Jeff Roberts

Jeff Roberts recently graduated with a B.A. in Liberal Studies concentrating in writing from the University of Iowa along with a B.S. in Chemistry and an M.B.A. in Finance. His writing has been recently nominated for a William Rockhill Nelson Award, and has been featured in the University of Iowa's Daily Palette and several other literary journals. He currently resides with his family in Kansas City, Missouri.

"The hallmark of Roberts' collection is his strong writing. He captures scenes with expertise, and his characters come to life through the dialogue. The author's stories are moving, light-hearted when appropriate, and explicitly human. In its best moments the powerful stories quickly become page turners once you get into the text."
—Writer's Digest

"...Roberts demonstrates a talent for tapping into the fault lines of human landscapes and the brittleness of relationships that are felled with a single word." —Kirkus Discoveries

 

PageOneLit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Jeff Roberts: I grew up in Wood River, Illinois; a small town just northeast of St. Louis. As to whether reading and writing was a part of my life, I’d have to say just the opposite. Wood River was a boom town during World War II, it had refineries, an ammunition plant, steel and paper mills and so the town was really geared to the trades. You went to grade school, then high school, met your sweet heart and then upon graduation you got a job at the refinery or the boxboard where you started a family and worked the rest of your life living in a nice suburban home. That worked fine during my grandparent’s generation and earlier, but during the 70’s that tall came unhinged. Those industries went away and those jobs were replaced with divorce lawyers, pawn! shop clerks and bartender/waitress jobs. At the same time as the economy was changing the school system and the town in general seemed to stay locked in that previous era. There was a very low premium on reading or the arts so besides the usual nursery rhymes on my mother’s knee as a kid and reading Tom Sawyer as a high school assignment, I can’t really recall any positive influence as a child. I will say my mother got one of those Time-Life leather bound editions of the “hundred greatest books” which I began to dip into during breaks and after I got my first undergraduate degree in Chemistry at Illinois; but even then I can’t say reading and writing were a very big part of my life. I really started getting into literature after I left Wood River and had gotten my first undergraduate degree in my early 20’s and by the time I turned 30 literature and books have become a hugely enriching and rewarding avocation of mine.

From the writing standpoint, originally the biggest draw was probably the usual Jazz Age Hemingway and Fitzgerald types from Paris in the 1920’s. As early as my days at Illinois, I thought writing was a sexy idea, gin soaked days hanging out in bars and side-walk cafes in Paris with artsy types discussing literature and writing books and sending them back to the states while you vacationed on the Rivera. Of course there were probably a thousand Americans in Paris at that time that didn’t get published. I’m sure they lived in a hovel and starved while trying to write their novel and had to return to their job making tires in Dayton when their savings ran out. As I got older and I started reading a lot more my views on the craft of writing ! changed and I realized I could be a gin soaked failure as a writer right here in Kansas City much cheaper. Joking aside, I got divorced in the late nineties so I was looking for a worthwhile way to spend my time after I put my kids to bed at 9:00 pm so I enrolled in a correspondence degree through the University of Iowa in 2002 which gave me access to the Writer’s Workshop. Originally I just took the classes for more insight into the craft of writing, the techniques of story telling and to have a dialogue with some of the talent in Iowa City. In the process though of taking those classes, I had a few stories published in student journals and I got a lot of positive feedback for my stuff. Then, around the time I graduated from Iowa, Dr. Carol Lauhon, one of my teachers got her PhD and got a job with a small publishing house in Chicago. She saw value in my material so before I knew it and with her support I had a book on my hands. I gave out all my copies of the first editi! on as a Christmas Cards that year so then I thought I’d writ! e some m ore stories and come up with a second edition collection of short stories in earnest.

 

PageOneLit.com: Why do you write?

Jeff Roberts:The thrill of seeing you name on the spine and vanity aside, I think there are at least two reasons why I write. In the writing process itself, one explores the themes, the different ways a story turns out and thinking through the ramification of this turn of the plot versus that turn of the plot; that process gives me a deeper examination and understanding of my own thoughts and of life in general. The second thing I get out of writing is the communication with the reader. I’ve done readings where I read Cosette and afterwards a woman came up with tears in her eyes and said she’d just buried a pet and told me how the story touched her. Immediately there’s an intimacy there you wouldn’t normall! y have and it taps into a shared humanity I haven’t experience in any other way. I had the same experience after reading The Red and the Black with someone who’d just buried a relative and that’s powerful stuff, people with their masks down and just raw emotion like that.

 

PageOneLit.com: Explain your title, LITTLE STORIES as it relates to the book as a whole.

Jeff Roberts: Well the book is eleven short stories, so that is what it is, the diminutive of stories. I wrote six of them as an undergraduate at Iowa. Most of my assignments were 5000 words or less so in that short bit of time, you have to introduce a set of characters, set up some tension and resolve it very quickly, hence the adjective little. I consider a novel a story, you can introduce a character, show how he or she changes over time or reacts to different situations to give a multifaceted view of that character, but in 5000 words you only just get a snap-shot shot of a character so by its very nature a short story of that length is exploring a scene or action more than a character.
 

PageOneLit.com: LITTLE STORIES was written during your undergraduate years -- Looking back on the stories written for LITTLE STORIES, can you describe how you have grown as a writer today?

Jeff Roberts: Well, I wrote five more stories for the book after I graduated, but given that the 5000 word or fewer story was the flavor of the book already, I stuck with that formula. At the same time, the process of publishing a book, the editing, the rewriting, reading the material to an audience does change you as a writer and give you a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn’t work or how a phrase or scene effects people after it leaves your head. So from that standpoint you can’t help but grow as a writer by putting your stuff out there in the public. I’m starting a full novel in the spring so the jury is still out on how I’ve grown as a writer and we’ll have to see if that is the case.
 

 

PageOneLit.com: LITTLE STORIES allows the reader to experience a perfect volume of shorts stores/tales/vignettes -- As a writer what does a book like this allow a reader over a full work of fiction? What does it allow the author to do over a full work of fiction?

Jeff Roberts: I don’t know about perfect, but as I mentioned before, a novel is more character based. You introduce a main character or set of characters, put them through some sort of action and the reader either learns something about them or life or they see something of themselves that will hopefully draw them into the story and sweep them away to the end of the book. Now if the reader doesn’t like the plot or those characters, or they’re inauthentic the reader will simply stop reading after the first couple of chapters and put the book down. It’s simply a non-starter. With a collection of short stories like Little Stories, each story is a different scene with different characters. If the reader doesn’! t like the first story, they have a different character set and a different plot waiting just a few pages later so I hope they find something worthwhile along they way. Given that medium, you can explore a lot wider range of topics in this sort of collection so I hope I can touch something in a reader.

PageOneLit.com: What is the common theme that threads LITTLE STORIES from beginning to end?

Jeff Roberts:Well the common theme running through out the book is the writer, me. A lot of my stuff written at Iowa was using different voices, first or third-person, dialogue, metaphors and the like. I tried writing from the vantage point of an old man, a child or distraught lovers and I had the freedom to explore a lot of things I wouldn’t have tried otherwise. The book is also me trying to find a voice or trying out different techniques, more dialogue or more description and so it went in some interesting directions. I hope, as a reader, some of it will strike a chord and they’ll take something away from reading but there’s no overarching theme, more an exploration of techniques and themes.

PageOneLit.com: What did you learn from writing LITTLE STORIES?

Jeff Roberts:Everything? As I said, I originally took the writing classes at Iowa in my spare time to get more insight as a reader. Through that process, I found out there is this whole world out there beyond me that you can access by writing so really I’ve just gotten through the doorway and I’ve yet to take if very far.

 

PageOneLit.com: What do you hope to achieve with LITTLE STORIES?

Jeff Roberts:I didn’t really hope to achieve anything as a writer, as I mentioned before, I didn’t have anything written until 2002 and along the way I never really had thought they’d turn up in print. The publishing of Little Stories to me was like graduate school. I did my undergraduate writing at Iowa and my graduate work was getting this in print. Who knew about trade discounts and distributions, galley proofs or copy editors? All this was new to me and if I don’t sell one copy of the book I’ve at least learned a lot that I wouldn’t have experience otherwise.

PageOneLit.com: What's next? Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing?

Jeff Roberts: Well I started working on an Art degree at Penn. State this past fall (collecting unrelated bachelor degrees has turned into a bit of a hobby). I plan on writing a novel next spring that about some broken down 46 year old divorced or unhappily married man (any resemblance to characters living or dead is unintentional) with some musical background who crosses paths with a jaded painter in New York City. I’m using this correspondence Art program through Penn. State to learn the language and vision that someone in the visual arts like painting has. You can have a certain chord, like an A minor, that strikes a somber tone just like certain hues of color can give the same mood in painting so I want to explore two people coming from different world! views and watch them try to communicate and learn from each other almost as if they spoke different languages. A second theme I want to look is the old cliché that every waiter and waitress in New York is really an artist waiting for their big break. The first week they arrive there they seem to go to 5 casting calls or museum exhibits a week, then a year later they go to two a week; finally after ten years they seem to go to one every six months and have a world weariness about them though rationalizing their life that they’re waiting for that big break. To me that is the same as some man who retires after forty years of corporate work and has nothing to show for it but a tiny retirement fund or a mother who spent twenty years at home raising kids and then once they leave has an empty house and doesn’t know who she is anymore. All their youthful dreams and promise just seemed to have slipped away a day at a time while they were busy living their life and then one day ! they woke up and were dry. So I’d like the book to explore some of those themes.

 

PageOneLit.com: What was the last book you read?

Jeff Roberts: I just finished Ford Maddox Ford’s, The Fifth Queen. He was a writer and editor I’d always heard good things about and I’ve always wanted to read The Good Soldier. I was up at Prospero’s Books here in Kansas City which has an eclectic collection of used books and I found a copy of The Fifth Queen on a musty back shelf in the bookstore so I picked it up an! d dove in. I read it over my time off at Christmas and I was at my Charlie Hoopers, local pub, a couple of days ago right before I read the final chapter and I was commenting that while the description was nice and the period dialogue well done, I hadn’t found it very compelling and it was a bit unfocused and meandering. Then I came home and read the final chapter that night and I see the whole book was a setup for Katharine Howard’s speech to Henry VIII at he sat in front of his Lords of Council at her trial and my opinion changed. Well done Ford!