Ravi
Hosho
Nathan W.
Bryan Basamanowicz

Please email me at artisticallydeclined[at]gmail.com with your addresses and your copies of Visigoth will be in the mail!

In honor of Visigoth’s fifth anniversary I’ll be giving away four copies of the book (they are used copies but in good shape). It’s a book I believe everyone should read. So, leave a comment on why you would like a copy and I’ll pick four people a week from today.

Now, for the goods:

RWB: It’s been five years since VISIGOTH was published, but when I read the stories the book feels timeless. And I know the stories are older than five years. When you look back on the stories in the collection what do you remember most about them? Do you remember the impetus for any of them? Are there any stories you look back on from that era that didn’t make the book that you still think about now? If I didn’t know the publication date I would have guessed mid-90′s, simply for the state of story publishing at the time, but in either decade it still would have held up as one of the best modern story collections, in my opinion. What has time done for you in relation to VISIGOTH?

GA: All stories are products of the time and place into which they are born–for good reasons, bad reasons, indifferent but inescapable reasons.  They are also, more importantly in my view, the products of something like 100,000 years (probably twice that, but we have no evidence) of human consciousness.  The mind that created “Visigoth” is absolutely the same “kind” of mind that painted an aurochs and the almost photographically realistic horses on the wall at Chauvet 40,000 years ago, or mined and prepared red ochre with a mortar and pestle in a cave in south Africa 100,000 years ago.

There is only one story.  The usual dictum goes, “There are two kinds of stories,” or “There are seven basic types of story,” and so on, depending on the level of thought and the point of view and the purposes of the person expounding the dicta.  I say there is only one.  But because we are slightly different from each other, because we ourselves are constantly changing, and because the world is constantly changing, the story comes out differently each time it is born.

My stuff specifically?  Some of it strikes me as terribly juvenile.  Some seems to be holding up pretty well.  I wrote them in the late 80s and early 90s.  I published the first two shortly after I wrote them, in Fiction and in The Quarterly, but went through a decade-long drought before the next publication.  I published a pile of stuff in the early 2000s, but it took another couple years after that (2006) to get them all in a book.

Why the drought?  I don’t know.  It nearly killed me.  I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever.  And it came close to killing other people.  Which is to say, in answer to your question, the impetus for those stories was nitro in my blood.  I was a tight-rope walker and felt life and death were at stake with every bloody word.  I was a writer, purely and simply and exclusively.  I published enough to confirm my high opinion of myself (and had had some plays done in the early 80s), but the long exile in obscurity was very hard.  I am actually in another such period now.  The publisher of Visigoth and I Am Death and I have parted ways.  I have published bits and pieces (and even big sections) of several novels in places like” Agni” and “Massachusetts Review” and “A Public Space” but the novels themsevles are remaining unpublished.  Again:  I don’t know why.

There is one difference between the 90s and now, and my understanding of it, my ability to articulate it, comes directly from John Hawkes, who was a seriously unconventional novelist who managed to get himself front and center a few times on our literary stage.  When he published his first book, “Cannibals,” a fellow student (at harvard) interviewed him and asked him what it felt like to be a writer.  Hawkes said, “I don’t know.  I don’t think of myself as a writer.  I think of myself as someone who is playing around seriously with words.”

His point is that he was not in a profession, he was not in a category, he did not have a badge or a title or a certificate.  He was merely confronting consciousness with language.

That is what I am trying to do, with as little thought for reward and recognition as I can manage, simply because I cannot NOT do it.

RWB: I like this idea that there is only one story. I think you are right, that people get hung up on this idea of there being this type of story or that type of story. The point is the story itself, whichever story it is for that moment. It’s an interesting context in which to look at one’s own work as well. So, the drought you speak of, did you find that intensity working into your stories in a way that differed from the pre-drought period, and if so did any of these find their way into VISIGOTH? Perhaps related to this is how you see the difference between the publishing climate of the 90′s and now, do you feel writers or perhaps publishers have stopped confronting language the way writers like Hawkes and yourself have tried to do over the years?

GA: What a delicious bleeping question.  Pardon my drool.  The Great Drought of the 90s produced writing of great intensity.  I don’t think it was a different order or kind of intensity, though, because I didn’t know the drought was occurring:  I didn’t know until it was over.  While it was happening, I thought I was simply continuing what i had begun.  The title story of the Visigoth collection came from a novel.  There were…several others.  All were burned.  In the end, they were, I have to admit…not very good.  Or at least as “flawed” as they were “interesting.”  The Visigoth novel, which was called “Dead Hand” (after my only successful play on a similar theme), was actually pretty good, I think, but it was waaaay too long for that kind of mouthy narrator.  Tom McGuane, who acknowledged it as an offspring of his “Panama,” said if I cut it in half, it might work.  But I was already on to something else, and thought, of my HERO, McGuane:  oh fuck you, man, the least you could have done is type that criticism out so I didn’t have to struggle to read it.  CUT IT IN HALF???

Second half of your question:  the publishing climate always seems inhospitable to those who are not the few, very few, monstrously comically few, who are luxuriating in the bain de soleil.  Nevertheless…I am not the only artist currently engaged with English prose to feel that we are indeed in a crisis, and that is deepening, not shallowening.  I like to think (who does not…everybody?), as you suggested, that the problem is an unwillingness to “confront language,” but that too has always been and will always be the case.  Most people are content to look at amateur photographs of vacation scenery over and over and over, if that’s what everybody else is doing, and they are free to say they like this one better than that one.  Lonely are the brave.  Or brave are the lonely.  What seems different now is that the unwillingness has been commodified, monetized; that it became first a fear, then a hostility, then a marketing necessity (just like everything else in America), and is now as much on the mind of the reading public as the CIA’s trial overthrow of Guatemala in 1954.  No:  as much on their minds as the discovery and killing of saddam Hussein.  Of Muammar Qaddafi. Of Jerry Sandusky (allegedly) butt-bleeping (it sounds better that way, no?) and blowing young scholar-athletes who wanted to be Nittany Lions and savor the farts of JoePa.

Seriously:  in times of upheaval (e.g., vomit), only the easily manufactured product will be allowed to live.  the “business model” (there’s only one, just like stories!) is not only de facto our means of survival, it is de jure!  When the learned playboys of publishing still had their houses, Alfred Knopf, for example, would condescend to publish Wallace Stevens (their correspondence is hilariously sado-masochistic), but the learned playbosy are long dead and gone.  (Do you hear Lou Reed when i say that?  I do.)  Maybe that’s a good thing, because they were busy little monsters (to rip off my friend Billy Giraldi).  On the other hand, would you rather be John Keats dead or _________ (fill in the blank with currently popular asshole) alive?  It’s a really good question.

RWB: That last hypothetical you pose is, I think, a perfect question for any writer to ask themselves as they develop. Would you rather be an undeniably classic writer whose work lives on indefinitely, or someone whose writing makes them some level of money and notoriety in the present with no guarantee of the long run of the artform. Maybe I still remember too fondly my days of imagining myself as a great athlete, and maybe this is an unfair question, but five years on from its release do you ever find yourself thinking, like a kid dreaming of playing in the World Series (or perhaps the Stanley Cup), about the future legacy of VISIGOTH?  When you write a new story now do you feel there is anything to live up to or to honor from your first collection?

GA: Not an unfair question at all.  A good one and a tough one.  Rocks me back on my little old cowboy-boot-heels (which is what I wore when I wrote the Fizzygoth stories).  The problem is this:  I don’t want to disown my youth…but a lot of it was misspent.  Badly misspent.  The Fizzy stories represent the absolute best spin I could put on my life:  the best expression of what ailed me, and the best consequence of having tried to get out from under that ailment.  So a part of me is embarrassed by Visigoth.  Another part of me is insanely proud of it.  I daydream about fame and fortune right now, and I ponder the idea of greatness after death–a lot.  (I think in one sense I’m teaching a class about it next semester:  CONSCIOUSNESS: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?)  But I am very close to a kind of serene acceptance–as in the Serenity Prayer, as in Buddhism, as in the foundation of what’s good in every spiritual or religious thought a human being has ever had–of what I can and cannot control.  I can’t make myself rich and famous, even though I acknowledge that goal as the fundamental duty of all American citizens.  I can continue to write (well, honestly, I can’t, haven’t for about six months, but, you know, I COULD IF I WANTED TO!). I can go on ala Samuel Beckett even when, especially when, I can’t go on.  A friend of mine said, “Visigoth and I Am Death are your Mosquitoes and Soldier’s Pay.  AMBBB is your Absalom, Absalom! and Three Clowns is your As I Lay Dying and The Daredevil is your The Sound and the Fury and–you get the idea.  I could go on and on!  Talk about dreams of glory…!   But here’s the closer:  one of the novels I have floating around is called The Treaties, and it is about the life of a minor character in the story Visigoth:  the main character’s friend, left wing to his center, Indian to his white.  It is a big big big novel.  Every time I write (or lately, read) a sentence of it, I think of how wonderful I felt when I wrote Fizzy, and how this novel will live forever.  Frankly.  Honestly.  I do.

RWB: It’s nice to hear an established writer talk about the daydreaming, because I often feel foolish when I catch myself having those moments, but I’ve always said they are natural. Maybe it comes with ambition. I was struck when I was working in construction how many people felt at home with the job, there was no pining for something better, except maybe retiring to Hawaii after fifty years on the job. It was a job and they looked at it as a sort of “this is what I do and I’m comfortable with that” attitude. For me, I often feel not being that way is my biggest failing in life, but your Consciousness comment makes me think that maybe that is what separates artists, writers, and the like: not being comfortable just doing a job, wanting to get more out of the effort that is going into our daily activity. Of course, this is spitballing, but  do you feel that is a driving force behind art, and maybe what appeals to you with your characters who are often a mix of both worlds?

GA: “Established”?

RWB: I’d say two books through Milkweed, and stories published in many of the top literary journals is pretty darn established. Yours is certainly not the resume of a beginning writer.

GA: Okay, let us say, “disestablished.”

What “spitballing” is to other people are life and death questions to whoever we are.  Artists.  I used to balk at that word, feel a little embarrassed or even ashamed to make such a claim.  My father was an accountant and my mother was a housewife; they both grew up on farms, dairy farms, with sheep and hogs and chickens and about twenty cultivated species other than corn and soybeans.  As I famously insist in “Narrow Road” my mother didn’t even have running water in the house she and my aunt and my grandparents lived in (and that was the house I was born in!).  That was hard, hard work, and both my parents were happy to get off their farms.  My father’s father tried more than once to do something other than farming, because he…detested it.  He liked to read.  so I know what you mean when you talk about the seeming contentment of people who really work for a living.  Whatever the quality of their actual lives, they at least do not walk around as if pole-axed worried and scared and defiant and proud about the next sentence they’re going to write, the next brush-stroke, the next crotchet or minim (I have been studying my musicology).  To be worried sick about imagniary things is crazy!  But of course it’s not “imaginary things” that we’re worried about.  And whatever it is we’re worried about, it’s been worrying select folk–as I have said waaay too many times–for about a hundred thousand years.  What we’re worrying about is the nature of reality.  We are actually worrying about life and death.  Life, consciousness, reality:  extremely tenuous connections there to death, unconsciousness, unreality.  Most people are rightly, healthily, not all that interested in those connections.  That’s what we see when we skulk around in our berets, hoping to be left alone–UNTIL WE’RE DONE, when we want the biggest crowds IMAGINABLE.  I’m working on an essay now, sort of like Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” you know, founding document of the Renaissance.  It’s called “Much Ado About Everything: An Oration on the Dignity of the Artist.”  I just hope I can remain dignified while I write it.  I tend to rant and whine….

“I need a crowd of people / but I can’t face them day to day.” –Neil Young, “On the Beach”

RWB: It’s funny that you quote that line from Neil Young, I’ve always felt an unhealthy connection to that sentiment. Life and death, though, that’s the stuff. Writers often use phrases like “come to grips with” about why they explore certain themes. Did your explorations help you understand life or death or reality better? Do you think there is such thing as a true coming to terms with mortality or reality? And if so what role does our work as writers play in that journey?

GA: Unhealthy?  Nah…everybody’s somewhere on that spectrum.  Some people come to life only in the presence of other people, some only in the absence.  Most people are–surprise!–around the middle!  Writers, artists, are in the middle, too, but here’s what I think is going on, at least with me:  we are ripped violently from the arms of solitude and ripped in turn violently from the arms of other people, and we get, you know, dizzy.  Writers are more or less introspective, right?  Nature of the job.  Lot of staring into the void.  But the subject matter…!  You have to be up to your ass in alligators.  Introspective people need frequent and regular doses of down-time.  I read about it in the New York Times, so it must be true.  We looove our drugs and our drinks not because they put more logs on the sociability fire, but because we can get a kind of downtime even in the presence of other people. Again, I speak hypothetically and mostly about myself.  I got addicted to all the various modes of downtime because I looooooved it so much.  Now I have to tough it out, mainly with Bach and Haydn and Debussy.

But have I come to grips with any of the biggies?  No, not at all.  Do I understand life and death and reality better?  Well, no.  I’m more articulate then I was when I was nine, but I don’t know anything new.  Don’t know anything at all.  Still, it’s part of the pubic relations campaign that artists have always been waging:  we are pioneers of consciousness!  We are the Enterprise, boldly going wherever, for the sake of mankind, so please give us big grants, so we can jack off with an easy mind.  Like I said, I have wanted to stop boldly going many many times.  I can’t.

But here’s the answer I guess I’ve been working up to:  the work of the artist can be true-hearted, true-minded (or false-hearted and false-minded or somewhere in the bleeping middle), and the consequences of that work being in the world may or may not, matter to other people.

I am terrified and exhilirated by life, by reality, by death, by thought and emotion–and I think art is a primary, a quintessential human response to those…those…those stimuli!

RWB: Speaking of reality, as writers our realities often blend into our fiction. Whether snippets of dialogue, settings, events, these things find their way into our stories sometimes consciously and sometimes not. I know this type of reality plays a role in the stories of VISIGOTH as well, especially in “The Flyweight.” A story inspired by a friend of yours who was an Olympic hopeful. I imagine that going back to this element of the book is not exactly pure nostalgia, considering the emotions of the stories. How did your real life or real events help shape VISIGOTH and has it changed how you’ve incorporated the “real” into your fiction since?

GA: Yes, let us speak of reality until the fountain overflows and the cups are struck from our trembling hands.  When we were preparing Fizzy for publication, my editor and I, the great Ben Barnhart (lately sacked from the increasingly dubious Milkweed Editions) spent some time wondering if I should provide intros or afterwords for each story, in which I would tell the so-called backstory, or suggest the so-called inspiration, or, more accurately, describe the actual people whose lives and suffering I ripped off in a failed attempt to make myself famous.

Two of the pieces were–when they’d been published the first time–explicitly “essays,” work in which the so-called truth is supposedly told in so-called unadorned or sincere or authentic fashion:  “The Flight from California” and “Narrow Road to the Deep North.”  In “Flight” I didn’t really rip anybody off except myself and my wife, but I did cash in on one of the greatest sorrows I have known:  the death of my dog, the beautiful and beloved Woody.  In “Narrow Road” I actually address the way in which I was ripping off my cousins and mother and others in the wake of my uncle’s murder.  There was some kind of terrible misunderstanding between my aunt and my cousin (whose husband and father had been killed) and me:  I thought my aunt (who died not long after) had given me the killer’s suicide note with the explicit wish that I write about it.  My cousin, who lives in Canada and can’t easily get her hands on me, came away from her mother’s deathbed with the promise that she would never let anyone ever see the suicide note.

Ben came up with an order that was more or less chronological (according to when the stories had been written) but which also seemed to hint at connections in otherwise totally unconnected stories.  We also decided to call them all “stories” and not make any distinctions about essays and fiction.  Because I don’t believe there are any valid distinctions–not if the artist is honest.  Or is at least striving for honesty while writing, only to be tripped up by horrible feelings of guilt and theft and deceit later on,

All the stories in Fizz have “real lives” in them, without which the stories would collapse.  A friend of mine lost two dog-teams through the ice on Great Slave Lake, another friend had his face blown apart by a barber-chairing tree (he lived, I am happy to say, but there was a LONG while when chips of his skull were floating dangerously around the electrified jello of his brain), the main character in “The Free Fall” had a resume alarmingly similar to Paul Wellstone’s campaign manager (eventually Obama’s Minnesota campaign director), and his friends, some of whom are or were on the Milkweed board, didn’t like it one little bit, even when I made it clear that the bad stuff came from me, and only good stuff from Jeff (whom I totally admired and whose character I had no wish to impugn or stain in the least little way).

Then there’s “The Flyweight.”  He was actually a heavyweight (90kg), and he suffered terribly when he had his breakdown.  Most of his friends kinda sidled or faded away (I certainly did, and should not speak for anybody else), because it was frightening and because we figured, hey, he needs some qiuet time, and then “born-again” Christian fervor entered the picture, which I felt ridiculously threatened by then (not now, it’s all one to me).  But Mike came out of his nightmare and within three years was on the Greco-Roman wrestling team that was not allowed to go to the Olympics in Moscow in 1980.  He just missed making the team in 1984, but was a FILA World Champion in 1985.

That the Internet and the World Wide Web are effectively magic, and in some cases quite black, is only just registering with me.  I found a clip of Mike losing to Steve Fraser in 1984 and I was chilled to the bone.  I wept.  To say that I have mixed feelings about it all is quite an understatement.  I feel more like a barberchaired tree.  Corpses everywhere, real and imagined, no difference.  But here I am, busily, smugly, typing away…

“Let us stop talking falsely now, the hour is getting late.”  —Bob Dylan (but it’s the Hendrix version in my head).

The whole “reality hunger” hype is a lot of huey louie and dewey.  If people, if readers, if American readers and citizens were the least bit interested in reality they would go after it like starving dogs, not stand in lines to have Oprah’s bloody pick packaged and spoon-fed to them:  this is non-fiction, it’s true, it’s well documented and wholly verifiable, this really happened just the way it’s written to and by this heroic but flawed, courageous, right-thinking, massively interesting person.  Or:  this is fiction but it’s about a flawed, courageous, right-thinking, massively entertaining elf who’s the daughter of a pastor in Kansas who overcomes obesity, hard luck, the death of her mother from cancer, and her dragon’s drug addiction.

We would go after reality like wolves—serious, intelligent, relentless, not evil, just hungry, tough but carrying no grudges—because we have had very little of it in our politics and entertainment in the last decade.  And it hasn’t just been missing, it’s been outlawed and disappeared, just like a dissenter in Peru.  Anywhere.

I had pretty much signed off on the literary press in this country when Jonathan Raban iced the cake with a big squirt of poop:  he was talking about the broad and deep popularity of a certain author, and then, in a parenthetical aside, pays huffy condescending lip service to the idea that there was “an inevitable dissenting minority” who didn’t like, at least not fanatically, this writer’s work—as if to say, yes, sad but true, they are the wearisome burden we must carry in a free society, good citizens really pretty much agree on all the important stuff, that’s why I can go to a Teabagger rally and find like minds, good honest people amongst the wacko freaks, that’s how this country is able to carry on:  we allow but ignore the dissenters, the weirdos.

But what am I saying?  Why am I whining?  It’s all real, and it’s all bullshit.  “Bullshit is bullshit!” I shouted to the uneasy crowd of readers at the LA Times Book Festival.  “That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not real.  Fiction true, memoir false, memoir true, fiction false.” It’s a memoir (SLAP), a novel (SLAP), a memoir (SLAP), a novel (SLAP), real (SLAP), imagined (SLAP SLAP SLAP:  VE HAFF  VAYS OF MAKING YOU WRITE WHAT VE VANT YOU TO WRITE!)

Like I said earlier, we thought we had better tell people (re ”Visigoth”) which stories were true, and which weren’t, and what kind of truth underlay what kind of imagination, but decided, wait, won’t they be interested in figuring that out for themselves?  Or not “figuring out” but simply taking it for what it’s worth? They’re readers!  But no.

I tried to incorporate the documented real with the undocumented real in “I Am Death”:  more than half of the transcripts in that novella are taken from tapes of interviews with actual people involved with various aspects of the Chicago mob and the power struggle that was going on in the late 80s.  “Don King,” the head of national pizza chain, “Pizza King,” is actually the very well known head of a very well known pizza chain.  I won’t say who.  I was, however, bizarrely, inexplicably, fact-checked on that story.  “I see there is an alderman named Fred Roti who was arrested in 1988, and you have a Red Froti.  Is that the same person?”  “No,” I sez, “I have never heard of Fred Roti.”

These nuances of truth and imagination turned out to be of very little interest whatsoever.  Nobody was TOLD that it was real, so they just read it as a mafia story that was unfortunately written before “The Sopranos” aired.  Same with the other novella, “Peasants”:  it was an office story and I wanted to tell it just like I told it over the course of many happy-hours, you’re not going to believe this, it’s totally true, wow—but it just wasn’t an interesting story in the end, not interesting enough, or possibly even poorly-written!  I don’t know.  The one thing I heard, critically, was that novellas were too short.

RWB: You pre-dated The Sopranos and The Office!

I think you raise a really interesting point, that while obvious is rarely raised at all: that the “reality” or “fiction” of our work is only ever questioned or wondered about if the seed is planted. If something is marketed as “autobiographical fiction” or one of the many other hybridized labels someone somewhere created. And why are those seeds planted in the first place? Is it for the reader or the writer? How much does it matter to the actual stories how true or fictitious they are? Ultimately this seems like a question writers avoid asking themselves. “What is for me and what is for the reader?”

GA: Yes, generally, for ordinary everyday readers (however few are left and with whom I will have, and never have had, any beef whatsoever–we can’t all be highly accomplished literary daredevils and maestri), the label or the suggestion or the marketing/publicity premise is necessary.  But necessary only because they have been trained to look for and accept labels, trained to actually think they need them.  They do not, but it will take a long while to get over that belief.  My feeling is radical (i.e., a feeling that goes back to the root):  all persons interested at all in reading ought to be able to figure out for themselves what they’re reading, and take it or leave it as they see fit.  This is where criticism and slow steady exchange of views becomes helpful:  a reader can make his judgments tentative, can change them, revise them.  The book can live longer than a sensation, and I mean that in both the “spectacular” and “sensory” ways.

The question of “what is for the author and what for the reader” goes to another place altogether.  I was just reading a piece about the new film version of “Coriolanus” (which I’m looking forward to, C is one of my faves).  The guy who did the adaptation was quoted to the effect that “Shakespeare wrote to put asses in seats, just like me.”  I understand what he’s saying, but I think it’s frightfully wrong-headed.  Certainly Shakey was an actor and producer as well as playwright, and consequently wanted his plays to make money, as much money as was possible, and to that end was probably willing to engage in all sorts of hi-jinks.  But that is the nature of theater:  hi-jinks.  He could have skipped writing speeches like ”Now are our revels ended” and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” and “when the mind’s free, the body’s delicate,” not to mention really tricky stuff like you find in “A Winter’s Tale” if all he wanted to do was put asses in seats, to do “nothing for himself” and “everything for his audience.”

We writers and readers are nearly identical.  We live in the same world.  The variations are mostly superficial.  We can’t help but write for our readers–even if openly defy such a “constraint.”  But to think, oh man, my readers won’t get this or won’t like this or whatever, and to edit and revise yourself simply and solely because you want broader appeal and easier (faster, more remunerative) consumption…well shit, there are thousands of entertainers willing to do that.  Why not be one of the few, the proud, the brave?

Novels:

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

Curse the Names by Robert Arellano

You Can Make Him Like You by Ben Tanzer (yes, I published it, but still, it’s one of my favorite books of all time).

Story Collections:

Volt by Alan Heathcock

Normally Special by xTx

Ayiti by Roxane Gay (seriously, same deal as YCMHLY)

Poetry Collections:

The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux

Things I Say to Pirates on Nights When I Miss You by Keely Hyslop

Birding (chapbook) by Kat Dixon

Albums:

The Black Keys: El Camino

Wilco: The Whole Love

The Decemberists: The King Is Dead

Songs:

“I Might” by Wilco

“Lonely Boy” by The Black Keys

“Holding On To Black Metal” by My Morning Jacket

I consider myself lucky to have had a small role in the glorious publication history Tanzer continues to compile. More than that I consider myself lucky to be able to call him a friend. To say that My Father’s House effected me emotionally would be an injustice. My Father’s House wounded me as if I were the main character who is losing his father. It spoke to me as if it were my own inner dialogue of dealing with my issues regarding my inherent, perhaps bred, need to be tough. Not for other people but for myself. That to let down those guards I have built up could create a spiraling to an unquantifiable extent.
 

And sure, there are differences from Tanzer’s other work. My Father’s House is even more personal, more intimate. Tanzer uses more dialogue to express the inner monologues of his protagonist, and while there were moments where the unforgiving editor in me thought the dialogue might be too much monologuing in the moment for a character I was never unaffected by what the character was saying. Which maybe makes me more compartmentalizing than Tanzer’s anti-hero. And how do I feel about that?
 

The bottom line is this: Tanzer is going somewhere with his novels. And I don’t mean that in a “gee, that kid is really going somewhere” way, though that is likely very true as well. But Tanzer is taking a journey in his novels. Whether consciously or not. With My Father’s House he has reached the point in this fictional biography where he decides that he must follow his ache to be a writer. Four novels in, one can only wonder what kind of masterpiece that means Tanzer has waiting in the wings of his pen.

PICK UP MY FATHER’S HOUSE from MAIN ST. RAG!

RWB: You are  a musician, and alt.punk is obviously rooted in music. What artists or albums did you find yourself listening to while writing and/or editing the book?

LL: Aimee Mann had a lot to do with how I shaped the protagonist, Hazel. The track titles in Mann’s album Bachelor No. 2 say a lot: “How Am I Different?” “Nothing is Good Enough” “The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist” and lyrics from other songs such as Deathly “Now that I’ve met you/would you object to/never seeing each other again/’cause I can’t afford to/climb aboard you/no one has that much ego to spare.”

“Just Like Anyone” was one song of Mann’s that I played over and over when I was trying to depict the hopelessness in scenes where Hazel and Otis were alone together on the bathroom floor. I wanted to depict dreary defeat in her, that feeling of wanting so badly to help someone (Otis) who was so far beyond saving. And I think a big theme of alt.punk was clearly underlined in Mann’s “Ghost World” with lyrics such as “All that I need now/is someone with the brains and the know how/to tell me what I want.” And because I just want to rattle off a song of hers that I think is absolutely brilliant when it comes to auxiliary is “Momentum.”

When it came to writing the secondary characters such as Otis and Landon, and when it came to the angsty scenes at the bar or in the heart of novel’s conflict, I’d turn up live recordings of The Sex Pistols and The Stooges. There’s something about the unpolished distortion that brought back my own memories of going to clubs like The Campbell Gaslighter, The Cactus Club, The Great American Music Hall, the Warfield, Slim’s, and I remembered all the grungy floors, piss-smelling bathrooms, hand stamps, show fliers, and the uncouth patrons spitting and puking and sweating all over the place. These live recordings set my mood in the direction to write about all the gross-out fests in “alt.punk,” as well as the anarchic angst that Landon radiated throughout the book. In Otis’ more lucid moments, I’d play a lot of Pogues. I guess I’d play a lot of them too in Otis’ out of control moments to. The Pogues are a well-rounded bunch.

RWB: It seems like you put a lot of initial thought into your characters before they hit the page, or maybe that’s hindsight, but what is your process like? Did you plot out the novel before sitting down to write it, or are you more stream-of-conscious with your work?

LL: Why thank you. Ha ha. I plot nothing. All my first drafting comes from a fleeting stream of consciousness. The characters in my first drafts are always rough around the edges, missing pieces, lacking sense. As we all know, editing sharpens the characteristics of the main and secondary personalities. While editing alt.punk, one of the most important (yet basic) lessons was drilled into me time and time again: show don’t tell. The editor, Nathan Holic, would say things along the lines of “don’t tell me he’s an asshole, show me reasons behind what makes him an asshole.” Nathan always wanted more, and challenged me to the nth degree to bring out the characters’ true colors. I owe a lot to him and his talent as an editor.

RWB: I’ve often read you mention how the editorial process became a very personal venture, even going so far as to say that it saved your life. What about the process was so life altering and how has that effected your writing since alt.punk?

LL: Without getting into too much detail, in early 2009, I lost almost everything in my life in a single day. Pulling a quote from an old blog post from back in 2009, “A month ago I was lying flat on my back at the rock bottom of rock bottom. I spent the last two years (or 4 depending on your definition of hedonism) rebelling against some pretty major social rules. I got into a shitload of trouble and I somehow lost all sense of myself, and here’s the ironic part, the whole venture started out as an attempt to figure out my shit. I wasn’t writing or playing music or working toward anything constructive.” And that year in September, Casperian Books sent me a contract to sign, and I figured I could either do this whole-heartedly, or I could continue to drunkenly wallow on my friend’s couch. I got off the couch and found work. Food and shelter followed. I was christened with an editor who would forever change the way I read and wrote. I cut out all drinking and other. I worked during the day and sometimes into night, and edited in every minute of my spare time. As cliche as it sounds, the editing process gave me a reason to better myself as a person and a writer. Also, editing all the psychosis and addiction in alt.punk really wore me down. I just couldn’t take all the darkness and cynicism any longer, so I naturally excommunicated all those nasty things from my worldly view. In a nutshell, the whole process of taking alt.punk from rough draft to publication changed everything about my life, my outlook, and all decisions going forward.

RWB: This doesn’t sound like you’re run of the mill line editing for a finished product. Is it safe to say there was more to it than minor alterations? What kind of edits were you and your editor going back and forth on, and, since it seems the editor played a large role in shaping the final product, was it hard at first to accept another voice into your process with the novel?

LL: I’m going to be honest, even if it makes me look like a total idiot, but I thought editors just fixed misspelled words and made sure all paragraphed were indented with five space bar clicks. I turned alt.punk into Casperian Books thinking it was as good as it was going to get, and that they were going to immediately print copies and put the book up on their website for sale. Then reality hit, and well, I can say there were a lot of blows to my self-esteem that year. In a good way.

An editor is everything, at least it was in my case. Scenes were cut only to be expanded, dialogue was snipped only to be enhanced. The ending was hacked, and a new one written. Characters were no longer just pawns on a board, they came alive and developed complex emotions or thoughts that I had never engineered in the initial draft. Nathan Holic, the editor, said something along the lines of, a character is like an iceberg, that the reader may only see what’s above the water, but a writer must be responsible and know everything below the water line. In no way, would my manuscript have been ready for the market in the initial draft.

And yes, accepting Nathan’s suggestive edits were, at first, impossible for me to swallow. I thought to myself, “there’s no way this guy knows anything about where I’m coming from.” Big bold red wrong. I was so wrong. And he is just so very smart. He is a working professional who spends a lot of his time reading and critiquing manuscripts, even writing his own. He challenged me to bring out the very best in the characters, and also to give meaning to a lot of my scenes. And he critiqued my writing in a very professional yet humorous manner. Example: “Though I don’t know for certain, I think the plural for snatch is snatch”

RWB: The editorial process is one that always intrigues me, whether it’s the writer’s own revisions or those done under the tutelage of an editor or professor or what have you. Can you think of an example of how the editorial process for alt.punk has changed how you write now? Are there ways that you approach writing now that were born out of the experience?

LL: “Show don’t tell” has become an integral part of how I write , and it was instilled in me by alt.punk’s editor. It’s also something that I keep in mind if I am critiquing a peer’s work, or reviewing a book. One may think that this is such an elementary rule to abide by when writing, but only when editing this novel could I really grasp what it meant. This is a crass example, but it’s based on reality. Early in the editing process, Nathan Holic came to me with something to the effect of, “Don’t just tell me Landon is an asshole. Show me what makes him an asshole.”

This showing and not telling rule did not come naturally to me, and it still doesn’t. At times, I have to remind myself not to take the easy route out and toss out descriptions that mean nothing. “This author’s narrative was awesome,” is not going to convey anything to a reader. Use of clear-cut examples as well as comparisons make content rich and
easier to understand.

RWB: Have you come up with any tricks (for the lack of a better word) with how to conquer this problem? For me, I lost myself in writing dialogue to create scenes in action, but a lot of fiction writers don’t like to use too much dialogue.

LL: I have gotten better at conquering the “show don’t tell” issue. I try to read through a scene and make sure the scenes and characters are introduced to the fullest capacity. I try to come up with unique ways of doing this so not every character is introduced the same. That’s the neat thing about fiction, as Nathan once said to me regarding fiction, “if something isn’t believable, you just make up more shit until it is believable.”

I didn’t realize writing lots of dialogue was not a good thing. I know I use a lot of dialogue in my scenes, and I think it’s a great way to convey personalities, and what type of person that character may be. Is he/she meek, sarcastic, a smart-ass, etc. Dialogue is a great tool for “showing” and not “telling.” There are only so many ways a writer can describe how much a person is an asshole without dialogue. In fact, writing Landon’s smart-ass “one-liners” as they’ve been referred to in reviews was one of my favorite parts of editing the book.

RWB: Okay, now that I have perhaps beat the editing process to death, let’s talk about post-editing. As a a debut novelist what has the experience been like for you with your book coming out, holding it in your hands, having it reviewed and read?

LL: One of the most daunting feelings in the world is going to bed knowing real people have my book in their hands. They have real thoughts and judgements, and also word-of-mouth influence. It’s one of those things though that a person just has to get over, such as submission rejections. One should not hold back because of possible rejection, just as one should not hold back or be discouraged by the thought of a bad review. Though I think this will always remain one of my personal struggles.

RWB: Now that your debut is out of the way, let’s move to the obligatory question of what you are working on? Personally, I was very fond of the story in Pear Noir, any chance we’ll see a story collection?

LL: Thank you! Would it be factual to say that we both fell for each other’s writing based on Pear Noir! #4? I believe we met after that and the rest is literary history.

Arg. This question is hard because I have to admit that short story writing does not come naturally to me, or perhaps I should say,
easily, or should I say, rarely if ever at all. I’ve been asked to query a collection on more than one occasion, but unfortunately, I
don’t have a stockpile on hand at all. In terms of other stuff, I’m knee deep in reviews. I’m also trying to get in some pleasure reading
so I can stop hauling around a ton of books everywhere I go (don’t mention an e-reader unless you want to get punched). And I’m trying to get back to the basics of who I am. I’d like to spend more time with my guitar, less time online. So that in a nutshell is what I’ve been up to lately.
RWB: We did, in fact, bond over Pear Noir #4. And our shared birthday, of course! And now our distaste for e-readers.

Now that we’ve covered the usual ground, let’s end with something a bit different. If you could have written one book out there, one book in all of history to have authored what would it be and why?

LL: We do! And I’ll wish you a happy early/late birthday wholly dependent on when this runs!

Without a doubt, if I could, I would have wanted to write The Great Gatsby. I feel the writing as well as the content was advanced for its time. Everything about it is perfect, the content, the delivery, the way Carraway presented the succession of events. It also highlighted issues which are still socially relevant today. I know Fitzgerald toiled over the manuscript time and time again, shelling out drafts only to tear them apart for more revisions. In my mind, it remains one of the finest pieces in American literature.
RWB: Good call! Thanks for taking part in this rag-tag interview, I appreciate you putting up with what turned out to be an arduous process!

You can find more on alt.punk at Casperian Books!

Coming from Safety Third Enterprises, the folks behind the wildly successful He Is Talking to the Fat Lady by xTx, Hinton’s chapbook feels like a natural follow-up direction to xTx’s collection. What the two share as writers is stark honesty, the inability to pussyfoot around, and a fearlessness when it comes to the words they choose to put to paper. For instance in “Father/Daughter” Hinton writes from the perspective of a girl who is remembering seeing her father’s penis.

Hinton writes with a poet’s sensibility. Her stories are fragments of realism wrapped in dream sequences. “I want to create a machine with our tongues revolving around one another,” she writes in “Something Pure and Good.” And you will find yourself nodding, hoping along with Hinton’s narrator that such a thing could be possible.

Like any good chapbook, I Don’t Respect Female Expression will make you ache for more of Hinton’s work. It will make you feel Hinton’s loneliness, uncertainty, and yes, bravery. It will tell you of the promise in Hinton’s words, and it will make you believe that she will continue to deliver.

I Don’t Respect Female Expression is available now from Safety Third Enterprises. The physical chapbook, if xTx’s is any indication, will sell out very quickly, so I suggest getting in on it. Now.

GO GET YOURS!

FOR MORE INFO CLICK HERE

More Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux

If there is Something To Desire by Vera Pavlova

To The River by Rose Hunter

Fortune by Joseph Millar

Green Diver by Peter Sears

Jelly Roll by Kevin Young

The Human Line by Ellen Bass

Mars Being Red by Marvin Bell

Lost Horse Press New Poets Series Vol. 4

Second-Hand Coat by Ruth Stone

The Vigil by CK Williams

Prairie Style by CS Giscombe

Selected Poems by James Wright

A few places that are having sales of some kind on poetry books this month:

Wave Books

Powell’s (a good place to get many of the above titles)

Artistically Declined Press

If you know of any other places having sales or discounts for National Poetry Month please tell us in the comments!

It’s called Of A Monstrous Child and is an “anthology of creative writing relationships.” The idea behind it is that a mentor and a student-turned-peer are paired up. They introduce one another and a story or some poems. It’s a fresh take on the anthology, one that goes beyond the work into the making of the work through the influence, study, and companionship that runs at the depths of this trade. A few of the writers who show up here are Zachary Schomburg, Robert Wrigley, Ryan Boudinot, Rick Moody, Amy Hempel, and Brian Evenson.

To be honest, traditional anthologies start to bore me at a certain point. I’ve had some ideas for non-traditional anthologies myself, and maybe one day will be fortunate enough to see one realized. When it comes to Monstrous Child, brain-baby of Nate Liederbach (the fellow I met at AWP) and his former student, James Harris it’s too soon for me to tell exactly what the effect of the anthology’s format will be as a whole, after all, I’m only a fourth of the way into it. But I like the ambition, I like the portrait of mentor relationships, a bond dear to writers. I’m surprised I haven’t heard anything about this anthology in the way of a review or a blog post. Anything. I’m sure somewhere there has been, but it seems right up the alley of so many writers I know and interact with. I hope this post will help people find the book. You can learn more about it HERE.