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The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and Festival celebrates an outstanding debut novel published in the preceding calendar year. This year’s10th anniversary will be marked with two days of celebration including a Q & A with this year’s winner, David Gordon (The Serialist), as well as with his agent and editor; the event will also include panel discussions with past winners Victor Lodato (Mathilda Savitch), Michael Byers (Long for This World), Maribeth Fischer (The Language of Good-bye) and NPR book critic and author Alan Cheuse.
The festival, which will take place Nov. 15-16, will include an evening with this year’s winner, David Gordon. The festival is free and open to the public. The evening readings will take place in the VCU Student Commons, 907 Floyd Ave. To find out more about the festival and events, please visit the website: http://novelist.library.vcu.edu/winners.html
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Q & A with author David Gordon
2011 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Winner, David Gordon, discusses how personal experience as both a reader and a writer influenced his novel, The Serialist.
The Serialist really plays with genres – you have the detective genre, the vampire and horror genres, etc. Do you read a lot of genre fiction?
Yes, I have on and off. I continue to read a lot of crime novels, and I’ll switch back and forth between those books and things I have to read, like Proust (laughs). I have read a great deal of sci-fi and horror books, especially when I was a kid. I’m also a big fan of horror films and Kung-Fu movies, so a lot of that is just sort of there, in the attic of my head.
In this book particularly, I seized on the idea of using the mystery format as a way to give it a plot. In terms of the other genres, I was thinking about detective stories and mystery stories and wanting to deliver one, and the fact that this character (Harry Bloch) wrote them got me thinking about genre. I just sort of expanded that to thinking more and more of other genre types—sci-fi, horror, etc.
As someone that doesn’t read a lot of genre, the narrative really rang true to me.
That was something I spent a lot of time thinking about. First off, I wanted it to ring somewhat true to the person who was a fan, and I also wanted it to be kind of like a parody, but at the same time, not so much of a parody that it has no semblance of believability. I had to actually create things that seemed like excerpts but stood on their own feet. One thing I think is fluid in fiction is being able to move back and forth, in this case between telling the story and thinking about books. It’s the sort of thing fiction does so well.
Having worked in many different fields, how did your past occupations inform the novel?
Even though nothing nearly as exciting as any of this actually happened to me, obviously, it’s somewhat of a catalog of the various very weird jobs I’ve had. Like many writers, I feel like my resume looks like something a maniac would live with unless you have an explanation, like “novelist.” I worked at adult magazines and have done ghost writing, and copywriting, and all of those sorts of things. First and foremost, just the experience of having all of these occupations, I basically gave Harry a bunch of them and made them more exciting. I might have thought of the basic storyline, but I don’t think I would have thought of this guy in this situation if it wasn’t for my own experience.
 The book is kind of a love letter to books and people who love reading. Also, it embraces that writing is writing, and that there is not just one way to tell a story.
I thought it was important for his character, that he feel, at least at the beginning, a little bitter about his position in the hierarchy. The truth is if I had a friend who published 23 novels I would think that was amazing. I would be hugely impressed.
I also thought it just made it much more interesting, purely by chance, that it became a very literary book. I felt like I’m not going to have a writer character and say “Oh, he’s a genius,” or famous. If you’re going to write about loving books and loving writing, what if you take all of that away? Now he’s just a guy who’s barely getting by, he’s working in the trenches and doesn’t think that much of his own work—and now, what does it mean to love books or literature to be quote unquote like an artist or a writer? I just think it made it more interesting.
Courtesy of event coordinator Shannon O'Neill
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