Violence and Love and Family Ties 

An Interview With Christopher Linforth by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Your collection, The Distortions, was released by Orison Books on March 1, 2022, and was the winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize. I read the stories and was absolutely blown away by the spectacular prose, tone, and mood, not to mention the compelling characters and dialogue. Tell us more about the genesis of these wonderful tales. 

Christopher Linforth: Many years ago, I was spending a lot of time in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, while also traveling to other parts of the former Yugoslavia. It was only years later that I started to process my time and experiences in these countries. In general, the stories reflect my life in America, and I only occasionally mine—through a fictional lens—some of the events and people in my life at that time. This collection is not autofiction or anything close, but it does hew to elements of my past layered with years of research and a lot of invention and imagination.

Once I was back in the US, I began to read the wealth of post-Yugoslavia literature. I devoured the novels and short stories of Josip Novakovich, Aleksandar Hemon, Sara Nović, Téa Obrecht, Dubravka Ugrešić, as well as groundbreaking histories of the region: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, Misha Glenny’s The Balkans, and various essays on Titostalgia, the nostalgia for Tito’s reign over Yugoslavia. I read academic treatises and obscure articles and discovered caches of original documents. Then I watched the BBC’s The Death of Yugoslavia multiple times and many episodes of Mamutica, a kind of Croatian version of Law & Order. 

Over the last several years, while writing The Distortions, I’ve been especially mindful of issues surrounding cultural appropriation and in my own consideration and deliberation of whose stories these are. I’ve done my best to avoid an American Dirt-type situation. I view my book more in the line of other recent literary works by Julia Phillips, a New Jersey writer, who wrote about missing girls in Russia (Disappearing Earth), or Aminatta Forna, a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer, who wrote a novel set in the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars (The Hired Man). Unlike American Dirt, Phillips and Forna’s books have been widely celebrated and lauded for their historical and cultural accuracy, as well as their thematic and dramatic strengths. The point, I think, is to do what you’re doing well, convincingly, and sympathetically to a culture that is not your own.

DHWW: One of my favorite stories in the book is “Men of the World.” Can you tell us more about the piece, and what inspired it?

CL: It’s hard to recall exactly what triggered my writing of that story. I wrote the first draft around six years ago and then worked on it for a year. At the time, I was interested in writing about secrets and families and toxic masculinity in the period after The Homeland War. I thought about what if one man had stayed to fight and another had fled. From the story’s opening, I wanted to bring these two men together and see what would happen. The ensuing power struggle between the two men drives the story and moves it in unexpected directions and that has been the thing I’ve enjoyed the most about “Men of the World.”

DHWW: Yet another amazing story is “All The Land Before Us.”  I read the story in a coffee shop, utterly transfixed. Without providing any spoilers, I’d love to hear how that story came to be. 

CL: Okay, no spoilers! I was thinking about how the pressure of being trapped with someone could lead a person to act out of character. Once the specifics came into place, a father and son in a makeshift wartime trench, the story just escalated and became an interrogation of violence and love and family ties.  One of my old fiction professors loved the story, but she feared that no American magazine would ever publish it. She was right. Luckily, a Canadian magazine—Prism International—selected it for its Vulgar issue.

DHWW: Was there anything that surprised you about this collection? That is, did any of the stories end up in a different direction than you’d anticipated? 

CL: After the book won the fiction prize, I still wasn’t happy with a couple of the stories. I rewrote “The Little Girls” several times, trying to find what the story was really about. It took a while and started to take on a hybrid form, somewhere between a contemporary story and an old-fashioned tale. I think it got there in the end. The publisher also included the story “brb,” which wasn’t in my original submission, but both he and the fiction editors loved it. When I read the collection now, after being away from it for so many months, the stories do surprise me. They lead me astray and end in places that I wouldn’t expect.

DHWW: Tell us about some of the themes that pop up in your work. What are your artistic passions and obsessions? Did those themes return in The Distortions? 

CL: With The Distortions set in the post-war era, the aftermath of ethnic cleansing haunts many of the stories. This is an area obviously fraught with the danger of gratuitous violence and the exploitation of victims. I was very mindful, especially as an outsider, in my handling of the material. Throughout the collection, the images and themes of war and death and violence fluctuate between implicit and explicit dramatization. For the most part, I tried to hand the role of the perpetrator of violence to the reader, let them fill in the gaps. 

I was also especially interested in the manifestations of capitalism after the war and how they affected the post-Yugoslav countries of Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, all in different ways. Though my collection mostly focuses on just Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, I was cognizant of my geographical and cultural biases, and I limited my excursions in trying to cover everything—which would have required a significantly longer book.

DHWW: You and I met at the artist colony, Ragdale, in 2019. But you’ve held fellowships at conferences and residencies nearly everywhere. I haven’t been to as many of these as you, but I’ve truly treasured my time at the ones I’ve attended. Did you write or revise many of the stories in The Distortions at residencies or conferences?

CL: I’ve been lucky the last few years in being accepted into so many residences. That said, I do apply for a lot, so I get a fair amount of rejections as well. For me, the time away at somewhere new jolts my creativity and sends my output into overdrive. At the Vermont Studio Center, I worked on my novel and wrote almost forty flash pieces. At Ragdale I worked on “Sojourn,” which was later picked up by Witness, and “The Distortions,” which won Epiphany’s Breakout Fiction Prize. Unlike my time at Ragdale, I usually edit my work once I’m home and I feel clear-eyed and ready to shape my stories.

DHWW: I’m astonished by how prolific you are. Your stories have appeared in about one hundred literary magazines, which has got to be a record. And now you’re working on a novel! Do you have any advice for emerging writers who are trying to get published in these outlets? 

CL: No record! I know plenty of writers who’ve published a lot more. My advice would be to keep writing new stories and read as much as you can. During the first summer of my MFA, I went to the library and checked out a half dozen volumes of Best American Short Stories. Over the next one hundred days, I would read one to two stories a day, not really paying attention to the names of the writers, but really luxuriating in the storytelling and the different ways stories could be told. I learned more that summer than in the previous five years. Later on, I took a workshop with Matthew Vollmer and he had us write a new story each week. He gave us prompts to get us started—long one-sentence stories, stories with repetition, autofiction, literary artifacts, etc.—and he guided us to think of storytelling in new and innovative ways. The stories we all produced were of higher quality than the usual workshop fare, and I ended up publishing most of mine.

DHWW: You’ve worked and studied with some of the greats: Denis Johnson, Rick Moody, and Andre Dubus III, as well as others. If you’re like me, Jesus’ Son was (and still is) one of the most important books when I was starting to create my own aesthetic and style. Who were some of the authors who helped form who you are as a writer?

CL: Early on, I read a lot of European and Russian literature: Albert Camus, Herman Hesse, Milan Kundera, Leo Tolstoy, Bernhard Schlink, Colette, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka. Then I discovered American literature and fell in love with the writing of Paul Auster and that of his ex-wife, Lydia Davis, and his new wife, Siri Hustvedt. After devouring the oeuvres of that love triangle, I moved on to some of the masters of American short fiction: Alice Munro, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Antonya Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Hempel, and Mary Gaitskill. 

When I first read Jesus’ Son, I was blown away. Years later I then had a chance to be in a class with Denis. I worked with him on early drafts of “Restoration” and “Zorana,” the two oldest stories. Denis had a sense of old-school magic about him and a commitment to perfect sentences. After workshop, we’d meet one-on-one and he’d go through my stories line by line, pointing out how to finesse every word in a sentence. I’ve always treasured his line edits and his advice to be bold, to put the story first and the audience second.

DHWW: I know that you also write a fair amount of book reviews in journals such as World Literature Today, Rain Taxi, and the Colorado Review. Tell us about your book-review life—does it help you with your creative work, or does it involve a completely different set of skills? 

CL: During the 2020 Covid year, I had a lot of time on my hands and my short book of experimental flash, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), was stuck in limbo in the publishing offices of Otis College. I couldn’t do much about that book, so I began to read some other small press titles. I ended up reviewing several of them that summer. For me, the process of reviewing took away a lot of time I could have been writing new material. Yet, that summer the omnipresence of Covid made it hard to focus on my own work. Writing reviews distracted me from the madness and the uncertainty of that time.

DHWW: What’s next for you, beyond the release of The Distortions? 

CL: I’m currently working on a novel set at the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars and is a sister project to the collection. In my spare moments, when I want to write something short, I’m working on a collection of flash pieces that examines the intersections of internet culture and the New York art scene. It’s in the early stages, but I like where it’s going.

DHWW: Thank you for telling us more about yourself and your work! Where can readers find out more? 

CL: Thanks, David! Readers can find more at my website and my Twitter.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is the author of Winter Counts (Ecco, 2020), nominated for the Edgar Award, and winner of the Anthony, Thriller, Lefty, Barry, Macavity, Spur, High Plains, Electa Quinney, and Tillie Olsen Awards. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next pick, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named a Best Book of the year by NPR, Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and other magazines. His short story, “Turning Heart,” will appear in the 2022 Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories anthology. Learn more at davidweiden.com. 

A former resident of Zagreb, Christopher Linforth is the author of two previous story collections, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020) and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014). Linforth’s stories have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Witness, The Arkansas International, Fiction International, Consequence, and Best Microfiction 2021, among other places.

1 June 2022