Interview: Kevin Fenton

Writing/Publishing/Advertising/Mad Men/Merit Badges (2011)

Interviewed by Patrick McAllaster

Kevin Fenton--Photo by Cory Docken

Kevin Fenton’s short-story, Product Placement featured in Volume 2 of Emprise Review. At present he is busy at work readying for the early 2011 publication of his 2009 AWP award for fiction winner, Merit Badges, from New Issues Press. Kevin describes Merit Badges as a blend of The Waves and That ’70s Show, such a claim has our interest piqued. We took some of Kevin’s time to chat about television, publishing, and literary influences.

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1. What did you think of the Mad Men season finale?

I’m way behind but catching up on DVD. The last thing I saw was a nice lady shooting birds.

2. There are many reasons to watch the show, it seems like each viewer gets something a little different from the series, what about Mad Men pulls you in?

The promise of entering into a Stan Getz tune or an Alvin Lustig design. It keeps that promise. But there’s another promise it doesn’t quite keep, which is to create characters I care about. I’m not seeing that, although a lot of the smartest people I know are. They are like soap opera protagonists in that desire stands in for character.

3. What’s funny to me is how dismissive a lot of people can be of television, and yet, some of the best long-form storytelling, in any medium, is found on television right now. In addition to Mad Men, what are some of the other notable examples of this trend?

Weeds and Big Love. When a season comes out on DVD, we write off a week. I mean, we make our deadlines and brush our teeth, but that’s about it. HBO and Showtime are the new Broadway. They are where our best actors turn in their best performances. We’ve also been watching a brief, remarkable British show called Sensitive Skin, which actually treats characters in their sixties as real human beings.

And I don’t just love long-form shows. I love just regular ding-dong sitcoms. I own News Radio and Spaced on DVD. I’m a facebook fan of The Big Bang Theory, which caused all sorts of consternation when friends thought I was a fan of the beginning of the universe. I’m ambivalent about that, but I love the sitcom.

4. Blurb Merit Badges. Sell it for the yet to be sold.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves meets That ’70s Show.

Beyond that, I feel on safest ground repeating what others have said. For people who love character and plot, even though it’s a short book, there are four strong voices telling stories that span a couple of decades. A friend of mine said that the use of four voices kept him turning pages because he was always wondering what was happening to the other three protagonists. If you like good sentences, people have told me that long after reading Merit Badges in manuscript they have walked around with sentences in their heads. For anyone looking for formal experiments in multi-character narrators, Merit Badges provides an example if, for some reason, The Waves and As I Lay Dying have been checked out.

5. With a little over a year to go before Merit Badges is published, where are you at in the process?

Giving some input—maybe too much—to the designer, cleaning up the manuscript, writing acknowledgements, rounding up blurbs. The time it takes to physically produce the book only accounts for some of the time between acceptance and publication.

6. As the publishing scene continues to show strong in indie presses there is still some difficulty in getting the word out as there are so many presses, what are some of the methods you plan on using to overcome that?

I’m lucky. I’ve spent twenty-five years in advertising and marketing. I’ve published a literary magazine, Two Cities.

The basic book marketing challenge is this: you’re asking an introvert with no budget to launch a new product in six weeks in a crowded market. The good news is that authors are some highly motivated and smart introverts. And we have some new tools in our toolkit. In the seventies there was no web, no Twitter, no Facebook, no blogs. In college I wrote letters to four friends and ran into ten more at bars on break. That was my network.

That said, the thing about tools is that you can’t just swing a hammer wildly and expect to build a house.

I’ve got some ideas about what that house might look like and how I might go about building it I’ve started a weekly blog, Either This Or A Nap, a Facebook group–Merit Badges–The Novel, a Twitter feed. Most of my opinions are provisional, but there’s something happening that I expect isn’t going to work: forming connections at the expense of deepening connections. Rolodexes don’t buy books; contacts don’t buy books, people do.

Besides various digital stabs at connection, I’ve also introduced myself at a couple of bookstores and plan to visit some more in the spring. As the publication deadline approaches, there will be a web site, which should be cool if I can pull it off, and upon publication there will be some sort of events.

I plan on writing up a case study about my experiences promoting the book when all is said and done, and I’ll be glad to share that with any writer who’s interested. The easiest way to get that is to join my Facebook group, but if you want it, I’ll figure out some way to get it to you.

7. Does your work in advertising ever influence your work in literature, or vice versa?

Five years ago, I would have said not at all. The purpose of literature is to expand and intensify our sense of what it means to be a human being. The purpose of advertising is to sell soap.

But I’ve been reading Michael Chabon and Nick Hornby on the value of entertainment. The best Minneapolis advertising people—the people at places like Barrie D’Rozario Murphy or Mono or DgB—are keenly aware that they are asking people for a chunk of their time. They try to repay that by creating something witty or beautiful or otherwise pleasing. The great Creative Director, Tom McElligott, used to say the test of any ad was, “Is it the most interesting thing they saw today?” That’s not a bad thing for any writer (from Tolstoy to Don Draper) to keep in mind.

8. Stock question—a writer or text our readers might not know about?

Joseph Mitchell’s Up In the Old Hotel. Beautiful long-form New Yorker portraits of the kind of people and places seldom profiled in the press (or else reduced to stock “characters.”) I’ve never encountered writing so dense with detail but also absolutely deft and a pleasure to read.

9. List some personally influential writers and how their work informs your writing.

Faulkner, because he gave me the sense that a writer owes a duty to a people and a place. Woolf, because she insisted that every book finds its own form. Updike because he wrote unforgettable sentences about recognizable lives and places.

Among contemporary writers: Lorrie Moore, Nick Hornby, Colson Whitehead, Rick Moody and many others have all blown off the top of my head at times.

I am also fortunate to have gone to a great MFA program at Minnesota. My fellow MFA, Amy Shearn, has a subtlety of thought that I would kill for; Jennine Capó Crucet has an astonishingly mature and nuanced sense of a culture. I remember sitting in the Montreal airport, reading a Julie Schumacher story in The Atlantic, and thinking: this woman was one of my teachers? How cool is that? Charlie Baxter’s The Art of Subtext is, along with James Wood’s How Fiction Works, one of the best things ever written about the craft of fiction and both came out just as I was finishing up Merit Badges.

But here’s the big weird fight that mattered to me most. When I started working on what would become Merit Badges in the early 90s, John Gardner was in charge of workshops. And he absolutely insisted on a certain kind of writing, which completely effaced the author’s voice. Maybe because I came to Gardner in my thirties, I also noticed the style of writing he prescribed was a style he did very well and that his competitors such as Bellow and Updike didn’t practice. Plus, he was always photographed smoking a pipe and I was, like, please.

His philosophy was this: You set everything up very carefully, you scoured away all the obiter dicta and poetry, and you followed the same basic precepts for everything you wrote. In some ways this was made for writing programs because all your problems were pre-solved. But I just hated it and rebelled against it. I thought: look at Bellow, look at Updike in some of the Pigeon Feathers stories, look at Wilfrid Sheed’s ironic, muttering masterpieces, and then look at the British writers (Amis, Winterson, Byatt, Rushdie), they aren’t playing by your rules, man, and they’re kicking your ass, and then, look at Moody and David Foster Wallace. Well, they can be annoying but they’re great, too. So I argued and argued and argued with Gardner and various teachers and then realized, about fifteen years later, that I had in fact absorbed many of his most important lessons and that he was also a humane and generous man.

And at the same time my friends Dan O’Shea and Troy Denning have pointed me toward genre writing, which is pretty adamant about structure, too, and, man, is some of that fun, and if a writer makes me want to turn pages, they have something to teach me.

Thanks for your time and good luck with Merit Badges.

Thanks. I love Emprise Review. Books are the greatest thing ever invented, but it’s magazines that actually ferment all of it into a culture that’s worth a damn.

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Patrick McAllaster is the Editor-in-Chief of Emprise Review.

Also from Patrick:
Interview with Micelle Reale
Interview with Dan Holloway
Interview with Ken Wohlrob