It Didn’t Even Matter Whether or Not I Ever Learned Algebra: On Brian Allen Carr's Vampire Conditions

When I got Vampire Conditions in the mail last week, I sat down just to take a quick look and ended up reading the whole damn thing straight though to the end.

When I finished it, I wanted there to be ten more books just like it that I could read right away but there weren’t and never will be, and if I didn’t still have the book to hold and flip through, I might wonder if it ever existed in the first place. That’s what this book does.

The stories in Vampire Conditions feel like great magic tricks in the sense that when they’re over, you sit there, freshly entertained, wondering exactly what just happened. How does Brian Allen Carr do what he does with these stories? You want to know, but you don’t want to know. The endings are so perfect that you’re left with this feeling that can’t be described or accounted for, so you get into the next one, still very impressed with the last, doubtful that he’ll be able to replicate the impact, and then he does it again, and again you sit entertained and impressed, trying to figure out exactly what or how things pile up the way they do.

The main characters in these stories range from an adopted teenage Asian kid whose dad gets George Straight to come hear him play some country songs on the guitar, to a middle-aged firework store owner who finds himself with a bunch of baby opossums to deal with as a direct result of something he did. And despite having very different narrators, these stories flow smoothly together and make themselves very easy to read, even though the writing itself isn’t the least complicated thing on Earth.

I don’t want to say too much because this is the kind of book that’s better when you come into it fresh, like going to see a movie you’ve barely heard anything about, so I’ll leave it at this: Vampire Conditions by Brian Allen Carr is fucking fantastic in a way that nothing else is. Read it, everyone.

Hush Up and Listen: An Interview with Ken Sparling

Ken Sparling is the author of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers, Untitled: A Novel, and Book. His recently re-released novel Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt is what we’re here to talk about today, and you should check out Amazon to find out about buying the book, and to see some reviews and interviews. Sparling’s writing has regularly appeared in New York Tyrant over the past few years, and his new book, Book, just came out with Pedlar Press and is available at indigo.ca. Additionally, Mud Luscious Press has contracted to re-issue Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall, probably in 2012. Look for it!

*This interview originally appeared in Keyhole Magazine. And Dad Says He Saw You At the Mall is available from Mud Luscious here.

* * *

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Ken, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions about your recently re-released novel Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt. Let’s dive right in. What can you share about your use of dialogue and how it functions here?

KEN SPARLING: The dialogue functions as a recommendation to the reader for a way of being in the world, and it calls upon the reader to be in the world in that way while reading the book. It calls upon the reader to treat the reading of dialogue as an example of what it might mean to read well. The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Buttfunctions as a request to the reader be open to an approach that might not be something she is used to encountering in her reading, to be open to an approach that calls upon her to be active in her reading of the book in a way that turns the act of reading itself into a form of dialogue, a dialogue between the reader and the writer, rather than a form of passive reception.

The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt also functions as an opportunity to recommend a kind of talk that gets forgotten, the kind of talk kids engage in until they get to a certain age. It functions as a recommendation to resist abandoning the impulse that leads to childlike dialogue. It’s a recommendation to resurrect the impulse for childlike dialogue.

The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt is a recommendation to trust. The dialogue inside the book looks outside the book for a reader who will listen to the impulse that makes the sort of talk that is happening possible, and who will embrace that impulse and respond to the book as though reading a book were itself an opportunity to participate in a dialogue that could function as a recommendation. The dialogue in Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt functions as a recommendation that the reader make of her reading a recommendation.

MG: Would you call this a semi-autobiographical novel?

KS: The idea of autobiography, as I understand it, is that something happens in a person’s life and then it happens again in a book. For me, the creation of a book can never be the representation of something that has already happened. The creation of the book is itself the thing that is happening. I make my life happen when I write, in the same way I make my life happen when I read a book, or walk to the corner, or have a conversation with my wife or kids, or eat a taco. I understand the notion that a page of words can somehow represent past events, but I don’t think I want to participate in that notion.

MG: Will you offer a few thoughts about the difference between the way you released this book the first time — out of your home, bound with duct tape inside retired library books, with cover illustrations drawn by your children — and its re-release form?

KS: I remember that I was very excited about the idea of making things by hand around the time I decided to make Hush Up myself. I was buying all kinds of used books from the used book store at the library, especially children’s picture books. And there was a place down in the basement of the Toronto Reference Library (where I had just been relocated) where they had a couple of huge recycling bins that were used by the Friends of the Library, who run the bookstore, to dispose of books and magazines they couldn’t sell, and there were often a lot of magazines in these bins, like National Geographic, or fine art magazines. I wasn’t a very happy guy right after I got relocated and, wanting to get away from my desk and the crappy work I didn’t want to do, I would go down and fish around in the recycle bins and get magazines with pictures I liked. I’d cut the pictures out, or tear them out, and glue stick them into the children’s picture books, usually covering up the words.

At first, my intention had been to cover up all the words in the books and put my own stories into these picture books. I even took one of the altered books to a reading and did a kind of variation on the story programs they do at the library for kids, where I read a page of my story and then held up the picture book so people could see these pictures that actually had nothing to do with my story. In the end, I didn’t do very many books where I put my own story in. I ended up mostly just obliterating the stories that were there, so that the books were all pictures – the pictures the children’s book illustrator did, and the magazine pictures I’d ripped out and glued over the words in the book.

I’m not sure what the impulse was here. I would spend an awful lot of time at work gluing pictures into books. It might have just been that I didn’t want to do my real job. It might have been that I hated words at the time and wanted to find a way to obliterate them, to shut people up… I’m not sure. Around the same time, I was trying to figure out how to make Hush Up into a book without simply handing it over to someone, like I’d handed Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall over to Knopf, and I was talking a lot about this problem with Derek McCormack – my writer friend who wrote the brilliant intro for the Artistically Declined version of Hush Up. I remember asking Derek about what it would cost to get the book printed, and at the same time I was working on defacing these children’s books, and at some point I realized I could buy old hardback novels from the used bookstore and rip the guts out and put my book in. I figured I could create the inside of the book myself using a photocopier and a sewing machine and duct tape, and stuff the book inside the covers of these old, used library books. So the difference between the experience of making the book myself and publishing it with Artistically Declined is vast. When you get a book published by a company – even the greatest publishing company in the world – all you really do is hand it to the publisher and wait. At the time that Ryan asked if he could publish Hush Up, I hadn’t handmade any copies in a while and I thought, sure. It was kind of weird, because I had no idea who this guy was, he just emailed and asked for copies of some of my books, then a little while later emailed to ask if he could publish something by me, maybe Hush Up, which he’d calculated I started making ten years ago. Somehow I thought he’d read the book before he asked for it, but then he asked for a handmade copy, so I knew he couldn’t have read it.

MG: How has your experience been with Artistically Declined Press? 



KS: Great. Ryan Bradley, who initially contacted me, has been amazingly enthusiastic and industrious about getting the book into print, about making a great cover, and about promoting the book. He made a website called stinkypoobutt.com dedicated entirely to the book and trying to get it out there into people’s hands.

And the other half of Artistically Declined, Paula Bomer, had me and my son, Mark, staying at her house in Brooklyn for four nights last weekend while I was in New York for a couple of readings, one of which Paula orgainzed and hosted at KGB.

You know, in the end, I think it really comes down to the people you deal with in the projects you decide to engage in and the people I’ve had a chance to work with because of my association with ADP have been incredible, they have such an amazing work ethic and are completely dedicated to creating beautiful things.

When I first started hand making Hush Up by myself, I guess I didn’t want to have anyone else involved. I wanted to go solo. Again, I don’t know if it was that I hated having to rely on other people, or I hated what happened when you just signed up for some experience and then waited around for other people to decide what was going to happen next. This was a hard thing for me to get over, this waiting for other people to take care of things. My first attempt to stop handing my life over to other people was to just wrench the whole thing away and do it all alone. This satisfied me at the time, but it made me kind of cranky, and I’m trying to get over that, and it’s taking some time.

With ADP, I’m really reveling in the opportunity to get to know and work with a bunch of wonderful people. The trip to New York was great because I met so many great people and great writers and participated with many of them in readings – Sasha Fletcher, Shya Scanlon, John Madera, Giancarlo from New York Tyrant, Jennifer Knox, and I got to see Greg Gerke and read with him again (we read together in Toronto a few months back) – but most especially it was great because I got to stay with Paula and her partner Nick and their two kids, Hal and Jack, and they are such a great family. A lot of what I think I’m about, and what Hush Up is about, is the problem of doing good family. So this was cool, to see this amazing family working together, dealing with conflicts, sorting things out, getting meals taken care of, and to be a little part of that for a few days.

Also, Paula put me and Mark in her basement, which is a big room with massive bookshelves on a couple walls, and these bookshelves are loaded with incredible books and journals. When I wasn’t out with Mark at the jazz shows he took me to, I was in Paula’s basement reading. Some of the stuff I read was stories by Paula, which are beautiful, heartbreaking stories. She’s such a great writer, with this unbelievable ability to write utterly convincingly from the male perspective, and I didn’t know this until I found myself in her basement and read a few of her stories in journals she’s got down there. She’s got a book of stories coming out in the fall and I’m really looking forward to it.

Honestly, from my perspective, the experience of working with ADP hasn’t had as much to do with the project of making an object called Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt as it has with working out together ways of making me and the book and ADP more visible, sort of leveraging the strengths and positioning of a bunch of people to create something that swirls with life.

MG: What are you working on now? What’s next?

KS: I’ve been taking passages that I cut from other pieces of writing, writing that I did years ago, or passages that I’ve transplanted wholesale, passages that I’ve saved over the years, handwritten notes I wrote ten, twenty, even thirty years ago and put in a drawer and forgot about, passages in old computer files on computers that still have floppy drives, and I’ve been bringing all these passages together in a single document, and then going through the document looking for a way to unite the material in a manner that makes it seem as though I intended for these bits and pieces to be together all along, but without losing the sense of discontinuity I reach for when I bring together a bunch of bits and pieces and toss them into a single document. The process of working through the material to develop a kind of unexpected unity, or unity through a common call among the pieces to be unexpected, often transforms the original bits to the point where they have no relation to what they were when I started out with them. But I want to believe that where they started, as bits forgotten in drawers, somehow informs what they become. So far, how that happens is a mystery to me.

This way of working happened accidentally, much as the process for Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall happened accidentally as I worked with Gordon Lish to try to figure out how to make a book out of all the little bits of writing I was producing back then.

The evolution to this more recent process, where I mix bits of old writing together into a single document and then work through the material again and again, re-encountering, rearranging, stirring, moving, culling and recreating, began when I decided to try to straighten out my mess a bit. My wife, Mary, finds it very frustrating living in amongst the mess I leave behind wherever I go. So I thought if I could clean out old files, condense things a little, I might be able to get some things off my desk, and off my bedside table, and off the floor beside my bed, and at least get a bunch of stuff hidden away in drawers. I was just trying to tidy up. I took files full of old handwritten stories, and notes, and little inspirations I’d had over the years while riding my bike or travelling to meetings for work on the subway, and I sat out in the backyard and read through these files looking for bits worth saving, bits I could use – although what I was going to use them for was never clear. I was just listening to the sound of what I’d written echo in my head, trying to hear if any of it was musical. So I might tear the bottom off a sheet of paper that had a sentence or two that struck me as worth saving, and recycle the rest of the sheet. At some point, this changed, and I started inputting everything I came across into a single document – without passing judgement on anything I’d written – until I had enough words for a book. When I had enough words for a book, I started going through the document, trying to make something happen with any of the stuff where it felt to me like nothing seemed really to be happening. This process was accelerated when I got a laptop for the first time, and I could take it out to the backyard, and I no longer had to save up scraps of paper with bits of writing on them, and then take these bits of writing into the house later to input them into the computer. I’m at the stage now where I try not to be judgmental about anything I encounter when I’m first putting a document together. I try to trust that, even if the writing seems off, the impulse is good and it’s a matter of staying with the material and being patient enough to wait until the impulse uncovers itself through my working and reworking the material.

MG: Why do you write? How long have you been at it? When did you decide to write books and why?

KS: I write because it excites me. It excites me to read certain combinations of words in a way that no combination of words should be able to excite anyone, and I want to figure out how it is that a bunch of symbols that are meant to function as pointers to more substantial bits of the world can come to excite me in this way. A good way to explore these symbols is to produce my own combinations. Certain other writers have created combinations of words that compel me in ways I don’t understand. I write partly to try to demystify this process, but more and more these days I write to participate in the mystery.

I’ve been writing since grade school, which is when I first decided I was going to be a writer. Over the years since I made the decision to become a writer, even though a lot of times during those years I wasn’t actually doing any real writing, I was always working on the plan in one way or another, exploring strategies to make it happen, acting like I was a writer, even when I didn’t feel like I was a writer, waiting for a time when it wouldn’t feel like I was acting anymore, when I would feel like I was really a writer.

MG: What advice do you have for young writers?

KS: The only way I’ve ever felt at all comfortable giving advice to another writer was by marking up a manuscript of their writing, and I haven’t always felt entirely comfortable doing that. I always felt most comfortable marking up a manuscript that I already found compelling, where the marks I made seemed inevitable, in the sense that the work itself yearned to find the sort of release that was possible through the deletion or rearrangement or re-visitation or reconsideration of certain words in the work. Any advice I give would have to come in the form of a recommendation, and the only way to recommend something to another writer is through writing, either by writing something yourself that stands as a recommendation for a way of writing, something that attempts to make visible an approach; or by marking up the other person’s writing, in which case the act of marking up stands as a recommendation for a certain approach to engaging an existing combination of words, a recommendation that would stand as an example of excision, recombination, resurrection, reconsideration. . . . In other words, a recommendation to practice a certain approach to writing that involves a particular manner of editing.

A Luminously Magical Collection: Luke Geddes's I Am a Magical Teenage Princess

What draws you in first are the titles: “Bongo the Space Ape,” “Defunct Girl Gangs of North American Drive-Ins,” “And I Would’ve Gotten Away With It If It Wasn’t For You Meddling Kids.”

Then there are those funny first lines:

“Having once been initiated, the party cannot, will not, will never, under any circumstances, end.” . . . “Sex in outer space is not that different.” . . . “Bongo doesn’t need this shit.”

But Luke Geddes, in his first book I Am a Magical Teenage Princess (another excellent title), knows that once he’s drawn you in, the outlandish must meld with gritty substance. Those titles and lines open doors — doors to ’60s/contemporary life mashups, savage cartoon dreamscapes, hellish high school dramas where one’s private embarrassments play out, for the edification of youth, on a public screen.

On entering these stories you might think, on first glance, you’re in familiar territory. There’s hygiene-conscious Helen, the ever chipper coworker, Barney of Bedrock fame. But don’t be fooled. The cartoon characters, the TV sitcom “types” have shadows, and depths — and even tears and blood when the story trips a wire on them and they plunge down some harrowing space.

In “Another Girl, Another Planet,” the characters’ lives, like any teens’, are rife with clichés from pop culture. But the protagonist is so smart, her dead spaceship so inimical to teenage pap that a magazine quiz’s title, “What kind of future planner are YOU?” resounds like an existential joke. And in “Betty and Veronica,” the duo don their characteristic masks in public, while beneath them brew untidy passions — imperiling their squeaky-clean roles.

Ultimately, it’s Geddes’s empathy and clear-eyed, comedic vision that makes Magical Teenage Princess stand apart. Like us, his characters are magical and flawed, strange constructs of ghost eras and selves.

Collecting Crumbs in the Poetry of Arlene Kim

There is bad in the wood

(this is where children get lost
for good)…

Morsels of dialogue appear scattered in sections of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?. A path that poet Arlene Kim marks in the undergrowth.  The echo of warnings.  Crumbs to follow when we’re lost and found and lost again in the woods.

What lies ahead are birds who cannot be trusted, “camps of teeth,” and trees who whisper to the handle of the ax, “you’re one of us.”  These woods of migration, of Korea, of war “when all the Mothers left,” of making and unmaking family.

Borrowing from Korean folktales and traditions and the work of Keats, Akhmatova and Celan, Kim tells us stories of heartache, abandonment and dismemberment.  She inhabits  the voices of Daughter, Sister, Turtle, Chorus, among others, who are, at times, one in the same.  In the woods, these voices warn and give directions.  They question lineage and mourn the echoes of its absence.  In “Season of Frogs,” the Chorus gives a dirge:

At night we sing all our questions to the trees:
Who widowed the mothers?  Who ate up the husbands? Who
left us
with just this crippling cry?
More things than hawks can steal.
Why did you leave us, Mother?  Why did you not try harder
to sew
the song of you
firmly to our tongues?

Daughter/Sister/Girl attach and cleave pieces of the dismembered body in order to remember (and forget) her family, country and history.  The “single long braid” is a “partial cutting, imperfect collection.”  From “Exhibit A: Archive”:

Mother lent us her hair for exhibit.  It grew the same on us,
her clutch, her collection.  Oh, we must not cut it,
the rope to her, the inherited line.
But that was an ancient time.  She says
we must now forget it, untie ourselves.  Only knots remain—she
ties and unties them every evening.

As we collect the remnants of family and fate, “bees and rag-winged dragonflies,” the splinters of the woods, Arlene Kim hands us a blade.  To cut ourselves “out from the belly of home.”

The Fun Part About Experimental Literature: On Ken Sparling's Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

I was first introduced to Ken Sparling’s work at — where else? — AWP, when I bought his book, Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, and one of Ben Tanzer’s books as a package deal from Artistically Declined’s table. Admittedly, I was sold on Sparling’s book because of the title, and wasn’t prepared for the tightly episodic, slice-of-life prose therein. By the time I’d reached the halfway point of Hush Up and Listen, it occurred to me that Ken Sparling is one of the best kinds of writers, by which I mean the kind who shows readers that all the rules they learned from workshop are total bullshit.

So naturally, I jumped at the chance to review one of Sparling’s earlier novels, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, and it’s awesome, too. It doesn’t have the focus or grace of Hush Up and Listen, but it does have the same sense of fractured desperation and the same wayward, perhaps futile search for meaning. In much the same way that Philip K. Dick had to write We Can Build You before Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, this book is Ken Sparling’s realization that he’s onto something big.

The premise of Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall is simple enough; the narrator, a Canadian library employee also named Ken Sparling, is concerned about his relationships with his wife Tutti and their son, Sammy. The stress of these relationships is clear, and his memories of his mother, father and stepmother (the fictional Sparling’s parents divorced when he was a child), help the reader understand that he didn’t have functional models for adulthood, so he has no idea what to do once he gets there himself.

This all sounds like a fairly conventional middle-class domestic novel, but Sparling delivers it in vignettes that, through repetition and a non-linear structure that bounces between the present and the past, make for an uneasy atmosphere. The idea that he is dissatisfied with his wife and stays with her out of numb resignation isn’t stated, or even described, but the reader can sense it as their interactions become more terse and mundane as the book progresses.

The same can also be said of the narrator’s paternal frustrations; although he freely declares his love for his son (“I cannot believe Sammy will ever turn out to be less than perfect” and “I love him so much it is all I can think about sometimes” are two examples of this), the narrator’s fear that he is a mediocre dad wears on him as much as the messes, tantrums, and other exhausting realities of parenting.

Sometimes the narrator makes direct appeals to the reader, which range from taunts to challenges (“But you try telling the truth. Just try it sometime. Maybe you think you are already doing it.”) to questions that feel like cries for help (“will I have moments of clarity, moments just long enough to understand where I am and what is happening to me?”). These, along with a few sparsely sown moments of stunning description (“when she blinked, her eyelids fell like torn rags in the wind”) should be enough to keep readers invested.

The full effect of Sparling’s work — that is to say, the effect his structure has on tone and atmosphere — creeps up on you as you read, and that’s the kind of experimental approach that rewards the reader for his or her effort. I kept thinking about how something like this would get savaged in workshop, just torn apart for the arbitrary movements of the narrative lens, the mundane dialogue, the apparent refusal to ratchet any of this material into a conventional story with a rising action and so on. I kept hearing a well-meaning but persistent voice saying “show, don’t tell” as passages were crossed out or circled with a red pen.

That’s the fun part about experimental literature (which is really just plain old literature), though: there are few things more exhilarating than watching someone break rules and not only get away with it, but pull it off. Ken Sparling does that in spades.

An Interview with Sheldon Lee Compton

Robert Vaughan: Hey buddy! I was up in Boston over the weekend for Tim Gager’s DIRE literary Series and I fell into a time warp. Good news is I was able to start reading your book, The Same Terrible Storm. Man, can you write! I’ve always been an admirer of your craft. We’ve crossed paths in many different places online, and off. But I was drawn into your stories immediately, and can’t wait to dive into the interview. Such an honor to get to chat with you about this heavily awaited book. So, let’s start at the beginning. How long have you been working on this? How many drafts? Tell me about the progression of this “final” birth of your book.

Sheldon Lee Compton: The Same Terrible Storm is a collection of stories completed over the period of about three years, many of them published in some generous literary journals and others just now seeing the light of day. Of the stories in the book, I’d say I put each through three or four drafts for the longer stories and a couple for the short-shorts. This was a decision that came fairly late after talks with Stephen Marlowe at Foxhead Books, the press that published the collection, the idea to include both long stories and shorter stories in this collection.

I can’t say how happy I was to have a collection on hand for Stephen when he and I first talked about my sending something to the gang at Foxhead. I sent two collections – one that became The Same Terrible Storm and a second titled Where Alligators Sleep, which is exclusively short-shorts. I had a lot of input on the book itself, from the final content to the cover, which was handled by the talented Logan Rogers and his crew. My plan for the next collection is to add several short-shorts before publication, maybe even double the number of stories currently in the submitted draft.

RV: Sounds like such a dream come true. Also, this organic process you describe (varying lengths of stories turned into a collection or anthology) seems to be more common currently. It’s great that you had such a supportive team at Foxhead, makes me thrilled to hear this score for indie presses. I wanted to discuss your opening story of TSTS, I was so immediately captivated. You build such a fierce, tender relationship between the narrator and Mary, and son, Dennie. From page 5:

‘I don’t even like insects to bite her. That’s how personal I take it.’

Also: ‘But Dennie was to be raised Christian and that made learn- ing hand-to-hand combat maneuvers tricky. Self-defense didn’t fit into Mary’s plans all that well. But she knew the world was mean, cruel and hard, so she left it alone. Only thing, she didn’t want to see Dennie coming at me with sweep kicks and throat strikes, so we stayed at the east end of the field, away from the house. I felt like I was in a familiar place out there in the field, just like in the war. It was those times out there with Dennie when I would go hours without a drop of anything, and not even miss the smell. If we could’ve stayed in that field forever, hand-to-hand, learning how to keep the world from swallowing us up, I might have had a better chance at being a good Christian.’

RV: So, you establish this grave sense of danger, and this insular need to protect self, family, and to defend against that ‘evil’ at large. Willing to address this? Is this a recurring theme in your work?

SLC: I for sure inject that sense of danger you’re talking about with most of my work, but I suppose it’s not always an evil-at-large type of situation. Often the danger is very focused. But, as anyone who reads the book will see, the stories are set in Eastern Kentucky and this region often functions as a character in its own right, and usually in opposition to the hopes and dreams of the people who populate my fiction. I’m not trying to make the place I come from worse than it is, but at the same time I’m not interested in sugar-coating anything, either. When I write about the people I’ve grown up with and live with now, most folks are of one of two mindsets — there are those who will argue that the mountains that surround are protection from the rest of the world, or those who feel the mountains are hardly more than prison bars, stopping any notion of improving our lot in life. This is a black and white sort of thing, and something I like to do is find the gray in those instances. It’s what I hope I’ve achieved in this book, nothing is completely honorable and nothing is without a certain amount of darkness. But if there is a consistent danger or opposition throughout my work it would be the character’s region. Whether you love the mountains or hate them, this region plays a huge role in the lives of most Appalachians.

RV: I love that you addressed the region, which functions as a character (in its own right) because I feel you have such eloquence in how you write nature and environment, how it shades a story. For example, from page 12: ‘Then the drizzle lifted off, back into the clouds, which moved away in a slow bulk across the ridge and dissipated like a swarm of colorless wasps.’ It is breathtaking, the imagery so poetic. I also admire your use of character names: Burl, Spider, Torch, Mackey, Murphy…how do you decide names? Do they decide you? Also, the “double” tag names with real and call names like Michael/ Spider and Caudrill/ Torch. Are names important? If so, how?

SLC: I’m thankful for your attention to my attempt at a certain lyrical style, Robert, I truly am. Two of my influences as a writer are Breece Pancake and Michael Ondaatje, whose styles could not be more different. Pancake’s is muscular and tight, while Ondaatje writes in that highly poetic way that always reveals the poet inside him. So my influence from Pancake was in how to write honestly about my region, while I tend to lean to Ondaatje as inspiration for the individual sentence, its texture, sound, feel and possibilities. I work hard at blending these two literary devices in my work, and so I do so appreciate when anyone notices. Nature is a given with regional writing, and so it’s more often the place where I can allow myself to use a more poetic voice, even if the story is about slaughtering a hog or working at a junkyard.

I do give a fair amount of thought to character names. There are so many colorful names where I’m from that I often find myself meeting people and then writing their names down as a reminder to later use them in whatever I may be working on at the time. Each one you’ve pointed to here were either names of people I met or worked with or heard of through some local source. Spider and Torch are actual call names of two truck drivers from Eastern Kentucky. Somehow I knew I’d use them in my fiction at some point. I simply couldn’t resist. One of my favorite character names was German — a character from an early draft of the story “Snapshot ’87.” I hated to edit that character out when revising only because I liked the name so much. It was taken from a guy I worked with in the coal mines when I was a teenager. It was his birth name. I still find that terribly cool.

RV: Names in general are cool! For instance, I love that you call me “hoss.” Even though you might call everyone this, I’ve often wondered if I ought to respond by calling you “little Joe.” With all brotherly respect, of course. Tell me a little about your writing life- do you write in the morning? Only certain days? Computer or long hand? How do you tap into a muse, or is that just horseshit?

SLC: Nothing but brotherly for you there, hoss, and feel free to lay some “little Joe” on me! The writing life for me is a full-time job and I’m thrilled about that. In October and I took the leap and left the workforce until very recently. While writing full-time I worked about eight to ten hours a day, waking at five-thirty in the morning and working through the day, allowing myself a couple breaks here and there and an hour for lunch. I found the old saying that it takes a great deal of discipline to pull that off is so very true. The upshot is that even though I’m back in the workforce, I can still manage about six hours a day of writing, doing most of the work in the early morning before I ever leave for my grunt work. Other than needing that instant gratification of the computer for the actual process, I don’t have many tangible needs to write. I once wrote in longhand, but since college my penmanship is simply too poor. I can write a note and if I don’t refresh myself before bed by going over it I’ll not be able to read it the next morning.

Like all folks in this craft, I gain my inspiration, if you can call it that, by reading. I can read a passage from Barry Hannah and get really pumped about trying to write that clean and naturally, or pick up books like How They Were Found by Matt Bell or Mel Bosworth’s Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom and Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes, just to name a few, and be reminded that I actually know writers who are doing it right so it can’t be too far out of reach for me. Sometimes just turning other people’s books over in my hands and reading the blurbs is enough to remind me that this work can be done and done well. The trick for me as a writer of fairly heavy themes is to not take myself too seriously while doing it, though. I usually write about Eastern Kentucky, as I’ve said, and the people here. Most of what has been published until the last five to ten years about Appalachia has been a little too soapbox for my tastes. It’s difficult to write about a culture and keep social commentary out of the picture, but I hope I’m coming close by concentrating on the characters and simply telling their story in an entertaining and compelling fashion.

RV: In your last response, you touched on the subject of themes in your work, referring to yourself as “a writer of fairly heavy themes.” In this collection alone, you broach religion, divorce, drinking, single parenting, blue collar jobs (and unemployment), lies. Can you tell me what draws you to what you write? Does it come organically, or are you turning life into fiction (to draw from Robin Hemley’s great book about craft)? Do themes come to you as you craft a story, or are you aware in advance of what you will be delving into for a certain story? Also, where do you find the motivation for your stories? You mentioned the Appalachians and breath-taking region in which you live, is there more? Maybe give us a tale not yet written . . . what’s something you’ve not yet explored and why? 

SLC: I do draw on my life experiences in my work. Not as much as some might think, but a fair amount. I’m sure we all must to an extent. But, admittedly, I’ve happened to have had an interesting life so far, though most of it has been a darker, more difficult, span of time than some others. I was never really very aware my themes tended to be “heavier” than others until readers began making mention of it here and there. I was aware there were good writers and great writers out there who were not writing about the unemployed, single-parenting, divorce, drinking, the confines of religion, and so on. Just as much as I was aware there were writers, like myself, mucking around in those waters and mudholes. I don’t feel so much drawn to write about the subjects I take time to consider long enough for such a thing. I just believe strongly that each person, no matter if they’ve lived next door to one another for fifty years, have their own vital and unique way of seeing each and every thing and person around them.

I’m fascinated by that fact, and even more fascinated and eager to discover what my experiences look, feel, taste, sound like in only the way I can experience them. In order to truly do this, you have to share it with others in whatever you can. It’s funny you should mention if there are any tales I’ve not touched on yet, because there most certainly is, a glaring one, in fact. My maternal grandfather, Bob. He died when I was about four, so never really knew him. I knew he grew up as an orphan and lived by plowing fields for supper and other chores for a bed to sleep in. My family has always said the community raised him. It created in him a strange sense of looking out for himself, much to the hardship of others, especially his wife and children. He exists only in story form to me, and the stories are countless, an absolute well of stories. In all the years I’ve been writing, I only recently started a story based on him. It’s called “The Favor” and should appear in Where Alligators Sleep, if all goes well.

RV: I look forward to reading that story about your grandfather, Sheldon! Let me ask if you ever judge your work, while crafting, or even after a piece has been published? I recently sent off 24 poems to Gloria Mindock at Cervena Barva Press for my upcoming poetry chapbook, Microtones. And right after I clicked the “send” button, I experienced these deep pangs, like she is going to hate them! (good news, apparently she didn’t!) Do you go through this? If so, how?

SLC: I love that you’ve got a chap coming out, hoss.  Hats off on that note, and that’s a fine title, too. As for judging my own work, well, you better believe it. Oh, yeah, man. I judge harshly. Old West hard. I can, in all honesty, say I’ve only written five or six stories I knew were good stories at the time I finished them. And like any of us who’ve been working it that long, you’re talking hundreds upon hundreds of stories. Twenty-four years and that’s it. Five or six stories, maybe. Of the two novels I’ve worked out of me like rotted teeth, I threw the first in a creek behind my house, the only copy written on my first typewriter when I was nineteen, and the second, which is good but needs a few major surgeries, remains trunked. It’ll see the light of day, though.  As long as I know it’s good, I’ll keep working to see if it can be better. The others, the stories, became tolerable after several drafts, enough drafts that I eventually never wanted to read them again. That’s how it goes, sometimes. Work it until you drop. Somebody will notice. They’ll see how you’ve sweated and heaved and pulled and pushed and never let up. That work will show in your words. And it’ll show if all you did was sit back on your thumb, too.

RV: I thought you were going to say, sit back on your keyster! Hahaha. Okay, I’m going to mix things up now. Time to get off YOUR DUFF, little Joe. Here is a line from a recent Tin House New Voice novel, Glaciers, by Alexis M. Smith: ‘She decided against washing her hands.’ Write a 50 word (or less) piece using any or all of that line. Go! 

SLC : Ha!  Off my duff I come!  Here goes nothing:

“The carpenter held her fingers, the last load of old shingles already hauled off.  He stayed on awhile after, picked the yard for torn pieces of the old roof and nails.  She sat on the porch while her carpenter softly parted blades of grass. She decided against washing her hands.”

RV: Nice use of white space, very provocative, too. Okay, you’re on an island in the Pacific looking for Amelia Earhart’s remains. Name five different parts of her body and a favorite song you are listening to at the time you discover said part.

SLC:  Okay, let’s see here – Crossing a small creek while listening to “Take It On the Chin” by William Elliott Whitmore, I find her jawbone, strong and determined, even in that tiny vein of water.  Later, along a ridge north of where we came ashore, I trip across her leg, the boot laces still pulled tightly into an impressive knot.  I’m listening to Townes Van Zandt’s “Flying Shoes” while admiring the sturdy boot and the leg that had flown so high for so long.   I grow tired after several hours and find a shanty of some sort made of slim branches and great leaves spreading out for a roof.

As I enter, listening to Tom Waits’ “The House Where Nobody Lives,” I find a large stone.  Along the side of the stone is a single fingernail seemingly embedded into the rock, seemingly still clutching for purchase.  I’m about to heave when I leave the leafy shanty and lose my footing, sliding several yards into a clearing.  At my feet I see what at first appears to be a dead animal, its fur matted and clumped.  The closer I come to the thing I see its hair, a half inch of her scalp stretching across its underside.  The Pixies “Hey” finally rolls through my ears.  I can still hear that distinct cry of the guitar as I make it back to the shore line.  I’m the first there, so there’s no news to share.  I walk the line, listening for the others when a foamy wave moves in over my ankles and then out again.  And now she’s looking at me.  Those eyes, blinding if stared at for too long, pushed back from the sea and onto the shore of her private and expansive cemetery.  And as I look at her eyes, and only her eyes, Hank Williams is there singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”  And I do.

RV: Dang, Little Joe, you’re good. I say, expand and submit that one! Now, I will give you a “word bank,” five from Matt Bell’s new novel, Cataclysm Baby: empty, scars, soot, taste, & swallowing. You can use any or all of them in a 50 words or less piece.

SLC: I’ll tell you something, hoss, those are some fun words to throw together.  Here you go: The room is empty as scars without stories when Ben wakes.  It is a knocked about box made of soot, and, as he feared, most of the food burned along with all the hope left.  Though he cannot taste what is not there, he continues swallowing as if in prayer.

RV: Great imagery there. You’re a natural born poet, my friend. I want to ask you about your online journals. I know you’ve started a few. You took my triptych, “A,B,C” at A-Minor when you were at the helm there. We also cross paths at Fictionaut, a member-only online writer’s community. Tell me how your writing has shifted since the advent and rise of online writing. Any positive or negative influences?

SLC: It was a pleasure to publish “A,B,C”, no doubt.  Wonderful work.  And, yeah, just realized I tossed in a rhyme without realizing it with the “there” and “prayer”.  Well, well. Thanks for suggesting I have a little poetic notion.  I think poets are on the front line in the literary world.  To write and consider each word, each comma, each line space with such deliberation is something to be admired.  To speak directly to your question, man, I cannot overstate how important the online communities of writers and what many consider the indie writing scene have been for me.  With each small journal, print or online I either founded or co-founded, I received such satisfaction going through submissions and finding just the right story, the one I just couldn’t wait to read aloud to someone.

With Cellar Door, the first journal I co-founded, we didn’t go online.  We paid for a run of two-hundred and fifty copies and sold them from the back seat of our car.  We actually stacked the envelopes full of stories in the middle of the living room floor and parted them out into two basically even piles and started reading.  That’s where I was first introduced to writers like the late Carol Novack, Matt Bell, and an already well-established Joey Goebel, and many others I never heard from again, but remember their stories as clear today as the second I read the first sentence of their submission.  With online journals, I co-founded Wrong Tree Review and then, within the first issue, became interested in starting an online journal that offered readers something new each week.  So, A-Minor Magazine came about, which I edited for about a year and stepped aside.  I loved the experience, but am not currently involved with any journals.  Of late, I’ve been a little selfish.  I want to focus on my own work and simply enjoy the work of others.  In the past week I’ve added seventy-four books to my wish list at Amazon, not to mention my drop-ins at Fictionaut, the writer’s community you mentioned.  There’s always something great to read there.  All in all, I would say the positives in the rise of online publishing greatly outweigh any negatives.  I think print and online can exist, if not complement the other.  People are always eager and pleased to find new options to communicate with each other, share stories.

RV: I like how you’ve worn so many hats leading to this new one: published author (of your new book: The Same Terrible Storm!!!) Explain how this latest transition has changed you, if it has at all. And who are the authors you’ve read lately? Any that stand out? 

SLC: Shortly after I learned Foxhead accepted the collection, I made the decision to leave the traditional workforce and write full-time.  That has been a major change, and a positive one so far.  I’ve been working full-time at this craft since October with the support of my loved ones, and I couldn’t be more fortunate.  The true blessing for any writer is to have people on your side who understand that it can be work, not just a hobby.  It takes a certain type of person to realize this is a craft, a true pursuit of labor, without actually being a writer themselves.  I don’t know if I’d be able to make that leap or not, but I’m thankful to be surrounded by those who can.

The daily grind of writing full-time is a fair amount more challenging than I’d expected, but it’s good work.  It helps me to have a few projects going at the same time.  Currently, I’m writing the novel and also working on a book of photographs with accompanying flash fiction pieces, each of thousand words, for a future book to be called A Thousand Words.  My wonderful lady Heather McCoy is the photographer for the project so we’re getting the chance to work together.  The hardest part at this point has been picking my favorites from her portfolio.  At one point I had I roughly three hundred pictures sorted out and then realized that would be a pretty huge book at one thousand words each.  We’re aiming now for one hundred photographs and stories.

I’ve also been buffering my work day with reading, so I’m glad you asked about what’s off my shelf and beside my laptop these days, Robert.  Since I’m in novel mode, I’m reading more along those lines.  On tap for now is Ron Rash’s Saints at the River, Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and a couple story collections with Kyle Minor’s In the Devil’s Territory and Chris Offutt’s Out of the Woods nearby, as well.

An Interview with Amelia Gray

For this series I’m asking the writers I love to recommend a book. If I haven’t read it, I read it. Then we talk about it.

In this installment, I’m talking with Amelia Gray about Airships by Barry Hannah.

* * *

Colin Winnette: Can you talk a little about what brought you to the book? What were the conditions that led to your picking it up for the first time, and why did you want to talk about it here with me?

Amelia Gray: This great book! I first found Barry Hannah teaching at Texas State, during my first year of grad school. I was 22, and here was this motorcycle-riding troublemaker writing the best fiction I had read in my life. Can you imagine? I couldn’t handle it.

CW: Oh wow, so you studied with him? How fortunate! Were these workshops? One-on-ones? How was it structured and what was it like?

AG: I sort of studied with Hannah. Really, I was a bystander for the others who were studying with Hannah. We were only allowed one workshop semester with a visiting writer and I figured I was a young idiot (I was right!) and that I should hold out for Denis Johnson in my last year. Still and all, I feel very lucky about it.  I sat in on some one-off workshops and he was about how you might expect — feisty, intimidating, kind in his way. He was approachable. He liked to shoot the shit.

CW: It’s interesting, knowing your work, but not knowing before that you studied with Hannah, I would have probably listed him as one of your influences. Is there anything about your approach to writing, or even living, that you trace back to him specifically?

AG: One thing he said in a Q&A I’ve since quoted to other people a million times, to the point that I’m paraphrasing it, but he said that a story starts as a diamond in his mind, perfect in every way, and when he sits down to write, the diamond crumbles into dust. It crumbles a little more slowly as he gets older, but no matter how many times he sits down to write, it crumbles. That idea has always been a comfort to me.

CW: Some might say you can never recreate/re-present an idea, which occurred to you in a specific context, and in a specific way, so every time you sit down to write, you’re not destroying what was there before, you’re just not able to make it again as it was. You can’t. You’re making something else.

AG: I don’t think it’s willfully destructive so much as it is a simple study in the imperfect leap from brain to page. Like the lady who destroyed the fresco last month — she had an image in her mind and she did the best she could.

CW: When we were setting up this interview, you mentioned you only recently came to Airships. What was your initial reaction to this particular book? Did it differ from the work of his you read as a 22-year-old?

AG: Well, so I was young when I met his work, and so star-struck that I had him sign two of his books: Bats out of Hell and Yonder Stands Your Orphan. I was working my way through Bats out of Hell, reading his stories aloud to boyfriends, but I found I didn’t feel comfortable reading the book. I mistreat books, I break the spines and leave them face-down on the sink while I’m washing my hair and whatever. I wanted to read this book and mistreat it but I couldn’t bring myself to, maybe because he wrote in it and he was mythologized in my head. Every story he wrote was brilliant and changed my writing, and that was a little scary. I was afraid to break the spell. Then he died and I was too sad to read him for a while. Then, finally, recently, I was neither sad nor afraid. Turned out I’d read half the stories elsewhere so it’s not quite true that I hadn’t read it anyway.

What a book! What mastery in such considered writing that seems loose and funny! There’s so much life and air and love and light. I feel lucky that I didn’t read some of these stories when I was 22, that I saved their first experience for when I had the heart to appreciate it. I’m borrowing argument from the Catholic virgins here.

CW: Yes! There is irresistible heart at the core of Hannah’s stories, even the more brutal, such as “Coming Close to Donna.” I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he doesn’t shy away from love. Some kind of intense love is at the heart of almost all of these stories, and few writers other than Hannah can so boldly and confidently say something like, “Love slays fear,” (“Escape to Newark”) and make us really and truly feel it, while at the same time keeping it in voice, buried in the characters in the story, distancing himself from it. Is this something you’ve felt while reading, and, if so, can I ask you something as simple as, how do you think he does it?

AG: Yes, exactly. I’m glad I wrote that paragraph above about love and light before I read this one, because now I feel we are in a synchronicity. “Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman. Friendship and politics go to hell.” I suspect he does it because all of his characters have enough of him within them that they each can burst forth with this unique, authentic voice. He’s really writing the same story over and over again, his own heart, the song of himself, whatever you’d like to call it. That he does it so damn well is where you’ve got to sit up and pay attention.

CW: I’ve had this itch about Airships for awhile now, or a curiosity, and it’s about the way Hannah uses religion from story to story. It feels a little different each time, as if he’s approaching it from a variety of angles, and I begin to wonder about this personal relationship to religion. Having known him, what do you make of the biblical references scattered throughout Airships?

AG: Hannah had a near-death kind of experience right around the time I knew him and he told us that he found Jesus in that time. I think I remember him saying that Jesus actually came into to the hospital and sat with him. He wrote in one of my books: “Christ is the strength that you do not have to pray for. Thereness, my lass.”

CW: I’m tempted to let that hang, because it’s beautiful and strange and I really love your answer, but not knowing about your upbringing/your relationship to religion, I have to ask what that meant to you? His message, and his honest belief that he was visited by Jesus? Just as a reader of his work and a fan.

AG: I found it to be an honest belief from the man, the belief that he was visited by Jesus. I was raised in the Presbyterian church and have heard that stuff enough that I don’t find it that strange. I hope that if Jesus ever visits me it’s cool hospital Jesus and not freaked-out jail cell Jesus.

CW: Is there a story that best exemplifies, for you, what this collection can do? Is doing? I think of a story like “Testimony of Pilot,” its range, the strange violences, the characters brutalized by love and the mere passing of time, it feels like this story shows so much of what Hannah is capable of, and he seems so completely in control of all of it. It feels vast and airtight.

AG: Actually I was thinking ‘Testimony of Pilot’ too. There are others that are tighter in terms of plot but I just love ‘Testimony of Pilot” for just that organized appearance of chaos. “Appearance of chaos” instead of “chaos” because there is that work there, yes, though the seams are all stitched tight. And it has one of my favorite lines of all time.

CW: Not to ruin it for those who haven’t read, but I’m guessing it has something to do with a dragon?

AG: Oh yeah, you got it.

CW: There’s a brilliant move in TOP, where Hannah allows his narrator to get sort of out of control, to work himself up to a frenzy — I’m thinking of the recital led by Quadberry — and (credit where credit’s due, Adam Levin first pointed this out to me in a writing seminar at SAIC) Hannah acknowledges it, owns it, and sort of cuts right to the heart of how storytelling works and why we bother to do it. The narrator gives us a nod, after it’s all said and done, and he admits how memory distorts and that he got carried away. He’s mythologizing. What are your thoughts on that reading? Is Hannah writing this self-reflexively? And where else does he exhibit these kinds of acrobatics?

AG: That recital scene is exactly what I’m considering when I think of the appearance of chaos. It feels out of control because we’re not used to that kind of structure in a long story like this. It reminds me of some other writers, ‘How to Tell a True War Story’ by Tim O’Brien, parts of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson.

CW: What’s your position when it comes to control over a story? Do you let a story run away with you, or is each piece carefully plotted beforehand? 

AG: Every time I write, I’m trying to run away from the careful plot, but the plot drags me back in. It’s like one of those bungee runs or the third Godfather.

CW: If you could only recommend one story from the collection?

AG: ‘Love Too Long’ gets me every time.