Pretending To Be Adult Enough To Make Adult Decisions: On John Cotter's Under the Small Lights

A couple years ago, a friend had told me that her friend, John, had a book coming out and that, since we’re both writers, we should probably know each other. Within a few weeks, a different friend, also acquainted with John, told me that I should probably know him because we do similar things — we both write fiction and used to (sort of) want to be actors, the parenthetical being 100% mine and only in hindsight — and by the way, had I heard that John had a book coming out?

After scoping out each other’s respective websites and exchanging a few brief e-mails, we finally met and he later read a couple sections from that oft-mentioned, then forthcoming book, Under the Small Lights, at the reading series I host. The whole room was in thrall while he read two scenes that had us thinking just enough about the characters and the book itself before we all started thinking about ourselves, which is admittedly what any group of young people will do.

That Cotter sets Under the Small Lights in Boston is not happenstance. Boston is a college town filled with young people and Under the Small Lights is a story of youth. It’s about Jack, a would-be playwright in his early twenties, and his handful of close friends who spend a couple years pretending to be adult enough to make all those adult decisions that compromise what we want with what we’re told we’re supposed to want, equating sex with marriage and money with education (and maybe even hard work). The book moves through a series of scenes that surface like memories, wandering the way our attention spans and affections will, from friend to friend until our rash decisions blast everything away, or until we have to make new friends or risk the inevitable outcome that accompanies emulating/lusting after/emphatically loving your friends.

Cotter’s characters remind me of my own experiences in an invasively tight-knit group. We were downright incestuous, unapologetically so, and while we all fell deeply in love with ourselves and each other every day, we felt obligated to regularly be the selves we put on for others. We assumed that everyone expected that kind of consistency, but it’s a folly of youth to think that a person is an individual. We each held communities within ourselves, including who we were before, after, between, and without our friends. It’s a balancing act that almost everyone I know has tried to strike during the dicey transition from adolescence to adulthood and it’s no different for Jack or Paul and Corinna, the married couple who Jack loves both collectively and individually. Although Jack is admittedly the most insecure of the group, through his conversations with Paul, Cotter reveals that performance is part of everyone’s growth spurt, quite possibly because it allows us to figure out who we don’t want to be:

“Does Corinna seem happy?”

I felt the way I usually did pressed to understand someone else’s feelings, hopeless.

“She’s twenty and she lives at her mother’s house. I don’t know. I think she’s found you and she loves you. I think she’s waiting for your life to begin.”

He nodded. “She’s lazy,” he said and smiled, realizing he was being too hard on her. “Well, she has to finish school.”

“What about you? Ever think about trying again?”

“I drive up to a house,” [Paul] said, closing the book, “and put out my cigarette, check my teeth in the mirror, you know how I do, and by the time I get to the front door, I’m there only for them. I’m whoever they want me to be… It’s deeper than acting. No offense. I really do want to make them happy, to say what they want to hear.”

Scenes like this one are familiar for their honesty, even if they’re words that my friends and I were never brave enough to say out loud. That Cotter lets his characters be so brave is their saving grace. What might otherwise be construed as a group of selfish kids is instead a group of self-aware kids, who are easier to relate to and easier to love.

An Interview with Leigh Stein

Rob MacDonald: Your first novel, The Fallback Plan, is doing very well, and I’m curious to hear how it feels to have your work in the hands of a wide audience. When you put out a chapbook of poems with a small press, you know that a lot of your readers are likely to come from within that poetry subculture, but when you put out a novel with Melville House that gets reviewed in Elle, the audience must cover the whole spectrum. Is that exciting or terrifying?

Leigh Stein: It’s true; they’re two totally different beasts. When I’ve had chapbooks of poetry published, I know who my audience is going to be: my friends in the poetry community, and their friends, who eventually become my friends, too, once we meet at AWP. Not even my family really reads my poetry (my mom and sister have read a little bit), so that’s how small the audience is.

Getting a novel published is bigger; it’s more like being on stage, which I used to love. There’s a distance between you and the reader (I’m not handselling my novel, like I’ve done with my tiny poetry chapbooks), and the reach is, of course, broader.

The hardest part of the experience for me so far has been the public reaction. All the major press I’ve gotten has been positive, but I initially made the mistake of reading all my amateur reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. These can be soul-crushing, personal, and vicious. I didn’t expect my book to elicit such a powerful response: I thought some people would like it, and some people would be meh. But instead, some people love it, and some people despise it (and me). There’s a lot of confusion over who Esther is: is she me? Am I a slacker readers can love to hate? ‘Cause I’m not.

RM: I made the mistake of reading some of those same reviews, and I was surprised to see how often people were getting hung up on the politics of moving back home after college. That aspect of the book felt secondary to me, and I didn’t get the feeling that you were trying to make a big statement about either entitlement or slackerdom — it was just another way of showing how life can fall short of our expectations, how reality doesn’t always live up to fantasy.

LS: The moving back home part felt secondary to me, too, while I was writing it. But publishing is a business, and my book is being marketed as having a lot to do with a particular moment in our economy / culture, so as to sell more units, and make my bed of money even fluffier.

But seriously, you hit on a good point: fantasies and expectations. Esther is an actress; she’s used to playing different roles and imagining fantasy scenarios, and that just carries over into her normal life. There are some fantasies, like winning the lottery, which are totally culturally acceptable. But the darker fantasies . . . that’s what’s controversial. I had a friend who once told me she wished something really bad would happen to her, like her mother dying, so people would feel sorry for her and leave her the hell alone. Successful, ambitious, hard-working people are under a tremendous amount of pressure (I’m including myself here) and sometimes our fantasies are about giving in and giving up. That’s Esther. Her invalid fantasy comes from pressure on the outside (“Get a job!”) and depression on the inside.

RM: Fantasy seems to play a significant role not just for Esther, but for all of your characters, regardless of age — Amy has her art, Jack and Pickle have their video games, and there’s that great scene at the end with May and the cicadas. As I was reading the book, I found myself thinking of fantasy as the element that survives even after we let go of our childhood — sort of a persistent echo of childhood itself.

LS: That’s true! Especially with Amy’s fantasies (or, sadly, memories) made manifest in her art, but also with May’s collection (and even the video games). Fantasy follows us, and I think is also what brings us back to literature (and there’s a lot of Esther going back to childhood books in the novel). Maybe we can’t dress up in capes and crowns the way we used to as children, but we can still read books that transport us.

Laura Miller wrote a book called The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventure in Narnia, which opens with a poignant, shimmering childhood memory: she’s standing outside in the California suburb where she grew up, wishing Narnia really existed and wishing she could go there. “I want this so much I’m pretty sure the misery of not getting it will kill me,” she says. “For the rest of my life, I will never want anything quite so much again.” Bam! That’s the opening paragraph! I loved this book. I read it when I was almost done writing mine (in other words, when I was already deep into my own Narnia fantasy), but it has so much to say about childhood and yearning and magic.

RM: That quote speaks to the danger that comes along with imagination — even though we can use books (and music and art) to hold onto (or reconnect to) childhood, maybe we’re just prolonging the agony. I know that Esther eventually decides to let go of her childhood, but did you find that writing the novel helped you to let go, too, or are you still hanging on?

LS: Am I still hanging on to childhood? Not like I used to. In my early twenties, I was so nostalgic. Is that weird? To be young and nostalgic? I think it’s something I just outgrew, novel or not. The novel I’m working on now isn’t so nostalgic: it’s about girls in their mid-twenties and problems with girlfriends and boyfriends. Maybe it’s immature, or obvious, to write about life as I see it happening (there’s Gchat in my next novel, for example), without more reflective distance, but that’s what I’m interested in.

RM: It’s really interesting that The Fallback Plan is trying to make sense of the present through the lens of the past, but a lot of your poems are looking back at the present from the future’s perspective. 

LS: It’s hard to exist in the “now,” without reaching forwards or backwards, and I guess my writing is a reflection of my personal struggle to stay in the present. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.” This is good advice for living (smell the roses!), but my creative practice is fed, and inspired by, yearning for what is gone and what will come.

Water and History Everywhere!

There have been exactly two books I’ve read in my life that have made me decide to stop writing for good, knowing full well I could never achieve the mastery of their respective novelists. Before you go and ostracize me for indolence or lack of perseverance, know that the feeling of discomfiture is always temporary. In fact, on both occasions after a few hours wallowing in my self-pity and doubt, I was determined to get back on the warhorse and ride that Equus ferus into the combat that is writing.

The first novel that elicited defeat within me was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. I was eighteen when I first came across the little book, so you could possibly blame youth on my resolve to give up. But the second time I felt the sense of vanquishment was no longer than a few months ago, when I finished Graham Swift’s brilliant novel, Waterland.

Set in the bleak, drab, musty, and aqueous Fen land of East Anglia, Waterland is the profound story of a family marked by tragedy, incest, madness, torment, 240 years of ale-making, and generations of excruciating, pumping manual labor of land reclamation. It’s a big, beautiful endeavor and Swift delivers brilliantly.

This novel screams with energy, fertility, violence, madness, and a profound knowledge of history and drama. Graham Swift slowly unravels the plot of this masterful work much in the vein of Thomas Hardy, but with a wonderful, contemporary verbal felicity and ardor.

There are unbearable scenes in this book — unendurable both for their honest, horrific imagery, but also for the complete mastery with which they’re unfurled for us readers by Swift — little bits at a time, not too slowly, not too quickly. But oh so goddamn eloquently! In particular, there is a long scene dealing with an illegal home abortion performed on one of the characters, which will leave you breathless for the consummate language with which it’s written. The intensity and dynamic of this particular scene is reminiscent of the tableau Hemingway gives us in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Fascists and fascist sympathizers are being run through a gauntlet of armed Republicans, and thrown over a cliff. To say it’s acute and agonizing would be watering down the tension. I found myself reading Swift’s passage with jaw fully clenched, at times grinding my teeth. Yeah, this book will make you get that much into it.

If you’re a writer, you’ll think about giving up your craft after reading Swift’s Waterland. But only briefly. This kind of book will ultimately energize you, and fill you with the hunger to continue weaving your own stories. If you’re a reader, a lover of history, humanity, and getting lost in earthy, realistic narratives, you’ll not want to finish this book. You’ll want to dole it out to yourself in increments, maybe daily . . . maybe weekly.

Graham Swift went on to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for his novel Last Orders. It is a wonderful book, worthy of the prize indeed, and a great little film as well with Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, and Bob Hoskins among others. It’s recommended at the bottom of this page. But Swift’s career-defining work (at least so far) is his stellar Waterland. Please read this amazing novel and rejoice at the beauty of storytelling; and at the beauty of our language.

Something About A Keeper—Peter Markus’s We Make Mud

When I was a kid, my dad and his brother and his brother’s sons and I would go fishing for trout a lot. We’d go out to a lake in Eastern Washington. We’d catch a lot, throw back a lot. Keep a few to barbecue. We used a lot of charcoal. My dad and his brother would send us cousins and brothers out for paper plates and the small kind of grills they sell for twenty bucks at the bait shop.

I don’t remember learning how to gut a fish but I remember the gutting. I remember having a dream once out there at the lake, about being gutted myself, a knife running me up from asshole to mouth, some giant thumb the size of a knee cleaning me out and running me under an enormous hose. I remember telling my dad and cousin-brothers and uncle about it. One of them said, Yeah, I’ve had that dream.

This, for me, was some way of defining family.

Reading Peter Markus’ most recent book, We Make Mud, I felt myself again and again reeled back to those fishing trips, and I’ve been trying to figure the why. It’s a marvelous thing, this book, one that makes good on the promise of the shorter, previous story books Good, Brother and The Singing Fish. And like those, in We Make Mud makes much music out of a deliberate, repetitive river-language of fish and brothers. From the title story:

“Us brothers, we kept reaching down, with our hands, down into the mud. We kept on with our hands reaching down, into the mud, and when we did, us brothers, we kept on pulling up mud. But then once, when we reached with our hands down into the mud, us brothers, we pulled up Girl. We pulled Girl up, out of the mud, until Girl became a tree. Us brothers, up this girl tree, up, us brothers, we climbed.”

But like a muddy river, you can’t step into the same Peter Markus sentence twice. The continually torquing and repeating language wraps you up, disorientingly, more like lahar than river, until all you see is the river and the fish and mud. And perhaps this is what it is that reels me back to childhood. From “The Singing Fish”:

“Look here: there was a dirty river in our dirty river town. There were dirty river fish in this here dirty river that us brothers liked to catch. There was a house, just up from this river, with a back-of-the-yard part where, us brothers, we liked to take the fish that we’d catch out of this dirty river and, us brothers, we liked to chop off the heads off these fish.”

It’s childlike, this simplicity, in which a world forms slowly, and out of repetition. As kids we do the same thing every day. We wake. We play. We eat. We play. We sleep. We wake. We play. One day we’re playing and Boy appears. One day we’re playing and Girl appears. It seems as if by magic. Like the first time we tossed dirt into water and made mud.

Foursquare, Delicate, and Lovely: A Review of Kent Haruf's Plainsong

When one examines wood for purposes of construction, one looks at the direction of the grain, its flow through the sanded plank. A grain’s pattern offers indications of a plank’s strength. Grain that wavers like a sine graph yields a weaker structure than a grain pattern more oriented and point-to-point. Woven throughout Plainsong is a deep-rooted sense of goodness and grace that almost seems hokey and antiquated in today’s world. But goodness in this book is not bumpkin in the way that sophisticated city-dwellers often sneer. No, Plainsong is brave. It’s also a slow book in the way that a mist only begins to saturate you with time. It takes hours or days perhaps to realize the strength of this book and allow it work upon you. One fingers the pages and comes in stages to know Tom Guthrie, his boys Ike and Bobby, the troubled but sweet girl Victoria Roubideaux, and the work-rough hands and wind-blistered faces of the McPheron brothers. It’s the McPherons, two brothers who live alone on a farm outside of town, that buoy this novel of human cruelty with an unyielding air of decency. What’s so compelling about the McPheron’s good nature is that they are decent and the veracity of their decency is never challenged. That decency is a fact weighty and undeniable as a boulder. I imagine that if one could slice the McPheron brothers apart the way a tree’s trunk becomes wood plank, one would see the grain of good in them run arrow straight. Normally I admire characters that skirt the terminator line between right and wrong. That teetering often makes the characters feel real, but that wobble between shades doesn’t exist with Raymond and Harold McPheron. They are good people, simply that, and it’s incredibly pleasing to encounter them, to be reminded that we can create such light and people that embody those characteristics might exist in the world.

There’s a blurb on the front cover of this book by the New York Times that sums up the feeling I get from reading Plainsong: “A novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader.” Exalt the reader. How often do you encounter those words in the description of a novel? Often novels entertain, stun, confuse, surprise or excite us. But exalt? What a weighty word exalt is. It means to praise, to esteem, to revere, venerate, worship, lionize and ennoble. Ennoble. It seems like we often lose sight of what being noble means. It’s not a large part of our reality tv lexicon. Nobility is a smaller facet of our modern character because to be noble means also we have to believe in something greater than ourselves. I think this capacity is shrinking in the human animal, especially the Internet-connected human animal. We have to be noble for something larger than our own concern. That can be God, Nation, or Community even. One can be noble for another person, one’s daughter, son, mother, or even a stranger, but being noble is never an aggrandizing of self or self-image. To be noble is to not be solipsistic or surface-oriented. Many modern texts are concerned with their own aims and goals only. Such texts engineer ways to make their voice heard in the modern din of literary work by confusion, manipulation, or straight-out, unqualified weirdness. Often we laud the strange as being something new when in fact the strange is really nothing more than a weakness of communication, a grain run awry through the wood. There’s a marked difference between having no meaning at all as opposed to merely being sly about meaning. But the sorts of inward-oriented texts I’m talking about here fulfill many needs still. They can surprise, flabbergast, stun, or entertain us, but such works cannot exalt a reader. Only a text concerned with reaching out can connect enough to exalt a reader.

In Plainsong, it’s that exaltation that does me in, every time. See, I’m a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy, his tortured, wonderful sentences, and the grim, nihilistic characters that inhabit his landscape. It’s easy to consider the world in McCarthy’s terms. Such an ill-hearted determinism often feels right when we face what we face in the world. In a book like Blood Meridian, one marvels at the intensity with which McCarthy stares into blackness, never wavering. He’s showing us the true heart of the human! At one point, I thought it brave to do such a thing. Many consider Blood Meridian his best work, and a work like The Road to be inferior, but I tend to think of it differently now. While The Road is brutal and forlorn, there is a moment slowly built up to where the book offers a gesture, when the boy reaches out to take the stranger’s hand, and that textual gesture is also the book itself reaching out to the reader. With that motion, the book elevates itself. Sometimes it behooves us to deny reality, because in that turning away, we have a chance to change things, to reimagine our world in different terms. Each denial is also the spore of recreation, or can be. The Road does not exalt the way Plainsong does, however, because the focus is different. Plainsong‘s focus has what John Gardner may have called a moral intent, or if that word is too bold, then perhaps one might proclaim the aim of Plainsong to be an effort to not tear down and lay waste, but instead to lift.

Some may consider these types of gestures to be remnants of the magical thinking that has plagued our species since its inception. And perhaps that is so. To be wedded to feeling or emotional states often presents a poor invention in the face of bald facts and many consider that moment at the finish of The Road to be McCarthy growing soft. I don’t think so. It takes guts to reach out like that. It takes balls to write about hope, especially when cataclysm gathers the large crowd.

That’s why Haruf’s Plainsong, to me, is such a brave tome. It’s not fanciful. It’s constructed of straight lines and forward glances. The morality in Plainsong is gray, however, never unilateral, and its variations are wide as the sky in Holt, Colorado. Tom Guthrie takes questionable actions against one of his students, but he’s also fierce in his defense of his children. There are no reasons, no explanations. The same sorts of things we get in McCarthy, we can find in Haruf (and one hears as well tones of Cormac in Kent’s measured prose), but what we find in Plainsong that’s not in Blood Meridian is a willingness to entertain that good does exist in the world, that good is not imaginary, nor foolhardy, nor magical, nor is good delivered from God or portioned out by spirits otherwise incorporeal and unseen. Instead, goodness is realized, or better yet, created in the world by how we act, how we treat others, and how we protect those that we love from the small-hearted. Because what is exaltation other than a recognition and transcendence of faults? What makes me weep when I read Plainsong is seeing how easy it is to be a good person and then wondering why, for me, it’s always so hard.

An Interview with Meg Tuite

Robert Vaughan: I heard the “Linus & Lucy” instrumental song from Charlie Brown during the holidays. I realized how much I related to Charlie Brown and those characters as a kid. I played piano endlessly like Schroeder. Sucked a finger and carried a dingy yellow blanket everywhere like Linus. Do you have any fictional heroes from childhood? If so, how did they impact you?

Meg Tuite: My mom gave me the book Little Women when I was a kid and said “there’s a Meg in here.” I was mesmerized by Meg March, because she was such a tough ass and said it like it was. She was a writer and extremely flamboyant. I loved her. I read that book over and over. I was blown away when I realized that Louisa May Alcott had brought this fictional character to life. Meg March was alive, for me, and everything I wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe she existed only through the imagination of some woman writer. I was very shy, except at home when I bugged the hell out of my siblings with my endless dialogue to no one. Yes, I was in awe (still am) of the magnanimous Meg of Little Women.

RV: Families, functional or not (and what family is? I want to poke out the eyes of those who say their family was “purrfect!”) seem important to you as a writer. In your remarkable first novel, Domestic Apparition (love that title), the chapters are all little gems, vignettes, each barreling the story forward through complex family incidents. How did you arrive at the main character? This family? What prompted you to tell a story about this particular one?

MT: Oh, Robert, didn’t I tell you? Family Health and Overzealous Mental Balance, Inc. is just now pouring the bronze for the monolithic sculpture of our nuclear nucleus in homage to our raging consummate genetics. (Did that even make sense?)

Domestic Apparition is a novel-in-stories. Most were published individually and then I decided to put a collection together, altering content so it was the same narrator throughout, and the same family. My protagonist, Michelle, was based on many different personages rolled into one. But, most of the chapters / stories are based on a memory, a feeling or a character from my past. I had to put a piece of myself in there to bring this family alive.

My family did go to a Catholic grade school and there’s a hell of a lot of material to work with there. And my siblings are all wonderfully eccentric so I played with some of their idiosyncrasies like the character, Nathan, who had some of the same habits as my older brother, Kevin, when he was a kid. But no matter which chapter / story I wrote, it always ended up fictional, every piece took on a life of its own.

RV: Every piece certainly does have its own breath, and even more so when one collaborates. We have had the great fortune of our paths crossing not only through social networks, but also through the monthly Exquisite Quartet column you write at Used Furniture Review, and your stories appearing on Flash Fiction Friday, which I co-host monthly on WUWM’s Lake Effect. We also had the great fortune of reading our work together, thanks to fellow writer, Susan Tepper, at the KGB Bar in NYC in October, 2011. Then, there are the multiple places our work appears together such as Stripped, A Collection of Anonymous Flash. Can you address collaboration, what you like (or don’t) about it and the impact on your writing?

MT: I am thankful for all of the collaborations with you, Robert! You’re amazing and I love Flash Fiction Friday on WUWM. I was honored that you read one of my stories on air. That was a special occasion. And our reading in NYC was exceptional. I always love reading with other writers and NYC was remarkable because I got to read with some of my favorites. I’ve just worked on two collaborations with photographers and really enjoyed it. Jennifer Tomaloff’s anthology is Bending Light Into Verse. She’s sublime. The other is Lost in Thought Magazine; Kyle Schruder is the editor and the photographer is Valerie Chiang. I was totally inspired when working with someone else’s images. They evoked these whole new worlds for me.

Exquisite Quartet is an extraordinary experience. I collaborate with three other writers on a story each month. I start a narrative and then pass it on. All four of us pull together the strings of a tale and then I do some final editing each month to make sure it works cohesively. It’s exciting to see where each writer will take the story. Some writers really flow with it. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology of 2011 is now available. All thirteen stories were published by the stellar Dave Cotrone, editor at Used Furniture Review. It’s been a surprisingly gratifying year working with all 38 outstanding writers.

RV: I’ve ordered two copies of Exquisite Quartet already — can’t wait to read it. I’m also collaborating on Jennifer and Kyle’s projects, so I relate to that same sense of awe that comes from combining two artistic mediums: photography and writing. The act of writing can be so insular, and that our paths lead us to so many other talented artists is certainly a highlight. Can you tell me about the ways you like to craft? Music or silence, public or office? What is the ideal set-up for your pen to fly (or is it the keypad?)

MT: I am always curious about the diverse scenarios that are necessary for someone to write. Some writers need a TV on in the background in order to concentrate! Wow! While I was writing during NaNoWriMo last November, I met a group at a coffee shop, but all the conversations drove me crazy. I followed them instead of what I was writing. I’m a writer who needs solitude to really focus, go deeply into the story. I prefer to write with a pen first and then the computer to type, editing as I go.

RV: I’m the same way, pen first, then computer. And I know what you mean about too much noise, it can be so distracting. We both have the luxury of quiet space. I have woods surrounding my house, and I don’t take that for granted. I’m wondering if you have any literary mentors, or writers past or present, who you feel may have shaped your writing?

MT: I can’t say that any of these writers have influenced my writing, but I do return to them again and again for inspiration. I love Flannery O’Connor for her inimitable metaphors and her dark sense of humor. I used to study her collection of stories and actually counted how many metaphors and similes she had used. I was obsessed. Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer, only wrote two small collections before he was killed by the SS during WWII, but those two books hold entire worlds inside them. His work is sublime. Djuna Barnes is one of my favorite writers. Her dialogue is genius. Flann O’Brien, an Irish writer, wrote at least four novels and I go back to those repeatedly. A brilliant writer and so incredibly funny. And I’ve always loved to read and memorize poetry: Dickinson, Rilke, Sexton, Dylan Thomas. I could go on and on with this list of writers I adore. And of course there are many current writers out there that I admire: Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristine Ong-Muslim, Michelle Reale, Mary Stone Dockery, Robert Vaughan, Len Kuntz, Jim Valvis, Howie Good, Sara Lippmann, Susan Tepper, Julie Innis. . . . Like I said, it really is endless! I’ll stop now.

RV: I think it’s healthy to have mentors, or writers you like to read at the very least. We share many similar tastes. I know from our conversations in NYC last October that you expressed a desire to write more poetry. Funny how from there, you leapt right into that NaNoWriMo novel writing month! But looking ahead, what writing turf might lie unexplored? You’ve published Domestic Apparition, your excellent first novel, have a chapbook collection coming, collaborate on the Exquisite Quartet monthly column. You are quite the busy gal! Not to mention being nominated for not one, but FOUR Pushcart Prizes in 2011. So, what is the scariest thought of writing you might take on? Is it a play? Non-fiction or memoir? Everyone seems to be dabbling in that currently.

MT: I’d like to finish that novel I started for NaNo. The first draft is almost complete and then, of course, the deeper work begins after that. I have a collection of short stories that I’ve assembled. I’ve never written a play, but was asked to write a screenplay for someone. I didn’t get very far, but will continue to attempt it. I keep dabbling with the idea of memoir, but it hasn’t taken off like I was hoping. I do always come back to the short story. I love writing them and I have a list of magazines I’d like to get published in. I am writing some book reviews also, so there’s a bit of NF writing, but haven’t written an essay in years. I think the scariest notion for me would be if someone asked me to write a sci-fi story or a western. Ha! So maybe I should just go for it and do it! Face my fears!

RV: Yes, the poet Howard Nemerov, brother of fantastic photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus, once wisely said, “The only way out is the way through.” Sage advice. But before we get all scholarly and shit here, how about some quickfire questions . . . our buddy, Anna March has started up her excellent music column at The Rumpus, so in her honor, what are five of your fave songs from 2011-12?

MT: Oh, this is a great question!! Thanks to Anna March for her amazing columns! I’ve picked five, Robert, but now I can’t stop listening to music. And it was a tough choice!!

Amy Winehouse singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Kills me every time I hear it. I love her and miss her desperately!!!!

Patti Smith singing “Dancing Barefoot.” One of my all-time favorites.

Radiohead performs “Creep.” I love all their work!

KD Lang performs Neil Young’s song, “Helpless.” I get chills every time I hear it!!

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform “Red Clay Halo.” I wanted to be Gillian when I first heard her. They never cease to blow me away!

RV: All excellent choices, complete with video links! How about five “secret” celebrity crushes?

MT: Hehe!! Okay!

Any kind of sex with Denzel Washington!

Oral sex with Oral Roberts!

Make out session with Dame Judy Dench (wait, she was already spoken for, wasn’t she? Damn)!

Heavy petting with Dr. Phil!

Missionary position with any Mother Superior!

RV: Oh what fun this would all be! How about . . . I know you are originally from the Chicago area. So five things you miss about the Midwest, or Chicago in general? (And you can’t say Liz Phair because she’s mine!)

MT: Damn, you get Judy Dench and Liz? Hmmm.

I’d have to say I miss the Cubs games. We’d sit in the bleachers, soak up the sun and drink beer. It was the general meeting place before internet dating sites.

Going downtown with my mom when I was kid to see the tree, shop and have lunch at Marshall Fields.

Summers we’d spend in Michigan swimming and causing trouble wherever we could.

I liked that we could walk to school and to our friends house or take the el to get somewhere in the city. We didn’t rely on cars as I do now living in NM.

I miss the great Blues bars downtown. We heard amazing music. Most of the good bands don’t have NM on their itinerary when touring, but always Chicago.

RV: Ahhh . . . the blues, so we are back to music. Which reminds me, there was a recent trend on Facebook: track down the #1 song of the week that you were born. Mine was “Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!!!” How perfect for a writer (those commas!) and a poet to boot! What is yours? And how might it relate to you (or not? You can Google it via Billboard or Wikipedia)?

MT: My song was “The Letter” by the Box Tops. Ha!

I love their outfits!!! I have to say it’s all about the letter from his baby to bring him back home. I had no baby. I’ve been traveling forever but never got a letter to come back home. I think I was writing a letter that I wasn’t coming back home!

RV: “My baby, she wrote me a letter!” How cool! Okay, now I am going to give you a first sentence as a prompt. You can incorporate it, and continue . . . or you can take off wherever it sends you:

“A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.”(From “Love” by Lydia Davis.)

MT: A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.

He was a disappearing act in the cafe they both went to and out on the streets of the city. Once a lady sat right on top of him, drank her coffee, made phone calls on her cell, read the newspaper and then left, without excusing herself or acknowledging him in any way.

The woman loved him for this. He abided many things. He got to the cafe at 9AM prompt for years and she sat at a table nearby. He drank his coffee with two packets of sugar that he stirred in slow methodical swirls while he stared off into space.

The woman thought of approaching him. He wore impeccable suits and his shoes were always scuffed from the long walks he took and all the people who stepped on them. He never spoke to anyone. Death hovered around him like a vaporous camouflage. It was a hazard. He was pummeled on the streets by crowds that ignored him. He never became annoyed.

The woman loved him so much that she would walk in front of him and part people like the red sea to keep them from damaging him anymore than he already was. After all, he was dead. She would sometimes walk backwards in front of him, stare at him intently, but he didn’t notice. He might have been a philosopher or someone who had suffered much loss.

After years of obsession, watching decay fester his eye sockets further into his skull and his rugged skin turn to gray stone she picked up her coffee and muffin and went to sit next to him at his table. His bones swam inside his suits. She was afraid there would be no trace of him soon. She had rehearsed many things that she might say to the man, but now was at a loss for words.

At some point he looked over at her. He smiled. She didn’t mind that his lips were a memory and his teeth were brown as his beverage.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

Her heart was entombed in some kind of mausoleum, expanding with each breath she took. She didn’t know that he saw her too.

“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said.

She merely nodded, buoyant with the potency of the moment.

A loud group of boys came up to their table. One sat on top of the man and another sat on top of the woman and the other two boys pulled up chairs. The one lodged in the woman’s lap was quite globular, but the woman didn’t mind.

The man looked over at the woman and smiled. “You see, nothing is ever as uncomfortable as you imagine.”

RV: You are a master crafter, Meg! I say submit it! One more little glimpse of your talent with another way to open up a flash piece? We’ll play word bank! Here are five words and you use any of them in a piece, 50 words or less (thanks, Joseph Quintela, of Short, Fast and Deadly!) And the words are: loose, coarse, unnecessary, chunk, rope (all taken from From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story by Susan Tepper).

MT: She kept falling. The coarse chunk of a rope was too damn loose. Why didn’t they have some manual on how to hang yourself? This was just embarrassing and an unnecessary waste of time.

RV: Those darn loose ropes, I’ve had a few! Haha . . . now some quickies: Do you sleep naked or in pjs? Boxers or briefs?

MT: I love the pjs in winter and ass to the wind in summer. Would definitely go with the boxers!

RV: No pjs here, naked year round. If you had to live one other place than the good ‘ol USA, where would it be?

MT: You’re HOT, RV!!!! I’d choose one of the Greek islands. Paolo and I like to fantasize about what our life would be like there. We’re still waiting for some unknown rich-as-hell relative to drop a load of cash on us and then will be on our way. Any day now, I’m sure.

RV: Lucky you, Miss Mykonos! Hurry up and move, you two, so we can come visit! Now, tomorrow morning, you wake up and discover you have turned into an insect (a la Kafka’s Metamorphosis!) What insect are you and what is your destructible character trait that might be your untimely end?

MT: No question, I’d like to be a preying mantis. And I must be a male, because once the female mates with me she bites off my head.

RV: Yes, those female preying mantises!!! What supreme power they have. Now we are in sixth grade . . . and all the girls are, well, gaga over you-know-who. But you have a secret crush. Mine was Alex: brainiac, so quiet, nerdy. Blushed during lunch when I stared. Yours?

MT: Gene. He’d come over to my house and sit on the steps. My mom asked me what the hell we saw in each other. I blathered on about god knows what and the poor guy just sat there listening. He never said a word and then after about an hour he’d say “alright then, see you later,” and that was our love thing. He ended up becoming a cop in L.A. You think I pushed him into it?

RV: Maybe he was that cop in L.A. who used to come over and . . . oh, never mind! Say you’re a man, maybe even became one through a sex change. And you’re about to meet your first date from an internet site at a local pub. What happens next?

MT: Oh yeah, I saw that porn flick about the cop in LA, hehe!!

Okay, if she giggles or has stuffed animals in her house, I’m out of there so quick! If we get past that and she has no girly bullshit we order beers and since I’ve had a sex change I’m wondering if she notices my last-of–the-mohican chest that I’ve been working to get rid of with hormone injections. We have a few beers, then decide to go to her place. She’s ready for the action, but discovers I’ve got different apparatus. “Oh no, oh dear,” she cries and then realizes she hasn’t had much happening on e-Harmony and says what the hell. We go at it and the rest is either history or historical.

RV: Or both! So, lets wind this puppy down, even though I don’t want it to ever end. Which brings about this: how do you feel about endings? Both in writing, and in life?

MT: It’s always a great time hanging with you, Robert!

I love to write endings in stories. Sometimes they arrive easily. I’ve also sat with a story for months before an ending erupted out of the fog. I find it satisfying when endings show up as a complete surprise to me.

In life, I’ve dealt with a lot of endings. I work in hospice and so I know that with each person I am spending time with, an end is inevitable. Sometimes I have years with them, but usually it’s less than six months. I’ve met the most extraordinary people over the last ten years and what a gift to hang with them during that time of their lives. They are open and introspective and I get to hear their amazing life stories. I love the work and some of the endings are difficult, there’s always mourning that accompanies it, but there’s so much truth that shines through these wise folk before they go.

Thank you so much, Robert, for a sublime interview! Your questions were exceptional and once again, I never knew what was coming next from you! You are the bomb!!!

RV: Right back at you, Meg. This was a blast.

This Is Not A Book For The Shamrocks-and-Guinness Crowd: A Review of Robert Mclaim Wilson's Ripley Bogle

Several years ago I challenged a friend to read the first 10 pages of Ripley Bogle and then put it down: “I dare you to walk away after ten pages. I bet you can’t do it.”

I should come clean about something before you (wise reader that you are) go much further than this sentence. Here it is: I’m an evangelist for Ripley Bogle. It’s one of those books I’d take to a desert island because it’s on my top ten list, usually floating around the #4 or #5 slot. Here is an example of excellent writing and every time I pick it up I find something new, something brilliant. Whenever I get asked to recommend a “good read” this is the novel I mention and I do this because so few Americans have heard of Robert McLiam Wilson. Yet the voice he creates in Ripley Bogle is memorable, hilarious, and fearsomely intelligent. I like to say that Ripley Bogle is a collision between Charles Dickens, the punk movement, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And, if I’m being totally honest, I’m also jealous that he wrote this sparkling gem of a novel when he was only 25 years old. That’s just unfair.

Some background perhaps. Yes, you deserve this.

I moved to Belfast in the early 1990s when the Troubles were still going on. Car bombs popped around the city and headlines announced that yet another person had been shot. Men roamed the night with machine guns and baseball bats. This little spot of earth went about the business of tearing itself apart between 1969 and 1998. It was a civil war fought in slow motion. It was mean and vicious and terrible. Hearts were broken. Blood was spilled.

Belfast, you’ll understand, was not exactly a city for tourists. Catholics were shooting Protestants. Protestants were shooting Catholics. The British Army roved the street in massive armored trucks while, high above the city, there was the constant thud of military helicopters. They were always up there, spying. At night they turned off their running lights so you couldn’t see them. You’d hear them though, and they shook the glass in windowpanes. They became a weird kind of white noise as you drifted off to sleep.

This was the world I entered. My mother was born and raised in Northern Ireland, but since I grew up in America I didn’t know the place very well. And I really wanted to know it well. So I packed my bags and became a citizen of my ancestral city. It was important for me to talk with Protestants and Catholics, Irish and British, Unionists and Republicans. I wanted to understand why the violence was happening and I wanted to listen to the voices beyond the headlines.

This is how I stumbled across Ripley Bogle. By the time I arrived in the early 1990s it had already won a pile of prestigious awards and it was in all of the bookstores. I picked up a copy and sat down to read about this character — this young man named Ripley Bogle — and I was mesmerized by his use of language, his dark humor, and how he challenges the very notion of Irishness itself. This is not a book for the shamrocks-and-Guinness crowd because Ripley Bogle is a direct assault on nationalism and cultural nostalgia in general. The main character is more interested in poverty and what it means to remember the past.

And remembering the past is what Ripley Bogle is all about. Set in the mid-1980s, the main character is currently homeless in London. As he wanders around the streets and tries to stay warm, he remembers his violent childhood in Belfast. We move back and forth between the violence of Northern Ireland and the rough streets of London. Bogle moves around London like a modern-day Dickens even as he recalls what it was like to grow up in the warzone of Belfast. We read about a tar-and-feathering he witnessed when he was a boy, we learn about the executions and punishment beatings he saw, and then we return to London where he is freezing. He sits outside the Queen’s palace and imagines her looking at him.

The subject matter is dark and grim to be sure, but Bogle’s voice tugs us forward and we want to hear more. He has a wicked sense of humor and the entire narrative is sprinkled with imaginary conversations with Dickens, Orwell, and a host of other literary giants. We also run across frequent songs that Bogle makes up, like:

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Don’t give a toss to what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like shiny acne in the sky”

Or this:

“Our Ireland is a lovely place,
A supergroovy nation
Bigotry is her pastime
Death her occupation.”

And because Bogle smokes cigarettes the way the rest of us breathe oxygen, he frequently thinks about getting cancer, as in this song:

“We’re the boys from Deathsville
The lads from Cancer Alley
We dogfight with the cellular
And add them to our tally

[…]

So look out for Melanoma,
Watch out for Dermoid Cyst
If you meet Carcinoma,
You’ll quickly not exist.”

Ripley Bogle is hugely entertaining — yes — but its greatest triumph is allowing us to peek into the Troubles of Northern Ireland as well as homelessness in London. We’re used to narratives where the Irish speaker is good-hearted, folksy, he loves Ireland, he cares about the countryside more than the city, and he never lies. Ripley Bogle turns all of this on its head. Here is a narrator who isn’t good-hearted, he plays magic tricks with the English language, he is an urban pacifist who hates Ireland, and we’re never entirely sure if he’s telling us the truth or not.

For my money, Robert McLiam Wilson has written the best novel to come out of Northern Ireland in the last 30 years. It’s hugely readable and it’s unfairly good. Ripley Bogle is the kind of novel you’ll appreciate having read and, I dare say, you may became an evangelist for it yourself one day: “Wait, wait,” you’ll say. “You’ve got to read this book. I dare you to read the first 10 pages and walk away. I triple-dog-dare you.”

*

PS. I should also mention his other critically acclaimed novel, Eureka Street, which was published in 1996 and also takes place in Belfast. Since then, Robert McLiam Wilson has been working on a novel called Extremists but, year after year, it has been delayed. He seems to be like JD Salinger in both his cult following and his endless work on a new but continually postponed novel. (If you ever read this Robert, I’d love to interview you. You’re a writer that makes other writers very jealous. Email me. I’ll fly to Paris and pay for all the coffee).