John Reimringer has a BS in
journalism from the University of Kansas and an MFA in creative writing from
the University of Arkansas. He has worked for the Santa Fe Railroad; as a
newspaper editor in Kansas; as a youth hostel night porter in Edinburgh,
Scotland; for the University of Iowa Law Library; in the University of Kansas
public relations office; and as a college English instructor in Minnesota. He
lives in Saint Paul with his wife, the poet Katrina Vandenberg. Vestments,
an Indie Next selection for October 2010, is his first novel, and was published
in September by Milkweed
Editions.
On your nightstand now:
Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye. Great novel about Minnesota and Lake Superior--Duluth and the North Shore and ore boats.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Lord of the Rings. I was 10 or so and at an aunt's apartment after her funeral, bored with the adults, and picked up a Ross Macdonald novel with a lot of sex off her bookshelf. An uncle found me with the book and, instead of scolding me, said, "Here's something you might like more" and led me back to the bookshelf and a paperback set of Tolkien. It was a challenging read at that age, but all the more magical for that.
Your
top five authors:
Hemingway, Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, John McGahern, Andre Dubus. All strongest at the short story, and most of them Catholic.
Book you've faked reading:
Ulysses. Twice. But I read once that in Hemingway's copy, which was one where you had to cut the pages open, the only pages cut were Molly Bloom's soliloquy.
Books you're an evangelist for:
The Night Birds by Tom Maltman and Where No Gods Came by Sheila O'Connor. Great Minnesota books by great Minnesota writers: Tom's is about the 1862 Sioux uprising near Mankato; Sheila's is about a Catholic girl trying to deal with a crazy mother in Minneapolis.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Can't think of one. But I did read Moby Dick at age 10 because I'd seen the movie and thought it was an action novel. I'm telling you, that whaler's chapel description takes forever to read when you're 10.
Book that changed your life:
For Whom the Bell Tolls. I picked it up off a communal bookshelf when I was working at a youth hostel in Edinburgh, Scotland, and from the first line--"He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest..."--I was captivated. I wanted to write like that. I'd wanted to be a writer as a kid, but that novel, that moment, reawakened my interest in writing as an adult.
Favorite line from a book:
Lots, but how are you going to beat the last two paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, as originally written:
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
I say "originally written" because current editions of the book inexplicably change "orgastic" to "orgiastic." It's "orgastic" in the first edition. "Orgiastic" reduces Gatsby to his parties; "orgastic" gets at the self-creation that was Gatsby's essence. I'm on a mission from God here.
Best story title:
Andre Dubus, "If They Knew Yvonne."
Favorite song lyric:
Bruce Springsteen, from "Racing in the Streets": "I got a '69 Chevy with a 396/ Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor/ She's waiting tonight down in the parking lot/ Outside the Seven-Eleven store...." I grew up among gearheads in Topeka, Kansas, and that lyric captures car culture perfectly. Rob Sheffield in the Rolling Stone Album Guide calls it Springsteen's best song ever.
Book you've read that almost no one else has:
Joiner by my late professor James Whitehead. Three times. Even the italics.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It's way different from the way I write, and different than my usual taste in reading, but what a glorious book! I'd put it in the ring against anything as the best novel of the 20th century.