Grant Catton graduated many moons ago. He’s covered concerts, taught courses, and maybe secretly published zombie novels under a pseudonym. After graduating, he’s given back to the program in his own special way: he’s basically our very own Andrew W.K., generously hosting a small handful of MFA bashes at his home right off the edge of campus. Read on further and party hard.
What was your relationship with writing before applying to the MFA program?
I imagine being a writer is like being married or making any long-term commitment to something: you get into it with a only a vague idea of what it’s actually going to be like, then you discover it takes a lot more work than you thought in order to make it succeed. Nor will the results match your expectations. They might be better, sure, but they’re not going to be like you thought.
About six years ago I was working as a reporter in New York and getting fed up with my job. So I saved some money and went to Argentina for a while. The U.S. dollar goes a long way down there. I figured I would spend all day every day writing, come back with a novel, get it published, then just… you know… life would be roses from there on out. I worked on the novel for like eight hours straight the first day. Then two hours the next day. Then the third day I realized “Holy shit, I’m in Argentina. I should go out and do something.” I was pursuing that fantasy every writer must have at one point in their lives: going off the grid and writing all day. But… it just completely did not work for me. That’s also when I realized I was carrying around a lot of childish fantasies about writing and about my life in general, and that it was time to grow up. I came back to the U.S. and decided to get an MFA. It seemed like a way of putting my money where my mouth was, so to speak.
So how did your time with the MFA program change that?
I was lucky to have Dan Barden’s fiction workshop as my very first MFA class. I was the first person to submit my story and, if I remember correctly, he held it up in class the following week and said, “No one in their right mind would read past the first page of this story.” Don’t misunderstand though, it was not insulting in any way; it was meant to be funny and illustrate a point about story structure. And I got the point. He encouraged me to use more conflict and spontaneity in my writing, to let-go of my preconceived intentions and allow interesting things to happen. His ideas and no-bullshit teaching style resonated with me. He also did me the huge favor of telling me it was “okay” that I liked to write genre fiction. I needed someone to tell me that.
Another big event in my MFA career was when Tom Chiarella visited and spoke to the MFA students. His message was for us as young writers to kind of break out of the traditional short story/novel mold and get with the times: embrace social media, start blogging, freelance for magazines and newspapers, write in different forms, have a bit more fun with writing. I took his advice. All of it. Soon after that I started writing for NUVO covering the local music scene and had the time of my life. I realized that I didn’t have to break my head against a wall trying to get a short story published in a lit mag in order to call myself a “writer.” As long as I was writing, producing, I could define what it meant for me at any one time. It’s always changing too!
And your relationship with writing post-MFA is..?
I’m not concentrating on a novel or short stories much anymore. Right now I’m mostly writing and submitting short, web-length humor pieces. I just had one accepted by a website called Splitsider, if I can shamelessly self-promote for a second. I’m writing short scripts for my cousin, who is a film-maker. I’m also trying to turn one of my zombie books into a tele-play, just for fun, and to get my head around the T.V. writing form. Not unrelated, I recently wrote an essay about the film industry and why it basically sucks right now.
During my last semester as an MFA, in spite of everything I’d learned, I was more confused than when I started the program. That’s no joke. I hadn’t gotten into any PhD programs, so my career as a writing grad student was over. I didn’t know what I was going to do after graduation. My thesis novel wasn’t coming together as planned. I was questioning whether or not I had a future as a writer. But that was just a phase, and a very necessary phase. I was there, I felt that feeling, and then moved on and kept writing. I wrote letters, I wrote on my blog, I wrote music reviews, short scripts, whatever. I stopped worrying about it and got busy writing again.
Do you have any habits or superstitions?
This probably qualifies as a bad habit, but… I’m a night owl. I do most of my writing between 9:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. I hear a lot of writers say they wake up at 3:00 a.m. (or whatever), write for a few hours, and then go to work and go about their day. My brain just doesn’t function that way. I’d like to change that, sure. But I’d also like to be more frugal with my money, drink less, eat a diet rich fruits and vegetables, call my mother more often, etc. These are on-going processes. Talk to me in 20 years? Yeah, I’ll probably be the guy waking up at 3:00 a.m. Right now I’m the guy going to sleep at 3:00 a.m.
I don’t drink alcohol when I write. Sure, there have been a few times, whatever. But in general, the two do not mix. Drinking takes the edge off; when I’m writing I need that edge.