David S. Atkinson
is the author of "Not
Quite so Stories" ("Literary Wanderlust" 2016), "The
Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes" (2015 National Indie Excellence
Awards finalist in humor), and "Bones
Buried in the Dirt" (2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist,
First Novel <80K). His writing appears in "Bartleby Snopes," "Grey
Sparrow Journal," "Atticus Review," and others. His writing
website is http://davidsatkinsonwriting.com/
and he spends his non-literary time working as a patent attorney in Denver.
For
More Information
- Visit David S. Atkinson’s website.
- Connect with David on Facebook and Twitter.
- Find out more about David at Goodreads.
- Visit David’s blog.
The center of Not
Quite So Stories is the idea that life is inherently absurd and all people
can do is figure out how they will live in the face of that fact. The traditional
explanation for the function of myth (including such works as the relatively
modern Rudyard Kiping's Just
So Stories) is as an attempt by humans to explain and demystify the
world. However, that's hollow. We may be able to come to terms with small
pieces, but existence as a whole is beyond our grasp. Life simply is absurd,
ultimately beyond our comprehension, and the best we can do is to just proceed
on with our lives. The stories in this collection proceed from this conception,
each focusing on a character encountering an absurdity and focusing on how they
manage to live with it.
For More Information
- NOT QUITE SO STORIES is available at Amazon.
- Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble.
- Discuss this book at PUYB Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
- Watch the book trailer at YouTube.
Thank you for this interview! I’d like to know more about you as a person
first. What do you do when you’re not
writing?
I spend most of my non-writing time either reading or
working as a patent attorney. I like to spend my non-work time with my wife and
cats, but I don't really get into the shows my wife watches. So I can sit with
her, I usually put on earmuffs and read and/or write while she watches. We do
spend a good amount of time hiking around the Front Range,
and we do like to travel. Trips in recent years have taken us to places like Mexico,
France, and Egypt.
We hope to visit Vietnam
next.
When did you start writing?
I had to have started at some point, but I don't really
remember ever not writing. I remember doing short stories and poems as a kid,
even trying a novel (not completed) when I was ten or so. My parents were big
readers and my dad even wrote himself, so it was something I was always around
and got into early.
As a published author, what would you say was the most
pivotal point of your writing life?
There are a lot of moments that were pivotal to me as a
writer. Books I've encountered, classes I've taken, my MFA program, and so on.
It's really difficult given all those influences to pick a single most pivotal
moment. However, for Not Quite so Stories,
the most pivotal moment was probably when I ran across Etgar Keret's The Nimrod Flipout in a Barnes &
Noble. The cover featured a forlorn man in a bunny suit standing amidst a
number of dead birds with a shotgun in his hands. That was a pretty freaky
image, so I had to check the book out. The things Keret did in a story
fascinated me, the weirdness mixed into daily life. I started thinking about
writing stories like that, and the stories like that I'd already written. This
fed into me encountering other authors like Amelia Gray, Haruki Murakami,
George Saunders, and Aimee Bender. The collection kind of snowballed from
there.
If you could go anywhere in the world to start writing
your next book, where would that be and why?
It may sound a little morbid, but I'd like to write a book
in the Paris catacombs. It's such a
strange place, I can't help but think it would creep into what I was writing
and result in a really interesting story. People might read it just for where
it was written.
If you had 4 hours of extra time today, what would you
do?
My usual answer would be to hopefully write more, though
likely read more. However, we just got back from our Mexico
trip yesterday. It was wonderful, we got to do things like walk around Chichen
Itza and swim in an open cave cenote, but it was
exhausting. The truth is today I'd probably use that time to get a little
sleep.
Where would you like to set a story that you haven’t done
yet?
I keep tossing around the idea of setting a story in Egypt
soon after the Mubarak revolution. My wife and I visited just a few months
after it had happened and we saw so many things that would make good stories. I
just haven't written any of them yet. One thing was the way people were coming
together to do things simply because various facets of government were too up
in the air to function properly at that time. My wife and I were on a balcony
in Aswan when we saw a car come
around the sea road too fast and crash. No police arrived, things being too
chaotic at the time for them to be able to respond to everything they needed
to. Rather than wait, a crowd gathered out of nowhere. They picked the car up,
put it back on the road, and sent it on its way. I'm sure I couldn't take care
of myself that well in a time of crisis and it was an amazing thing to see. I'm
sure there's a story there.
Back to your present book, Not Quite so Stories, how did you publish it?
I got very lucky. I attended a reading given by an author
I'm fond of. I've attended enough of her readings that she recognizes me. She
came over to chat and was nice enough to introduce me to her publisher. Having
read a few of my stories (which happened to be in this collection), she told
her publisher that she should look at something of mine. Though Literary
Wanderlust hadn't been originally thinking of short story collections, they
agreed to take a look. Luckiest of all, they loved the stories and wanted to
publish my book. Now short story collections are a regular part of what they
look for.
In writing your book, did you travel anywhere for
research?
Some of the stories in this collection are quite recent, but
some I've been messing around with for a decade. More importantly, the seeds
that grew into many of these stories dropped at points all over my life. Though
I didn't specifically travel to research, many were influenced by knowledge I
picked up while traveling. "Changes for the Chรขteau"
came out of a little hotel in the south of France
where the manager reminded me of a French version of John Cleese's character
from Fawlty Towers. "G-Men" was
influenced by a tandem sky dive I did in Kansas.
I wasn't specifically traveling for research, but I wouldn't have been able to
do these stories without things I learned while traveling.
Why was writing Not
Quite so Stories so important to you?
I loved the sense of noticing the magical within the normal
world that I found in authors like Etgar Keret, Amelia Gray, Haruki Murakami,
George Saunders, and Aimee Bender, that sense of remembering just how wondrous
our existence actually is. I wanted to explore that too, see if I could find
wonders all my own. It was a kind of reclaiming of the world back from
everything that tells us there is no magic left. At least for myself, though
hopefully for the reader too, I wanted to make the world marvelous again.
Where do you get your best ideas and why do you think
that is?
The ideas I get (the good, the bad, and the ugly) come from
all kinds of different places. "Happy Trails" was based on a
nightmare I had one time. "The Unknowable Agenda of Ursines" was
based on a friend commenting "we should go to a casino" after a
recent run of publishing luck I'd had, for some reason getting crossed in my
head with the fact that a bear had jumped on his car a few months beforehand. I
think the central thread running through them all is trying to keep open to the
wonder that is naturally in the world. There are so many good ideas out there
and it's simply that we get so bogged down in daily life that we don't see
that. We have to remember to keep seeing.
Any final words?
Hopefully not yet. I hope to keep living and writing for a
long time. If I had to pick final words though, they'd probably be: "Aaargh."
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