Alexander Chee is Ready to Write His Next Five Novels

Alexander Chee and I met on a mild Texas day, one of those rare afternoons with the right kind of lingering heat. We sat down together in the living room of the Katherine Anne Porter House, still set with the original furniture, or what looked like the original furniture. The actual origin is unknown to me, but was veiled with a sense of antique authenticity, nonetheless. The blinds were drawn. The only light filtered in from the windows set into the ancient front door. 

Jeremy, the then-steward of the house, brought Chee a cup of hot coffee. 

“Glorious,” Chee said. “Glorious.”

When speaking with Chee, you get the sense that you’re being told something essential, and practical, about how to live and, by extension, how to write. During our interview, Chee fanned himself languidly with a large folding fan. I had a long list of questions and a hopeless optimism that I’d have time to ask even half of them. There was so much that I wanted to know. 

“We are not what we think we are,” Chee wrote in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I read this essay collection in New York City, where many of the essays take place and where I lived in my early-to-mid-twenties. Chee’s words gave me permission. To let go of the need to be anything, to be anybody. To let go of the stupor thinking of the future lulled me into. Chee doesn’t talk about pain explicitly in this conversation. But you get the sense that he knows how to transform life into something beautiful. 

Chee was born in Rhode Island, raised in Maine. A rural northeasterner with that sensibility for survival, one that any Texan would recognize. None of these places, whether North or South, are easy places to live. Chee spent time in South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii as a child. These places pepper his work the way a grandparent might—they loom large and elude any tidy explanation for importance, but that importance is palpable, urgent. Chee graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1994 and published his first novel, Edinburgh, in 2001 to critical acclaim. In 2003, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People by Out. It’s easy to see how that superlative has staying power. Over the last two decades, Chee has published the bestselling essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and his second novel Queen of the Night. He has been awarded the Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, and many prestigious residencies and visiting writers’ posts, which I’m afraid to list, not because they are many (though they are), but because I might miss one. It would not be an overstatement to say that Chee is one of the most accomplished writers of our time, in general, and one of the most necessary queer writers of all time. Chee is currently an associate professor of creative nonfiction and fiction at Dartmouth University. His forthcoming novel, Other People’s Husbands, will be out in 2025. 

Jacqui Devaney: My first question is about teaching. You teach at Dartmouth right now and you have taught at Wesleyan before. In your article on Vulture on writing, you mentioned that you taught seven workshops or so a year. How do you think about teaching as it relates to your writing life? How are you thinking about teaching right now? 

Alexander Chee: Well, I think I am getting close to the place where I would like to retire. I’ve taught as much as I think I want to. For any number of reasons. Typically, the way I’ve articulated it in the past, and I think it still stands, is that you run into more writing problems than you would just on your own. So, when that problem comes up for you, you have some kind of vocabulary to handle it. 

It’s not any less true for being something I teach to undergraduates and beginners. By which I mean, that aspect has stayed interesting. The other piece is that I think it’s perhaps useful to study with someone who is, as we say, an active practitioner. In the early days of teaching, I noticed that most of what I was teaching came out of the best things that I had heard from other people. And then the things that I had been made to articulate. The sort of things that you don’t know that you know until you say them. Which is, as I understand it, the basis of the value of the oral exam. Where you are combining the things that you know, on the fly, to answer a question and in the process, you make new connections and merge with something you didn’t know before. As long as that is still true, it’s still interesting to do. The problem I have now is that I know what the next five books are and I just want to write those. And then if I want to teach again after that, then we’ll see. 

Devaney: You’ve said that your new book is about dark academia. 

Chee: But funny. 

Devaney: Do you feel like this book stemmed from your ambivalences about teaching? Or do you think it’s something else? 

Chee: No, I think it’s something else. I think it’s more about trying to describe a change to both higher education and the economy that I saw happen in 2007-2008, with the financial crisis. And trying to make some art out of that. As well as some other things that aren’t directly related to that. In terms of what inspired me, those were the things that, at the time, inspired it. The novel I’m working on now has a couple of places where it begins. One is in a short story I wrote in the nineties. One is something I wrote in 2008 thinking it was possibly going to be a pilot for a TV show. And then there is a way of looking back now on that period in my life when I was traveling through all of these different institutions, teaching for them, but not really a part of them. When you’re a visiting writer, you have a limited view of what is happening, but you also often collect all of these stories that people feel like they can just tell you. That way of feeling like you’ve arrived into the company of people who want to tell you a story, that’s part of it. 

Devaney: Like a ‘stranger on a train’ kind of thing.

Chee: Sort of. It’s funny, the analogy I’m thinking of is that in Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House, there’s a guide sitting in every room. And when you walk in, they introduce themselves and start talking to you about the room. And what they know is that room, specifically. A college can be like that.

Devaney: Everyone knows their specific area. They probably have strong opinions and stories. 

Chee: They sometimes want to tell those stories. The place I’m writing about isn’t any one place I used to teach at. It was more liberating to invent a place and invent stories out of the stories I’ve heard. It was funny, because when the announcement [of the book] went out, there were a number of people from all of these different places that were like, “uh oh.” And I was like: It’s interesting that you all, from all of these different places, think that you are the place that I’m writing about. 

Devaney: You also mentioned [on Instagram] that there was something new for you or that there was something new about the book. Could you talk a little bit about that? I know that in that Vulture article that I keep bringing up—I promise I read a lot of other things you wrote than just that—you also mention that at one point, you were thinking about writing a thriller. So, I’m curious if these things are related. 

Chee: Ah, the British man and woman on the train. 

Devaney: I loved that story. 

Chee: That is a good story. For the people who are going to be reading this [in Porter House Review], it’s a story about a retired police detective and his wife, who didn’t identify any occupation for herself other than avid mystery reader. And that was compelling enough on its own to think about someone whose job it is to solve mysteries and his wife whose chosen pastime is reading stories of people solving mysteries. And then they have this squabble in front of me on the train. He says, ‘I feel like the way that murders are solved in mystery novels is very unrealistic.’ She starts rolling her eyes. And now that I’ve lived in London, I think I understand why British editors get frustrated by American writers who write about London, because they don’t take enough time to learn about the place. In any case, I retreated from that idea for many reasons. I even applied for a grant with it. A Guggenheim, which I did not get at that time—I got my Guggenheim later. I think the Guggenheim people were probably like, What the hell is he doing? 

Devaney: I’m sure they weren’t thinking that. 

Chee: Maybe after the next book. 

Devaney: You’ll revisit the idea? 

Chee: Maybe under a pen name. I like the idea. In the conversation I had with this police detective, I asked him if he wanted to write about the murders that he’d solved. And what he said was, No, I can’t write about those. I’m not allowed to talk about them. But there were unsolved ones that still haunt me. And that was so interesting. To think of someone who would try to write a novel to solve a murder that he hadn’t been able to solve after a long career. It’s an interesting idea. 

And then I came up with two very involved plots. With the help of a friend, and former student, who grew up in London, who was feeding me all this info. She was my deep source. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to that. 

But this one is a comedy. It’s supposed to be funny. It’s satirical. The best satire is very sincere. What makes satire even better is if the writer really means it at the same time that they are also mocking it. There’s this genuine affection or feeling for the material at hand. Part of what makes Andrew Sean Greer’s Less so enjoyable is that the narrator, for all the difficulty he’s experiencing as a writer, also really loves writers and loves that literary life. But more so Greer, than the character. 

Devaney: But that feeling came through. 

Chee: It did for me, but maybe I’m just projecting. 

Devaney: That’s what really matters, right? 

Chee: [laughs] I suppose. When you’re reading a novel? I suppose so. 

I came at satire through E. M. Forster, who I think is funnier than he gets credit for. Viciously so, actually. He’ll do these jokes that happen at the end of a paragraph, just before the paragraph turns to something totally different, so you almost miss it. It’s like you can feel the whistle of the knife, as you turn the corner. I’m thinking of his first novel, there’s a lawyer character. And the narration roasts him with something like, He was not one of those lawyers who had a great deal to do. It’s not like the funniest joke. But it’s a joke at his expense, he doesn’t know it’s being made about him, because he’s a character in the novel. And it’s also the perfect description of him. And then he [Forster] just moves on. And he does that for the rest of his career. He has those little, tiny moments. 

I was thinking about that. And I was reading and listening to Dancer from the Dance, which I think is hilarious. Especially the older queen character. 

Devaney: Sutherland. 

Chee: Sutherland. Who has the most ridiculous costumes and will walk into a scene and say, We’re having a crucifixion for Easter, you must come over, as if it’s the most normal thing. And that’s not the end of the joke. The joke goes on and on. There’s even a fairly good argument that the whole novel is a kind of extended joke about the New York gay scene. And I loved it so much that after I finished reading it, I was driving home and remembered that I had the audio book. It had been a long day. I did not particularly want to listen to NPR. And I remember that I had Dancer from the Dance and so I put it on and thought, this is marvelous. It’s still a go-to to cheer myself up. I don’t know if I could teach this novel in an undergrad institution in 2024, mostly because of the racism. But it’s an unwieldy creature of that kind. Not that I’m sitting around listening to racist jokes in the car and being like, haha. It’s more like those jokes remind me of the way a power structure describes itself openly and expects everyone to laugh. Which is interesting. And maybe that’s the way to teach it.

Devaney: Do you think there are throughlines there with your novel? About power structures and academia. 

Chee: Maybe. I think a lot of academia is about power structures that expect you, if not to laugh, then to smile as they describe themselves. Or at the very least, to not get in their way. 

But I think part of what I’m interested in also isn’t the imagined power of the academy either. It’s more about all of these ways that a college life can be a theater piece. The way that when you teach, you create a persona in front of students. And then you might forget that you have to stop performing to return to yourself. So that it doesn’t become some ongoing self-portrayal.

Devaney: Thinking about power structures, I’m going to return to something that you said in that essay from Vulture where you talk about writing. You specifically talk about writing the other and about mixing cultures in writing. We’re in Texas right now, a very politically complicated place, particularly when it comes to power as it relates to race, gender, identity. Texas has been a majority non-white state the late 2000s, which is a fun fact that not a lot of people know. However, the dominant image for most people is this… 

Chee: White Texas. 

Devaney: White Texan, white cowboy. I think there’s a burgeoning image of an athlete that maybe transcends whiteness. There’s, of course, exceptions to that [in writing, as well]: we have Bryan Washington, Simon Han, and Kimberly King Parsons. We have a lot of writers that are trying to break free of this dominant image of whiteness and maleness. What would you tell some of the writers who are trying to buck this image? 

Chee: These are all pretty new writers, maybe Bryan less so. He says inside of the Katherine Anne Porter House. [laughs] I wonder sometimes how much people associate Bryan with Texas. You know? Even though he’s been very devoted to writing about it, I think the thing I figured out about Texas pretty quickly in my new job at Dartmouth is that Texas is shockingly diverse in contrast to some other places. Shocking compared to its national image. I teach first-year writing and I had all of these students out of Dallas, Austin, Houston coming into my classroom and I don’t think one of them was white. And writing really interesting stories about where they grew up. For a while, I had a class where students had to write non-fiction stories about their parents’ immigration and that was where it got pretty interesting. 

I don’t know that there’s really any advice that I need to give them. If young writers are looking to move forward with their own stories about this place, this state, I certainly think there’s plenty of room for it. In some ways it’s about the disjunction, nationally, between the culture and the politics of the culture that I think is about the gerrymandering and the racism that has defined so much of the last hundred years. It feels a little bit like erasing what has been happening, to say that it’s always been happening. I think it papers over the very specific difficulties that emerged out of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow South, which a lot of white people don’t know about because they don’t have to. Nothing makes them have to know it. Especially with the push in this country to erase even what we were teaching about that in schools. That points to how powerful it is to even just describe it. 

Devaney: For our last question, I want to talk about roses. Roses come up in a lot of your work. 

Chee: I do like them. 

Devaney: In your first novel, Edinburgh, and in your essay “The Rosary” in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. 

Chee: There is also a very important rose in the Queen of the Night. 

Devaney: To me, the roses feel very grounding in your work. Beauty in the wild. A reminder that beauty is something that must be sustained and pruned in order to grow. Can you talk a bit about what roses mean to you and your writing? 

Chee: I grew up with roses that my mom and my grandmother would grow in Maine, which had a very short rose season back then. My mom would have me help her with taking care of the roses for winter, covering them up and making sure they were mulched. She was the one who cut them back, I didn’t do that. It was a largely sentimental feeling until I decided that I was going to grow this rose garden in Brooklyn, which became the subject of that essay. I do think that the stamina to write a novel, for me, came out of that kind of gardening, where I had to imagine the shape of something that may or may not appear at the end of the work and commit to the planning, nurturing of it and the protection of it over years. I had to live with that as a part of what I was doing with my life. 

I think back to how the essay “Girl” was in my files for twenty years, unfinished. I wrote it in 1994. And then in 2014, Guernica reached out to me and asked if I had anything about gender and I had just looked at that essay. I thought it was pretty good but needed some work. Which is always what I thought when I looked at it, but I never followed through. And now many people love this essay, such that it’s embarrassing to me that I made it take so long. But part of it was that I just didn’t have that stamina for revision that it needed. It turns out that it didn’t even really need that much work, but it was about being willing to take it on. That much by then, I had learned. Then the essay was published and went viral. It was included in an anthology by Guernica. From there, it was chosen for Best American Essays by Jonathan Franzen, and it was my first inclusion in the anthology. That was quite a lesson. 

It was an important lesson about the difference between who I was in 2014 and who I was in 1994. Before and after the garden.

***

Postscript

• All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
• If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
• Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho
• Objects of Desire by Clare Sestanovich
• What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf? by Lauren Groff