“Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars”: An Interview with Daniel Wallace https://ift.tt/D0BfxQd
A few weeks ago, I went to a high school performance of the Broadway musical adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish. It was a beautiful experience. Perhaps I am turning sentimental in my old age; perhaps the students were simply that good at set design, acting, and singing; perhaps the orchestra (which did play wonderfully) were transformative musicians; or perhaps, more simply, the tenderness in Daniel Wallace’s storytelling can transcend the tangle of teenage hormones and my normally curmudgeonly nature.
Tender, I think, is the right word to use when discussing Wallace’s work. I often think about the ways in which Edsel Bronfman from Extraordinary Adventures maneuvers out of seclusion and into the great unknown after winning a vacation to Destin, Florida. Or, in his memoir This Isn’t Going to End Well, how Wallace achieves the impossible by writing about suicide, mental health, and masculinity in a way that ultimately feels joyously human, as opposed to morose. The stories in Daniel Wallace’s recent collection Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars (Bull City Press, 2025) are no less tender and joyful than Wallace’s previous work. Here, he explores the vast emotional terrain of what it means to be messily and beautifully human.
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, which was adapted and released as a movie and a Broadway musical. His essays and interviews have been published in The Bitter Southerner, Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers and Our State magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. He was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Big Fish and Ray in Reverse can be read as interconnected short stories, but Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars is your first official story collection, right? I’m curious if, deep down, you are a short story writer who happens to write novels.
I wrote short stories for many years before attempting a novel. A novel! Who does that? I really didn’t know how to write one, or how to write at all in the beginning, so for years I wrote stories, small bites, graduated workouts (I thought) until I could bench press 100,000 words. I remember the first time I wrote a story that was 20 pages long; I printed it out on onion skin paper and held it in my hands as though it were a tiny baby. I was so proud at that heft. I was on my way.
But I wasn’t on my way; I was already there. Short stories are the bomb. Even before Big Fish I wrote two books I called novels that were really a series of interconnected short stories. And I would say Watermelon King is the same. I think my first genuine or traditional novel is Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. Anyway, I don’t think I answered your question. I guess the answer is sometimes. Short stories bring me the most joy, and that’s what I’m after: joy.
It makes me wonder if your process of writing a novel is different from writing a short story?
There’s no difference. When I sit down to write I never think, Here I go writing a short story. I’ve never sat down ever and said, Let’s write a novel! I have no idea how to write a novel. Or a story, really. I sit down and type and see what happens, see where it goes. Sometimes the story stops after a paragraph; sometimes after a few hundred pages. I’m always surprised. Again, there’s joy there, in the not knowing.
What narrative development over the years has surprised you the most?
I think it has to be the end of my first published novel, Big Fish, when about three-quarters of the way through I realized (spoiler alert) that the father was going to turn into a fish. I had no idea this was going to happen before then. It made no sense, but at the same time it made all the sense in the world. I worried that a reader might have some trouble with it though and so I revised the book to better support the contention that this could happen within the narrative as constructed: little crumbs and clues, like, early in the book, comparing the scabs on his legs to scales, and putting him in a lot of water. It worked for me, and most everyone else, I think. I’ve never gotten any complaints, anyway.
One of my favorite conversations is about how stories present themselves to the writer on a blank page or, like your father-fish, in revision: an image, a bit of dialogue, a sound or setting. Personally, I rarely write with plot or structure in mind. But the vision usually begins with an image of a character often doing absolutely nothing, but there is an emotional core to the image. How about you?
Same. It’s a word or a phrase or an image or a smell or a sound – almost anything you can think of that is not a plot. Plots happen because of a character’s desires and the conflict that arises because of them, but there’s no reason a writer needs to know who the characters are exactly and what exactly the conflict will be until it happens on the page.
I always think of that Grace Paley quote, which (paraphrased) goes something like “No story is complete unless it has two or more stories.” Some of these short stories are very short, like less than a page, but they still manage to have the necessary nuance and depth of a longer story. How do you find the second story in flash fiction?
I’m so happy you mentioned Grace Paley. I was enraptured by her in my early, formative writing years. I was obsessed. She was probably the second author whose books I waited impatiently to be published (she didn’t write all that much); Kurt Vonnegut was the first. I waited for their books the way I waited for The Allman Brothers two-record set, Eat a Peach, to come out.
In stories as short as the ones in this book, there are at least two or three stories that are not on the page, stories that the reader has to supply. This allows the reader to be an active part of the story; it’s collaborative. For instance, the very first story is about a dog something happens to. But the dog’s name is never mentioned, or what kind of dog it is, and neither is what happened to it. It turns out those things aren’t important. They’re only important in their absence.
Your tendency to go right to the edge of revelation in these stories (I’m thinking of “Mending Fences” and others) is one of the most exciting parts of the collection. It takes trust.
I think the question here is, Can you lead a horse to water? And, if so, can you make it drink? And the answer would be yes and no, in that order, I would say. (Anybody? Is this thing on?) It’s thrilling, to me, that stories as short as the ones in this collection can still take up so much space in a reader’s heart and mind – can move the reader. Here’s the thing: I began to learn how to write when I realized why I wrote at all, and that was and is to achieve an effect that moves a reader, one way or another, this way or that. People are capable of a complicated and probably infinite range of feelings: between good and bad, happy and sad, there are a lot of specific emotional spaces and moments to live in, however briefly, and, however brief, these stories can take you to some of them.
Thank you, Daniel, for talking with me. I am excited for others to read Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars.
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