[Thanks to J. Haniver for recording and editing the following interview. –TmC]
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Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I’m not sure, actually. Its original composition dates back to around 2010 through 2011, I believe. I know I myself wasn’t particularly satisfied with my life, and with the general state of world affairs, and I was probably thinking a lot about what we falsely label “the good old days.” I can’t remember the specific impetus behind it, other than that its basic idea allowed me to indulge my favored digressive way of writing. I’m also greatly interested in memory and how we perceive our pasts, rightly or wrongly, and this story offered a great way to delve into those ideas a bit more than I had before.
Are any of Mickey Fisher’s memories yours?
Mickey Fisher is definitely not me, but there are some things I drew on from my past, if only their bare structures, in order to create his memories. There’s talk of the lake his family’s cabin was on… that’s basically my own family’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin, which plays a huge part in my earliest memories. There are little things, like the playing with Matchbox cars, and some other little things like that. The image of his friend’s older sister hanging out the upstairs window is essentially a real one. It’s in Mickey’s memories for the same reason it’s in mine, though I don’t say so in the novel: that sister would, several years later, kill herself. Shot herself in that house’s basement the week before I graduated high-school. She was like, ten years older than me. Troubled life. In the novel I don’t mention that, and the reader doesn’t need to know it, but it’s why it’s there in his head. A sweet little moment and image made sweeter, maybe, by the fact it would never again be repeated… that it never again could be.
Did you base the character of Vincent on someone?
I had a Tom Waits-ian image in mind, in fact. The Tom Waits of, like, the Mule Variations era. Rustic, rural character, rough and mysterious. I really had nothing else in mind, other than a sort of cliche figure from American literature: the mysterious and seemingly all-knowing character, a stranger who usually visits a town out of the blue one day and brings magic and revelations. Here I made him not a visitor, but an original denizen of the area. Taking that kind of archetype and merging it with certain little inconsequential elements of the Waits persona, like the rough voice and dusty clothes, even the warm but mysterious personality. It wasn’t like a portrait of him or anything. By the way, not many people know that I pictured Peter Dinklage when I was writing the character of Scooter Boober in Dizzlemuck. This was after I’d seen him in The Station Agent, and didn’t know he’d become such a big star. I just remember picturing him as I wrote Scooter’s scenes. These are the only two times I have ever done that, as far as I remember.
Is there a moral or message in the novel? It’s a sad story for sure, and yet seems to offer some kind of hope at the end… or the hope for hope, maybe.
A moral or message? No. My wife called it a novel about suicide, which it really is, at its heart… the idea of not liking your life so you decide to leave it. In the case of Lost Creek Falls, it’s leaving it for a moment from the past, rather than killing yourself, but leaving is leaving. It’s suicidal in the sense of abandoning all that is here and now… and yes, it’s sad. Let’s not spoil the end, but it’s not a beach read, for sure. I don’t write beach reads. I’m not in the business of being uplifting. Yet within all sadness there is usually room for hope… or acceptance, I suppose.
But there’s humor in the novel, for sure… as there is often in your books. Subtle humor, maybe, but it’s there.
Not all of them, but sure, it’s found here and there. In After the Death of the Ice Cream Man it’s in Jonah’s awkward attempt to hit on, and ask out, Jess. There’s a bit of slapstick in Of Reptiles and Amphibians, too… all that clumsy chasing after the water snake. Dizzlemuck is really my only purely comedic novel. It was intended to mock and satirize. In Lost Creek Falls, Mickey is a bit of a smart mouth when he wants to be. He mocks some people in it, with little asides here and there. Does that make him likable or not? I’m not sure. I’m never sure if you’re supposed to like a character of mine… I try to make them as real as possible, and real people are flawed and often hard to like. We’re both saints and assholes, all of us.
You mentioned somewhere that the novel originally ended differently. Without spoiling anything, can you talk about that?
It had a chapter after where it ends now, a sort of resting chapter… a peaceful little beat that my wife, actually, decided wasn’t needed. She said no, it ends right here, where it ends now, and didn’t need that sort of pacifying element. She was right. It might not make for a comforting ending, but it’s where it needed to end. You always want to end with more questions asked… you answer a few, or give the illusion of answering them, and then you put more in the reader’s mind. More questions, more uncertainty, more mystery.
Did you have a literary model when writing this book?
No, actually. I don’t remember wanting Mickey’s voice to sound like anything other than his voice. Although, reading it now, I hear myself falling into a Hemingway kind of cadence now and then, which makes sense: around the time I wrote it I was experiencing a Hemingway Renaissance… which would lead to really upping the Papa tone in Of Reptiles and Amphibians a year or so later. No, I think Mickey Fisher sounds like Mickey Fisher… I like his voice, and his way of thinking. It was different writing about a young father. That was a first for me. I don’t have children, so it was interesting to look at his life through his eyes.
What do you hope the reader gets out of this book, or takes away from it?
I guess, at the end, I hope that the reader finds that a book like Lost Creek Falls asks them questions when they finish it. Maybe they’ll look at their own lives a little differently. That’s probably the goal of any piece of writing, to open a window into life, or the state of being alive as a human being on this planet. Also, maybe, some more philosophical questions deriving from the story itself, the thoughts on nostalgia and memory and depression and how self-absorption can blind you to the problems of those around you. Two different readers should both have different takes from any good work, and therefore be able to argue with each other. One sees it one way, the other sees it totally differently. I would imagine there’s a debate some people could have after reading Lost Creek Falls. I would hope so. They’ll probably feel sad at the end, too. That’s okay. You only feel sadness when you’re alive, you know.
Lost Creek Falls is a real place.
Yeah. I’ve never been there. I needed a title, to be honest. This was the first thing I ever wrote that didn’t develop a real, solid title by the time I was done with it. It didn’t get a proper title until four years after I finished it. Or something like that. Maybe two or three. It’s a good title. I wanted it to be of a place, and I tried several other real ones, like Old World Wisconsin, and some fake ones… like, god, Yesterland was one of them. Terrible name. I wanted a connection to memory and, sort of, disappearance. But Yesterland… god, that’s like a terrible Michael Crichton book or something. So, no… Lost Creek Falls came across my path and I thought: great, perfect, it says everything I need to it to say, and has a cool ring to it. So that was that.
I thought I read somewhere where you described the book with a mash-up of references… do you know what I’m talking about?
Was it the novelization thing?
Yes, that’s it. It was Stegner and….
It was a novelization of a Tarkovsky film written by Wallace Stegner. That came to me one day when I was thinking of how to describe it, and I think that’s pretty accurate. I hadn’t as yet discovered Tarkovsky when I wrote this, hadn’t even heard the name, but discovering his stuff was like discovering a kindred soul. I share a lot with him, in terms of how I view memory and images and… well, I could go on, but yes, I think Lost Creek Falls has a Stegnerian tone with its prose, but an at least vaguely Tarkovskian feel to its images, at least in the flashbacks. A guy like Mallick, too, could make a good movie out of simple material like this, with the emphasis on the textural weight of the past, and the poetry of memory’s images. Same is true for After the Death, which was once compared to The Tree of Life. But… yeah, I don’t know. It’s a simple book about memory and a man’s sense of place and belonging and regret and contentment. Perhaps misleadingly simple. Those things are never simple. That’s the point of the novel: memory haunts us. The past haunts us. It’s the judge of our present as much as the present is the judge of it. And our contemplation of it can blind us to the present, as it does to Mickey Fisher. He spends too much time in the past and misses the much larger story that surrounds him in the present… tragically so, as it turns out.