A is for Al: An Interview with Al Kratz

Welcome to The Burning Hearth! I’m so happy you’ve stopped by for this interview with my friend and writing group fellow, Al Kratz. Al and I met several years ago via an online Bending Genres workshop. Upon discovering we shared Iowa roots, we began a conversation about the power of place in writing. Over the years that conversation has continued and expanded. We’ve worked together as editors at New Flash Fiction Review, we’ve supported each others’ writing (no one gives feedback quite like Al), and are members of the Top Shelf Writing Group. I’m so honored that I’m in conversation once a month with Al and the other members, Barlow Adams, Lisa Alleston, Audra Kerr Brown, and Karen Jones.

One of the joys of the writing group is getting to be a first reader for these writers whom I respect and admire. That is exactly the case with Al’s latest, self-published, book T is for Trian. He brought parts of this literary non-fiction blend of travel writing, literary craft, personal narrative, and memoir to the group over the course of several months. I felt like I had ventured with him on his weeklong, cross-continental journey aboard the Amtrak’s Empire Builder. His purpose for this excursion was to have a traveling writer’s retreat, but he came away with so much more.

In our interview we talk about T is for Train, the writing life, retirement, and his newest ventures into self-publishing and art. I’m certain you’ll hear the train whistle blow as you join me and Al for our interview.

A is for Al

T is for Train

Al Kratz reading from T is for Train

BH: Al, it is a pleasure to have you back at The Burning Hearth to discuss T is for Train. I want to begin by having you talk about two things that my brain connected from Chapter 2, “Osceola to Chicago.”

“Today’s trains might be more about ideas than realities, but either way, the past is a heavy presence.”

And,

“I was just a guy, writing part-time in Iowa, trying to write a novel about a guy obsessed with macro ideas about the End of the World, not realizing what really needed his attention was the micro world falling apart within him.”

While the train might be more about ideas than realities, it seems to me you started your journey more about ideas than realities and ended up discovering the reality that your past (when you ran away as a teenager) was a heavy presence. As you say in your synopsis, “Out on the road came unexpected closure: the old man making peace with the wandering young man.”

I’m curious, how has that closure changed you?

Al: In some ways it was this repetitive closure that I’ve worked on my whole life without even knowing I was doing that. I had been revisiting that time of my life a lot, kind of like my present-self checking in on my past-self and making sure we were both ok. I really didn’t expect that to be a part of this trip. I did think I was just a guy on the road trying to write a book. Finding this story instead surprised me. When I ran away as a 19 year old, I got into Minneapolis right after sundown. It was a very real moment for me. The sun leaving and saying you’re on your own now, kid. On the train as a 55 year old, we slow rolled into Spokane at three in the morning. How similar and different those two arrivals felt really struck me and developed the strong connection between the trips. The biggest change for me was realizing that’s what I had been doing. I had tried to write about running away before but had never really got it to work. Learning how to read my own story taught me how to write it. Maybe learning how to write it taught me how to properly close it?   

BH: I want to touch on the fact that this past May (11 months after your train journey) you retired. In Chapter 3, “Chicago” you state:

“A master of wasting time in my youth, it has become simple math now. With every day that passes, I’ve got less time to waste.”

Earlier in the chapter you write:

“Time ticks to a different beat when you’re on Writer Retreat, but a fixed bucket of time is only valuable if the time is used well. In other words: Tick Tock, Mofo!” (My marginalia next to this line: So Al! Love!)

How has retirement altered the passage of time? If indeed, it has. And recognizing, as we all do when we are on the downside of the apex of the bell curve of life, that there is less time to waste, one might view retirement somewhat like a perpetual retreat. How are you making your time more valuable? Is the expanse of time intimidating? Freeing? Have you been able to resist filling it with things that take you away from your goals?

Al: If running out of time is the poison, then retirement has been a pretty strong antidote. I say pretty strong because eventually the poison wins of course, but I do now have this expanse of time you mention. So, I still hear Tick Tock, Mofo in the background and it gets me to the desk, but now I have time almost every day to write. It has been extremely freeing. Maybe the best part is having my writing time better match my peak mental times too. For me, that’s the eight to eleven in the morning range and around two to five in the afternoons. 

I’m interested to see if this surplus in time will change my love of a writing retreat week. On the train trip, that was still a luxury to be away from work for that stretch of time. Will it still seem like a luxury to me now that I’m not working, or will it seem like a cost? I will find out soon! I’m going to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this summer.

BH: What was your greatest takeaway after returning from this journey? Are you still discovering things about it now?

Al: Aside from the closure we mentioned earlier, I think the greatest takeaway I had was confirmation that I was on the right journey. That reading and writing was the journey. I still feel this clarity very deeply. Happening to read Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and happening to find her reference to Freud’s concept of deep repetition compulsion right when I needed to understand that exact concept just makes me want to keep going. What’s the next thing I need to understand? What’s the next book that will do that for me? What’s the next thing I can write about in a way I didn’t know I could? So, I’m not really discovering things about the train journey or my youth anymore. I feel like I’m on to the next one and the next one.

BH: You include some great photos in your book. In fact, you turned one into a piece of art that you used as your cover. In our writing group, you shared the process you used in creating it. I would love for you to share that here. Also, what made you choose this particular photo for your cover?

Al: I’ve been working with Oil Pastels for a very long time. I’ve been treating that art the way I used to treat my writing which is to do it in bursts and then set it down sometimes for several years. Now with the retirement time on my hands, I’ve been trying to work with pastels every day. I’ve just started to share this kind of work. That’s a fun stage. I remember the hesitation to tell people I was a writer. I’m just getting there now where I can say, “and an abstract artist.” I just found out one of my pieces is going to be cover art for the September issue of the literary journal Pithead Chapel. 

It’s helping with the writing too by showing me different ways creativity can work. For the book cover, I had been borrowing a pottery technique called Sgraffito where you use layers and scratch off the top layer to make unique textures. So, I drew the brown train track first and covered it entirely in black. Then I scratched the train track “back” to the front. I did the same for the lights. It made it look like the tracks had been pulled from the earth which is a fitting metaphor for the way I pulled the story too. 

Having it be rendered by my hand rather than my phone made it more special to me too.

I really wanted the book to have color pictures, but it just didn’t make economic sense in the end. I had to accept black and white, but I do like the way they captured the various things I saw on the road. Now that some time has passed, I should have a post on my website with all the pictures. I also really wanted this book not to be too much of a vacation slideshow.

That image I used for the cover was always the picture for me. That moment going through Glacier National Park was a beautiful moment in terms of observing the external world and my interior world too. I found out that next morning by reading Kathy Fish’s Substack that this moment could be called Frisson.

BH: My dance training, mainly my choreography training, has a huge influence on my writing. I’m wondering if, as you delve into a new form of artistic expression, you are finding that what you know and learn about one is carrying over and influencing the other? If so, how?

Al: I’m sure the pastel work is helping the writing, but I’m not sure how or where yet. It easier to see where the writing helps me in the pastels. Maybe that’s because I’m more of a beginner there? But I’m interested in abstraction. Partly because I have no skill for realistic drawing! But I do like how a thing doesn’t have to look exactly like the thing and the ways it doesn’t look like it actually makes it be more of the thing. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think it might be what I like about fiction too. A pastel drawing has a lot in common with flash fiction. I’m interested in having a main character in my drawing. Having the iceberg, where part of the story is in what’s not in the drawing too. The implied moment. These thoughts all have to be helping in ways we don’t even have to understand. But how can a piece of writing be like a painting? How can it be like dancing? How can it be like a muted trumpet solo?
 

BH: One of the areas where my choreography training heavily influences my writing is what it means to be audience focused. In your reading of The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth you share and consider the following:

“…I read more Booth and the idea that art ignores the audience. As he does so well, he turns these conventions upside down and argues that while the artist might disappear, his implied Second Self is never gone. It constantly “molds the reader into the kind of person suited to appreciate such a character and the book he is writing.””

I littered the side of the page with marginalia here as my thoughts turned to how trained I was to be aware of the fact that I was performing for an audience, and that everything I did needed to be projected out past the back wall of the auditorium, thus allowing me to touch every audience member. When choreographing, I was made aware that my goal was to have my audience understand what I was doing. This didn’t imply that I didn’t challenge the audience with my work. Rather, it begged the question: what good was my choreography if no one could understand it? Both the choreography and the performance were an act of giving away. What was I wanting to communicate to my audience? Was I accomplishing my goal? Was I doing it the best way possible or was there a different way to do it? So, in my mind’s eye, I was in the audience watching my choreography and my performance. Few things have shaped my writing as much as this approach to choreography and performance.

Back to Booth. He leads you to thinking about “First Self. Second Self. Shadow Self.” You begin the following paragraph with “Now that I knew how to navigate the train…” I wonder, how do you navigate the “First Self. Second Self. Shadow Self,” as it applies to your reader?

Al: I actually don’t fully know how I navigate it. It kind of became like a golf swing for me. If you think too much about the golf swing, where this hand should be, that arm, this hip, that eye, and all these things before we even get to where the ball should be, you end up with no golf swing at all. You have to scrap all those thoughts and just start swinging the club without any thoughts of navigating the different pieces.

The problem I was trying to solve on the train related to the narrative voice getting along with the main character’s third person voice. I actually ended up setting that project down for a little while, so I didn’t land on a good navigation strategy. I did find a fun solution to my current project. I’ve had a novel done for a couple years now. I haven’t yet found a home for it. It was originally written in third person as well with a narrator that never acknowledges their existence. After I retired in May, I decided to take Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done revision advice, and I am rewriting the novel from the start. I also am rewriting it in first person. It allows my disappearance from the framework to make more sense to me. Hopefully, it allows the main character to be closer and more vulnerable with the reader. I’m hoping to have this draft done by the end of August.

BH: You decided to self-publish T is for Train through Amazon KDP. Why? And, do you intend to self-publish again?

Al: The original reason was because I felt the work was too personal of a blend. Like possibly it might only be for Al Kratz. And I didn’t want to make any changes to fit what might match better with a press. It’s part travel writing, part memoir, part writing craft, part we don’t know what to call it. That was the content reason for self-publishing.

On the press side, I was curious to see what it would be like going it alone. My two previous books were on small independent presses. Both presses did exactly what they promised to do for my work. I was interested in seeing what it would be like to have complete control of this project. KDP does what they say they will do too. You have complete visibility to the costs and the sales. It is really hard to sell books. It’s hard to get the word out there and it’s hard to find readers.

Choosing the best press is a project by project decision. I would definitely consider self-publishing again. I would also like to have my own imprint under KDP and help other writers through the process if the project is right for them and for me.

It’s a tough decision. I doubt I will have another project like T is for Train where it was such an easy decision for me to self-publish.

BH: What advice do you have for anyone who is thinking about self-publishing?

Al: Ultimately you have to do what feels best to your project. A lot of the sales and marketing work will fall on the author regardless of self-publishing or independent press publishing.

I advise going into the process with as much information as you can gather and have good criteria for making some of the tough decisions. In a world that tells us no way more often than it says yes, it can be really tough to get down the road with a press and have to pull away. I still feel that sting from a project where that happened to me over six years ago and it never did get to publication.

Find the things that are non-negotiable for you and then make sure the presses you are approaching meet those requirements. For example, maybe full visibility on sales and royalties is the most important thing to you. Maybe it’s marketing and promotion. Maybe it is the prestige of peer vetted and selective publishing versus self-publishing. Talk to other authors and find out what their non-negotiables are and how their presses did in trying to meet them. Find out what ups and downs they have had with publishing.

Thanks for the questions and the discussion!

Al Kratz is a writer from Indianola, Iowa. He’s been working for the past year on combining literary and visual arts. Merge, a gallery exhibit, recently paired ten of his short fiction pieces with images from a fine art photographer. This summer he worked with his wife, mixed media artist Krsity Evans, to bring literary artists to the stage at the Des Moines Art Festival. More about his work can be found at alkratz.com.

Thanks again for stopping by. As always, please like and share this interview. The Burning Hearth is small but mighty, and I would love to see my subscribers grow.

Up next is an interview with Jai Chakrabarti, the author of the short story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, and of the novel, A Play for the End of the World. I highly recommend reading both.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!

Until next time,

Constance