Gary Lutz, author of Stories in the Worst Way (3rd Bed, 2002) and I Looked Alive (Black Square, 2003), will start the second season of Just Buffalo’s COMMUNIQUE Flash Fiction series this Thursday night at Rust Belt Books (202 Allen St.), with U.B. assistant professor and Exhibit X curator Christina Milletti opening.

Recently I posed a few email questions to Lutz, who has been building himself an entranced following of both readers and well-known authors, and asked him about the inclination toward unconventional sentence structures dictating his prose.

In his introduction to Amy Hempel’s Collected Stories, Rick Moody writes, “It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraph.” Since I assume you would agree with this statement, how important is it that American fiction possess a fresh linguistic choreography? I believe in the primacy of the sentence as the unit of composition. The sentence is the one thing that prose fiction can give you that a movie, say, or a painting simply cannot. I seem to see quite a bit of flimsiness and ungivingness in the contemporary literary sentence, a lot of underconsideration and artlessness. I see a lot of fiction with the brightly impermanent surfaces of feature journalism. The sort of sentence I tend to fall for has both an instancy and an ultimacy about it—a lone, grave yelp preserved in a kind of epigrammatic casing. Among writers still writing, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, Christine Schutt, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Pamela Ryder and Brian Evenson are practitioners of that type of sentence, the syntax I live for.

Movement is certainly not lacking in your work. Do you find, however, that utilizing complex sentences helps or inhibits the fluid spontaneity of your composition? Or are we not supposed to consider these living, breathing “narratives” per se? I’ve never thought of myself as a storyteller. I don’t think of myself as someone with any stories to tell. Even as a reader and a listener, I don’t care for tales, for yarns. When someone starts telling me a story, I tune in only to the melody, if there is one, or to the quirks and kinks of the vocality. I can’t seem to remember the plots of any of the novels I’ve nosed around inside. There are entire books I’ve reread for the punctuation alone. The motions in my fictions are definitely not narrative motions.

One thing that intrigued me when I first started reading your stories is most have this recurring gender-neutral narration. Could you explain your keenness on keeping such interchangeability with a singular voice in regards to the varied situations you present? Well, a pedant would insist that gender is little more than a phenomenon of grammar, a matter of inflections and the like, and I would have to go along with the pedants on that one. Sexuality is something else altogether, something both lovely and baffling in its indeterminacy. The differences between the sexes—and there seem to be quite a number of sexes—are finally fewer than meet the eye.

You were able on more than a few occasions to study under New York editor-writer Gordon Lish, whose highly meticulous approach to syntax you cite as a key influence. What was his biggest stylistic contribution to Stories? Gordon Lish has had enormous, life-altering effects on almost everyone who has spent even a minute in his vivid presence and been witness to his genius. The writers I named above have all, at one time or another, been taught and edited by Gordon. I count myself lucky to have sat in on his sessions—they could last for seven, eight hours at a stretch—of intricate, aphoristic improvising on the art of composing sentences. He spoke of sentences at the molecular level—or, rather, at the atomic, even subatomic level. The most important of the many lessons he taught me was to tend to the disposition of the merest syllable.

Some of your readers may not know that you currently teach business writing and college composition. Are your students familiar with your work at all? In class, I stick to the subject matter. I never talk about my own writing, and I doubt that, over the years, more than a few students have got wind of it. Anyway, the lessons I try to teach are English lessons, not life lessons. There is much English to have a go at teaching these days.

Thursday, September 21 @ 7pm. Rust Belt Books, 202 Allen Street (885-9535).