Interview with David Oppegaard, author of The Suicide Collectors

The Soulless Machine Review interviews David Oppegaard, author of the upcoming debut novel, The Suicide Collectors, available in December 2008.

Here are a few options for pre-ordering:

Powell’s Books: The Suicide Collectors
St. Martin's Press: The Suicide Collectors
Amazon: The Suicide Collectors

You can hear an audio clip of the novel by going to the official site: The Suicide Collectors.

Twin Cities Book Tour Dates:

12/12/08 - Hamline University

2/23/09 - Edina Community Library

I first meet David Oppegaard in Core, a first year MFA requirement for students at Hamline University. David stood out like a sore thumb in that class. He had the kind of passion and drive necessary to carry something like a novel through the writer’s hell of full-time automaton wage-slave, got-to-put-food-on-the-table days.

In celebration, I would like to pimp his book, which I have yet to read. I will buy a copy, just like everyone else, in the hope that I can add a few royalty pennies to his author jar.

If you have time after reading this, check out his personal blog: Deep Thoughts With Blogagaard

The Interview:

SMR: So, The Suicide Collectors will be your first published novel. If you had to sell it to me in 30 seconds, what would you tell me about it?

DO: The Suicide Collectors is a combination of horror, literary, and speculative fiction. Five years after suicide plague has culled 90% of the earth’s population, a man named Norman travels across a wild and dangerous America to find a cure.

SMR: I remember you saying you had written several practice novels. What is a practice novel, and how did they help you grow as a writer?

DO: I think you need to write a lot when you’re starting out as a fiction writer. At least, I did. Surgeons don’t start out operating on live patients; they use cadavers. Writing novels that I knew probably would never see the light of day was my way of honing my work until I had something living to work with.

SMR: Why an MFA in Writing?

DO: I got an MFA in Writing so that I could be part of a literary community and to also get more critical feedback of my work. It suited my purposes admirably.

SMR: What are your feelings about workshops?

DO: They’re exhausting. They can either be helpful, or make you never look at your story again. Eventually, as you develop your voice and your particular sensibility, you move beyond needing an entire group’s help and start leaning on only one or two voices to help you with your work, and that’s a good thing.

SMR: Why suicide? What are your thoughts about David Foster Wallace (and Kurt Cobain)?

DO: I set out to write an apocalyptic novel with a new twist, and I’d never heard of any book with a suicide plague before. DFW was a troubled and complex mind and he obviously got tired of dealing with the pain. I think Kurt Cobain might have been better off never becoming famous at all, which is the sort of paradox that boggles the fame-obsessed American mind. I was always more of a Soundgarden and Pearl Jam guy myself.

SMR: When you are breathing life into your characters, where do you pull from?

DO: Mostly from all the voices inside my head. They just won’t shut up.

SMR: Are you involved in any literary organizations? Local or otherwise?

DO: No. I just get The New Yorker.

SMR: When you write, do you read other books?

DO: Yes. I write almost every day, so if I never read when I write One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish would have been my last book.

SMR: I read on your blog that you read Ulysses over the summer. What, if anything, did you learn about fiction from reading it?

DO: I appreciated the book and all the intellectual fireworks, but the entire time I read it I got the feeling that Joyce was trying too hard to show how smart he was and the story suffered because of it. It was interesting to see so many point of view styles mashed into one book, however.

SMR: What’s next for David Oppegaard?

DO: I’m finishing up my second novel Wormwood, Nevada. It’s set in a small town in central Nevada where a meteor lands and shakes things up. It will also be released through St. Martin’s Press, either late in 2009 or early in 2010.