A Man for All Seasons, especially Winter: A Conversation with Minnesota Novelist Peter Geye

Interview and Photos by Susan Schaefer

Author Peter Geye upstairs at the Loft Literary Center      

Outside the skies are frothed licorice and ice as mid-morning menaces like midnight. There’s powerful weather brewing.

A perfect time to hold a wide-ranging conversation with my teacher, mentor and friend, author Peter Geye [say ‘guy’], who elevates weather to character status in his latest novel, Wintering, published by New York powerhouse Alfred A. Knopf.

While the summer storm rages we hole up in the Loft Literary Center’s Open Book space, sipping java and reminiscing about our 12-week Loft Master Mondays fiction writing course in the place we first met, then nudging our conversation to what sets the Twin Cities area apart as a world-class writer’s mecca, to the release of his current book, his busy book promotion schedule, and the rigors of being a stay-at-home dad and professional novelist.

Wintering, review copy

His new novel, Wintering, released in early June, is a holy whisper. Perfect summer (or anytime) reading set in the achingly majestic borderlands of Northern Minnesota, Geye's writing is a paean to the complexity and ultimate triumph of the human spirit that is often as much at odds with itself as it is against the forces of nature. Delving deeply into the human psyche, this book mines universal themes in a unique tale of love, loss and revenge traversing decades and points of view, set in a landscape of ancient and menacing wilderness.

Calling Wintering a ‘sister book’ to his award-winning previous two novels, Safe from the Sea and The Lighthouse Road, brightens Geye’s mood. “I like that term,” he approves. (His previous works were not published under the Knopf imprint so the prestigious New York publishing house prefers not to consider ‘the set’ a trilogy.)

Geye mulls the question about why Minnesota lends itself to such a robust literary tradition - why we produce so many outstanding writers.

“There is so much support here,” he motions to our surroundings. “Take the Loft, for instance. There isn’t any institution like this anywhere else in the country. There are lesser versions, but nothing like this in terms of scope and support.”

“And there are the grants. There’s the McKnight Artist Fellowships administered by the Loft.  A Minnesota writer can apply for and win a $25,000 grant. Then, there’s the Minnesota’s Legacy Fund, which is unique. Established as a result of building the Twins’ (baseball team) Stadium, it offers exceptional funding for the arts in Minnesota, and I’ve benefited greatly from these.”

Geye continues, “Minnesota is filled with world class amenities from wild places and water to an astounding array of arts and cultural organizations. When you have this as an artist, you stay,” he emphasizes.

“People go to places like California for the weather. They are here for one hundred plus colleges and universities, a fantastic metropolitan area, theater, culture and so on. And so we end up with an unbelievably rich community of writers,” he concludes.

Speaking of wild places, what about his relationship with the Boundary Waters and North Shore areas that he writes about with such passion, knowledge and authority? 

“I’m a professional visitor,” he laughs. “I didn’t grow up with the cabin and a Northwood’s lifestyle, rather I discovered this area of the world through occasional canoe trips with my dad.”

Assuredly, he has staked that region as his fictional epicenter. Wintering takes the reader through each blade and grove, each cascade and ravine, until we’re literally hovering above, paddling along, or hiking through this mysterious and threatening terrain.

What entrances the reader is the luxury of Wintering’s every line. Geye’s sentences are carved like fine wooden artifacts, meticulously sanded and polished until each is an object worthy of a spotlight on a shelf.

His Knopf editor, Gary Fisketjon, who has redlined the likes of Donna Tartt, Annie Dillard, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff and Jay McInerney, has waxed lyrical about how Geye builds his work “line by line,” and such writing is ecstasy for serious readers. Charlie’s goal was to pillage the wilderness and get rich from the wreckage. This sparse sentence packs Wintering’s villain, Charlie Aas’ lifetime of malfeasance. The book is a cavalcade of such images.

I am typically not a reader of wilderness books or thrillers, nor particularly a fan of Midwestern history. Hailing from the East Coast, I gravitate towards works that blow grit in my eye or existential angst in my chest. But beginning with Geye’s Far from the Sea, I became a convert, opening to tortured frozen landscapes replete with themes of revenge and nature’s conquest. I’ve learned that the crust of ice on melted snow often yields to a deep and soft interior.

Peter Geye leans into Open Book’s iconic staircase 

Just as Geye’s exterior, now all scruffily bearded and slightly unkempt, masks a highly approachable, warm and gracious inner reservoir. Editors, students and fellow writers alike testify to his generosity of spirit, and my personal experience echoes the chorus.

Many might not take Geye for the (soon-to-be-single) primary caregiver father, but he is and will continue to be after his upcoming, amicable divorce. His daily school year routine rotates around his three young ones and he basks in this role of ushering them safely off to school, feeding and getting through homework, story and bedtime.

“I have written literally thousands of words with one or two kids between my legs,” he grins.

Regarding the tough tangle between full-time fatherhood and creating literature, Geye sees writing as his “chance to have life outside my family.”

“When you spend 15 hours a day with kids, no matter how much you love them,” writing books, inventing characters, and having these characters then invent you, is a monumental release.

Geye admits that the regular transition from inhabiting his fictional world back to his real one isn’t always easy. Like an actual family, he experiences a true sense of grief once his books are complete and his characters, his creations, no longer accompany his days and nights. “It’s a resounding sense of loss” as he returns to his real world.

Geye inscribes review copy

Writing in longhand, Geye acknowledges that his writing process doesn’t flow. It’s hard work and he embraces it. He’s a yeoman. Part of his process includes taking those written sheets around with him, reading and rereading, later word processing the longhand, (typically the same night), crafting, editing and re-crafting.

This intense labor shows. As Knopf’s Fisketjon attests – Geye’s work evolves “line by line” with the rare result of producing a literary tour de force “that knocked him sideways” when he first read it.

The character of Berit is Wintering’s touchstone, a rock really, one who may acutely strike women readers by her usual and compelling nature. How did a guy like him channel this iconic female character who is charged with guiding the reader through the unfolding layers of far past, past and present?

“I knew I wanted a narrator who could help navigate the reader through more than one story. It takes more than one story to tell our lives. I tried a few points of view and then wrote 50 pages. It was Berit who I ended up wanting in this role.” He says he became reliant on her in a way he’s “never experienced from a character before. She became my companion. I felt camaraderie. She ended up telling me the story.”

Geye’s character Berit became his companion – his fictional comrade

And so, Geye has unlocked the major feat of great fictional writing, which is when the characters share their story from their point of view with the writer. It is then that a writer surrenders to his/her characters, being freed to create the all-encompassing fictional world – a world where none of life’s daily problems or passions interferes with the reading experience. It is a triumph few achieve.

In this time of dramatic distraction that skill in this book is worth a trip to, or click on, the bookstore, a quiet spot, and a reading journey out of time and mind. Wintering delivers this magic with the punch of summer storm.

Please note: Geye will be teaching the Loft’s Master Mondays course again this fall, as well as an unprecedented one-year novel writing course beginning in January. Check the Loft’s website for more information.

Susan Schaefer can be reached at susan@millcitymedia.org.