Robert McKean
Populating ROBERT MCKEAN’S novels and stories are some five hundred characters, steelworkers and bankers, doctors and jewelers, teachers and librarians, lawyers and yardage clerks, salesmen and ballet instructors—all residents of Ganaego, a small mill town in Western Pennsylvania. Mending What is Broken, his latest novel, is just out from Livingtson Press. McKean’s short story collection I'll Be Here for You: Diary of a Town was awarded first-prize in the Tartts First Fiction competition (Livingston Press). His novel The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts was awarded first-prize in the Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest. The novel was also named a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Recipient of a Massachusetts Artist’s Grant for his fiction, McKean has had six stories nominated for Pushcart Prizes and one story for Best of the Net. He has published extensively in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Chicago Review, and Armchair/Shotgun.
Instagram: @Rob.Mckean
X (formerly Twitter): @mckean_rob
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
I would be hard-pressed to believe anyone born from the twentieth century on has not been influenced by film. I can think of a score of films that have not only changed my writing but my life. I will mention four and focus on one. Gilliam’s Brazil, Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Fellini’s 8½, and Altman’s Nashville. Nashville has something like fifteen major characters, or, as a writer will say, fifteen points of view. As the film shifts from one character to another as they converge on a concert in Nashville, we learn who these people are, their aspirations, longings, sorrows, egomanias, and particularly their manifest inadequacies. The film is threaded through by a sound truck that roves Nashville’s streets broadcasting the deadpan rantings of a far-right libertarian. I have a manuscript based on an early workers’ strike that takes place in a small company town in 1937 with nine points of view. In my descriptions of the novel, I credit the influence of Robert Altman.
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
I sometimes listen to music as I write, the sound very low, a low murmur. And although I like jazz (mostly pre-Bebop, Armstrong, Ellington, Basie, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Getz), I find when I’m writing that classical music is less distracting (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, Verdi, Puccini). A frequent choice is Radio New Zealand on the internet, all music no talk all my morning, their night. Trying to learn how to play an instrument as an adult—and mostly failing at that—did teach me a little of musical architecture. Classical music’s complexity, its interweaving of themes, has helped me design more complex narratives. If Mozart might juggle five themes simultaneously, I think I can orchestrate a story that sinuously interweaves three or four or more ideas.
Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?
I’m an amateur baker. I have been baking whole grain sourdough bread for many years. I love the challenge of whole grain baking and I love eating the stuff. What one needs to keep in mind during the process of bread-making, controlling the temperature, watching the time, or allowing time to work its magic, and touch, learning the feel of a developing dough—temperature, time, touch—are analogously the same disciplines one needs to craft a moving story. Temperature in a story is pacing the action, pushing, holding back; time is granting the unconscious the freedom and license to invent and connect; and touch is the writer’s hand guiding the rhythm and flow of language. And so, yes, baking has influenced my writing, and, no doubt, writing has influenced my baking. Or, to put it another way, every loaf of bread is a story.
Do you collect anything? If so, what, why, and for how long?
When my wife suggested that most people do not need four or five large desks, I reluctantly downsized my desk collection. I found an auctioneer who would take a very large antique oak S-curve roll top desk. The desk had belonged to my father-in-law; I had it shipped across the country. The swivel chair, which did not match, was said, perhaps apocryphally, to come from Groucho Marx’s office. No one sat in it, the chair was not comfortable. The desk went with great effort from the movers up to our third floor, but then would not go through the door into my office. The auctioneer let me down diplomatically, “You know, no one wants these big pieces of furniture anymore?” But I love wood, the intricacy of the grain, the warmth of the material against your hand, the gentleness and durability of it, and especially the meticulous skill of a craftsman or woman in selecting, shaping, and finishing these beautiful articles of practical use. The desk I am sitting at now is a very large partners’ desk, burled walnut, leather-topped, enough real estate to mound up all my many unfinished, behind-schedule projects.
Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?
I’m not a quitter, by nature. Accordingly, I try to choose wisely beforehand what I am going to read. I don’t much like genre or simple-minded entertainment (reading the newspaper will more than fill that need), which immediately eliminates a majority of contenders. And I don’t like authors whom I consider too predictable or too superficially topical. There is neither time nor need for second-rate literature. But if it should happen that I have been snookered into a book that I thought would be a good read that turns out not to be right for me, I will put it down long before halfway. On the positive side, I suppose what I want to proselytize for here are the great sources of human wisdom and comedy that line the library shelves, the magnificence of the nineteenth century novelists, the astounding inventiveness and suppleness of the twentieth century masters, and now the talent rising from all directions in this our newest, most diverse century: We abound in great literature.
