Peter Mountford recently published a new short story collection, Detonator (Four Way Books), a career-spanning volume that showcases his delicate balance of darkness and warmth. As a writer and a teacher, he possesses a wealth of experience, which he lavishes upon readers and students. How did he bring the characters in Detonator so brilliantly to life? His stories span the globe. How much from these stories arose from his fascinating life? Matt Rennels digs into his process in this interview below.
Matt Rennels: I read in an interview that you got like 1,000 rejections, scrapped two novels and a set of short stories before you started over, and then you started publishing. The stories in Detonator, which span from 2007-2019, represent this period of success. Can you identify any change to your writing that happened?
Peter Mountford: One of the first stories I wrote after I had this revelation was “Barbarian Fantasies.” Before, I’d write stories about a pair of siblings in an anonymous American town, one of whom is a manager at a Starbucks, and they’d have a subtextual argument about their parents, and then one would stand and look at the trees. This would be like, fifteen pages. Very boring, no offense to young Peter. Then I was like, let’s try to write something that is harder to reject because I was sick of the rejections. So I wrote this story that opens in Ecuador, in 2000, a time of economic turmoil and revolution, and the main character is a hedge fund analyst forecasting the country’s future for a firm in New York, and his girlfriend, who is having sex with Russell Crowe’s driver (and doing nothing to hide this), is mad at him because he’s now forecasting doom for Ecuador’s future. That’s the opening few paragraphs. There’s more conflict and intrigue and heat in the first two paragraphs than in the whole fifteen pages of that previous story. Again, no offense to young Peter.
Some of these stories appear to be based on your experiences—for instance, your time spent in Sri Lanka, Scotland, Bolivia. How did you apply the “write what you know” rule? For example, were you the boy in “One More Night Behind the Walls?”
Yeah, I need an emotional foothold in a story for it to have some kind of emotional urgency for me. Very often it’s just the setting. So, yeah, I lived in all the places where these stories took place. I did have a lot in common with the kid in “One More Night”—similar age at the time of the war, melancholy mother, we spent a lot of time at the Colombo Swimming Club, there was a curfew. But as with most of the stories, the rest is made up. We did not find a human femur beside a burnt-out car, I wasn’t charged with keeping my mother safe, she didn’t walk home from parties, there was no big New Year’s Eve party at the Swimming Club, and so on. Everything that actually happens in the story is made up.
That’s kind of how it often goes. I was, for example, a pallbearer at a funeral in Scotland, the setting of “Love of Her Life,” but again all the people are invented. Much of the setting of that story, and even the fact that there were two busses from the burial to the wake, and one got stuck when the pass closed, that all happened. But zero of the real people are in the story.
In a few of the stories, including “Detonator,” you span several years. It’s interesting—and often touching—to glimpse at what will happen to characters in the future. But with short stories, time and space are limited. What mechanics need to be in place for this time leap to work?
That time jump in “Detonator” was so difficult, just from a logistical standpoint. The first two thirds or half of the story takes place over a few months, and then it jumps ahead about seven years and spans about a year in that new “time zone.” I had to understand how old the daughter is now, and various things happen in the second part (a person gets sick and dies, the narrator is by now divorced a second time, and his second ex gets pregnant and has a child), so that timeline has to make sense, too. It doesn’t help that the character himself, who has had a brain injury, is deeply confused. I ended up having to assign actual dates to everything so that it made sense, even if the reader can’t see those dates, and the narrator seems overwhelmed by it all.
All of your characters feel so well inhabited. Please share your process.
Absolutely. Rebecca Makkai wrote an interesting Substack on what she calls POV Disorder, which is about a similar thing. Basically, she says if you think of your POV character crying in the passenger seat of a car, are you seeing the side of the car, the side of their face within it, and they’re crying? Or are you seeing the blurry dashboard that they’re looking at? The answer, if you’re writing third person limited, is the dashboard. You’re not looking at them, you’re looking through them. This is immensely difficult for many emerging writers, but it is by far the most important concept in fiction writing. Maybe the need for human conflict is more important, I guess? But I see a lot of clients and students, and until they get a handle on these two things—need for conflict, and how to write close POV—they’re in a lot of trouble. The process is that simple. If my POV character enters a room, I think: What is the first thing they notice? What’s the second thing they notice? Then I write the first thing, and then I write the second thing afterward. These two things might not be what I, as a writer, want to describe about the room, but I’m not the one entering the room; this character is. It’s that simple. But you do it all the time, it never ever stops. So during a conversation, you’re constantly checking in with the character—what are they thinking now, what are they noticing? It’s rarely ever just a bunch of lines of dialogue in a row. Because that suggests you’ve stopped keeping up with the POV character’s mind and her sensory inputs.
You have these wonderful asides, like in the title piece story, “Detonator,” when your narrator ruminates about how parenting hasn’t always been a verb but now is. These asides could be essays on their own. Can you please share how you manage to interject such poignant asides while balancing the progression of a plot?
I’ve always loved fiction that isn’t afraid to think about ideas directly. Like, I love the energy of an essay, and I love the energy of storytelling, and I want both to be present. As an example, there’s a passage in “Barbarian Fantasies,” which again is set just pre-9/11, after the main character has this unpleasant, tension-filled interaction with the movie star Russell Crowe. Afterward, there’s a short passage in the story that goes:
Although Russell Crowe’s publicity department has sculpted him a reputation as a blue-collar bruiser, he’s just another rich jock with a chip on his shoulder. If there was a locker, he’d stuff guys like me into it. He’d pin us down and fart on our heads, because we’re the other type of privileged white guys. In Rolling Stone, my kinsman Moby once described an incident where Russell Crowe accosted him in a bathroom, saying, “He grabbed me and threw me against the wall and started berating me for being an American. He was like, ‘You stupid American, your country, you think you own the world.’ The obvious irony is that Crowe and his ilk think they own the world. The more brutal irony would be that we stupid Americans are right, we do own the world. Unlike Moby and me—who are far too eager to appear brainy and weak—Crowe fashions himself a brawny and sentimental lug. When he wears his father’s war medal to award ceremonies and reads sentimental poems and beats people up and cries, he reminds me of George W. Bush, who fashioned himself a similar public identity, although he was also just a rich bully.
I guess you’re not supposed to do that kind of thing in a short story? Obviously, that passage doesn’t read like “fiction,” but it is. I don’t know. I had fun, and I think it’s relevant to character and theme.
Detonator has a nice through-line of themes and writing style, while still sticking firmly to literary fiction. I’m curious, is there a genre or format you haven’t tried yet but would like to?
Oh, I tried writing a thriller and I tried writing a detective novel. Finished both books, and the reality is that neither was any good. I’m not cut out for it. I love reading good crime fiction, I adore Denise Mina and Tana French, and I’ve read a lot of Elizabeth George, Jo Nesbo, and so on. But I can’t do it. I think it goes back to your first question. I need a foothold in the story. When trying to write the detective novel, I hung out with cops, I went to Seattle’s homicide department office, did a ride-around, I did all this stuff. But I couldn’t get into the mind of this person who gets out of college and then goes and joins the police force, works his way up from beat cop to the homicide division. His motivations felt so foreign to me. He’s single, and in his thirties, and… what? I met these people, I talked to them, but I couldn’t do theory of mind on them, not really.
And what’s next for your writing?
I love writing one or two long short stories per year, often during the summer. I’m going to keep doing that. And I’m hoping to write a craft book! I might self-publish it, even. And I have enough stories for another collection, already, but I’ll keep plugging away on that one new big ambitious short story per year. I’m just about to start my short story for this year.
Peter Mountford is the author of the novels A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (winner of the Washington State Book Award in Fiction), and The Dismal Science (a New York Times editor’s choice). His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Southern Review, The New York Times magazine, The Atlantic magazine, The Sun, Ploughshares, and Guernica. He teaches creative writing at University of Nevada, Reno, at Tahoe’s low-residency MFA program and through MountfordWriting.com, and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.
Matthew Rennels has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. He has work published in Adelaide Magazine.