Philip F. Deaver
Philip F. Deaver is permanent Writer in Residence and Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. He also teaches in the Spalding University brief residency MFA program in Louisville, KY. He is the 13th winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award and writes in three genres—fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He's held fellowships from Bread Loaf and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and has been recognized in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories.
Interview with Philip F. Deaver
NZ: You are a past winner of the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction, for your collection Silent Retreats. Do you remember how you went about putting that collection together?
PFD: I think I wade in starting with the first story. After that, I might get lured along by a good title or a first sentence, but I quite likely won’t read the whole collection in order of appearance. I’ll always be very curious about what kind of story the author chose to go first, to go last. What kind of story gave the whole collection its title. I feel those stories, positioned that way, are as close as I might get to a direct statement from the author.
NZ: What do you look for in a collection? What kind of surprises are happy surprises? What kind of surprises are unhappy ones?
PFD: First of all, let me say that I read a lot of collections of stories. Once I begin to hear the voice of the author in the different contexts of an array of stories, I feel like I’m in the company of a friend, and I’m interested what will come next, what that friend will do differently and also consistently story to story. Sometimes a sameness will arise from a collection of stories, as if the author too quickly hit his limit for invention, and that can disappoint. In many collections, even if a few of the stories don’t rock my world, one of them makes up for all of it. I remember reading Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx, and admiring them each one by one in a satisfied if moderate way, and then coming upon “Brokeback Mountain” and going crazy over it. Studying it closely. Calling everybody on the phone. That’s my kind of happy surprise.
NZ: What makes you skip to the next story? What are you looking for?
PFD: I’m quirky. If a story goes flat for me early, or I find the opening to be routine and promising only about what I’d expect with little hint of something more, I might wander off and start browsing for a title or first line that catches me. On a different day, in a different frame of mind, the story I skipped over before might capture me. Having said that, I don’t really believe in carefully crafting “attention-getting” openings for stories, because of the danger that that opening might be only for getting attention, might not really be organic to the narrative as it turns out. Making a discovery like that will cause me to skip, that’s certain.
NZ: What are you working on now?
PFD: I’m back to short stories. My notebook filled up while I worked on a novel the last two years. I’m doing a lot of thinking about long stories, ten to fifteen thousand words—hard to publish individually but they make great anchor tenants in collections. I’m from Illinois, and these last twenty years have been in Florida. I’ve written a lot about both regions, and now in the new fiction I’m exploring far flung venues and setting my usual fare outside the US.
