with Adriann Ranta

DJP: No, definitely not. I wasn’t much of a reader and writer… all through high school my literary diet was mostly comic books. It wasn’t until college when I read the Great Gatsby and really fell in love with literature and started writing. I started dabbling with poetry and short stories in college but it wasn’t until the last four years that I’ve made a really serious commitment to writing stories.

AR: Do you generally stick to fiction?

DJP: Yeah I do. I love reading poetry, but I’m terrible at it.

AR: You just graduated University of Arizona’s MFA program. What are you plans now?

DJP: I’m going for my PHD. The program is actually in English with a creative dissertation.

AR: You’ve had a lot of success recently in getting your short stories published in tier one magazines. Do you have any tricks to getting published or is it just the boring standby of writing well?

DJP: It is writing well. Everyone wants to know the secret. One of the things is not just writing well, but editing well and polishing well. Some of these stories that have done well first got rejected by 10 or 20 places. Then I would show it to friends and teachers it wouldn’t be a major revision but another line editing. Then I’d send it out and it would get snapped up. It used to be, 50 years ago, that editors really edited and you could send in what would potentially be a really great story and they would edit it and make it great. Now editors don’t do much in the way of editing, the story market is so flooded that the editor’s job is really just to go through the slush pile and find the stuff that’s already really close to done. If the story isn’t really polished and tight already, the chances are that even if it could be a good story they’re not going to be able to take the time to make it better.

The other thing is just to send it out like crazy. The story that won the Atlantic award and will be in Best New American Voices also got rejected by 20 other great magazines—that one got rejected by Playboy, which wound up taking another one. There is no rhyme or reason. It’s all very subjective and there’s also a great deal of luck involved. People say you have to work hard and have to have a certain amount of talent, and that’s all true, but I really think there’s just a little luck involved too, because great stories get passed over.

AR: Do you stick to short stories or have you written a novel? Do you have an agent or do you do your submissions yourself?

DJP: I did write a novel in 2003 and it was terrible. But it was a wonderful experience. I think I learned to write that summer by writing a bad novel. I haven’t given it another chance yet, but I really want to. I’m sure I will. For now, I feel like I just got the hang of short stories, so I want to keep writing stories until I get burned out.

I do have an agent. I got very lucky. I was at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, which I think is a great conference. I was there the summer of 2006 and Gail Hochman was one of the speakers and she set up five-minute interviews after her panel and I got one of those slots. We talked and she said she was sort of interested, but I didn’t have a whole book I just had a couple stories. She asked if I thought it was kind of premature. I said maybe, but I’d like to get an agent for these stories because I feel like I have some good stories and they’re not finding the best homes. When I got home after the summer I sent her two stories and she said yeah, she’d take me on. But that was just less than a year ago, so it hasn’t yielded any results yet. All the stories I’ve had published so far were taken before [Hochman] took me on. The Playboy thing I submitted myself. It’s another issue of luck, I know I’m incredibly lucky to have met Gail Hochman and her agreeing to represent me.

AR: As a young, debut author, what challenges did you face in getting noticed in the slush pile? Is getting published going to be easier from now on?

DJP: No, I still have stories that have never been published. I think the market is really interested in big stories where a lot happens. One of the reasons they’re taking my stories is because they’re big stories. The story that won the Playboy prize, it’s really like three stories in one. The father throws his son out the window because he can’t tolerate that his son is gay. Another man’s father dies so they have to drive up to North Florida and they find that his father has been raising an alligator, so they have to drive down to South Florida and try to release this alligator, meanwhile they’re two difficult father/son relationships. It’s about 30 pages in Microsoft Word; a big, unwieldy story.

AR: What are you encouraged or discouraged by as a young author?

DJP: I’m encouraged by a lot of the contests out there focusing on emerging writers. Playboy has the College Fiction Contest, Best New Voices is entirely devoted to writing program work. There are a lot of writing contests for writers who don’t have a book, haven’t been published in large journals. That’s great, there has to be a market or forum for that stuff, so emerging writers don’t get overlooked. The only thing that would discourage me is any magazine or journal that won’t take unsolicited submissions because I think they’re missing out on some great stuff.

AR: What mistakes have you made that you feel other writers can learn from?

DJP: You have to write what you want to write. A couple years ago, I forced myself to write a novel because it was the thing to do, because stories wouldn’t make me much money and collections of stories don’t sell well. Even though I had never published anything, I don’t know why I was thinking this way, a part of me was thinking that to write a novel was the thing to do if you want to make it in America as a writer. But my heart was never really in it.

I had always liked reading and writing stories. I think whether you want to write poetry, short stories or novels you can’t think about how many people might read it or how much money you might make. Chances are you’ll never make much money on writing anything. The best thing to do is write what you really want to write about, this doesn’t mean “write what you know,” you can write what you want to know, what scares you, there are lots of better catch phrases. Ultimately write what turns you on, what you enjoy.

AR: How does the reality of being published in first tier magazines measure up to how you thought it would feel?

DJP: It’s exciting. It’s really exciting to see your name in print, to hold the magazine in your hand. We’re still talking about writing in a culture that watches mostly TV and movies, it’s not like you’ll ever walk down the street and have people recognize you. That’s never going to happen to me. It’s exciting for a small group of people, my friends and family. The one neat experience I did have was when I had a story come out in the Chicago Tribune and I actually got some letters. It’s such a large circulation newspaper and I had put that I was co-editor of the Sonora Review at the time so people sent letters to the Sonora Review. It was neat to get letters from strangers.

AR: Has being published changed your opinion on other writers? Maybe realize that it’s a little harder than some people make it look?

DJP: Having published now, I realize that it’s still really hard. When you read an author like John Updike, who seems like he has a story in the New Yorker once a month, you think he must just crank them out, it must be easy, but that’s not true. I’m sure he works very hard. I’ve been talking to a lot of other published writers and it’s always a struggle, the first draft is almost always embarrassing. For the few stories I’ve published, I have maybe 50 that are just terrible and so many false starts. For a while it felt like a guilty secret, like I’m not really a writer, just a guy who might get lucky and place a few stories. And then I realized, no, that’s all writers. All writers have aborted projects and terrible stories in the closet.

AR: Do you think you’ve benefited from U of A’s MFA program? How was your overall experience?

DJP: I think the MFA program can be a great thing. I think, though, that not a lot of people know what they’re getting into. There are so many MFA programs out there now that the ball is in the writer’s court. There’s a great book that came out last year, The Creative Writing MFA Handbook [by Tom Kealey]. The last time programs were ranked was in 1997 and they haven’t ranked them again. There are so many more programs that have popped up. [Kealey] makes a great point, you shouldn’t think in terms of prestige. You should think in terms of what a program can do for you. I really think you should go to the program that can get you the best funding so you don’t have to work and have the most time for writing. If you’re going to go to a program for two or three years you want as much time as possible to write. I was very lucky that I’m married and my wife had a full-time job. We got a very small apartment and just made ends meet on one salary.

Two years ago I was still very rough as a writer so I applied to 12 programs and this was the only one I got into, so I came here. But I had no funding so I wound up paying a lot of money to do this, where if I had waited a year or two I might have gotten a better deal. I’m not complaining, obviously things worked out pretty well for me, but I would say don’t rush it. Wait until your work is good enough. I have a good friend who has a three-book deal at Random House. He applied to 10 or 12 programs and only got into two, and Iowa was one of them. People hear that story and think it doesn’t make sense, if he got into Iowa then certainly he could get into other places. But the fact is that most of these programs get something like 500 applicants every year. You just have to apply to a bunch.  I think people get discouraged because they don’t get accepted into these programs and think that it means they’ll never make it as a writer but that’s not what it means.

AR: Do you have any advice for any other young writers with 50 bad stories and false starts?

DJP: First of all, don’t give up. You have to be stubborn, you have to be persistent, you have to believe in yourself. The other thing is, one reason an MFA program is so good, is that you can’t just leave your stuff alone. You can keep making the same mistake again and again and not realize it and keep writing these stories that are bad and not know why. Some of my best experiences have been working with other people, working with a teacher or friend who can sit down and go over it on a line by line level, or the whole story structure. You have to be able to show your work to other writers. They’re able to look at your work objectively, which I don’t think you’re ever truly able to do.