An Hour With David Vann

Written by Naomi Bisley

A family history tarnished with six suicides and a murder sounds so similar to a Shakespearean tragedy it’s enough to drive anyone to write. Such is David Vann’s background.

Before the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival's An Hour with David Vann, I had no knowledge of the man behind the work. My expectations of him were chiselled from his latest and most popular books, Legend of a Suicide and Caribou Island, which fictionalise his past with subtlety and dark humour.

I’m lucky enough now to have spent a chunk of my Sunday with David Vann in conversation Bill Manhire, and from what I can tell, the feeling of luck is mutual. Vann spends his introduction thanking us the readers, thanking the festival, thanking Manhire, thanking New Zealand. The formidable ‘David Vann’ who I had dreamed up, was supplanted by this generous character, genuinely grateful we would pick up his book, let alone fill a theatre to hear him speak. 

Vann describes his writing as the redemption of his past, giving the most terrible events a second chance at resolution. Legend of a Suicide is a series of linked short stories featuring Roy, whose father, in the wake of a failing marriage and career, shoots himself in the head on the deck of his boat. In the story Roy is living in Alaska with his father. It parallels Vann’s own life; at 13 his father shot himself while he was on the phone to Vann’s step mother, two weeks after Vann refused to join him in Alaska.

“What’s great about fiction is that everything refers to the protagonist, everything is fully meaningful. I’m writing to my father, writing questions I have for my father. He shot himself with a .44 magnum, a gun used for hunting bears. My sister and I loving him should have been enough for him to stick around. I still don’t understand it.”

Vann talks as he writes; fearlessly and honestly, even on a stage with an audience of 200. “If the guns weren’t available, I believe he wouldn’t be dead. He might have thought twice if he had to bludgeon himself to death, guns are just too easy.” 

He refers to a line from Legend of a Suicide, “Absurdity is all that makes grief bearable”.  There’s something truly absurd about a family whose past is fraught with such loss and madness.

Continuing this omnipresent theme, Vann reads from his book, Caribou Island, where a mother describes to her daughter finding her own mother’s body hanging from the rafters. To hear the writer speak what he has written, in the way he has intended it to be read, is a very special thing. Although I had read it several times, to hear it from the author was to have new life breathed into it.

Manhire talks further with Vann about the reference of characters to the landscape.

“Wilderness is a bare stage; a lot of people go to Alaska to escape but all you find is yourself. Describing the landscape will tell us about the relationships between the characters and puts immense pressure on them. The landscapes shift to make the character, from literal to figurative, ‘not stone but fear’.”

Vann sets characters in a space, and the space is instrumental in what happens to them. He describes his writing as unconscious- he doesn’t have plans for it. His characters are confined to that moment; there are no distractions- what better place to set the scene than in Alaska.

“Growing up in Alaska, I always felt like I was being hunted. The wilderness is alive; it’s not static ever… whatever feeling you have been trying to relinquish, when you go into nature it’s amplified.”

Vann is in the midst of writing another book about his mother’s family. He confesses that he doesn’t think his mother or aunty will ever speak to him again, and he says with complete confidence, “I am willing to give up my family for writing. A writer is the worst thing that could happen to a family- if they didn’t want me to write, maybe they shouldn’t have done so many bad things. I’m not going to stop, I’m not going to edit, I’m not writing to win friends.”

Vann has been described as making “Hemmingway seem sugary”, he’s been compared to the likes of Cormac McCarthy yet he is so humble and generous you wouldn’t think he is an award winning writer.