Michael Tavaler
ORP: What does success as a writer or artist mean to you?
Michael Tavaler: I’d like to write for as large an audience as possible, discussing life experiences that I hope - through observation and an eye for humor - will help readers reflect kindly on their own circumstances. I’d like to thank Oyster River Pages for allowing me this incredible opportunity. Beyond that, I would really like is an agent – I have an abundance of stories to get out there.
ORP: Do you know more than one language? How does this influence your art and/or writing?
MT: I do speak French (growing up in Montreal) and German (that I picked up from my Austria-Hungarian grandmother). As a student, I lived and worked in several counties, trying to get by in a second language and then later, in England, took up teaching German and French: boy was that a pain - not for the students but the actual grammatical work. But it did inspire me to produce a screenplay about Berlin in 1984 when I lived there, where I wished to stay but had to deal with Germany's past. The piece still has very little success. Tant pis.
ORP: What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve been given about writing or creating? What advice would you give to another writer or artist?
MT: It’s obvious but it is a principle to which I adhere: when I was in the creative writing program at NYU, E. L. Doctorow defined the difference between novels and short stories. A novel can expand, taking tales outside of the main theme. And it is true, when I write longer works, I can go on to tangentially relevant stories that don’t tie into the principle narrative. But in a short story, everything has to be relevant. So if it’s a third party, a man or a woman and they have three brothers, why three? Why not one, and that one had better be relevant to the main story.
ORP: What do you hope readers (or your audience) will take away from your creative work?
MT: There’s a school that indulges in very long sentences, accommodating self-reflection, usually with open endings. I’m from the other school. I love stories. Every year I read The Best American Short Stories: sometimes, depending on the editor, I devour every word in the collection or cannot read past the first short story paragraph. There’s more of the “esoteric” variety in these compilations chosen for the anthology so don’t feel I have any judgments on which style succeeds best, just what works for me.