Author Gonzales grounds the fantastical in reality
In his debut short story collection, “The Miniature Wife,” Manuel Gonzales spins tales about a highjacked plane that spends 20 years circling Dallas, a scientist who accidentally shrinks his wife, a composer able to speak out of his ears, and the day the undead infest a suburban mall.
It’s the kind of debut that gets a lot of attention. As Publisher’s Weekly put it in its starred review, “It’s rare that a debut author is also a seasoned storyteller, but this is the case with Gonzales, whose first book is a deeply imaginative collection of short stories.”
He follows up “The Miniature Wife” with a first novel, “The Regional Office Is Under Attack!” The book, out in April from Riverhead Books, centers on a group of “super-powered female assassins” who protect the world from annihilation.
The Texas native now teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Kentucky. Before that, he lived in Austin, where he ran a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids, Austin Bat Cave. In his previous life, he co-owned a pie shop in Austin.
He’ll be in Spokane this week as part of the Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series. In this Five Questions With interview, he talked about getting to know famous authors, writing weird and baking pies.
Q. Photos online of the cover of your forthcoming novel “The Regional Office is Under Attack!” has this from Spokane author Jess Walter: “Read this!” What did you do to warrant such a commanding (literally) blurb?
A. I – this isn’t going to be published, right, where Jess can see it? – I let him beat me at basketball. Ha. I kid, I kid. I’m awful at basketball and Jess is, what is the other word? Jess is not. Awful. At anything as far as I can tell. I’m not sure, though, how I warranted such a commanding blurb and I know it’s convinced at least one person to read the book – and she loved it, which is great for both of us. I met Jess when my collection came out – we were both at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, and we were in the author signing tent, and he came up to me out of the blue and introduced himself and told me how much he liked my collection, which was stunning, because I loved Jess’ work and had no inkling he would know anything about me or my book of stories. And then a year ago, he had come to Santa Fe, where I sometimes teach at a low-residency MFA program out of the Institute of American Indian Arts, and he heard me read from the novel and asked me to read more for the podcast he and Sherman Alexie run (“A Tiny Sense of Accomplishment”), and when it came time to ask other writers for blurbs, I thought I should ask Jess, and I was right.
Q. It’s clear from your short story collection “The Miniature Wife,” and in the plot synopsis of “Regional Office” that you like to traffic in magical realism. What is it about that style that you find so appealing, and what are the pitfalls of writing it?
A. I do like magical realism but also science fiction and fantasy and horror – I like a lot of those pop culture tropes that remind me of the things I really dug into reading and watching when I was a kid. I like introducing these elements into otherwise realistic worlds to see how the world and our expectations of the trope become upended. And I would say that the pitfalls of writing any of these are the same for me – when I traffic in magic or magical realism, science fiction, whatever, these only work for me when they’re grounded in something real, that’s character-based, and when they’re taken literally – by me as I’m writing them, at least. Maybe you will read the story with the unicorn in it (“One-Horned & Wild-Eyed”) and surmise the unicorn is a metaphor for something else – someone once asked me what the unicorn was a metaphor for – but to me, from the beginning until the end, the unicorn is a unicorn is a unicorn. I never regard it as a metaphor because metaphors don’t break my heart, metaphors also don’t stab you in the chest with their glittery horns. So for me, the trope only works if it affects the real world, obtains its own gravity, is something real and tangible and affecting.
Q. You’ve done the short story thing. You’ve done the novel thing. Do you prefer one over the other?
A. I don’t prefer one over the other, though I’ve been working on stories a little less lately, since digging into the novel, that is. I enjoy short stories – love playing around in them, trying on new forms, experimenting with lengths and point of view, and I love how a story can be contained in my mind while writing and rewriting it, whereas a novel is so large that it’s difficult for me to keep it all straight in my head, to know where I need to fix what’s wrong. But lately the ideas that have been coming to me have been novel ideas more often than story ideas. And since that’s where my ideas are pointing me, that’s where I’m headed right now.
Q. What’s the best idea you have that you have yet to put to paper?
A. There’s this story about my great grandmother – and I might have it all wrong because I’ve been telling it this way for ages and keep forgetting to confirm with my mom – but there’s this story about her – she was a curandera (a Mexican shaman or witch doctor) and a midwife and my dad remembers everyone in town being both in awe of and afraid of her. Anyway, one of her husbands suspected she was cheating on him – she was – but he couldn’t prove it, so he decided to trick her boyfriend into revealing himself. He dressed up as her – my great grandmother – and went to this guy’s house and stood outside and called out to him, thinking he would come outside and be caught redhanded, except my great grandmother was there at the house, too, inside, with her boyfriend, and so her boyfriend thought that creature outside pretending to be my great grandmother was a ghost or a spirit, and he shot it – he shot the husband – and killed him. Which is a weird and fantastic and heartbreaking and funny story that I’ve never been able to figure out how to put into a story.
Q. Do you still bake pies?
A. I’m in New York for an event even as I write this, and tomorrow night (Thursday) I’m baking pies for my publisher, Riverhead, and their new social media game where they create meals and cook them based on books they’ve published – I think they started with Sarah Waters’ novel “The Paying Guests” and set out a period piece meal for it. I bake pies all the time, in fact, and I convinced – in part – another Riverhead author, Helen Oyeyemi, to spend the spring semester as a visiting faculty at the University of Kentucky, where I teach, because I promised her pie.