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| photo: Molly Kugel Merkner | |
Born in northern Illinois, Christopher Merkner has been studying the peculiarities of contemporary Midwestern living for almost 40 years. His first book, The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (Coffee House, January 2014), studies the corrosive and distortive influences of place and region on language and human perspective.
Merkner earned his MFA at the University of Florida and his Ph.D. at the University of Denver. The best thing to come from both programs: his wife and children. He is also grateful to these programs for their help in finding homes for his writing: Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, Fairy Tale Review, Laurel Review, New South, the Collagist and others. Merkner is co-director of the creative writing program at West Chester University. He and his wife and children live just outside of Philadelphia, Pa.
On your nightstand now:
Right now, on the top of the stack, I have Matt Bell's How They Were Found, Tara Masih's The Chalk Circle, David Leavitt's The Two Hotel Francforts, Roxanne Gay's Ayiti and George Saunders's Tenth of December.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I know this isn't very fun, but I sincerely have very few specific memories of my childhood, so I consider my 20s my childhood: as such, Raymond Carver's stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love were the first stories that woke me up, and I would say Donald Barthelme's Forty Stories counseled me most on my professional goals and professional life planning.
Your top five authors:
I'm drawn to authors who are as committed to literatures of justice as they are to literatures of form and language. There are many of these, obviously, but the five that I've been reading most recently are W.G. Sebald, Karen Tei Yamashita, Meg Pokrass, Anne Carson and Tara Masih.
Book you've faked reading:
I think I fake reading everything I've read. I'm not being coy, cute or difficult. No sooner do I finish a book than I realize I haven't really read it. I can't think of a book that hasn't left me feeling this way.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Patrik Ouredník's Europeana.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't know if I've ever had the money for this, but I think--and this is weird--I am pretty sure I bought Ben Fountain's Brief Encounters with Che Guevara because I liked the title and the birds on the cover. Or maybe I bought it because I liked the title only. I don't remember, but this is the one time I remember actually purchasing a book on impulse.
Book that changed your life:
I read Ann Charters's The Story and Its Writer--an anthology--with an amazing class of my undergraduate peers at St. Olaf College in the winter of 1996. This changed my life, and it convinced me of the ethical force of literature and that books--like just about everything else--are best read in collaboration, in community, with a driven consciousness of a common good.
Favorite line from a book:
"We gave the baby some of our wine, red, whites and blue, and spoke seriously to her." This is from Barthelme's "The Baby." It's a perfect fiction line: it's funny and it's sad, it's inscrutable yet honest, and it's working hard while seeming to not work hard at all.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Michael Ondaatje's Collected Works of Billy the Kid and his Coming Through Slaughter. I wasn't ready for them when I first read them, and I would really like another crack.