Michael Kimball is the author of three novels. With Jen Michalski, Kimball co-hosts Baltimore's only dedicated fiction reading series, 5:10 Readings, which takes place every third Saturday at 5 p.m. at Minás Gallery, 815 W. 36th Street. In August, he spoke with Urbanite's Hannah M. Spangler about his latest novel, Dear Everybody, an excerpt of which appears in this month's issue.



It's called The Way the Family Got Away, and the very beginning of it is based on an old family story that my grandfather told me while I was growing up. My great-grandmother's little brother, Curtis E. Buck, died in Mineola, Texas, and afterward her family left that place to travel back to the family home in Grayling, Michigan. It was a very affecting story to me growing up and to my grandfather when he told it. I could see he would get emotional. Sometimes he would cry when he told me this. I never understood the real meaning of the story until I realized it was actually a story that his mother had told him. There was all of this emotion that was basically being handed down.

The Way the Family Got Away starts with that little bit of family history, and the rest of it is my attempt to sort of honor the emotional biography of it. It's narrated by two young children, a little boy and little girl. Their little brother has died, and the family is moving cross-country. They don't understand what's happening—where they're going, why this is all going on—but they try and tell us, so there's always a double narrative. There's what the children tell us in their language, and then there's what we as adults would understand to be so.


Storytelling seems to run in the family. Have you always wanted to be a writer?

No. I grew up with my grandfather telling me stories. In retrospect, I think I got that instinct from him, but growing up I wanted to be a professional baseball player, then I wanted to run in the Olympics—you know, all of that stuff. It really wasn't until probably late in college that writing ever entered my mind as something you do [for a living].


Right. I've read that you've written textbooks and have a background in child development.

I still edit and rewrite psychology textbooks from time to time, and they've all in different ways informed [my] books. The things I learned about child development and language acquisition very much inform The Way the Family Got Away and How Much of Us There Was, my second book. In Dear Everybody, the main narrator's a psychologically unbalanced man, so I did a lot of research on clinical disorders.


So then what got you started in fiction?

I actually started as a poet, just writing tiny little poems, and there was just a point when the poems just sort of shifted into stories, and I didn't really go back.


What inspired Dear Everybody?

Dear Everybody started almost by accident. I had finished my second novel. I didn't know what I was going to do next, and I had this little flash of a letter: a man who was apologizing to a woman for a date that he had stood her up on. Years later he wonders, if he had showed, if his whole life would have been different. It just seemed to me there was a great voice there. That one letter evolved into the many letters of that story. He ends up apologizing basically to everybody he's ever known, and through doing so he tells his life story.


I've read that you're interested in different ways of speaking within novels. What inspires that interest? Did you start out that way, or is it something you saw elsewhere and wanted to explore?

I started out that way. The Way The Family Got Away was never my voice. It was never me writing autobiography. I generally have a distaste for the standard novel or the mainstream realist novel. I love being able to tell a story in a different way, whether it's through child narrators, whether it's through the letters that make up most of Dear Everybody along with all of the other kinds of things that are in there—the psychological evaluation, the last will and testament. That's what's fascinating to me as a writer— [finding] new ways to tell a story.


Your project "Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story on a Postcard" is another great example of that.

The postcard project started as another happy accident, I guess. I was just joking around with a friend of mine who was curating an arts festival. He asked me why I wasn't doing anything at the festival, and I said, "Well, I'm a writer, not an artist. What do you expect me to do?" He started suggesting things I might do, and somehow I suggested that I could write people's life stories. He loved the idea so much that he set up a table and sign and all this stuff for me at the festival. I thought it'd just be this funny little thing a couple people would do.


But that wasn't the case?

Not the case at all ... I ended up doing it for over four hours that night.


Was this during the Transmodern Art Festival? I was there and some friends of mine actually told you their life story.

Which ones?


My friend Will, I believe, and my friend Laura sat down.

Will Chung?


Yeah. That's Will.

I remember him. I don't really remember everybody's name, but I remember everybody's face. It was fascinating to do, and it was this really intense, intimate experience. But the other thing I realized is that people also really liked it. They appreciated that somebody was asking questions about their life but also that somebody was taking care of these details. A few people got in touch with me afterward, and the one that sort of drove it home was this woman who said, "You took a very difficult time in my life and made it manageable for me." Then she described it as a sort of postcard therapy. It was kind of heartbreaking.

I did it again at Honfest, and now I have the website up (www.postcardlifestories.blogspot.com), and, depending on how many requests I get, you can e-mail me your life story. You write up details, then I'll reframe it, rewrite it. It's me writing it, but I'm trying to capture the way somebody else says something, the little telling details, words I would never use in my own work, but they use to describe themselves.


You also have a film project in the works, which, like the postcard project, picks up on the different ways people express themselves.

We were filming the book trailer for Dear Everybody. So there's a scene where there's a voiceover. The main character is tearing a feather pillow apart, because he thinks he's going to find a bird. We were talking about that scene, Luca Dipierro, the director, and I, and he said or I guess I said, "What if we had a bunch of people doing this, destroying something, but for some real reason." And that evolved into the idea for I Will Smash You.

The call that went out was, "Name an object that has some personal meaning for you. Tell us what that is and we'll film you smashing it." So it's not just about destroying something. It's about the story behind a thing. It all ties back. It's, again, personal narrative.

There were people that were working through different demons of a certain sort. There was somebody who burns his discharge papers because he has nightmares that the Army will force him to reenlist and every time he's forced to reenlist it's at a lower rank. There was a girl who makes a papier-mache version of her teacher who was always mean to her and destroys that. There's a woman who destroys, I think it's a 1991 Ford Taurus, because it's haunted. So there's this huge range of things, but it's really all about the people.

We're just in rough cuts right now, but there are points in different segments where you see the person's face change. It can be relief or some other emotion, but you can see that they've somehow processed this stuff finally.


You were born in Lansing, Michigan. How did life there compare to life in Baltimore?

Baltimore in some ways is an old factory town and Lansing is too, so there's that kind of connection. It was nice to see that. There were things I recognized when I moved here that you don't see in New York City, where I've lived, or other places like that.


In The Way the Family Got Away, the family ends up in Michigan. Do the places that you've been affect your writing? Is that something that you carry with you?

Mostly in incidental ways. I'm sure Baltimore will show up at some point, but it takes a while. I didn't write about Michigan until I had been gone for quite a while. I didn't write about New York until I had been gone for nearly ten years.


What's a typical day like for you?

I get up. I answer phone messages, e-mail messages, all of that stuff. I eat the same breakfast every day.


What breakfast is that?

I have two waffles and four soy sausages with maple syrup.


I envy your breakfast. I just had Cheerios this morning.

It tastes great, and I have a couple of friends who are nutritionists. Having that amount of protein early in the day and that amount of good fats early in the day, it does wonders.

Michael Kimball's website is michael-kimball.com.

Share your thoughts at www.urbanitebaltimore.com/forum.