Craig M. Workman attended The University of Kansas and graduated in 2003 with a Bachelor of General Studies in Literature, Language and Writing. He later was admitted to graduate studies at The University of Missouri-Kansas City, and graduated in 2010 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Media Arts. In 2009, he was one of three hundred fiction writers nominated in that year for The AWP Intro Journals Award, a literary competition for the discovery and publication of best works by new and emerging writers. He is the 2012 recipient of the McKinney Prize for Short Fiction. He is an adjunct professor/lecturer of composition, American fiction and creative writing, an I-Ph.D. student and a Doctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwestern Gothic, The Legendary, Zombies Gone Wild Anthology, Stanley the Whale, Linguistic Erosion, The Eunoia Review, Midwest Literary Magazine, Kerouac’s Dog, Shotgun Honey and Literary Juice. He currently lives in Prairie Village, Kansas.---------
Craig M. Workman interview with Meg Tuite
“All the Flowers of Tomorrow,” is heartbreaking and yet life-affirming in its quest. Tell me about your inspiration and these characters, Sam, Tommy, The Kid and Marjorie. LOVE them. They are unforgettable.
As far as Sam goes, I had the inspiration for him while looking through a newspaper one day and seeing a picture of an old man. The accompanying story was one dealing with an old homeless fellow who had been dead on the side of the road for (they assumed) a few days. People passed him continuously and no one seemed to notice. That got me thinking: who was this man? Or more importantly who could he have been? Like Sam, so many of the other characters are influenced by my people-watching tendencies as well as actual people I’ve known, and yet some others come from my odd brain. As far as this piece goes, it’s the last in a cycle entitled Walking to Elysium: A Novel-In-Stories, so the reader—especially if only regarding this piece—is only getting the end-point of these characters.
The neighborhood comes down to the camaraderie of this group who look out for each other and a challenge to create this garden together. Is place a strong character in your work? Where did you grow up and how does that creep into your writing?
Place seems to be a fairly strong character in everything I write. I grew up in Osawatomie, Kansas for most of my childhood. Interestingly enough (at least it’s interesting to me), some of the things I write take place in small towns, while much of my work—maybe more—does not, taking place in old neighborhoods in cities that have become obsolete, are going away in some fashion and represent what Hemingway called “the end of something,” though I don’t write about rowboats and closed down factories. It could be that because of all the places I’ve travelled around the country, I’m absolutely enamored by places on the edge of becoming something else altogether or vanishing.
Do you write mainly short stories? Or have you ventured into other genres?
I have written a few horrible novels when I was much younger. I feel that my biggest strength is short fiction, and it’s the mode of representation I always find myself excited to keep working on. The adrenaline rush I feel when finishing a scene or a draft of a short piece is unequivocal.
Who are your most memorable influences as a writer?
I suppose I should start out with the laundry-list: Lots and lots of Charles Bukowski, Chester Himes, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Junot Diaz, John Rechy, Charles Yu, Chester Himes, Alice Munro, Kelly Link, Colson Whitehead, Stephen King, Faulkner, Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Octavia E. Butler, Sandra Cisneros and of course my mentor, the great Christie Hodgen.
How does your teaching influence your writing?
It makes me aware—quite painfully, painfully aware—of my own mistakes on the page. It also goes quite a ways in helping me understand what I understand and what I don’t about writing in general, the latter of which it often seems is a large amount.
What are you reading at this time?
Well, I’m in comps status for my Ph.D. program right now, so the short answer would be one hell of a lot. Aside from my one-hundred twenty-odd books on the list, I should say I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction and revisiting heaps of literary theory. Sorry I can’t answer in a more provocative manner here.
How does rhythm and musicality play into your work? You seem to keep tightly to the narrative. How do you feel about adjectives, similes and adverbs in a story? Do you cut those out when you can?
I think they’re pretty important to me as far as meter and how lines read aloud. That’s another trick I’ve been using for a while. I tend to read as much aloud as I can, and then yes, I certainly do cut out excessive description. When I try to be hyper-descriptive and then read those lines aloud, it feels as if I’m stuttering and the rhythm is disrupted. It could have something to do with reading so much of Hemingway’s lean, sparse prose when I was growing up, but there you have it.
What would you say is the best tip you ever received as a writer?
During my MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Dr. Christie Hodgen insisted that we should be flexible when revising our work. Flexibility is crucial, as you can’t always be certain during the first or second draft whose story you have in front of you or what kind of piece it needs to be. That advice kept (and keeps) my work in a usable sort of flux while working to solidify point-of-view, narrative voice and many other aspects of a piece that are never set in stone; sadly, it seems too many other writers insist this piece must be second-person, that piece must be epistolary, and so on simply because that was their first idea. First impulses are not always the best ones. Otherwise, why would we ever revise anything we write?
What do you think is the most important point to convey to your students who are new to writing?
Four points, actually: 1. Write every day 2. Read every day 3. Repeat steps one and two ad infinitum. 4. All the planning, wishing and hoping for something solid to come of writing does absolutely no good if you don’t get it on the page.
Can you give us a quote that speaks to you? That inspires you?
This one from John Rechy’s City of Night:
“Sundays during summer especially I would hike outside the city, along the usually waterless strait of sand called the Rio Grande, up the mountain of Cristo Rey, dominated at the top by the coarse, weed-surrounded statue of a primitive-faced Christ. I would lie on the dirt of that mountain staring at the breathtaking Texas Sky.
I was usually alone. I had only one friend: a wild-eyed girl who sometimes would climb the mountain with me. We were both 17, and I felt in her the same wordless unhappiness I felt within myself. We would walk and climb for hours without speaking. For a brief time I liked her intensely—without ever telling her. Yet I was beginning to feel, too, a remoteness toward people—more and more a craving for attention which I could not reciprocate: one-sided, as if the need in me was so hungry that it couldn’t share or give back in kind.”
What projects are you working on at this time?
In bits and pieces, I’m working on a collection of short fiction and flash fiction dealing roughly with the notions of before and after. If that sounds vague, that’s because it’s still a bit vague to me.
Thank you so much, Craig, for all! You are a’ guerilla gardener’!
---------
In order to preserve the artistic arrangement of the writing, this piece has been created with Print2Flash Flashpaper.