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January 17, 2011
Peter Geye interviewed by DailyNebraskan .com
Daily Nebraskan: One of the first things someone who visits your website sees is your brief bio, where it says you’ve worked as a bartender, cook, banker, etc. How important have your experiences and interactions with a variety of people been in developing a handle on how to write intriguing interaction between characters, but also between characters and setting?
Peter Geye: I’ve never felt inspired at a job, even when I was teaching writing. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed some of my jobs, especially teaching, but they’ve always been completely independent of my life and thinking as a writer. With respect to people, and intriguing interactions, I think a writer has to have their antenna up at all times, and that we’re generally wired to be paying attention. But most of what I hear, whether it’s at work or at the coffee shop, gets filtered into a kind of subconscious store room that I might visit once a month, and even then without intentions.
As for the interaction between setting and people, this question is more delicate. The people who live on the North Shore are a variety unto themselves, and if you want to write them you need to visit them, need to know some of them, need to shop in their stores and drink in their bars. You need to see them at work, otherwise you’d have no chance at the truth.
DN: What’s at the core of your interest in Lake Superior and its surroundings? What’s the allure to you as a native Minnesotan?
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PG: Lake Superior and the Mississippi River are the defining geological features of our state, at least my view of the state. And Lake Superior, because of its enormity and coldness and history, occupies a place in my imagination that is both poetic and deeply grounded in the workaday world. It’s that duplicity that makes it such an intriguing place to me. And it’s been a part of my life and my imagination since my earliest memories. That kind of long relationship lends itself to devotion.
DN: Is there some great mystery to Superior that welcomes a sort of personification?
PG: This is a great question. For myself, Lake Superior’s defining characteristic is its ancient history. I’m speaking of its geological history, and all the attendant facts of human life that accompany it. When you’re standing on the shore in mid-winter, and there’s no one else around, and no cars or homes visible, you could just as easily be anywhere in time as the present moment. That feeling is like religion for me. It’s transcendent, mystifying, enlightening. For all those reasons I’m quick to bestow on the lake a kind of personality the way a religious man personifies his God.
DN: I‘m always curious with first-time novelists, what’s something about the process or perhaps the time after the novel’s completion that you couldn’t have or didn’t predict?
PG: I was terrified of a letdown. I thought: Here’s something you spent 10 years working on, your dream has come true, all these people are asking you questions about it and telling you how much they admire it, and now what? I was surprised to find that the answer to that question is that the accomplishment of the book, of my own admiration for the book, those two things sustain the excitement. And really encourage me to work hard on the next one.
DN: To what extent did you plan the intricacies and dynamics of Noah and his father’s relationship and to what extent did they arise organically?
PG: When I started writing “Safe From The Sea” I had no idea who the characters would be. I started with the lake, just a vague image of a particular spot along the shore. I put a man without a name or a history in a car and drove him up the road. That man ended up being Noah, and the man he was going to visit ended up being Olaf. Everything that happens between them happens accidentally, at least from my perspective. But I’m a father and a son and the intricacies and dynamics of those relationships are pretty powerful, whether good or bad, pretty universal, too, I think, and translating them from real life to the page is the easy part. There’s a reason there are seven million father-son stories, and seven million more mother-daughter stories.
DN: One of my favorite lines is quite near the beginning of the novel: the bit about the Boston gulls being scavengers versus the Duluth gulls being part of a healthy ecosystem. How did you come to make that observation?
PG: Duluth is a proper city, but it’s a proper city on the edge of a great wilderness. People in Duluth sometimes have moose or wolves in their yards. The gulls in Boston are like annoying kids who get anything they want. The gulls in Duluth and all along the North Shore are skeptical, weary, wise. At least that’s how I see them. It’s a consequence of their environment. And maybe that line is evidence of my Midwest bias. Hell, I know that’s part of it.
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