Andrew J. Graff Interview

Introduction

Over Memorial Day weekend, I traveled to my old stomping grounds in southwest Ohio for the first time since the pandemic struck. My parents live in the Dayton area, so visiting them was my first priority. But visiting Yellow Springs was also at the top of my list because there’s nowhere else in the Midwest like it: Hippie town hosting popular eateries and an eco-friendly culture concerned with social justice; a hub for artists, writers, and free thinkers; home to the now-resurrected Antioch College and the famous comedian Dave Chappelle (the latter of whom I saw and talked to on the street, making a complete fool of myself, I’m sure).

Yellow Springs was the perfect place to sit down with local writer and professor Andy Graff, a former colleague of mine who’s the author of the novel, Raft of Stars, touted by the Boston Globe as an “exquisitely crafted novel” and The New York Times Book Review as “engrossing [and] large-hearted.”

When Andy and I first met several years ago, he was a newly minted Iowa grad from its esteemed MFA writing program and arrived with recommendation letter in hand from none other than Marilyn Robinson. (Of course, he was hired.) As I got to know Andy, I realized what I suspected in his interview: He is that rare gem of a human being who is immensely talented as well as tremendously humble, who cares about his students more than the topics he teaches, although he loves writing and there’s no doubt about the fact that he was born to write. Keeping in touch with him has been a joy over the past several years since I moved to Indiana, so when his first novel was released in March, I eagerly bought it.

The praise for this, Graff’s debut novel, is effusive, so much so that I was worried when I began reading it, I might be disappointed. But that was not at all the case. For those readers who haven’t yet encountered Raft of Stars, The Washington Post insightfully sums up well the power of the story and why it held me from page 1 to the end:

Outdoorsy tales like this, from Hemingway’s early Michigan stories to James Dickey’s Deliverance on down, typically use woods and waterways as proving grounds for masculinity. But Graff...wants to unravel some of the expectations of the genre. Nature, here, isn’t impressed with masculinity at all, and it’s prepared to smash machismo against its rocks along with anything else. . . Graff writes exquisitely about the wilderness,...[and] recognizes that his main job is to deliver a gripping adventure tale, which the concluding chapters offer plenty of — dangerous rapids leading to life-threatening waterfalls, menacing black bears and coyotes.

Graff now teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.  He has enjoyed many accolades already in his burgeoning career. For instance, in 2019 alone, he received Ohio Magazine’s Excellence in Education award, the Jacques Maritain Prize in nonfiction, and recognition as Image Journal’s Featured Artist. (You can read his stunning short story in Image here: https://imagejournal.org/article/the-ecstasy-of-saint-carolyn-theodore-burtanski/).

Because Graff grew up fishing, hiking, and hunting in Wisconsin's Northwoods, has worked as a white water rafting guide, and served a tour of duty in Afghanistan, part of my interview with him asks him to elaborate on how those experiences also informed the novel. So what follows is a conversation between friends, who also happen to be writers of faith. We spent nearly three hours together, talking through Raft of Stars and our faith journeys and our goals for writing and what’s next. What a pleasure to introduce Relief’s readers to this writer with whom I hope they become well acquainted! 

The Germ

The “germ,” wherever gathered, has ever been for me, “the germ of a story,” and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint. ~Henry James
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JM: Talk about your own experiences as a white water rafting guide—how those experiences informed your magnificent descriptions in the book as the characters traipse through the Northwoods and navigate the white waters.

AG: I love white water rivers. I grew up on one. One of the greatest, one of the most pleasant parts of writing this story was closing my eyes for 5 years and walking along the river banks again and being on the water. I think thematically, the major metaphor for me was the balance between agency and acquiescence. When do you have to paddle really, really hard and when do you have to let go and realize you’re co-laboring with a force greater than you?

I always dig it watching the river guides. You can tell a rookie river guide because they’re all muscle and overcorrection and panic, and then they end up hurting their shoulders in the season versus the old-time river guides with grey beards and grey braids. There’s one on the New River; they actually call her “The Gauley Goddess.” The Gauley has a Class 5 rapid, and she’s gotta be in her 50s. She has beautiful, greying braids flying out the back of her helmet. And I’ve seen her guide a Class 5, explosive white water, on video taking two strokes looking as calm as if she’s eating a muffin on a park bench. I think the old guides have learned to co-labor.

So in the book, all the characters are wrestling with when do I paddle really hard, and when am I up against the end of myself? And they all do that. Like, Miranda comes up against the end of herself, the boys do, Cal does with his identity, so that balance is present for me in all of the characters.

JM:  Let’s talk about those boys, Bread and Fish, who are the central protagonists in the book. The story opens with a vivid scene of the two boys, trying to save two baby turtles that have wandered off from the marsh (where they belong) to the asphalt on the road. Page 1 tells us that the turtles were “tenacious”—“persisting in existence.” Talk about why and how you chose this scene to begin the book and how both Fish and Bread get characterized there.

AG: The opening served as a microcosm of the whole for me. And it also has a nice, loud, inciting incident. The thematic microcosm was Fish didn’t know whether to feel joy for the turtles or scared for them. And the boys become like those turtles, sort of cast out into the wild. They are tenacious, they are persisting. One of the key phrases that comes up in that first chapter that gets repeated is Poor damn things. The grandfather, Teddy. says, whether the calf is born as a runt or a cat falls out of the tree, the world is full of poor damn things. And the boys have to ask, eventually, “Am I a poor, damn thing?” Tiffany, the poet, asks that. Cal, the sheriff, does, too.

Fish’s main question becomes, “Is there a way to never be afraid again?” Cal is dealing with identity. Tiffany is struggling with community. She’s been burned enough, so she has to shed her walls to open up and find her “coyote pack.” Cal literally sheds things—loses his firearm, loses his boot--

JM: loses his dog--

AG: Exactly. He’s eventually led on a horse like a kid on a pony.

It’s in that space where he finally says, “Oh, this actually fits. I feel cared for. I don’t have to be that sheriff in control of everything.” So when he sheds that, he’s able to show up for others. And eventually, Fish answers that question at the falls—and I think he eventually overcomes even the fear of death. He does the ultimate. And at that moment, something trips for him that we’re all probably after.

JM: Two other words are also defined in the novel, so the three definitions are like markers in the book as we proceed. The second word is “acquiescence”—to give in, to go along, to accept things as they are. The third word is “numinous”—marked by the presence of divinity, to be more than meets the eye. What were you doing these with those words?

AG: The numinous--that really shows up in spades at the end, as it does for most of the characters. Once they acquiesce to the larger flow and say, “I can’t,” something shows up from outside of themselves. The wilderness, the cosmos, God, the spirit of the father, the bear, provides. The thing that threatened us shows up.

And dang, I want to get that straight in my own life, too, you know? That balance between acquiescence and agency. The first half of my life, I’m pure agency.

JM: Thinking I control my own destiny.

AG: Yes.

JM: Sometimes some forces do take over, and we don’t control our own destiny.

AG: Yes. So the first chapter is that loud, inciting incident, that note from Bread, my old man is dead in the kitchen. Because I did write a manuscript that failed to publish. I worked on it for 7 years. And the consensus was kind of like, “This is boring. You’ve written a long, boring book.” So when I wrote this, with no promise that it would come to fruition either, and it almost didn’t—it got passed around among agents for a year.

JM: So you didn’t want to repeat that.

AG: Right. So I have that prologue, and boys on the run. I knew I’d have four chapters at least!


Publication Tears

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. ~Sylvia Plath

JM: So one of the things I also wanted to ask you about since you mentioned this book got passed around to agents—I know sometimes when stories have main characters who are ten year-old kids like Bread and Fish are, the book gets labeled “Y/A.” But you have enough fully developed adult characters, I assume that’s how you avoided having this book pigeon-holed that way?

AG: Eventually.

JM: Was that at first what was happening? People wanted to pigeon-hole it as Y/A?

AG: Yes. I went back to my agent that I worked with in the past and said, “I have a new book. Do you want to read it?” And she did. And she said, “Lovely, but I think it’s Young Adult. Can I show it to a Y/A agent?” And I said yes, and that agent had it for several months. Then came back and said it wasn’t Y/A because of the adult characters.

So it went back, and we revised a little bit and I added more interiority to the adult characters. At the end of which my agent still thought it was Y/A and showed it to another Y/A agent. And they said no. And eventually, it got shelved.

And I thought, “Oh, I wrote another sock drawer novel.” And then five or six months later, my agent asked if she could show it to a brand new other agent, and I agreed. And she loved it. And she and I worked on it for two or three months, and she sold it in two weeks!

JM: Oh, wow!

AG: Now isn’t that a wonky lesson on how little we can control anything?

JM: Exactly. So there’s your agency vs. the forces beyond you, whether that be market forces or forces of nature, right?

AG: Yes. It’s mind-boggling. And then HarperCollins picked it as their lead title, and they put all their marketing weight behind it. And I was like, who can do anything? I’m just going to sit in my office and write words.

JM: So you got the full backing of HarperCollins? You got the whole shebang?

AG: When it was in galley stage, they chose it for their lead, that program: It’s HarperCollins, Harper One, and William Morrow. Like all the imprints put forth some candidates, and then they winnow it down to one. And for winter season, they chose my book. I cried like twelve times in three days.

JM: Oh, I bet.

AG: I was like, no you didn’t. Whatever. It was just amazing. Ecco has been amazing, Ecco Books has been just perfect.

Fish and Bread

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. ~Flannery O'Connor

JM: I remember talking with you about your characters years ago, and you said I’m writing a new story, and the characters’ names are Fish and Bread. And so I asked whether the story would allude to Jesus’s miracle of multiplying the fish and bread. And you said, no, not really. But after I read the book, I did see a theme about hunger in the book. Throughout Fish and Bread’s experience, you describe in vivid detail both their hunger and their attempts to find and eat food, including the failed meal of night crawlers with the Red Man tobacco (which I knew would not end well!). What were you trying to get at throughout the novel in terms of this hunger motif—for instance, when Fish thinks to himself that “hunger smells like wood smoke”?  So what’s going on with Fischer Branson and Dale Breadwin?

AG: There’s definitely an echo of miraculous provision. Not that exact miracle but more loosely, the cosmos or God showing up. “Ours is a God of well-time miracles.” And the other way their names felt right, eventually, is that I really wanted to write an elemental novel – like all black bears and coyotes and rivers and lightning. And Bread and Fish seemed like the more elemental, the most basic meal you could have. I wanted everyone to have pine needles in their hair when they were done.

JM: Yes, lots of elements in the novel—fish, bread, dirt—you have lots of dirt—water, rocks--

AG: Yeah.

JM: And fire, too. And there is a miracle of survival at the end. One of the miracles I love is when Fish sees his Dad’s face in the bruin, and later on realizes it was either a hallucination from his starved state or a miraculous apparition—but he got warmth from it. That seemed one of the miraculous moments because that’s where Fish finally accepts his father’s fate and acquiesces to it.

AG: And provision. It was the thing that frightened him. It was very frightening for him to back into that cave. I really liked writing that scene of him putting his hands into that deep, smelly, wet fur and then having the dream of his father and his mother on horseback. There’s a whole lot of numinous encounter going on there, right?

What did Annie Dillard say? There’s a nonchalance in miracle itself, how it blends in. Post-miracle, everyone still has to make a decision: Was this a miracle or was this a hallucination or a dream or what was it? That’s how the miraculous tends to show up. It’s incarnational, you know. It's not always some burning bush outside of reality. It shows up as coincidence, and you have to decide, “Is that it or not?” And you have to decide.

JM: That is so true.

AG: I think of Augustine in City of God. He talks about the relics of Saint Stephen, I think. And all this miraculous healing started occurring. But people don’t even share the miracles with family members or neighbors.

JM: Because they wouldn’t be believed?

AG: I think it’s just because people just fail to acknowledge it. But we have to decide. There’s still faith there. Isn’t there some verse about this? Even if I did this, they still wouldn’t believe?

JM: Yes, Jesus said their hearts were hardened, so they still wouldn’t believe.

AG: Right. So in the book, maybe some say well, Fish was hypothermic, maybe. Or maybe it was miracle.

JM: So is there a little C.S. Lewis, a little Aslan in that bruin? I mean, the Beaver does say Aslan is not safe, but he is good.

AG: I did not think of the bruin as Aslan but yes, I’m on board with that. The bear was showing up for all sorts of questions. That happened, too, in that smaller scene when Bread and Fish were super hungry, and Fish couldn’t kill the turtle with his pocket knife. That was the one scene that I really argued to keep in the book. It was so important to me for the boys to choose not to kill it. I am so hungry; however, this seems so unjust. Something is so broken that everything has to devour everything else. And Fish chooses that sense of justice over his own appetite. And that was a big turn for me for him.

JM: Yes, and even early on, he wants to save those baby turtles. Fish thinks he saves Bread from his abusive father. And we see him being willing to sacrifice his life at the end. Is Fish a Messiah figure? Does he have a Messiah complex?

AG: That’s interesting. Actually, Fish is often being carried by Bread. So maybe it’s not until the end that he is truly at the end of himself that he’s able to be saved. I wonder why he struggles so much. He’s a wounded kid; he’s alone. There’s probably some turning away from the self. He wants to play hero. Like Cal as law enforcement officer, but that wrecks him.

JM: When Fish passes out as he sees the skeleton and when the boys smear mud on their face, there’s some Lord of the Flies allusions in this book. Now Golding based his book on a real story that wasn’t nearly as dark as the one he devised; total depravity is at the core of Golding’s book. But here’s your book showing two boys taking care of each other. And in one scene, even Kierkegaard shows up and his “leap of faith.” That’s where acquiescence shows up, too. And then the boys “go all beaver.” They become explorers and make spears out of cattails. Were you cognizant of these echoes of, yet differences from, LotF?

AG: I wasn’t thinking Lord of the Flies ever. I was just thinking of 10 year-olds alone in the wilderness with the very serious question boiling in the background about not having fathers any more and being cut loose and living like beavers and also a lot of fear and pain. In that particular moment, they’re trying to “put on their freedom.” And we readers know they can’t survive in their underwear carrying cattail spears—they are posturing. The truest thing about humans is not that layer that’s depraved and ugly but rather that there’s something noble, beautiful, good, and strong about humans—and they are not alone: “The Christ in me sees the Christ in you.” The implications of that are this: If I can promise that a better space in myself will try to see a better space in you, especially if you scare or confuse me, therein comes healing. You will never get there with a worldview of total depravity. If you believe that humans are totally depraved, a heap of dung—not to pick on Luther—but you’re never gonna get there. I’m not gonna trust that.

JM: In the wild, Fish contemplates that people seek “busyness” because it “solved fear and silence and hurt.” And I wrote in the margins of your book, “Welcome to 2021.”

Isn’t that true? How much the pandemic has helped people wake up to that reality. Suddenly, people had to sit at home with their families, and people said, “Oh, crap, we’re busted up. We’ve got work to do.” Or “There are really pleasant things here that I forgot about it.” And re-discover what home and silence can be.

JM: The boys name their raft “The Hope of Lantern Rock” and later, “Poachers’ Hope of Lantern Rock,” and then we get “The Last Stand of Poachers’ Hope of Lantern Rock.” Yet, the raft is not what delivers them. In fact, it fails them. How were you playing with this famous image from Huck Finn and how were you trying to transform or even invert it?

AG: Huck Finn was definitely in mind. The naming of the raft in a basic sense was to let them be 10 year old boys. To let it transform into who they were becoming as the things happen to them. They’re poachers now; as the raft was torn apart…it was their last stand. Hope is always the last thing standing. You can hope for hope even. I’m in a place of despair and I don’t even feel hopeful, but I can hope that I can be hopeful. I can ask for faith. What perseveres? All this stuff will pass away, but what is it in I Corinthians 13? What remains? Faith, love, and hope. I’m thinking that through now. When everything else goes away, those sort of moments, at least the possibility of hope and love and belief exist.

Other Strong Characters

It begins with a character, all I can do is trot along behind him trying to put down what he says and does. ~William Faulkner

JM: How did your military experience influence your crafting of character like Teddy, who’s a veteran?

AG: I was in Afghanistan for 3 months—early on in the deployment when deployments were really short. 2001. Right after 9/11. And actually, that experience informed Fish’s dad’s character [who served in the military] more than Teddy’s—the stress of deployments on families. I was 20 and not tethered to a wife and children. I remember sergeants having once-a-week, grainy satellite phone calls with family. Siting beneath camp netting and being “tanked out emotionally,” not making enough money, in a desert on the other side of the world, things aren’t good back home, etc. Teddy describes well Fish’s Dad’s problem—what did you always want to do? Teddy lands on how he and his wife barrel down the road with beer with abandon. That was attractive to Teddy. It was in war, too. That was in Fish’s father, too. Fish’s dad was answering that part of himself, and it cost him everything. And Fish’s dad only has the nickname “Bear.” When Miranda asks Teddy to talk to Bear, Teddy says, “God dammit and slams the door.” Teddy knew what Bear was chasing, so he just slammed the door because Teddy had learned to squash it. So not an addiction to war—that part of life we sometimes tap into, that wild part of life, there’s something about that in reckless abandon and lover and wildness. Life opens up and it’s numinous. I’ve tapped into the numinous.

Recklessness is needed for faith. Miranda yields to a form of prayer that is outside of rational control. I don’t actually know what I’m speaking now. I will walk in that. She answers a lot of the questions, including the main one: “Are we poor, damn things?”

JM: Speaking of Miranda, you crafted a story with two strong female characters in her and in Tiffany. Tiffany is the poet, but Miranda, Tiffany says, is a poem. Tiffany, the poet, and Miranda, the Pentecostal believer: both seem 3-dimensional and real. When Miranda says that “we’re not just poor damn things. Even if it feels true, it’s not the truth. There’s more to us, more for us, right now, right here, in this,” her words carry a kind of Gospel weight. How did you, a man, work to develop these characters and flesh them out with such complexity?

AG: I’ve been asked that question a lot. I honestly didn’t think to myself that I was writing female characters. I was writing human characters. I gave them a worry and let them worry about it. I was never saying, “Now what would a woman do?” I just had faith that we’re far more similar than we are different. Sometimes, it took good readers to help me with edits and revisions. When Tiffany and Miranda first bond river-side and Miranda brushes Tiffany’s hair. I worried that that would be too stereotypically female, but readers assured me that the scene portrayed vulnerability. It gave me an opportunity to show how Tiffany hadn’t been cared for in her past.

I think I’ve lived every single one of those character’s struggles, male and female. Every character is a part of myself and my struggles. How else can you write a character? I’m not sure.

My great hope is that the bear will show up in the wilderness. And Miranda is more than just a Pentecostal woman in denim skirt. She shows up too at the end in a way that is spirit-filled and wild and potent and good. And so do the boys. Fish gives himself completely over. The sub-par manifestations of the faith hurt us and disappoint us so much, so why does God allow it? And the answer is: It leaves the window open, doesn’t it? I can go back and now see the grace and beauty amid the hurt and disappointment.

Conclusion

Future Endeavors Ending with a Little Literary History & the Opposite of Trauma

JM: Does Ecco want to have you write more novels?

AG: I have a second one under contract with them. Now I gotta finish writing it.

JM: Do you want to say anything about it?

AG: It’s going back to the Northwoods. Different cast of characters, but I wanted to write about the rivers and the people and the small towns again, so a similar world.

JM: Kind of like what Paul Harding did after Tinkers with Enon.

AG: Right. By the way, I had Paul Harding as a teacher at Iowa. I had a workshop with him. In fact, I was in his class the day he won the Pulitzer Prize for Tinkers. The reading for the day was Henry James. And the whole consensus in the class was just, “Forget it.” We ended up just sitting outside and talking.

JM: Wow, so you were a part of that literary history. Incredible! As for your literary history, what would you like to leave our readers with about the novel that we haven’t yet covered?

AG: At the end, emotionally, one guy doesn’t have one of everything. In the beginning: Bread isn’t being helped; he’s been pitied. Tiffany has been marginalized and burned. Cal is drinking whiskey, alone. Fish is a liar. But in the end they share their burdens and their strength. I learned that trauma is defined as the exact opposite of “you’re strong and you’re good and not alone.” If a human feels alone and terrified and powerless, that’s the definition of trauma. I am isolated. I am terrified. And I feel powerless. That will traumatize someone. So what these guys learn is the opposite of trauma—they are strong, they are good, and they are not alone. To admit you need to change is humiliating. At the core, at the root. The strength is their agency, the agency to change.

Raft of Stars (Ecco, 2021) can be ordered through Amazon, HarperCollins, or Powell’s, and since we like to support independent bookstores, we’ll link you straight to Powell’s: https://www.powells.com/book/raft-of-stars-a-novel-9780063031906 You can follow Andy on Instagram and learn more about him at https://www.andrewjgraff.com/.

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Julie L. Moore is Relief’s poetry editor and the author of four books, including Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award.