Guest Author: Dean Bakopoulos [ Edited ]

[Brandi_R]

Dean Bakopoulous’ hotly anticipated second novel, My American Unhappiness, was released about a month ago and he’s going to join us here in the Writing room beginning Tuesday, 12 July. The Kirkus Review says My American Unhappiness “shimmers with mischief and offbeat charm . . . A dark entertainment infused by a bluesy yearning for a better America.”

Dean Bakopoulos was born and raised in metro Detroit, which is the setting of his first novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon  (Harcourt), a New York Times Notable Book. He has lectured at Michigan, Cornell, UW-Madison, and other universities about the economic and environmental problems facing the post-industrial Rust Belt, and has published related essays and criticism in The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, The Believer, and Real Simple. His one-act plays "Phonies" and "Wayside" have been produced at Alley Stage in Mineral Point, Wisconsin.

The winner of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Dean is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. He is the former director of both the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Wisconsin Humanities Council. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and his B.A. in creative writing from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is currently at work on a book of nonfiction, as well as a television series based on his first novel. 

[Brandi_R]

About My American Unhappiness:

“Why are you so unhappy?” That’s the question that Zeke Pappas, a thirty-three-year-old scholar, asks almost everybody he meets as part of an obsessive project, “The Inventory of American Unhappiness.” The answers he receives—a mix of true sadness and absurd complaint—create a collage of woe. Zeke, meanwhile, remains delightfully oblivious to the increasingly harsh realities that threaten his daily routine, opting instead to focus his energy on finding the perfect mate so that he can gain custody of his orphaned nieces. Following steps outlined in a women’s magazine, the ever-optimistic Zeke identifies some “prospects”: a newly divorced neighbor, a coffeehouse barista, his administrative assistant, and Sofia Coppola (“Why not aim high?”).

A clairvoyant when it comes to the Starbucks orders of strangers, a quixotic renegade when it comes to the federal bureaucracy, and a devoted believer in the afternoon cocktail and the evening binge, Zeke has an irreverent voice that is a marvel of lacerating wit and heart-on-sleeve emotion, underscored by a creeping paranoia and made more urgent by the hope that if he can only find a wife, he might have a second chance at life.

Why is everyone so unhappy? Check out the YouTube channel for My American Unhappiness to find out.

Read an excerpt at The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

Read "Please Don't Come Home From the Moon," the staggering short story that became the first chapter of his first novel.

[chad]

Hi Dean and welcome!

I was wondering  how much the GMHI was based in fact. If  there was anything factual about it?

Chad

[Andrew_Scott]

Dean:

As I was reading your novel, I wondered if Zeke might become a Frank Bascombe/Rabbit Angstrom kind of character for you. Do you think he might be a protagonist in some of your future books?

Cheers,

Andrew

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

Well, I did work at non-profits for most of my working life, and was the director of a humanities organization. Still, almost everything about the GHMI is made up, and all the characters are fictional. I, was however, hoping to underscore that all of the earnest rhetoric that accompanies many non-profit organizations when they engage in fundraising is a bit ridiculous, even when intentions and impact are significant. It's hard to look dignified when you're trying to commodify the value of the arts and humanities. 

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

Andrew:

I'm not sure if Zeke Pappas will come back like Bascombe or Rabbit. Sometimes I think he's better off where I leave him at the end of the book, full of possibility. If I put him on stage again, I'm sure to rough him up. 

Still, you never now. I thought I was done with the characters in my first novel, "Please Don't Come Back from the Moon," but I am about 100 pages into a book that revisits the world of Maple Rock.

[GS2991]

Welcome!! I hope you have a great time.

[cheto]

Yes.  It's amazing Zeke.  I'm drinking a Via!!!!

[Brandi_R]

Dean,

Thanks so much for joining us this week!

In Author's Notes: My American Unhappiness (which, for anyone interested, is an excellent essay that was cut from the final manuscript but appears on the blog Fiction Writers Review), you wrote a disclaimer about how fatherhood has changed you, ending with this sentiment:

I tell you all of this because when I wrote my first novel, I was not a parent. This novel, my second, was attempted with children. It is a tale told by a chronically anxious, worried man whose best friend was dying.

Can you say more about how fatherhood—and all the worry and anxiety that you describe in the notes--has changed or filtered into the choices you make when writing?

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

Well, I must say fatherhood has simply made me more in tune with two elements in the universe: risk and joy. The two go hand in hand. Having children requires an acceptance of risk--you can't love anything that much without risk. But they have also made me feel an intense amount of joy on a daily basis, something that is often a problem with me. 

So, I'd say that in many ways, having kids has allowed me to be a riskier, more joyful person. And I feel I bring that to my fiction and nonfiction now, taking risks with form and structure and voice and at the same time having more fun with work, throwing in humor and jokes and things that please me, that bring me joy. I like to write much more when I embrace the riskiness of the process and also find joy in it.

[Brandi_R]

---

Dean_Bakopoulos wrote:

Well, I must say fatherhood has simply made me more in tune with two elements in the universe: risk and joy. The two go hand in hand. Having children requires an acceptance of risk--you can't love anything that much without risk. But they have also made me feel an intense amount of joy on a daily basis, something that is often a problem with me. 

So, I'd say that in many ways, having kids has allowed me to be a riskier, more joyful person. And I feel I bring that to my fiction and nonfiction now, taking risks with form and structure and voice and at the same time having more fun with work, throwing in humor and jokes and things that please me, that bring me joy. I like to write much more when I embrace the riskiness of the process and also find joy in it.

---

Interesting how these fundamental aspects of life can have such an impact on the work. I often think about how a novel or story is not only a creation of the writer's imagination and unique outlook on life, but also the very specific moment in which it's being written.

I'm curious about your writing process. When you start a novel, do you tend to know where it's heading? Do you plan much before writing, or figure things out as you write?

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

I have a vague sense of the way I want the novel to sound, and who the protagonist will be, and what the novel plans to celebrate, to mourn, to lament, to fight against, but ultimately the plot surprises me. As I revise draft after draft, I understand where the story needs to go, and I try to get there. I never get the story to the EXACT place I wanted it to get, it always feels imperfect to me, the ending, like abandoning a world that's become overwhelming to me. But I know when it's time to get out. I know when I found out something that is true for the character on the stage, and that's when I know it must be that character's last word. 

But, a simpler answer: I make obsessive notes and outlines and post-its around my office, I just ignore most of them when I'm actually in the act of creation. 

[Brandi_R]

---

Dean_Bakopoulos wrote:

I have a vague sense of the way I want the novel to sound, and who the protagonist will be, and what the novel plans to celebrate, to mourn, to lament, to fight against, but ultimately the plot surprises me.

---

So well said. And an important distinction between the plot and the deeper issues plot strives to illuminate. I've been thinking about what you've said over the weekend as I work on a story that seems--on the page--driven more by the surface action than the deeper issues. 

I'm intrigued by Zeke's voice in My American Unhappiness. Beyond being the narrator, he's a storyteller at heart. I'm thinking, in particular, about the way the book opens, where he chronicles how the GMHI came to be and the quirky bits of personality, happenstance of time, etc all led to Zeke landing at the helm. Then there's the story of his family's hardships and how Melody's accident is what really brought the family's grief "from the tragic to the epic." Was this aspect of the novel--the first person narration and Zeke's distinct voice--a part of the novel from the start? Were you conscious about crafting Zeke's voice or what is more intuitive than that?

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

Zeke's voice was the driving force for the novel's creation. I heard his delusional, wounded, and ornate sentences before I knew, even, who he was or what he was doing. I heard his exclamations and his melodramatic reveries, and I thought, somebody is here, somebody wants me to tell the story of the last American decade through his eyes. I had my own political concerns, my own emotional instabilities, financial insecurities, and my own moments of unhappiness to lend to Zeke, but Zeke is entirely his own person, someone I recognize but probably don't fully understand, even now. Did I expect him to do what he did at the end of the novel? No. Not at all. But his voice demanded to end things at that moment.

And so, while this sounds almost mystical, as if I channeled some voice out of the ether, I don't necessarily intend it to sound like that. Once the voice emerged, I controlled it, crafted it, toned it down, and ramped it up in a way that served plot and theme and character. But those opening beats, that came from nowhere, that really was a voice from a sort of burning bush.

[chad]

"Notice

'Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished: persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

By Order of the Author

per G.G. Chief of Ordnance "

by Mark Twain

While I was reading your posts, I just remembered the notice found at the beginning of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark twain. And different people have different interpretations of "The Notice", but my intererpretation of "The Notice" is that plot, motive, moral and character, which he omits in the notice, can be both "cause" and "effect." That is, for example, did the plot drive the character, and or did the character drive the plot? And when we try to discern all the "causes and effects" in our own stories, we approach that ever important question of "why" we write- the origins of our own writing, which we only know and understand some of the time, but not all of the time. Great conversation! 

Chad    

[Brandi_R]

---

Dean_Bakopoulos wrote:

I had my own political concerns, my own emotional instabilities, financial insecurities, and my own moments of unhappiness to lend to Zeke, but Zeke is entirely his own person, someone I recognize but probably don't fully understand, even now.

---

This--and Chad's post about the origins of stories--has me thinking about the ways in which our own personal experiences and concerns and personality traits can filter into a work of fiction. It's a question that comes up at a lot of readings and author q&as: How close is the fiction to the author's own personal experience? Now, I'm not asking that question. But I am curious to hear your take on the question itself. Why do you think some readers are compelled toward this kind of information? Is it relevant to what you hope takes place between the reader and your work?

[Brandi_R]

In the spirit of NPR's lists of the summer's best reads. . If you were compiling your own list of the best reads for this summer, what would be on it?

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

Well, I sort of like to write hybrid novels, novels that bring in some reality and merge it with entirely fictional universes. My first two books came out of the obsessions I had personally, the questions and frustrations and concerns I was dealing with in my own life, and the characters I created, and their stories, were vehicles for those obsessions. Michael Smolij, from "Moon" is a lot like Dean Bakopoulos. No doubt. Zeke Pappas, from "My American Unhappiness" is like Dean Bakopoulos with all of his bad qualities turned up to eleven. Do you ever fantasize what you'd be like if you didn't care much about what other people would think? If you abandoned concerned for social proprietary? I like literary alter egos--Roth's Zuckerman, Robert Bolano's various stand-ins, even a less obvious one like Jim Harrison's Brown Dog--because they don't ignore the fact that a novel or novella is a constructed work by some human being imagining a whole world. Instead, they play with that idea, they embrace it. The novelist can enter and exit the story at will this way. Even Chekhov did this, especially in his plays. A lot of playwrights, in fact, do this--think Tennessee Williams in "The Glass Menagerie." He made his career take off by writing a play that was obviously about his own struggles. 

I'm working on two new books now--a YA novel and another adult literary work--and they deal more with the supernatural, with the magical was we interact with the Earth and its problems and mysteries. There's a lot less of me in those books, perhaps because I'm shifting, somewhat, into a more imaginative rather than visceral way of approaching my fiction. I need a break from myself, in all honesty. I'm sick of me. I need to spend time in other people's heads. 

[Dean_Bakopoulos]

This summer, I've been moved by "The Year We Left Home" by Jean Thompson and very impressed by Eleanor Henderson's "Ten Thousand Saints." 

Also, I like the mysteries of William Kent Krueger in summer months and am enjoying a galley of his newest, Northwest Angle, coming in late August, just in time for Labor Day weekend. 

I've also come late to the game on Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," ten years late, but it's the first vaguely sci-fi/fantasy novel I've ever read that made perfect sense to me, that I have "believed" from page one.

[Brandi_R]

---

Dean_Bakopoulos wrote:

. . .  I like literary alter egos--Roth's Zuckerman, Robert Bolano's various stand-ins, even a less obvious one like Jim Harrison's Brown Dog--because they don't ignore the fact that a novel or novella is a constructed work by some human being imagining a whole world. Instead, they play with that idea, they embrace it. The novelist can enter and exit the story at will this way. . .

---

I see what you mean and I do like how I can see, as a reader, the same sorts of struggles or concerns emerge for different characters across an author’s body of work. It’s not quite the same thing that you describe, but it reveals something interesting about fiction as a mirror not only to the world, but to the inner workings of the author.  

Thanks so much, Dean, for this thoughtful response—and all the others you’ve shared with us this week. On behalf of the entire Writing Room, thank you for taking the time to talk shop with us. It’s been enlightening. And I’m now looking forward to these new projects you have in the works—especially the re-visit to Maple Rock.  

This thread will remain in the Writing Room for the foreseeable future, so feel free to stop by when you have announcements to share.

Thanks!