Here Comes the Champ: A Conversation with Nathan Dragon
Nathan Dragon | The Champ Is Here | Cash 4 Gold Books | December 2024 | 154 pages
Shadow-selves abound in Dragon’s debut story collection, The Champ is Here. As a regular contributor to the minimalist-aligned annual NOON, and taking cues from Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Charles Simic, the author specializes in prose miniatures with a pared-down style, where porous identities seep in from the fiction’s margins. His narrators daydream themselves into boxers, pumpkins, and drowning victims. Parakeets die like bats, and laborers only know they exist when their workplace’s punch-in clock confirms: “IN AT ALL.”
Dragon has honed these slippery forms for over a decade, publishing in The Baffler, Post Road, and New York Tyrant. He’s an enigmatic character in innovative fiction—I had known him from his stories and as co-editor (with his wife, writer and artist Raegan Bird) of the publishing project Blue Arrangements, where he’s put out writing by the likes of Kayla Jean, Anastasios Karnazes, and Madeline Cash. But I had never put a face to the name until he created a personal Instagram highlighting his “career as an actor.” Since then, a handful of memes about his debut have cropped up preceding its release, one of which glibly positions it amongst books by a cadre of hyper-online, alt-lit adjacent writers, including Nicolette Polek (who provided a blurb for Champ) and Cash 4 Gold editor Jon Lindsey.
While these virtual in-jokes have some resonance with Dragon’s sensibility, his work veers from irony or digital affectation toward ambient snapshots of work-a-day lives. He writes about introspective men moving from cities to lakes, driving from construction sites to lobster pounds—self-enclosed but polymorphic, like a boxer or a red-cockaded woodpecker.
In late summer, I spoke with Dragon on the phone about developing his style with Diane Williams and the other editors at NOON, being a retired boxer, arranging his story collection like a photo book, and preferring the natural world to the internet.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Nik Slackman: There's so much boxing in the book. Do you watch boxing?
Nathan Dragon: I don't, but I used to box when I was a kid. I stopped when I was 16. I was undefeated and I won a championship.
I think a lot about how I just liked boxing. I just liked going to the gym and training and aspiring. I didn't think about the culture of it. At all. I didn't think “I need to get this brand of boxing gloves” or “I have to go scout out the other kids my age and see what ‘The Boxing Scene’ is like,” or “I gotta go home and watch pay-per-view fights.” I just boxed.
I wonder if there's a way to do that for writing. So much of my distraction has to do with the culture of writing. I'm not talking about any scenes specifically because there's so many across the country, but it’s so easy to all of a sudden be worrying about what this one microcosm of writing is doing and wondering, “Should I try to involve myself there?”
Whereas, with boxing, I just went to one little gym, Dullea’s Boxing in Peabody, Massachusetts, right next to Salem. I trained and didn't think about inter-gym relationships—I wouldn't even call it politics—or the way that all these things sort of operate as an ecosystem. I just liked boxing.
I wonder what it is about writing. I’ve got to pay attention to so many cultures to hopefully become successful—not even successful, but just to hopefully be able to get my next book published.
With boxing it was like, “Okay, that was one fight. I won. Time to go train for the next one.”
Of course, there’d be some things, like one kid that I fought was known to fight a little bit dirty. He would spar with bad strategies, kind of below the belt to intimidate you, just in case, down the line, you ended up fighting him. I knew about those things, but I didn't pay attention to them.
NS: It's amazing you went undefeated from 13 to 16.
ND: It was pretty exciting. And then I just stopped.
I don't know. I have this terrible memory—or like, a bad feeling—thinking about that time when I stopped. I had a fight scheduled and then I thought “I'm actually done with boxing.”
It was pretty sudden. My trainer, John Dullea, was an amazing trainer. I still feel very guilty about it, but I talked to him somewhat recently, and there's no hard feelings. But it doesn't prevent me from still feeling guilty 14 years later.
NS: It's funny, there's almost an old-man quality to the narrators of this book—like a retiree quality—and I didn't realize you were a retired boxer.
ND: Yeah, I'm trying to come out of retirement. Not to fight, I started training some kids one-on-one in Virginia.
NS: There’s a lot of pressure to perform with boxing. There’s also pressure that builds throughout the book, starting on a language level, and if the narrator can be taken as a singular if inconsistent voice, that pressure slowly builds its way into the narrator’s world. How did you decide to organize these stories that you’ve compiled over such a long span of time?
ND: That was the hardest part. At a very basic level, it’s just looking for a concrete detail between the stories that can get you from one to the next. So many instances of finding those consistencies and threads, or even slight movements within the language, I did with Rae [Raegan Bird], my wife. She's a master sequencer. It’s what she really likes to do. She used to be a lot more involved in photography, and we both always liked photobooks by Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, and William Eggleston.
When we sat down with these stories—you know, I say “we,” but she made most of the suggestions and did a lot of the heavy lifting throughout the drafts—we arranged them like a photobook.
It used to be different. I used to be a little susceptible to gimmicks—not exactly “nihilistic,” more absurdist. I used to want to call the book The Rest of It, which was the first story NOON published. I had originally wanted that to be the last story so that, if the book ended with “The Rest of It,” it's almost like, “yeah, there's more stories here, but they're not in the book.”
I'm glad it changed. It went from that little idea to being arranged much more concretely, again, like a photo book. And at the end of it, not something I thought of as absurdist. Because the narrator is sincerely looking for different kinds of meaning/meaning in different ways.
I have to say too, Harris Lahti, editor at Cash 4 Gold, also had a lot to do with the final order of the stories in the book. He's been a great editor for Champ. He gets what I’m doing or trying to do.
NS: That absurdist thread bucking up against this more grounded perspective seems to be in the stories as well, in a way.
ND: The groundedness feels really important to me. I didn’t want to be absurd—and I think the sequencing helped—because I feel differently now than when I first started writing, since this book contains almost ten years of my writing.
I almost think of them as anti-absurdist—if we’re talking about that more academic or philosophical absurdism, like the meaninglessness and the irrational. Irrational I’ll concede to. Maybe the stories are in conversation with a kind of absurdism. But it’s all very meaningful. Where the stories came from are. I think life is too.
This never really happens, but I wanted it to be a book that anybody could read, more or less, because I got so many ideas for stories from people I worked with—when I worked on farms or in light construction, or growing up working at a pizza place. I always write and read in the morning, and when I worked on the farms or in construction, I would try to do a little bit before work since I knew the day was going to be tiring.
NS: How did working those kinds of jobs shape these stories?
ND: I think the little irrational things, or the things that feel slightly off in many of the stories about working in those environments have some joy. That’s how I feel now when I think about these settings.
The farm was great, I’m glad I did it but I don’t know how much I’d want to do that now. But the pizza place, I miss it. Many of the people I worked with at the pizza place and at the light construction job, were natural storytellers. And I always had a hard time joining in. I wasn’t naturally funny or smooth in my out-loud talking. I think that must have some influence on why I like the editing part of writing.
NS: I’m curious about a decade ago, when these absurdist impulses started to generate. There's a lot that's hidden in your stories, a lot of clear sighted observations of the world paired with the ambiguities of common speech. I'm wondering what brought you to this interest in ambiguity or absurdism in the first place. Were there writers who really opened your eyes to these aspects of fiction?
ND: That’s such a good question. It's tough. You see younger people, or newer, amateur writers having an interest in ambiguity. I was like this—it can be used as a false source of mystery or tension. And when it’s questioned the response is, “Oh, but it was meant to be vague!” When it doesn't necessarily work where they're doing it. But I don't know if I have a good strategy in my own work to get around that.
More recently, maybe five years ago, Jon Fosse’s Septology was published in English. The more I read about Fosse, the more I appreciate him—same with a writer like Gerald Murnane. Fosse said that the language of his stories should be really simple, but also incomprehensible, like life.
I think about that sort of thing a lot. And I hope that what you referred to as “clear sighted observations of the world” is enough to keep it together. I think that goes back to the photo book idea: you have this narrator, whether he’s in first person, closer, or a little bit more distant in third person, and you figure out how that distance affects the ambiguity or specificity of these images and observations that are set up.
NS: Within that space of ambiguity and interiority, the narrators find solace in the natural world, whether it’s being proud to come home to a classic woodpecker, daydreaming names for a dog, or appreciating the smell and taste of the ocean. What is your relationship to the natural world, and how have you come to find it in your work?
ND: Even though none of these stories are auto-fictional, they all sort of have as their backdrop all of the places that I've lived. Growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, I always had the ocean. For 18 years. And then I moved to Chicago, where there’s the lake [Lake Michigan]. I don’t care what anybody says. It's nothing like the ocean.
There was definitely a little bit of missing the natural world there. The “Woodpecker” story, where [the narrator] finds a dead woodpecker, was written in Chicago. That one’s sort of about being fatigued by not having nature close by.
And then I was in Western Massachusetts, where I just farmed.
Then Tucson, which even though it's a city feels nothing like any city I've ever been to before, where you can drive for 15 minutes and you're in the middle of the desert.
I'm in Virginia now, a little bit in the woods.
As a small craft tool, I'm interested in using the natural world, landforms, or a body of water as the backdrop to a character’s interiority. Even though the character seems a little closed off in some regards, they're very open to what the world has to offer via the natural world. I'm able to bounce their concerns off of the backdrop of where they're at.
I mean, it's where, historically, throughout art, we've always found the sublime, and I wholeheartedly feel that.
I also think my stories take place in the 21st century, but we're so inundated with phones and computers in life, I just don't really have much interest in them showing up in my writing. As an editor, I’m interested in what other people are writing, even if it's got a lot of hyper-contemporary stuff. I am so willing to read stuff [with phones and computers], but in my day to day, I just don't really like it. Don’t like my experience of it. Sometimes I allow myself to get into unproductive research for my writing, going down rabbit holes and reading articles when I shouldn't. But even if I enter the internet for a little bit, I always think, “I hate this.”
NS: That’s interesting, considering your and Rae’s publishing project Blue Arrangements (which houses the highly curated “open call and arrangement,” Lazy Susan), which aside from a few print publications, is mostly an online publishing endeavor. Though it does have a low-key, early internet quality to it.
ND: I agree that even though so much of that project has been online, even the way Rae has it coded feels very low key, minimal, and sort of handmade. And all the hours that go into arranging the Lazy Susan projects. The first few publications we did that were print, we made them ourselves with the help of a couple other DIY printers.
It feels like that's what's accessible to me.
With writing, when I have material in front of me, it’s much easier to shape what I want out of it, rather than all these things that I don't really understand. Starting a story is the hardest part, because you're creating something from nothing. Once I have a few notebook pages of notes, images, and possible actions or concerns for a narrator or characters, I start to shape and arrange that. I think making sure that there's little objects and little tableaus that will sit nicely together is the modus operandi of my stories and Blue Arrangements.
NS: You wrote this collection over the course of ten years, and while the stories change and develop, they all have such a surefooted prose style. Have the stories always come out this way? How did you arrive at your style of writing?
ND: The first time I ever sent stories hoping to get them published, it was to three magazines and one of them was NOON. I really didn't even know what NOON was, or the other magazines that I sent work to. People who I had just started becoming friends with suggested that I send to these places.
I sent an eight page story, and then Diane [Williams], the NOON team, and I edited it down to be really short. I was excited, in a sense, because I felt like that form fit best with what I really liked.
I think a lot of my favorite writers before I started writing were musicians. If I go back to high school—and this might be cheesy at thirty, but I still listen to them and it makes me feel good—I really liked the Canadian band The Weakerthans. More towards my Chicago years, David Berman of the Silver Jews was probably the biggest for me. I also liked and still like Smog/Bill Callahan. And there were a handful of country singers from the 70s like Townes [Van Zandt] and John Prine, Jerry-Jeff Walker and Guy Clark.
The short form stuff rubbed against songwriters like Berman and Callahan. I also consider music not just in terms of lyrical influence. The sort of musicality of language, even if it's really simple—I like that. That’s something Diane thinks about. I was just listening to one of her Bookworm [the literary talk show] interviews. And she was talking about how she likes that the host, Michael Silverblatt, called her work “pieces,” in terms of them being more like musical pieces, and not something unfinished.
That’s the thing with the short form. I think people want to call them fragments or lazy. But I think that it takes a long time to whittle an eight page piece down to something that's really dense and a half page. Something hopefully sure of itself in whatever it's trying to put forth.
NS: Is that still your process now, after working with NOON? I imagine not all of them come out to eight pages.
ND: Actually, I'd say it's kind of similar. I usually get to a point where I feel like I can work with it once I'm somewhere between four and twelve pages, and work down from there.
With NOON, I feel like it was still a learning process for me. There's always some cutting and rearranging. I'm just so grateful that they want to work with me continuously. I have this huge feeling of excitement to get to learn from Diane and the NOON team, like Liza St. James, Zach Davidson, Madeline Lucas, and Blakey Bessire. I get a lot of edits from them that I read over just nodding my head very excitedly going “Oh, yeah, why didn't I just do this?”
There's this other thing that’s happened maybe two or three times, where I'd send in a piece that is somewhere between three to six pages, and there'd be no edits. They'd be like, “Oh, this is great. We love the voice of this.” That feels like such a great accomplishment for some reason. Even though I'm always willing to get these edits and be pushed, there's something about the times that I've been able to get one or two or three stories by without anything—I'm like, “Woah, I did something here.”
NS: Before we end, I want to come back to The Champ Is Here, particularly an element I found fascinating in its structural progression. There’s always a girlfriend in the book, who's at first nameless, and then becomes “B,” then becomes Buggy. She is a grounding force in the collection. I’m wondering if you could speak to her presence.
ND: With that move–from nameless to B to Buggy–I wanted it to reiterate that, throughout the book, so much of its stakes are about the main character figuring out not how to not let his significant other down.
I don't want this book by any means to be read as auto-fictional, but it's easy for your own thoughts and experiences as a writer to show up in stories. If this book was read by someone as a very brief account of 10 years, as it was written, I think you’d just see a narrator grappling with work, life, and himself. Naturally, it seems like that would be one thing for a narrator to wrestle with. Hopefully showing glimpses of not being so self-involved or even calling out his own closed off and self-centered feelings.
NS: That closed off quality is interesting—like I said earlier, it does feel like there's this pressure that builds through the book, almost an anxiety. Nothing is changing around him, necessarily, or very little things—a shopkeeper will brush him off, a bird will die, or a hook gets in his finger—but that pressure and anxiety builds regardless. How were you able to bring that to the work?
ND: It might be pretty close to being the main concern. Showing the narrator's resentment, just a general resentment towards things, and how to keep it at bay--I think that tends to show up as anxiety.
This might have to do with my grappling for an answer about technology. It’s like an experiment to see if stripping out the things that I don't typically think about from my stories, like the phone and the internet (that is to say a whole means of being social and connecting to people), then what are the other anxieties that could show up on a social level for a character? So things like not understanding why the shopkeeper brushed him off, or even how to interact with the person that he lives with, were useful things to write through.
I forget who it was, but there was some writer who said something along the lines of, “Critics love saying how my book wasn't very good because it was sentimental. I kind of want my work to be sentimental. I want there to be real feeling in the book.” I agree with that.