Drinks with Marc Eichen
single-malt scotch, neat
This writer meets with Marc via the technological burden known as Zoom. If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out his story from our February issue here:
And since we’re meeting in the middle of the afternoon and not at night in a swanky bar in Midtown Manhattan, my first question is:
What’s your drink of choice?
Single-malt scotch. Neat. With a glass of seltzer and ice on the side. I have a friend in Islay who takes me around to distilleries there and we try the good stuff. It’s good because you don’t need much of it to satiate your thirst, which keeps my drinking relatively cheap.
Where did “Corner Man” come from?
I am from New York, and I used to meet up with some colleagues at a diner near the last stop of the N train in Astoria, Queens. I was always early, so I would see people, standing on the corner, and I thought, what are their lives like? There must be something that makes that life bearable—gives it joy and anger and everything else that we all experience—because I don’t think we’re that different. A lot of my stories begin that way, with my questioning a way into the character’s life.
You’ve been publishing a lot of stories in various journals, and I know you’re working on some larger projects, too. How do you deal with the inevitable (and innumerable) rejections that come from working on this level?
My secret is: I have an agent, Kristen Che at BlueHen who sends my stories out. Sometimes I see the rejections/acceptances, but most often I don’t see them. That’s helped me a lot in two specific ways:
1.) I send out more stuff than I would have. When the rejections aren’t in your face, and you’re not having to do all the reading of submissions guidelines, formatting requirements, contest rules, etc. it frees up a lot of time to write.
2.) I’m less emotionally involved. My ego gets removed from the equation. So, even with an acceptance, my wife says we should celebrate, but I’m already moving on to the next one.
Do you think coming to writing—on a professional level, with the goal of being published and widely-read—later in life has benefited you?
Yes, definitely. When you’re in your twenties and early-thirties, there is so much riding on every high and low. You don’t have the necessary perspective yet that will allow you to sustain yourself through all of them. Because, the truth is, you’re not going to get any better unless you keep doing it. In order to do that, you can’t be knocked down every time somebody loves or hates your work.
Who’s a writer you feel you continually learn from?
The easy answer is George Saunders. Partly because not just his stories are smart and well-crafted, but he is a writer who thinks a lot about his craft yet remains very accessible, which I really admire. Richard Russo is another. He is very funny and writes women very well. There are a million others, of course. To name just a few: Zadie Smith, George Eliot, Olga Tokarczuk, Benjamin Lerner. Each one gives me courage to be better. We could spend all day on this question.
How do you feel about the phrase “writing for the phone”?
Well, there’s always a thing with the physics of writing. If you’re writing a ten-page story or a 300-page novel, you’re going to approach those differently. I do realize a lot of people read on their phones, and literature has sort of entered into the attention economy in a way. Because there are so many other things on the phone that are competing with your story. Usually, not other stories but Spotify or their boyfriend’s texts or the news, and on and on.
I’m not actively thinking about the phone when I’m writing, but I do pay a lot of attention to the 1st lines or stories and 1st chapters of novels to draw in the reader.
Is A.I. about to put every writer out of a job?
What I hope is that people learn to use A.I. as a tool, just like any other technological advancement. I try not to be too alarmist about it. There will be a flood of shit, at first, but then, I think it will increase the value of work that’s being written by actual people with content and a voice unique to them. Let’s be fair, a lot of art is...derivative. And that goes back hundreds of years. But the derivative work only highlights work that stands out above the rest.