About Jane McCafferty

Jane McCafferty is author of three books: Director of The World, which won the Drue Heinz prize for literature in 1992, One Heart, a novel from HarperCollins, and Thank You For The Music, stories, also by HarperCollins. Her work has received an NEA, two Pushcarts, the Great Lakes New Writers Review, the Mademoiselle Award for Fiction, and several of her stories have been listed in Best American. She teaches a variety of writing and literature courses at Carnegie Mellon.

Interview with Nancy Zafris:

NZ: You won the Drue Heinz award (for your short story collection Director of the World) while still a graduate student at University of Pittsburgh. How did winning the award change your writing life?

JM: Winning the Drue Heinz prize got me an agent. Several agents contacted me, but they all wanted novels. Then Nicole Aragi wrote and said she wanted to be my agent, period. She loved my writing on its own terms, not because the stories promised a potential novel. So I went with her, and she's been great. Also, it just gave me a tremendous boost of confidence. I could hardly believe it, really.

NZ: How did you arrange your collection for the Drue Heinz submission?

JM: I arranged the stories in my first collection in a rather pedestrian way. I put a "charming" and accessible story, very imagistic, up front. I put two strange --some would say difficult--stories in the middle. I put what I thought was my most accomplished story at the end. I did not, and do not write my stories so as to fit them into a collection, because one of the things I value in story writing is the chance to take on extreme variety in characterization. But I'm one person, so themes make themselves apparent. It’s probably a reflection of personal obsessions that a writer just can't avoid, so people reading the book may actually feel that the stories do somehow belong together.

NZ: Did your thinking change when it came time to put together your second story collection, Thank You for the Music?

JM: In my second collection, I put what I felt was the most accomplished story in the middle. I put a funny story up front, and ended the book with a story that is written like a letter. I ended the book that way because the story ends with some ideas that are important to me beyond the world of the story, ideas I wanted as an "end-note."

NZ: How do you read a collection, from start to finish, or somewhat randomly?

JM: I probably skip around, usually. I read so many student stories, and have done so for years, that when I'm reading a collection, I will gravitate toward stories that really interest me in their opening, that hook me for whatever reason. Because I have so little time to read what I want, I'm a fairly impatient and demanding reader.

NZ: What makes you skip to the next story? What are you looking for?

JM: Something that doesn't feel purely mimetic. I don't want to see characters exploited in traditional ways-- I've read way too many stories where the women are afraid of aging and getting dumped by jerks, for instance. I want a story that resists all that. I don't want "dumb male" stories, and I don't want "pathetic woman" stories. I want a story where I can feel the writer has an appreciation of the power of representation. I can't stand hackneyed representations that help the status quo look itself in the mirror. A happy surprise for me is when I stumble on a story that feels strange and necessary, where a sensibility is at work and it's a sensibility I don't see on television, and at the heart of it all is compassion for everyone. An unhappy surprise for me is when I feel like it's all about being clever, or when characters aren't really respected, or, like I said, when it's art that upholds the system as it is.

NZ: What are you working on now?

JM: I'm working on a novel about a woman named Evvie and a priest named Corrigan. It's taken forever to find the narrator, but I think I did find one. I also am slowly working on some non-fiction about 2 gay dads who adopted 4 kids. One dad is a black Christian, the other a white Buddhist. Three of the kids are from drug addicted biological mothers. I really need to find more time to research and write one of these days. Life is consuming with job and kids, so it all moves like molasses.