Followed by an interview with the author

Dan Mueller’s new story collection, Anything You Recognize, works as a precision machine, similar to the core drills geologists use to bore deep into the earth’s crust in order to bring up samples from the various layers and strata. The result is a remarkable cross-section of  humanity’s collective psyche. Mueller’s process also involves chopping the samples into distinctive bits and asking the reader, “Anything you recognize?” Or perhaps the book says, “Pick up and take with you anything you recognize. Surely some of these pieces belong to you.”

The collection as a whole feels autobiographical, especially in the authenticity that’s conveyed through the manifold scenes, situations, and conflicts. While the reader may envision Mueller as a boy, young man, and mature adult through the stories, only the author knows where the boundaries lie between autobiography and fiction; in fact, the worlds created here are so precise and familiar that Mueller himself may not know where the murky lines lie between actual and imagined experience. In his mind the scenes conveyed—through the toil of writing them—may have displaced what existed before in his memory, creating masterful fiction in the process.

Many period-correct details contribute: Thingmaker oven with bottles of glow-in-the-dark Plastigoop for making Creepy Crawlers, Country Squire station wagons, the Apollo 11 moon landing, Vietnam War, stereo record players built into heavy wooden consoles, black-and white TVs, Hot Wheels raceways, Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, and G.I. Joes. These brush strokes are placed within the seven stories that feature a young boy protagonist who, as an adult, recounts events from his fifth through tenth year, a period fraught with challenges largely brought on by his father’s being drafted into the Army to serve as a medical officer.

The family’s subsequent move from Greely, Colorado to Fort Hood, Texas presents the boy with painful realities, confusion, and opportunities for growth. He suffers a feeling of helplessness over the dissolution of a close relationship with a neighborhood boy, resulting in the evaporation of a vow they’d made to be “first, best, and last” friends for life. This story and the others that center around the youngster resonate with the poignancy of his grappling with sexual mysteries, hard-candy lozenges that stick in the throat, the confusing behavior of grown-ups, pangs of childhood love, racism, and the disappointment that comes with discovering how imperfect people are—friends, family, and himself.

He feels guilt over killing a robin with a slingshot, stealing a snapping turtle from a new boy in the neighborhood in order to elevate his own status, and relishing the suffering of others. Growth occurs, though, in these episodes, along with knowledge that life will continue to confound while providing opportunities. The realization, instilled early in the boy, that fulfillment—or happiness—will always be elusive is further explored in the eight offerings in the collection that involve adults in adult situations.

The adult stories—indeed the collection as a whole—utilize the time-honored journey motif. Two of the tales involve a free-spirited couple who travel down the west coast from Alaska to Tulum, Mexico, financing the trip with money saved from a summer spent working in a salmon processing plant in Alaska. Cleverly, they sew their cash savings inside secret pockets within their backpacks. Their “tentative, one-sided love,” as well as their plans to winter in tropical Tulum, are upended by what happens after they rent a “cabana,” really little more than a thatched-roof bamboo hut, the security of which proves to be woefully inadequate. Their journey interrupted, alternate routes will be necessary.

“Nothing Has to Happen,” features a middle-aged would-be writer seeking inspiration along with relief from a troubled marriage and the detritus of his mind. On his trip from New Mexico to Virginia for a writers’ workshop, he envisions peaceful evenings spent at campsites along the interstate, sipping beer by the fire and relaxing under the stars. He hopes that tranquility and introspection will provide the clarity and perspective needed in order to produce some writing worth sharing. The events that transpire, while not providing tranquility, do show him how quickly lives and plans can be altered through one simple act or slip of the tongue. Now, at least, he has something to write about.  

“The Embers” presents not a physical journey but one through time in the form of a monologue from an OB-GYN doctor addressing his former pastor, who “had the air of a counselor to whom much had been entrusted.” The monologue chronicles deep connections over many years between the doctor’s family and the pastor’s. The doctor’s violation of his own moral code not once but three times through his admiration for the pastor becomes the connecting thread through this painful trip. In the story’s present, years after the recounted pertinent events, the pastor’s health and memory are in decline. The time for reparation or apology has passed, but the doctor, by revisiting painful memories, has released some of his burden and gained understanding of how their shared journey brought him to where he is now.

The adults in this collection are travel weary, whether their journeys have been physical, emotional, or both, scarred by their struggles along the road of life. While these tales encompass disappointment with spouses, romantic partners, friends, family members, respected counselors, and life in general, they are permeated with the fragrance of love, perseverance, and faith. The stories about the boy mirror these same qualities as the youngster tries to reconcile what he can’t understand or fix in the present with what he hopes for in the future. Like all trips worth taking, Anything You Recognize presents challenges, but spending time in the worlds Mueller creates is ultimately heartening, providing joy gained from an appreciation of characters we recognize as being very much like ourselves and those we encounter during our individual life journeys.  The collection will be officially released on September 19, 2023 through Outpost19 Books and is available now for pre-order on the publisher’s website and on Amazon.

Author Daniel Mueller with his daughter Lili, hiking in New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains

RY: Many of the stories in your latest collection, Anything You Recognize, feel autobiographical. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you what is or isn’t, but rather if you could offer advice to writers who would like to incorporate actual events and characters into their stories but struggle with how to do so. For example, how do we include characters based on family members or close friends, especially if we’re using their foibles or flaws as part of the narrative, without jeopardizing friendships and causing rifts within the family? Also, how much of our own flaws and embarrassments should we be willing to expose in order to bring authenticity and emotional resonance to the tale? In your own writing where do you draw the line?

DM: That’s a great question.  Nearly every story I’ve ever written stemmed from something that happened to me in real life, but, you’re right, this collection is more overtly autobiographical than my previous two.  Indeed, all but one of the early childhood stories, of which there are seven in the book, were published first in literary magazines as creative nonfiction.  For me, the experience of writing fiction and creative nonfiction aren’t all that different from each other; like most writers, I’m always only ever trying to wring the best story I can from material that has in some way captivated me.  In fiction, the question for me is, what’s the most interesting thing that could’ve happened but didn’t.  In creative nonfiction, the question is, what’s the most interesting  way of presenting the thing that did.  In truth, whether I’m calling what I’m writing fiction or creative nonfiction, I don’t worry about whether actual people who see likenesses of themselves in the work will be happy or not.  I know this probably sounds awful of me, but for as long as I’ve been writing I’ve privileged the story itself above all other factors, believing that if it succeeds, those who in some way figured in it won’t mind how they’re portrayed.  And, I also believe, for a story to succeed at all, love must serve as a binding agent, and maybe even more so in dark stories.  This said, my sister didn’t talk to me for a year after she read a short story in which her wedding figured as the central action.  She’d asked me not to use her wedding, during which the best man died in a drowning accident under suspicious circumstances, but I was there, too, and so the experience was also mine, and the protagonist of that story, loosely based on me and what I was going through at that time, supplied the story’s meaning, at least for me.  It’s difficult, I think, to see ourselves clearly in the here and now, and when we put ourselves in stories, hopefully warts and all, it’s almost always a past self that finds representation.  In the stories from early childhood mentioned earlier, the fifty + years of temporal distance made it easier to be honest about my own flaws and the cringy things I thought and did, but I also think that readers, whether they know it or not, turn to literature for a degree of honesty and intimacy that’s hard to come by in our day-to-day interactions, and that’s what I try to give readers. 

RY: As I was reading these stories, a notion—somewhat foggy as it originated from my sophomore survey courses—took root: that the classic journey motif presents itself throughout this astonishing collection. Most of the stories involve a physical journey. The few that are confined to a single place still imply a journey, albeit emotional or spiritual in nature. This concept seems especially applicable to the ones that feature the young boy, Travis, as the protagonist. Without stretching it too far, these tales combined could qualify as a classic hero’s journey as the youngster struggles against a variety of obstacles, most of which are peculiar to the individual locales he moves through with his family. In Greeley there’s an older boy whose physical development far exceeds Travis’s and his best friend’s, resulting in “smarting palms left by his fastballs, the stinging nipples left by his spirals, the grass-stained abrasions left by his guillotine chokes and Indian deathlocks.” There is also the internal struggle caused by being uprooted and having to move away from his friend David, whom he ultimately betrays by leaving him alone in a compromising situation and at the mercy of Jerry, the sadistic stronger boy. In San Antonio he grapples with trashy, borderline abusive grandparents along with confusing adult language and why his parents don’t seem happy. In the last of the Travis stories, we find our hero in yet another new community, approaching adolescence, grappling with self-image problems and his need for love. Throughout his years-long journey the boy is growing and changing, discovering truths about himself, society, and human nature. Could you shed light on the journey motif concept, whether or not it applies here, and how it did or didn’t figure in the construction of the stories and the collection as a whole?

DM: A point of pride for me is the interconnectedness of the Travis stories that lends an arc to the new collection that my previous collections lacked.  I didn’t set out, however, to render a hero’s journey.  After my father passed away in 2012, I went through a hard patch emotionally, psychologically, and a year later I started seeing a therapist to address the question of why I felt such paralyzing guilt.  She asked me to share a few memories from my early childhood to try to identify the origin of a debilitating self-image I had carried within me for as long as I could remember, and she was surprised when I couldn’t remember much before sixth grade.  For eight weekly sessions, she asked me to try to remember specifics from my life when I was much younger, five, six, seven, and eight, but I couldn’t, try as I might.  But about a year later, I had a memory from the years when my mother, father, and baby sister lived in Greeley, Colorado, my father fresh out of medical school.  You might remember it from “An Incision in the Reeds.”  The kid tries to sic the family’s boxer Duchess on a grieving mother walking past his house on her way back from a funeral for a son killed in the Vietnam War.  I wrote that vignette, and then the strangest thing happened.  Another memory came to me, the one in “Cache la Poudre” about incinerating the paper trash and the slingshot Travis and his friend David pool their allowances together to buy at the Rexall Drug.  Long story short, I spent the better part of two years giving narrative form to these little memories that seemed to pop into my head one after another, like saplings connected at the roots.  In 2016, University of New Mexico awarded me a sabbatical, and I spent the year organizing the fifty or so vignettes I’d written into stories I then submitted to literary journals as creative nonfiction essays.  The other stories in the book were written before or after the Travis stories, and as I was organizing the pieces into the manuscript you read, I was pleased by the coherence achieved inadvertently by alternating between the Travis stories and the other ones.  Ultimately, I hope that discerning readers will see the book as a portrait of the artist as a very young boy and a nod to one of the writers I admire more than any other, James Joyce, which is probably wishful thinking on my part. 

RY: The prose in this collection is rich with artfully constructed sentences brimming with details presented through, at times, complex grammatical constructions. Writing of this caliber stands in striking contrast to the minimalist styles of contemporary authors such as Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Hempel, Brett Easton Ellis, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Are you intentionally bucking a trend with your long, luxurious sentences that adhere to the standards of formal usage? My suspicion is you grew up in a household where your parents were sticklers for correct grammar. Are you disappointed by current language trends that depart from  traditional conventions regarding who/whom, lie/lay, split infinitives, and ending sentences with prepositions? Do you have other grammar-related pet peeves? In drafting your stories how much consideration do you typically give to sentence structure and why does it matter?

DM: Thank you, Ron, for complimenting my style, which has been hard-won.  If I could be a minimalist like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Denis Johnson, I would.  By the same token, if I could be a maximalist like William Faulkner, John Cheever, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Stanley Elkin, I would.  At points in my life, I have tried to be both.  My writing style, however, lies somewhere between these two extremes, and I spend hours drafting and redrafting stories on the sentence level to get them to sound like me and, I hope, no one else.  There’s also narrative strategy involved in complex sentence structures.  A complex sentence demands focus, and if you can elicit a high level of attentiveness from readers, they’ve likely suspended their disbelief in the effort, and the language alone can carry them to strange, often surprising, more nuanced states of consciousness.  Ultimately, I want my sentences to sharpen vision, to improve the reader’s capacity to see. 

RY: There’s a beautiful paragraph early in “Antivenom” that describes Travis’s maternal grandmother Izzy and her second husband Leo. A textured portrait is presented, in a little over one hundred words, that highlights the couple’s overall tackiness as well as their lifestyle and how others might view them. This is accomplished not just through physical details but also by incorporating phrases such as “in cahoots” and Travis’s dad’s snide summation of them as “a real pair.” Colors also are deftly used with descriptions of photos of the couple in their natural surroundings: “. . . on the front steps between blazing pink azalea bushes in concrete urns . . . she pumpkin-shaped and ethereal, he leather-skinned, silver-buckled, and gritty.” This passage is but one of many throughout the book that do the heavy work of placing three-dimensional people into authentic worlds. Developing characters this way with nuanced bits of information coming from different angles must require, along with imagination, a keen eye for details, robust memory, and cleverly pointed research. Please share something of the process(es) you use to create these memorable portraits.

DM: Every writer comes to their subject matter with certain strengths and weaknesses.  I’ve always loved describing things that I can see in my mind’s eye and giving them substance, and when I’m writing and revising (which for me are synonymous), I’m striving for greater and greater exactitude.  It’s fun because I’m good at it, or I’ve gotten good at it.  I struggle with dialogue, however, with capturing how characters express themselves in speech, and while rendering talk isn’t as fun for me as description, I’m dogged in my commitment to getting it as right, or close to right, as I can.  If I’ve improved as a writer of dialogue, it’s from studying writers who excel at it.  Antoine Wilson is a writer whose dialogue I loved when we were classmates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1998.  Now when I read his work—his latest novel, Mouth to Mouth, is superb—I pay special attention to how his characters speak, how they differentiate themselves by how they speak, and pray his ear for dialogue will rub off on me.  Because I want my stories to be driven by the characters in them, I utilize as many modes of narration as I can, those I’m adept at as well as those I’m clumsier with, to give them the dimensionality of actual people.  Great writers are masters of multiple modes of narration, and characterization occurs not only by how the characters interact with one another dramatically, but by how they’re apprehended and remembered by other characters.  Izzy and Leo were real characters in real life, and I wanted readers to remember them as I still do, as larger than life when seen through the eyes of a six-year-old boy who has somehow become the sixty-two-year-old narrator. 

RY: The natural world figures prominently in several of the stories. In “Nothing Has To Happen” the narrator sets up his tent “in a site shaded by caddo maples and the narrow canyon walls, [where] in the receding daylight the yellow green leaves popped against the orange cliffs.” In “Ground School” a father and daughter negotiate a hiking trail that comprises “a 30-foot sheer rock wall; a grade punishing to the ankles, knees, and hips; a meadow of corn lilies . . . in which for a quarter mile the trail vanished and on each toxic, greenish blossom a hornet rested like the black iridescent knob of a scepter. . . .” These and other passages that also present the outside world as vibrating with life and portent must have been influenced by your own experiences. What role does spending time with nature play in your creative life? I’m sure you are often able to utilize details directly from memory of places you’ve visited, but how does research, when memory isn’t enough, also play a role in constructing these scenes?

DM: I rely predominately on memory for the imagery meant to evoke the natural world, which existed before any of us were born and will exist after all of us are dead.  The natural world is always a force in stories, even those set indoors, because its emblematic of vertical time against which the horizontal time of a story generates tension and elicits sympathy.  As powerful as what happens in a story, the natural world reminds us that the story we are reading is transitory and impermanent, however strong the impression left by the story in memory.  For this reason, I’m always looking for ways to bring the natural world into stories, even when I can’t entirely justify it artistically.  I just have a feeling that the natural world, i.e., the moon as seen through a neighbor’s telescope in “The Way They Do in Movies” or the jungle surrounding the German nudist camp in “Anything You Recognize,” will provide the contrast necessary for emotional resonance and meaning.  I rarely research places where stories are set because I tend to use places that have left strong impressions on me.  Indeed, one of the things I love about writing stories lies in resurrecting places and reimbuing them with the life I remember them having and, in the process, feeling young again, as if no time has passed since then at all.

RY: Thanks Dan for sharing insight into your new book and a bit of yourself! Anything You Recognize will be officially released on September 19. Pre-order now on the publisher’s website: https://outpost19.com/AnythingYouRecognize