Author2Author: Andrew Winston & Adam Langer, pt. 1

How does an Author2Author conversation come together? Sometimes it's a matter of pairing writers by their chosen genres. Sometimes it's because they share a publisher as well as certain thematic concerns, making it that much easier to align their schedules. This week, the unifying factor is location, location, location. Andrew Winston's Looped and Adam Langer's Crossing California both take place in Chicago, though they're set decades apart. The conversation begins with the earlier of the two settings, as we temporarily jump twenty-five years into the past...

Andrew Winston: I am curious about your choice to set Crossing California in 1979-1980. What did the setting allow you to do that you could not have done setting the book in contemporary Chicago? Did you feel constrained by it in any way? Was it important to have access to elements of your own youth? What was most compelling about that material? (Please tell me that--à la Larry Rovner's Rovner!--you once formed a band called Langer!)

Adam Langer: Aside from having read Looped, I don't recall all that much about your background, so I don't know if you're a lifelong Chicagoan, older than me, younger than me, or about the same age, so it's hard to say how our experiences of Chicago might differ. But, to me, the most interesting period in contemporary Chicago history is the period between the Daleys--after Richard J. died and before Richard M. took over--the period that I treat in both Crossing California and my forthcoming book The Washington Years.

Aside from being the time in which I came of age, it was a time of great political upheaval and unpredictability when, as a teenager, I was actually fascinated to read about local politics. There were great villains and heroes: "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak, "Calamity Jane" Byrne, and, of course, the late, great mayor Harold Washington. I spent my summers in high school and college working for local papers and radio stations, where I would learn of the so-called "Council Wars" on a daily basis--researching Harold Washington for Chicago magazine, writing about gangbangers for the neighborhood Lerner newspapers, rewriting wire copy for WXRT News and WBBM Newsradio 78. Although I don't live in Chicago anymore, I do still read the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Reader online, and nothing seems to come close to that heady experience.

What interests me about the period of 1979 to 1981, when Crossing California is set is that as it represented a time of transition in Chicago, it was also a time of transition in the country, the fast move from the Carter '70s to the Reagan '80s. And, of course, that shift does have certain resonances with the present day. I find it fascinating how national crisis always seems to bring America together then split it apart. I remember a sense of unity during the Iranian hostage crisis--yellow ribbons around the trees of West Rogers Park, everyone gathering to watch Ted Koppel and Nightline--followed unfortunately by a period of greed, solipsism, and xenophobia. Sounds familiar.

That said, I have to confess to a certain lack of intentionality in terms of how Crossing California came to be. I know there are many writers who choose to write about a particular historical period in order to comment on the present day; Arthur Miller's The Crucible comes to mind. Also, when I was recently in Chicago to do a reading I caught a matinee of a play at Steppenwolf called Lost Land which commented on contemporary geopolitical conflict through the prism of early 20th-century Hungary. My style of writing is, for better or worse, much more serendipitous or seat-of-the-pants (kind of like this response I'm writing). I tend not to outline when I write, and I only knew Crossing California was set in Chicago when I typed the words "California Avenue," only knew what period about which I was writing when I typed the words "It was 1979." Which sounds like hocus-pocus when I think about it, but that's pretty much how it happened; when I outline, I lose interest, but when I don't know what's happening next, I keep writing to find out. So however many parallels I find between the lives of the characters in 1979 and our lives here in 2005, their existence is either coincidental or subconscious. I found the tight structure of the 444 days of the Iranian hostage crisis more liberating than constraining actually.

And I do have to say that it certainly was convenient for the young characters' ages to correspond to my own, for their experiences to mirror some of my own experiences--defending the Ayatollah before a nonplussed audience of 7th graders, delivering a purportedly erudite speech at a bar mitzvah, performing on kids' shows on NPR, crossing California Avenue every day to get to and from school. I regret to say, however, that I never did perform in a band called Langer! or anything else. I have written a bunch of crappy songs that I've never shared with anyone except my dog and, though I toyed with the idea of recording a demo to go along with the book, I chickened out and decided that the book should stand on its own.

Author2Author: Adam Langer & Andrew Winston, pt. 2

After dipping into Chicago's past yesterday by way of Adam Langer's Crossing California, the conversation turns to the more recent setting of Andrew Winston's Looped.

Adam Langer: In some way, I have to say that I think you had a harder task than I did when it came to capturing a period in time, largely because writing about a time 25 years ago allowed me the benefit of distance, while the year 2000 still feels very much like yesterday to me and it's hard for me to completely grasp even now. Did you find it challenging to write about a time that's still so much of the present consciousness? And how did you choose to set Looped when and where you did? Also, how does your experience of Chicago--whether as outsider or insider--contribute to your experience writing Looped? By the way, I had some ideas too about asking you to contrast the way you and I have written about Chicago, how I have veered toward the microcosm, while you have delivered a jaw-droppingly ambitious macrocosm, and to see if you think that this contrast relates in any way to how you and I have each experienced Chicago. But I'm having trouble asking a cogent question about this topic; if you can make sense of my blather and riff on it, that would be cool.

Andrew Winston: Your question about micro- versus macrocosm views of Chicago hit right at the heart of something that only became clear to me this spring as I started having to talk about how Looped fits (or doesn't) with the history of Chicago novels--yours included. I moved to Chicago as an adult in 1988. So unlike you, Bellow, Stuart Dybek, Harry Mark Petrakis, Joe Meno, Daniela Kuper, and many others, I did not have a particular piece of Chicago to call my own. I lived all over the city, southside and northside, for about ten years before I began writing Looped. I experienced the city as a collection of neighborhoods, not one in particular.

And I recently realized something else (like you, I don't plan all this stuff out ahead of time): over half of the characters in Looped are not from Chicago. Like me and many of the people I know, they come from elsewhere- -other countries, other cities, other states--Vietnam, Greece, Louisiana, Cleveland, Texarkana. Cities draw people to them, just as New York has drawn you. That's part of the social engine of a great metropolis. Of course Looped also contains homegrown stalwarts from the south suburbs, the north shore, and lakeside high rises that also have to be in the mix for the representation of the city to be whole. That's the Chicago I know, and that's the one I wrote.

The ironic thing about the other part of your question, time, was that I did not set Looped in the near past, but the near future. I began writing it in the late 90s, thinking it would be so cool to have a book that tracked with the year in which it appeared. But like Millennium Park, Looped missed the target date by a few years. I enjoyed writing about the present in a slightly off-center way, inventing places and events that were slightly twisted from reality as a way to sometimes satirize a trend (like hybrid coffee shops such as Urbs in Horto, or the proliferation of half-assed bands with names like Tarp), sometimes to honor them--like creating a comic book store not unlike the semi-famous Quimby's. (I had other inventions--like a beer called Snap! that came with a toy inside, targeted at Gen X drinkers who bemoaned the passing of their cereal box trinkets--but that, along with 400 other manuscript pages, had to go by the wayside.) By using a contemporary Chicago setting, I was able to weave in rich raw material I gathered from news stories--like the story of Soo and Ng Pran-Markowitz which evolved from a radio documentary--and from tales my friends relayed to me--such as the gay lovers who host a homophobic priest who breaks his foot and stays for months while the lovers pretend to be roommates.

Author2Author: Andrew Winston & Adam Langer, pt. 3

The conversation takes on a new shape--a few of them, in fact!--as we move from setting to structure...

Andrew Winston: Both of our books involve lots of subplots and interweaving plotlines. Given the free-flowing approach you described in your previous answer, I am interested to know how you managed to arrive at such an intricate structure. Feel free to get technical. Or theoretical, as the case may be.

Adam Langer: Although I always wrote stories, when I was a kid, my best subject was math--once I got to trig class in high school, that all changed. But I'm still fascinated with geometric shapes, and often, I keep the idea of a particular shape in mind when I'm writing to make the structure clear and coherent to me. I'm briefly reminded of an old interview I did with the late Chicago improv guru Del Close, who was flattered when I called him "The Ted Kaczynski of Comedy." During our interview, Del mentioned that sometimes in his improv classes, he liked to see if his students could perform using the idea of geometric shapes and or patterns, such as a checkerboard, to structure their improvisations.

Coincidentally, when I was writing plays in Chicago, I was interested, as you obviously are too, in loops, which, to me, imply a sort of circularity, but not necessarily a closed circularity. The structuring idea of several of my plays was that you would end up where you began, but it wouldn't necessarily be the same place anymore, kind of like the last of episode of that cult 1960s sci-fi TV series The Prisoner, in which the character named Number 6 finally returns to his home, but, because of what he has experienced, he no longer sees it at the same place. In this way, for Ulysses, the Odyssey is a sort of loop too. I really like your title and the multiple definitions the word "looped" implies--the dictionary one, the Chicago Loop, of course, the synonym for "schnockered," and so forth. And, given that you start out with the image of a Ferris Wheel, and, toward the end, at State and Madison, you have a character offering a statement that speaks to the circularity and/or looping quality of life ("It is here. The end. The beginning. The beginning of the end"), it seems that you were working with a particular shape in mind as well.

Early on, when I was working on Crossing California and learned that I would be writing about three families, the geometric shape that came to mind was a sort of triple helix, and if you made a graph of the characters in the order in which they're presented, which I did during a particularly obsessive moment, their interactions would actually look like three interwoven strands. What I liked about this image is that the shape recalls both the specific idea of DNA and the general idea of lives that overlap. When I was writing The Washington Story, which is coming out in mid-August, I wanted to expand beyond the idea of West Rogers Park into the world at large and all the way out to the Milky Way, which was why the idea of a spiral shape came to mind. The image I'm working with now--I'm maybe forty percent done with a first draft--is of concentric circles orbiting around a specific point, suggestive of a solar system.

Author2Author: Adam Langer & Andrew Winston, pt. 4

Check back this weekend, if you get a chance, for a special bonus round of conversation between Adam and Andrew in which they'll discuss the impact of parenthood upon writing...

Adam Langer: How did the structure of Looped help or hinder you, particularly the idea of sticking with the events of one particular year? And, how much of the idea of "loops" directly or indirectly informed the construction of the novel and the characters within it? I'd also add that it's really interesting to think of these shapes in relation to Chicago, which is such a flat city of criss-crossing straight lines, as opposed to one of loop-de-loops.

Andrew Winston: You're being modest, I think, about the sophistication of your structural vision and how it informs the work. I agree that such ropes and wires are not to be seen lest we become (shudder) post-modernists. (I guess if I had really wanted to pound the loop theme home I could have done it á la Finnegans Wake, beginning and ending the book with halves of one sentence. Nah.) But those underpinnings are always in the background of the best novels, and it is never less than fascinating to learn these things after reading a book and having a new light bulb flick on.

I don't have anything as geometric in mind with my work (you're verging on fractals, my friend), but I do believe very much in structure and limitation as necessary forces in the creative process. Limitations are what give a work its energy. Why one thing rather than another? Whether or not the reader always senses it, the choices that result in a finished work only make sense if they are controlled by a larger vision.

Since I wanted Looped to have the feeling of a cohesive work created out of many threads, I created a sort of literal tapestry for plotting the novel. I took the various stories and plotted them out over a giant wall calendar, each story with its own color, trying to see the movements and patterns of the whole book. I came back to this visual aid over and over again, revising as the book changed, trying to hold the shape together. I think my approach to this is a holdover from my long years of writing poetry and being so concerned about shape in the lyric form.

The other main constraint was keeping the chapters very brief. That started out as part of a plan for the book to be serialized in a Chicago paper. But I realized that I was able to work much more easily with the shorter form, revising and polishing them as I went. Again, I think, this goes back to the habits ingrained by writing poetry. I had a hell of a time working within that chapter length as the book went on and there were more characters and plots to move forward with little room to work. It caused me a number of bad days. And while I think it was a useful rigor, I want to work with more narrative room in the next book. Still I am finding that I need firm chronologies and other tools to create the spaces in which to write.

Author2Author: Andrew Winston & Adam Langer (Bonus Round)

Andrew Winston: My wife and I had our second child during the production phase of Looped. I was reading copyedited manuscript pages the first week he was home. You had your first child recently, as The Washington Story was in galleys. I am wondering what thoughts you have had about your writing in relation to becoming a father. Has it cast a new light on some of your preoccupations as a writer? Have you thought about any of your old work in a new way or been in any way surprised by new thoughts about your book in the works?

Adam Langer: Gosh. The fatherhood question. Since you're the father of two and I've only been a father for, umm, less than four weeks, you're undoubtedly better qualified to answer that one than I am. I'm not sure how being a parent has affected or will affect my writing, other than the facts that I seem to have less time to do it and that I now know for sure that whoever compared writing a novel to giving birth was so wrong it's scary.

I don't feel that I'm becoming a different writer yet. Though I'd like to write a children's novel some day, something in the vein of Huck Finn or Michael Chabon's Summerland, my characters still seem to be swearing as much as they always have, and I'm still listening to as much loud music as I can while I write. The one thing I hope to be able to say is not so much that parenting has made me look at writing differently, but that writing has made me look at parenting differently. When I was writing Crossing California and The Washington Story, and now that I'm writing the new, as-yet-untitled, not-set-in-Chicago tome, I have felt a need not to judge my characters, not to mold them to suit my purposes. Whatever readers and critics have said about the supposed cynicism of my work or the negative feelings I'm supposed to have about some of my characters, I can honestly say that I try to like all of them equally and, even when they behave poorly, to understand why. I hope these qualities will make me a better parent. Some day, my daughter will be able to tell me if they do.

I've really enjoyed this conversation, Andy, and hope we can chat in person some time soon . Now, it's your turn to wrap up. What are you writing now and how is your role as a parent affecting the way you are writing it?

Andrew Winston: The loss of time, as you note, is the key change in morphing from a writer into a writer-with-kids. For me this has put flesh on the struggle between selfishness and selflessness. Writing and parenting are two things that rule your life with almost totalitarian thoroughness, and to be good at both you need to cultivate forms of selflessness. But while writing demands a generous imagination that ranges far outside the self, the work and the recognition is essentially a celebration of the individual. Maybe I have it a bit worse than others since I work a full-time job, too, and my time at the desk is deducted directly from my time to do anything else for or with my family. So it can feel selfish to put so much energy into writing when a small household of loving people wants--and deserves--every bit of that energy focused on them. I have no solution to this tension. It's just there, a constant hum.

Lastly, I could not agree more that birthing analogies to publishing a novel should be put to rest forever. Experiencing the specificity of the event kind of robs birth of its metaphorical utility. Certainly my wife would argue that until I have to pass the galleys through my intestines, I should not draw any comparisons. And after watching the process rather helplessly and yet awestruck, I would not gainsay her right to a firm opinion on that.