A Conversation with Matt Dean
From an Interview with Wend Elsen

What was the original spark that kindled your interest in writing this novel? (Character? event? issue?)

Many years ago, when I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, I occasionally went to a gay bar called the Town House. I believe it’s still there, still gay, and in good financial health, but in the ’90s it had a number of identity crises. At first it was the seedy sort of dive you might find up north, where locals scowl at the summer people and everyone lines up to buy pull-tabs. There may have been a leather phase. I’m sure it was supposed to be a dance club for a while. During the peak of Garth Brooks’s career, it became a country-western bar, and even featured two-step lessons on certain nights of the week. One night when I was walking along University Avenue to get to the place, I saw a car at the curb with its four-way flashers on. There was some sort of brouhaha that snagged my attention, and lo and behold it showed up in what served, for a long time, as my first chapter.

Here’s a snippet:

Outside the bar, two men were arguing. From a block away I heard them, though I couldn’t yet resolve their shouted syllables into words. One, a rotund man with unkempt hair and a two-day beard, wore no jacket—only jeans, brown hiking boots, and a T-shirt.

The other was taller and thinner, bow-legged, young and clean-shaven. Snow gathered around a duffel bag that lay in a heap at his feet. His round face was moon-pale. He wore a battered gray cowboy hat; of his dark hair, only the uneven bangs in front showed. Leaning back against the wall of the Town House, he shivered even in his sheepskin coat. A spinning knot of snowflakes landed on his nose; he flinched.

As I passed them I heard the shorter man say, “You was talking to her, though, wasn’t you?”

I saw, then, a battered Fairmont parked crookedly at the curb. Its hazard lights flashed, yellow in front, red in back. A woman sat in the passenger seat. Her window was rolled halfway down, and she gripped its top edge with china-white fingers. She pursed her crimson lips, her forehead wrinkling, smoothing, and wrinkling again.

Other than the final paragraph, describing the car and the woman, I can’t remember how much of that actually happened. And after that, it’s all fiction: Jonah goes inside the bar; the cowboy follows; they go back to Jonah’s house; they spend the night together. The cowboy, though named Rory, was the ur-Spike.

I’d been writing short fiction—nothing of any great import—and I had only the vaguest notion that I was starting a novel. But by the time I’d accumulated 3,200 words, I knew I had the first chapter of a book rather than a self-contained story.

Around that time, I read In a Country of Mothers, by A.M. Homes, and that gave me the barest thread of a plot. That story, involving a vastly inappropriate transference-countertransference relationship with a therapist, never really materialized. The action wandered aimlessly for a couple of chapters, never quite wandering the way I wanted it to, until I hit upon the gist of the current plot.

Many readers feel they “know” an author after reading his book—are they wrong? What are some autobiographical elements, and what is completely different from you?

It’s fair to say that Jonah and I have a lot in common. I tweaked little details, just for fun. I made him a Luddite, hopelessly inept with gadgets of all kinds, though I’m a gadget freak and an early adopter. He dislikes Billy Joel and abhors Barbra Streisand, though I adore them both. He’s always been self-conscious about his red hair, though I’ve always been self-conscious about my weight.

On the other hand, Jonah and I are both disorganized slobs. We both make snap judgments about people, only to regret them later. We both have a tendency to stammer and yammer when nervous.

As for the plot, lots of little elements came from real life. Christa is sort of an amalgam of two or three of my friends. Martin is based on someone I worked with. I’ve actually been in the precise offices where the workplace scenes occur and in the precise apartments where Michael and Tigger live. But nothing of any great importance that happens in the book actually happened to me.

I did try to force myself into the kind of transformation that Jonah attempts, but I went about it privately, not in the context of a group. Back in the day, I was heavily involved in Campus Crusade for Christ, but never with a group like Eliot’s.

And of course, Jonah is 25 at the end of the book. I’ve got a few years on him, and I’ve gotten quite a bit farther in my journey. (Maybe “journey” is the wrong word. Maybe I should call it a “meander.”)

Do you have “gateway novels” in your sock drawer that will never see the light of day?

Yes and no. There were such novels—and plays, too—but they’re all in a landfill somewhere in Ohio. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I left all my old manuscripts in a file box at the bottom of my closet. A couple of years later, my parents moved, and the box wound up in their basement. Almost a decade after that, when they moved again, my mother discovered that the damp and mildew had turned the box and its contents to mush.

As a teenager I was quite fond of Agatha Christie, and the genteel mystery was my first ambition. I planned a whole series of them. I wrote a scene here, a chapter there, but never finished anything resembling a whole book in that series.

I believe the first novel I completed was a young-adult romance, intended for a contest. It was about best friends, a boy and a girl, who fell in love: highly original. The contest rules stipulated a minimum page count, and to reach it I felt compelled to include a number of dream sequences, at least one of which was recycled from an episode of Laverne and Shirley.

In my first and last attempt at science fiction, a mushroom-shaped space station somehow accidentally hyper-jumped across the galaxy and ended up in orbit around a planet made of copper ore. I’m not sure why a space station would even be equipped with a jump drive, but never mind. Oh, did I mention that at the time of this accidental hyper-jump, there were only two people aboard? And that over the course of the novel they fell in love?

By now it’s probably obvious that I wasn’t altogether heartbroken to learn that my old file box had been destroyed.

In your acknowledgments you write, “I suspect that writing a novel is an act of such unsurpassed folly that anyone who attempts it is either quite mad or has a lot of help.” What gave you the motivation to keep exploring the story, to keep writing?

I’m not what you’d call a particularly self-confident person, but I have somehow managed to develop a tenuous belief in my ability to write—not that I’m claiming any sort of innate gift here. In his latest book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes the 10,000-hour rule:

The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

I’ve definitely put in my 10,000 hours—and then some—and as a result I generally like what I write, so that rereading some bit of yesterday’s work is usually enough to get me through today’s.

A certain amount of ennui also helped. That probably sounds odd. What I mean is that I’m most productive at writing when my day job isn’t so great. If my job is “too” engaging, then it drains away all my time and energy, and the writing doesn’t happen.

I got some encouragement from friends and mentors, as well. In the back of Poets & Writers, Carol Bly ran an ad offering manuscript consultations; I’d taken her writing workshop before, so I emailed her and we set something up. We went over the first three chapters together, and she offered a lot of advice and some much-needed pep-talking. I attended David Leavitt’s novel workshop at the 2006 Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference, and that, more than anything, gave me the self-assurance to finish. A fellow writer and fellow participant in David’s workshop read each chapter of the final draft as I completed it, and his suggestions were absolutely invaluable.

Oh, and though at times he may have grown weary of hearing me whine about my book, my book, my book, or of hearing me talk through yet another crazy idea to rescue it from my own laziness, my partner, Todd, was amazingly and beautifully supportive and encouraging through the whole process. He never for a moment doubted that—if I actually, you know, finished—I’d create an actual serious book, meant to be read by actual serious people.

The novel is set in 1992. Why did you choose that period? What challenges and opportunities did that choice present?

I wrote The River in Winter in two great bursts. The first draft came in 1997 and 1998, and I wrote it virtually in real time, with events occurring no more than a couple of days or weeks before the time of writing. I set the book aside for “a while,” and “a while” gradually became a year, and then five years, and then the better part of a decade. Whenever I contemplated revising it, I could never quite decide whether to bring it up to date or to leave it in the past.

My ambivalence stemmed in part from the fact that 1997 and 1998 didn’t seem historically important. It’s not as though a “period piece” necessarily has to be tied to some great movement or event, but that kind of thing certainly helps to locate the fiction on the world stage. It seemed obvious that if I didn’t bring the book up to date, readers would either wonder why I’d chosen 1997 and 1998, or wonder what time period it was in the first place.

On the other hand, 2001 stood as great barrier to an update. To choose one trivial example among many, Jonah’s mother is that rarest of all birds—a liberal talk radio host. The Barbara of 2007 and 2008 would surely be a much angrier person than the Barbara of 1997 and 1998.

After all this time I can’t remember what planted the “1992 seed” in my mind, but I’m sure it had something to do with Bill Clinton. It must have been the publication of his memoirs.

Clinton was the first president I’d ever voted for, and oh, how I loved him—and still love him, even more because of the good work his foundation does. It occurred to me that I might be able to capture that shining moment when everything seemed possible, when he’d just been elected after 12 long years of unpleasantness. It also occurred to me that shortly after Clinton took over the Oval Office, he was forced to capitulate to ”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,“ and that it would hit at just the right place in the novel’s plot.

I came of age in the ’90s. It’s a terribly nostalgic decade for me, even more so than the ’80s, when I was in high school and college and was—in the manner of high school and college students throughout history—practically too dumb to live. In a sense, I wanted the ’90s to be a character in the novel. I went back and looked up a lot of primary-source material about the 1992 election, and I hope I managed to capture the feeling of that night. When Clinton addressed the crowd in Little Rock, I felt so relieved—as if now, finally, everything would go back to being all right again. But even at such moments, it’s difficult to forget that nothing is ever that simple.

Political correctness seemed terribly important, and I had to refresh my memory a bit. I’d never been fully aware of the right wing’s immense displeasure with political correctness, perhaps because Minnesotans are habitually so polite that the character of their ordinary discourse differs little from politically correct discourse. In any case, my research fortunately bore some extra fruit in the form of a job for Jonah. In the first draft I’d given him a techie job, and I’d never quite been able to make that work to my satisfaction. I think giving him a job in the fictional Office of Workplace Tolerance—the legislature’s “political correctness police”—makes a lot more sense.

Which famous person would you most want to read your book, and what is the fantasy result?

If Colin Farrell read the book and developed an unquenchable yearning to play Spike, and thus began putting together a film adaptation, for which he would beg me to write the screenplay, I don’t think I could ask for anything more.