1. Why do you write?
Writing fiction is a lot getting drunk off the draught of the keyboard (Home Row Happy Hour) and then squeezing your heart into an empty gin bottle and hurling it as far as you possibly can into an ocean of unknown variables. You don’t know what sort of current your script will get caught in; how large the tidal wave will be. You have no clue how many seasons your heart will spend bobbing up and down, succumbing to the sloshes of nature, the indifference of mankind, the boiled insouciance of an accelerated society whose paws have more and more freely adapted to the rectangular scepter of the remote control and less and less to the tattered lapels of a book jacket. You have no clue what foreign shore will be privy to your psychedelic scribbles or if your heart will even wash up in the hands of an appreciable audience at all.
All you have (intrinsically, I think) is the joy of composition. The moment when that blank slate of the computer screen is gradually dotted with syllables and motion—the inward paradoxical feeling of having somehow, magically, traveled simply by sitting on your ass for eight for hours straight and tapping out crunches into a stream of jittery alphabetical shapes. You have that feeling of feeling less alone in the world, the feeling of connecting with something inexplicably spiritual. The feeling of devising a story, of living out that story through composition and in giving that story (and not caring, in a way, if the story ever quote unquote “makes-it”—in the immortal gothic cadenza’s of Black Sabbath “Give it all and ask for no return/and very soon you’ll see and you’ll begin to learn/ that it’s alright—yeah it’s alright” ).
2. If you didn't write, what would you do?
Probably masturbate….wait….
3. Your favorite writing quote?
There’s a quote by Anne Sexton I read when I was in high school from a letter she wrote to a burgeoning writer I’m really fond of, a poetic Polonius urging an unfledged literary Laertes to, “Get to work man, and let the publishing come in its own time even if its 15 years from now. No matter. Fight for the poem. Put your energy into it. Force discipline into madness. Push for the stars or at least go back and push one poem all the way up there. I did it, why not you?” There’s another really well anthologized quote from Heart of Darkness which I used to have pierced over my writer’s desk where the narrator comments, “No I don’t like work…no man does, but I like what’s in the work. The chance to find yourself.” There’s a book on atomic positivism the size of a Sunday school bulletin by Ludwig Wittgenstein entitled, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that just destroys me with metaphysical maxims like “The single thing proves over and over to be unimportant but the possibility of every single thing show us something about the nature of the world.” and, “If eternity is understood not by endless temporal duration but by timelessness then he who lives in the moment lives eternally.” Of course David Foster Wallace’s 1993 contemporary fiction Dalkey achieve interview with Larry McCaffery where he talks about, “Fiction is what it’s like to be a complete and sentient fuckin’ human being vs. a rather sophisticated mammal.” just disintegrated every cell of my anatomy when first perused. Somewhere Michael Chabon has a great quote about if you want to learn to be a fiction writer you must learn, “to sit on your ass,” and although it’s not hip to reference there’s a quote from Loius L’amour’s autobiography EDUCATION OF A WANDERING MAN (the book Chris McCandless was reading at the time of his demise) goading the reader to “Start writing no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
Wait, you wanted quote singular.
4.
Your favorite non-writing quote?
I have a crinkled rejection slip from the New Yorker
pinned like a botched homecoming boutonnière above my writing desk at my mom’s
house. It reads as follows: “Play with
words, not with yourself, Mr. Von Behren.”
5. What vegetable do you hate to eat and
why?
The first poem I wrote for Miss Mooney in third
grade was a five-seven-five haiku about Rutabagas. It went like this:
Rutabaga,
babe.
Don’t
you want to eat it, babe?
Rutabaga, babe.
Basho Beware.
6.
What are three elements that you need to mention in order to tell someone your
most embarrassing moment?
There was a
lot of alcohol and a lot of public nudity and (what the hell) lets throw in an
elderly nun in a wheelchair brandishing an oxygen tank and clutching a rosary
in the fashion of flailed Mardi Gras beads ….it only gets better…
That
summer (2004) I fell salivatingly in love with this classy older married woman
and wrote 300,000 words and blew my wrists out like an overtly-plugged amp in a
teenage garage band. Fast-forward eight
years to last summer. I had just gotten rejected from a semi-prestigious
literary magazine and it was one of those desultory,
“Yer-shits-good-but-we-just-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-you,” rejection
missives. The healthiest advice I’ve ever received about publishing is that
when someone says “no,” you mentally supplant the word “no,” with the word
“next,” so the fear of rejection in completely reneged, but for some reason
instead of mentally hearing the word “next,” I heard a lot of internal swearing
followed the by the word game and by the word on. I mostly write long-crazy
novels and give a couple poetry readings a month but I wanted to start
hammering away at the windshield of the page again and just tie the reader up
to the linguistic bedpost of each sentence, Odysseus voluntarily trussed to the
totemic strip-pole mast of ecstatic longing unable to defer from emotionally
ejaculating into the cradle of his cod-piece (or whatever they wore back then)
with every forbidden sip of the Sirens refrain.
...and oh, since you have a hard time making
yer lover come, you should come to DIRTY LAUNDRY LIT gala of joy on Oct 6th. The stage
is going to explode into bouquets of light leaving the audience hedonistically
hungover indeed…
--all questions interrogated by (push-cart prize princess) Diva Natashia Deon...whose fragrant poetic pulse inspires us all...
7.
Why did you decide to read for Dirty Laundry Lit: Hungover?
Boy, the story would have to convene about eight
years ago when poet laureate Billy Collins was reading at the University where
I worked and I was hanging out with a young poet named Lindsay Gail, who is
hummeled-cheek and buxom and whose northern hemisphere looks like it was
poetically purloined from the logo’d stem of a St. Pauli’s girl emblem.
After the
reading I approached the poet laureate and tried to say something witty about
lanyards and he completely ignored me all the while ogling Lindsay Gail’s
cleavage. Finally I grabbed Lindsay Gail
by her wrist and said something to the poet like, “We’re formative young poets.
Who do have to sleep with to get published?” Collins continued to ignore me
before I inquired again and he annoyingly swatted back, ““Why don’t you just go
to Breadloaf. They call it Bedloaf.”
Sometimes when you feel the need to be heard you
scratch and howl even though it seems like no one is paying attention to you at
the time and I started copying and pasting and then splattering seasoned blog
entries from eight years (about a fourth of my lifetime) ago into the fair
forehead of ye olde Facebook status update rectangle everyday. They were all
stories that were each about 2,000 words long scribed solely for the
velvet-haired “muse” creation I was in love with all those years ago. Via the
magnetic mire of incestuous social-networking conduits I ended up befriending fellow,
“Bedloafians,” one being a dear poetic brother from Vermont named Larry Bradley
(whose first name is that of my favorite Uncle and last is that of the
University which fired me). It was through poet Larry Bradley that I met the
refulgent gazelle-eyed sensuous scribe Natashia Deon who invited me to recite
my poetic tithes at Dirty Laundry Lit at a time when I direly needed validation
for my craft.
That said I’m honored to be a part of Dirty Laundry
Lit. Honored to be a part of Natashia’s vision attesting to the narrative
potency of the human condition evinced through the linguistic medium of words.
Honored to hang out with writers of exceptional glory I admire.
8.
If you could have any two people in the world, dead or alive, to show up to
this reading, who would it be and why?
You. I want to read just for you. And you. I harbor
a hardcore second-person pronoun fetish.
9.
Where did you grow up? If more than one place, where would you call your
childhood home?
I’m extremely proud to
be an Illinois writer. It’s the state that gave birth to Hemingway, Carl
Sandburg, Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, Studs Turkel, but I’d argue that in the
last fifteen years alone thirty percent of the authors deemed contemporary and
significant who will be read and taught 100 years from now have roots in this
state.
George Saunders, who I
had the privilege of introducing at a book store before he was well known, was
born in Chicago and is just pure south side blood. Dave Eggers grew up in the
‘burbs and attended one of those high schools you always see featured in John
Hughes films where beanie clad members of the school bridge club are always
making pacts over lunch trays to lose their virginity by Arbor Day. Richard
Powers ( Galatea 2.2!!!) grew up near Chicago and teaches at U of I. Jonathan Franzen was born in a suburb of St.
Louis—but on the Illinois side. Jennifer Egan lived in Chicago as well Being a
young impressionable novelist and knowing that David Foster Wallace finished
proofing the galleys for Infinite Jest in my same area code was just
tremendously important to me when I was nineteen years old and just getting out
of that perfunctory Kerouac-induced “Look ma, no punctuation, say something Zen
that is seemingly profound,” mandatory male writer phase.
The town I live in is called Peoria and it’s pretty
much the genital wart of the Midwest. All of the sociological flotsam and
jetsam sifts down the muddy eddies of the Illinois River and just gets stuck
here. It’s the birthplace of Richard Pryor and the hometown where comedian Sam
Kinison entered puberty. It’s inexplicably referenced as a footnote to
Ginsberg’s Howl as “Holy Peoria,” and is the setting of DFW’s swan song epistle
to corporate tedium THE PALE KING.
It’s a town (or city circa maybe half-a million if
you include environs) that’s a working-class wet dream stranded on a hilly
bluff with a lots of old money and beautiful old houses that were built by
bootleggers in the prohibition era. It’s the home of Bradley University, where
state poet laureate and friend Kevin Stein teaches, and the home of the late
journalistic legend the great Rick Baker and
almost monthly there will still be poetry readings where fifty people
show up. I have a dear friend, poet Kyle Devalk who is always reading poems on
the top of overturned garbage cans or vacant church steps.
What I love
about living here is that, few places on the planet I have observed where the
quilt of disparate social-stratums seemingly overlap each other. As a writer
you are sort of born wearing an ontological periscope like a spelunkering cap
at all times as you sift through this chasm of life called reality. You observe
compassion in a different way. You observe poverty in a different way. You feel the pulse of love and the pangs of
hurt with more intensity and with escalating vigor because that’s your job.
Parts of P-town are extremely ghettoey. The high
school I attended had the lowest ISAT scores in the state and the highest
teenage pregnancy rate in the nation. Parts are extremely opulent and yuppie.
Down the river it looks like William Faulkner country and there is more white
trash than you could bag up with a twist tie.
People get stuck here. I sauntered into my best
friend from high school a few weeks back whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years
and he told me he had been arrested 52 times and then he lifted up his shirt to
show me the welts where he had been stabbed on his front porch a few months
earlier and then he started rapping and he started doing spontaneous things
with language that I just can’t do even though I write my ass off every day.
But perhaps what I love most about living here is
that if I am having a bad day I can get in my dilapidated BMW and in five minutes
just be out driving across desolate country roads and chasing the tangerine
splash of the sunset and looking at barns. That’s all I want to do when I start
selling books is just refurbish a barn and write eight hours a day and brew my
own mead and can my own vegetables and, every Saturday night, smoke my pipe
while listening to Prairie Home Companion.
Not a bad life indeed.
10.
One word to describe your childhood hometown?
Remember those confetti
vignettes collectively culled from the scrapbooks of childhood when you first
discovered books and you were involved in summer reading programs at the
library downtown in the summer and you were wearing shorts and you could feel
the air conditioner rattle and hush and
purr against the bare whiteness of your legs and that girl you harbored a
hard-core crush on, the red headed girl with freckles who is taller than you
who always sits in front of you with her back extremely straight and whose
northern limbs elevate like an exclamatory mark every time she knows the answer
in math class and who always colors between the lines and who somehow, perhaps
by divine providence or happenstance, you saunter into her at the library at
the check out counter while you are ferrying a pagoda of young adult tomes by
CS Lewis and Franklin W. Dixon and various Newbery award lauding scholars and you
become embarrassed because your mom is next to you and you are wearing really
thick glasses that look like abandon
television sets which you just got a few weeks earlier and, even though
everyone in your family wears glasses and your mom tells you that they make you
look handsome you still refrain from looking at her directly but can tell from
the semi-dampness of her hair that she just went swimming that morning and the
stalk of her entire anatomy smells like chlorine dappled with hints of sunshine
and you try not to feel maladroit and
intellectually deficient as your moms talk and you notice that she is checking
out books at a higher Accelerated Reader caliber than the ones you are
currently checking out and you say
goodbye really quickly while looking down as if to verify that your shoes are
properly velcroed and at night, when you read with a flash light under the dome
of your EMPIRE STRIKES BACK sheets and
try as hard as you can you cannot stop thinking about the red headed girl in
the library check out line and how, every sentence you read still from time to
time, moving your lips in warbled static, carries with it the fragrant scent of
sunshine and chlorine.
11. Wanna add something? Please do.
As a dangling coda
(shhhh!!!) is that when Natashia first contacted me I didn’t open up her e-mail
because she looks, in an almost Secret Sharer kinda way, almost exactly like my
friend Shawn. About a block from where I live there are all of these seedy
writer bars kinda ol’ school blue-collar Cannery Row type taverns you can still
smoke in that look like something Eugene O’Neil might stumble out of after
three days of consecutive imbibing with a draft of Ice Man Cometh tucked under
his arm. One of these bars is called the Getaway and the first time I slipped
inside Shawn was stationed behind the bar and when I ordered a beer she lifted
her top as if playing a rendition of Simon says. Before she placed the sudsy
libation in front of me she hiked up the frayed hem of her denim skirt like a
flower in spring by the railroad tracks and after I told Shawn she just made a
patron for life she asked me if I could do legal work for her. So when I first
saw that Natashia had contacted me I refrained from opening the e-mail because
I figured it was a Shawn-pseudonym soliciting funds.
1 comment:
Writing fiction is a lot getting drunk off the draught of the keyboard (Home Row Happy Hour) and then squeezing your heart into an empty gin bottle and hurtling it as far as you possibly can into an ocean of unknown variables. You don’t know what sort of current your script will get caught in; how large the tidal wave will be. You have no clue how many seasons your heart will spend bobbing up and down, succumbing to the sloshes of nature, the indifference of mankind, the boiled insouciance of an accelerated society whose paws have more and more freely adapted to the rectangular scepter of the remote control and less and less to the tattered lapels of a book jacket. You have no clue what foreign shore will be privy to your psychedelic scribbles or if your heart will even wash up in the hands of an appreciable audience at all.
All you have (intrinsically, I think) is the joy of composition. The moment when that blank slate of the computer screen is gradually dotted with syllables and motion—the inward paradoxical feeling of having somehow, magically, traveled simply by sitting on your ass for eight for hours straight and tapping out crunches into a stream of jittery alphabetical shapes. You have that feeling of feeling less alone in the world, the feeling of connecting with something inexplicably spiritual. The feeling of devising a story, of living out that story through composition and in giving that story (and not caring, in a way, if the story ever quote unquote “makes-it”—in the immortal gothic cadenza’s of Black Sabbath “Give it all and ask for no return/and very soon you’ll see and you’ll begin to learn/ that it’s alright—yeah it’s alright” )
So true. Fiction as genre has been fuckin’ alright but it’s also been a nudist colony. Through the orgiastic process of group anonymity, we’ve been capable of sloughing our linguistic attire, unzipping the fly of our own inhibitions and anxiety and letting everything (from Prince Albert’s to lego lesbians to generously surfeited jello-tacos).
Being anonymous has also allowed me to be naked with many blithe and voluptuous creatures I’d NEVER have the opportunity to get naked with outside of the medium of fiction. What an unbidden voyeuristic delight to watch that sublime creature you’ve harbored a massive hardon on since ENG 101 loop accolades on your prose from across the classroom—knowing that she has your heart in the editorial palette and, judging solely from the winecooler-like color her face has gradually blushed into—she has fallen in love (if only for a moment) with everything left inside of you.
The beauty of anonymity is that it makes circulating fiction less authorial and more of an entitlement for the humanities. As poet Coleman barks once commented on the mystical renderings of Rumi “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”
So go ahead. I fuckin’ dare you. We’re already naked. Put more of yer’ heart in that bottle. Open up a few veins and pinch the reader with something that has never been shown or said before.
What—are you scared to be naked? Are you scared that no one will like what’s left inside of you?
--written with zeal for George Chambers....attfuckingboy!
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