Matthew Salesses talks about The Hundred Year Flood and more

August 27, 2015, by

A big congratulations to Houston writer Matthew Salesses. Matthew, a current PhD candidate at the UH Creative Writing Program, has received the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Fiction, teaches Inprint Writers Workshops and Inprint Life Writing Workshops at Houston Methodist Hospital, has served as an Inprint Poetry Busker, and can also be found live tweeting at some Inprint readings.  Matthew’s new novel The Hundred Year Flood was just published and is receiving rave reviews. He reads on Friday, August 28, 7 pm at Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. All his fans are excited to hear him read. Here Inprint blogger Erika Jo Brown talks about Matthew’s new book and shares her lively email exchange with him.

salesses-hundred-year-flood-20201-cv-ft-v1As you read Matthew Salesses’s beautiful new novel, The Hundred-Year Flood, the Prague setting and “love square” may remind you of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The visceral treatment of a natural disaster may call to mind the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, especially for readers around the Gulf. The haints and spirits that follow the protagonist may suggest the hauntings of Beloved. The bewitching effects of an artist couple will delight fans of The Woman Upstairs. The novel’s compelling, phantasmagorical tone may stir up thoughts of Murakami.

With these literary constellations, Salesses has conjured up a wholly original novel, touching on the reverberations of adoption and how family secrets can affect nearly-grown children—an age of development often overlooked in this context.

Salesses is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston, and a regular workshop leader for Inprint. We recently emailed about his brilliant book.

ERIKA: Your book has traces of autobiography—the protagonist is a Korean adoptee, a writer, has spent time in Prague—although it radically departs from your life in most ways. Were you inspired by particular books or authors similarly prompted by the reality of lives lived? I’m thinking Alexie, Baldwin, Duras, etc.

MATTHEW: The closest would be Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which also has a love square and some parallels, I think, to his time there. But I’ve never been very interested in the intersection of artist and character. I’m more interested in the intersection of character and reader.

ERIKA: I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying has been described as flash fiction, a form you publish in widely, and which you teach. Your novel’s sections are similarly short (with the leisure of the novel to double-back and re-examine certain scenes and conversations). This question is often asked of women, so I’m interested to know if having a child has affected the way you work, your stylistic preferences, your time management.

MATTHEW: I love flash fiction. But writing it has nothing to do with fatherhood. It does have something to do with wanting to be the type of writer who finishes projects. While I was working on The Hundred-Year Flood, I wrote I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying one chapter a day, just trying to do something I could finish. One of the major breakthroughs for me with THYF was in throwing out what a chapter was supposed to be like, and using numbered sections that, for me, were permission to write chapters a few pages long or a hundred pages long. I think of it like breath. I had to figure out what the book’s natural rhythm was, and what mine was. I think my writing breath is fairly short, condensed.

Becoming a father has definitely affected all aspects of my life, including my writing, but if anything, I find myself drawn to longer work even more now than before. Maybe it’s something about making meaning over the long arc of a book, and how badly I wish I could know whether I’m doing a good job as a parent and whether my daughter will turn out happy many years from now.

Becoming a father has definitely affected all aspects of my life, including my writing, but if anything, I find myself drawn to longer work even more now than before. Maybe it’s something about making meaning over the long arc of a book, and how badly I wish I could know whether I’m doing a good job as a parent and whether my daughter will turn out happy many years from now.

ERIKA: Speaking of subverting genric paradigms, The Hundred-Year Flood resists conventional narrative in structure, in chronology, and even on the level of sentence. Do you read a lot of poetry, micro journalism, novellas? I could almost hear the screaming Anne Carson fangirl and -boys when the novel mentions her in a bookstore scene.

MATTHEW: I love Anne Carson. That quote got into the book because of a class at UH with J. Kastely, in which we read Eros the Bittersweet, one of the few of her books I hadn’t read then. To me, her definition of desire is everywhere, especially in writing and especially for a person always trying to get closer to himself. As far as what I like to read, it’s mostly novels at this point, and things people link to online. I think of The Hundred-Year Flood as traditionally structured overall—in a simplistic way, it’s a tragic love story—which  helps me to be less traditionally structured with chronology and other things. You have to meet some expectations in order to break others.

ERIKA: Setting your book in Prague was so smart–a place with turbulent history, transgressing on the privacy of civilians, of which there are many unanswered questions. How did you manage to capture the “imperfect English” transliterations of some of the characters?

MATTHEW: I’m not capturing, I’m imagining. Two of the characters speak English in iambs the entire book. That’s a personal joke of mine, but something I have been surprised no one has commented on. It’s more about leaps of imagination than about representing reality.

I’m not capturing, I’m imagining. Two of the characters speak English in iambs the entire book. That’s a personal joke of mine, but something I have been surprised no one has commented on. It’s more about leaps of imagination than about representing reality.

ERIKA: Your novel’s world is filled with ghosts, one in particular, which doesn’t truly materialize for the reader until towards the end of the book. I kept thinking about the various spirits, specters, and wraiths that I’ve picked up, both from my heritage (Jewish golems) and places I’ve lived (Southern haints). What was it like to weave these imaginative hauntings (including the trope of Tee’s emotional container) throughout the book?

MATTHEW: It took a lot of revising. The main ghost in the book was more like memory than ghost until after the novel sold. The container full of micro-aggressions and identity-aggressions was something that also came in late, in order to try to represent Tee’s relationship with passivity and action. The weaving took a lot of reading the novel over and over again, trying to get the pacing right.

ERIKA: Tee’s full given name, Thomas, is not given until 85 pages into the novel, when he writes a letter to his mother that prompts a series of revelations. Did this craft decision signal a character attempting to reclaim (or claim for himself for the first time) a fuller identity?

MATTHEW: Funny. I didn’t think about this so much, but it’s more the opposite. “Tee” is what he would call himself, and is something that could be pronounced in Korean. Thomas is the name his parents gave him and call him. It’s more of a tie to a past that he thinks is stopping him from self-determining.

ERIKA: In your acknowledgements, you write that you are “curiously indebted to a passing remark by Mat Johnson.” Now we all have to know what that was.

MATTHEW: Maybe you’ll find out at the reading! How like a writer to read the acknowledgments so carefully! Ha.

ERIKA: In your acknowledgements, you write that you are “curiously indebted to a passing remark by Mat Johnson.” Now we all have to know what that was.

MATTHEW: Maybe you’ll find out at the reading! How like a writer to read the acknowledgments so carefully! Ha.

ERIKA: The impending flood was such an effective external conflict that ratcheted the tension as the book proceeds. How did the idea of natural disaster become integrated with the bildungsroman of the book?

MATTHEW: It was a decision made in search of more plot. The book was originally set in 2004-5, when I lived in Prague. I remembered walking through Karlin and photographing the flood damage. When I was restarting the book from scratch (the first time), a couple of years in, I thought that the flood could make it more interesting. Then I read about the prophecy that Prague would be destroyed half by fire and half by water. How could I resist after that?

ERIKA: I’ve heard you read a few times around Houston. Do you like giving readings? There does seem something incredibly lyrical about your writing.

MATTHEW: I love reading. I love the moment when you start to settle in and you feel more in touch with your book for a little while, rather than less, because you are closer than ever to what passes between the book and its readers.

I love reading. I love the moment when you start to settle in and you feel more in touch with your book for a little while, rather than less, because you are closer than ever to what passes between the book and its readers.

Salesses is the author of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity (Thought Catalog Books). In November 2015, Gazillion Strong will serialize his illustrated Korean drama/novel, Marked. He’s written about adoption, race, and parenting for NPR, The New York Times, Salon, the Center for Asian American Media, and The Rumpus. Matthew serves as Insight Editor for The Offing, Online Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast, and Fiction Editor for The Good Men Project.

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