A Conversation with Craig Lancaster
Credit: Casey Page
The first time I talked with Craig Lancaster was in early 2009. We met near the doorway to Montana Public Radio’s Studio B on the University of Montana campus in Missoula. My radio job at the time included producing a weekly program and podcast called The Write Question. Craig had just published his first novel, 600 Hours of Edward. (Click here to listen to that interview.)
A few years later, I interviewed him again when Edward Adrift was published. (Click here to listen to that conversation.)
During my post-MTPR years, I’ve kept track of Craig via social media. I’ve read his books. I’ve marveled at his prodigious talent and productivity. Since our first conversation he’s written and published another 11 books, if you count the printed version of his play, Straight On To Stardust, which I do. So, 12 books in 15 years. (insert WOW emoji)
I wanna be like Craig.
Craig’s other superpower is his ability to create characters who speak like someone you might overhear in a café or grocery store. It feels like they’re in the room with you as you sit reading. Scenes from the story flow through your mind, vivid and tangible. A few times I had to stop reading and remind myself that I don’t know these people. They are fictional characters.
Anyway, it’s always fun, and a huge honor, to talk with Craig Lancaster. Enjoy!
Chérie Newman: Northward Dreams is fiction. It's a novel. Yet your characters are astonishingly vivid and authentic, especially in the way they speak. What do you notice most when you listen to conversations?
Craig Lancaster: This is such a good question that I'm filled with regret I've never asked it. I'm filled with further regret that I probably won't write it down and thus will miss the chance to steal it from you. Now, I'll see if I can give you an equally good answer:
I think I most fixate on what's not said in conversation, as that's revelatory in its own way. You can tell a lot about how people were brought up, the prisms through which they see the world, and the outlines of their discomfort by what they'll skirt. I think this might have developed through my own need — which took a long time to rein in — to talk something to death. That was a real albatross in some of my personal relationships as a younger man. When I thought I was giving everything (that is, too much) and didn't sense something commensurate in return, I started looking for cues that weren't explicit. A good example: my relationship with my father, which has become more fraught the older I've gotten. I think he could relate to me when I was a child, as his own emotional development hasn't graduated far from the traumas he endured as a youngster. As I grew up and demanded more of him and elevated the level at which I wished to communicate, he struggled. I told him once that he hasn't liked me as much since I've grown up and developed my own wants and point of view point. He balked, then said, quietly, "You're probably right."
That ability to suss out what's said and what's not is useful at both ends of the character-building spectrum. You can really flesh out someone who has learned to express herself clearly (I'm thinking the Rhonda character in Northward Dreams, who at a crucial moment has to tell the main contemporary character, Nate, why she thinks he's acting the way he does). You can also hide a character inside an inability or unwillingness to engage.
CN: A few of the chapters are written in the voice of a second person narrator. What prompted that choice?
CL: There are nine intercalary chapters in the book, each one focused on a single character who appears in the novel across the 1952-2012 timeline. In these chapters, I think I went with the second-person point of view initially just to talk to them: Here's what's happening to you, what you're feeling, why it has gone the way it has. Any notion I had about changing that up went away once I saw the effect. There's an immediacy to the POV. Those characters are illuminated in ways they couldn't have been even in close third person.
CN: This novel tells family stories that unfold over four generations. What have you noticed about familial patterns during the past hundred years, especially in rural areas?
CL: Come on, Chérie. I can speak to only the past 54 years!
But seriously: I grew up in the suburbs. But people close to me, whose stories impose on my own, come from a rural background, notably my father (the Fairfield bench area of Montana) and my mother's father (southwestern Minnesota). The first big pattern, and it's not specific to my family, is the urban movement. We're not as connected to rural landscapes as we once were, by and large, and I think you can see that lack of connection today in how we relate to each other, where some of our political divisions lie, and the easy, unfair way we have of denigrating a growing-up experience that doesn't resonate with us. (Rural folks often get dismissed as rubes, which is unfair. My wife once clapped back at a postal clerk who noted her New York T-shirt — where she's from — and said, "You must be glad to be out of there." Also unfair.)
As far as family dynamics, though, I suspect more is the same than is different, now vs. 100 years ago. It's almost a cliche to rebel against where you came from, which, I suppose, is why so many of us do. For me, it was essential to get out of suburban Fort Worth, Texas, as fast as I could, and to stay gone and wandering. It's only now, in middle age, that I feel home — my boyhood home — tugging at me a little harder. It's no accident that Nate, for example, was plucked out of the Mountain West and moved to Texas as a boy. I've been there, Nate.
CN: Beyond the obvious (writing an entire book) what challenges did you encounter and overcome during your journey to publication day? What’s the most delightful part of the process?
CL: Oy! I wrote a blog post that tells the story so I never have to tell it again. The only thing I'd say in addition: I have no hard feelings. I wanted it to work out with the previous publisher of the book, and for assorted reasons it just didn't. I've never been served by being close-minded about anything, and that includes the possibility that I might work with that publisher again. But I'm on my own with this one and quite OK with that, because I'm such a believer in this book. Consider reading Chapter 1. You might become a believer, too!
The most delightful part of the process is the one I'm entering now, with lots and lots of chances to meet readers and make connections. I love it. I've missed it.
CN: You're a novelist (11, so far!), a playwright, magazine designer, copy editor, writing coach, journalist, prolific social media poster, and an analyst/content specialist for a research firm (whatever the heck that is). Your family and friends need some of your time. There's also your passions for sports, your dog, and your pursuit of the perfect breakfast plate. How do you do it all?
CL: Just for the accounting: This is novel No. 10, but if you include the play — Straight On To Stardust — there have been 12 books overall. Where did the time go?
I think the simple, glib answer is that I'm happier when I'm busy. The longer, more illuminating answer is that I very much sense the ticking clock. We get one spin through this life — this is true even for Keith Richards — and one chance to do the things we want to do. The artistic pursuits I chase are imperatives — I would not be able to deal with these thoughts or memories healthily or helpfully without the outlet of spinning them into something else. I've been lucky in that my professional lives — journalist, designer, editor, payments analyst, pipeline inspection specialist — have appealed to me beyond the need of making a buck. I don't last long at things that aren't, on some level, part of who I am.
Anyone needing my time — assuming I agree with that need — is invited to breakfast. When should I expect you, Chérie?
CN: Ha! Looking forward to the Brussels Sprouts! You've lived in many towns in many states. How has that influenced your storytelling?
CL: We live in an age of Google Earth, which means we can see most anywhere, in three dimensions, without leaving our chairs. That's useful, but it doesn't supplant the knowledge one gleans from knowing highways and byways, of being privy to conversations in rural supper clubs, of having neighbors who are banging away at a life far different from your own. Travel — whether for work or a new place to live or for a diversion — is the great educator about people and how they live, and I have used my privilege of having lived and traveled widely in the United States as creative fuel, again and again.
I still believe that, fundamentally, we are more alike than we are different, all of us, but our perceived differences get lit up in regional ways. Of Max Wendt, the traveling pipeliner in And It Will Be a Beautiful Life, I wrote of a desire to see what was beyond the next horizon, even if he had been there before. I know that yearning in the deepest part of me. I hope it's never extinguished. I hope I never satisfy it.
CN: What else do you want us to know?
CL: I'd like to circle back to the idea of home, just for a bit. My first several books were set entirely or partly in Montana. This new one takes place chiefly here, although it also stretches to Wyoming and Texas and, in at least an allusory way, California.
The next book — title a bit in flux, publishing timeline uncertain — is the one that takes me all the way back to Texas, and I'm really looking forward to bringing that out. It was a surprise at the beginning, then became less so as I went along. In the end, there's no other place it could have taken place.
I'm nobody's paragon of interpersonal comportment, but I used to say to people, hey, whenever it's possible and safe to maintain good relationships with your exes, you should do so. They're an important part of your story.
The same is true with where we grew up. You might outgrow it, you might find someplace else that speaks to you more intimately, you might sink your roots deeper into new soil than they ever stretched in the old, but that place had some role in building you. If you can find a way back to it, even if that's only reconciling the way it traumatized you, it's worth the effort. Texas didn't traumatize me, at least not in ways that have debilitated me (and even then, the culprit was Texans, not Texas). But it sure took its sweet time in talking to me again. Or maybe I took my sweet time in learning to listen.
In any case, I'm tuned in now.
Thanks, Craig!
I invite you to click around on Craig’s website. Find out more about what it’s like to be a writer by reading his entertaining blog posts. Buy some books. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter, which includes the adventures of his little dog, Fretless.
Become part of the CL Nation: www.craig-lancaster.com
