Youthful 35-year-old Eric Puchner, who just published a debut collection of short stories, "Music Through the Floor," said during an interview from his San Francisco home that he "knocked around a bit" after finishing his English degree at Middlebury College.
Among his many jobs was working as a baggage handler at the Salt Lake International Airport. In Portland, Ore., he cared for two severely mentally retarded adults. He worked in construction. He spent some in Mexico.
In the evenings he planned to write but found he was exhausted. Still, unwittingly, he was building some life experiences that would become invaluable in his writing.
He said that for a long time he resisted enrolling in a Master of Fine Arts program but finally ended up doing just that at the University of Arizona.
By good fortune, it was there that he met his wife, Kaathran Noel, also a fiction writer, whose novel, "Halfway House," will soon be published.
Following their marriage, they moved to San Francisco where she worked at a homeless shelter and he taught composition at San Francisco State University and operated a training program to help immigrants.
While Puchner always thought he would someday be a poet, one of his professors at Arizona "delicately" pointed him toward the short story. He is not sorry. He finished "Music Through the Floor" while in his current teaching position at Stanford University.
"I was trying to figure out if I had a collection," Puchner said. "I was dealing with a variety of voices in the book, and the people in New York told me I needed a 'united feel.' I was worried but have been gratified so far by the reviews complimenting me on the variety of stories. A lot of it comes from my own experiences."
The stories "Diablo" and "Mission" are based on his experiences in the immigration-training program, and "Children of God" emanates from his care-giving situation with two mentally challenged adults. "Whenever I set out to write a new story, I want to do something different. I also like trying a new voice I haven't done before."
Puchner says he has always been obsessed with language. "Even at a young age I wrote some awful poetry. I love writing sentences that snap or crackle in some way. I like to describe the world in a way it hasn't been described before. Imagery and metaphor are useful in capturing the world in ways not previously articulated."
After he received his MFA degree, Puchner thought he had to use literary words, "but they were so anti-antithetical to my personality. I was under a false impression of what literature was supposed to be. Recently, I heard George Saunders, one of my favorite writers, read from his work. He said he improved once he realized he could stop writing like Hemingway. He started using words like 'crap' from the days when he was 14. I had a similar revelation."
Puchner doesn't subscribe to the popular claim of some critics that the short story is dying. Some of the writers who have influenced Puchner are Allyson Rose ("I worship her"), Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter, Donald Bartheleme and John Cheever. "Cheever is sort of sleight-of-hand, even though he deals with painful subject matter. Many of the most exciting writers I see are doing the short story."
"Essay #3" in his collection was inspired by Puchner's years of teaching composition at San Francisco State. "The language was so tortured and unintentionally funny. Those who taught composition would find funny malapropisms the students used. But sometimes, the language would be poetic and beautiful.
"Students would come to me during office hours and immediately burst into tears — ostensibly about getting a C — but it was really about the emotional pain in their lives. So I wanted to write a story in a comic mode that becomes serious."
Puchner is writing a novel he has already sold to Scribner's, but he remains committed to the short story. "It's like a comfortable room where I know where all the furniture is, while the novel is like going into a strange house. But I do like returning to the same characters every day."
While writing the novel, Puchner took a break and wrote "Animals Here Below," a short story he slipped into the "Music Through the Floor" collection at the absolute deadline before the book went to press.
Despite the success of his collection, Puchner said he is "filled with self-doubt. It hasn't gone to my head — if anything, it has raised the bar and made me want to try even harder. It's a very strange feeling. Having the book out there is like being 'workshopped' naked before the whole world."
Although Puchner uses a comic line in his writing, he understands "the fine line between comedy and ridicule. I'm not interested in ridicule. If the readers don't sympathize with the characters, it won't have an emotional impact on them. But I don't like to skirt issues either. My wife is my first reader, and so far she has never said I have gone over the line. Maybe I have an internal mechanism protecting me."
Puchner alleged that he would be "crazy" if he didn't have "a love/hate relationship with writing. Sometimes it's hell. The only way is to sit down every day and wait. Sometimes you have to force it, and sometimes it just pours out of you. In the essay 'Neon Tetra' it just poured out of me."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com