The thing Brock Clarke has always liked about fiction, he says, is that it enables you to do something with material that no one else would ever bother with or even think of.
Take, for example, the premise that Lawrence Welk—the accordion-playing TV host from the 1960s and ’70s, whom Clarke loves “unironically”—returns from heaven to run for governor of North Dakota.
Or consider a tale where the protagonist is slowly choking to death, literally and figuratively, on a frozen burrito.
Then there’s the one about the former administrator of post-liberation Iraq who ends up a youth ski instructor in Vermont.
These are all scenarios from some of the nine “tragicomic” short stories featured in Clarke’s latest work, Special Election, published this month by Acre Books/University of Chicago Press.
“The stories in the book are linked by the idea of people trying to find unusual solutions to grindingly usual problems—problems that are so familiar as to seem depressingly futile,” says the A. Leroy Greason Professor of English. “My idea was to see what unusual thing I could do to make these problems seem not quite so predetermined.”
More than half the stories in Special Election were written during the pandemic lockdown, says Clarke, “when I had all this time, but a limited attention span for some reason.” That limited attention span meant putting aside the novel he was working on at the time to concentrate on the shorter form.
“A novel is more about plot and a sense of long-term planning, whereas, typically, I think about short stories in terms of pattern. It's easier to deal with pattern if you're having a hard time thinking expansively.”
Clarke had not originally planned to produce a book of short stories, he says, but by the time he had written six or seven of them, he “became aware of a commonality of feel, sensibility, and style emerging.” By the time he had written the final story, it felt like the collection was complete, “although I didn't really know that until I had written it.”
Clarke teaches fiction writing at Bowdoin, which mostly means short story composition, although he does currently have a couple of students working on novels. “I tell my students that, if you’re writing a story, there’s usually a moment where it goes wrong and you can sort of see it when you look back. So, I encourage them to go back to the moment before things went wrong and then say ‘OK what if I did the opposite? What if I had this character do this thing instead of that?’ It’s just an endless process of trying something different.”
For his next project, Clarke has returned to the novel he was originally working on when the pandemic struck. He’s fairly tight-lipped on details for now, other than to say that it will be a piece of historical fiction set during the last century.
Brock Clarke is widely regarded as one of America’s gifted comic writers. “Clarke’s disquieting, droll work reflects humanity like a dark fun house mirror,” says Publishers Weekly, while, according to The Washington Post, he “creates books that taste like delicious cuts absurdity marbled with erudition.”
