An Interview with Deborah Crombie

A Texas woman with a British soul, Deb Crombie, deftly weaves wonderfully tangled webs of mystery around Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Both are employed by the London Police and find themselves solving one complex crime after another while becoming hopelessly personally involved. In The Sound Of Broken Glass, Gemma is challenged by the salacious death of a respected London barrister in a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. An unsavory accident or murder?

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MaryAnne Kolton: When you were little, what did you dream of being when you grew up?

Deborah Crombie: Such fun to think about this, MaryAnne.

I think the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowgirl. I have photos (somewhere—the childhood album is missing . . .) of me at six in my cowgirl outfit, complete with six-shooter. Then a horse trainer and breeder—I was horse mad. King of the Wind, the Black Stallion books—loved them!

And then came the “ologists.” My grandmother, who lived with us, was a retired schoolteacher. She had a subscription to National Geographic and we read every issue together, cover to cover. I had a rock collection and wanted to be a geologist, then an archeologist, a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a zoologist, a botanist . . . you get the picture. I think “world explorer” figured in there somewhere. And I wanted to climb Mount Everest.

Later, I started college as a history major, finished with a degree in biology. The one thing I never imagined I would do was write novels.

(And Charles Darwin is still my hero.)

MAK: Do you see these childhood dreams resonating in your writing in some way?

DC: Obviously, I liked learning new things, and that’s certainly carried over into the books. Not only do I tend to research new geographical areas, but most books throw me into new subjects, such as rowing in No Mark Upon Her and rock guitar in The Sound Of Broken Glass. You could say that writing satisfies my magpie instincts.

But even more than that, I see the thread of curiosity, and I think that curiosity—about people and places and life in general—must be the driving force of the novelist. We are, most of us, the elephant’s children. We always want to know WHY.

MAK: You’ve said you have felt that the UK is your “real” home for most of your life. So many Americans are Anglophiles to some degree. How did this feeling you have come about?

DC: This is hardest question to answer, and I’m not sure I’ve become any better at it over the years. I no longer trust what is actual memory and what I’ve spliced in, trying to find some logic in my own life. . . . Did it really start with A.A. Milne? I still have my treasured first editions, so perhaps that is true. I’m sure there were other children’s books, and then there were Tolkien and CS Lewis, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and on to Sayers and Christie, Mary Stewart and Josephine Tey, Dick Francis and James Herriott. But it was more than stories—there was always landscape, even in my dreams as a child.

I’ve said this often, but it remains a lodestone in my perception of my life: I didn’t actually visit England until I graduated from college (my parents took me as a graduation gift.) And on that first bus ride between Gatwick Airport and London, I looked out at the rolling hills and fields and red rooftops of Surrey, and felt I had come home. That feeling was profound, heart-deep, and has never gone away.

MAK: There is such a sense of interiority about your characterizations. It tends to give the reader permission to care a great deal about Gemma and Duncan. How do you do that?

DC: Some of it is instinctive, I think. I heard Duncan’s voice in my head so clearly before I ever began to write him, and that’s how many scenes and characters begin for me — with a line of thought or a line of dialogue.

Then there is that perpetual writer’s curiosity. Even as a child I looked in the windows of houses in the evenings, wondering about the families that lived there — What were their names? Did they have pets? What did they eat for dinner? What did they talk about? So I think this fascination with detail carried over into — or perhaps spurred — my writing. And these details do tell the reader things about the characters.

And the third thing—I’m viewpoint obsessive. I never, never write omniscient viewpoint. I never shift viewpoint within a scene. And I always try to make it very clear at the beginning of a scene whose head we are inhabiting. I think this gives the readers a very strong sense of identification with the characters—and of course we are in Duncan’s and Gemma’s viewpoints most often.

MAK: Are you more like Duncan or Gemma and in what ways?

In the beginning I would easily have said Duncan. I understood how he thought and how he reacted to things. And although I very deliberately made Gemma’s personal situation one that I understood very well—a young woman trying to meet her responsibilities as a mother AND get ahead in a job that she cares passionately about—I saw her as much more assertive than me, and perhaps more emotionally open.

DC: But the characters have grown into themselves, sometimes in ways that surprised me. Duncan turned out to be the more willing to take emotional risks, while it was Gemma who was reluctant to make a commitment. It’s a journey of discovery these days. And interestingly, the character that I identify with most strongly might be Kit.

MAK: It might be helpful here to give a brief background summary of the story of Gemma and Duncan. Then tell a bit about why you identify so strongly with Kit?

DC: Duncan and Gemma began the series as professional partners. I set out with the idea that I wanted to write characters that experience growth and change, whose lives evolve. Even so, I think it was as much a surprise to me as it was to them when Duncan and Gemma’s
relationship moved into the realm of the personal. That’s a very dry way of saying they fell in love . . . but that’s what happened, as it does in real life, no matter how inconvenient.

Kit, who came to Duncan when he was eleven, is now fourteen, and he is so like me when I was that age. (I should say here that I was never a very “girly” girl.) Kit wants to be a biologist. He loves animals. He likes to collect bits and pieces of things, rocks and plants and insects, as did I. Kit is a noticer, very aware of atmosphere and other people’s emotions. He also has a tendency to feel responsible for other people’s safety and emotional well-being, which can be a dangerous trait. And Kit is a dreamer. He sees stories in things, and in people. Who knows—he might even grow up to be a writer…

(Gemma) “Did you ever see any indication that Mr. Arnott was into anything . . . kinky?”

“Vincent?” Kershaw looked astonished. “Kinky? I’d say you couldn’t have found anyone more sexually straight ahead than Vincent.” . . . Kershaw went on, thoughtfully, “I never thought he liked women.”

You mean he liked men?” asked Gemma, wondering if they’d got the whole scenario wrong.

No. I mean he didn’t like women. . . . I learned years ago that he would never make a real effort to defend a woman. It was as if he made an automatic assumption of guilt.

—from The Sound Of Broken Glass

MAK: Your fans are quite anxious to read your newest book, The Sound Of Broken Glass, if their Internet posts are any indication of their loyalty to you and love of Gemma and Duncan. I don’t want to talk too much about the book itself so as not to give away any tense-making plot maneuvers. But I am wondering how far ahead you are plotting when you are writing the book you are working on? One book, two?

DC: I’m usually thinking at least two books ahead with Duncan, Gemma, and their family’s continuing story arc. And with the particulars stories for each novel, sometimes farther back than that. I introduced Andy Monahan, the character who is the focus of The Sound Of Broken Glass, three books ago, in WHERE MEMORIES LIE. He had a walk-on part as a witness to a murder, and I found I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I gave him very brief cameos in the next two books, and a personal connection to Duncan and Gemma, knowing I wanted to devote a
book to his story.

MAK: Melody is another character that seems to have found a place in your heart and is gaining more page space.

DC: Ah, Melody. One of the most fun things about writing a long-running series is the evolution of characters. When Gemma took that promotion to detective inspector and could no long work with Duncan, I knew they would both need new partners. Melody showed up in the first few books as a bit of an eager-beaver, always bringing Gemma coffee. She still likes to bring Gemma coffee, but she’s a detective sergeant now, and she’s turned out to be a very complex and interesting character with an unexpected background (no spoilers!) She’s a mass of contradictions, very sure of herself in some ways and lacking confidence in others.

Melody’s rather prickly friendship with Doug Cullen, Duncan’s sergeant, is now one of the driving story arcs of the series for me. Neither of them is quite sure who they are, but in trying to build a relationship they learn things about themselves as well as each other.

MAK: In addition to your excellent characterizations, which make the reader want to check in with Gemma and Duncan on a regular basis, the novels also contain a splendid sense of place. How much time do you actually spend in the UK gathering details?

DC: I usually go to England (most often London) a couple of times a year, for about three weeks at a time. That’s about as long as I can manage to be away from home without complete domestic chaos!

I usually stay in a flat in London, most often in Notting Hill. That’s the best way to really get the flow and rhythm of my characters’ lives, and I especially love being on Duncan and Gemma’s “patch.”

MAK: What are your feelings about touring and all the promotional work that’s required in today’s very competitive world of selling books?

DC: It’s a necessity except for the very top of the list authors — and perhaps even for them. In a way, it’s nothing new. Authors have always had to sell themselves. I organized my own book tours with other writer friends in the early days. But the social networking certainly takes up more time than anything we did in the past. On the downside, that’s time that could be spent writing. On the upside, it keeps you connected with readers and the reading community in a way never before possible. And it’s fun. You can’t do everything and I think each author has to find the niche that suits them. I’m better at Facebook than Twitter, for instance.

As for touring, I love it. It’s such fun to meet and visit with readers. And the best thing about touring — making connections with the booksellers, hasn’t changed.

Imagination and Language Combine to Make Spirits in the Head: On Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

The First Gulf War began in 1990, and I was worried about being drafted. Thinking about such a thing in reference to this war seems ridiculous now but, at the time, with the ghosts of Vietnam swirling around us, I was worried. I watched the news and wondered if Iraq would be Generation X’s war. I wondered if I would experience waves of heat or if I would feel sand beneath my boots. Would the government push an M16 into my hands?

As the Allies mobilized against Saddam Hussein, my friends and I drank cases of beer and asked each other if we’d go. This wasn’t an academic exercise, you understand. We thought about the 5,000 Kurds that had been murdered by chemical attacks in Halabja. And didn’t Hussein say this would be the “Mother of All Wars”? Let’s not forget that Iran and Iraq had just finished a very bloody war with each other, a war that had snuffed out the lives of over 500,000 men.

So, yeah, I was worried.

Amid this jumble of fear and unstoppable world events I picked up a copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. He was from Minnesota like me and his latest book was getting rave reviews all across the nation. I’d read a lot of war literature before (All Quiet on the Western Front, Slaughterhouse Five, Catch-22) but nothing prepared me for how inviting, how visceral, and how immediate O’Brien was. Here was a writer from my neck of the woods and he said things I’d always felt deep in my ribcage, but I just didn’t know how to articulate them. I read The Things They Carried in one sitting. It mesmerized me. It captivated me. And when I closed the book, I sat back and looked out the window for a long time. A very long time.

This book shifts between war and peace so effortlessly, so brutally, that we quickly learn what it might be like to go to war and, perhaps more importantly, what it means to come home from war. I was especially hooked when I read a chapter called “On the Rainy River”. In these pages, a fictional Tim O’Brien is drafted by the government and he spends his remaining days over the summer working in an abattoir. That metaphor is perfect enough, but as the date for his induction into the US Army draws closer and closer, he drives north to the Canadian border. In beautiful prose, this fictional O’Brien sits in a boat and decides if he will flee his country (Canada is so close, just twenty yards away) or if he will turn back and go to Vietnam.

Rarely does a book speak so directly to your life. I mean, here I’m reading about a fellow Minnesotan sitting in a boat and he’s trying to decide if he will fight for his country. All of these societal expectations are swirling around him and, as I read about a fictional Tim O’Brien making up his mind, suddenly Vietnam and Iraq and American manhood and growing up in a small town all get collapsed together. As I continued to read, that was me sitting in that boat. That was me looking out at Canada. Would I go? Should I go?

O’Brien finally decides to go to Vietnam but not for any heroic or noble reason. He allows himself to be drafted because he couldn’t stand the idea of disappointing anyone in his small farming town. As he says towards the end of this chapter, “I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”

I’d never thought of it this way before. I’d never considered how embarrassment and shame can factor into what appears to be a selfless act.

“Hey Hicks,” one of my friends asked after I finished the novel. “If our asses get drafted, what’re you going to do?”

A good question. I had visions of driving an ambulance like in M*A*S*H or maybe becoming a medic that ran from one wounded soldier to another. Carrying a gun though? I just couldn’t see myself doing that.

Flash forward a bit. The First Gulf War ended quickly and with limited loss of life, at least as far as America was concerned. My friends and I laughed at how frothed up we got about the whole thing.

“To think we were worried! Jesus, what a bunch of wimps. What on earth were we thinking?”

It’s true The Things They Carried made me re-examine my understanding of individualism, community, patriotism, and the nature of truth, but let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone else before: To my growing astonishment, I began to resent that my government could draft me into a war that I might find morally reprehensible. The more I thought about this, the more I wanted an escape clause, so I became an Irish citizen. When my purple passport arrived in the mail it felt like a magic door to elsewhere had opened up. It allowed me to live in Europe for six years and it allowed me to meet people I’d never meet otherwise.

Looking back on it now, becoming an Irish citizen fundamentally knocked me on a different road. Would I have become a dual-citizen without the hard questions that Tim O’Brien raised in his slender book? Who knows, but his book did spark my imagination to think of myself beyond the shores of America. Since my mother was born in Northern Ireland, I also started to care more about her national history around this time of my life. Some people might have a problem with my decision to become a dual-citizen but, as I’ve said elsewhere in my writing, I hold the treasonous belief that we can love more than one country. Just because I was born in the U.S. is no reason to set up a border patrol around my heart. As a rule though, countries don’t like such split allegiances. I can call myself Irish-American but it’s the American part that matters most…at least as far as Uncle Sam is concerned.

But, back to the book. Although The Things They Carried raised thorny questions of patriotism and community for me, it is, at its heart, a novel about writing. It’s very easy to miss this on your first reading. Yet O’Brien reminds us that words connect us across time, words can raise the dead, and words can help explain the incomprehensible. Sometimes it feels as if Tim O’Brien is deliberately frustrating us. In a chapter called “Good Form” he forces us to grapple with the differences between “story truth” and “happening truth”. In one of the more famous sentences in the book, O’Brien says, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.” Telling a war story or, for that matter, any story, means bumping up against the problems of perception and memory.

We may get annoyed with The Things They Carried because we don’t know what the truth is but we also get carried away by his prose. Even today, it’s hard for me to read just one sentence and put this book down. Forget about “story truth” and “happening truth” for a minute. I’m going to tell you the god’s truth: writing this review took much longer than it really should have because whenever I stopped to consult the book, whenever I flipped through my battered beloved copy, I got lost in his prose and read pages beyond what I needed to.

So here’s another truth for you: To read Tim O’Brien is to realize that you’re in the hands of a master. Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s read a few passages from “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

Or this:

“In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.”

Or lastly:

“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

Even though I’ve read this chapter many times, I want to re-read it again. And again. And again. But that’s not the half of it because there are also chapters like “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, “The Man I Killed”, “Speaking of Courage”, “The Ghost Soldiers” and the final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead.” This ending gently reminds us that stories can save us. Stories allow us to commune with the dead. Stories give us a place to be with our loved ones even when they are no longer among the living. As O’Brien so beautifully states, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.”

Spirits in the head. That of course is the essence of good writing.

This book is almost 25 years old but it hangs in my imagination and haunts my understanding of war, returning from war, and the passage of time. When I first read this book as a young man it made me question my relationship to my country and my own sense of bravery. Now, as I creep into middle-age, this book challenges me to become a better writer and it asks some hard questions about the nature of storytelling. More and more, I realize this is an excellent book on the craft of writing. I’m confident it will be read one hundred years from now. Why? Because it’s not just about war. It’s about how we tell stories to each other. It’s about reaching out. It’s about understanding the vital power of words.

Tiny Pearls in a Big World

These people that litter Mary Miller’s stories in Big World are nearly broken and almost just as unlikable. Or that is to say they are living mostly unlikable lives, because Miller’s characters — the predominance of which are young, underachieving women — are not unlikable in the ways, say, Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen characters are unlikable. These characters are unlikable in the secret ways we don’t like ourselves, hiding those things we try to hide in a big world: “I’m sort of horrified by the things I tell myself when I’m the only one around to hear them,” one aimless narrator confesses — to herself — in the untidy closing story, “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” Untidy and aimless, these are apt descriptions. Miller’s characters often resist change and the stories themselves can teeter on plotlessness, like the wheels of a pick-up truck spinning endlessly in the Tennessee mud. One narrator scrubs her addict boyfriend’s camper in reaction to his half-hearted and ultimately unfulfilled promise to bring the thing to the state park. Another narrator attempts an affair with a co-worker in the absence of her alcoholic boyfriend, but that too does not stand to last. Oftentimes, we’re left simply to wait for sunrise.

But Miller is adroit in her storytelling, and where these stories are slight in their action they are larger in scope. The characters share a hopelessness that is often found in Raymond Carver’s characters, a certain grittiness, here removed from Carver’s lush Pacific Northwest and trapped in the honky-tonk and trailer park South where the landscape is pocked with beer bottles and cigarette butts; full of cheating lovers and surrounded by Ruby Tuesdays, Taco Bells, IHOPs and Dairy Queens. The stories of Lorrie Moore, too, come to mind. Miller’s characters make the stupid decisions that have been thrust upon them by all their stupid yesterdays, all of it soaked with death, with divorce, with loss.

Yes, these stories are tiny pearls, each one propelled by Miller’s pinballing language that is lyrical in its sudden turns: “We stayed in a house on the beach and ate seafood and went to the outlet malls, but my father wouldn’t let me go in the water because once I got caught by a riptide and almost drowned and after that I got stung by a jellyfish and after that my mother died.” It is clear Miller loves these characters: for all their misgivings, the author does not condescend to them. For all their hopelessness, Miller lovingly imbues the tiniest grain of hope into each character, and only Miller herself believes in the power of that grain to be polished to pearl. She understands the pressures that weigh down on these characters, how these characters are all, self-referentially, “fucked in the head.”

And not for nothing, but the artifact itself is wondrous too. A beautiful soft cover pocket book with moody watercolor cover art that somehow serves to reinforce the heart of this collection, as if the one thing these characters can hold on to, cradled in small hands, a curious logic of holding such a small book and calling it Big World.

X Marks the Spot Where Four Months Converge: On Philip Connors's Fire Season

APRIL

Last summer — also the summer I read Fire Season: Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors — was the first summer of my life where I didn’t go to West Virginia, where my grandfather worked as a county doctor, where I was born, and where I still feel at home when I stay there. Sentimentality welled up in me when I scanned the jacket flap-synopsis: Connors escaped his editing job at the Wall Street Journal in New York for the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, which reminded me that my grandfather left New Jersey in his youth to go work as a fire lookout on the Appalachian Trail. However I knew, rather than leaving a profession like Connors, my grandfather worked to save money for med school.

As I started reading Fire Season the connections that I drew between Connors’ and my grandfather’s experiences as lookouts became less direct and more subconscious. I found out more about the US Forest Service’s history than I knew within Fire Season’s prologue. Connors notes that the original US Forest Service policy called for total suppression of all fires spotted by 10 a.m. the next day, which now allows natural prescribed fires to burn. However, Connors doesn’t reveal any of his personal history, just yet. While I don’t remember my grandfather telling me any history of the AT, I do remember my grandfather’s anecdotes of him planting cucumbers off the path to have a nearby harvestable water source. As I continued reading Fire Season I figured much of Connor’s time in the wilderness of the Rockies must have been similar to my grandfather’s hikes on the AT even if I couldn’t always match the two with a memory.

* * *

MAY

My grandfather died in May 1999. His wife had already died in 1996. After her death he wrote his memoir Stories of a West Virginia Doctor and lived with his dog Briar — the name he kept giving to all his collies. And so I didn’t not go to West Virginia this summer because my grandfather died and I wanted to stay away, but rather because I had just finished a busy first year of grad school in the Midwest and then taught two summer lab sections of speech communication where I attempted to steer my students away from dead grandparent inspirational speeches.

After reading Fire Season I realized Connors’ duties as a lookout followed my grandfather’s retirement routine: walks with his dog, taking naps, reading books, and slugging whiskey (replace whiskey with coffee for my grandfather, though). I also enjoyed Connors’ duty-like enthusiasm to share. Just like how my grandfather loved to tell medical stories (i.e. “Getting An Eraser Out of Her Nose,” included in Stories of a West Virginia Doctor). Connors wants to tell everything there is to know about fires, starting with the fact that if you spot a smoke, then you get to name the fire connected to the smoke. And then, you name the fire after what’s already in the area: a smoke seen in “Thief Gulch” gets named the “Thief Fire.”

* * *

JUNE

I started and finished Fire Season during the week of my birthday on Flag Day, June 14th. Each chapter of the book follows one month, so I read one chapter-month a day until I finished. Every year since my birth — until my grandfather died — on every Flag Day my grandfather carried a flagpole from his garage, walked across his front lawn and over to a hole by a chestnut tree, stuck the pole in the hole, and hoisted up the American flag. The week that I read Fire Season I thought about my grandfather. I thought about him not only because it was my birthday week, but also because I had just finished teaching and just wanted to do what he did in his retirement: walk a dog, drink coffee, and read books during the rest of summer.

My grandfather modeled the joys of reading by sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee at his hand and the percolator sputtering on the counter. He would flip through detective novels, trying to figure out the crimes like he used to diagnose the aliments of his patients.

Fire Season chronicles Connors’ solitude spent reading. He takes magazines and books with him each ten days “on” in the seven-foot by seven-foot tower before his four-day return “off” back to his wife. Connors’ acknowledges that there’s a different value of spending time alone with a book than spending time with someone. While I would have liked to have spent time in West Virginia with my family this summer, I enjoyed spending time with Connors’ book just as well.

* * *

JULY

I first read an excerpt of Fire Season in the summer of 2008 when I worked as a camp counselor. Between shuttling gifted students from their dorms to their classes at West Virginia Wesleyan College (my grandfather’s alma mater), I read literary magazines in the library — the only quiet place on campus. I happened upon an issue of the Paris Review, which included “Diary of a Fire Lookout” by Connors. The entry chronicled Connors’ happening upon an abandoned fawn that he picks up off a trail and brings to his station to take care of, but then is ordered to return to the forest. (Eerily that entry I read in July 2008 reappeared in the July month-chapter of Fire Season.)

I can easily say I’m a reader (who loves coincidence), but at the same time I feel pretentious calling myself a writer (especially a writer who enjoys coincidences). Connors seems to feel similarly. He jots notes while smoke watching, but mostly he reads. Connors writes Fire Season without revealing too much about his personal life, (evading a lingering focus on his brother’s suicide as well as recognizing how he forces a comparison of wildfire smoke to smoke from the towers on 9/11, which he witnessed) and instead he supplements his personal writing by writing about other writers’ lookout tenures, including Gary Synder, Norman Maclean, and Jack Kerouac.

I understand the need to connect with other writers (even via coincidence), just to at least have someone else who you can connect to with what you’re doing. I need someone else to say it’s odd, but not crazy, to sit at your desk and write, just as I’m sure Connors liked to know that others sat in a tower and watched.

* * *

AUGUST

My grandmother didn’t allow cards in my grandfather’s house, so I learned to play other games. I remember playing the game Memory, a lot. I remember the vast amount of red-colored cards with their paired images facedown and shuffled randomly on a table. Each round I flipped over two cards, hoping to match them. As the game progressed what started as chance turned into purpose. I flipped one card over because I knew where its matching card lay.

One of the things I was left with after reading Fire Season felt like a game, too: where once you spotted a smoke, but before you named the fire, you had to find the fire’s azimuth — its directional bearing. You use the Osborne Firefinder, which includes a topographical map with a circle of a metal ring on top. Degree markings alongside the edge of the ring help you measure. A movable sighting device allows you to figure out the bearing from your location. Once you find out the azimuth, you triangulate with another lookout’s reading. The intersecting lines create a “cross.”

Connors’ Fire Season enabled me to imagine my grandfather up in his tower — between reading books and cucumber harvesting, enjoying summer like retirement—radioing in a smoke. I can almost hear him talking to another tower, a distance away. The two of them converging their lines to come to an intersection like an X-marks-the-spot on a map, noting to the fire, “You Are Here.”

A Portrait of Contemporary Rural Dysfunction: Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia

As a product of the blah-inducing New England suburban sprawl, I remember being fascinated by Appalachia. That rugged, heavily forested mountain corridor that isn’t out West but is still mysterious territory to a child of I-95’s coastal homogeneity, its intrigue made large by middle school textbooks describing the fortitude of the legendary settlers of the country’s first real frontier and later sensational reports of all-out clan warfare and moonshiner vigilantes. The trees seemed like they’d be bigger, and so did the people. Scott McClanahan’s Crapalachia is nothing and everything like those stories. His memoir of growing up in backwoods West Virginia – a broken cultural microcosm wrapped in a tourist-friendly haze, languishing amidst the specters of mining casualties and even older ghosts – is more an unflinching, heartbreaking, and laugh-inducing portrait of contemporary rural dysfunction than a compendium of tall tales, though there are plenty of those as well.

A prolific short story writer, McClanahan imbues his mosaic of brief yet enduring memory bursts with same easy, gritty exuberance that makes his fiction so distinctly habit-forming. From the outset, he grabs the reader, initiating him into the captivating Southern Gothic grotesqueries of his adolescence. There’s Grandma Ruby, the deeply flawed but endearing matriarch whose hobbies include extreme manipulation and taking photographs of corpses, and who cares for 52-year-old Uncle Nathan, a sufferer of cerebral palsy who’s also a big fan of six packs and Walker, Texas Ranger sans the irony. The dozen other aunts and uncles, distinguished by the Y sounds at the end of their names (Stanley, Elgie, Terry) and a proclivity for verbal brevity (“sheeeeeeeeeeeeet”). And the embarrassingly neurotic Little Bill whose hardcore OCD will make you never want to listen to Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” again. McClanahan shows a deep regard for not only the people of his home state but also the facets of its unique history, embellishing his painfully funny, jarring prose with bits of local and family lore, coal miner death tolls, fried chicken recipes, and the repeated exclamations (“What the fuck?”) of a perverse country preacher striving for a taste of the supernatural but only allowed to choke down the harshness of the world’s absurdity: “I knew that the dying were selfish, and the living were too.”

Subtitled, “A Biography of a Place,” Crapalachia is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining delving into the inextricable linkage of a writer and where he’s from, but it’s also a gut-stabbing meditation on the universality and pointlessness of suffering. Casual teenage viciousness, ambivalent and at times borderline criminal parenting, drug use, and especially death – what McClanahan cheekily anoints as “THE THEME OF THIS BOOK AND ALL BOOKS” – are motifs as prevalent as the 40 ounces the author and his friends slug to relieve constant boredom and a sinister, gnawing suspicion:

I awoke and saw that life was one big practical joke full of pain. Someone was laughing at us. Someone was torturing us. I remember being at Grandma Ruby’s as a little boy and crushing the ants on her sidewalk.

But there’s also hope, a fiercely ingrained hope for better days ahead and a deep-rooted cultural satisfaction in making the best of a tough situation, a sense of resilience McClanahan admires in his coal miner forebears and ostensibly in himself. It is evident in his poignant attempts to prolong the legacy and memory of his dead grandmother and uncle by depositing bags of Appalachian dirt throughout the country, in the tenderness he shows an illiterate child while substitute teaching. It is also a feeling he desperately wants to share with the reader, whom he addresses at the end of most of the short chapters, a call and response technique usually employed, interestingly enough, by the religious zealots he often ridicules. This loud plea for inclusivity, for me, is ultimately what sets Crapalachia apart and above other recent works of autobiography. In order to find meaning in the past and to solidify his identity, McClanahan wants, no needs the reader to acknowledge the harsh realities of his own decaying life. Only through understanding and acknowledging a shared condition can we create the solidarity necessary for survival: “We pass the torch of life for one another like runners in the night. I WILL forever be reaching for you. PLEASE keep reaching for me. Please.”

Daunting, but undeniably powerful. This punchy, inimitable book is one of the best memoirs I can remember reading, a prescient and preposterous ode to Americana’s charms and failures with enough greasiness to stick to your bones like homemade gravy for as long as you let it.

An Interview with Rachel B. Glaser

For this series I’m asking 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 Rachel B. Glaser (author of Pee on Water and MOODS) about I Am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy.

Colin Winnette: Some books we love and would recommend to anyone because we just deep down believe that everyone should read them(!), other times our recommendations are tailored to suit the individual receiving the recommendation . . . but then there are books we love in a selfish way, that we hesitate to recommend to anyone, as if they need our protection. Where on that spectrum does I Am Elijah Thrush fall for you? Is there, in your mind, an ideal reader for this book?

Rachel B. Glaser:  I know what you mean about “protecting” the books we love. I think I Am Elijah Thrush should be reprinted and read again by many, but I did enjoy the way the book made its way to me, as if by mistake.  It feels great to “uncover” a book.  There is an idea that it’s rare to come upon a great book that you haven’t heard recommended many times before, but it keeps happening, which is encouraging to me, though it means that there are great books out there, lonely from not being read!  Though I felt precious about this book, I did the opposite of keeping it to myself, and have been regularly buying it online (bookstores never have it, though they all have tons of Purdy!) and distributing it.  In terms of an ideal reader for this book—someone who enjoys the absurd?  I feel that Jane Bowles has a lot in common with Purdy, so anyone who appreciates her writing should seek out I Am Elijah Thrush.

CW: It’s true. It’s a little depressing to think about how many great books are out there, going unread. Without your recommendation, I never would have heard of this one. In fact, it was sort of a difficult title to get my hands on. But I’m thrilled to have had this opportunity to read I am Elijah Thrush, because it’s a fantastic book, wild and funny and moving and super strange. What brought you to this particular book originally? And, if you can remember, what were some of your initial reactions?

RBG:  I’m so glad you enjoyed it!  My boyfriend, John Maradik, picked this book up off the shelf while at Grey Matter Books (in Hadley, MA) with the poet/our friend Christopher Cheney.  John read it and loved it and then Cheney read it immediately after, and they were both so enamored and entertained with it that I felt there was no way I could feel the same, but when it was my turn I was just as surprised and delighted.

From the first line you can tell it’s going to be good:

Millicent De Frayne, who was young in 1913, the sole possessor
of an immense oil fortune, languished of an incurable ailment, 
her willful, hopeless love for Elijah Thrush, “the mime, poet, 
painter of art nouveau,” who, after ruining the lives of countless 
men and women, was finally himself in love, “incorrectly, if not 
indecently,” with his great-grandson.

That first line is like a book in itself!  Each word is so forceful in creating a story and defining the characters.  When I read Purdy, especially this book, I am consistently deeply surprised.  In some ways, a first line like this could deflate surprise.  For instance, we already know Elijah Thrush is in love with his grandson.  It is not revealed in some suspenseful way.  The surprises happen on a smaller level, in the sentences and the moments of the book.  So, my initial reaction was disbelief and joy.  Since I knew that Purdy had written many books, reading and loving IAET felt like the beginning of a long life with Purdy.

CW: That opening line really is something. It’s almost as if, for Purdy, love and obsession are givens. It’s how those states are expressed that occupies him most. We learn that the narrator is “in love with a bird” long before his “habit” is revealed, and with far less ceremony. Purdy presents the object of the narrator’s affection as if there is nothing potentially strange about it. It’s the ‘habit,’ the form that the narrator’s love takes, that interests Purdy. What do you make of the way these characters love?

RBG:  I think their love drives this whole plot home.  “Make your characters want something” is the well-worn phrase in fiction classes, and I’ve never agreed with it as much as when I read Elijah Thrush.  I used to think of characters wanting in a more traditional way, like character A just wants to become a famous musician.  Character B is really hungry and hasn’t eaten in days.  Purdy creates love triangles among two elderly white enemies, a black man hired as a spy, a child who speaks in kissing sounds, and an animal that lives locked in a room.  Love is written about in a great, new way.  It feels good to watch these loves like an outsider, to not immediately relate.  I also enjoy how all these loves are hopeless.  No character in love falls out of love.  All the loves have barriers keeping them complicated.

CW: That’s a good point. These are all perpetually frustrated loves. It’s all messy and there’s no way out of the mess. It’s a tragic kind of farce. A huge part of the joy of the book for me was watching these characters navigate those “barriers” you mention. So, rather than just making his characters want something, Purdy keeps his characters wanting, and in a major way.

RBG: Yes, I think you’re right. The characters in this book are in an almost constant state of wanting. They have much anxiety, pain, and sorrow over their love. Love is a cruel torture in this book. Moments of joy, surprise, and friendship, ease the mood, but do not erase the pain. So much of Purdy’s work feels exaggerated, but he’s just exposing the ridiculous, unrelenting, human parts of ourselves.

CW: Let’s talk about the weirdness here, and how Purdy manages to maintain an unpredictably bizarre world with emotional consequences that are acutely experienced by the reader. The various frustrated loves and emotional sacrifices all have recognizable and sympathetic emotional content, but are presented in somewhat alien packages. Again, I think of the example of the narrator’s “habit”. It is simultaneously horrific and bizarrely tender. It presents an emotional state I relate to, though the physical reality is like nothing I have ever seen or experienced before. Could you talk a little about Purdy’s tactics in this regard? Did you have a similar reaction?

RBG: While trying to find other people writing about Purdy online, I once came upon a review (I think on Amazon) where someone referred to Purdy’s writing as “Social Fantasy.”  I had never seen this genre referred to, (and have not since), but it accurately described Purdy’s work to create unexpected, heightened (often absurd) interactions between characters that create a tension of possibility and show human existence to be inane, dramatic, and incongruous.  The characters of Jane Bowles and James Purdy are capable of anything, nothing is “out of character” for them.  Ascertains are reversed, logic is dismantled.  This is how I’ve come to think of the term “social fantasy,” which has been a continual reference point when working on my own work.  I think this feeling might be what you are getting at too.  The way Purdy writes human emotion so beautifully and true, even in the most (especially in the most) unfamiliar relationships.

CW: “Tension of possibility,” that’s perfect. (The book is always one or two steps beyond believability, which is not to say we don’t feel for the characters, but their lives are, as you say, pointedly absurd. So while it begins to feel that nearly anything could happen, there are still identifiable consequences to the absurdity, and we feel for the characters, so we’re invested in that “anything”.) I also think “social fantasy” is a great way of talking about your and Purdy’s work. I’m always curious when I hear a writer talk about personal points of reference in their own work. Could you list specific examples of how you’ve applied that reference point in your writing? Is it a conscious thing applied during drafting/editing or a just useful way of talking/thinking about your work in general?

RBG:  Twice in my life I have stumbled upon an author that I feel has pre-inspired me. The first time it was with Barthelme, the second with Jane Bowles. Both times it felt I had been channeling them before I’d ever read them. Barthelme gave me extra confidence to let my narrative voice go wild, and allow my characters to talk in an unrealistic manner. Bowles and Purdy encourage me to write characters that act and want unusually. Sometimes I am writing a story that is very strange, and no matter how typical the characters act or talk, the story is still going to have a weird, intriguing undercurrent. Other times, as with the novel I am working on, the situations are familiar to me, and I need to picture Bowles and Purdy and find the inspiration to make it “bristle with impossibility” (as Purdy once said).

CW: Are you far enough along in the new book to talk about it? If so, would you tell us a little bit about it?

RBG:  Sure, Colin!  It’s my first novel and currently called “Paulina & Fran” (or alternately “Careers in the Visual Arts”).  It’s about the complicated relationships between girls, the culture of art school, artist/career disappointments, and the power of nostalgia.  It’s a love triangle at art school in the early 2000’s, but I’m hoping to transcend some of the conventions of the kind of book I just described!  I’ve got some crazy sentences in there, but recently I realized my female characters are not insane enough.  I was somehow reading a summary of what had taken place on a reality tv show I have never seen (Real Housewives of Somewhere) and I saw that the ladies on this show were acting far more ridiculous than I had arranged for my characters to act.  So I am I taking this as a challenge.  Here is one of my favorite sentences from the story:

“Libraries!” Paulina cried, “What a trap for youth!”  One did not 
become realistic in libraries.  One filled their head with mold 
and ideas, and left their sexuality in a coil near the stacks, 
where it turned to nothing and joined the dust on the floor, 
swept by losers. 

CW: Could you talk a little about your attraction to absurdity? I know you’re a die-hard Bowles fan, and we’ve talked about Gaeton Soucy in the past, but who are some others and what draws you to them?

RBG:  In Junior High I was reading Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and the plays of Christopher Durang.  I went to public school in New Jersey, and I think I was partially attracted to absurdity because I was surrounded by a lot of conventions.  Art seemed like an escape out of the ordinary.

CW: You’ve also got a new book of poems forthcoming on Factory Hollow Press. Is your poetry equally influenced by the writers you mention? How does your approach to poetry differ from your approach to writing fiction, if it does at all?

RBG:  The influence of Purdy and Bowles might be even stronger in my poetry, though I wrote most of the poems in MOODS before I’d read either author.  I love making bold declarations and those occur in a higher density in my poems.  When I’m writing a poem, I feel like I’m prancing alone on a stage.  When I’m writing fiction, it feels like I am organizing my closet, bidding on things at a massive auction, or strategically planning a war.  These sensations are partially a reaction to the number of words on the page, but not entirely.  A poem distills things.  I think I am more accepting of my poetry.  I write it with immediacy and don’t mess with it, bemoan it, and cart it around the way I do with fiction.

CW: Any final thoughts on I am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy? Anything you want to make sure gets said before we say goodbye?

RBG: I want to comment on the bravery and nerve of Purdy. People who read this book often assume that Purdy was African American, because few white writers write so boldly about African Americans. The racism against Albert is a constant force and pain in the book. I think what I find so complex, interesting, and troubling, is the way the characters Millicent and Elijah are racist and loving at the same time to Albert — both in the same sentence and in the same feeling. In many books, racism is implied or alluded to, but in Purdy’s book it is bared and explored. Purdy’s narration as Albert is so thoughtful, bizarre, and intimate. It is important to see from Albert’s point of view, to experience his pain and his love, and there is so much of both.

Thank you, Colin, for your great questions!  I feel I understand Purdy on an entirely new level!

An Interview with Matthew Dickman

MATTHEW SHERLING: What is your favorite meal & why?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: One of my favorite meals is a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. My twin brother, Michael Dickman, and fellow poet Carl Adamshick used to order that classic at a wonderful bar in Portland called Cassidy’s when Carl worked downtown . . . it is a perfect meal!

MS: What is currently your favorite album?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: My favorite album right now is 10,000 Maniacs “In My Tribe” (don’t judge me!).

MS: If you could wrap up your worldview in one sentence, what would it be?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Worldview (at the moment) = “Lispector”

MS: How long have you been writing poetry and what draws you toward it?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have been writing poetry since High School. That’s about twenty years. One of the things that draws me to poetry is that through poetry (through art) I better understand myself, I better understand the world I live in. It’s also fucking awesome making something out of nothing! When we sit down (or stand up!) with a pen and a blank page it’s one of the only moments when we are absolutely free.

MS: That’s a powerful way to look at the practice of art. Can you describe your process when constructing a poem? How much editing / spontaneity is involved?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Years ago, when writing poems, I would have complete control over the moment of a first draft. That is to say I would think of something to write about, do some research, and then write. Now it’s a more reckless experience. I sit down and begin to write with, often, no idea of what will be written. I’m moved to make something. I’m in love or sad or hopeful or have had too much coffee and so I want to let it out. What happens feels up to the moment. After that I redraft, I share it with friends and listen to what they have to say. Some poems go through numerous drafts. Others only one or two. The spontaneity is in deciding to build a boat. The editing is making sure the boat will actually sail. Though sinking sometimes feels good too!

Are there any poets who particularly inspire(d) you now or when you first got into the craft?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: YES!

Andre Breton
Dorianne Laux
Joseph Millar
Marie Howe
Yusef Komunyakaa
Dorothea Lasky
Pedro Mir
Diane Wakoski
Eileen Myles
Frank O’Hara
Bob Kaufman
Anthony McCann
Dunya Mikhail (sp?)

…to name only a couple that comes to mind today while the sun falls and night walks into Portland, Oregon…

MS: Cool! Your work seems to be considerably accessible. Is this something you shoot for? also, what is it that draws you to more ‘surrealist’ writers Breton and Haufman?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I think the only thing I shoot for when writing is something that engages me. Of course it might not engage anyone else! Also, I believe all art is accessible, expecially if you accept a certain amount of mystery in your life…Writers like Breton and Kaufman remind me that the landscape of poetry is not the landscape of earth with fences and continents but outer space… way outer space!

MS: Can you say a bit more about your use of ‘landscape’? Also, how do you feel about ‘Objectivist’ or ‘Imagist’ poets who place heightened emphasis on the ‘thing itself’ // the “real”?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Landscapes, for millions of years, have been both inner and outer (like belly buttons!) and our inner-landscapes affect the outer-landscapes we walk around on–as does our physical environment affect our emotional environment. Sometimes I can’t tell the two apart. The “thing itself” is never, of course, actually the “thing itself” once it’s placed into a poem or another piece of art. It has been translated, managed, slightly tuned to another frequency. A choice has been made by an entity outside of the “thing” or the “real” object removing that object from it’s (let’s say) first truth and placing it in another truth… the truth of the meaning-making artist using it or applying it in some way or another to her work.

MS: Can you tell us about your current project?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have a new book out this month, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and am working on a chapbook with the poet Julia Cohen. The poems in the chapbook came out of seven days of writing together in Brooklyn. The writing based on questions we asked each other and random words.