After spending ten years in prison for accidentally burning down Emily Dickinson’s house—killing two people in the process—Sam Pulsifer is determined to start a new life.

Who is committing literary arson in Sam’s name, and why? Author Brock Clarke gets to the bottom of this literary mystery—and has readers guessing until the very end—in his brilliant and moving satirical novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

Jennifer Uhlich: To get us started I thought I'd tackle one of the big questions first: why Western Mass? On your Brock Clarke's blogblog you explain that you were born in Springfield, have relatives who went to Amherst, and then allude to a traumatic school trip to the Emily Dickinson House. But as I read your novel I kept thinking that Sam's story wouldn't have worked anywhere else, and not just because of the concentration of writers' houses in that region Perhaps you could speak a little about your relationship to the area, and how that helped shape the novel?

Brock Clarke: Well, my relationship with New England is ambivalent. In some ways I love it, a love that's part nostalgia (my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are all from New England and I spent my summers there--in north central Connecticut), part longing (I was born in MA, but moved when I was three to upstate New York, which I hated as a teenager and New England for me was always, in my mind, the place I should have lived), and part genuine affection (I love the modest but still rugged mountains, the starkness of the winters, the understated beauty of a place like Rhode Island, the grittiness, the scrappiness of some of the cities). On the other hand, I hate people like me, who wax nostalgic about New England, about the goddamn formerly tragic and now triumphant Red Sox, about the supposedly taciturn New England Man (which is a figure we get from books like Ethan Frome as much as we get from life). And I suppose that's, partly, why I wanted to write this book: to see if I could conjure up a New England that exists besides but as an alternative to what we all think we know and love (or hate, or both) about New England.

JU: So is the New England of the novel a facet of your personal experience of New England? An imaginary New England? Or perhaps a little bit of both?

In a similar vein, the way some of your characters relate to famous writers is also quite an alternative to what we might commonly assume. Certainly wishing to burn down a writer's home is not the usual response to, say, Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson. In my experience, people either love a writer or they don't really care about them; after all, if you don't like a writer, you can simply not read their writings. Do you think that we relate more deeply, and more negatively, to writers than we acknowledge? That perhaps we all have in our pasts that loathed novel or traumatic tour of a writer's house, which can bring out such a reaction in us?

BC:: It's a little bit of both. Because our notion of New England—anyone's—is in some way shaped by books, stories, movies, television shows about, or set in, New England. And the imaginary New England of these books, stories, etc., is no doubt shaped in some way by personal experience.

Some of that deep feeling we have about writers we love, and loathe, and both, includes anger, sadness, all the things we don't necessarily want to feel. For instance, the chapter in the book where the English professor hates literature and thinks that all writers are cunts. That's because the writers have done their job, they've made their readers—or at least one reader—see things in themselves they don't want to see. This is another way of saying that literature scares us as well as entertains us; it makes us more expansive, and it also sends us running from the vision of the narrow people we are. The writers' houses are convenient for the people in the book: you can't really burn books, there are too many of them; but the house you can see. You can take all your bad feelings out on the house, instead of the book, which might have caused you to feel, or understand, the bad feelings in the first place.

JU: It's interesting that you characterize these responses as the result of a book doing its job, because that's one of the questions that Sam is mulling over in this book: what does a story do? And he comes up with a lot of answers, from the very funny (the reading group in the bookstore, for instance) to the very sad (what we learn about Mrs. Pulsifer’s stories). Is there any way to sum up what a story's job is, then? What, for instance, is the job of this novel?

BC:: I think a story's job is to do what (thankfully) you say my novel does: make you feel different emotions and have different reactions and feelings to what should be a cohesive plot. If the story is doing its job, than some of these approaches should surprise you, in a good way, make you feel things you probably didn't think it should make you feel. (a bunch of people who've emailed or interviewed me expressed surprise that the book could make them feel as sad as it did, and I find that incredibly gratifying, and also interesting: the idea that a sometimes funny book—a ludicrous book, sometimes—could make you feel so sad). Also, a story's job is to confound a reader's, and a writer's, preconceived notion of what a story's job is. Although that sounds like so much metafictional hoo-ha that I'll stop there, while maybe I'm still ahead.

JU: Your response, though, sends me in two directions, because it makes me think about two of your characters to whom storytelling is very important: Sam and his mother. To take the latter first, Sam's mother engages in two very important acts of storytelling: one is the series tales she tells Sam about the Emily Dickinson house, and the other I shan't specify because I don't want to spoil it for people, except to say that it's related to the first. Is her storytelling different from the kind of storytelling you describe, and if so, what are her stories trying to do?

BC:: Her stories are both meant to distract herself (and Sam) from the pain of her husband leaving. Which is to say, they're meant as diversions, as entertainments. But, as she well should know, if art is any good, it often intensifies the feelings we're trying to escape. They're gruesome, they're vengeful, and they don't end up being cathartic at all—they drag Sam and Mrs. Pulsifer deeper into the problem, which is exactly the opposite of what she intends them to do.

JU: And then of course we have Sam, who seems to be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't: both his lies and his attempts at straightforward honesty backfire. (Funnily enough, I was browsing the paper today and they quoted that line of Dickinson's, "Tell all the Truth but tell is slant." I had forgotten it—very appropriate!) And yet he is our storyteller, he is telling us his story. In a sense, he is the classic unreliable narrator—or is he? What role does Truth have in a story? And do you think it's plausible to say that part of what Sam is doing in the book is learning how to tell a story?

BC:: I don't know if Sam is the classic unreliable narrator, there being so many different kinds of classic ones. There are the willful liars; there are the ones who deceive themselves so artfully that they don't entirely know they are unreliable; and there are the ones who tell the truth slant, and so we think they're unreliable, but only because we think we recognize the truth when we see it. I think—I hope—that Sam is a little bit of all three. And yes, it's fair to say that part of Sam's quest is to learn to how to tell a story, and also to learn that many people will interpret it however they want to, no matter how well you learn to tell it.

JU: And in Sam's case he can never get anyone to interpret it as he wants them to, can he? For that matter, he doesn't do so well interpreting the stories that others are telling him. No one story ever seems to do the job the teller intends, though they are certainly doing something to everyone.

I am interested in your definition of truth, what truth means and especially how truth and storytelling work together. Not only because what we as readers are told is the truth never seems quite right, but also because of the way truth is questioned within the novel. You especially play on the idea of memoir—what is a memoir? What does it mean to write a memoir?—through both the bond analysts and the reading group scene. And in a sense the novel is Sam's memoir. So I'm wondering what is your interest in memoir, your thoughts on the genre, and how it relates to truth?

BC:: My take on memoir is probably evident in, and from, the novel. My main beef is with memoirs that cross the line into self help, or those memoirs that seem not to make difficult choices in the book itself, difficult choices in terms of craft, of plot, of writing itself—these memoirs assume that all the difficult choices have been made in life itself, and, since the life matters to the writer, it will automatically matter to the reader. I'm not speaking of memoirs (like Donald Antrim's new memoir) that struggle with exactly these questions—what to leave in, what to leave out; of whether the truth can be known and whether, if it is known, it'll do anyone any good. Of course, I feel that novels, by virtue of their fictiveness, the necessity of their invention, have a built in advantage here. But then again, novels that don't seize that advantage (and there are plenty of them) are more aggravating than memoirs.

JU: Your line about the life mattering sums up a lot of my difficulties with memoirs as well—but I'm a little confused when you bring this over into the novel. What does a novel look like that doesn't seize upon the advantage of its fictiveness? And why is that more aggravating?

BC:: To my mind, this kind of novel assumes that certain subjects (whether they're autobiographical or not) have a certain built in power. And as such, they don't do much to transform them, and what we think we know about them, through inventive language, sentence structure, plot structure, theme. It's aggravating because I'm a novelist and I want novels to prove all the good things I've been saying about them.

JU: Something like the bond analysts, then, who feel like they need to have done something before they can write a memoir or a novel? That you have to have a great experience which you can then write about, otherwise you simply can’t have a novel period, as there’s nothing else involved? And do you think, perhaps, we as readers often approach novels in such a manner—that we expect the subject to have some sort of power in and of itself?

BC:: Yes, that's exactly right. The bond analysts stand for our worst impulses as readers and writers. At least in my, admittedly small, mind.

JU: And then perhaps, too, Sam is learning to be a reader as well as a writer, a storyteller?

I ask because I think what most confounded me, in reading the book, was that beneath the funniness and the sadness (for Sam is sad and funny, and I have never wanted to help a character as much as I have wanted to help Sam) there is something about your book that made me feel uncomfortable—or perhaps a better word would be unskilled—as a reader. Because so much in the novel happens because of stories, and misinterpreting stories, I felt very hesitant about interpreting anything I was reading. And yet that’s our end of it, as readers, isn’t it? We have our own job to do. And this book made me profoundly aware of the work involved in being a reader, and how important that work is.

BC:: That's certainly not my intention—to make readers hesitant to interpret the book, or any book. As you say, that's part of our end of the bargain, as readers: to enjoy ourselves but to work hard (and enjoy working hard) trying to figure out what the book has on its mind, what it has to offer; to try to understand what it says about the world, and to then decide whether we agree, whether it's worth saying. And our job as writers is to give readers something to work with, something to consider, to interpret.

JU: Hmm. I think I meant more that your book made me aware of just how much interpreting we do, and how important it is. That I found myself interpreting carefully, thoughtfully, rather than on autopilot as I often do; for me, Sam's misinterpretations of the stories and people around him were an object lesson on the importance of interpretation.

I wonder if that's another flaw of writing that focuses solely on the subject, not the writing—nothing to interpret?

BC:: That's an interesting point: that we've been taught (or fallen back on the easier habit of) to read for subject—in doing so, we forget or miss that one of the pleasures of fiction is the language itself, the sentences, the way they're put together, and how the transform the subject.

JU: Well, your book is definitely a challenge to that habit, and a necessary challenge too I think. So not only is the novel funny and sad, it's also (I would argue) important, for just that reason if nothing else.

Now I only have one more question, admittedly a goofy one but it's kept me wondering: traumatic experience at the Emily Dickinson house? Is it a story you can tell, or will it remain the mysterious incident that would lead to the novel all these years later?

BC:: I wish I could say, "It just remain a mystery." But I've been talking about it nonstop over the last few months—"it" being a trip I took the ED Homestead as a college senior in Fall 1989. Nothing really traumatic about it, but it stuck with me—the intelligence and kindness of the tour guides, the idiocy of the tourists (me included) feeling ED's bedspread, touching her desk, etc. Why do we go to these houses? That was my question then and still is.

JU: I'd guess that part of it is related to the fascination with writers' process—? How many books are there now detailing the writing habits of famous writers? At what point did it become part of a writer's career to write an essay about how and why they write? It's one thing that struck me in grad school, how many aspiring writers are looking for some sort of magic formula that will enable them to produce a book of their own: write between 4 and 7 in the afternoon on alternate Thursdays while subsisting on a diet of spinach and white wine, and you will produce a novel as good as x. Though touching the bedspread—that's bordering on some sort of religious experience, no?

BC:: That's the generous way of looking at it, and almost entirely right, too. The less generous way of looking at it is that the books are hard to understand—they get at things that are beyond us, they are written in such a way, line by line, that dazzle and frustrate us—but the houses are easy to understand, because we've lived in one ourselves. The houses are comforting where the books are not.

Essential Links
Writers Revealed Podcast
L.A. Times Review
Office Website for the Book
Read an excerpt!
Brock Clarke's blog

About the Author: Brock Clarke is the author of The Ordinary White Boy, What We Won't Do, and Carrying the Torch. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, The Believer, the Georgia Review, and The Southern Review; in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies; and on NPR's Selected Shorts. He teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.