Q&A with Miles Harvey

 

Photo by Azize Altay-Harvey

 

 

Miles Harvey is the author of the new story collection The Registry of Forgotten Objects. His other books include The King of Confidence. He teaches creative writing and chairs the Department of English at DePaul University in Chicago.

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the stories in The Registry of Forgotten Objects?

 

A: Six of the stories are older—a couple of them even go back 20 years. But the other six pieces are recent, the result of concentrated effort after I finished my last nonfiction book, The King of Confidence, in 2020.

 

And as the process unfolded, I wound up significantly revising most of the older tales in order to make them cohere into the collection as a whole.

 

Q: The writer Charles Baxter said of the book, “This astonishingly beautiful book of interlocking stories has at its center things and people that are about to disappear. It is as if all these stories comprise one large story, an emotional journey of the lost and found.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Well, on a personal level, I’m extremely gratified. Charles Baxter is not only a friend, mentor, and former professor of mine, but he’s also one of my favorite contemporary writers.

 

I’ve learned so much from him--about the craft of fiction, about the profession of teaching, about the gift of generosity and about the way to comport oneself as a writer and human being. There are not many people, in short, whose opinion I value more.

 

To be honest, I felt a shudder of anxiety when I mailed the book off to him—and, of course, I was thrilled to learn he liked it.

 

I also think he’s right that the individual stories in The Registry of Forgotten Objects are meant to coalesce into a larger narrative. We often call themed collections “story cycles,” but that phrase suggests a symmetry and neatness that I never intended for this book.

 

In many story cycles, for instance, the narratives are linked either through setting (often a small town, as in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio) or through an insular social group (often a family, as in Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid).

 

I love both of those books, but I’m more interested in what the superb fiction writer Andrea Barrett has described as “quiet linkages”—connections that are intuitive and haphazard, the kind we make in dreams.

 

I was blown away, for instance, by Benjamin Labatut’s haunting and hard-to-categorize When We Cease to Understand the World, which, as one critic put it, “spirals around the connections between science and madness, science and beauty, science and war.”

 

The connections I was attempting to tease out in The Registry of Forgotten Objects were considerably less expansive, though perhaps no less elusive: the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects.

 

Q: How was the book’s title--also the title of the last story in the collection--chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: T.S. Eliot once wrote that “it is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves”—meaning that our individual identities are inextricably linked to our interaction with the physical world. Yet even though we define ourselves through objects, we tend not to think about them very much.

 

In one of the collection’s stories, “Balm of Life,” a woman is suddenly dumbstruck by all the random items in her cluttered home. “Where did all these things come from?” she wonders, “Where would they go after she was gone? Would they wind up in someone else’s house, then someone else’s, people only vaguely conscious of their presence, people who couldn’t explain their significance any better than she could?”

 

In fact, several of the objects on her shelves show up in other stores in the collection, including an antique wooden barber pole that readers first come across in the opening piece, “The Drought,” during which someone tosses it into a river.

 

In the next story “Beachcombers in Doggerland,” that same pole washes up on a beach, where a character scoops it up, eventually hiding it under the floorboards of his bedroom.

 

By the final story, a piece of speculative fiction set in the future, this pole has fallen into the hands of an elderly man on a quest to the Registry of Forgotten Objects—a mecca that houses artifacts, commonplace in our own age, which have long since lost all meaning.

 

Although the old man has no idea what the pole might have been used for in the past, he thinks he knows its real purpose: “to be lovely and to give a person hope.”

 

And I suppose that’s pretty much how I feel about short stories. They may be products of a bygone era, and they may no longer have much of a market, but they’re just such sublime things.   

 

Q: This is your first book of fiction--do you have a preference between writing fiction or nonfiction?

 

A: I studied fiction writing 35 years ago in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, where Charles Baxter was one of my teachers. And although each of my books has been a work of narrative nonfiction until now, I’ve kept writing and publishing stories all along. It’s been like a beautiful avocation for me, something I turn to whenever I can find the time.

 

I definitely read more fiction than nonfiction, and once I get deep into writing a short story it sometimes starts to feel like lucid dreaming, an experience I find pretty addictive. But I’m not sure I can say with any degree of certainty that I enjoy writing fiction more than nonfiction.

 

To be honest, the elements of craft for both are pretty much the same—character, setting, scene, structure, etc. The big difference, of course, is that in fiction you’re free to make stuff up, while in nonfiction you have to adhere to facts.

 

But facts can be liberating, especially if you’re willing to do a lot of research. And I love doing research, even for short stories. In fact, several of the tales in this collection are largely the result of research, which helped bring the characters of those pieces to life and helped make the settings glisten with resonant detail.     

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m playing with some book ideas, both for fiction and nonfiction, but one of the most interesting things I’m working on is an oral history project with my students at DePaul University in Chicago.

 

It’s part of a curriculum built around Big Shoulders Books, a social-justice, nonprofit publisher that I co-founded with my creative-writing colleagues Michele Morano and Chris Solis Green over a decade ago. So far, we’ve released eight different titles with more than 100,000 individual copies in print.

 

In 2013, we published our first book, an oral history collection about street violence in Chicago called How Long Will I Cry, which I edited. This book has now gone through eight printings, totaling more than 50,000 copies.

 

Our new oral history project concerns human interaction with the Calumet River system on the city’s Southeast Side, which used to be one of the world's leading centers of steel production and now struggles with extreme environmental degradation and economic displacement.

 

What my students do on these projects is go out and interview someone for an hour or so, transcribe that conversation, come back and talk to other students about it, then go out and interview that same person again.

 

And eventually, we take the transcription, which can sometimes be 50 or more pages long, and edit it into a short Studs-Terkel type of narrative.

 

On top of giving my creative-writing students some interviewing skills, I think this process helps them listen to other people's voices, not only for what the interviewees are saying, but for the way they say it, the intonations, the syntax.

 

One of the things you learn about other human beings when you interview them is what great storytellers they are. And I hope for my students, listening to other people tell stories frees them up to write their own.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I feel a little weird saying this, but publishing a collection of short stories so late in my career feels less like an afterthought than the culmination of something I’ve been working toward for a very long time. If nothing else, I hope this gives other writers struggling with long-term projects a bit of hope.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Miles Harvey.