Boulevard Craft Interview: Danielle Dutton
photo by Sina Queyras
by Griffin Reed, Managing Editor
from Vol. 38, Nos. 1 & 2
Throughout Danielle Dutton’s genre- and media-spanning career, she’s displayed an incredible and unique curiosity, specificity, and sensibility—from details she makes entire worlds, and in her details, she has exceptional taste. As an author, Dutton has published the novels S P R A W L and Margaret the First, the prose work Attempts at a Life, the text for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, the illustrated nonfiction chapbook A Picture Held Us Captive, and, in 2024, is releasing a collection entitled Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other.
As a book designer, she’s created beautiful covers for both Dalkey Archive Press and Dorothy, a publishing project, the feminist independent press she founded in 2009 along with Martin Riker, which puts out two exquisite and innovative titles each year. As a professor of English and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Dutton co-directs the Center for the Literary Arts and teaches courses on everything from the generation of the “first book” to the fiction of the Anthropocene. Dutton is also a frequent and treasured regular of St. Louis indie bookstore Subterranean Books, through which arrangement Dutton and this Boulevard interviewer first crossed paths. For this interview, we connected over email late last year to talk reading, book design, and more.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Boulevard: What have you been reading? Anything new and spectacular? Anything that you’ve come back to, or that continues to act as a touchstone for you? I know you’ve spoken a lot about your interest in Virginia Woolf, especially during the writing of your novel Margaret the First. Also, that you’re a fan of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, a book I’ve had on the shelf for years without ever summoning the moxie to crack the cover.
Danielle Dutton: Yes, Woolf and Perec are two perennial favorites. If you aren’t feeling up to Life maybe try W, or the Memory of Childhood instead? It’s incredible. And shorter! In terms of my more recent reading . . . this year I loved Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance. I also read Beloved for the first time this past summer. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it took me so long to get there. It was tremendously good. And then I’m always reading for Dorothy, the press I run with my husband Martin Riker. Reading submissions, editing, proofing, etc. That’s not really what people mean when they ask me what I’m reading, I know, but the truth is that’s a lot of my reading time right there. Oh, I also enjoyed Celia Paul’s Self-portrait recently. And on my nightstand, ready to go: Second Place by Rachel Cusk and Triptychs by Sandra Simonds.
Boulevard: Your upcoming collection, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, promises material on ekphrasis, writing, sex, and the Midwest. One section, in particular, is a kind of collage of dresses as they appear in sixty-six works of literature. Books, objects, and works of art obviously inform your writing, in this new collection and in your other publications. In the various stages of your writing process, do you find that you intentionally structure your reading or your engagement with culture? For research purposes, or to attend to certain rhythms of form and style?
DD: In general, I don’t intentionally try to interact with specific things out in the world so that I can use them in my writing. It’s much more organic or accidental or inevitable than that. It’s like these things (a book or a painting or whatever) come into my line of vision or thinking and then later they fall into place in the writing.
Writing Margaret the First was different, though, since that was technically historical fiction, even if it was fairly experimental, and so there was this huge body of source material I was working off of: documents and letters and work from someone else’s actual life. So in that case, I was constantly returning to those materials at every stage of the writing to make sure I wasn’t straying too far off course, in terms of things like rhythm and style, yes, and also just in terms of the actual facts. But I don’t think I would be able to avoid outside media, living as I do pretty much in the world. All the time new ideas and images are flying at us. Some of those just get stuck in my mind and eventually make their way into my work.
Boulevard: At Dorothy, how does the process of receiving and reviewing manuscripts work?
DD: Throughout the year, we get submissions from agents and other people we know (translators, writers, other publishers), and we’re also now and then soliciting work from writers or translators we admire, but the majority of the submissions come during our yearly open reading period, which takes place over two weeks every September. We get a bunch of submissions during those two weeks, both agented and un- agented, and then we spend the next few months reading through those and getting back to people. I don’t necessarily feel like we’re reading more every year. Limiting the reading period to two weeks definitely cuts down on how many people submit, but that’s something we need to do. We can’t handle more submissions than we naturally tend to get in those two weeks. In terms of the final decisions, it comes down to conversations between me and Marty, and our sense of what our list might need next, where it might want to go.
Boulevard: I’m fascinated by the cover art of Dorothy’s books. You had some experience in book design before co-founding the press, right? Besides the choice of graphic itself, are there other elements you take into consideration when formatting the books?
DD: Thank you. Yes, I was the book designer at Dalkey Archive Press for a few years before we founded Dorothy. I wasn’t trained as a book designer; I just learned as I went when it turned out Dalkey didn’t have anyone in-house doing design work.
Anyway, the number one thing I think about as a designer is the art. I think of the Dorothy covers as a very cool visual gallery, and I get especially excited when we use work from younger or contemporary artists. One artist we wound up working with, Catherine Lemblé, was actually still in art school when I contacted her to use her piece on the cover of Amina Cain’s Creature. I’d seen her work on someone’s blog way back when, and then I did some internet sleuthing and tracked her down. Sometimes, it’s really clear what art we should use on a cover, like when we used Leonora Carrington’s Self Portrait on the cover of The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. But often it’s really a hunt, and it can totally stress me out, and sometimes the artists say no, and etc. etc. etc. But it’s still such a joy to finally find, and then get permission to use, a piece that feels perfect for a book, that communicates with the writing in cool ways, and helps to communicate the book to readers.
That’s how I think about the design in general, both for the covers and for the interior texts: I’m trying to help the book communicate itself.
Boulevard: You mentioned Triptychs by Sandra Simonds, which just came out through Wave Books. Like Dorothy, it’s another smaller press that I think is doing great design work and curating its material really well. Are there other publishers you particularly admire, now, or that influenced the creation of the Dorothy Project?
DD: There are many publishers I admire: Transit, Two Lines, Wakefield, Nightboat, Song Cave, Two Dollar Radio, Siglio, Wave. Those are just a few, but generally it’s a great time for independent publishing in the U.S. That’s not to say it’s an easy time for publishers, but there’s a wealth of presses out there putting out important work. Oh, and NYRBooks and New Directions, two of my all-time faves.
In terms of publishers who influenced Dorothy, there was Dalkey Archive, of course, where my husband and I both worked before we started the press. Other influences include Hogarth (the press run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf), Burning Deck (run by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop), Flood Editions (run by Devin Johnston and Michael O’Leary), and Clear Cut Press (run by Matthew Stadler and Rich Jensen). Other than Flood, all of these presses are now defunct, but they each inspired us in different ways.
Boulevard: Switching gears to your own craft, I’d like to ask about how you handle time. You just had a great short story in The New Yorker, “My Wonderful Description of Flowers,” that begins with the recounting of a dream, a Rilke quote, and then the slip of an entire day in the break between paragraphs. How do you navigate what to leave in, what to leave out, how long to linger, in your narrative time?
DD: That’s a good question, but I can’t give a clear answer. The way I manage time in a story is always different. It’s the sort of thing that might be instinctual in one spot—like the way I jumped over the narrator’s whole day in the beginning of the story you just mentioned—and might require a lot of tinkering in another. What I’m trying to do is find the right rhythm for a line, a paragraph, a transition. It’s about all these rhythms working and fitting together in some interesting or pleasing way. Actually, I think the management of time is why I’m a fiction writer. I mean, for a while, when I started, I wasn’t sure if I was writing stories at all, but what I’ve realized tethers me to fiction specifically, as a genre, is my interest in the movement of time, the feeling of time passing in space, or the effects of time on consciousness, which isn’t the same as plot.
Boulevard: What’s been your experience with the editorial prescriptive to “kill your darlings”? What does the editing process more generally tend to look like for you?
DD: I edit as I go, combing through each line as I write, slowly shifting things, figuring things out, trying to make each line interesting or useful or beautiful, until the piece starts to grow. This is one reason I’m a fairly slow writer. There have been a few pieces where I’ve worked differently, writing quickly through to the end and then going back to make it work, but generally it’s this slow process of setting one sentence down after another, obsessing over each one as I go. So, in a way, I guess I treat all my lines as darlings? I don’t know. I try not to think too much about editorial prescriptives, as you put it.
Boulevard: There’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which each of the main characters has a dream, and each of them, in their dream, sees a character called the Cheese Man. On the Cheese Man, the writer of that episode has said that he wanted one element in the episode that served no purpose and that had no explanation. I’ve always thought that that was actually a pretty great approach to creating or interpreting art. What do you make of it?
DD: I can understand the need for a Cheese Man when you’re writing a dream episode. There’s that lovely way dreams don’t have to make sense even as they’re making sense. In fact, my husband’s new book, The Guest Lecture, ends with a wonderful dream sequence that does this very thing, makes perfect sense even as it’s so strange. Anyway, I don’t know if I’ve ever used a Cheese Man in a story. I don’t really want anything in a story that isn’t serving a purpose, but then I’d argue that the Cheese Man is serving a purpose, too (having seen that episode several times!). That said, I do sometimes think we try too hard to wring neat meanings out of works of art. I’m often suggesting to my students that they try to talk or think about a story as an experience. I don’t love it, for example, when someone says “the point of this story is X.” If a story is good, it’s going to be so much more than a “point.”
Boulevard: You’ve pushed back at times against the way the term “experimental” is applied in certain critical/mercantile settings. When you set out on a project, I imagine you’re not thinking in terms of experimentality.
DD: I’ve certainly wondered about that word, about what it means, or about what different people mean when they use it. But, in a way, I suppose I am thinking of experimentation when I start writing. I’m always trying to make something happen for myself and for the reader, something that is unknown to me, and that requires an openness to strangeness and intuitiveness and, possibly, disaster, that might be reasonably called experimentation. As I write, I’m discovering what I’m writing. I think the version of the word I tend to push back about has more to do with its use as a label slapped on a product to warn readers against it.
Boulevard: Creatively, professionally, or personally, what’s something you’re really looking forward to?
DD: I’m looking forward to working on a novel that I’ve been turning over in my head for quite a while now. I don’t like to say too much about what is still unwritten—it feels like a jinx—but I will say it’s a novel in three parts, and it’s partly about aging and partly about the ocean.
It’s very hard, though, for me to find time to write, except in the summers, and I appreciate that time immensely . . . but then knowing it is my Time To Write can also get me all clogged up with pressure when, if I’m honest, what I really want to do when it’s nice out is just sit on a rock in the sun. I’m also looking forward to a trip to Guatemala, where I’ve never been. And I’m always looking forward to getting back to California, which I do once every year, both to see my family and to visit various favorite spots along the Pacific coast, which is one the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen.