James Magruder’s third collection of short stories, No One is Looking at You, is a treat for this author’s fans, returning to the settings we know and love from his previous books — the theater, an Ivy League campus, the milieu of gay men of a certain age. Also delightful as ever is his language and prose style, which makes his work across his many genres, from the book of his Broadway musical to his history of the Yale Repertory Theater to his novels and stories, so instantly recognizable, with a vocabulary, a sense of humor, catchphrases and rhythms that are inimitably, uniquely Magruder.
To quote a comment about the book from Baltimore poet David Bergman, “Magruder, who has produced wonderful theater, fascinating novels, and an exciting history of the Yale Repertory Theater, perhaps has found his métier in the short story.” I started our conversation by asking him if he agrees that the short story is his true calling.
James Magruder: I’d say that short stories are actually the hardest thing. I always held fiction above drama as a much more difficult genre, and more difficult challenge. I wrote short stories in college, but in grad school my focus changed, and then I worked at Center Stage for years. It was at my first residency at McDowell in August of 2001, after I finished the draft of the play I was working on and still had a few days to go that I thought, well, let’s just try a piece of short fiction. So I wrote this, like, four-page thing, and it felt fine and good, and then when I got back to Baltimore, I started writing more stories. My first collection, Let Me See It, I view as the MFA in writing I never got, because although I’d certainly read a shit ton, I had no training. The stories in that collection were my training.
Marion Winik: I found that the new book shares some themes and settings with Let Me See It.
Sure, because every character is basically me. And the stories with younger protagonists I think of as my Hardy Boys series, often devoted to the question “why was I sleeping with that older guy?” Let Me See It has two narrators who are first cousins. The one who dies of HIV, Elliott, is the me who was reckless and careless, and the one who survives, Tom, represents a more sober and careful side.
The reckless and careless one went to Paris and got gonorrhea, I recall; in the new book, you return to Paris from another angle. And the Cornell campus, which is a major setting for Vamp Until Ready, is back in the stories in first half of No One Is Looking at You, which all have collegiate protagonists.
There are locations where my best material happened — because I can’t make stuff up, or don’t want to. The stories in that first half I pulled from an unpublished and unpublishable novel that I wrote after I had been diagnosed with HIV in 1988 and thought I was going to die. The six boys in Part One, “Origin Stories,” are all me, with different names and different home states. And though some of the prose survives from the original version, I changed them all from a first person POV to third person.
Going along with the title, No One Is Looking at you, the college boys are closeted, mostly, and struggling and fumbling with sex and love and all that, and they want to, in their own way, remain in the third person. They are struggling to figure out who they are, and would rather keep some distance, remain at a remove.
In the second half, where older characters take over, I own who I am. I have nothing to hide, so it’s first person.
And Roger Hauf, a college professor who appears in several of those stories, seems to be your avatar.
And as Roger says right off the bat, students don’t care a whit about what my life lessons are, their own stuff is most important to them. But you, the reader, might be interested in what wisdom Roger and I collected along the way.
I was curious about the significance of the epigraphs for each of the sections? For the younger characters in Origin Stories, we’ve got “Joe, macht die Music von damals nach.”
The German quote is from a Brecht/Weill musical we did at Center Stage, “Happy End.” It translates as “Joe, play that old song they always played.” It’s from a bar scene where a bunch of petty criminals are trying to remember the lyrics to this song that they sang when they were younger.
That tracks. For the grownups in Parting Shots, it’s “Run for the roundhouse, Nellie, and you might corner him there.”
This has to do with Roger’s gradual acceptance of the way the world has changed, EDI and its surrounding ideas and language. Early on, he says things like, I can use the word ‘faggot,’ because I own this stereotype. But by the end, with his students constantly pushing him, he tries not to misgender people. He worries that he might have engaged in misery tourism.
And in the last story, Amulet, he’s castigating himself for his cultural insensitivity on a long-ago trip to Thailand.
I could never write that Thailand story, until last year. I shamed the chef at the breakfast bar by refusing the omelet he was trying to hand me because it wasn’t made to order for me. I’ve been so ashamed of that particular action that nobody ever knew about it except Steve.
But as I said earlier, eventually it’s like, I have nothing to hide.
So what does that have to do with running for the roundhouse?
Well, you can’t be cornered in a roundhouse, because there are no corners. Similarly, you can’t be chased or backed into the EDI stuff, you have to get there yourself. It was part of my response to feeling cornered by the EDI social justice police both at Swarthmore and in the culture-at-large.
These stories take a frank and often funny approach to sex. Do you have thought about what makes good sex in a book story?
In a good sex scene, the protagonist learns something about himself through the sexual activity. In the early stories the characters are getting their first lessons in sex with men. in Service Learning, where the protagonist loses his heterosexual virginity, he learns he’s not ever going to be good at it. You always have to be moving the narrative forward, so the sex scene cannot be gratuitous.
In “Who Are Your People?” the protagonist explains that he could distinguish a buckwheat cake server from a tomato lift, both esoteric components of a complete silverware service, I believe. But the last sentence of the story says, “The global reach of the internet and its embrace of queers and all their cross-pollinating cultures, however, have rendered the position of homosexual lifestyle mentor as quaint and obsolete as a tomato lift.” Do you really believe that?
I do, actually.
So you don’t think people need real people to help them?
I think young queers do need real people. But they don’t know that they need us. There’s the title again: No one is looking at us. Who needs a lifestyle mentor when you’ve grown up with a pansexual affinity space group at your junior high school? And gay white cis-males are always going to be the first to be run off the island.
The expression “no one is looking at you” is a curse that Irish parents put onto their children. Its corollary is “who do you think you are?” Don’t get too big for your britches. And kids absorb it.
Jewish parents certainly don’t say anything like that.
No, it’s the opposite. Everyone is looking at you at every moment, because you are the most fascinating, wonderful little boy who ever was. Both ways have their positives and negatives. The Irish approach can actually be helpful when you’re young and self-conscious, and you think everybody’s looking at you. If you really understood at eighteen that really nobody was looking at you, you could be freer. But by the time you’re Roger’s age, which is mine, you’ve lost all self-consciousness.
And as a writer, I’ve never had any self-consciousness. I’ve put everything…everything in there. That I always punish myself at the end is as Irish as Paddy’s Pig.
Meet the Author
Though James has no events coming up, he works the floor at the Ivy Bookshop on Falls Road on Fridays and Sundays 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., and will be glad to sign a copy of Nobody is Looking at You, or talk books in general. Also note that his magisterial history of the Yale Rep 1966-2016, list price $60.00, is going for $7.95 on Amazon today, 12/8/2025.
