Winter Count, 1964
An Interview
with author Stuart Lishan

When we asked Stuart Lishan what he was currently reading, he cited the “wonderful, stylistic” Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus, Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series in The New Yorker entitled “The Climate of Man,” which Lishan calls “depressing as hell,” Kevin Boyle’s National Book Award winning Arc of Justice: A Sage of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, and of course the latest Harry Potter novel.

“I can’t help myself,” says Lishan.  “I’m a Potter junkie.  It’s good couch potato reading.”

Lishan also readily confesses to what many writers of nonfiction would never even whisper.  Sometimes, he says, due to the fact that “all memory is faulty to a certain extent, especially when the memory is forty years old,” he must break with the laws of the nonfiction police and “embellish or just plain invent certain details.”

“But that doesn’t mean I’m not trying as hard as I can to get it ‘right,’” he goes on to say.  “After all, that’s the informal contract that the writer of nonfiction has with his or her dear readers.  And I want to be as good as my word.”

What struck Lishan in the re-imagining of the events that take place in “Winter Count, 1964” was “the deep need for intimacy among these kids, for physical contact, and the hostility and fear of it, as well.  I love the edge and dramatic tension that creates.  Basically, these kids don’t know what to do with these desires.  This piece explores that territory.”

The title of the short short comes from a class Lishan recently taught at Ohio State in the pedagogy of creative writing.

“We were reading a book called The Story in History, by Margaret Fortunato Galt,” Lishan says.  “One of her writing assignments is inspired by a type of oral history, called Winter Counts that were compiled and kept by members of the Dakota tribes.  They’re basically oral calendars in which a particular year in the life of a tribe is marked with a particular memorable event that happened during that year.  I don’t know why that particular scene bubbled up for this year 1964 and not another.”

Finally, when asked what advice he would give to aspiring creative nonfiction writers, Lishan said, “Play around in your writing.  You’ll be more inventive that way and have a good time in the process.  Be disciplined and patient.  Good writing takes time.  It all sounds so reductive boiled down to two or three sentences.  So here’s some advice: Don’t get hung up on advice.  Better to slap your pretty little ass down in a chair and write.  Write.  And then go write some more.”

—Rob Markowski and Josh Lapekas