Ten Questions With Daniel Wallace
What happens when a novelist who blurs the line between myth and memory swaps paragraphs with an editor who is obsessed with both? Daniel Wallace and Chuck Reece meet at the border between The Real and The Fantastic.
Daniel Wallace interview | ten questions | Big Fish author interview
Acclaimed Southern novelist Daniel Wallace, best known for Big Fish, wrote his answers to ten questions from Salvation South editor Chuck Reece. In this exclusive Q&A, Wallace discusses the art of magical realism, the far Southern place where fish rain from the sky, and his latest collection, Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars.
Daniel Wallace interview | ten questions | Big Fish author interview
Ten Questions
No. 1
Chuck Reece: You’ve published six novels, one work of nonfiction, and an illustrated book—a children’s book of an unlikely sort called The Cat’s Pajamas, in which you argue that because people say, “You’re the cat’s pajamas,” there must have been a time when cats actually wore pajamas, because no one has ever said, “You’re the dog’s underpants.” But why no collection of short stories until now?
Daniel Wallace: I’ve been writing short stories for a long time, long before I wrote a novel or a book about cats in pajamas. I learned how to write writing short stories. More than novels, I think, short stories approximate the way people really talk to each other and make sense of things. But they’re so hard to write. Flaws are more obvious in a story than they are in a novel: A novel is expected to be messy. So I never became a good longform story writer because—well, I should be so lucky. But the stories in this book are short enough to embody what they’re meant to be so here they are.
No. 2
CR: In Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars, you have collected twenty-three short stories. Very short stories. The shortest one is one page—only 175 words, by my count. The longest is fourteen pages. Why so short?
DW: See above.
No. 3
CR: In the twenty-seven years since your first novel, Big Fish, was published, I have had many occasions to turn friends on to your writing. All of those friends ask me, “What’s it like?” My go-to response is, “Imagine if Gabriel Garcia Márquez had been born in Birmingham. It’s Southern magical realism.” Am I overselling you, underselling you, or just being wildly inaccurate?
DW: I don’t know, but I do like to imagine Gabriel Garcia Márquez hanging out in Birmingham. Maybe Italo Calvino too. We’d have a blast.
No. 4
CR: In 2009, five years before he died, Márquez told a Chilean newspaper the goal of his writing was “destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.” When a writer can destroy that line, it always feels like great fun to me. Why is that?
DW: Because that’s life, it’s all happening on that so-called line of demarcation. This past semester a student in a class asked me what magical realism was, and I said off the cuff to imagine a town where everything is just as we know it—our so-called reality—except that it rains fish a couple of times a week. A student in that very class raised her hand and said, “My family comes from a town where it rains fish.” I looked it up. Yoro, Honduras. That’s the line.
No. 5
CR: Big Fish centers on a father about whom the description “larger than life” would be an understatement. In the new story we’re publishing today, “The Long Road Home Is Covered in Limpid Roses,” there is a “good-for-nothing, horse-thieving father.” In fact, in the 127 pages of Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars, the word “father” appears thirty-three times and the word “dad” eleven times. That’s a daddy every 2.8 pages. What is it with you and daddies?
DW: Oh my god. You counted. I can play that game too. There are thirty-eight mothers, one mom, and thirty-one dogs. This book covers the gamut.
Daniel Wallace interview | ten questions | Big Fish author interview
No. 6
CR: A couple of decades ago, Tim Burton, one of my favorite movie directors, made a film of your first novel, Big Fish, starring Ewan McGregor and the late Albert Finney. I thought that was a great movie. Did you?
DW: Very much so. It pairs well with the novel.
No. 7
CR: The last time I interviewed you, two years ago, we talked about your late brother-in-law, William Neely, who was the subject of your most recent book, This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew. I know that book was challenging for you to write, because William was not only part of your family, he was also your hero when you were young. Did anything you didn’t expect happen as a result of you writing that book?
DW: After living with that book for all the years it took to write it, I think I imagined every possible eventuality. I wondered if the man who was accused of murdering William’s best friend Edgar, and who I write about in the book, would hunt me down and kill me, but that hasn’t happened. Yet. But the most consequential thing I learned was that I could read someone’s (William’s) suicide notes, all twenty-five pages, and disagree with his own assessment as to why he had chosen to take his own life.
No. 8
CR: You and I are about the same age. Both of us grew up in the South. And both of us were attracted to fantastical writing. My first discovery of that was in the nonfiction of Hunter S. Thompson, who was from Kentucky: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. Whose fantastical writing blew your mind?
DW: H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Alfred Hitchcock, anything.
No. 9
CR: Same setup, different question: We also have similar musical tastes. Name a favorite song by a Southern artist from when we were in high school, the late ’70s. And explain why you love it.
DW: I may be a little bit older than you. The Southern musical artists I was most drawn to were the Allman Brothers Band, and I listened to At Fillmore East constantly. While I love almost everything on that two-album set, including the cover, I will say “Whipping Post” is my favorite. My best friend Tim and I—we played basketball together in high school—listened to it before every game. It inspired us.
No. 10
And in conclusion...
CR: Thank you for answering these questions. I think you're the dog's underpants.
DW: I'm speechless. But happy.
Daniel Wallace interview | ten questions | Big Fish author interview
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.
