K. L. Cooks Last Call: Stories won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.

His novel, The Girl from Charnelle, won the 2007 WILLA Award for Contemporary Fiction. His most recent book, Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions 2011), a collection of linked stories, won The Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Glimmer Train, One Story, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, The Writers Chronicle, Brevity, The Louisville Review, Shenandoah, Witness, American Short Fiction, Arts & Letters, Post Road, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and Harvard Review. His work has also been anthologized in 2012 Best American Mystery Stories; Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri; Now Write: Fiction Writing Exercises from Todays Best Writers and Teachers; When I Was a Loser: Essays on (Barely) Surviving High School; and Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education. He teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College and is a member of the graduate faculty of Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing Program. In 2007-2008, Cook was the Viebranz Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University, where I currently teach. When my Fall 2012 Reading the American West read his story, Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard, from The Best of the West 2011 anthology (University of Texas Press), I decided to interview Cook about the story as well as his perception of living and writing in the North Country versus living and writing in the West. Jill Talbot: You lived in the North Country for a year as St. Lawrence University's Viebranz Professor of Writing. How do you describe the landscape and feel of the North Country in relation to the spaces of the West? K. L. Cook: What initially surprised me about the North Country was its brutal beauty and its inhabitants' endurance. Before coming to St. Lawrence, I had been to a few artist colonies in Saratoga Springs and Blue Mountain Lake for a month at a time. I realize that those places are considered tropical compared to Canton and Potsdam. But still, I had experienced some North Country extremes--the heavy and translucent silence of the snow, the carnivorous black flies in June (I still have scars to show for it), the startling colors of the leaves the two days before they are all replaced by denuded branches, the bears and deer nosing for leftovers outside the window. What I didn't expect in Canton was the humidity--and the lack of air conditioning! I had grown up in Texas and have lived my life in the South and the desert Southwest, so I'd never been to a place in the civilized world where the people figured they could endure a few weeks, much less a

few months, of ninety-degree weather and outrageous humidity without Freon-generated relief. I remember my first months in Canton, in late summer stretching into mid-October. It was hot and unbearably muggy, with only a couple of scrawny oscillating fans available at the hardware store to circulate the misery. Even the St. Lawrence University library didn't have air conditioning. Crazy, I thought, as I lay sweating. This is worse than Houston! When I inquired about this, the locals just said, "Oh, it'll pass in a day or two." They lied. Finally the heat passed. Fall arrived, only to be replaced a week later by the first blizzard, blanketing the campus in a thick sheet of white fur, which my family and I thought was gorgeous. Now this is what we've been waiting for, we rejoiced, sledding down the university hills on open-faced cardboard boxes. Unfortunately, the snow just kept falling and falling and falling in what turned out to be one of the worst winters in Canton history. Five gazillion inches was the official tally, I believe. The roads covered in black ice. Huge piles of dirty snow, as hard and thick and high and gray as prison walls, piled for months on the sides of the roads. Stalactite-sized icicles dangling precariously from the sagging gutters. Landscapes of lost mittens and gloves and wool caps (and even, inexplicably, a pair of women's purple panties) discovered half a year later during the spring thaw. Negative-25 degree temperatures cold enough to make nose hairs and eyelashes click together like castanets! In Texas and Arizona, we may have angry landscapes, endless deserts of huge saguaro cacti and sagebrush and tumbleweeds, wide brutal blue skies, occasional 120-degree heat, and zero percent humidity. . . but we don't really know suffering like North Country folks know suffering! JT: I, too, grew up in Texas and have lived mostly in the West (Colorado, Utah, Idaho), so when I arrived here, I felt as if I had to whisper. Theres a reserve herein the people, the landscape. I was told, Youll get a lot of writing done here. And its true. Ive written more here than I have anywhere else Ive lived. And its not because Im snowed in or the fallen leaves are blocking the red front door of the house I rent. Theres a closed-offness to the landscape, a quietude that invites me to sit down and transfer that inwardness to my writing. How about you? Do you feel that where you are alters your writing? And how does the West in particular shape your writing? KC: I love what youre saying about the closed-offness to the landscape and a quietude that invites inwardness. I think that has been true for me as well, though Im unsure if my own productivity in upstate New York and the Northeast has more to do with the landscape or with the fact that when Ive been therewhile at St. Lawrence and at artist colonies in New Hampshire and New YorkIve had the luxury of time that is not necessarily afforded me in my real life. Perhaps both. I also think theres an element of homesickness. When Im in the Northeast, which is an essentially alien landscape to me, I find myself able to imagine the West more fully and deeplyand with a greater sense of both clarity and longing. Its as if the beauty and strangeness of a foreign place makes me keenly aware that its not really my place, which in turn makes me want to write about the places I know intimately. Im curious if that is the case for you. How does the West in particular shape my writing? Ive thought about this a lot over the years,

and its complicated for me, as Im sure it is for you. Ive studied and taught the literature and films of the American West for decades now. As a writer whose subject is the West, I feel like Im in constant conversation and tension with that literary and cinematic history, just as Im sure a writer from the American South cant escape the shadows of Faulkner, OConnor, or Welty, or a New England writer cant escape the shadows of Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, or Emerson. I feel my work butting up against Twain, Steinbeck, Didion, McMurtry, Proulx, Stegner, McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter, Nathanial West, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, and Rick Bass, as well as John Ford, Sergio Leone, and the schlocky history of the Western as a pulp genre. So writing about Texas and the Southwest has as much to do with my love for, and argument with, that tradition as it does with my familiarity with it as my home. This issue, I believe, is more problematic for Texas writers because Texas, in literature and film, is so often a caricature of itself. Every serious Texas writer probably feels that tension even more acutely. As a writer from Texas yourself, does that ring true to you? JT: While reading Texas writer Larry McMurtrys Horseman, Pass By for this course, I was sitting on my front porch and got to the last line that ends he reminded me of someone that I cared for, he reminded me of everyone I knew. Something came back to me in that moment, and I sobbed (rare for me when I read) because I realized how much I miss Texas, Texans, and the voices McMurtry captures, the drawls and the yalls of my past. Writers from Texas have voices with grit, a coarseness like sand in your teeth. Its an authenticity I think supplants any stereotype. And its not just Texas, writers in the West have a dare to their voice, and I often worry if I dont get back there soon, Ill lose mine. Our Viebranz Writer from 2011-2012, Mark Slouka, is now in Arizona, and in one of his letters to me, he describes the town where hes living as dusty. I know what he means, how the dust of the West gets into your words. I need dust in my writingin both what I read and in what I write. You mention some of the great writers of the West. Im hoping youll share a few of your favorite lines from selected works that ring true to you. KC: I think youre correct that there is a kind of daring in Western writersmore of a willingness to let the characters get into some serious melodramatic trouble. Larry McMurtry was a major influence on my writing, in large part because he was writing about the people I knew from West Texas and Houston, though a generation removed. I actually wrote my masters literature thesis on McMurtrys ambivalent relationship to his frontier heritage, focusing on three key novelsHorseman, Pass By (which you mentioned), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, and Lonesome Dove. I havent been as interested in McMurtrys fiction postLonesome Dove, but those early books, including his moving collection of essays, In a Narrow Grave, gave me much-needed permission to write seriously about the dusty, half-articulate West Texas culture that Id known. As a poor kid from Amarillo whose family werent readers, I didnt think literature could be written about my neck of the woods. I dont think I would have dared, to use your word, to write without his example. What moved me most about his work was the mixture of humor and pathos, and the elegiac spirit of those early booksa celebration and mourning for a passing way of life. The haunting

ending lines of Horseman, Pass By, which McMurtry wrote when he was in his early twenties, continue to be the most resonant refrain in his work. Ive been influenced and moved by Sam Shepards surreal version of the West, in plays such as Fool for Love and True West, and Annie Proulxs anthropological studies of Wyoming life, but its McMurtrys mixture of critique and elegy that still excites me most and moves me to write. JT: Each of these aspects you mentioncelebrate, mourn, haunt, surreal, elegyeven humor and pathos, may be attributed to your story, Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard, originally published in Glimmer Train and featured in the powerful, evocative collection, Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. When my Reading the American West class read it, I brought in copies of Paula McClains The Paris Wife and Joy Fieldings The Age of Desire. I also discussed Jed Mercurios American Adulterer: A Novel (about JFK) and Woody Allens Midnight in Paris in order to provide context for a burgeoning trend in recent literary works that realistically (via research and the authors own words) fictionalize a figure. But here, you have integrated that historical, albeit mythologized duo Bonnie and Clyde into a narrative about family, among other things. The story was a hit with both me and the class, and its one we eventually discussed as being a contender for the most representative story in that anthology for encapsulating the prevalent themes of the literature of the west. Ill stop writing about our experience in discussing it and allow you to discuss your inspiration for the story and your strategy in writing it. KC: Thanks for your kind words about the story. I write in bits and pieces, revising relentlessly, over months and sometimes years, before I see the larger design and meaning of a work. I think of it as a steeping process. Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard steeped for a long time, with its genesis in an anecdote my grandfather told me about Bonnie and Clyde driving through his backyard when he was a teenager during the Great Depressiona time in which he also had to quit school to help care for his dying father. I wrote a few pages of the story twenty years ago and then put it in a drawer and forgot about them. When I found those pages years later, a long draft came quickly, as if I had been subconsciously writing it all that time. I think one key for me was the point of view of the narrator, Riley, who tells this story in present tense, but we learn, early on and then certainly by the end, that hes a much older man looking back on this event and its repercussions for his family, and hes trying to figure out his own responsibility for what happened. That is always the case for me with first-person narratives. It takes a while for me to understand why a character must tell the story he or she is telling. But when I do figure that out, everything tends to fall into place. I also think that, with this particular story, it took me a long time to feel confident enough to write about historical characters. Those early pages alluded to Bonnie and Clyde, but the duo never arrived on the scene. Perhaps I was, on some level, afraid to make that imaginative leap. When I discovered the pages later, I gave myself permission to let the historical characters directly occupy the story, and that made all the difference. JT: Youve written an award-winning collection of linked stories, Last Call, which is set in West Texas. Will you describe West Texas to readers who may not be familiar with the flatness of the landscape, the storms of sand, the oil drills yawning across the panhandle? KC: Well, you just described it very well. I went to Amarillo High School, and our mascot was a sandstormthe Fightin Sandieswhich suggests just how significant wind and dust are in the

Texas Panhandle. And those oil drills were a major part of my familys economic life since my uncles and grandfather all worked as riggers. And the weather fluctuates radically, with thirty and forty-degree shifts in a day and 100+ degree days oscillating with freakish snowstorms. And the flatnesswell, youll never understand how expansive or empty or how beautiful the horizon can be until youve been to the Panhandle. The upside is the grand openness of the sky. The downside is that theres no place to hide in that kind of landscape. Whenever I visit the South or the East, I always feel a little claustrophobic because of all the hills and trees and uneven ground. West Texas is a harsh landscape and an acquired taste. You perhaps need to have been born and raised there to love it. I dont want to live there again, but it has, through three books and more to come, occupied a huge space in my imagination and defined, for better or worse, my understanding of the American West.