Robbie Herbst Seeks ‘Productive Tension’

Fine Arts Work Center writing fellow Robbie Herbst. Photo: Agata Storer

Maybe it’s Robbie Herbst’s background in music that attunes him to the relationship between the artist and the audience. His experience as a performer — he plays with the Elgin Symphony Orchestra in Illinois, where he is assistant principal second violin, and with the West Michigan Symphony — puts him before strangers in a way that few burgeoning writers are.

“I think it’s good for writers to be in the world,” he says. “It’s important to exist among nonwriters. It can help keep things in perspective.”

Herbst, a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center this winter, didn’t style himself as a writer at first. His degrees from Dartmouth College are in music and history, not fiction; his M.F.A. from the University of Colorado Boulder is in performance. But creative writing is something he’s always been interested in, he says, and in the last half decade he’s started taking it much more seriously.

Herbst has had stories published in The Rumpus (“Crusher”), The Massachusetts Review (“Dog Moms”), Hobart (“So We Bought a Hearse”), and more than a dozen other literary magazines. The stories range from the character-driven tale of an American on an “international booty call” in France to a bite-size horror piece about a teenage girl who grows a beak. Herbst recently finished writing a novel he jokingly describes as “Challengers for classical music” — it’s presented as a triptych of contradictory narratives from three Chicago musicians in a complex relationship with themselves and one another.”

Getting that novel done wasn’t easy. “I ended up writing with a second monitor so I could track what was happening a hundred pages earlier,” Herbst says. “It was a lot more complicated than what I’m used to doing.” He usually writes on his notes app or in a Word document, but for the novel he used Scrivener, a program designed for writers organizing complex narratives.

For Herbst, considering the way readers might react is one of the most important parts of writing. “It’s a difficult thing, understanding how the reader will perceive and digest a work,” he says. “I think it’s important to subvert what they might want or expect from a story. That’s a productive tension.”