John Reimringer

An interview with The Aroostook Review's Editor-in-Chief

Geraldine Cannon Becker

John Reimringer’s first novel, Vestments, was named one of the “Best Books of 2010” by Publishers Weekly and won the 2011 Minnesota Book Award for the Novel and Short Story. A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week/Starred Review, and an Indie Next and Midwest Connections pick, Vestments was the Milkweed Editions 2010 Editor’s Circle Selection and has been featured on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show.

An excerpt, “Betty García,” appears in the Milkweed anthology Fiction on a Stick: Stories by Writers from Minnesota. Reimringer has published stories in Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Louisiana Literature, and Gulf Stream Magazine. The recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships and a residency at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, he has been a Susannah McCorkle Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Loft-McKnight Fellow.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, and raised in Topeka, Kansas, 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 at the Parsons Sun and Hutchinson News; as a youth hostel night porter in Edinburgh, Scotland; for the University of Iowa Library and Law Library; in the University of Kansas public relations office; and as a college English instructor in Minnesota. He teaches at Normandale Community College and lives in Saint Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood with his wife, the poet Katrina Vandenberg.

When he moved to Saint Paul in 2001, Reimringer became the fifth generation of his father’s family to live here: his great-great grandfather became a U.S. citizen in Saint Paul in 1856, two years after the city was founded, and ran a saloon and grocery store downtown; his great-grandfather was married in Assumption Church in 1880 and died in a drunken tumble from a sleigh at the second-ever Saint Paul Winter Carnival in 1887. His grandfather, father, and brother were born here.

The Interview

Q. When did you know you wanted to be a writer or when did you begin writing?

A. I think around ten. I wrote imitations of what I was reading: bad science fiction, bad adolescent sports novels. In college, I majored in journalism because it seemed a practical sort of writing. My adult life as a writer probably began when I read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls while working at a youth hostel in Scotland. I’d left journalism by then, was traveling around Europe with a backpack. Obviously I was looking for something. Still, I went back to the U.S. and worked for five years as a library clerk before going to grad school for my MFA. I kept circling books and writing—newspaper work, library work—before I took the plunge to try becoming a writer.

Q. Who were your main influences?

A. I started with Hemingway. In grad school, we read people like Cheever, and Flannery O’Connor and John McGahern. All great short story writers. The first Christmas I was dating my wife, the poet Katrina Vandenberg, she gave me Andre Dubus’s selected stories, and he became a big influence, too. I think it’s interesting that all of my favorite writers are strongest in the short story. It’s an elegant form, and indispensible in learning how to write. So many students want to go directly to the novel these days, which is a shame.

Q. Would you talk about writing Vestments?

A. It started as a short story about a father-son conflict between a violent, alcoholic father and a tough son who has a spiritual side. In the original story, the son was a Catholic seminarian, but when I decided to turn the story into a novel, I changed him into a priest because you always want to raise the stakes in your writing, and a priest has more at stake than a seminary student.

And at that point, I thought, “What have I gotten myself into?” Because writing a book about a priest is a pretty significant commitment to describing a way of life that most of us have a hard time imagining. So I read a lot about priests, a lot of studies of priests, a lot of books in which priests described their lives in their own words. I’d grown up Catholic, and my parents had priests and nuns as friends, so I had a sense of priests as three-dimensional people who had their own interests and strengths and failings, and everything I read confirmed that. Later, when I had a full manuscript, I ran it by a couple of priests for accuracy. They both liked it, and besides a couple of minor corrections, both said it really got at the heart of what being a priest is. Which I consider something of a miracle, never having been one. When the second priest was finished reading it, I went to his office to talk, and the first thing he did was to ask if I were an ex-priest.

The other big factor in writing the book was moving to Saint Paul. I’d never lived here, but my father and his family were from Saint Paul going back to 1857, when my great-great grandfather became a U.S. citizen here. Katrina and I moved here in 2001 because we wanted to live in a city that had a good literary scene. My father had just died, and maybe it was missing him, but when we got to Saint Paul I fell head-over-heels in love with the city. I felt like I’d returned to my ancestral home. I’d been kicking around the original short story of Vestments trying to turn it into a novel for several years at that point, but when we moved here and I changed the setting to Saint Paul, all of a sudden the book had a sense of place and purpose that it hadn’t had before.

Q. How important is a sense of place to your work?

A. It’s essential. I can’t imagine writing a story or a novel that wasn’t set in some particular place. That generic suburban, strip-mall wasteland that America has supposedly become doesn’t exist for me. America is cities, countries, small towns, regions. I mean, look at Maine. I’ve only been as far north as Portland, but I can’t understand half of what people are saying. And when I first went to Arkansas for grad school, which isn’t that far into the American South, I had a hard time understanding that accent as well. Even if I were to write a story set in a suburban strip mall, it would be in a suburb attached to a particular city, in a definite part of the country. Saint Paul and the weather and landscape of Minnesota are practically another character in Vestments.

Q. I noticed that about Vestments. It is interesting, though, how a place you are not familiar with can grow on you if you stay there long enough, or if you make connections. Small towns have similarities whether they are in Arkansas, Maine or South Carolina (where I grew up). What about publishing the book, doing a book tour and doing readings, and even sitting in on classes? All of this will certainly interest our readers.

A. I guess the biggest thing you learn about all of these things is that writing is a business as well as an art. You have to be businesslike about sitting down to write every day if you’re going to finish a book. You have to learn something about the business of publishing—how to get and work with agents, what the market for your type of writing is and what the good presses are, how to work with your editor. The cover design of your book is business. Even the supposedly glamorous stuff, the book tour and readings, is business. You’re essentially hand-selling your book on a tour, and even if there are only two people at a reading (which happens a lot), you’re reading to the bookstore owner or manager, because if they like you and like your reading and like your book, they’re going to hand-sell it to people who come into their store for months. And then they’re going to wait for your next book. And you have to write that, and keep building the audience you started with your first book. Being a successful writer isn’t just sitting around waiting for inspiration, then being whisked off to fame on the covers of your book. It’s hard work from beginning to end.

Q. What are you reading now?

A. Just finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Big novel of Henry VIII, told through the point of view of his counselor, and some would say chief henchman, Thomas Cromwell. Writing from the point of view of a historical figure who lived 500 years ago takes incredible brains and ambition. I’m in awe.

Q. What about the research you have been doing for the new project you are working on?

A.I’m toying with a novel set in Saint Paul in the 1920s, when the city was an open city for gangsters. A historical novel is an incredible amount of work. You literally can’t write a sentence without wondering whether it’s accurate to the period. If you want to have a character curse someone, how did they curse someone in the 1920s? If you want to have a character turn on a light, you have to find out when the switch from gas to electric lighting took place. Where was the one phone kept in a house, and what classes of people would have a phone in the 1920s? And on and on. The internet, of course, makes much of this easier, but I’m still slowly collecting a library of necessary reference materials.

Q. Do you have routines you follow?

A. Well, yes and no. Early on in a writing project, I like to get up and write early in the morning, before any of the day’s distractions have seeped into my head. Further into a piece of work, I can write at any time. It’s important to have routines that you can count on to prompt you to write, but it’s also important not to become too dependent on them, or they can become excuses not to write. “Oops, I didn’t get up early this morning; I can’t write today.”

Q. What advice would you give young writers?

A. Write a little every day. Preferably first thing. You’ll be surprised at how much work your subconscious can do on a piece of writing while you’re doing other things, but you have to feed it every morning.

Q. I really like to have the writer give us insight into their lives, as well, so do you have anything you want to talk about in particular?

A. You know, Vestments has been pretty successful, but the interesting thing you learn from that is that publishing a book and even getting good reviews and sales doesn’t change your life. You still have to wake up and face your own faults and shortcomings. The lawn still needs to be mowed. The dripping faucet needs to be fixed. And you’ve still got to write the next novel.

Q. Our theme for this issue is "Traditions." Do you have traditions you might discuss as a writer--any rituals, for example?

A. The tradition Katrina and I swear by is this: we each keep a calendar on the wall of our office. For each hour we write in a day, we get one star on our calendar. We use the kind of stars you got in grade school for being good, the little foil ones that come in five colors that you can get at an office supply store. It’s all about accountability and putting in the hours. Doing the work.

I would post a gold star for you today! Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to respond to these questions.

Readers, you may access other interviews and find out more about this author at his website: www.johnreimringer.com.