Interview with Michael Fischer
Editor’s note: Going forward, our author interviews will be moving away from the 10 Questions series and instead will take different forms depending on the author’s wishes. We’re hoping this provides a more diverse and specific reading experience, and also makes room for author-led creative projects and discussions down the line!
“My mom begins the tour. Here is the courtyard they decked out for the rehearsal dinner: whites and blues and silvers, tiki torches. Here is the ballroom where the reception was held, during which my cousin Luke managed to start a conga line. Here is the pool where everyone sobered up on Sunday. Here is the lawn where the ceremony took place, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, one chair in the first row left empty for me.”
—from “Photo Negative” (Volume 66, issue 4)
Tell us about the first thing you wrote that you were proud of.
There’s a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin decides to write a self-help book called Shut up and Stop Whining: How to Do Something with Your Life Besides Think About Yourself. When I was in middle school, I tried to write what I thought that book would contain if it really existed. It was basically disjointed, overconfident advice on things I’d heard adults complain about. I don’t think I wrote more than half a dozen pages before I ran out of steam. I believe I gave it to my English teacher and she offered some vaguely encouraging feedback. But something about the artistic cover of essentially being Calvin’s ghostwriter made me feel invincible and quite satisfied with it at the time.
Do you have any unpopular opinions or advice about writing/reading/literature?
When I was in grad school and attending many conferences and other writing events, I heard a lot of writers and panelists talk about the necessity of maintaining some kind of regular writing practice. I also often heard the question, “Why do you write?” answered with some version of, “Because I have to; it’s deeply necessary for me,” etc.
I don’t maintain anything resembling a regular writing practice. I respect that the structure works for a lot of people, but I don’t like feeling tasked with writing or stalked by a sense that I “should” be writing. A similar thing goes for my personal stakes in the “why” of writing: I write when and if I want to, but I hold writing very lightly and it always feels optional; I don’t need it or chase it. I often won’t write for months on end, and that doesn’t bother me. If I’m asked what I’m writing, I just say, “Nothing,” without feeling like I need to perform guilt about my not-writing. I think a sporadic or low-stakes writing life can still be productive and deeply serious.
Do you have any hidden talents?
I’m an inveterate schemer. I love a scheme and a workaround. I’m one of those people who get really into credit card rewards for airline miles and things like that. My old student ID thankfully doesn’t have an expiration date on it, so I still use it to get student rates on things, even though I’m almost 37 and should probably stop.
To take one random example scheme: Several local theaters near me offer student rush tickets that are only available two hours before showtime (by which time nothing good is left), but they also let you reserve tickets in your cart for a set amount of time. When there’s something I really want to see, I put a ticket in my cart and set a timer to re-add it once my “cart reserve” time expires. I do that over and over—keeping it off the available seating map—until it’s close enough to showtime that the student rush code becomes valid and I can buy the ticket. I find things like that very satisfying.
“Photo Negative” takes the brief form and matter-of-fact tone of an essay: Were there other versions of this piece that varied in form/tone/length? How does the final version better support your vision of the story?
Speaking of unpopular opinions: I’m not a big believer in the “shitty first draft.” I tend to think and think and think about a piece—half-writing it in my mind, maybe writing down a few notes—and then I write it in one big rush, very close to fully formed. I don’t write often but when I do, I can usually write easily and quickly. It’s rare for me to need to really slug it out with a draft, changing the tone or how it’s organized until I finally hit on something. This piece didn’t change much from my original idea of what I might do to what I ended up with.
One of my favorite pieces of writing advice regarding tone is, “When it’s hot, write it cold.” My hope is that if a piece works and the reader is with me, the emotional valence of the writing is clear. There’s no need to narratively point to what’s happening, as if saying to the reader, “See? Isn’t this sad?”
I also gravitate toward a relatively flat tone and an undecorated ending because those elements mirror the emotional experience of many of the moments I write about. For example, at the end of “Photo Negative” . . . what the fuck are you supposed to say at a moment like that? It’s done, it’s just one more emotional pinprick in the journey out of incarceration, and you just have to hold that and keep moving. There is, literally, nothing more to say about it.
MICHAEL FISCHER is a nonfiction writer, storyteller, and senior manager at Jobs for the Future’s Center for Justice & Economic Advancement. He also conducts writing and storytelling workshops for various organizations, including AIDS Foundation Chicago. Michael is a fellow of Haymarket Books Writing Freedom, Right of Return USA, Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice, Luminarts Cultural Foundation, the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, and the Education Trust Justice Fellows Policy Program. His writing—which has been cited as notable in Best American Essays and won the National Systems Impacted Writers’ Contest, among other honors—appears in The New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, The Rumpus, Brevity, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Michael is also a Moth StorySLAM winner. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Nevada, Reno and an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago, where he was awarded a Grauman Fellowship.
