Contemporary Authors

• Up Up, Down Down - 2018 Scribner, New York

• Cheston Knapp - https://www.chestonknapp.com/about/

  Cheston Knapp is the managing editor of Tin House. With his wife and son, he lives a life of reluctant modesty in Portland, OR.

  Contact

  Publicist

  Kate Lloyd
  Scribner Books
  Kate.Lloyd@simonandschuster.com

  Agent

  Bill Clegg | The Clegg Agency
  156 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1210
  New York, NY 10010
  bill@thecleggagency.com

  Photography Info

  Solo Exhibitions

  2017 Reclamation, Blue Moon Camera & Machine, Portland, OR

  Group Exhibitions

  2018 Reclamation, Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR

• Creative Nonfiction - https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-only/work-itself-home

  The Work Itself Is a Home
  A conversation with Cheston Knapp
  Kaylee Ritchie
  Cheston Knapp is managing editor of Tin House. His book Up Up, Down Down, a collection of essays, is forthcoming from Scribner in February 2018. With his wife and son, he lives a life of reluctant modesty in Portland, OR.

  At the upcoming 2017 Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference, Knapp will participate in three panel discussions: “Finding A Publisher that Cares About Your Book,” “Ask a Book Editor,” and “Literary Magazines from A-Z.”

  We asked Cheston Knapp about how he came to land his position as the managing editor at Tin House, to describe what makes a creative nonfiction piece stand out, and for advice on having work published in a literary magazine.

  CNF: You’re the managing editor of a very well-respected literary magazine, but also a writer. How did you get into editing? And what path did you take to get to where you are today professionally?

  KNAPP: I was hired as an intern at Tin House … sheesh, more than a decade ago now. At the time I had designs on going to graduate school, corralling myself into that safe institutional stable, but jobs kept opening up here. First I worked as the assistant for the workshop we run every summer in Portland, then I became the director, and, during that time, I was also pinch-hitting for the magazine, working as a sort of editorial mercenary. Staff-wise, Tin House is pretty small, and almost everyone wears several different professional hats. I found that I really enjoyed working on stories and essays, and, in some ways, I consider those early editing years a kind of apprenticeship—I was learning the ropes, only I was lucky enough to be learning them while working with some of our nation's best writers. I labored over everything that came my way, sure each time that the writer was going to figure out that I was a clueless doofus. They all do, of course, but no one has yet told my boss, Win McCormack, without whose largesse Tin House wouldn't exist. Then the managing editor position opened up, and now here I am. I often think about that early desire to outfit myself with a writerly certificate, a degree in linguistic prowess. I'm always wondering whether I would've produced more of my own work had I gone that route. But I'm also pretty sure that if I'd gone that route I wouldn't have the job I have now, maybe not any job at all, who knows, so whatever—bird in hand.

  CNF: What’s your day-to-day like at Tin House?

  KNAPP: It changes depending on where we are in production and what I have going on. Pretty much for every job I answer a slurry of mind-dulling emails in the morning and try not to read the news, and then, around noon, when I'm so horrified and depressed by all the news I've failed not to read, I go for lunch—typically a modest salad and a piece of fruit, but also really more typically some beefy sandwich with extra calories that makes Future Cheston's heart hurt a little—and then maybe I'll send out some contracts or rejections depending on my mood and the day of the week. Or maybe I'll have to talk to our circulation folks about the upcoming direct mail campaign or the previous month's subscriber and renewal rates. Other times I'll edit a story by someone as tummy-rumbling-ly accomplished as Karen Russell or Adam Johnson or Anthony Doerr or, one time, Alice "Queen Bee" Munro, and I'll procrastinate and blame the extra calories for my fearful hebetude and try to rationalize my decision to lie upon one of the couches in the office and just read.

  CNF: What characteristics do you think make a creative nonfiction essay exceptional? What are you looking for when considering work for publication in Tin House?

  KNAPP: I can't tell, does this site have infinite scroll? Because I sorta think I could go on about that long. Whole books have been written that attempt to answer this question! Exceptional essays can look as different as exceptional people. So many brilliant minds have worked at cracking the nuts of their identities through essays and maybe that's a good enough place to start: an exceptional essay, for me, is always in some way about the manifoldly complicated pronoun "I." Content doesn't matter so much for me, in other words. Give me first the writer's voice, his or her stylistic pluck and stutters, and let all the other chips fall where they may.

  CNF: Can you give any advice to writers who may be looking to find a home for their work? (This does not have to be specific to Tin House, but it could be)

  KNAPP: I'm afraid I don't have any unique or special advice that one doesn't already hear at writing conferences: read the journals you're submitting to, familiarize yourself with the literary landscape, gird yourself for a relentless surging cataract of rejection, be a good literary citizen, etc. But I will say that I think we tend to put too much emphasis on publication, so much so that it can corrupt the work. I've seen it happen. I mean, even the way we talk about it is fraught—find a home for the work. You should feel it in your bones—that the work itself is a home. And the more work it does—even attempts to do—the more it will feel like a home and the more other people might want to come over for tea and, I don't know, whatever a crumpet is.

  CNF: Can you talk a little bit about the submission/editorial process works at Tin House?

  KNAPP: Sure thing—how familiar are you with the concept of a lottery? Just kidding! There are six of us on the magazine's editorial board, and we all read the stuff that comes our way, whether through agents or the slush or soliciting writers we admire. Each week we send the best of what we've read around to the others and, on Wednesday mornings, we discuss and vote on them. Majority rules, although it very rarely comes to that. One of the things that I like about Tin House is the communal vibe. Since it's put together by six different tastes, it's more likely to provide something for every reader to enjoy. Or that's the idea, at least.

  CNF: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned about publishing, either as a writer or as an editor?

  KNAPP: It's probably something as seemingly simple as how little one has to do with the other. Yes, editors publish writers, but publishing has its own odd exigencies—an agenda ill-suited to the headspace one needs to produce work that, only by an inscrutable and miraculous magic, doesn't suck so hard it chokes. My advice if you're writing with publishing in mind: don't. Save yourself the heartache and an editor the headache.

  CNF: You’ve put together a collection called Up Up, Down Down, forthcoming from Scribner in February 2018. Can you tell us a little bit about the collection?

  KNAPP: There are seven essays in the book, and they all circle questions of identity and authenticity. There's this choice soundbite from Coleridge that I really love, and it more or less sums the project up: "Oh me! that being what I have been I should be what I am." How can I be all the people I've been? Each essay sort of tilts at a previous iteration of myself, a former identity. So there's an essay about attending adult skateboarding camp that's also about nostalgia and my having been a semi-serious skater growing up. There's an essay about beer pong and my brief time in a fraternity. And there’s an essay about UFOlogists and having grown up in the church. Content-wise, they're sort of all over the place, really.

  And, I didn't know this was going to be a book. I wrote three of the pieces and found that they had a sort of family resemblance. Then I wrote another and found that it, too, fit, if obliquely, with the others. With those four in hand I thought, oh fuck, not this, anything but this. It wants to be a book. All at once I was saddled with an inchoate collection of linked-ish essays. Out the door, with remarkable celerity, flew all my wildest dreams of bestsellerdom. Anyhoo, I wrote three more essays and as I did, I was conscious of the thematic resonances and little echoes throughout. The book represents six years of work, but most of that happened over the last two and a half.

  CNF: Do you have any final words for the conference attendees, or for other practicing writers of creative nonfiction, who will be reading this interview?

  KNAPP: Given the staggering self-important prolixity of my earlier answers, I'm pretty sure the only person who'll make it this far is my mom. Hi, Mom! Did you ever find my high school diploma? If some other hapless soul has hung on, I'll leave them with this canapé from Valéry that I've been coming back to: “It seems to me that every mortal possesses, very nearly at the center of his mechanism, and well placed among the instruments for navigating his life, a tiny apparatus of incredible sensitivity which indicates the state of his self-respect. There we read whether we admire ourselves, adore ourselves, despise ourselves, or should blot ourselves out; and some living pointer, trembling over the secret dial, flickers with terrible nimbleness between the zero of a beast and the maximum of a god."

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Print Marked Items
Knapp, Cheston: UP UP, DOWN DOWN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Knapp, Cheston UP UP, DOWN DOWN Scribner (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 2, 6 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6102-5
Tin House managing editor Knapp debuts with a collection of essays that attempt to balance highbrow and
lowbrow elements.
In "Faces of Pain," the author and a photographer attend a wrestling event held at the Portland Lion's Club,
where he "saw so many incredible things I almost couldn't believe my eyes." "Beirut" is an existential
reflection on beer pong and the author's frat-house 20s. "Mysteries We Live With" is an investigation into
true-believer UFO subculture mixed with stories of the author's own Christian upbringing. Most of the
essays flow with self-deprecating charm, but Knapp often trips over his own wordiness and unnecessarily
complicated verbiage. In the 90-page concluding essay, "Something's Gotta Stick," the author recounts his
days at an adult skateboarding camp, lost in nostalgia while hunting for affirmation that would "clarify my
relationship to my past, and, in so doing, help me lean into the future as if it were a headwind." Knapp sees
stories everywhere, committed to a belief that the lives around him are each their own unwritten memoirs.
While a curious, self-conscious take on memoir, Knapp's essays are often overwrought. The prolix
"Neighborhood Watch" is a story of gentrification and the intersection of neighboring lives in the aftermath
of a local man's murder. The author ponders, again, "the vital and vivifying mystery" of life, that another
person's existence can be so different yet "so close to where the epic drama of your own life is set." "Why
can't I get out of my own way?" he asks in one essay. "Seems I'm always getting caught in the sticky wicket
of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story's being told. Overaware that a story's being told. My
default mode tends to be this one of narration, meaning, roughly, that an experience doesn't really become
'real' for me until it's prosed." These essays, often about trying to be stories we're not, are carried by Knapp's
struggle toward self-acceptance.
A writer's up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Knapp, Cheston: UP UP, DOWN DOWN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A516024457/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=57a239db.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A516024457
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Up Up, Down Down: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
264.41 (Oct. 9, 2017): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Up Up, Down Down: Essays
Cheston Knapp. Scribner, $25 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-5011-6102-5
From the first page, Tin House editor Knapp's roundhouse, fullmouthed style takes a firmly tongue-in-cheek
approach to the existential crises of male maturity for the millennial generation. College drinking games,
UFO hunting, wrestling, tennis, and skateboarding prove platforms for launching Knapp 's mind-stretching
reveries on literary influence (notably, in his case, by David Foster Wallace), nostalgia, identity, and
adulthood. Threaded with the theme of "authenticity" and haunted by paternal loss, Knapp 's philosophizing
is kept lively by exuberant and sometimes acerbically funny descriptions, as of the "oniony-ripe academic
BO" given off by Harold Bloom's prose. Meanwhile, his ingrained empathy for others, as when he reacts
with horrified embarrassment to a young woman's public bathing-suit malfunction, rescues his personal
reflections from the trap of navel-gazing, "the sticky wicket of self-consciousness." The real subject
throughout is language--Knapp observes that "to learn to say something is to learn to see it" and that
experiences don't become real for him until they're "all dolled up in the dinner jacket of syntax"--and his
exuberant joy in its music, which comes through in long Latinate sentences and jaw-cracking multisyllabic
words (readers may find themselves looking up "borborygmic" or "desuetude"). This intelligent take on
coming-of-age deserves to be widely read, if only for its effortless-seeming form and its expression of how
style and content are irrevocably intertwined. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Up Up, Down Down: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 9 Oct. 2017, p. 53. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A511293343/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b0be3ad.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A511293343

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/books/review/cheston-knapp-up-up-down-down.html
  Word count: 1479

  BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
  When It Comes to Writing, Cheston Knapp Is His Own Harshest Critic
  By MICHAEL IAN BLACKFEB. 23, 2018

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  Credit Alain Pilon
  UP UP, DOWN DOWN
  By Cheston Knapp
  Illustrated. 310 pp. Scribner. $25.

  One question returns again and again in “Up Up, Down Down,” the debut collection of essays by Cheston Knapp, the managing editor of the Portland, Ore.-based literary magazine Tin House. It’s a question we all ask ourselves from time to time, when life’s perplexing circumstances threaten to overwhelm our capacity for wise decision-making or basic coping mechanisms: “Why can’t I seem to get out of my own way?” Knapp poses the quandary in various forms across the collection’s low-rent landscape of semi-professional wrestling outfits, frat parties, water parks, skateboard camp and ufology. It’s an inquiry that nearly derails the entire book.

  We all struggle with how to deal with our shortcomings, but few of us seem as comfortably wrapped in the question’s delicious, pig-in-a-blanket anxiety as Knapp, whose perpetual handwringing serves as the book’s unfocused narrative spine. He begins a compelling chapter about a neighborhood murder with the caveat that he, the storyteller, will probably mess it up: “Seems I’m always getting caught in the sticky wicket of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story’s being told. Overaware that a story’s being told.” I found it hard to maintain much confidence in the writer if he did not trust himself enough to tell his own story. It felt a little like being led into a cave by a spelunker telling me, with a shrug and a smile, that I might not make it back.

  In another essay, Knapp uses his own flailing attempts to imitate Roger Federer on his neighborhood tennis courts to deconstruct his journey from aspiring reader and writer to literary Reader and Writer. To this end, he invokes David Foster Wallace’s own reaction to the athlete (in a profile written, incidentally, for The Times), and predictably treats the author as a saint: “I don’t refer to Wallace as anything but Wallace. Not by the publishing world’s freight train, ‘David Foster Wallace,’ and not by the hipster … acronym ‘DFW.’ And certainly not ‘David,’ or, worse, ‘Dave.’” Over the course of the essay, Knapp outfits himself not only in the same clothes Federer wears but also in the pretensions of a capital-w “Writer” friend named James who lives next door to him in college. Knapp admires this man as “part Cool Older Brother and part Reclusive Genius,” whose apartment “was for me the prototypical locus of writerly divination.” It seems he’s also, unfortunately, assumed Wallace’s penchant for obscure verbiage and discursive asides.

  Knapp feels himself a fraud among such men, which might make for a satisfying and funny read about the impossible expectations we all set for ourselves, but instead the author turns abstruse, spending several pages discussing the literary critic Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, which even to Knapp “smells of oniony-ripe academic B.O.”

  Photo

  It is a perfect illustration of getting in one’s own way, as if Knapp feels he has to prove his literary bona fides before we’ll take him seriously as a writer. Not so. He had me at hello. His very first sentences are so good and specific that I felt myself to be in capable hands from the start: “Bell time for the Keizer Klash was 7:30 p.m., sharp, and Scott and I had arrived early according to plan. … It was October and already dark out and G.P.S. directed us down the kind of driveway I thought only existed in horror movies — murdersome’s the word.” He’s a terrifically descriptive writer, particularly when illuminating the banal suburban world around him. So, in his best passages, we get the Christian men’s group called Promise Keepers, who “weep and wave their arms together like reefs of sea anemones.” We get a neighbor with “astonished blond hair.” We get his admission, following a mortifying teenage nip slip in the wave pool at Splashdown Harbor, that “an involuntary and maybe autistic part of me immediately gauges the breast’s firmness and heft, cross-references the diameter and hue of the areola and indexes the ambitious nubbin of its nipple.”

  It’s all so precise and laugh-inducing that I found myself wanting to smack the guy across the top of the head when, a couple pages after introducing me to D.O.A.’s professional wrestlers — one dubbed “The Plus-Sized Playboy,” whose “face paint smacked of the Insane Clown Posse,” and the other, “Dr. Kliever,” who “lists his weight as ‘242 lbs of surgical steel and sex appeal’” — Knapp goes on a numbing tangent about the “phenomenological conundrum” that arises out of the various kinds of human experience, and how the Germans distinguish among them using the terms Erlebnis and Erfahrung. C’mon, dude!

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  The book’s bipolar disorder feels rooted in the author’s own insecurity about being Somebody to Be Taken Seriously. Growing up as the son of a devout and domineering Christian father, Knapp captained his high school lacrosse team and participated in the worst excesses of collegiate Greek life before discovering literature, at which point he becomes a student with “wispy intuitions that haunt the mind” and who dreams of “having one’s name burnished on a syllabus, to finally and at long last be studied oneself.” He’s being slightly self-mocking here — self-aware enough to understand his own pretensions but seemingly unable to let his own good writing speak for itself without having to demonstrate his mastery over the entire Western canon.

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  That said, some of his self-flagellation is quite funny, as when he recounts a journal entry from his freshman year at college. “Observe my inchoate insight: ‘I finished Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” It was an interesting short story that I thought contained many underlying meanings and themes.’” Ha!

  But “Up Up, Down Down” truly soars when it relates life as it is actually lived, and not as it is weighed against the author’s ideas about what a writer’s life should be — for example when describing a local eccentric who becomes a murder victim in the essay “Neighborhood Watch,” or when Knapp hilariously finds himself the only grown-up at a skateboard camp he understood would be filled with people his own age: “I am thus far the only adult to show up to Session 2’s Adult Skateboard Camp. I am 31 years old and some fast math tells me I’m technically old enough to be every other skate camper’s dad.”

  Cheston Knapp may never be another David Foster Wallace, or “Dave,” as I call him. That’s O.K. He has his own voice, an authentic voice worth developing and savoring. He need not worry, as he does — constantly — that “concerns about … authenticity grow out of our awareness of and sensitivity to phonies and fakes.” Knapp is neither of the above, nor is he a realized enough writer to trust his own stuff. Not yet, anyway. He will be, if only he can get out of his own way.

  Michael Ian Black is an actor and comedian. His most recent book is “Navel Gazing.”

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  A version of this review appears in print on February 25, 2018, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: His Own Worst Enemy. Today's Paper|Subscribe