What He's Poised to Do

little accordion book contained two stories. Those were the pairs of stories that I saw as corresponding with each other, just as the characters in the stories advanced their lives by corresponding with each other. And then we came up with the Postcard Project to complete the package.

CAL: Tell us more about that.

ALEX: When we designed the case, it was meant to hold eight stories in four accordion books. Then one afternoon we started talking about the fact that the box was a very exclusive form. It folded up. There was a bellyband around it. It kept people out, in some way. As a remedy, Ben suggested writing a story that was intentionally incomplete and inviting readers to contribute to it. We printed that story, “What He’s Poised to Do,” on the actual casing, and then we put a postcard in the fourth pocket, where the fourth booklet would have gone. The reader got to write back to us, the publisher, to complete the story. We posted some of the responses to the Mail Room of the Hotel St. George Web site.

BEN: People loved that Postcard Project.

ALEX: I think it brought in a different kind of appreciation. Because the box was a high-end, limited-edition object, I thought we’d get attention from design magazines and book blogs. We did. But then there were all the people who seized on the idea of the Postcard Project as an interactive fiction experiment. Which was cool, but also a little frightening. When something sounds “high concept,” people sometimes assume it’s not superior to a description of itself—that it doesn’t transcend its own novelty.

CAL: Funny you should say that, because that’s how I encountered it. I was out in Los Angeles on business with Carrie Kania, our publisher, and we went into Book Soup, the wonderful bookstore on Sunset, and both of us were exploring the store, looking for hidden treasures. At one moment or another, each of us separately stumbled across an elaborate endcap display the store had devoted to Correspondences. I was astonished by the innovative approach to the form and the intricacy of the package. But I didn’t buy it then, in part because I was worried about crushing it in my luggage, but also because I was feeling protective of it. I knew Carrie would love it the way I did—this is the kind of thing we’re always driving each other crazy with—but I felt such a sense of discovery, and I wanted to be able to order it when we got back and present it to her as if out of nowhere. Back in New York, I walked into Carrie’s office, and there was a copy on her desk. She’d bought it at Book Soup and hadn’t mentioned it to me.

BEN: It’s like an O. Henry story.

CAL: It gets stranger. A few months later, I was judging a live fiction event in New York for The L Magazine, and Ben and Aaron Petrovich were two of the other judges. We were all introduced, but it was only after we’d been there a while that I realized that these were two of the people responsible for Correspondences: the author and the publisher. At that point, I hadn’t yet read beyond the cover story: I think I was so taken with the box as an object that I was reluctant to read further into the collection. Then I went home and read the stories, and they were exquisite. I was entranced by the elegance of Ben’s writing, and by the fact that his characters were flesh-and-blood people, even the ones he found odd. I called Aaron, and we started talking about developing a more traditional paperback edition.

ALEX: Did you think right away that you’d need to add stories?

CAL: I thought it would be important, yes. Luckily, Ben had written more.

BEN: I wrote more pieces as a direct result of that original box. I did lots of interviews about the HSG edition, and often the interviewers’ questions actually sparked new stories. In the spring and summer of 2009, I went on tour for Please Step Back, and that strange journey—cities I didn’t know very well, people I met on the road—also helped with new material.

CAL: My sense of Ben’s vision for this new version came into focus after he sent me his first version of the full collection; a number of the added stories were longer, more complex pieces that extended what he’d done in the earlier stories.

BEN: In a strange way, the second phase worked like a correspondence between me and the original box.

ALEX: I notice that you decided to keep “What He’s Poised to Do,” which was the interactive story connected to the Postcard Project.

BEN: We did keep it, after some discussion.

CAL: It might be an understatement to say we kept it. It became the title story.

BEN: But it’s no longer interactive. For this edition, we decided to do without the participatory element of the story and let it stand on its own, as a kind of establishing vignette.

CAL: For me, that story was always the keystone of the collection. So many of the ideas that define your stories—alienation and intimacy, communication and miscommunication, honesty and dishonesty—are traced in those few pages.

ALEX: Ben, do you think of this new collection as an extension of the original edition? As an evolution?

BEN: I’d say it’s a complement. There’s overlap in the stories, of course, but there are enough differences, in both content and design, that they feel like separate things.

CAL: Though there was one bit of continuity that was important to us when we offered to take the project over, which was to ask Hotel St. George to design our edition as well. We loved the original box so much, and felt that it had such power, that we wanted to bring at least some of that into the traditional book form.

ALEX: I thought it would be interesting to have a subtle design element that reminded people that these are stories about (and around) letters, as well as stories that span the globe, and so I came up with this postmark idea.

BEN: I’d say that the book-box, Correspondences, has its own pleasures, and that the book that’s not a box, What He’s Poised to Do, has its own. In terms of the stories themselves, this version feels a touch less tricky in conception and execution, a touch more straightforward.

CAL: But there are still a few little tricks throughout.

ALEX: Like what?

CAL: Like the way the stories interact with each other. They don’t all correspond in exactly the way they did in the box, but there are tiny echoes throughout. In “A Bunch of Blips,” a woman gets involved with a series of men, and one of those men seems to be a character from another story. The woman in “Her Hand” might be the woman who’s married to the man in “What He’s Poised to Do,” but later. Blood in one story seems to flow into another story. A bird from one story might fly into another one.

BEN: Some of those echoes are intentional, and some are just possible, as you say. I’m always suspicious when the characters in a story collection seem to have nothing to do with one another: to me, that seems artificial. At the same time, I didn’t want to link them together too mechanically. I just wanted the stories all to take place in the same universe, and to address the same set of concerns: men, women, love, lust, loss, comedy, tragedy, pleasure, pain, and lunar settlement. So that little tissue that connects all the stories is a fictional version of the real-life tissue that connects us.

Read on Further Explorations

If you’ve just read What He’s Poised to Do and enjoyed it, you might enjoy the following as well. If you haven’t, but you’ve enjoyed any of the following, you might enjoy What He’s Poised to Do.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (1843). The philosopher Kierkegaard’s work is often used to cudgel undergraduates into submission, which is a shame, because he’s also one of the most playful and inventive writers of his or any time. Either/Or is one of the best examples of how to build an argument using multiple perspectives, layered narrative, fragmentation, and pseudonymity.

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1886). James is the author I return to more than any other, in part because I’m constantly trying to untangle him—at the level of sentences, at the level of thought—and in part because I find the books immensely pleasurable. No one has done a better job at observing the way light plays on the surface of human consciousness. This novel is considered something of an oddity for James because it deals with politics more explicitly than most of his work, but for me that helps bring the vexed