Luna Park: How were you first drawn to writing fiction professionally? In other words, could you briefly explain how you moved from a career as a corporate lawyer to applying (and, what’s more, getting in) to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—then having your stories published in such acclaimed literary magazines as Zoetrope, A Public Space, Harvard Review, and One Story? It would seem you are far from a dawdler—as a new reader to your work I actually wonder when you have the time to sleep.

Nam Le: I don’t think I was ever drawn to writing fiction ‘professionally’; I was always drawn to writing, and, until a few years ago, I was drawn mainly to poetry. I started ‘seriously’ writing a novel (an appellation that really applies by the mere fact of so doing) during a one-year hiatus from the law. So I guess you could say I was drawn, during that time, to the pipedream of being able to write professionally. Iowa was a bit of luck and a lot of timing—I’d recently finished my novel and was back in Litigation and M&A when I read a review of an Australian book (John Murray’s A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies—a fantastic collection) that mentioned the program. This was late 2003; I Googled it, was intrigued, realized the deadline was upon me, and sent off the first few chapters of my (since abandoned) novel on a whim. Dawdling?—man, I do plenty of that, I’ve just gotten so good at it now it looks like something else.

LP: The stories in The Boat are reminiscent of some of the most respected works in the short story form, such as Joyce’s Dubliners or the stories of Alice Munro. I say this because the stories all seem to have a knowledge and sensitivity well beyond the writer’s years. On top of this, the settings of stories in The Boat cover nearly the entire globe: from Iowa City to Columbia to Hiroshima to Tehran to Australia. The only continents not represented are Africa and Antarctica. And, no matter its location, each story is believable and compelling. When I first read the story “Cartagena” in the recent Pushcart Prize anthology, I thought for sure the story’s author had lived most of his life in South America, rather than in Australia.
In your recent interview with One Story magazine, you say some of the best advice you received about writing was from a friend who told you Marilynne Robinson said that “plausibility was purely a matter of aesthetics.” How do you think this advice relates to your own writing? I assume it has something to do with your felicity to write fiction set in a wide-range of locations.

NL: I’m saving Antarctica—it’s the continent with which I’m most fascinated. (At one point I almost joined the Seaman’s Union in Melbourne to up my chances of landing a supply ship spot. (And see, now you’ve got me dissing Africa!))

The idea we’ve ascribed to Marilynne Robinson—that plausibility is an aesthetic matter—lies, for me, at the heart of the fictional enterprise. It pushes back against all the assumptions that circumscribe our narrative process. It permits. And, in the case of my own writing, it permits not only (or even chiefly) diversity of geographical setting, but diversity of structure, style, plot, character, mood, voice, etc. These seven stories are different because I wanted each story to be entirely self-contained, to be attentive to its own imperatives. Because I wanted to see other things, other places, circumstances and people, through other eyes. Because I wanted to explore how I’d been engaged by other stories—stories of all shapes and narrative stripes. And because why not? In the end, all a writer can try to do is write—in a way that tries to be interesting and moving—about the things that interest and move him. Personally, I’ve found no persuasive reason to cut back on that set of things.

LP: Do you see your own writing as somehow different from the majority of short stories being published today? For example, Donald Barthelme once described his own method as one of collage, and went on to say that “collage is the central principle of all art in the 20th century.” Possibly not in such all-encompassing terms, but do you see yourself as similarly attempting something new with the short story, or perhaps with fiction in general?

NL: Well, on balance, my stories are longer, I guess. But not so much as to be distinctive. I had to answer this question recently, of what it was I thought I was trying to do, and I came up with this formulation: that, for me, the project of fiction is to articulate consciousness with integrity. That’s what I try to do. What we talk about as ‘style’ is intrinsic to execution, of course, but should be, in my opinion, secondary in the reckoning of how ‘good’ something is. Barthelme and Bellow, Lydia Davis and Alice Munro, all different stylists, are all ‘good’; they just sit differently on each of the three branches (of ‘articulation,’ ‘consciousness’ and ‘integrity’). It’s a big tree. To mix metaphors, I think anyone who manages to pull off that trifecta is necessarily doing something new, something transformative. Maybe I’m old-school in that I still believe the finest thing a story can do is move its reader—to set off a little sob in the spine, as I think Nabokov called it. I don’t believe in technical self-limitation. I do believe 21st century consciousness is a complicated thing—and that its complications are without precedence. At bottom, I believe it’s a tough but good time to be writing.

LP: Do you feel different with your stories now coming out in book form rather than in a literary magazine? Book publishing is certainly a far more lucrative and public an endeavor than magazine publishing. Do you feel book publishing is more of a complete accomplishment for a short story writer? Or is it just that publishing in literary magazines won’t put food on the table?

NL: Well, last I checked, short story collections weren’t putting much food on many tables, either! No, I don’t think that book publishing is a more complete accomplishment than magazine publishing. Yes, given the choice, I’d go with book publishing. Why? All the arguable reasons relating to readership, disposability, etc. But mainly for sentimental reasons—it’s a book As a kid in love with reading, I didn’t think ‘I’m gonna grow up to become a literary-journal-published writer’. Don’t get me wrong—I think we need both; in fact, I suspect many stories get a better shake in journals and magazines than in collections. But books are books, and I can’t get past this (perhaps pre-rational) reaction.

LP: Do you read many literary magazines, and did you when you were younger and living only in Australia? If so, which ones are you currently reading?

NL: I almost never read literary magazines while I was in Australia. I try to now, but my habits are pretty scattershot; I’ll read some in bookstores, try to keep up with friends’ work and recommendations, herky-jerk through my various subscriptions.

LP: Is there anyone that you have run across in literary magazines whose work has stood out for you? Whose names you might find yourself excited to see again on the back of a magazine?

NL: Unfailingly good: Deborah Eisenberg, Edward P. Jones, Mary Gaitskill, Matt Klam, Tobias Wolff, William Boyd, William Trevor. I’m always excited to see David Foster Wallace’s name in a contributors column. Off the top of my head (and based on my ultra-scientific sampling method above), I’ve recently read stories I really dug by Aleksandar Hemon, Jesse Ball, Maggie Shipstead, Cyan James, Charles Conley, Sophie McManus, Chris Leslie-Hynan, Cate Kennedy, Nami Mun, Ethan Rutherford, Anthony Doerr, Fiona McFarlane, and Daniyal Muennuddin. And heaps of others not coming to mind right now. And anyone still alive on the list below.

LP: Along these same lines, what writers would you say have been influential to your fiction writing?

NL: Influence, of course, is a tricky thing. Here are some fiction writers who have written books I love: Melville, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Twain, Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Greene, Cheever, Yates, Leonard Michaels, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Marilynne Robinson, Tim Winton, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denis Johnson, Robert Stone, Lorrie Moore, Charles D’Ambrosio, and on and on.

LP: Is there any relationship you’ve had with a literary magazine editor that has been more than usually helpful to you as a writer? Maybe not a Gordon Lish type, but someone who has maybe pushed you in directions you didn’t realize, or perhaps just helped clear up your work with remarkable skill?

NL: The first story I had taken was taken by Brigid Hughes of A Public Space—I’ll not soon forget that. The first story I had published was published by Michael Ray in Zoetrope: All-Story. Both are extraordinary editors: open-minded, meticulous, bold, assertive, learned. The most extensive and inspiring editorial exchanges I’ve enjoyed have been with Robin Desser, my editor at Knopf. She’s everything I didn’t dare hope for in an editor (and she would’ve slaughtered this sentence).

LP: You have recently accepted the post of Fiction Editor on the Harvard Review. Congratulations. Could you tell us more about how that came about? I know that in issue 32 they published your story “Hiroshima.”

NL: I met the editor of the Harvard Review, Christina Thompson, two years ago during the editing back-and-forth for “Hiroshima.” (I’ll always be indebted to her, and the fiction editor at the time, Katherine Vaz, for taking that story; I’d previously been told by well-meaning, in-the-know folk that it would be ‘unsaleable’.) We corresponded for a while after that, and eventually I became an informal reader, an extra set of eyes to run over any pieces Christina might send along. When Katherine Vaz left the post earlier this year, Christina invited me in, and I was honoured to accept. I should clarify that the title probably sounds more glamorous than the job—which is an honorarium rather than salary-type gig.

LP: When he began as Fiction Editor at Boston Review, Junot Diaz said he wanted “writing so sharp it cut the eye.” Do you have any comparable feelings about writing you are looking for at Harvard Review?

NL: Man, that’s a good quote—do you reckon he’d mind if I co-opted it? Bearing in mind that selection is very much a collaborative process, the threshold for me is pretty basic: does this thing make me want to keep reading it? Beyond that it’s really case by case. (There are dealbreakers, of course.) What am I looking for? In general, I’ll go something raw and strong over something polished and less strong, something strange over something familiar, but then again, what salt-worthy editor wouldn’t say that? It’s that Justice Potter Stewart calculus: you can’t put a name to it but you sure know it when you see it.

LP: We asked this same question of Benjamin Percy in our first Luna Park interview, and I was wondering how you might answer it: It seems there are two sort of readers, those who enter a bookstore and go straight to the magazine stand, and those that first go for the bookshelves. Which one are you?

NL: I do almost exactly as the excellent Mr. Percy does: new fiction first, then magazine rack, then bookshelves and remainders.

LP: Finally, those of us who read your interview with One Story are dying to know—are you still working on that story about Thai pirates?