Fiction writer, screenwriter, and director Steve De Jarnatt rode at a full gallop onto the literary scene in the late aughts with the publication of his short story “Rubiaux Rising” in Santa Monica Review, which was included in the 2009 edition of  Best American Short Stories.  Following that star-making turn, De Jarnatt’s stories were also published in Fifth Wednesday, Cincinnati Review, Joyland, New England Review, among other periodicals, and appeared in two editions of the New Stories from the Midwest anthology.  

Evident from the first sentence of each of the stories in his debut collection Grace for Grace (Acre Books/University of Cincinnati) is an exuberant love of language and a wonderfully musical ear.  Likewise in evidence in De Jarnatt’s stories are an unwavering curiosity and an unappeasable hunger for the innumerable varieties of human experience.  Each story offers up something extraordinary for the reader.

Christine Sneed has long admired De Jarnatt’s filmmaking—his seminal feature Miracle Mile, released in the late 1980s, remains one of the most striking and bizarrely lyrical end-times films ever made, and he’s also known for co-writing a very different film, the screwball comedy Strange Brew, which, like Miracle Mile, has enjoyed a long half-life.  As Sneed writes: “It’s hard not to be envious of De Jarnatt’s smooth crossover to the tricky genre of the short story, of which he’s already proven himself to be an imaginative and skillful practitioner.”

Sneed interviewed Steve De Jarnatt  (stevedejarnatt.net) about Grace for Grace on the art of the short story, and his many years’ experience as a screenwriter and director for The National Book Review.

Q:  What inspired you to start writing short stories, after so many years as a screenwriter and director in Hollywood?

A: Around 2008, after about thirty straight years working in Tinseltown and having to re-invent myself a few times – I found that work always begetting more work seemed to be drying up, so I decided to get off the Hollywood train before it got too bleak and went back to school to learn the craft of fiction.  I entered Antioch University’s Los Angeles MFA program humbly and without the extensive reading background most others in the program had. I am cursed to be a slow reader, a bit dyslexic, and admittedly for years my fiction reading was often quickly scanning the pages – searching for ‘movie plot’ in the prose.   

But I had great mentors there and really tried on a lot of styles.  I probably thought like most entering the program realm – that I’d hone my spare, nuanced little Raymond Carver gems – but that isn’t what came out of my pen (or at least I had no Gordon Lish to assist) – and a more baroque, excessive approach became my thing, I guess.  

Q: Some of your stories, for example “Mulligan,” “Grace for Grace, and “Chronicles of an Umbra Hound,” are heavily episodic rather than traditional linear narratives with a balance of scene and summary.  Can you speak to this stylistic preference?  

A: I couldn’t say it was a preference.  That just seems to be what I find in the word clay after whittling away for thirty drafts.  Lately I have been outputting fifteen to twenty thousand words for a short story, then trying to cull it down under ten thousand.  And of course most lit rags of any note won’t accept longer pieces, so I also feel very lucky to have found three of them who have published multiples – New England Review, Cincinnati Review, and Santa Monica Review – who all seem to embrace my length and madness. 

Often I write out of sequence – almost a mosaic method – cards up on the wall, but everything not connected yet. Each of those island patches of the story expand on their own and finally it all stitches together. One hopes. Then mega revisions in a more linear way.

I have been told I do some things you are not supposed to, or at least are not in current vogue.  Unspecific omniscient POVs, foreshadowing, deus ex machina, etc.  And I have to confess, I probably work a bit too hard trying to avoid ever writing a normal sentence.  To compare it to film technique - you might say I am doing a crane shot or 360-dolly all the time – rather than shooting an unobtrusive Ozu or Bresson style (perhaps it would be the equivalent of the Iowa Workshop realism model). But to me – braying a bit and going overboard is the beginner’s joy of trying this medium on for size.  And there is such a vast number of great writers out there today that excel with wonderful, restrained prose – I guess I am still just trying to find my particular niche. Overt, archaic, over the top. I dunno.

Q: There are a multitude of diverse characters in Grace for Grace: eclipse chasers, farmers, great blue whales, former soldiers, snake-handling Pentecostals, former fashion models, addicts, EMTs, parents who abandon their children (due to a state’s inadvertent loophole which temporarily makes it a sanctuary for rejected children)--how do you find these characters and wrestle them into a narrative?  

A: I cop to the fact that I usually do have an image, which contains the DNA that will be replicated into a larger story. 

For “Mulligan,” it was a few tragic parents who are driving through a storm to cross the Nebraska state line – to legally abandon their children before the Haven Law changes (loosely based on actual events).  To humanize characters who are going to make that sort of choice is a tough thing, but that is what I love as a challenge.  That is why I write, I think.  Can I give you a peak into these flawed souls and have the reader understand their agonizing decisions?

For “Her Great Blue,” the image was of thousands of sea creatures large and small stranded on a beach when a tsunami has sucked the water out to sea – a lone woman, unable to walk – and her new best friend – a giant blue whale. And the main character, perhaps only a cipher at first, at least in nutshell form: an ex-model / kept woman of a hedge fund manager – sounds terrible, but here also my attempt is to try to find depth and empathy for her life – by putting her in the midst of a dire situation (and even trying to understand her sugar daddy character despite his flaws).

I almost never inject myself into things or use my life. I prefer outsider characters who are struggling somehow, even physically or psychologically demolished a bit.  And then I have a tendency to put them through an additional ringer or two.  I often feel bad for them and all I put them through, but if I left them alone - they wouldn’t exist. 

Q: I’ve read that your story “Rubiaux Rising” was written in response to a prompt you received from one of your professors at Antioch University, where you earned your MFA in creative writing. Tell us more about its genesis. 

A: Jim Krusoe is a great writer who has several novels published by Tin House Books and has run a legendary writers group – 30b – in Santa Monica for 25+ years that a huge percentage of Los Angeles writers have come up through. Early on in the MFA program he gave me a prompt to help me with pairing down my excessive prose style – always trying to take on way too many things. An exercise to attempt something simple, clean: “Write about a man in a room with a plant” – this was the assignment.

I think it spawned three story attempts.  And two were published.  “Except, Perhaps in Spring” in Joyland (edited by Katya Apekina) which had someone trying to reconstruct Linneas’ “Flower Clock” – and the other little tale had a tangent scene involving the ecstasy of eating an heirloom tomato in the midst of a very dire situation. And then I surrounded that little bit with a very eventful story of endurance.  “Rubiaux Rising” seemed destined somehow – just flew out of my pen and was perhaps the easiest thing I’ve ever written. Told in some faux Cajun patois narration I just channeled somehow, and of course ended up not being particularly spare in the prose – so it failed the prompt badly I would have to admit. 

It was also the very first story I ever sent anywhere and just shot-gunned it out to a list of literary magazines I’d found.  At the time I knew almost nothing of all the tiers of top ten, top thirty etc.  Then just before graduation as I was getting ready to chop it way down (removing the tomato bit) for a reading at my last Antioch residency – I received word that editor Andrew Tonkovich at Santa Monica Review wanted to publish it.  Wow—validation right out of the gate!  I let the story be. 

Just a bit further down the line – “Rubiaux” was pulled from the vast slush by Heidi Pitlor, then selected by Alice Sebold for The Best American Short Stories 2009.  Perhaps a jinx to win such a Powerball with the first lottery ticket you ever bought?  I dunno.  But I then began to really take the craft seriously. That maybe I could do this, instead of being a film and television hack.

Q: You’ve written many screenplays, more than have been produced (the fate of most, if not all, screenwriters). Aside from the sheer number of words and their appearance on the page, how do you approach short story writing in comparison to screenwriting? What were the biggest challenges for you when you started writing fiction? 

A: They are very different crafts.  Most Hollywood scribes who say, “Oh I’ll just go write this as a novel,” merely reformat their drafts into basic prose, and often with lackluster results because of that arrogance.  I accepted that I knew nothing when I entered the Antioch MFA program and tried to shed all my cinematic shenanigans when writing short stories.  I sought to mainly explore memory and sensory detail and avoid plot. But you really can’t – you still have the muscle memory despite your intentions. 

The literary craft is a far superior form of art, I think.  Scripts are a sketch, a jumping off place for the surface elements of a story.  A simple tale told around a campfire.  Fiction is endless in how it can illuminate the consciousness of multiple characters, remain elastic, and is far from being exhausted, despite thousands of years.  Screenplays are barely a century old and are already pretty much spent with what they can bring to the table.

And because fiction evokes so much empathy – it is an exciting time now with all the new writers from previously underserved communities and disenfranchised backgrounds who are sharing their narrative gifts and letting us feel what the true population of the world has gone through. 

Q: The stories in Grace for Grace are some of the most original and verbally exuberant I’ve read.  There’s a musicality to each of them, every sentence evincing what George Saunders has called a “line by line energy.” What/Who are your main influences? 

A: Yes – I think that is very much how I try to approach it.  I always have to read aloud and hear a certain musical flow. I sometimes will even defer to that melody over clarity.  Because of this mild case of dyslexia I have, the syntax is always oddball and skewed when words are first put on paper.  I try to make sure I don’t lose the reader with really long sentences, though, and seek highly critical feedback from many, particularly in regards to clarity.

When I do readings – I really understand how dense and strange some of my writing is and can only barely take my eyes off the page – it feels to me like driving around one hairpin turn after another through a mountain pass at night. 

As far as influences of this “line by line” aspect – I really appreciate Cormac McCarthy, Saramago (though I do try to punctuate properly), and Annie Proulx’s short stories particularly. Way too many influential writers to name drop – but I think those who seem like they might be making up a few words on each page – I have a soft spot for.  And to have some idols like Alice Sebold and Antonya Nelson give you a thumb’s up – is a heady thing.

Q: “Wraiths in Swelter” is set in Chicago during the murderous heat wave of July 1995.  I was impressed with your knowledge of the city and the heat wave (which coincidentally I was there for).  You’d spent some time in Chicago when you directed some ER episodes, but what other research did you do for this story? 

A: Ha!  Just vamping I’m afraid, but happy I could almost fool a local denizen.  My family had relatives in Illinois, and we’d come through every other summer.  Got to see a no-hitter at Wrigley when I was way too young to appreciate a game with no action, but I really don’t know the city well. 

And yes, I directed some of the ‘90s show New Untouchables in Chicago and also ER episodes – where you go out and shoot a “walk and talk” scene with the cityscape in the background (the rest back on the soundstage in Burbank).   One of the ERs – a Halloween episode - we got to roar through the nocturnal streets with a hay-filled convertible and Dr. Peter Benton, usually the most humorless character on the show – singing the theme from Shaft.

I usually accumulate a lot of material to possess and graze, but don’t ever do thorough research. I feel hamstrung by being overly factual. As long as there is verisimilitude and the story flows, I’m good. 

Q:  Regarding your story “Mulligan,” was it always a multiple POV story? (And were the parents who actually did drop off their children ever forced to reclaim them?)  

A: Yes, it was always multi-character, and probably whittled down from about eight different family situations.  (And there was a whole epilogue where a couple of the adult characters and a bus filled with children end up back at an unfinished housing development. (But I excised that – left it just a possibility of a hopeful future at the end).

I do think a book another mentor at Antioch gave me – John Berger’s “To The Wedding” might have been influential and perhaps the long character intros in William Friedkin’s remake of Wages of Fear – Sorcerer – before the protagonists converge.

And as far as I know, no one had to reclaim their INORPHS (Involuntary Orphans).  Most states have a haven law for babies usually up to a year old, but Nebraska had left that provision blank in their law – so for about six months any youth up to 18 could be jettisoned and the state would be responsible from there on out.   That was the whole set-up—they are racing to the border before the law is changed at midnight.

Q: What are you working on now? 

Oh God – too many things in folders, up on the board, in various states of progress or neglect.  I can fill up notebooks – map out a whole giant schematic in no time, but then get distracted by some new thing.  Or because of our current times – a narrative cannot keep up with our poisoned reality so it goes into a holding pattern.  (aAlot of writer friends are having this issue now).  And the older I get, I really need somebody to poke me with a stick – to sanction a mission.  I started out in this literary racket in my late 50s - so not sure if I have the will to spend the years necessary on a decent novel. Have abandoned several (at the border of hope).  But more short stories to come for sure. 

And because we are currently in this “golden era of peak TV” with streaming content, I have been poking my toe back into the Hollywood cesspool a bit the last couple years. In the ‘90s – I was on the network’s ‘List’ and got hired to write 15 pilots (with four being shot as pilots) – and came very close a couple of times to having my own show ordered. So I have been spending some of my dwindling creative capital on pursuing this again.

I have also been giving what advice I can to established fiction writers who are trying to crack this field and wish them all well and hope they get on staff and make some bank while it lasts.

Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men.  Her stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and a number of other periodicals. She has received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and has twice won the Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association. She has also been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena, California.