.
This touches a little bit on your next question, but very short fictions are all about timing: when to get in, and when to get out. I think you could say this about all storytelling, but longer narratives like novels, even just longer stories, have plenty of access points; not so with the majority of stories in this book. This a book that focuses on the moments that make us, that change us, that enlarge and illuminate us. I think everyone secretly wants to live an uneventful life, because that’s the greatest gift, isn’t it? Just to live through your days with the people you love, in good health, going for long walks, getting a dog, making things. Most of it is nothing to write (home) about.
That’s not all of it, though, not by a longshot. The moments examined and revealed in “Beneath The Moon And Long Dead Stars” are the ones that we remember whether we want to or not. And sometimes that’s all it is, a moment. The ones that change us, even in a minor way. But it’s an accretion of minor changes over time that make us who we are.
DM: As a writer of short fiction, I find writing flash fiction stories to be more difficult than writing longer short stories. With these stories it felt like you came out swinging; you got in and got out. That said, I noticed that “First In, Last Out” was previously published under the title “The End of the World” for Pinestraw Magazine. Was “The End of the World” once a longer story that you edited down to flash fiction? Or for that matter, were any of the stories an episode from a longer story or a novel?
DW: “First in, Last Out” is my post-Covid story, though Covid is not mentioned even once. The original title, “The End of the World,” felt a little heavy-handed over time, so I used the phrase that my wife, Laura, says she wants on her gravestone. It fit.
DM: I’d love to know about your process. Would you please share it?
DW: I don’t have much of a process. I do have a sign in my office that says SIT DOWN. Sitting down may be my process. I have to be encouraged sometimes—maybe shamed is the word – to get to work. But once there I don’t know what’s going to happen, especially if I’m playing with something new. I don’t think I’ve ever come to the computer with the intention of writing short fiction, or a longer story, or, God forbid, a novel. I could not write a novel if my life depended on it even though, counting the book I just finished, I’ve written seven of them. One of the best parts of having the freedom and time to write is that moment when you start to figure out what something is going to be. And it’s always a happy surprise.
DM: Do you know the endings of your stories before you begin writing them?
DW: So not only do I not know what the endings are, I don’t even know the beginnings.
DM: What’s a piece of advice you’d give to new writers of flash fiction?
DW: Advice to young writers: pay attention.
DM: Although these are standalone stories with individual characters and conflicts, reoccurring settings—the beach/ocean (not necessarily the same beach/ocean), and resolutions, although some felt unresolved, there was an overall tone that linked the stories together. For me, the tone made the collection cohesive. The first time I read the collection, I read the stories in chronological order and in one sitting. Obviously, each story has its own narrative arc, but I was looking for a narrative arc for the collection as a whole.
“Welcome to Monroe” was so climatic for me that from that point on the remaining stories felt as if they were in falling action until the narrative was “resolved” with your final story. Perhaps, it was your choice of second person point-of-view in “Welcome to Monroe” that created the climatic effect I refer to here. But there were flashing redlights in two stories that followed WTM: “The Ladder” and the last story, “[Dust Jacket Copy, Unrevised].”
“The Ladder” is the type of story I’ll return to over the years. It’s a humorous story and I found it ironic that the character will more than likely not die from smoking but from climbing ladders to do so. Unlike the characters in your other stories who undergo life-changing moments, this character chooses a moment for herself every single day to reflect on her life:
The cigarette didn’t last very long, never as long as she wanted it to, but always time enough to review the plot points of her life, the highlights, good and bad, the husband and the children and now the grands, the cars, the planes, the ships, the glam, and the struggle, the love, the sex, so much of it really it didn’t seem fair that one woman should have it all.
Her summation of what life is all about—an accumulation of good and bad moments—seemed to be the intention, or what I call DHM (the deep hidden meaning) of this collection.
In “[Dust] Jacket Copy, Unrevised]” there’s a similar line: “Conclusion: good outweighed the bad.” The main character, Makayla Katz, is a writer like yourself…hmmm…who discovered a box with scraps of paper in it with “a few words scrawled on each.” I thought that the scraps were symbolic of what writers do; they collect little moments in time. That story along with “The Ladder” felt as if you were tying up loose ends and then there’s that word, “conclusion.” I also viewed the dust jacket as a metaphor for life. It literally envelops stories as a person’s lifetime frames their stories.
So, when you compiled these stories did you consider how the placement of each might create a broader storyline and a narrative arc? And let’s say I’m not making all this up would you agree that “Welcome to Monroe” was the climax in this collection?
DW: “Welcome to Monroe” has a different feel than many of the other stories here and is certainly the darkest in the collection. It’s unrelenting, and it made me sad even as I was writing it, which doesn’t happen very often. It is a climax, but not the climax, because is there one? A collection, I think especially a collection of flash fiction, where the moments are so pure and, I hope, crystal clear, almost obvious in a way that’s satisfying as opposed to being predictable, is hard-pressed to have a cohesive arc. There is the journey up and there’s the journey down, neither (to me) being more interesting and exciting than the other. There are things to see on both sides of the mountain.
And yet. I rarely read a collection of stories from beginning to end: I open the book and go. Is a climax necessary? I really don’t know. But we put the book together as if it did, and by we I mean me and Ross White at Bull City Press. And working with Bull City Press was one of the most pleasant publishing experiences I’ve ever had. I was part of the entire process, including but not limited to the order of the stories, the size of the book, the font, and the cover, which features a painting by my daughter, Lillian Bayley Hoover.
DHM—I love that acronym. There always is a DHM, I guess, in fiction, but I don’t ever hide it, at least not on purpose. If you trust yourself the Deep Hidden Meaning will betray itself, because I don’t know if it’s a good idea for the writer to know what the story actually means, what it’s about, especially on a subterranean level. I don’t think much about the work I’ve already done, but sometimes something will occur to me, and I’ll realize what I meant, where the story came from, and how I seem to know so much more on the page than I do in my day-to-day life (ask my wife about that).
DM: After reading your collection a second time, I realized that my initial take was somewhat skewed. I kept hearing “You Want It Darker” by Leonard Cohen. If you take the stories for face value, they’re rather bleak, but on that second round I thought of them as love stories. The loss or the end of something would be meaningless if you hadn’t loved it in the first place. There’s so much loss, lost people, and grieving in the collection, but there’s also a recognition that had there not been so much love that the loss wouldn’t be worth its mourning.
What are your thoughts on that? Do you see them as love stories?
DHW: Love stories, yes, exactly, and the loss of love, or love stories where there is no love. Stories of longing. Characters on the hunt for more in their lives, never fully satisfied, but they also find contentment, though for some the contentment was in the past and the longing is for something to replace all that’s been lost. But there’s an underground river of stoic irony running through the stories, and other than the aforementioned “Welcome to Monroe” I think a kind of dark humor. Let’s settle on tragicomic.
DM: On the subject of themes, your characters also face desertion and abandonment, a loss of a spouse, a parent, life, or just a moment in time. Two of your stories begin essentially with the same sentence: “The last time I saw my dad” in the “Big Curve” and “The last time I saw my mother” in “Snow.”
In “Welcome to Monroe” (I keep coming back to that one, because it hit me so hard) you didn’t write the line “the last time I was seen was by my dog” but I heard it in my mind. All these “last times” made me ponder.
Are you more interested in capturing that moment in time where everything shifted or is there more to it? An exploration of mortality? Where did the inspiration come from? Are writers collectors of moments?
DHW: Yes. Moments. Images. Scenes. Scraps of language. Life is full of last times, small ones, and then bigger ones, in preparation for the Last Really Big Last Time, maybe. I think I could write a dozen or more stories using that line: The last time I –” The variations are limitless. In fact, I have written other stories that begin just that way.
DM: The first story, “A Perfect Name,” blindsided me and I thought I should have known better. I mean if you judge a book by its cover, right? After I read the stories, I visited your website which has all these wonderful whimsical illustrations that I loved, but doesn’t quite “match” the personality, if you will, of Beneath The Moon And Long Dead Stars. This isn’t a criticism. Writers shouldn’t be boxed in, but there are many who write for their fanbase. Compared to your others books, this book feels like a deviation from what your readers might expect from you.
Would you agree with that statement? What do you hope your readers will get out of this collection?
DW: How many readers does an author need to have to have a fanbase? I wonder if there’s a number, but if there is I’m pretty sure I have yet to reach it. No one expects anything from me, and that’s great. If Stephen King published a romantasy, his fanbase would be shocked and not a little upset. I don’t have to shoulder that burden.
Shorter stories give a writer an opportunity to deviate, to experiment, to have the kind of fun that doesn’t need to be sustained over a long haul. I think readers will experience the same thing.
DM: I’ll leave you with something light-hearted that I asked your friend, George Singleton, in an interview once. Is it mandatory as a Southern writer to write dog stories? In a way, dogs, like some of your themes, connected the stories together, but let’s just stick to Southern writers and their dogs. What’s the deal?
DW: Dogs are a necessary component of any successful story. That’s just a fact.
How many dogs have I written about in the last forty years? Dozens and dozens, if you include the pack of wild dogs in Kings and Queens of Roam. Until just recently (and one two-year stint in Japan) I have never not had a dog. That’s a lot of dogs. But not as many as George Singleton has had.
DM: On behalf of Southern Literary Review and myself I truly appreciate having the opportunity to interview you and also all the great writing that you’ve contributed over the years to readers and writers.
DW: You’re sweet to say so. Thanks for reading and reflecting. You made me think about things.
About Daniel Wallace:
Daniel Wallace is the author of seven novels, including Big Fish, his first, published in 1998, and Extraordinary Adventures, in 2017. In 2003, Big Fish was adapted and released as a movie by Tim Burton and then in 2013 a Broadway musical directed by Susan Stroheim. His novels and stories have been translated into many languages. His children’s book, for which he did both the words and the pictures, is called The Cat’s Pajamas, and it is absolutely adorable. His most recent book, a memoir entitled, This Isn’t Going to End Well, was published by Algonquin Books in April 2023. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater, where he lives with Laura, his wife.
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