Blurring Lines, Fraying Edges: A Review of We Might As Well Light Something On Fire by Ron MacLean

“There is something particularly compelling about a detached foot, he says. Something sad. Almost Lonely.”

—from “Unfound”

Remember silly putty? Back in the day. When you kneaded the polymer dough into a pancake, pressed in headlines and comics from the Funny Pages. Doonesbury, Garfield, Peanuts. After you peeled away the newspaper revealing your new creation, you tugged and pulled, twisted the words, distorted the images. It was like having a fun house mirror in the palm of your hand. Then you rolled the political commentary, the cat’s ponderings and Charlie Brown, all that existential angst into a ball. If you pulled the sphere apart and peered inside, you could still see the essence, the infinite possibilities, amid the swirl of ink.

This is what it’s like to read Ron MacLean’s short story collection We Might As Well Light Something On Fire, published by Braddock Ave Books, where he stretches the boundaries of storytelling, plays with form, presses his thumb into the life of his imaginings, blurring lines, fraying edges, playing with time and space, following threads of energy, but always with the intention to question what it means to be human, to search for political and social justice, to expose our feelings of alienation, to illuminate the never ending quest for connection.

The sixteen stories divided into three sections are often off-kilter, zany and absurd. Consider: A quinceañera for a cat named Egg in “Quinceañera.” Or, dancing goats clad in tan raincoats, porkpie hats and Ray-Bans hiding in plain sight from their executioner, a theoretical physicist turned butcher in “Lesser Escape Artists.” Or disarticulated feet washing ashore in British Columbia, five in total, wearing size 12 running shoes in “Unfound.” Or a friendly haunting by turn of the century Wisconsin politicians in “What Remains” where a former Assistant US Attorney finds a father/son duo hiding in her bathtub. They hang around fixing her plumbing, cooking dinner, enjoying cable TV and facilitating the donation of food to Occupy Wall Street protestors while she battles the Lockport, NY police department over custody of her father’s ashes.

MacLean interlaces excerpts of recipes, musical refrains, travel guide books, historical anecdotes. He spins time in a blender, scrambles sentences like refrigerator poetry magnets. “River Song,” a prose poem like song lyrics, recounts again and again the saga of a dead girl, a doctor, a bridge, Blinky and Ray Ray and a freezer full of tinfoil wrapped money. With each retelling, the truth like memory becomes malleable, more elusive; it erodes away like the banks of a river.

Despite its unconventional underpinnings, the collection begins with and disperses throughout realistic straight forward narratives, in an earnest voice that’s like a conversation. A confessional. Grounded in the here and now — with keenly observed details — leaving head space for the surreal complexities to come. MacLean crafts dialogue and interior musings that are clipped and fragmented, proffered in inhospitable environs, highlighting an acute sense of dislocation.

In the opening story, “Toilet,” the narrator attends a birthday party for someone he doesn’t like enough because she has no need to shine. His thoughts ping pong off the concrete columns in the large industrial open space, a former toilet paper manufacturing concern, now an apartment. He’s not where he’d like to be in his career. He opines that he’s recently lost his context. Confides that he keeps a goat to clean his yard, to make conversation at parties, but mostly for the company. He’s connected to all of these people, he’s friends with them in one way or another, but feels alienated, disjointed. He’s so desperate, he’s willing to go home with a woman whether she’s “sexy or sick as a dog.” The partygoers are reduced to body parts in his mind: the mustache, the sexy clavicle, an ear. Everything is out of context. Even the party food doesn’t makes sense in this hipster Northeast enclave, in which the hosts serve biscuits and gravy.

In a triptych of stories “Prostate Frank Finds True Love,” “Bounce Goes Kissy-Kissy,” and “The Hemorrhoid Holds Court,” a group of mostly middle-aged men meet for their weekly Friday morning coffee klatch. Reduced to nicknames, Bounce, Max the Grabber, Hemorrhoid, Alter Boy, as if a person’s entire being can be summed up in a word or a phrase, they chat, each man assuming his roll, but no one is really listening.

MacLean’s musings of isolation are most profound in the “Night Bus” a travelogue of a tourist excursion to see the uppermost reaches of Northern Finland, the barren tundra, and the constellations. Initially the narrator is optimistic, energized by the crisp cold air.

“And the air. I can’t get enough of it, It’s so, I don’t know what. Cold. More than clean. Something that makes my pores sing Buddy Holly. Bjork. Like mountain air poured through a trumpet filled with lake water.”

He feels boundless love for the communion of parkas, mittens and boots, bib pants and balaclavas. He tries to communicate, practices in his head the sentences he parses together from his translation phrase book, but he never quite hits his mark. He tells a young woman she looks hot in her coat. A fellow traveler, “the Talker” is everywhere chatting everyone up from the bus driver to passengers, to the snack man. The Talker rhapsodizes: “I want to get closer and closer to unadorned yearning.”

There’s a disorientation that comes from long trips, the rhythm of miles lulling the brain to sleep. As the narrator clenches his frost bitten fingers (result of a failed college romance) he contemplates the polar night when the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for 51 days. The Talker wants him to admit, “I have been lost in this night before.” The narrator refuses to voice the Talker’s directive but his despair is palpable.

I was frustrated at times with my inability to decipher the meaning, the author’s intent in some of these stories such as the madcap “Lesser Escape Artists.” I didn’t mind searching the dictionary or questioning the Googleverse. I desperately wanted to unlock the mystery of string theory and its connection to Mailer and Mahler and string cheese and goats shuffle stepping to what I presumed was Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.” How was all that connected to the couple who bring a philosophizing rabbit of the wrong sex to a butcher shop to determine the state of the woman’s womb?

But perhaps that’s the point, the pondering and not knowing with certainty is what it’s all about.

Music and Connection: A Conversation with Ron MacLean

I first met Ron MacLean as a student in the year-long intensive Short Story Incubator program he teaches at Grub Street in Boston. His enthusiasm for the process of revision and the short story form proved inspiring and transformative in my own work.

Ron MacLean's short fiction has appeared widely in magazines including GQ, Narrative, and Fiction International.  He is the author of the novels Headlong and Blue Winnetka Skies, and the story collection Why the Long Face?. In his new story collection, We Might As Well Light Something on Fire no two stories are alike. These diverse narratives, from the traditional to the experimental, span a vast range of emotional experiences. What unites these stories is an expert rendering of the complexity and connotations of what it means to long for a connection with others.

Ron and I met in person to chat about We Might As Well Light Something on Fire, the intersection of music and language, the creative tension between tragedy and hope, and the role of longing in fiction. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

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Jennifer Marie Donahue: Music is everywhere in this collection and played an integral role in my reading experience. I would love to hear about the link between your writing and music. How do these musical choices and references create meaning and unity in this collection?

Ron MacLean: I was completely unaware of it as a theme or a thread until I started putting the collection together. Music is very important to me. I love music. This feels self-aggrandizing to say and I don't mean it in a highfalutin way, but I pay great attention to the music and rhythm of writing. I'm thinking about the sound, the patterns, and the rhythms that I'm creating and I think of it as music rather than as text. That's how I think about the language. When I started noticing all the music in the book, I was thinking about how music matters to each character. My ambitions were simple. I wanted to make sure it wasn't simply my love of music getting on the page but instead to say everywhere it comes up does it matter to the characters and the situation. I trusted that unconsciously whatever I knew and felt about music would make connections between stories.

JD: I think it was very successful. In the first story of the collection “Toilet” when a Michael Jackson song starts playing our narrator reveals: “I have expectations I can't escape. I want to eat my own flesh. I want to shout, “Run!”  This critical moment of the story reveals an emotional vulnerability that we felt but that had not yet been articulated. Then there is the juxtaposition of Michael Jackson's music, since he represents a music superstar, with the character of this story who in his own words says, “I have recently recognized I'm a failed actor.” To me, that was powerful. Was that organic? Did that come through revision?

RM: Almost everything good in the book came through revision. That came through revision. The presence of the Michael Jackson music in the story ended up giving me the space to work in the narrator's revelations.  “Wanting to be Starting Something” is the first song. I chose that consciously because it's the beginning of something and for the narrator, the juxtaposition is the narrator beginning to own who and where he is in his life.  The trigger is this Michael Jackson music. Who doesn't love dancing to Michael Jackson music, pre-scandal? That factor, that I bring out later at the end of the story, is part of what allowed me to have the narrator reveal himself.  Here's this song, it's just a party song, except, oh no, it's more than that. It gave unconscious permission for the narrator to say: here's the truth – “I want to eat my own flesh. “

JD: I felt like music also informed my reading of the next story in the book, “Lesser Escape Artists.” The bridge sections callback to musical structure but subverts my expectation because in songs bridges reflect back on earlier material. These sections seem to open up the story world. And then we have Mahler and his Symphony #6!  How much of these story elements are meant to guide the reader?

RM:  What you say you read, in terms of the bridges opening up rather than providing callbacks was exactly what I intended.  I did not start out with those as part of the original structure of the story. The structure of the story came pretty late. What I had initially was a story that embodied chaos theory,  fractals, and some esoteric stuff that felt like an interesting intellectual exercise. So, it took me a few drafts to pry my fingers off of how proud I was of having a brilliant idea. There's emotional material happening here and while the chaos theory is really interesting it's not the heart of things.

JD: It's just one layer but a compelling one.

RM: Thank you. It is definitely there. The butcher makes it pretty explicit. The way the bridges came up was I had material I felt belonged in the story but kept landing on the cutting floor. I trust my intuition a lot as a writer. I would try to shoe-horn this material somewhere and my writing group would say, the story is getting better but what the hell is this? Why is Dorothy Dietrich catching a 22 bullet in her teeth? I knew it belonged in the story.

JD: So, rather than slip it in, you decided to call it out?

RM: After a bunch of failed drafts, I stepped back and thought about the story as a symphony. Because Mahler was one of the pieces that was not making it into the story but I knew I wanted. That started, I will admit, from the sheer joy it gave me to throw Norman Mailer and Gustav Mahler into a conversation together, inadvertently. Most of the time for me, those things are draft delights that I think, okay, I've had my fun now it's time to go away. But that one I felt like it was speaking to the story in a larger way. It doesn't directly relate to the rabbit who is trying to get off the chopping block at the butcher shop, nor does it relate necessarily to the couple. But then I started to think about one of the Mahler lines, “I want it to fall like an ax.” I realized late in the story that it absolutely does relate to what the couple is going through and what the rabbit is going through. That was when I stepped back and said, what if I think about it as a Mahler symphony?  That didn't work directly, so then it was: what if I think about structuring it as a piece of music? That is when the bridge idea occurred to me. I will also confess, I was also thinking of my mentor and his question he often asked: “How do you build a bridge to readers?” I decided I was going to build a bridge.  It was a goofy and literal idea in a story I was lost in and it became a way to open it up and create connections that wouldn't have been there without it.

JD:  The first line of this story “There is blood in the end. I'm not going to toy with your emotions by keeping you in the dark about that” is ominous.  While we are reading the story we are striving against that darkness, looking for that victory or win. Rooting for the blind rabbit, the couple, the narrator to push against the idea that “desire fractures us all.”  The final line of the story leaves us in a complicated emotional place: “In a world this chaotic, I choose to believe.”  Can you talk about the inherent narrative tension between the tragic and hopeful? 

RM: I think for me, the tension between the tragic and hopeful, or between the dark and the light is a pretty central thread in everything I write. I don't experience simplistic victories in my life nor simplistic defeats. When I think back on some of my best days, they are punctuated with some awful moments. Maybe not awful moments, but the good and the bad it's all there at once. Most of us don't get to choose ecstasy alone. That to me is really important to reflect in what I write.

JD: This calls to mind the quote by John O'Donoghue that I shared with you not long ago, “the human heart is a theater of longings.” This idea crystallized for me why I'm drawn to certain stories.  Many of the stories in your collection evoked this sense of longing, the permutations of this feeling and all the ways it can manifest in life. You render this longing so beautifully on the page.  How are you able to tap into this emotion so successfully?

RM:  The easiest answer is, how am I able to recognize it and tap in, I am filled with longing in my own self.  It's a pattern that I recognize in my life and its one of my obsessions in fiction writing as a result. Whenever somebody asks me -- what's your subject in fiction?, my answer is the attempts we make as humans to connect with one another and the imperfection that is inherent in that.  To me that is very tied to desire.  I have a really deep longing for connection with other humans and I'm fortunate enough to have a lot of connections but it is always imperfect. I think that the relationship of desire and fulfillment, partial fulfillment, occasional fulfillment – the slippage of good intentions that don't quite connect because of the various pressures on us is something I'm endlessly interested in. I have massive compassion for it. Because I think we are all looking for it, in one way or another, even if we are building walls so we can hide from it. 

Energy, Entropy, and the Sunsphere: An Interview with Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas’ story collection Sunsphere is a funhouse of energy and potential energy revolving around the Sunsphere, a former World’s Fair tower that is now a derelict tourist attraction in Knoxville, Tennessee and to which Farkas brings iconic status. These nine stories engage and circle the mysteries of human relationship, the fine points of entropy, and the classic automotive joys of the Mercury Comet, among many other things. I was motivated to talk with Andrew because he and I share an affinity for story collections with broad scope and ambition.

Ron MacLean: What is the origin story or creation myth of this collection called Sunsphere?

Andy Farkas: In 2002, I was accepted to the University of Tennessee’s M.A. program in English. Beforehand, I’d never been to Knoxville and knew nothing about it. When I arrived, wandering through the city, I ended up seeing the Sunsphere for the first time. Since it’s kind of down in a little valley, this World’s Fair tower isn’t the imposing, awe-inspiring structure that you’d expect (like the Eiffel Tower or the Space Needle). Instead, it’s honestly kind of ugly and dwarfed by the buildings up on top of the hill. At the time, the park surrounding it was a wreck because it was at that stage of remodeling that makes me think it’s all been a lie, we’re not actually trying to fix anything, we’re just having fun breaking things. Looking at this kind of ugly, not particularly awe-inspiring structure, I immediately knew that I liked it more than any other World’s Fair tower because it seemed like a parody of all of them. And so I began doing research on the Sunsphere and the 1982 World’s Fair. Once I learned that the theme for that exposition was energy, I instantly connected that to the way the place looked now (having reached entropy), which led to me researching energy, entropy, and quantum physics (with a big thank you to my friend, Jim Westlake, for helping me out with that research). The stories mostly sprang from there.

MacLean: In Sunsphere, the narrative grounding is very different from story to story — with “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” or “Everything Under the Sunsphere” at one end of the spectrum, and “I Don’t Know Why” or “No Tomorrow” at another. Others fall in between. What for you is the core of a story? The fulcrum on which it balances, the nucleus that gives it energy? And how do you find/build/grow what surrounds it?

Farkas: Experimental work can be more idea-based, so I normally start with an idea instead of, say, a character or situation. “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” started with the idea of potential energy. There’s a ton of potential energy all throughout the story. The problem for Trevor is that he thinks there’s no way to access that energy because everything he tried in the past led to ruin. Now, whereas this story is a little more realist, I still started with an idea (potential energy) then expanded the idea (potential energy that can’t be accessed). So, I didn’t decide I wanted to write a more conventional story, I just followed where the idea took me. “I Don’t Know Why” is the same. Entropy is all throughout Sunsphere, but “I Don’t Know Why” is the entropy story. I knew I wanted to pack in as much entropy as possible. That led to the post-apocalyptic city of Knoxville being filled with white noise (for communication entropy) and chaos (the Sunsphere being deconstructed, the city impossible to navigate). Since it seems like everything is truly over, I thought, “Well, it’s the end of the world,” and so I started looking up potential ends to the universe (which is how each section of the story ended up with a subtitle that describes a different end to the universe). From the original idea, then, everything else springs. Since I’m not working in realism, I have no problem creating characters who represent ideas themselves. Though I would say normally these idea-characters of mine are critiques of the ways we turn others into paper cutouts of themselves, or turn ourselves into two dimensional robots.

MacLean: I’m smitten with Kat and Trevor from “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” What would Kat say about Los Angeles? What’s her take on “No Tomorrow?” What would Trevor say about Knoxville? Did he ever get confused by the many names for a single street?

Farkas: Kat needs to keep moving, so she’d probably kick the driver out of the Mercury Comet in “No Tomorrow” because he’s going too slow. And plus, he’s in Knoxville, and she’d definitely rather be in Los Angeles, weaving in and out of traffic, finding the next power source. When we see her in “Do Kids in California,” though, she’s burned out because she was trying to channel all of the energy of not just L.A., but all of California at once.

Trevor might be attracted to Knoxville because of the Sunsphere, which he could end up seeing as the center of energy he’s looking for. As for a guy like him, he wouldn’t get confused by the street names because he’d convince everyone else to call the streets by the names he uses. Gene, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” however, can’t even convince himself what they should be called.

MacLean: What is an example of an uplifting, aphoristic billboard that would describe your best life?

Farkas: When I wrote Sunsphere, I was sitting between two very large pieces of paper, each with a very small sentence printed in the center of them, that came from the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. One said, “Somewhere better than this place,” while the other said, “Nowhere better than this place.” I think that space in between fits me no matter where I am. On the other hand, I also thought of a movie poster for Being John Malkovich (1999) that I had on my wall for a long time. It said, “Ever want to be someone else? Now you can.” I feel like writing, whenever it’s going well, allows me to be someone else.

MacLean: What makes an Andrew Farkas story a story?

Farkas: Since my stories are rarely about plot, I instead look for when the material has reached critical mass (as Michael Martone puts it). This is particularly the case in a piece like, “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit.” There are lots of different sections, most of which don’t connect to each other, except that they take place in a bottomless pit, or are about the bottomless pit. Once I build up all of this material, I look for the moment when it feels like I’ve explored this idea enough. Call it the Goldilocks moment. But even though there’s no real beginning-middle-end, when the story’s over, you have that satisfied sensation you get at the end of a Freytagian piece. The difference is, instead of riding the rollercoaster, you’ve been let loose in the funhouse and experienced all there was to experience there. If I’ve done my job, you look forward to going through the funhouse again.

MacLean: What makes a story an Andrew Farkas story?

Farkas: Definitely the voice. People who know me and who’ve read my work always say that they can hear my voice when they’re reading something I’ve written. People who don’t know me, but have read my writing, when they meet me, they always seem to say I sound like my writing. I think that happens for two reasons: 1) I am not at all a fan of “invisible style,” writing that works hard to make you forget about it so you only focus on the plot or characters. Plot and characters are interesting, but I want people to think about the language and the voice too. 2) When I’m writing, I constantly read my work out-loud. It isn’t done to me until I like the way it sounds from beginning to end. If I trip up at all while reading, I know I need to rewrite a sentence or a section.

MacLean: I am deeply concerned about Mr. Yang from “The City of the Sunsphere.” At this writing, what is Mr. Yang’s condition, and/or his proximity to James Agee, expressed in terms of Knoxville City Hospital room numbers?

Farkas: 42

MacLean: Can we discuss Freytag’s triangle and the obsession with classic story structure? In particular, can we find a way to undermine its dominance?

Farkas: I think the way you undermine Freytag’s dominance is by introducing people to work that doesn’t follow the triangle and hope it clicks with them. That’s what happened to me. When I was an undergrad, I had to read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). At the time, I hated it. I also watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). I hated that too. But I’d been exposed to them. And they stuck with me. I found myself thinking about them, telling other people about them (usually how much I couldn’t stand them, though they perhaps were thinking that I, you know, doth protest too much), until finally I just had this compulsion to go back to them. Now, I love both works. And I’m really into work like Dead Man and Endgame (and pieces that fit into this outsider category). I expose my students to this kind of art all the time. One of the best compliments I ever received about my teaching was when one of my students asked if all the movies in the class were going to be weird, and before I could answer another student, who’d had me before, said, “Everything you read or watch in an Andy class is weird. But then you discuss it afterwards and it doesn’t seem so weird anymore.”

MacLean: What is your perihelion?

Farkas: Closer than you think.

MacLean: Given that your stories are structured non-traditionally, on what basis do you revise, and how do you know when a “story” is “finished”?

Farkas: Revision is actually my favorite part of writing. The most difficult thing for me to do is look at a blank page. So, at the beginning, I hate whatever it is that I’m writing because it doesn’t conform to how I see or hear the piece in my head. The worst thing for me to do, then, is to revise along the way. Unfortunately, all too often I do just that. At some point, however, I finally have to pound on my keyboard (I write on a computer mostly, with some handwritten notes on the side) until I have as many of the ideas out on the page as possible. That draft is horrid. I then print that draft out and pound on the keyboard while looking at the horrid draft, rewriting and normally adding more (though sometimes subtracting, but I find it’s mostly adding for me). I keep doing this until I get to the point where all I have to do is think about how to craft the sentences. This is my favorite part because the piece mostly looks the way I want it to look, it just doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound yet. I guess it’s rather like sculpting, if sculptors first had to collect the atoms to make marble, then they made a block of marble, and then they made the statue. I’m only exaggerating a little there. I then know the story is finished when I read through and everything sounds exactly right. Ideas and style/language are more important to me, I suppose, than plot and suspense. It’s probably no surprise that, in a culture full of people saying, “No spoilers,” I say, “Give me all the spoilers now and don’t dally.”

MacLean: “There is a way to battle the torrid world, a way to understand it. But somehow, I’m on the outside.” This line, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” is one of the most moving things I’ve read in a while. Why? And what is the way, for us hungry readers?

Farkas: At one point in “Everything Under,” Gene is trying to get into a shindig and he can’t find the way in. Later, when he’s describing this experience, he says he isn’t sure if he wants to be on the inside or stay on the outside. So not only is he alienated throughout the story, he has no idea what he wants. He blames the torrid world for this because as you raise the heat in a system you create more disorder. Gene thinks if the world were completely organized, then he’d know what he wants. This, of course, will never happen. But since Gene is constantly trapped in between, he’s not only alienated from society, he’s alienated from himself. Strangely, this makes it so he can battle the torrid world because the way to battle the torrid world is to be outside of everything. He’s in the ideal position, but can’t see it because he’s bought into the idea that alienation is bad. I think that’s why you find that sentence to be so moving. It’s tragic that Gene can’t see what position he has and use it for something because, in a lot of ways, the outsider is often seen as a loser. With this discussion, I also wonder if Gene might represent the position of narrative art that isn’t quite conventional.

MacLean: What is the most dangerous condition a human can contract through (accidental) contact with the Sunsphere?

Farkas: You might get proselytized by the Cult of the Great Golden Microphone. If you allow yourself to be blessed by the adherents, you will end up covered in glitter.

MacLean: What are you working on next?

Farkas: Right now, I’m working on a collection of essays called The Great Indoorsman. In each piece, I explore some indoors space (since I’m not outdoorsy at all), but I also connect my experience to something in the world. For instance, my essay, “Filk,” that appeared in The Iowa Review, is about old video rental stores, but it’s also about filk music (folk music inspired by the science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror genres) and the cult film Dark Star (1974). Just recently, 3:AM Magazine published “Wait Here?” an essay that’s a metaphysical investigation of waiting rooms.