David Lawrence Morse is a professional writer of short stories and plays. His first collection of stories, The Book of Disbelieving, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. His stories evoke motifs reminiscent of folklore and classic fables.
Interviewed by Hannah Peterson
Inscape Journal: Your stories parallel the feeling and motifs of folklore. Where were you first introduced to this style of storytelling, and what inspired you to write folklorist stories?
David Lawrence Morse: I grew up reading the Bible, going to Sunday school, and being taught biblical stories. That was my first introduction to literature in which the ordinary is not ordinary, where unusual or miraculous things can happen. I’m sure growing up on those stories influenced me quite a bit.
IJ: There are a lot of faith-driven stories in The Book of Disbelieving. Did that play a part in naming the collection? How does the act of faith and belief play into how a reader processes fabulous literature such as this, or even fiction in general?
DLM: That’s a great question. I have a couple of answers. The simplest answer is that the title is a reference to two different quotes. The first quote is the famous one from Samuel Taylor Coleridge—that to appreciate a work of art or to appreciate a work of literature requires the willing suspension of disbelief. So, I’m trying to invoke that concept of disbelief. What does Coleridge mean by that? I think that we are naturally inclined to be skeptical, especially when we encounter something that seems to us to be unrealistic or unreal. But Coleridge is saying if you want to experience a novel or film or work of art, if you want to participate in it, then you have to suspend your disbelief, and at least for the moment, believe that what’s happening or what’s being described actually happened or is happening. So, you’re meant to participate as a body in the story.
These stories in The Book of Disbelieving, when readers see them they may say, “Well, there’s no way this could happen.” I’m saying this is a book that’s going to require the suspension of disbelief—disbelief is part of it, baked into the process of reading this book.
The other reference is a quote that I put forward in the epigraph, by an ancient Greek fabulist named Lucian of Samosata, who says, “I am writing about things I neither saw nor experienced nor heard about from others, which moreover don’t exist, and in any case, could not exist. My readers must therefore entirely disbelieve them.” He’s being tongue-in-cheek there, but he’s raised the same questions as Coleridge about our capacity for belief, our suspicion, about things that seem to be unreal.
I think we’re suspicious because we don’t want to be gullible. We don’t want to be gullible because we know, at some level, we’re inclined to believe. We want to believe things, but we don’t want to be fooled. We don’t want to believe in something that’s not real. We don’t want to believe in something that’s not true. We don’t want to be taken for a ride. Our suspicion is a reaction to our inclination to believe—those two impulses are at war with each other in our souls. We need to believe that there’s a meaning in our lives, a purpose to our lives, that there’s some sort of divine order, that it’s not all chaos. It’s not all for nothing. We need to believe that. So, there’s that tension throughout the stories: When the characters are confronted with fantastical happenings—in the exterior world or in their own interior world—they don’t know whether it’s real, they don’t know whether to believe it, and their loved ones and other people in the community are challenged with those same questions.
In regard to how faith plays into readers processing fiction, I think humans are inclined to believe. We are storytelling animals. We need to tell stories. We want to tell stories. Stories help us impart or derive some meaning from life. We’re able to understand our lives better through the lives of these characters.
IJ: In the introduction to The Book of Disbelieving, Susan Minot describes your stories as having “the flavor of a fable, or the eerie feeling of a nightmare.” Why write fabulist stories, and do they have a place amongst modern adult readers?
DLM: I direct a writing program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. I’m not teaching them to write fables, I’m not teaching them to write fantasies, and I’m not teaching them to write fiction, either. I’m teaching them to write policy memos and policy briefs. There’s no place for fantasy in that. Things get quite dangerous when our policymakers and our political leaders start putting forth fantasies. I’m very mindful that, in one sense, the written word has to be predicated on our shared understanding of reality. That’s very important to me, as I’m teaching students how to write for real-world audiences in real-world circumstances and make policy recommendations about urgent crises. In that sense, fantasies and fables can be seen as antithetical to the work that real people have to do in the real world. Obviously, I don’t entirely agree with that, or I wouldn’t be writing stories like this.
Another word for fable is myth. The two words are used synonymously. Both the word fable and the word myth can be used in common everyday language to mean a lie. Something that’s not true. “No, that’s just a fable.” “That’s just a myth.” Or think about the phrase urban myth. The word myth can also mean a story that might not have actually happened but is meant to convey some sort of foundational truth about how we live. Think about the story of Adam and Eve. Whether or not you think that that’s actually how humanity got started, you can understand that there’s a foundational truth that the story is trying to convey about our thirst for knowledge—and the price that we pay to attain knowledge. So that’s a true story, even if you don’t think that that’s actually how the first humans were created. A myth or a fable can speak to a higher or foundational truth about how we live even if the events that they’re describing didn’t actually happen. That’s something I’m trying to achieve when I write stories—I want them to provide access to some foundational truth.
I also think that fables operate like dreams. In a fable or a dream, you never know quite what’s going to happen. You don’t know quite what the rules are. The fantastical can invade the realistic at any time. When we dream, we’re trying to impose some sort of meaning on the apparent chaos of our existence. We dream to reprocess what’s happened to better understand it. But dreams are also chaotic and confusing. I don’t know if you’ve thought about your own dreams lately, but a lot of times, I have no idea what mine mean. They seem like nonsense. Fables are trying to capture that sense of a dream world where anything can happen—the fabulous may be just around the corner. And yet, unlike a dream, the fable is fashioned in a more purposeful way. A fable is like a more coherent dream.
Those are all things that appeal to me about fables. But those are all reasons I’ve come to after the fact—after I started writing fables—because I felt the need to write them and needed to explain why.
Originally when I was learning to write, I tried for years to write what you might call domestic realism—in which nothing terribly out of the ordinary happens. Characters are just going about their everyday lives. There are many writers who write domestic realism, like John Cheever and Alice Munro, whom I love. And yet I found in those days that I couldn’t write it. When I tried to write it, I got bored. I couldn’t find a way, like Cheever or Munro, to make the everyday lives I was depicting on the page appear luminous or intriguing; it all just felt tedious and boring. For me as a writer, I needed to find a spark. Introducing some element of the fantastical makes writing more fun and playful for me—non-ordinary.
IJ: How did you learn to be playful in your writing?
DLM: Playfulness is a kind of freedom. Writing is a difficult thing to do with one’s time. I needed to find ways to make it fun and not just difficult, or else, why waste your time? Go out and do something else. I needed to find a way to be free and playful on the page. Just like you need to find ways to be free and playful in real life. That becomes harder as you get older, and therefore, even more important.
I remember clearly—I was living in Washington, DC, in some little studio apartment and was working hard at writing fiction, staying up late, drinking too much caffeine, and writing domestic realism. I was stuck in some story that I’d been working on for weeks. Like I said, I was bored. It was miserable. I passed out on the couch at 2 a.m. or something. I could hear these rats above me in the ceiling, scurrying. I also heard all these drunken revelers out my window and they were partying and having a good time. They seemed—in my own state of misery—to be laughing at me. Like, what am I doing with my time? Making myself miserable, writing boring stories. I was in a desperate, delirious state of mind and fed up with the story. Then I had this weird dream-vision of how I could rewrite the story as a fantasy. I think the dream/fantasy was born out of desperation and a lot of caffeine. I had this notion about how I could start over with the story and introduce this wild, crazy element that had never occurred to me before. So, I got up and started over with the story on page one with this fantasy that changed everything. And I had a lot of fun with it.
I never ended up publishing the story. It wasn’t that great of a story. But what I discovered was that I needed to separate myself from reality and let my mind entertain any notion at all, no matter how fanciful—in fact, the more fanciful, the better. Allowing yourself to entertain any notion is the first lesson if you want to be a playful writer. This is a lesson I first learned from my drama teacher in high school—though it took me a long time to internalize it. His name was Fred Allen. When we were learning how to do improv, the number one rule was, the first thing that comes to your mind, you do it, you say it, you don’t judge it, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s funny or not funny or smart. Whatever comes to mind, you run with it. I’m not an improv actor, and I think I’d be terrible at it, but that’s the rule. I try to follow that rule, to write whatever idea comes to mind, whatever word or phrase or sentence. It’s possible material, and you don’t judge it. Then you play around with it and see if it can lead somewhere.
IJ: What are the challenges of approaching short fiction as opposed to playwriting or novel writing? What do you find most satisfying about the process?
DLM: There may be some writers who plot their novels before they write them, and they have it all planned ahead of time. There are some great novelists who do that, but I can’t. Don’t get me wrong; I might try to plot out a novel, and I have, but whenever I do, I have no real belief that what I’m plotting is what I’m going to be able to do. Generally, I end up going in a completely different direction. Writing according to an outline feels like coloring by numbers, all the inspiration taken out of it. The point is that when you’re writing a novel, you’re writing hundreds of pages in the dark, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know where you’ll end up. It means you’re just spitballing, you’re throwing a bunch of material on the page to see what plays out and see what works. You write hundreds of pages like that, and it’s only when you get to the end of that long process, which can take years, that you start to figure out what the book is about. Then you have to go back and rewrite the whole thing, cutting out what doesn’t belong, adding new material, and refining it. That’s an arduous and time-consuming process, and it’s hard to maintain focus and belief in that process while you’re writing in the dark. One of the great, perhaps the greatest, virtues of writing short stories is it’s only twenty pages, or ten pages, or thirty pages instead of four hundred. I might start a story. I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know the ending. As with a novel, I’m trying to discover the story’s meaning as I go, but I get there much sooner. That means I can spend more time refining and honing and shaping instead of writing in the dark. That’s why writing short stories is so satisfying for me—the in-the-dark part is minimized. You can spend more time shaping and pruning, and I like that.
IJ: Themes of marriage and gender dynamics appear in several of the stories in the collection. From Osa and the narrator of “The Big Fish” to Paul and Alice Sorser in “The Book of Disbelieving” to Octie and Magaline in “Spring Leapers.” What is it about the union of a couple that compels you to write about them?
DLM: That’s a great question. You’re right! That’s a prevalent theme, and not just in those three stories, but many others. Well, as for the romantic pairing between two people, many think it’s the foundation of society, right? We can either be discreet, isolated individuals who are totally alone, or we can try to—with trust and a certain amount of belief and hard work—dedicate ourselves to somebody else. By doing that, we’re also showing our ability to dedicate ourselves to a community, because it’s a selfless thing to do, it has to be a somewhat selfless thing to do. As you can see, those stories are concerned with the theme of individuals versus communities—or individuals fighting with the fact that they can’t be alone, they have to be paired up with someone else within a larger group. That’s one answer.
Another answer would be that it’s in relationships like that—romantic relationships or partnerships—where people are exposed for who they are. You get to know someone in relationships like that better than you’ll ever know anybody else—I mean, if you’re doing it right—and they get to know you in a way that no one else knows you. There’s so much vulnerability and exposure in romantic relationships. Fiction is concerned with writing about people as they really are, and interpersonal romantic relationships reveal characters as they really are.
IJ: I’ve heard it said that our writing ends up revealing more about us than we would admit to under duress. What parts of yourself do you see in your writing, if any at all? Did you discover anything about yourself in the writing of The Book of Disbelieving or any other work that you have crafted?
DLM: Oh, that’s a great question. I’ve never been asked that before. The last story in the book, “The Serial Endpointing of Daniel Wheal”—I’m not Daniel Wheal. There’s a lot of ways in which that character is distinct from me—but I would say, of all the characters in the book, that character is my closest avatar. Unlike Daniel Wheal, I’ve never been chased by a servant of death, so that’s a significant distinction. But, as I’ve gotten older, approaching what you might call the zenith of middle age—if there is such a thing—I’ve had to think more about death, perhaps felt compelled to. So that story was personal for me, because I was wrestling with existential questions about what it means to be alive and the difficulty of conceptualizing or comprehending one’s imminent demise. We’re all going to die soon. I’m not trying to sound apocalyptic, but thirty years is too soon, fifty years is too soon: we’re all going to die soon. That’s the reality. Montaigne wrote this famous essay called “To Philosophize is to Learn to Die.” I might tweak that and say writing is about learning to die. It’s a difficult thing to do. We should spend our whole lives trying to comprehend that reality—that we’re going to die—and finding a way to live despite that. It’s almost like a meditative thing, taking steps to accept a reality that’s difficult to accept. Maybe writing that story got me a bit closer to accepting that reality.
IJ: What has been the toughest criticism you have received as an author? What has been the best compliment?
DLM: When I was in grad school, at the University of Michigan, sometimes famous writers would come to visit. You would throw your name in the hat––make it known to the administration that you wanted to meet with this writer, and they would choose a couple of students to do so. This famous author was coming to campus—a Nobel prize winner—and I threw my name in the hat, and I was chosen to meet with him. In preparation for this, I read several of his novels, which I deeply admired. I gave him like thirty pages of a novel I was working on, and he was supposed to read it ahead of time, and then we’d get together to talk about it. The day before we’re supposed to meet, the MFA program had a social gathering. I went to it because he was there. I managed, eventually, to find my way into his presence. I was hoping, when I introduced myself, he would say, “Oh, yes, I’ve read your writing, and I can’t wait to talk with you about it. It was brilliant,” or something like that. But I let him know who I was and there was no recognition whatsoever. He’s a dour person, he’s severe, and there’s no recognition, and it was awkward. I stumbled away, and I met with him the next day to talk about the thirty pages I’d given him. He had very little to say. And honestly, I don’t remember anything he said except that he’d written one note in the margin—in thirty pages, he wrote one note. He had highlighted a paragraph that I especially loved. He wrote one word: flaccid. I’ll never forget it. As far as I’ve determined to remember, that’s all he had to say. That was probably the hardest criticism I’ve gotten, and I’ve gotten a lot of criticism.
You go through an MFA program, you take creative writing classes, and you’re going to hear a lot of criticism because that’s part of it. I’m generally fine with that. You hear criticism from a lot of different readers, as you do in a workshop, and you have to pick the readers that seem closest to you in terms of perspective. You listen to them. Then much of the other criticism, you ignore. You can’t listen to everybody or you are going to be pulled in all these different directions. So generally, I find criticism from my beloved readers to be really helpful. Yeah, I don’t remember any compliments. I mean, people say nice things all the time, but I think it’s in the nature of writers not to believe that stuff. I mean, it’s nice to hear compliments, but you can’t put too much stock in that or you become self-satisfied. And I don’t think self-satisfaction goes very well with writing. You have to be driven to probe and inquire and doubt, and you can’t do that if you believe you’re a great writer.
IJ: We have seen the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI writing tools in recent years. What use is there for human writing and imagination when the click of a button can create a story? Will writing as a career become a thing of the past?
DLM: Well, it’s a really good question, and I’m scared about that whole situation. In fact, at the Jackson School, where I teach, I was asked to be on an ad hoc committee in which we tried to come up with a tentative, provisional policy about AI and how our students and faculty should be using it. So, I’ve been experimenting with AI for the last few months, testing its capabilities. It’s impressive what it can do. There are clear limitations right now, in terms of writing, but it seems obvious that it won’t be long before AI can write consistently at the level of human beings, and I don’t know how to respond to that. It makes me scared and sad because writing is difficult. I think most people, even the writers I know who are incredibly talented, find it difficult, and it’s time consuming. Producing great art is time-consuming, and society has to pay someone to do it. Artists need to be paid for their work. Society has to pay them, there are various ways that artists get paid, and those ways have changed over the centuries, but in all times and places, artists have had to be compensated one way or another so that they can spend the time they need to write. I’m worried that if AI can do in a second, or in a few seconds, what it takes a human being years to do, then it seems pretty clear. Who’s going to pay a premium price for a novel written by a human being, when a novel can be written by AI essentially for free? I would like to think that the novel written by AI would not have the same qualities as a novel written by a human being, but I can’t say that with confidence. I saw a recent piece that said it doesn’t matter whether a human being or a machine wrote the novel, what matters is how we as readers respond to it. Literature is ultimately about processing words, being inspired by them, and thinking about them, so what difference does it make if a machine or a human wrote the words? That makes a certain logical sense. But as a writer, I can’t help but feel deeply saddened by this.
This is something I’ve been doing now for twenty-five years, and it’s a meaningful thing for me to do. It’s a meaningful daily activity for me, and I hope I’ll keep doing it, even if AI can do it with a fraction of the time and effort.
