Courtesy of the Author

Daniel Griffin is reading from his recently released short story collection Stopping for Strangers at the Robson Reading Series on Thursday, February 17 at 7pm. The Ubyssey sat down with the UBC grad to find out more about his work.

The Ubyssey: Tell me about the stories in Stopping for Strangers. How do they fit together thematically as a collection?

Daniel Griffin: I wrote the stories in Stopping for Strangers over the past ten years or so. For about six of those years, I was taking my sweet time doing an MFA at UBC. I’d say about half the stories in the book were workshopped in UBC’s optional residency program.

A lot of the stories are about family—fathers, brothers, husbands and wives, etc. In fact at one point I thought of having the book in sections–one group of stories about fathers, one about brothers, but ultimately I think the stories are about much more than that and grouping them in that way was somehow false. They’re also stories about people struggling to connect with the people around them, struggling to do the right thing in difficult circumstances, essentially dealing with the challenges of living that we all face every day. They’re simple stories simply written and I like to think they get to the heart of what it means to be human.

U: On your website, David Bergen compares you to Raymond Carver. Do you think your writing is similar? What is your relationship to Carver’s work?

DG: I’m flattered by the comparison for sure. Carver was really an influence when I first started writing, but as I grew there were many other influences too. I’m a big believer in influence. When I wrote “Mercedes Buyers Guide,” I was trying to write an Ann Beattie story. I’d read “Distortions” and was blown away and I had her voice in my mind as I sat down at my desk one Saturday morning.

What David said about the book I think was mostly comparing the voice, but I also think there’s similarities in the kind of stories we write. I call what I do domestic realism and I certainly think both he and I were often looking at family life from the male perspective—and in family life, I’m including the husband and wife relationship too.

I feel strange supposing I can speak for Raymond Carver, but I think I’ve got it right here.

U: You’ve been published in a number of the country’s biggest and most successful literary journals. How do you think that shaped your career and this book?

DG: Writers need to start somewhere, they need encouragement and small victories, they need to have an audience, however small, and that’s what literary magazines provide. I can’t imagine the literary landscape without them. But these magazines also need writers to support them. I always tell my students that they need to support the literary journals by subscribing—plus there’s no better way to know what markets are out there for your work than by subscribing to a couple of journals.

I very much owe my start to these magazines. I met Andrew Steinmetz, who’s the editor of Vehicule [Press]‘s fiction imprint, at the Writers’ Trust Awards when a story of mine was a finalist for the Journey Prize. The story was originally published in The Dalhousie Review. Without The Dalhousie Review, this book might never have found its way to Vehicule.

It’s certainly special to have so many literary magazines across the country, and I think it’s fair to say that this is the place where you can spot the next generation of Can lit emerging. It’s the minor leagues. Any professional league needs a minor league to nurture the next generation.

U: What advice do you have for emerging writers?

DG: In every course I teach, at some point I always take five minutes to tell everyone the four simple steps to becoming a great writer. Write every day, read every day, work at improving your craft [by studying] writing as a science as well as an art so you can learn how to tell stories better, and then finally you need to find your voice. Finding a voice is not something easily taught or found; it’s that unique outlook on the world that makes your writing unique.

Of course, having listed off the four simple steps to being a great writer, it turns out they’re not so simple. Oddly, writing lots and reading lots is the easiest of them, and yet it’s rare among aspiring writers. In these writing classes—which are usually for people who are just starting out as writers—at the start of every class, I ask who wrote every day this week. No one ever raises a hand. I ask who wrote half the days and one or two people usually put up a hand. Most of the class write just once or twice in a week.

If you want to be serious about writing, do it every day, good days and bad, when you want to and when you don’t. You need to be at your station, pen in hand. You can’t just expect the muse to strike when you want her to. She comes on her schedule, not on yours.

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