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WORK TITLE: Into That Good Night
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PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Texas State University, M.F.A.
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CAREER
Educator, editor, musician, and author. Texas State University, writing teacher.
WRITINGS
Newfound, editor-in-chief. Also contributor to Bull: Men’s Fiction and Entropy Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Levis Keltner earns a living through teaching and a variety of creative activities. More specifically, he works at Texas State University as a teacher, at Newfound as its editor-in-chief, and as a musician and author. Bull: Men’s Fiction and Entropy Magazine have both published some of Keltner’s written pieces. He has also penned a full-length novel: Into That Good Night.
“Into that Good Night is very much the story of a group, and a roaming close point-of-view felt like the only way to make every kid’s fears and dreams and desires authentic and to spark understanding from the reader,” explained Keltner to an interviewer on the Entropy website. He added: “Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse was a huge inspiration and resource in this regard.” On TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog, Levis told another interviewer: “I hope readers find the group’s outlook as refreshing as I did and fall in love with at least one of these unlikely and tragic heroes.”
The focus of the book lies mainly with a character by the name of John H. Walker and his group of friends. John has made a name for himself throughout his middle school through his aptitude for sports. However, John’s world has recently been shaken by a serious illness. John has been diagnosed with cancer, and his prognosis is terminal. Yet John isn’t the only one to be disturbed by this news about his health; the rest of the town and his school are all processing John’s fate in their own ways. One boy, Doug Horolez, copes with the news by branding John with a new nickname: “Dead Man Walker.” It is Doug’s point of view that frames the entirety of the book.
Eventually, the two boys come to bond, both with each other as well as several other classmates—but what draws them together isn’t John and his illness. Rather, one of their other classmates is suddenly found dead just on the outskirts of their small community. The cause of death is murder, inflicted by numerous stab wounds. The victim is identified as Erika Summerson, and while the community reels over the loss of her, Doug is especially affected. He has harbored feelings for Emily, Erika’s sister, for quite some time. Because of this, he takes it upon himself to try and get to the bottom of her death and who could have been behind it. Doug is soon joined by John and several other students who knew and loved Erika; their quest leads them back to the woods where her body was originally discovered. It is there that they hunt for any sign of evidence. Yet by taking it upon themselves to crack the case of Erika’s murder, the group manages to land themselves in further trouble. They soon discover that someone else is after them—someone who has no intention of letting them find out the truth, and who has had their eye on them all throughout their search. The group’s investigation also leads them down the road to several other gruesome discoveries. Over time, the group’s sleuthing takes on a more mystical approach, as John takes up more spiritual means to try and uncover the truth. The group latches on to John’s attempts at divination, hoping this will give them better means to a more satisfying end. “As a coming-of-age novel, it also falls short, given the dullness of Doug’s adolescent struggles,” remarked one Publishers Weekly reviewer. Other reviewers gave more positive reactions. On the Conflict of Interest website, Thao Votang wrote: “As a debut novelist, Keltner’s plot complexity, juggling of the number of characters, and wonderfully lush descriptions are all impressive.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2018, review of Into That Good Night, p. 73.
ONLINE
Conflict of Interest, http://conflictofinteresttx.com/ (August 16, 2018), Thao Votang, review of Into That Good Night.
Entropy, https://entropymag.org/ (June 19, 2018), Shannon Perri, “‘Authorship is as slippery as selfhood—we’re all coauthors of each other in some way, no?’: An Interview With Levis Keltner,” author interview.
Levis Keltner website, http://leviskeltner.com (August 23, 2018), author profile.
TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog, http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/ (April 30, 2018), author interview.
Levis Keltner is a writer, musician, editor, and educator from Chicago and living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT. His short work has appeared in Entropy Magazine and Bull: Men's Fiction. He is the editor-in-chief of Newfound and teaches writing at Texas State University.
“Authorship is as slippery as selfhood—we’re all coauthors of each other in some way, no?”: An Interview With Levis Keltner
written by Guest Contributor June 19, 2018
About five and half years ago, I was applying to MFA programs and headed to my first AWP conference. In the airport on our way to Seattle, a friend introduced me to Levis Keltner, writer, Editor-in-Chief of Newfound, and graduate of the Texas State MFA program. I think I asked him a million questions that day, and he so generously answered them all. As his first novel, Into That Good Night, debuts, it’s an honor to question him once again. His responses, as always, are illuminating.
Shannon Perri: Your works have killer openings. For instance, your recent essay, “Resting His Eyes,” published here in Entropy Magazine, starts:
“Joe taught me about special effects, how the horror of a horror movie is fiction. The head blown off with a shotgun is a watermelon placed on a mannequin’s neck. The zombie-chewed shoulder is latex, cotton balls, and makeup. To get me to lower my hands and look, my grandpa explained these nightmares as tricks, technical feats plus imagination.”
Brilliant! And your novel begins: “Without the Summerson girl, we might never have recovered from the tragedy of young John Walker. The winter after his diagnosis, she was found stabbed to death in the woods outside of town.”
So captivating. What is your process/philosophy on ensnaring the reader from the get-go?
Levis Keltner: First off, thank you so much for interviewing me and for the kind words about the opening paragraphs. In their first drafts, neither story started as they appear here. These sections came during later revisions and were shuffled to the beginning.
Growing up, my father was the most amazing storyteller. Though he had only a fifth-grade education, he had a way of talking, a rhythm and a tone that got people to listen, confident in that, wherever his story went, it would deliver a punch. I aspire to emulate him in these oral history-style starts that allow a reader to sink comfortably into the dream of the story.
SP: In the referenced essay about your grandfather, Joe, you write: “I don’t think Joe ever expected me to write about him. He wouldn’t be too happy with my portrayal, eulogized as anything but a generous man loved by his friends and family. And maybe he would goad me to hit him as hard as I could.”
Your words made me think about how the goal of writing is to hit as hard as possible, to get at a truth. Do you find this “hard-hitting” more challenging in nonfiction versus fiction?
LK: Well said! Then I wonder what it means for a piece to hit hard. Are we talking verisimilitude? Whether a subjective human experience is rendered authentically enough? In fiction, there’s this feeling—right?—of peeling back a character’s many layers to expose the marrow of a story to readers. In application, it’s more like painting—broad strokes first, then finer and finer strokes over a series of drafts.
For me, this hitting hard in nonfiction wasn’t much different, but the process was longer and more personal.
After my racist, alcoholic grandpa died, I honestly didn’t feel much—little grief, little nostalgia, little loss. That was the story of draft one. I remember showing the draft to Tatiana Ryckman, who does a lot of great creative nonfiction, and she pushed me out deeper. She asked things like, “How does feeling nothing make you feel?” and “Could things have been different?” The introspective peeling back began, draft after draft. It was like therapy. It took months of interrogating the character—me in this case, or the semi-fictional me—to uncover what the story was really about.
There’s the additional challenge of portraying real people, family. The point of the piece was to exhume serious family bullshit, but straw folk do not great writing make. I worked to be as thoughtful as I could in portraying problematic individuals. In any case, the harder I swung, the uglier the truth became. The story went through a dozen drafts before I’d beaten down to the pulp.
SP: You are a writer, teacher, and Editor-in-Chief of Newfound, a nonprofit literary journal and small press. How do these different roles influence each other, if at all?
LK: As editor-in-chief, I manage the team, handle our financials, oversee grant work, manage the journal and chapbook prizes, and hand bind chapbooks. It sounds exhausting. Sometimes it is. Mostly the work energizes me, reminds me how much writing and publishing matters in challenging monoculture, fascism, bigotry, and all that trash, as much as it matters during the deeply personal process of reading and writing to understand the self and the world.
SP: The latest issue of Newfound is unapologetically political. The theme is “Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere,” and the cover image says, “No Fascist USA.” What are your thoughts on the intersection of art, politics, and social justice? Should art have a political agenda?
LK: During my undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I joined the International Socialist Organization for a stint. I went to meetings and we protested on campus and around the city. I still remember when the local chapter’s second in command learned that I studied creative writing and how disgusted he was. Art reinforced bourgeois bullshit, he was certain, and therefore couldn’t ever effect meaningful change. I came to realize that the ISO’s brand of socialism was problematic on a lot of levels, but the most troubling was the idea that revolution was simply a matter of equally redistributing wealth and control. A fan of thinkers like Paulo Freire and Jiddu Krishnamurti, I knew that the conditions of our lives shape our minds often as cogs of systems of domination and any revolution would be short lived without a liberation culture that questioned monoculture of any kind. The arts are tools toward that revolution.
The idea that politics and everything are interconnected seems pretty popular today. As Danez Smith lit-famously said, “Every poem is political.” Or am I speaking from a Twitter-friends bubble?
SP: This June you’ve published your first novel. Because the experience is still fresh, could you tell us more about your process, both in terms of writing Into That Good Night, pitching it to agents, and ultimately selling it? With hindsight, would you do anything differently?
LK: I entered my MFA naively—it seems a common narrative? I expected to write a great book or some knockout stories and to slide into a book deal. My development as a writer and frankly as a person didn’t match the shape of those expectations. I’ve been writing seriously for ten years and only now understand what I have to add to the literary conversation and how to say it. It took several years after the MFA and putting to bed all the old writing and starting fresh before the novel clicked into place. Bless all those that get it a lot sooner. Even then, writers need opportunities to be seen. So few have opportunities to be seen by tastemakers and land that [insert dreams here].
In hindsight, I would take another year or three before submitting to agents to polish the manuscript and work harder to build a readership by publishing short work in journals. If my favorite writers took months, sometimes years, to craft a single story, how did I think I was going to write an amazing novel in two measly years on top of working two jobs? Great writers say this on repeat during craft talks, I feel, and yet it can be a struggle to put off the payoff of “finishing” or “making it” and to simply enjoy the process itself.
The novel took two years to write and underwent significant revisions at each stage, for about two years, thereafter. My agent Mark Gottlieb and my editor were largely pleased with the book. Still, I kept at revision until the very last minute. Even now, though I’m resigned that no novel is perfect, I wish I’d had time for one more pass to tighten the language even more. But a writer could do that forever.
SP: About your novel, Tim O’Brien writes, “Keltner has given us a smart, engaging, and gracefully written story, full of surprises, beautifully plotted, and peopled by fascinating and complicated characters. I was spellbound from start to finish. What a truly wonderful book this is.”
What I appreciate about this book, and your writing in general, is that it has plot-driven momentum, but doesn’t lack human complexity. As a storyteller, how do you balance the need for narrative drive with the need for character depth?
LK: That’s sweet of you to say. Funny enough, what you identify as a strength, some might identify as a weakness. Is the book a page-turning YA mystery or a thoughtful coming-of-age literary work? Choose a side, right?
I came to terms early on that Into That Good Night wouldn’t satisfy beach readers or the literary cool kids. I hope the book finds a home among a third readership that shamelessly enjoys the ride of genre plotting with stops along the way to ponder existence. Those are the books I want to read. To me that’s the full package.
Reading Shakespeare’s plays first made me consider that a story could do all the things: interesting prose, complex characterization, tight plot. I’ve also come to see that great novels engage readers on three fronts—emotionally, politically, and existentially. I constantly consider how these aspects are playing out in the plotting and characterization.
To pull any of it off, I proudly rely on my friends for rigorous feedback while drafting. Raymond Carver once said that he accepted nine out of ten comments that friends made about his stories, so I feel in good company. The genius posturing of some artists is tired and false. Authorship is as slippery as selfhood—we’re all coauthors of each other in some way, no? I accept the limits of my experience yet aim toward the polyphonic novel. At some point I need you and others to point out what I can’t see. I think that’s more than OK. It’s healthy.
SP: Into That Good Night embraces many compelling questions, such as: how does one find purpose amidst unspeakable grief? Or, why are humans drawn to groupthink, and what does it take to break away and think independently? I’m curious—as you write, do you consider theme?
LK: The distinction between drama and the socio-political implications of that drama are inseparable to me. And I read quite a bit of nonfiction that falls under philosophy or X theory, and that likely leaks into the work. I also write to understand what I find distressing. At the time of writing Into That Good Night it was being & nothingness and the tendency for well-intentioned groups to fuck up the world as if means wasn’t ends.
I can be terribly critical and find fault in every work and enjoy picking apart canon works or overrated popular stuff. The critical impulse can be disastrous in writing. If allowed to set up straw characters for a beat down, the whole story will be lifeless and meager and false. I struggled to turn the damn thing off, to write against the impulse. Then I realized I could go the other way with it and lend my characters the eyes to scrutinize their worlds and their interiority and to expose their rich and conflicted inner lives. This critical tendency is probably also why, I’ve recently realized, that all my stories are tragedies.
SP: Though the novel has a clear protagonist, the point-of-view rotates amongst several characters, and at times even shifts to an omniscient perspective. The book examines group dynamics, so the alternating point-of-view seems fitting. Still, how did you settle on this way to tell the story?
LK: Into that Good Night is very much the story of a group, and a roaming close point-of-view felt like the only way to make every kid’s fears and dreams and desires authentic and to spark understanding from the reader. Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse was a huge inspiration and resource in this regard.
I also believe it’s inevitable for a literary mystery to play on subjectivity. Readers want answers, so the real story must be about the search for answers. How much are answers worth? How does the search contribute to our problems? Do answers bring clarity and peace, or does such resolution come from another place entirely? These are the real mysteries that Doug and his friends explore in Into That Good Night. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods were big inspirations in that regard, and always the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti.
SP: I’m obsessed with the Bruce Springsteen “Dead Man Walkin’” lyric that precedes your novel: “Between our dreams and actions lies this world.” What world are you living in now—or put simpler—what’s next?
LK: I’m so glad to hear the line resonated with you! It was a lucky fit for the book and has since served as a needed reminder of the similarities between the writing life and being a musician. I used to be in a band, a lifestyle in which living out of one’s van for months at a time, touring for years before you had an album on a label, let alone a major one, was an easy swallow because you believed in what you were doing without interest in selling out to make it big. It wasn’t a glamorous life. It was authentic one.
Somewhere along the transition from music to writing, I think I forgot that writers were artists, or can be, if interested in pushing at the boundaries of form and content. So, I’m enjoying where I’m at writing-wise—an indie author who’s found voice with a lot more to say.
Going at my own pace, I’m working on short pieces for journals and magazines—a fiction short story and an essay about Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, even some poems. And I’ve started a semi-fictional novel about the Santa Cruz Strangler, the porn industry, Silicon Valley AI researchers, and the end of the world.
Shannon Perri holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Texas and an MFA from Texas State University, where she teaches in the English department. Her fiction has appeared in Joyland Magazine, fields, Fiddleblack, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin and is at work on a novel set in Big Bend National Park.
Levis Keltner is the author of the novel Into That Good Night. His short work has appeared in Entropy and Bull: Men’s Fiction. He is the editor-in-chief at Newfound and teaches writing at Texas State University.
No bio
Into That Good Night
Publishers Weekly. 265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p73+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Into That Good Night
Levis Keltner. Arcade, $24.99 (336p) ISBN 9781-62872-844-6
In Keltner's disappointing debut, the cancer diagnosis of high school sports hero John Walker rattles the Chicago suburb of Palos Hills. Doug Horolez, an unsympathetic non-jock, dubs his classmate "Dead John Walker," a nickname picked up by other callous students. The community's malaise is somehow dissipated by the murder of sixth-grader Erika Summerson, who's stabbed to death in the woods outside Palos Hills. Doug, who has a crush on Erika's older sister, ends up joining a group of his schoolmates, including John, in investigating the crime. But Keltner fails to explain how the amateur murder probe allows the residents of Palos Hills to recover from the trauma of Walker's cancer diagnosis, especially given the investigation's ugly revelations. Readers should be prepared for some clunky prose (Doug "buried his nose between the pages and inhaled until his lungs were hard balloons full of the shared experience of this object the girl had cherished"). As a coming-of-age novel, it also falls short, given the dullness of Doug's adolescent struggles. There's very little to recommend here. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Into That Good Night." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 73+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532712/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5e4b1ca3. Accessed 25 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532712
Monday, April 30, 2018
Page 69: Into That Good Night
Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....
In this installment of Page 69,
We put Levis Keltner's Into That Good Night to the test.
Set up page 69 for us. What are we about to read:
Page 69 tells of the first time Greg Dombrowski meets John H. Walker, the local legend recently diagnosed with terminal leukemia. In the memory, Greg confesses his infatuation with Erika Summerson, the young girl whose murder sparks the novel.
Here Greg struggles through his hypermasculinity to express his feelings for Erika while he and Walker bond over a game of HORSE. Their time together gives Walker license to later ask Greg to join the group that searches for Erika’s killer.
What is Into That Good Night about?
Into That Good Night is a story about a group of kids who become inseparable friends when a girl they love is murdered in the woods behind town. They bond while scouring a secluded section of the valley for clues to close her unsolved murder. They are soon harassed by a person they believe to be the killer. United against a common enemy, the group strikes back. Through the haze of adolescence in a predominantly white, working-class American suburb, the novel’s underdog protagonist Doug Horolez must then decide whether or not to help the only friends he’s ever known in their quest for peace and justice.
Do you think this page is a good reflection of the book overall? Does it align itself with the book’s overall theme?
Greg’s point of view is one of seven in the novel. This excerpt snapshots his white cis hetero adolescence, mid-attempt to figure it all out—the new and raw emotions, the transience of relationships, Life, his talents and passions, with his intense attraction to Erika underpinning every thought.
The excerpt reflects the novel in that it illustrates an adolescent mind trying to make sense of the world passed on to their generation.
The novel’s point of view shifts between all seven kids: E. Summerson, Tiffany Dennys, Josué Ortiz, Alex Karahalios, John H. Walker, and Doug Horolez, who gets most camera time. Funny enough, Greg probably gets the least.
Trying to make sense of existence is the work before us all to our last days, I think. Adolescence is a special time because many of us start to ask big questions and our observations are in some ways less bullshit than what we tell ourselves in adulthood, misbelieving we have all the answers.
I hope readers find the group’s outlook as refreshing as I did and fall in love with at least one of these unlikely and tragic heroes.
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PAGE 69:
INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
cool to see him turn up alone on Greg’s court at Penny Park one November night, before Erika had died. The halogen floodlight mounted to the telephone pole behind the backboard had already whited-out the world beyond the court, right before Greg was about to head home, when the swings creaked. Greg saw nothing, then jumped—startled by the Dead Man on the sideline. Buried in a scarf and the hood of his parka, his face looked bloodless, zombiefied. The kid had cancer or something. Still, meeting Walker was worth skipping dinner for. They played HORSE. Greg won, but the game wasn’t a sweep. Walker might’ve had a chance if he’d stopped gabbing and focused when he had the ball. Greg remembered the kid asking after the winning shot if there was anything he loved more than basketball. Greg had said no. Greg then mentioned Erika, like some big stalker. He kept shooting, stripped down to his jersey and shorts, his body heat worked up, trying hard not to listen too hard to the bundled kid on the sidelines pushing with the personal questions, as though somehow he knew how sick Greg’s heart was for her, the guy saying, “Erika … Erika …” with these floats of white breath that Greg dodged on his way to the hoop, as if she would materialize out of one if the kid wasn’t dying and had a few ounces better lung capacity. Greg couldn’t shoot worth a shit, then, too afraid it could happen, which was dumb because of how badly he wished it would—until an hour later, when they were drinking hot Gatorade teas together—he and John H. Walker drinking Greg’s own winter game elixir, no shit—outside of 7-Eleven, like buddies, and Greg admitted wanting to love someone as much as he loved the game. “Something bigger,” Walker said and admitted he knew the feeling. Greg walked home that night with true respect for the kid, though feeling kinda that he’d gabbed and hardly let Walker speak, which wasn’t his style. Sharing feelings wasn’t his style. Still. So when the guy came up to him yesterday to say there might be a way to help Erika, he must’ve already known Greg would say yes.
The kids dug until daylight fled the crowns of the trees. All that time, they plodded with their long-handled shovels in the well-rooted earth while John went around saying, “Deeper. No—close. A little deeper.” Each thanked him for his feedback to be kind. They figured his condition made physical labor risky—everyone except E.
Be prepared for the unease of The Outsiders mixed with the suspense of It when you pick up Levis Keltner’s Into that Good Night (Arcade, 2018). Keltner skillfully describes the picture-perfect, sleepy town of Palos Hills set against the looming danger of the woods where young Erika Summerson is murdered. A group of oddball middle-schoolers come together under the leadership of their junior high’s cancer-stricken golden boy to solve the murder.
Erika’s older sister, Emily, who goes by E., is the great love of Doug Horolez. Keltner positions most of the book from Doug’s point of view; thus, Doug’s awkwardness, his pausing speech, and his loneliness provide a stumbling, uncertain pacing to the novel. But doesn’t awkward pacing define teenage years (if not our entire lives)? Keltner captures this sentiment and holds his characters on the edge of adulthood beautifully throughout the novel. He writes:
The rules and laws of the adult world were make-believe they could shed like a dream, but only from this distance, playing as they were on the edge of belief and disbelief. Hearts thumping, they caught a waft of hot asphalt and the citrusy scent of cut lawns out there, on the other side. They’d been wrong earlier. Time didn’t move slowly in Palos Hills, but mechanically.
The misfits grow to like one another and even consider each other friends. Surprise romances form and break, and their relationships shift and change. Their pursuit of Erika’s killer takes a different tone when they discover they are being watched and thwarted by someone else in the woods. As the danger increases, the group’s leader, John Walker, who has become known as Dead Man Walker, pushes their pursuit into rituals and mysticism. Walker is undoubtedly high on the pain medication for his cancer treatments, but in the group’s minds the woods become an alternate reality where they feel as though they can control the outcome.
I wondered if teenagers could be as openly honest as they are in Into that Good Night, yet I appreciate Keltner’s depiction of their vulnerability. In their youth and loneliness, they are bound together by the kindness that the deceased Summerson sister showed each of them. As a debut novelist, Keltner’s plot complexity, juggling of the number of characters, and wonderfully lush descriptions are all impressive.