By Chih Wang

If something seems familiar about Mathieu Cailler’s new short story collection, Forest for the Trees, maybe it’s because one of its pieces, “Quickenings,” was first published here at The Coachella Review. In this collection—his seventh book and second of short stories—he brings us intimate moments of people’s quiet suffering, their little joys, losses, and revelations, from a wife passively defying her husband (“Party of Two”) to a taxi driver protecting his passenger from an abusive date (“Highway 111”), from a war veteran’s rescue gone wrong (the title story, “Forest for the Trees”) to a gun’s silent witness of a boy’s troubled life (“Remmy”). His prose is beautiful, as befits his skill as a poet, but is accessible and compelling.

The Coachella Review caught up with Cailler via Zoom to talk about rediscovering his own stories, writing as inanimate objects, and future collaborations with his cat.

 

THE COACHELLA  REVIEW: There are fifteen short stories in this collection. The title, Forest for the Trees, is also the title of one of the stories. It’s a really apt title for the book, as all the individual stories are like individual trees. All of them are vignettes of the complexities that happen in everyday lives. And what I got as the “forest” was the idea that the small moments in our lives are part of the answer to the bigger questions of who we are, what we want in life.

MATHIEU CAILLER: I hope everyone takes away what you did from the title; that was my intention. These people are very much wedded to their own pain and can’t really see “the forest for the trees.” The title story used to be called “Hero” and then “The Clearing,” but I ended up calling it “Forest for the Trees” because, one, it took place in the forest, and two, it bound the collection in terms of theme.

TCR: One of my favorite stories was “Party of Two.” On the surface level, it’s just about an old married couple having lunch, but the way each half reacts differently to a young couple’s PDA—especially when the young man reminds the wife of a past love—brings so much tension into the scene. I loved the wife’s small act of defiance at the end. Much of her thoughts aren’t so much told as shown through her actions. What inspired you to write about them? How did you come up with their premises? You covered a wide variety of ages and job occupations and life stages.

MC: I write really eclectic collections, like you were saying, diverse in terms of POV, ages, gender. I tried to jump around a little bit and in all sorts of ways. It’s funny that you mentioned “Party of Two,” because that’s one of my favorite stories in the collection, as well. I wrote it a long time ago. It was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post through their Great American Fiction Contest.

The idea came from my mom telling me about the day she went to a garage sale and ran into a guy who looked just like her old boyfriend who went to Vietnam. That was kind of the beginning of it. I just thought, That’s kind of intriguing. We talk about doppelgangers, but we don’t necessarily talk about them in terms of this generational thing where the doppelganger and the memory of the original person can exist in their twenties, and the person who knew the original person is in their seventies. I thought it was interesting that my mom had this kind of flashback to her old life. And it wasn’t as painful for her because the person did not die in Vietnam, nor was there a nice relationship like a lifelong friendship that occurred after, but I thought, Let’s play around with that. How can we kind of put them in some sort of tense scene?

I love stories that have really tight settings, really bound in almost a one-act play. You have a lot of backstories that probably wouldn’t make for a great play, but they allow just a little bit of tension to brew. I thought setting this story in a diner was pretty perfect for that. And you have them reacting differently to the young couple’s PDA: The wife enjoying the PDA and being like, Good for them! The waitstaff is like, Who cares? We have such a busy day. Go about your life. And then you have one person, the husband, who really gets upset. We never really get inside the husband’s brain enough because it’s told from the wife’s point of view, but we get the sense that maybe he’s never even been in love. Maybe this love upsets him. There’s kind of a confrontation between the young man and the husband towards the end, where he basically says, Haven’t you been in love? Herbert’s working through a lot, and seeing someone else’s happiness puts him through quite a pain and sorrow.

TCR: So does that mean that you don’t really have a backstory for the husband totally fleshed out?

MC: Yes, we only learn a little bit through the wife. She became pregnant kind of quickly; she was on the rebound. And the husband was stable; he checked a lot of boxes. When she became pregnant, he was forced to kind of go into a job he didn’t want. And we kind of just see the beginning of maybe a relationship that wasn’t built on the most solid foundation, and they end up living like coworkers bumping into each other in the hallway.

TCR: Oh, that was a beautiful description in the book.

MC: Thank you. You know, I think a lot of these things are written out of fear, like, I hope this doesn’t happen to me. I’m a recently married person, but when I was dating, it was like, God, I hope I’m able to sustain, you know, love. It evolves and changes, and who you are in 2023 is not who you’ll be in 2040. I hope my wife and I grow together, right?

I think in a lot of these stories, the kind of “villain” character, if you will, is certainly a part of me. And it’s a way to express maybe my biggest fears and maybe remind myself, Don’t become her. Even the sillier stories, these are all founded on little parts of my life, working through them in some weird way.

TCR: So, the first story centers on possible beginnings, and the last one is about possible endings. And this isn’t your first collection of short stories. I’m sure, like putting together a song playlist, picking the order of the stories is a skill in itself. How did you create the order of the stories?

MC: When I ordered this, I thought maybe people will see the beginning and the ending, like you said, so that makes me feel amazing that you got it. It’s very hard to order a collection. The editors, the press—they were lovely in the sense that they were like, We like the way you ordered it; let’s roll with it. But I’ve had other editors be like, This story makes more of a splash in the beginning. And I had considered that strategy because the first story, “The Father,” is a quieter, softer story, more contemplative, and the second story, “Forest for the Trees,” is far more like a thriller. But I thought it would be kind of disingenuous to start the book with the thriller, because most of my stories aren’t like that. I didn’t want the reader to pick up the book, read the first story, and think they’re in for a Stephen King thrill ride. I was trying to set the tone. By the time you get to story three or four, I hope you go, Oh, I see what kind of book I’m in.

Then I try to bounce around in terms of point of view and subject matter. The last story, “Remmy,” is from the point of view of a rifle. I thought that once I have the reader and they’re into my book after fourteen stories, they’ll allow me to write this kind of weird, surreal story from the point of view of a rifle. If I had started early with that, the reader might be like, What the heck was he doing? So I wanted to establish that maybe you’re [reading] solid, kind of realistic fiction, and then allow me this weird one at the end.

TCR: So build up trust and then test their boundary.

MC: That’s correct. And hopefully it pays off. Hopefully people are like, Well, that’s a weird note to end on. And “Remmy” was the last story I wrote, actually, so it felt very fresh to me. I had a horrible time finding publication for [the individual story]. It ended up getting picked up by a magazine in New Zealand. They were thinking Americans are obsessed with guns, and they loved the idea of this point of view. But in America, I heard often the opposite, like, Really interesting voice, but we don’t really want to publish anything having to do with a gun. And I was like, I understand.

TCR: That really shows how context matters, like who your audience is and how it affected where you got it published.

MC: Absolutely. And it was a really well-received piece in this New Zealand periodical. And they ended up serializing the story and putting it out over five years. It was a big honor and very touching that they would do that.

TCR: So if the last story was written last, does that mean the first story was written first?

MC: “The Father” was written a long time ago. Probably 2014. My first book, Loss Angeles, came out in 2015. And that was also a short story collection. It was more bound by the locale of LA and the theme of loss. I started writing the stories for this current book before Loss Angeles was put out. So Forest for the Trees has been almost ten years in the making, writing a short story here, writing a short story there. I don’t think I’ve ever had a book come out where it’s taken that long. It had been so long for some of them that, when I was reading them, I was like, I don’t know what happens. I kind of remember how it takes shape.

TCR: That must be kind of a cool experience to read your work like you hadn’t written it.

MC: A very unique experience. I’ve never had that. [The publisher] had done some edits… and when I got the book, I put on the dictation software. I was able to have Microsoft Word read me the PDF, and I was like, This is interesting. There are whole paragraphs [that felt] like they were written by another human being. It’s a very weird experience. For, like, eight years, I haven’t read this paragraph.

TCR: But did you still like it?

MC: You know, I did. There were moments where I was like, I’m a different writer now. I thought about how I might have gone about certain things differently, but I thought, Hey, if the editors like this, I don’t want to cut out this paragraph or whatever.

It was an interesting thing because authors often kind of dump on their old work. And it’s a weird thing because, as a reader, you go, What, I love that book! I don’t want to hear the author pooh-pooh it. I’m very cognizant of that. Don’t ever attack your own work. I think that is what Aimee Bender said. She did it to herself and then said, I hate when authors do that, so I shouldn’t do it.

I think it’s a natural evolution. The writer we’ll be in ten years is not the writer we were ten years ago, but it doesn’t mean the first one’s wrong, because then in ten years, you’d redo the other book. There’s that old quote: Art’s never finished, just abandoned.

TCR: Many of your stories float back and forth in time. Sometimes they’re flashbacks that give the reader more insight to the present, and sometimes they’re flashforwards that create more tension. My favorite example of this is “Highway 111,” where I made an assumption about the meaning of a birthday date, but toward the end of the story, I find out whose birthday it is, and it really added an extra level of depth to understanding the main character’s actions. How do you balance the time spent in each timeline? How do you decide when it’s time for a flashback and when it’s time to go back to the present?

MC: In “Highway 111,” the flashbacks are kind of built right into the present narrative. I tried to think about the reader and the confusion and the clarity levels. If the backstory could be weaved in seamlessly, I tended to do that instead of breaking it up into sections.

I love backstory; I think it gives motivation for everything. I often tell my students that one story is usually not enough to carry a story. It’s always about two stories and forming a braid. How you form the braid is entirely up to you.

If I feel like the backstory is its own thing, or the flashforward is its own thing, and it’s holding a lot of meat, then I break it into sections. With “Highway 111,” I needed the reader to know why this day is painful. And I tried to do it seamlessly—kind of sprinkle it on like salt over an entire meal so it’s in there but no one can pick out the salt.

TCR: Do you write in the order that we see it in the story? For the ones that have section breaks that go back and forth, in particular, do you write the events chronologically and then go back and mix up the scenes?

MC: I kind of see it happening. And in some of the bigger stories, I think it allows a little bit of a break. I try to play around with white space, which maybe comes a little bit from me loving poetry. It breaks up the present narrative and allows the reader a moment to be like, What the heck is this going on? And then there’s another little story that you kind of hold in your pocket.

But I will often go back and be like, I need to write three more flash-forwards just to break it up [more evenly], or I will break up one of the flash-forwards. I’ll pop them in places where I want the reader to start putting together what’s happening. So you’re revealing this kind of striptease of a plot. The backstory allows you to reveal information at your discretion.

TCR: There are two stories that focus on an object’s point of view. We already talked about “Remmy.” There’s also “On the Odometer,” which is not technically from the point of view of the car [a 1953 DeSoto Powermaster], but it is using the car as the framework for how we move forward in time. What made you decide to structure the narrative around an object?

MC: I was teaching a lot of Alice Munro at the time. She plays around with time in a weird way. She bites off decades and, like I said earlier, I like a tight setting. Alice Munro was like, We’re gonna start in 2025, and we’re gonna bring it back to 1962, then we’re gonna go to 1980. And I just love that exploration of a huge chunk of time. I didn’t want to write one of her stories, but how could I play around with it?

I had just purchased a classic car and was thinking of when the original owner bought this car. We hadn’t been to the moon. JFK was just inaugurated. What if you kept the classic car your whole life and passed it down? How would that look? [Through] that realization of the classic car driving around town and reading a lot of Alice Munro, I thought I could structure a story through the vehicle’s odometer. It would allow me an ability to span decades.

TCR: So did you buy a ’53 DeSoto Powermaster?

MC: No, I did not. I bought a ’65 Ford Thunderbird.

TCR: What drove you to experiment with different point-of-view techniques? And now that the stories are complete, what have you gained from that experience?

MC: What led me to it was a story by Sophfronia Scott, “Batty’s Wig Bears Witness.” It’s from the point of view of a wig that’s been abandoned at a thrift shop. I believe it’s a neon green wig. And I love that story. It’s a love story at its core. Whenever I teach creative writing, I often assign that story and have students write from the point of view of an inanimate object. I thought it was a really difficult exercise that stretches your imagination. And then one day, we had a weird chunk of time left in class. Everyone was writing, and I thought I’m gonna write, too. I sat down, I had a legal pad, and I started filling up an entire page pretty quickly. And it was this rifle that was gifted by an uncle to his nephew [“Remmy”].

I think it’s kind of a cool thing to come up with new ways of storytelling. What I learned from that is to not be afraid of a big idea. But if someone had told me before to write a story from the point of view of inanimate object with no guide like Sophfronia, I might be like, Oh, God, that’s gonna be weird. How does that even look? Because you can’t use dialogue to the same effect. Unless you really make the thing anthropomorphic, like the candlesticks from Beauty and the Beast. I was like, How can I do this naturally and still keep it a Mathieu Cailler story? I feel like I’m stretching myself but still keeping it authentic.

TCR: What was the easiest story to write? And why?

MC: God, they were all kind of a pain.

TCR: Let’s start with the hardest story to write, then.

MC: I would say “Forest for the Trees” was one of the harder ones to write because I had to keep my foot on the gas at all times. I just wanted there to be an intense amount of pressure, but I also didn’t want it over the top. I had never written a thriller, so I remember going back and rewriting paragraph after paragraph many times. I remember being like, Oh God, have I bitten off a little bit more than I can handle here? This is kind of crazy.

TCR: After that experience, do you want to write more like that?

MC: I think I would. I definitely would love to adapt “Forest for the Trees” for the screen. I even thought it would be interesting to have the main character be a woman instead. I think that would be intriguing because we do PTSD a lot, like from a war—how do you reassimilate? But it’s rarely done through the eyes of a woman soldier.

And I think for the easiest story, I want to say “Remmy,” even though it was crazy to do it, but I had thought about it for a long time. I had written another story about a boy and his father hunting in Montana. It didn’t work out, but I had a lot of the imagery of the sky and the hunting. When I dove into “Remmy,” within a week I had a pretty decent rough draft. It was like the stories that you have written in your head driving [or] in the shower, where you fleshed it out [including] how it might end. So I just pushed through that thing with a lot of momentum.

TCR: Was that the shortest amount of time it took to write one of the stories?

MC: Yes, it was, like, three weeks and I had a really solid draft. I revised it a little bit over a couple of months before I started submitting it.

TCR: You had some very beautiful lines, and almost every story kind of had a statement about the way life is. I love the way you phrase images to explain characters’ feelings. For example, in “Party of Two,” there was, “It was as if someone had taken a quarter from their savings account each day. It was hard to notice the loss at first, but now, only a few wrinkled bills remained.” That’s just a great description of their love without saying “their love.”

MC: Oh, good. I don’t want to destroy a reader with so much detail. I just need a sentence or two that does the job. And that’s where you just sit down [and] think of a metaphor, some sort of thing you can pull off. So I’m glad it worked for you.

Sometimes you need a line to—like you’re saying—carry a lot of weight. You want to express something deep, and you think, If I could just get the right line here, then I don’t have to elaborate. It does all the work. Also, in “Party of Two,” that line, “She’d never loved a man as she’d loved Major. He was Paris, and everyone else was Cleveland,” to me [represented] the whole story in a way. And that allows you to understand her pain, right?

TCR: Right. [Seeing Callier’s cat, Nell, enter his Zoom window.] I saw a really cute post of your cat helping you with the keyboard. In what ways has your cat helped you with your writing?

MC: You know, my life is quite solitary during the work week. I am at home practically the entire day. I mean, I go to the gym and I try to get out be a human, but so much of my teaching is now online, and the writing is obviously here, so having a buddy to sit on my lap or meow or sleep in the hammock above my desk, is just really nice. Nell will start walking in here in the early morning and want to hang out in here, so I say, Alright, I can’t watch TV. And yeah, it just makes it a lot less isolating. Like having a little writing buddy.

TCR: Like, literally.

MC: I had pulled up a Word doc to draft an important email, and I had gone to the restroom or gotten some coffee. I came back, and she had been moving around on the keyboard and actually wrote a poem. It had weird little line breaks, and she had hit enter. I saved it. I’d say that’s Nell’s first poem.

TCR: I want to see that in your next book of poetry.

MC: I might have to have the trust of the editor.

TCR: Just put it in the end, when you’ve won the trust of the reader.

MC: I love that idea. I think you can sneak one of those in at the end.

TCR: Speaking of future books, what are you working on now?

MC: I just finished a middle-grade, YA—kind of in the middle of the two—novel. It was born out of a short story about two siblings: a thirteen-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy in 1955 rural Indiana. They are looking for this fugitive to get the reward money, and things don’t go exactly as planned. It was probably one of the most fun, if not the most fun writing project I’ve ever done. I feel like I’ll be fully done with it by March.

TCR: I love how you like branching out and trying different things.

MC: I always think of that quote about doing something every day that scares you. And writing still scares me. So I check that box every day.

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Chih Wang is a writer and freelance copyeditor at CYW Editing. She holds a certificate in Copyediting from University of California, San Diego Extension and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of California, Riverside in Palm Desert. She served as fiction editor and copyeditor at The Coachella Review and is currently the copyeditor for Kelp Journal. She is a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association and ACES: The Society for Editing. A San Diego native, she spends her free time working on her novel, a contemporary fantasy, or training in aerial silks and hammock.