Five years ago, when Kevin Fitchett was a Fine Arts Work Center fellow for the first time, he mostly worked on poetry. Now he’s back, and fiction has taken the front seat. The reason is simple: “I’m better at it,” he says. He’s here to finish his novel, The Masters. But in Fitchett’s work, the boundaries between poetry and fiction — and his life and art — are porous.
The two forms have always co-existed in Fitchett’s writing. He studied both poetry and fiction while getting a master’s in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. And during his first FAWC residency, he worked on an earlier version of the novel. Fitchett still writes a poem once a year, he says, but most of his poetry now feeds his book: “I’ll have a character say my best poem ideas in dialogue,” he says.
The Masters follows fictional poet Ken Pritchett as he travels with his father to Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club on the eve of the Masters Tournament (which begins this year on April 10). Ken and his wife are in a trial separation, which has made him “kind of unhinged,” Fitchett says. “He calls the feeling élan,” — which means a vigorous spirit of enthusiasm. “He’s fired up. He can swim in a frigid river and not even flinch. He’s happy. And he’s horribly sad.”
Ken has recently published a book of poetry titled Lamb-Bow after Lambeau Field, the football stadium in his hometown, Green Bay, Wisc. Poems from Lamb-Bow appear in the novel as prefaces to chapters or within the narrative, as Ken reads his work to other characters. The poems — which Fitchett has been writing and setting aside for years — also serve as a catalyst for communication between Ken and his father because, although the two “never talk,” Ken’s father reads everything his son writes. “My writing is the one medium we’ve given each other a free pass at for spreading sincerity,” writes Fitchett in Ken’s voice.
The similarity between “Ken Pritchett” and “Kevin Fitchett” is no coincidence. The novel “could sound like my life,” Fitchett says. Like Ken, Fitchett grew up in Green Bay — “a drinking town with a football problem,” he says. The novel “takes place in the places I know. I also got divorced when I didn’t want to, and I’m good at golf.” But those parallels are balanced by plenty of departures from his experience, he says. “I’m creating an artifice, not writing nonfiction.”
He studies other writers as he works on his fiction, and he’s careful about what he selects. “I prescribe myself stuff,” Fitchett says. He spreads a few of these prescriptions out on the table in front of him: Alice Munro’s The View From Castle Rock, Richard Ford’s Be Mine, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book One. Each volume is an “apothecary vial,” Fitchett says — if he absorbs anything else, his writing will be thrown off course.
Fitchett doesn’t usually read books that rely on action for narrative propulsion. He prefers “indeterminacy,” he says. “Characters that are constantly shifting.”
He recalls a line in American journalist and novelist Frank Norris’s 1901 essay “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” in which Norris writes of “the drama of a broken teacup.” In Fitchett’s writing, “the drama isn’t in the fissure in the china,” he says. “It’s in why we care about breakages in general that are small compared to civil war or right whales going extinct. It’s in what was said, years before, by the person holding the cup.”
The dialogue in The Masters opens a window on hidden tension, grief, and heartbreak. Good dialogue is of critical importance to Fitchett. It enables the reader to feel when something is about to happen — “The subconscious, coming like a big wave,” he says. “You see the little hump, and then, boom, it hits. It leaps out at you in a strange form.”
Humor is also important to Fitchett. “The great writers, literary lighthouses, they’re always funny,” he says. “They can be wickedly funny in a quiet way.” In The Masters, Fitchett pokes fun at his characters’ “shithousery” — meaning their sometimes underhanded, “smirky” sportsmanship — as much as he exposes their deepest fears and motivations.
But sometimes telling instead of showing is necessary: Fitchett likes when authors “grip the story and tell you why something is important,” he says. “I admire fiction with authority.” He opens Munro’s The View From Castle Rock to the short story “The Ticket” and reads aloud: “This is the story, or as much as I know of it.” A line like that can “forgive a more discursive style,” Fitchett says.
In an early chapter of The Masters, Fitchett’s opening line is: “On the tenth hole at Wawonowin Public, my dad passed to me the only lesson he’d ever taken himself seriously enough to give.” The lesson: it’s OK to have secrets. (As the novel goes on, Ken learns that this sentiment is many-layered.) The first sentence is refreshingly straightforward, especially as that chapter proceeds into moments of mystery and opacity.
The novel is like a mosaic, Fitchett says — fragments of imagery and scenes create a bigger picture. The imagery of golf plays a vivid part: “You can write beautiful scenes,” Fitchett says. “There’s iron and dirt and grass and this perfect white ball with crimson font.” In one chapter, he writes of a storm at the golf course: “…the western air over the clubhouse a matte and total shale, an ultrasound-like churning at the center. The club glowed under this development. Its emerald siding and white doors — the colors of Augusta National — were brittle in the sunlight coming from the still-clear east.”
Fitchett’s novel is almost done, and he’s a ruthless self-editor: “If I have a scene that doesn’t work up to something hilarious, vulnerable, or revelatory, then I’ll cut the whole thing.” Once the novel’s finished, Fitchett says, “it has to be radiant. Otherwise, no one will publish a white guy writing about golf and getting divorced. It must be too good to refuse.”
During his first FAWC fellowship, “I wasn’t good enough to write what I wanted to. But now I am. It just took practice,” he says. “You’re building up to a skill level, like golf. You know when you can be a professional — your scores say it.”
It would have been horrible if he had published what he wrote five years ago, Fitchett says, “because I’d look back at it and say ‘ugh.’ ” But infinite improvement is the goal: “Maybe I’ll say ‘ugh’ forever,” he says. “I hope I do.”
