How do you live when you’re hiding who you are? A conversation with Tadzio Koelb, author of TRENTON MAKES

INTERVIEW BY YI ZOU

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Before publishing Trenton Makes (Penguin Random House), Tadzio Koelb had poems, reviews, and essays already under his belt. Now, after four years of on and off writing, editing, and revisiting, he has completed a tale of identity, isolation, and corrupt humans living in a corrupt society. In Union Square, on one of the few pleasant days in the middle of winter, he talks about his journey in writing, the inspiration for his protagonist, and how a story set in post WWII relates to our modern world.

 

Yi Zou: How long has the idea of Trenton Makes been in your head? What inspired it?

Tadzio Koelb: A pretty long time. I remember talking about it with my thesis advisor in my undergraduate program. I was finishing a different novel then, but I had already come across the CD of jazz music by Billy Tipton, who was discovered at the moment of his death to be biologically female.

That had set me thinking about a few different things. Most immediately, how do you live when you’re hiding who you are or what your body is? How do you do that? And I took it to an extreme because I think extremes are where you find more interesting stories.

 

YZ: How long has it taken for you to complete the novel?

TK: It’s hard to say exactly, because I started a bit and then went back to revise an earlier novel that I never managed to place with a publisher. So, I usually say it’s about four years.

You just have to do it. You just have to sit down in front of the piece of paper or the computer or however you function as a writer. Right now, I’m not really doing that since I’m sort of waiting, I’m so caught up in the excitement of publishing this novel that I don’t have the ability to focus on the next thing yet.

 

YZ: Is this a story that you planned out piece by piece before you started writing, or did the plot form as you wrote it? Have these characters changed from how you envisioned them in the beginning?

TK: A little bit of both. I would outline pretty extensively, but when I went to flesh out those various different pieces, they would sometimes be much longer or shorter than I would have anticipated. There were big question marks surrounding some of the events. How to arrive at them, and what all of the various repercussions might be.

Some characters changed, very drastically. I had originally thought that Dion would be almost a cult leader, for example.

 

YZ: Did you ever encounter a block while planning or writing, and what helped you get past it? What did you learn?

TK: I think of writer’s block as just another name for fear of failure. Naturally, I experienced fear of failure all the time. I think it’s a constant. I think if you’re an artist and you don’t fear failure, you’re probably not a very good artist, because you should want to do something that you’re not sure how to do. You should be attempting to do something ambitious and difficult.

I think the most important activity to do for a writer is to read. Reading is an enormous inspiration and a source of almost comradery with other writers, even if they’re long dead. They encourage me and they lead me.

This is my first published novel, but not the first one I wrote. I had an instructor at my master’s course, who used to say, “Writing a novel teaches you how to write the novel you just wrote”. Having said that, though, it’s like anything in the sense that the more you do it, the more you understand it, the less you have the question yourself.

 

YZ: What made you so interested in the post WWII time frame? Did you have to do a lot of research?

TK: I chose that particular time, because the character was, for me, best displayed against a backdrop of isolation. I didn’t want there to be chat rooms, support groups, anything that might suggest a kind of network to which this character could turn. But, I wanted a time that wasn’t so different from our own and I believe that a lot of things that happened in WWII are still affecting the politics that we’re suffering from in America today.

I thought I was familiar, but you discover a lot of small things that would have never occurred to you to ask. How did people get rid of their garbage? Or heat their houses?

 

YZ: Is the style of non-linear storytelling something you employ often?

TK: Yes, it is. In this particular case, I was also influenced or inspired by a book called “The True Story of the Novel” by Margaret Doody. She discussed earlier forms of the novel and different ways in which novels could be structured. It inspired me to be as transgressive in the formatting of the novel as I thought the character Kunstler was in relation to his surroundings and society

 

YZ: There is this element of reincarnation through violence, from Kunstler’s husband to Kunstler and finally to Kunstler’s son. How did this motif come to be?

TK: I pulled in my discussion of Kunstler as, sort of, the ultimate self-made man. I looked at a couple of stories, one of which is Frankenstein. In this case, Kunstler is both Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster. I also looked at the story of Isis, who tried to reassemble her husband but was unable to find his sex organs. I also looked at the Nietzsche-ian statements of the revenge of the son on the father, and these kinds of violent progenitors.

 

YZ: Kunstler ends up doing some incredibly immoral things. Were you concerned with keeping your protagonist “sympathetic” or “likable”?

TK: The important thing about Kunstler is that he demonstrates how bad systems generate immoral behavior. We see a lot of stories about people facing difficulty that are shown as deeply and essentially good, but forced to do something—perform an act—bad. I think that’s a misrepresentation of the way in which we are affected by our inequalities. I think that a corrupt system creates corrupt morality which the individuals trapped inside can’t even see as corrupt. Kunstler is somebody just like that. In order to get what he wants and needs, he will do things that seem, to him, to be justified.

 

YZ: Did you experience rejections while trying to get Trenton Makes published?

TK: Oh, yes, quite a lot, in fact. There were some agents worried about the length. Specifically they thought it was too short. Some liked the first half but not the second half. And some liked the second and not the first. Some, one rather, told me she thought it read like a first draft. It’s almost exactly the same draft, with minor changes, that’s being published one month from now.

 

YZ: Are you represented by an agent, and how did the two of you connect?

TK: I’m represented by Anna Stein, at ICM. I came to her through one of the many ruses I used for meeting agents. Essentially, any time I met a person, of any kind, whether or not that person had any relationship with the literary world, I’d ask them if they knew an agent. And if I submitted my work to agents, and they said it wasn’t for them, I asked them to recommend someone else. I was always on the lookout for an introduction. I got an introduction from a colleague at Rutgers, and I was very lucky that Ana was sympathetic with the work.

 

YZ: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

TK: For the writing part, I think write what you really want to because you’re going to be rejected a lot. It’s better to be rejected for something you meant than something you did only to please others, and ultimately, you’ll write a better book if you’re being honest. For publishing, I think luck is a huge part of it. I thought I was going to have to publish this book on a mimeograph machine and sell it on the corner. I just got very lucky, I think, that the subject matter was timely, and I found an agent who was interested, and she knew the right editors to go to, and so on.

 

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Yi Zou is a graduate student studying fiction at the New School MFA program.