In late June, a few hours ahead of his reading at Prairie Lights Books, I met Lee Cole over coffee in Iowa City. He was in town—back in town, really—to promote his new novel, Fulfillment, which tells the story of a dysfunctional family in which each member desperately wants something they can’t quite have. It’s a novel of personal dynamics, but it is also an exploration of what it means to be fulfilled in life.
Cole graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2019. I asked him about his experience in the famed program.
“I wrote a piece about it recently in LitHub, kind of about imposter syndrome. And my worry since it came out is that it makes it sound like I, you know, didn’t have a good time at Iowa or something,” he told me. “But mostly, aside from my own kind of personal anxieties, I thought it was great. I met my partner and my friends, who I’m really close with to this day, and I had great teachers. I encountered work that I may not have ever encountered otherwise, and I learned a ton. So I really think it’s kind of a magical place, the Workshop, and it’s so rare to be able to step outside of the world for a couple of years . . . and just be given time to write. I mean, what a rare and precious thing that is.”
Still, he has some thoughts about the MFA culture—and they map onto many of the concerns in Fulfillment—concerns about socioeconomic status, what constitutes striving of an unseemly sort, and who gets to be an artist or a scholar.
“What I was talking about in the article is the over-representation of Ivy League-educated people in elite MFA programs, and how there weren’t a lot of people who came from a background like mine in the Workshop—people from small towns, rural places, people who didn’t go to elite colleges, who were first-generation college students,” Cole explained. “And the obligation isn’t on MFA programs to solve that. It’s more of a problem, I think, with the way arts funding is done, public education and that sort of thing. But, yeah, it’s something I’ve thought about a lot since, wondering what solutions there might be to that problem.”
As the conversation turned to Cole’s writing, it was clear that the deep thinking that underpins his thoughts about MFA programs is also central to his approach to fiction.
“I have to write about whatever is preoccupying me at the moment,” he said. “So, you know, for my first novel [2022’s Groundskeeping], it was the line that opened the book, that when I’m away from Kentucky, I feel homesick, and when I’m home, I want to leave, and how do I resolve that kind of emotional conundrum? And so writing for me is a way of working through whatever is bugging me at the moment.”
Questions about the nature and achievability of satisfaction in life drove the writing of his second novel.
“One of the questions that I was thinking about for Fulfillment is, how do we know that we want what we think we want, which is a question that Joel [a pretentious academic] poses to his class at one point in the book. And I think part of that arose out of building up in my mind what it would be like to publish a book, and thinking of it as kind of an end-all be-all. . . . But it didn’t solve all my problems. It’s not like I could just rest on my laurels and say, ‘Well, I’ve got it figured out, you know, I’m good for life.’ And so it was this question around fulfillment and what that means for each person, and the disappointments that are sometimes wrapped up in that when you build something up. . . .”
In addition to what drives each of his novels, he also considers what might be missing from contemporary fiction.
“More generally, I really care about writing about work, about rural places, small towns, writing about the kind of characters that I don’t typically see in literary fiction that often. I hadn’t seen a good book about warehouse work like this, and I had done it for three years in Kentucky. . . . That’s often what’s guiding me. I think about what kind of book would I like to read. What’s not being written about?”
Because Fulfillment is set in the rural South and has several significant threads of menace running through it, I asked him whether Flannery O’Connor—the famed writer and alumna of the Writers’ Workshop—was an influence.
“I think rural places are often much stranger and weirder than contemporary rural or Southern writers make them out to be. Flannery has always struck me as someone who got it right, who manages to not sensationalize, but to tell the truth about darknesses that are there and the grotesqueries of some of these places. So, yeah, I’m sure that was an influence. . . .”
So how fulfilled are the characters when Fulfillment comes to a close?
“I wanted to think really carefully as I wrote this book about whether redemption would actually be plausible for some of these characters, or whether, you know, maybe they end up in some place they didn’t quite expect. . . . I think for each of the characters, it is different from where they started. It’s just not what they hoped for.”
That may be true for Cole’s characters, but for the reader, Fulfillment is a thought-provoking and satisfying read—all you might hope for in a novel.