Writer Takes Non-Novel Approach

As a graduate student in UC Irvine’s Program in Writing, Jay Gummerman was encouraged by some to write a novel rather than short stories. Publishers, conventional wisdom has it, are not particularly interested in story collections.

And it’s especially difficult to sell a collection of stories that have never appeared in print elsewhere, either in popular magazines or literary quarterlies.

The San Clemente short story writer has proved conventional wisdom wrong.

Gummerman’s collection of 10 such stories, “We Find Ourselves in Moontown,” has just been published by Knopf ($16.95). A reviewer for the New York Times, praising Gummerman’s “ear for the absurdities of contemporary speech, combined with his eye for the eccentric detail,” calls the book “by turns funny and disturbing, weird and recognizable. . . . ‘We Find Ourselves in Moontown’ marks the debut of an immensely gifted writer.”

“I’ll take that,” Gummerman, 31, said with a laugh this week, still basking in the glow of his first book review. “I’m very happy.”

Gummerman will do a reading and sign copies of his book beginning at 2 p.m. today at Fahrenheit 451 book store in Laguna Beach, 509 S. Coast Highway. He will also do a reading at UCI Irvine at 1 p.m. Wednesdayin the Babb Writing Center, Humanities Building, Room 126.

Gummerman’s offbeat stories are set in the new American Far West--from Reno to Oregon to Southern California. It’s a world populated with an odd assortment of characters that includes an aging, one-armed Little League umpire, a grade-school teacher who is involved with the pregnant mother of one of his students and the narrator of the title story, who is “perilously adrift in the Reno night.”

Gummerman, who earned his MFA degree in fiction from UCI in 1988, wrote all but two of the stories during the 3 years it took him to complete the 2-year writing program and finish his thesis. (Students are given a choice of either writing a novel or doing a collection of stories.)

Gummerman credits his friend and former UCI writing workshop member, novelist Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”), with helping him gain a literary toehold in New York.

“He really liked my work,” Gummerman said, “so he recommended me to his editor and his editor recommended me to an agent. So then it went from there.”

Last Spring literary agent Joy Harris of the Lantz Office in New York City agreed to represent Gummerman. He has since recommended two other writers from his former UCI writing workshop to Harris--Michelle Latiolais and Louis B. Jones, whose first novels will be published next year.

While such recommendations help a writer to at least “not be part of a slush pile,” Gummerman concedes that they offer no more than a foot in the door. In fact, he said, he’s averaging about “50-50” with other writers he has recommended to his agent.

The Whittier-born Gummerman began writing plays and short stories during his undergraduate days at Cal State Humboldt, from which he graduated in 1980 as a business administration major with an emphasis in computers.

He worked full-time as a computer programmer for 5 years--”I was writing at night and I was very tired all the time”--before entering the UCI Program in Writing in 1985.

Novelist Oakley Hall, director of the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at UCI, “was very encouraging,” Gummerman said, despite the odds against having a collection of short stories published. “He told me I should just keep doing stories.”

In a separate interview, Hall said: “He’s not only a good short story writer, he knows more about short stories than anybody I know. He’s read everything.” Hall describes Gummerman’s writing style as “very distinctive, kind of whimsical but with sort of a dark side to it.”

Although none of the stories in Gummerman’s book has appeared in print before, it’s not for a lack of trying. Over the years, he sent his stories to “all kinds of magazines”--from the New Yorker and Esquire to the Paris Review and a host of small literary quarterlies. But, as he put it: “No cigar.”

His only previously published short story appeared in the Chicago Review in 1983 and does not appear in “We Find Ourselves in Moontown.”

Gummerman said the stories in his collection are not drawn directly from personal experience.

“None of the stories are, strictly speaking, autobiographical but it seems like a lot of elements are certainly things I’ve witnessed,” he said. “I tend to write the things that draw my attention to them, but I don’t know why.”

Gummerman said he didn’t have a title for his book when he sent it to his agent, but he wound up using the title of one of his stories. In the title story, a vacationing Oakland security guard named Keepnews meets a sailor at the Reno Airport and they end up driving into the night, into a barren and anonymous desert landscape that resembles the surface of the moon.

The moon metaphor seemed to fit the other stories in the collection. “All the characters seem to be in sort of what I’d call a Moontown: a place where the excess stimuli they’ve been experiencing has been stripped away and it’s just this landscape,” Gummerman said.

While many authors refuse to discuss the size of their advances, Gummerman has no such qualms. He received a $10,000 advance for “Moontown.” With a laugh, he said: “That seemed good to me. From not expecting any of it, I’ll take what I get.” He also has sold the paperback rights to Vintage and foreign rights have been sold to England, Germany and Italy. “I think,” he said, “I’m up to a little under $50,000” for the book.

Gummerman currently teaches composition labs at UCI and devotes full time to writing. His wife, Kelly, is an assistant city planner for Huntington Beach.

The author, who is currently working on a new short story, has no intention of turning to novels.

“I think short stories leave more to the reader’s imagination. They also tend to have subtler effects. You get the feeling of something in one sitting. There’s a different kind of satisfaction with a novel. I tend to think the short stories are more elliptical and suggestive and I like the open-ended feeling.”

Gummerman, who admires the short stories of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and John Cheever, is unable to describe his own writing style, which has been praised variously in book jacket blurbs for its “precise detail,” “sure-footed whimsy” and “humor.”

“I think it’s humor masking sadness,” he said. “I don’t know. . . . If the writing’s any good, (it) speaks for itself. You can’t really give a fortune cookie description of it without sounding hokey.”