Ed Park on An Oral History of Atlantis

Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his debut short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis. Park talks about writing the stories in the book over a period of about 25 years, during which he was frequently asked to read in New York and crafted work for specific venues, audiences, and events. He explains how this led to a wide-ranging and ultimately linked set of pieces in a variety of first-person voices. He considers why the short story form invites him to a greater degree of experimentation, to lean more heavily on humor, and to draft more quickly even as he took longer to assemble the whole volume. Park reads from “The Gift,” one of the stories in the collection.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Ed Park

An Oral History of Atlantis • Same Bed Different Dreams • Personal Days • Weird Menace

Others:

Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 17: Ed Park on Korea’s Past, Real and Imagined • The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño • Seven Men by Max Beerbohm

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATIONWITH ED PARK

Ed Park: This book is relatively slim compared to Same Bed, but it actually took much longer. This represents about 25 years of stories by me. I’d always wanted to publish a collection of stories, but like many fiction writers, I’m always at work on a novel. When I’m a writer, I’m sitting down at my desk every morning for an hour to three hours, often pounding my head against the wall. It’s a cliche. But you do it enough times, and then you suddenly realize, oh, this is how the novel is supposed to go. You have these eureka moments, and you just keep doing that for day after day, week after week, then year, year after year. But

Whitney Terrell: That is true. Definitely recognize that as a process.

EP: It’s a long term, long distance kind of thing, right? I’ve been doing this since I was in my early 20s. I’ve never been without a kind of a novel project in mind. It doesn’t mean they all got published, doesn’t mean they all got finished, but that’s what I think of as the work. And then there are the short stories, which are almost like little miracles. They just come unbidden. A lot of the stories in this collection were written in a single sitting, a couple of the more well-known or popular ones, to the extent that that can be said, were written in about an hour. Obviously, as a fiction writer, you can do both things, and you’re using a lot of the same muscles and skills, but the way you go about them is so different.

For example, you mentioned “The Wife on Ambien.” Half the battle is having that title come to me, and then I think, I must have heard of how people—I actually have never taken Ambien, but people take Ambien and they wind up doing stuff they don’t remember the next morning, right? They’re either sleepwalking or they’re cooking up a lot of food for nobody, you know, just all this kind of crazy stuff. There are YouTube videos to this effect. But I took that concept, and when I had the title, I realized it’s going to be the husband describing his wife on Ambien and the things she does. It would be one after another, trying to make each observation of some activity she’s doing under the influence funnier than the last one, and then sadder. It’s a very short story, but the logic of the whole thing was embedded in the title somehow. A lot of the stories were like that.

WT: It’s a story about him being lonely, really. It seemed like to me, particularly the ending. Can you have spoilers in short stories? Can we say how the story ends or not? Maybe we should save that for other people.

EP: I don’t really consider that a spoiler. But I’d like to think that a lot of the stories are quite funny. One thing I do more in stories is just go for the joke, try to be funny. Or rather, I have an idea that I think is funny, and I can figure out how to put it down on the page, and just get that out there. There’s something about the stories—a story seems lower stakes. I have plenty of abandoned stories or title ideas that didn’t go anywhere. But you’re not committed as much. If you have a novel idea that you’re developing, it’s going to take a while, right? With a story, you could be done by the end of the day or end of the week. I think that’s very liberating. It makes me try things that, if I did it in a novel, I’d have to think how does it affect all these other characters and blah, blah, blah. It’s very freeing to do it in a story.

These stories were written the earliest. The very first story in the collection is called “A Note To My Translator.” I actually wrote that in 1997 and I published it in ’98. The next oldest story is the title story—which we can talk about more in a bit—which was 2001 and the and the most recent one that I finished was, was “Machine City,” which I believe was published in 2023, or 2024, so it’s quite a span of time. These are not all the stories that I wrote during that span. There’s actually probably a whole other collection worth of stories that I took out, but I felt like stories were on the same wavelength. And I’m attempting different things, obviously, from story to story. But one thing that I thought was cool was how, when bringing them together, I would realize, oh, wait, this character here, I named her Hannah, and in another story written like a few years later, there’s a Hannah Hahn. Her name is Hannah Hahn, this very austere literary editor. I’m like, what if they were actually the same character? I wasn’t consciously, as I wrote each story, trying to link them, but looking over them, I realized there were all these connections that I thought were a lot of fun, that the reader will hopefully pick up on.

But the reader can also read stories at random and enjoy them in their own right, without necessarily looking for those connections. So it’s weird, it’s not quite a novel in stories, it’s interesting to me as a linked collection, where I feel like the sum is greater than the parts.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s interesting to think about the comparison between novel writing that you just made, where when you change something, or when something happens, you have that eureka moment but then realize it’s going to affect the next 15 chapters, and you’ve got to go through all of them. I actually really like revising, but here, discovering connections, rather than being limited by them, feels like an exciting way to approach the work. Then some of the connections also are actually little jokes, like in “A Note To My Translator,” there’s a particular part of that which recurs later. That’s a recognition that is very satisfying and also very humorous later on. There’s a puzzle-making for the reader that’s really great.

And of course, you mentioned the title story. There’s a form of title that’s like, the “A History of Blah,” or “The Book of Blah,” or “An Atlas X,” etc. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen “An Oral History” in a title. Lots of people might associate oral history with teaching or preserving history. As we talked about in our last episode, you have a really different approach to history but oral history is something that you might connect to a collection of voices or different versions of the same story, like variations on a theme which is connected to the form. This book is so playful. A lot of people I can think of might think of oral history as a didactic form or one that is really concerned with elucidating fact or history, but you’re interrogating the relationship between audience and teller. There’s a character named Ed, recurring references to writing and its significance, there’s that character named Miriam who majors in oral history at Brown. What does this play have to do with the idea of oral history? What does oral history mean to you, and what does it do in the context of the book?

EP: It’s a great question, and I will say that I had this title. I mentioned earlier, this is the second-oldest story in the collection. I wrote it in 2001 and I wrote it for a reading for a literary journal that’s no longer around, at a venue in Brooklyn that’s no longer around. I wrote it in the summer of 2001 and it’s about a post-apocalyptic Manhattan. The narrator is going through this depopulated Manhattan and discovering this aquatic, whale-related entertainment district where Times Square is. It’s slightly surreal, maybe a little bit steampunk. I wrote it for this reading, and it got a great response. I had recently finished a novel that nobody liked. Not only did editors not want to see it, agents didn’t want to see it. There was something about writing that story, writing it for reading and performing it, that really just felt validating to me. It made me believe in myself. Then, a couple months later, 9/11 happened, and the title took on new meaning. The scenario freaked me out, the scenario that I had written of Manhattan being destroyed. From that point on, I had in mind that if I ever published a story collection that would be the title, “An Oral History of Atlantis.”

Most of the stories in this book were actually written for readings. A friend or a reading series might invite me to be on the bill with two or three other writers, or all different kinds of scenarios and all different sorts of venues. This happened, 2001, 2002, it just happened all throughout my life in New York. I think all of these were written for readings in New York. So, Atlantis becomes a metaphor for New York, as well as things that are lost, for a New York that’s lost, for venues and journals and friends who are who are gone.

And almost all these stories are done in the first person, right? So it is like this, “I” that I’m bringing to each event. Sometimes the audience might know me, my friends might be there. Sometimes, I’m just assuming people don’t know who I am. That, in a way, shaped these stories tremendously, because I was trying to get people’s attention and be as entertaining as possible, which often, we talked about humor a little bit. I found that at a reading, it’s easiest to gage if people are getting into it if there’s laughter, right? So I leaned heavily on that. But then, you know, over the years, it just becomes like an oral history in which every subject is me, my multiple personalities, my multiple fictional personalities, ranting at these unsuspecting audiences. I was so busy working usually, I worked as an editor for a long time, and an opportunity to give a reading for me was a command to write something new and it was good. Maybe the deadline mentality of being a journalist and being an editor made me think, “Okay, I’m supposed to read in two weeks. Let’s see what I can come up with.” There’s a little bit of pressure, but it’s a good kind of pressure, it’s a generative kind of pressure, at least for me. That’s how it came together and why it has the title that it has.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Ed Park by Beowulf Sheehan.