Now it’s Lance’s turn to be front and center with his gorgeous debut novel of outcasts in search of love and identity. POP SALVATION is set in Washington DC during the MTV generation, with its emerging punk scene and long lines at the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and features a boy who dresses like his hero, Andy Warhol, and struggles with the courage to be himself. Please stay and talk with Lance; and thanks to everyone who buys his book!

Talk to me about freaks. Just riff, if you would.

Let’s talk about Caleb – a boy who never felt good enough, whether it was being smaller than the other kids or having problem skin or the way his accent and his walk and the feelings he had set him apart. What drew him to Andy Warhol as his hero?

Caleb and Andy both faced adolescence as outcasts. Warhol was a sickly effeminate child of immigrant Pittsburgh, nothing extraordinary really. But instead of trying to fit in and be just like everyone else he played up the characteristics that made him different… and the brilliant twist from that was he presented everyday objects as the art. Think about it for a moment. Here you have a man that looks like Andy Warhol telling you that the everyday objects you ignore in the grocery store are actually what real beauty is… everything that surrounds you is art. If you hold that thought you begin to recondition yourself and you might realize that Warhol isn’t so strange looking after all. Andy Warhol as an Icon is pretty damn empowering to a boy that feels he can’t ever fit.

I’d transformed myself into a grade school clone of my hero. A pint-size Warhol. My summer with the art school crowd had given me the confidence to not only be different, but also to express myself in an extreme fashion.

So shocking was the art I had made of myself that James and the other children dismissed me with just one word on our first day back at school.

Freak. (POP SALVATION, p. 23)

Do you have any heroes?

I used to.

I think it’s great to have heroes, icons or someone to emulate, but all of that should be a starting point. Everyone feels powerless at some point and you might need the thought of someone greater than you to use as a catalyst to make you stronger.

But those heroes out there are made of the same molecules and energy that you are. They love. They have insecurities, headaches and bad days. And no doubt that they have a part that hurts too. Their actions, achievements or the way they live has made them heroic to you. Your interest should be the point of inspiration.

I’ve noticed that lots of young writers travel down this road to our peril. They attach strongly to their heroes and icons. Everyone wants to be Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Burroughs or Thompson (the list goes on and on to tedious extremes) but imitation is just dull.

You have your own voice, it’s the only pioneering thing you can do (which brings me to the inevitable grab for some pop song wisdom…because borrowing lyrics is totally different…*smirk*):

I can remember
Standing by the wall
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them forever and ever
Then we could be heroes just for one day
-David Bowie, HEROES

I don’t recall when and where my mind changed on it, but I think it’s better to live heroically than to put being a hero on someone else. We all have that potential.

The love story in this book is beautiful, aching, and tragic, but most of it happens via the safety of artistic collaboration and voyeurism. I’d love to hear your thoughts about what’s gained and lost with being so guarded.

This part of the story is a direct riff on some of Andy Warhol’s musings on love, relationships and art written about in From A to B and Back Again.

Voyeurism provides a safe remove. Subject and muse don’t have to engage in a dialogue about rejection or disappointment.

In the Philosophy, Andy makes a point of stating that he preferred the idea of fascinations over love. He goes on to say that love affairs get too involved and aren’t really worth it, and that the version of love you see on the screen is better than anything that happens in real life… The ideas in the book are all the arguments of keeping relationships at a safe remove to both protect your own heart and create the conditions for absolute adoration of subject.

The downside? If you stick to that philosophy you consign yourself to a rather monastic life. Fascinations are but a substitute, not engaged love.

“Remember. Art is what you can get away with. Action!” (POP SALVATION, p. 100)

Riff for me again: Love.

If any of us ever claims to have that one figured out we’ll have nothing left to write for or about.

There’s a line in the book that says, “A full beating heart is the greatest happiness.” Tell me what a full beating heart looks like to you.

It isn’t in the grandest of overtures, it lives in the subtle moments that you can’t ever plan. It can be in the comfort of a reunion between great loves that find life too complicated to be together or in a partner that manages to look at you and smile first thing every damn morning. I’ve been learning that if you pay enough attention it can be found constant throughout life, you just have to look close because it might be hiding beneath feelings you aren’t prepared for.

Talk to me about the process of writing this book. I remember your photo of the pages tacked up on the wall. Walk me through the way you work, how an idea or an urge became a novel.

There is a phrase in a RHCP song (Otherside) that I think illustrates how my mind works pretty well.

I heard your voice through a photograph
I thought it up; it brought up the past
Once you know you can never go back
I’ve got to take it on the otherside

I’m very visual in the way my thoughts arrange. Perhaps this is the product of being the first generation MTV audience. Stories build and unfold for me once I’ve assembled enough raw material to build with. Sure, I tend to write out ideas and dialogues longhand in composition books but I also need things surrounding me as visual reference material. I tear pages out of magazines and collect postcards and snapshots of the world that causes me to imagine my characters.

To build Caleb’s world I had a base of snapshots of DC. The architecture, the cherry blossoms, a garden diagram of Dumbarton Oaks and a streetmap of Georgetown. To this base I added the art. Warhol postcards and prints, a NYC subway token, a copy of a Mapplethorpe portrait of Andy Warhol, a Rocky Horror Picture Show poster and a disco ball…

But, the last piece was torn from a magazine. A DKNY ad that picture a guy and a girl standing in a crosswalk in what seems a moment that could be a reunion of intimate friends. One of those subtle but seemingly true moments. A good reference point for a story.

With those visuals tacked to the wall and evolving I also add music. I load the hell out of my iPods. For Pop Salvation I had a steady stream of 1980s pop going. My ears were constantly filled with the songs the characters would hear on the radio and see on MTV. For me this was easy, it was a nostalgic journey back to my youth through music and I love me some BritPop!

But even with all of that, you have to allow the characters to speak for themselves. I wish I could explain this better, but I think every writer out there knows this in the abstract. You can create the conditions, but the characters come on their own when they’re damn good and ready.

Call it whatever you want; the universe, the muses, the divine or some form of schizophrenia. None of us really ever works alone. It is what it is, and if you think you have the stomach or the talent for the writing game you’d best come to terms with this thing being out there. It is in the realm of the unknown or the deeply felt just being the mysteries you really don’t have to answer for anyone. I resisted this notion at first, then a darling young girl by the name of Brit decided to show up and demanded to be written in. It was as though she stood in the office doorway and challenged me with a tap of her stilettos and the question, “You forgetting someone, fucker?”. She changed the pace of the whole thing and the story couldn’t happen without her. But, she was nowhere in the planning.

Ah, the wall era.

I don’t know if anyone else does this but it works for me.

In the final stretch of a manuscript I staple the whole thing from start to finish on to the walls. From that perspective I can survey the whole thing, get a sense of the size of it and see the holes. At first I just scan the whole of it. Then comes the red pen strike outs and margin notes. I can walk into the room and start reading the story anywhere without having to shuffle through pages to find where I left off or where I should go. I can even randomly go to a section just to see if it reads sharp and conscious in a moment. Once the manuscript is ready for the wall treatment I know I have something that can be an entity without me. Plus you get this really crazy juvenile rush of,  Ha. I did this much! That is a pretty rewarding simple pleasure. I find it important to remember such pleasures in the craft of writing.

Brian ran to a neighbor’s house and started to pound furiously on the door. His neighbor opened the door with a shocked look on her face as she tried to understand the sight of a young boy in a party dress with blood oozing from his chest. (POP SALVATION, p. 119)

There’s an interesting tension between you and your main character here. You’ve told a poignant story about a boy who struggles with the courage to be his true self. But to write this story, you as the author had to put something real and unguarded down on paper. How hard was that to do?

Hmm. The writing was actually easier to do than answering this question seems to be. I understand the question, people tend to think that writing in such a visceral manner is a very dark and taxing practice. Yeah, it is and it can be, but I don’t really know how to do it any other way. Stories of loneliness, outcasts and the struggles to be accepted and loved seem to come naturally to me. It is what I have seen in my family and friends through the years.

The parallel that people may see or presume between Caleb and I is two boys that have struggled with their relationship with their fathers. Sure, I spent most of my life feeling that I was overshadowed and that I might be a disappointment to my Dad. Perhaps some of this was imagined on my part. But, it was imagined under conditions of distance. Writing the narrative as I did allowed me to explore and exorcise some of those feelings.

As Caleb developed and observed his world I distinctly recall having to remind myself to let him feel the things as a boy would. As a child everything is so much bigger than you and you feel powerless. Sure, Caleb is precocious in some of his interests and he grows up a bit too fast at some things, but being the outcast still makes him want to die, and indifference makes him feel he can’t ever be good enough.

Taking that journey through the eyes of a child allowed me to think through my childhood and put a lot of demons to rest.

I was one of those people you ran into and wondered, What had he been before he gave up? (POP SALVATION, p. 204).

Scared or excited about going on your book tour?

Terrified? Prepared? Both!

Over the years I’ve struggled with mild to severe bouts of Social Anxiety. There are times when something as simple as a trip to the grocery store causes me to come unglued. I’m not even on display in that situation, it’s a totally anonymous everyday activity that no one is ever going to notice.

The only way I’ve found to express how I tend to feel about the whole thing is to say that if I had become an actor instead of a writer, I’d be the kind of guy that would never see his own movies. Since that isn’t possible with public readings I guess I’ll have to wing it.

But, when I remove myself from that whole mess I also accept the fact that I am the only person on the planet that can do this. Every moment, word and step has led me to being the last word on Pop Salvation and being Lance Reynald.

Are you the same person now as the guy who first started writing this book?

I don’t think I’m the same person that started this interview.

I think we as writers tune in to life at a different level than most people. Every moment is filled with details that we will draw on some day to fill out the narratives of our stories. In casual interactions here and there, people have commented on the details I note and remember. Life really is an ever changing journey, and all the moments you’re at it can hold entire universes of wonder, split-second opportunities to create new stories. The art will always evolve because of this simple fact. There could be some sentence I said up there a few paragraphs ago that launches another writer on to their debut novel and from that starting point they are the only person on the planet that can tell that story.

Some of you may remember that several months ago I took off chasing some dreams. I packed two suitcases and left everything behind. I was determined to get out into a world of my choosing and finally make it as a writer no matter what the costs. It’s been one hell of a trip.

Ask a handful of friends and I’m certain they’ll tell you, I’m pretty handy with postcards. Perhaps it’s the gene deep in there that makes me a writer. A desire to share even the tiniest piece of the world and adventures in it with a few quick words. It’s funny that I’m such a fan of these snippets or word trinkets yet I’ve never really taken much a look at short stories.

I have to admit, I’ve been so deep in edits for the past few months that I could barely pick up anything to read for fun. Then I came across I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such As These.

THE DIFFERENCE

Although I was never an early riser, my father always counseled me to rise with the sun.

“Early bird gets the worm!” he told me.

“Sure,” I said, “but the worm who sleeps late, lives.”

I actually sat and enjoyed reading each and every bit of it. Pure pleasure and fun in reading. Much like postcards from a friend they made me smirk and imagine the wild ride Anthony Tognazzini is on. With his first book he lets you ride shotgun on the best journey through what it is to be fully awake in this crazy modern world of ours.

Let’s chat him up and you’ll see what I mean.

Welcome to Litpark, Anthony Tognazzini!

*

LR: Your work gave me the impression of a mix of postcards from far flung destinations, eavesdropped conversations, modern proverbs along with some downright spiritual observations. Where do you draw inspiration for such a diverse range of characters?

AT: I’m a note-taking kind of guy. I always have a pen and paper on hand, or a notebook. In addition to writing down lines or ideas that occur to me, conversation – participated in or eavesdropped on – is one of the best sources of inspiration. Recently a friend told me about visiting the set of Sesame Street and meeting all the muppets. I wrote that down. In a bar I overheard someone say, “I love you, but I’m not calling an ambulance.” I wrote that down. I also jot down lines from travel brochures, nature documentaries, whatever. I have stacks of these notes around my apartment, notebooks filled with them. I sort through these, and see what I can build. I might start with “My dog ate my tabla,” or something about the crunch of watermelon or “You were the road I was supposed to keep my eyes on,” or “I went to the store and bought a totally bitchin’ potato masher.” Sometimes one of these will spark a story on its own, other times I’ll assemble a few with wire and string to see if I can make something unusual. Oftentimes they amount to nothing, but occasionally magic happens. It doesn’t seem like the most efficient way to work, but it’s what comes naturally to me – working with these fragments. Barthelme said “Fragments are the only forms I trust,” and I think he had something there.

LR: Ok, I can’t resist asking. But my favorite piece is the last one “Abandoned Belongings”, something in it resonated with me. How did that one come to be?

AT: I love allegories and parables, especially ones that read like riddles, or read clearly, as though designed to impart a lesson, but what’s finally revealed is ambiguous. “Abandoned Belongings” isn’t that ambiguous, because the moral is stated at the end, but the interaction with the monk is puzzling. Sometimes we look for answers and get nothing but a backpack full of tissue. I’m also interested in Zen, and Zen koans. I think I was inspired by that sort of knowing, and those sorts of forms, when I wrote that one.

LR: I’m a bit awestruck by how much story you tell with such word economy. Admittedly, I don’t read a lot of short fiction. Yet it seems that more of it is seeing the light of day now. How do you see the publishing landscape changing for writers of short works?

AT: This is probably a self-serving opinion, but I feel like it’s inevitable that we’re moving culturally toward shorter literary forms. We’re in an ADD world of quick-jump internet links, sound bites, fragments and the like, everything’s faster and more compressed – it seems only a matter of time until literature adapts to this shift in consciousness. People will always tell stories, but the telling shifts shapes. There does seem to be a growing interest in the short form, and more and more avenues for publishing this sort of work, either online, where there are scores of excellent journals, or in print with houses like BOA. Of course, there’s not much in big league publishing to indicate that this trend is catching on in a mainstream way. Novels sell bigger than ever, and it’s hard to get a book of short work published, so maybe I’m just whistling Dixie.

LR: You work has appeared extensively outside of this collection. Do you have any secrets or great tips for other writers struggling to get their work out there?

AT: Perseverance. Thick skin. Now that a lot of journals accept online submissions, it’s less of a laborious secretarial imbroglio printing copies and licking envelopes, which is nice.

LR: Who are some of your influences? (living or dead, contemporaries in the field, other forms of art altogether?)

AT: Franz Kafka, Thelonious Monk, Buster Keaton, Kenneth Koch, Lydia Davis, Tom Friedman, Donald Barthelme, David Byrne, Sarah Sze, Richard Brautigan, haiku poets, Julio Cortazar, Robert Walser, Aimee Bender, Daniil Kharms, John Ashbery, Brian Eno, Yasunari Kawabata, George Saunders, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Hara, Leonard Michaels, Tomaz Salamun, James Tate, James Brown, Gertrude Stein, the Marx Brothers, Miranda July, Vincent Van Gough, Dean Young, Bob Dylan, Dr. Seuss.

LR: Some of the pieces have a quality like poetry or song writing. Have you tried your hand at music at all?

AT: Everything I do is guided by a love of music. I’m a music head. I listen to most everything, and make part of my living as a music journalist. Rhythm and melody is paramount for me in writing, and the way my writing sounds when read aloud is the ultimate test of its quality and durability (I’m constantly interrupting my typing to read sentences aloud). I also play guitar, sing, and write songs. I’m currently in the process of putting my band back together (the last incarnation split up last summer). When I got my Mac I started tinkering around on Garageband and recorded some rough demos of my songs (without an interface or mics or anything), which are up at www.myspace.com/skyeatsman. I also sing and play in a band that covers the music of the Louvin Brothers, a bluegrass harmony duo from the 1950s.

LR: What would you like readers to leave with as the theme of this collection? Is there a unifying thread that guided the work?

AT: Because the pieces are short, and formally varied, and were written over a long period of time in a variety of places and contexts, there’s not really a unifying thread in terms of formal composition. It’s more that the work is unified by sensibility. Because my approach is more like a poet’s than a novelist’s, my paramount concerns aren’t plot, character, and narrative trajectory, but energy, surprise, compression, and the creation of an experience that’s immediate, honest, and, I hope, emotionally true. Most of the stories are written in the 1st person, and it’s possible, even very likely, that this character can be read as the same anxious, giddy, alert but slightly dense person who is full of yearning and pain and a great capacity for love. I’m not much for autobiographical writing, but there certainly a lot of me in that character, even though it’s refracted through a fictional lens. But the difference between fiction and memoir is that memoir represents the author’s personal experience while fiction (hopefully) creates a direct, personal experience for the reader. So, ultimately, I hope this is what readers will take away from the collection – a personal experience that connects them to the themselves, the world, and the sense of possibility flowering in each.

*

Bios:

Anthony Tognazzini’s first book, I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such as These, is a collection of 57 short fictions. It was published by BOA Editions in 2007. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Sentence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Hat, Quarterly West, Ducky, Mississippi Review, and Quick Fiction, among other journals. He’s received three Pushcart Prize nominations, awards from AWP and the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships to the Prague Summer Writer’s Workshop and Ledig House Writer’s Colony. He lives and works in New York City.

Lance Reynald is the author of Pop Salvation (Harper Perennial, release date forthcoming), the sexy, heartbreaking tale of outcasts in search of love and acceptance. In addition to The Reynald’s Rap you can read him over at TheNervousBreakdown.com. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon where he is developing a serious Bacon Maple Bar addiction and can usually be found lost in the stacks at Powell’s still in awe of it all or passing the hours in one comic book shop or another. You can friend him at Myspace. You can also friend Pop Salvation at Myspace.

*

This week’s wrap seems such a hard one to start. It feels as though it’s such a long one coming, but it really isn’t. Still, I find myself floundering around looking for some point of origin for the crazy fortuitous journey to begin.

It certainly isn’t a secret around the Park that I really love our craft. In all it’s wild and crazy forms. Everything from some of the classics to the craziest and most random of the bloggers. I find inspiration, insight and some spark within most of it.

A few years ago I started tinkering around in Bloggsville. It gave me a place to explore my writing and get some feedback here and there from what I found to be a compassionate and understanding audience. Initially hidden behind a series of quirky screen names and odd profile photos I overcame a certain timid nature and used the medium to find my voice. The worlds of Journalspace, Blogger and a few others I can’t remember and long ago deleted acted as an incubator for the style of writing I find has become recognizable as my own.

Now, a mild digression moment here. When I started all of this wild blogging the literary world didn’t yet understand the medium or what role it might play. All the writerly magazines dismissed it as a waste of time. I even had a few friends that we’re writers tell me not to invest my time and skills into something that wasn’t the actual “ work”. As though they all adhered to this unwritten rule that they were a breed apart from the common blogger; the writing done in the medium something less than their efforts. This view is still a riddle to me. It’s all words and audience somewhere isn’t it?

And then came MySpace.

Now, this is where the naysayers should pay a bit of attention. Back when I still had fewer than 50 friends over at MySpace my roll call included a collective of memoirists, a major imprint, a handful of talented writers, literary organizations and of course, Jenna Jameson.

They all said serious literature would never catch on in Bloggsville.

Hmm? (how serious are we talking.)

In April of 2006 I added my most valuable friend to that MySpace page. A friend that would help me find a novel in the random blogposts. A friend that would offer unwaivering support to an idea, a dream. A friend that would connect me to some of the most talented writers working with the craft today. The friend that would quickly move from a shared love of thunderstorms to having the affectionate nickname of “the wondertwin”.

It was the wondertwin that saw the very first copy of Pop Salvation. She gave me the push to take it from a few insane blogposts that left my readers mute into a novel length debut.

Certainly, there are a few people in my life that made the growth of the novel possible. But, Susan Henderson is the one that I’d credit with actually pushing me to limits of my own potential with this one. She’s the support that resulted in the book’s completion. That support isn’t just about our friendship, it’s about a passion for our craft. A friendship born in Bloggsville, with a steady foundation here on this page you’re visiting.

Click here to “friend” Pop Salvation. Cool mock-up courtesy of iamthatguy.

Looks a bit like serious work to me.

Crazy journey for two years work, huh?

Where does it all go from here?

Well…

Working with friendships, taking chances here and there, taking heed some of the conventional wisdom and doing it my way anyway? Admittedly, I am a bit of a workhorse, and not a patient one at that. Susan can vouch for me there. She saw the first copy of Pop in early October and my worries about what it would do followed soon thereafter. We’re always our own worst critics though.

I don’t have the typical story with this one. I can’t tell you the tale of swimming in the slush pile and having a wall of rejection letters. I queried three agents informally via e-mail and sent along the first 40 pages. I didn’t hear back from a single one of them. Doubtful any of them have seen a single word. No contact is certainly no rejection. One thing I learned about my patience over the past few months; no form rejection letter means they haven’t even found the time to look at you.

I relied on friendship and the strength of my work here at the park to get my foot in a door. I’ve learned that there is a certain code, or compassion, among writers.

When we can, we help one another.

I’ve had a lot of help in the past two years.

I asked one of those friend’s what his advice was regarding how to send my little book out into the world. His response to my worries about the conventional wisdom,

“what’s to lose… at worst you’ll get a form letter back.”

Being ever the rule breaker and anarchist at heart, that was just the push I needed to do exactly what I wanted to do. Was that sneaking in the back door or just a bit of luck on the DIY approach I apply to most of my life? Who knows? It worked.

Pop Salvation ended up exactly where I wanted it. The imprint my gut told me would be the best home for it. Getting it there was through hard work, determination and the friendships built right here in the Park.

So, to all of you and especially to the Wondertwin, Thank You. I wouldn’t have done it without such a great bunch of friends and such a lovely playground.

Now, I’m off to bust out some edits and get this beast on the shelf for you kids in a year or so. I can’t wait to see what it all looks like then!

All my best and all my heart.

Follow that dream, you can get it!

xo. LR

*

Thank you to this week’s guest, Monica Drake, and to everyone who linked to LitPark this week: Rachel Fershleiser at Smith Magazine, M.J. Rose, Reading Writing Living, Kimberly M. Wetherell, A.J. Davis, Anthony S. Policastro, Janet Reid at FinePrint Literary Management, the Amici Forever forum, Charles Shaughnessy, Word Junkie, and Simply Wait.

One of the most important motivations behind my move to Portland was literature.

The city is home to the Wordstock Festival, Powell’s City of Books, Tin House Magazine and the Independent Publishing Resource Center.

Before I even made my first trip to visit I’d wandered it’s streets with Katherine Dunn in Geek Love, learned its secrets with Chuck Palaniuk in Fugitives and Refugees and the legend of Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing Program has guided me in my own attempts at storytelling. My new home has proven to be the best literary love affair, a town full of talent and quirks that continues to produce amazing and groundbreaking books. Living here immerses me in a community of writers I’ve found to be as generous as they are inspiring.

I stumbled upon my guest this month at the Wordstock Festival. A friend had sent me to see another writer read. That writer was sharing the stage with Monica Drake.

I sat and listened to Monica’s reading from her debut novel Clown Girl. You guys know by now that I don’t like to give spoilers on the books I bring to the park. All I’m going to say about Clown Girl is that it’s as fascinating a read and as quirky a world as Geek Love. The humour and sensitivity it takes to create Sniffles, the high art clown, is something that I’d say is an artist working craft brilliantly.

As I’ve learned more about Monica and taken time to talk to her she has dazzled me with her wit and generosity. She makes some pretty amazing balloon animals while wrangling an adorable three year old through a reading at Portland’s Central Library. She also travels with a hidden cache of foam noses for photos; what’s not to love about that?

Litpark Pals, Let’s welcome Monica Drake.

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LR: As far as clowns go, Sniffles and Company are a bit tragi-comic. Where did you find the inspiration for Coulrophilia run amuck?

MD: I worked as a clown years ago. That’s the real-life thread behind the novel, although the final form this story has taken is fiction. Ever since those days of clown work I’ve had moments when it all comes back, when I feel like a clown again, for better or worse. It’s good to feel like a clown in the best sort of way – willing to take risks, to stick one’s neck out. In the novel clowning is the central character’s art, but in many ways it could be any art. She’s an artist and has her own vision, and the world isn’t readily accepting of the value she sees in her work. That could be any of us, couldn’t it? I mean, anyone pioneering his or her own creative path.

LR: Under the greasepaint Nita is a philosopher at heart, her quips a keen mirror of the world around her. Clearly, she isn’t a clown in the tradition of Ronald or Bozo. Who would Nita see as the clowns in our world?

MD: Man, that’s a hard one. In some ways perhaps everybody could be on the list. Clowning takes so many different forms. But if you’re looking for specifics, Britney Spears is definitely there, and so is Courtney Love, and of course Tammy Faye Baker. Then there’s Rush Limbaugh. Should I consider the current president? This isn’t to say that these people are “clowns,” exactly, but only that they’re people playing a certain type of societal role, magnifying and simplifying aspects of human nature, showing humanity on the metaphoric big screen in an exaggerated way.

And then there are ordinary people, not celebrities, who are clearly clown-identified, and allow themselves to play the fool for a greater good, or as a social thing. For a while, there was a young woman around town who wore a pale green satin clown collar over her clothes. She had sort of a pixie haircut, and wore mismatched Converse. She was clearly taking the clown image and making it her own.

LR: You found an imprint for this debut without an agent. A DIY approach to getting a beautiful debut to the reader. Can you share a bit about that journey?

MD: I’ve had three agents over the years, all good agents and all in New York. But these agents didn’t seem to have the conviction to market my work. I’ve heard that major publishing houses now have “slots” to fill, and so are looking for work in particular and easily recognizable categories like “chick-lit,” “memoir” or “mystery.” That’s according to Lance Olsen, author of Rebel Yell, (a how-to-write book) and a few alternative novels.

Hawthorne Books is a smaller press. They asked if I had anything, and I handed them Clown Girl. Hawthorne has been great. I’ve had all the support a debut novelist could possibly want, and the book is doing well. They did a beautiful job with everything from the cover art to the quality of the book design, distribution and promotion.

LR: You have a teaching gig, a beautiful three year old, reviews and articles you contribute here and there; I’m guessing you don’t have so much a writing schedule, per se. How do you fit your writing into the rest of life happening around you?

MD: I spend a lot of time thinking about writing, turning over ideas. I have to be able to hold an idea in my head for a while, because I’m not always able to get to the keyboard. Sometimes I’ll scribble down a few rough notes, but I’m good at handwriting things. My handwriting is so poor, it actually gets in the way of my ability to write, so I only jot down key words to jog my memory until I can find a keyboard. Then, when I do have time to sit down and write, I usually have a pretty good idea of where I want to go with it, what I hope to sketch out.

I meet with a workshop group once a week, and I’m lucky because the writers in the group are fantastic. Workshop keeps me on track in so many ways. It offers a smart and engaged audience, which is invaluable, and also offers a chance to see what other people are doing, and that’s inspiring. Equally important, it’s a self-imposed weekly deadline. Every week we ask, “Who has pages?” I always like to be able to say yes, I have pages, and to know I’ve done a little writing since seeing the group the previous. It’s a way to stay accountable.

LR: Where do we get to see you next?

MD: I’ll have a story on the Hugo House website in February. It’s a wild story. I’m interested to see what kind of reception it finds. I’ll be reading at Hugo House in Seattle on February 15th, along with Rick Moody. I’m a fan of Moody’s work, so I’m thrilled for the reading. I’ve also been working on an essay which will hopefully find its way into an anthology put together by Matt Love, author of The Vortex and Red, Hot and Rolling. (That second book might have a little more to the title…not sure. It’s about the Trail Blazers.) Mostly, I’m working on another novel, but it’ll be a while before it’s ready to send out. Thanks for asking!

*

Bios:

MONICA DRAKE has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific NW College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to The Oregonian, The Stranger, and the Portland Mercury and her fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, The Insomniac Reader, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, and a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop. Her debut novel, Clown Girl, is published by Hawthorne Books.

LANCE REYNALD is the author of Pop Salvation (Harper Perennial, release date forthcoming), the sexy, heartbreaking tale of outcasts in search of love and acceptance. In addition to The Reynald’s Rap you can read him over at TheNervousBreakdown.com. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon where he is developing a serious Bacon Maple Bar addiction and can usually be found lost in the stacks at Powell’s still in awe of it all or passing the hours in one comic book shop or another. You can friend him at Myspace. You can also friend Pop Salvation at Myspace.

I have a great affection for debut novels. Having finished my own attempt at one this fall I finally had time to dive back in and see what we have going on out there in the field.

If you were to ask a handful of friends, some of them might say I have good instincts. Now and then I stumble across something that causes a brow to raise and a pause to be taken.

I linger a moment longer than usual, Google a bit. Fire off a note to my nearest and dearest. Something to the effect of,

Watch this one.

That’s how this month’s guest popped onto the radar.

A great debut does something incredible to me.

A sensation I really like. Something I expect if I’m going to pass on the recommendation.

It grabs me by the lapels and shakes me about, challenges me, engages me and then looks me dead in the eye and says, “You got that?”

Oh yeah! Loud and clear.

These are the books that I think serve the rest of us notice.

The books that raise the bar.

They improve our craft and leave us waiting for the next word to come out of their authors.

Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Atlantic, 2007) is one of those books, and I’m delighted to share the author with all of you this week. Porochista Khakpour is one amazing woman, with a debut that gave me a good shaking by the lapels and left me with a very happy smirk on my face.

You guys better start reading her now, she’s going to lead the pack for a while. Let’s go chat her up.

*

LR: Porochista Khakpour, Welcome to Litpark! You’re a very busy woman; I see your name everywhere. How did you find the time to nurture such an amazing debut?

PK: It’s probably a personality thing. I can’t really take a break. Rest, relaxation, vacations, spa days, yogic corpse poses– all that is very anxiety-inducing for me. This ol’ Angeleno has become a true New Yorker, I guess you could say. I have to do things and be a part of the world in some way. Even if that means separating myself from the world for a bit to later rejoin it full-force. I like to work hard and work hard. I was shocked when I found out all the other kids weren’t staying up til 3:30 AM every night their junior year to get their AP homework done. Maybe it’s an immigrant thing.

But, I also work like that to write and not because I have these electric coke-head maniac muses that just won’t quit; I write like that because I feel I have to. On my desk, next to computer and notepad, I always display that endless ever-growing tower of bills, envelopes which generally remain unopened. It’s extremely threatening, like working with a pen in one hand and a loaded gun in the other. My greatest inspiration has always been some degree of serious poverty. It sounds a little crazy and ironic, I guess. uh, perhaps the Alanis Morrisette definition of “ironic” – that I actually write with the intent of making a living.

LR: Your book is infused with a strong sense of New World identity and dichotomy and your characters journey through those things in the aftermath of September 2001. On tour, have you found readers aligned with the experiences of your characters?

PK: The book tour was very confusing. Whereas I imagined a lot of men in their late 30s through 60s as my readers, they mostly ended up to be 20-something girls with artsy glasses and nice tattoos who’d give me these big long hugs after the reading. Lovely, you know? Or, in the case of a few places, homeless-seeming 70+ year-olds–there were a lot of them–but I think they might just go to every reading? Not sure. Once in a while, I’d get some normal bright human who’d thank me profusely for writing this book, because of some personal connection they had whether it was knowing an Iranian-American, being one, being in New York during 9/11, growing up in LA, etc. In one case, an LA editor and blogger called my novel the first great Iranian-American novel, with my being sort of the first of the hyphenates for my people (note to self: The Hyphenates, excellent title for a multi-culti thriller.) I felt very fancy for a day or so.

LR: Your acknowledgments section reads like a who’s who of contemporaries; how have you found your own writing enriched by these friendships?

PK: Hmmm, well some of them were just my teachers. I don’t know if I could call Stephen Dixon my “friend,” as much as I wish I could. But he like many of the others were my teachers at Sarah Lawrence and Johns Hopkins. My writing was certainly enriched by all of them: Alice McDermott who finally got me to understand why they always said “write what you know,” Stephen Dixon who taught me you could do anything you wanted if you did it well. A few of the writers crossed over to becoming good friends of mine though. The only thing the crossovers all have in common that I can tell right now is that they all encouraged my sick humor, which is valuable in a friend or mentor, I’d say.

Donald Antrim and Jonathan Ames got their own line in the acknowledgments because, yes, they were friends. They were both actually very helpful – Ames knew me before I got my book deal and really helped me get through the very scary shopping-the-manuscript months. I remember one day in particular when I saw a young woman die on a subway and then I met Jonathan for coffee in Brooklyn and my agent called three times, with four different rejections to report from major publishing houses. Jonathan offered to buy me a sandwich. We went to the deli next door and bumped into one of the editors who rejected the manuscript. Very awkward. In between bites of the sandwich, my agent called with another rejection. I began crying so hard, the whole baguette was ruined. I wasn’t even deserving of a shitty sandwich as a consolation prize, I kept saying, until Jonathan finally placed me gingerly into a cab. Oh, it was a painful time.

And Antrim was passed the PK-savior baton after my book deal, when I spent an entire summer in the throes of a deadly insomnia that seriously began to threaten my life. His good advice and patient ear just kept me going from week to week, over the phone from NY to LA (I was at my parents’ home). Even just a few months ago, I called Antrim and declared, “I can’t do this reading tonight. I just can’t do it – I don’t even know why, but I can’t.” I was having some strange, stupid “exhaustion”-moment and wanted to pull an Amy Winehouse on a reading for no good reason, really. For two hours, he coached me, scolded me, etc. until I was able to face I was just scared and that we all get scared and such is life, etc., and then I did it. And it was fine.

So yes I have a sort of mild pedigree and my acknowledgments reveal that. But show me one published writer that really and truly doesn’t at all, show me one person that got anywhere with absolutely zero connections in this day and age. . . I’d buy him/her a sandwich!

LR: Xerxes Adam lives a life feeling that his own identity is split between irreconcilable cultures, a man that belongs in no land. Did the human struggle of this narrative help you see a reconciliation between the two that wasn’t apparent to you before?

PK: Absolutely. Initially, I wanted this novel to be far more sadistic, hopeless, and absurd. It took a long stroll down Identity Issues Lane to really see what a very real and serious novel I had on my hands. I didn’t expect it. In fact, I mainly became interested in Iran after I finished the novel. Like the protagonist, I had always thought of myself as more of an Angeleno or New Yorker, never really an Iranian. It was always suffocating me a bit so I latched onto any culture or counterculture that was as far from me as possible and made it my own. The novel retaliated and became like one of those fat mirrors to my face at first – mix of shocking and humbling – and by the end of it I think I fine-tuned the reflection to some fair even balance, but in the beginning it was rough.

LR: Obviously we’re going to see your name around for a while; what do we get to see from you next?

PK: I have pretty much wrapped up the manic planes-and-trains part of my book tour. I have three readings in New York coming up: National Arts Club on Nov 9, The Half King on Nov 19 (a very special Iranian women writers reading that I am moderating as well as reading in), The Happy Ending Series on December 12. I will be on Leonard Lopate’s NPR show on November 12. Then I have some university speaking engagements and conferences and benefits and stuff like that. Somehow through it all, I am also teaching, freelance writing, working on a collection of short stories and a new novel. I think the last one’s gonna wear the pants in the end, but we’ll see.

*

Bios:

Porochista Khakpour was born in Tehran, Iran in 1978 and her first language is Farsi. She was raised in the Los Angeles area. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars MA program, where she was awarded the prestigious Elliot Coleman Fellowship. She has also received a fellowship from the Northwestern University Academy for Alternative Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the Chicago Reader, The Village Voice, nymag.com, Paper, Nylon, Gear, Alef, Raygun, spin.com, Flaunt, Bikini, Bidoun, and nerve.com, among others. She currently lives in New York City.

Lance Reynald is the author of the novel Pop Salvation, the sexy, heartbreaking tale of outcasts in search of love and acceptance. Currently available for submission to interested editors, publishers and agents. He can be reached via his website, Lancereynald.com. He is currently at work on his next novel, Your Next Heartbreak Was the Hardest. In addition to Litpark, Lance is a regular contributor at thenervousbreakdown.com. As of December 1st, he is one of Portland,Oregon’s newest literary residents. You can friend him at myspace.

I’m not much of a name dropper, sadly I can never seem to remember the names. So, I bungle it at dinner parties.

I tend to get anxiety in social situations. Always feeling like I won’t have anything interesting to say. Trivia helps. My mind seems to retain loads of the trivial. If I’ve dead-ended subjects like the weather or minor current events trivia always helps the cause.

Always best to avoid the quirks that weird people out. I’ve found that we writers have quirks. My big one is Day of the Dead. Can’t get enough of it. Love the idea.

Once I run through the weather, some light trivia and the Dia de los Muertos collection I really start to get myself in trouble. This happened a few months ago at a casual gathering. Attempting small talk I found myself across the table from someone new. As usual I steered the conversation towards my comfort zone.

Literature.

Now, to be fair. My taste get obscure from time to time. In some circles I get accused of being a literary elitist. I don’t really agree with that term. I tend to think the books out there are out there for everyone, thus there is no elitist realm; but anywhoo… back to the story.

So, here I am at dinner. The subject turns to books, authors and such. Random stranger at the table was aware of what I do here in the park for fun; the chatting with whatever writers I want and having almost no ground rules (cause the boss is just that cool!).

There was great flow to the conversation so we must have been in my comfort zone, talking about some writer I love.

Usually that kind of excitement is one of three; Camus, Proust or Burroughs (William, not Augusten, and no I’m not really an elitist).

You guys know where this must be going, right?

The inevitable question asked.

“Why don’t you get an interview with him?”

Get a few glasses of wine in me and my humour gets wicked… I paused, but had a response. And not that vicious.

“I’m just not that good. Too much effort to get THAT interview.”

and Yes, that was the moment that my companion kicked me under the table and conversation went to trivia.

but, the notion of the impossible interview stuck with me.

Sure, Susan gives me lots of room to explore my subjects here in my corner of the park. The thought of bringing you Camus, Burroughs, Hemingway or Proust always gets a smile on my face.

But, I’m just not that good.

Michael Stusser; journalist, Game maker, interviewer and a guy with a sense of humour just wicked enough for me, on the other hand is.

Good enough to interview 45 dead celebrities. Getting their feelings on their own lives and pop culture.

The Dead Guy Interviews.

His book and our chat got me to smile a bit, remembering a most awkward dinner conversation and the thoughts on the interviews I would have loved to get.

*
Welcome to LitPark, Michael!

LR: I’m just going to jump right in with the big question;

Oujia, seance or a lot of research?

MS: All of the above! You’d be amazed how many of these guys have profiles on MySpace. To be honest, getting a hold of the deceased was the easy part. The hard part was getting clearance from their damn agents. Mozart would need to plug his new album, Napoleon wouldn’t appear without his high chair, and Genghis Khan was pushing a helmet law, of all things.

The genesis of the book came after running into Beethoven at a RiteAid. I was trying to use one of those damn photo machines and Piano Boy was refilling the batteries in his hearing aid. Well, it looked like Beethoven, anyway. Point is, it got me to thinking: what if I could track down the most famous folks from the past and talk them about their lives. It’s like that question, “If you could have dinner with one person in all of history, who would it be?” I decided to meet ‘em all.

LR: How did you come to pick the subjects?

MS: What I tried to do was talk to people who’d been dead for a long, long time – Montezuma, Confucius, Emily Dickinson. The more recently dead – folks like Miles Davis and Marilyn Monroe – have already been interviewed on radio and TV, and are on the record quite a bit. In the ancient days, there was less paparazzi– though there’s an early YouTube video of Caligula that’s hilarious. After compiling a list of about 500 names, my researcher (Anne

Kaiser, who has directed the Center for Policy Research at Harvard University for 25 years) and I narrowed it down to the ones we thought had the most to say – and perhaps wanted to clear up some misconceptions of themselves – Sun Tzu, for example, is actually an incredibly peaceful warrior – he’d love Bono or Angelina Jolie. Even though he wrote The Art of War, he’s all about conflict as a last resort. His new book is The Art of Golf, so you know he’s mellowed over the years. And the process just went from there.

LR: Any favorites among them?

MS: Cliché as it sounds, I’d have to say honest Abe; he’s an incredibly bright fellow and a great President during the roughest of times. He’s also got a helluva sense of humor. When we were talking about an opponent who called him two-faced, he said, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be using this one?”

I also loved Salvador Dali – he had an amazing point of view. What’s strange about him is that he’s so flabbergasted how normal everyone else is. “Nothing of what might happen ever happens!” he kept saying. “Why are bath tubs always the same shape? Why, when I ask for grilled lobster, am I never served a cooked telephone?” And odd bird, to be sure.

LR: Any surprises of an interviewee once you started working with them?

MS: You know, at the beginning of the process we had 45 interviews lined up, but there were some cancellations. Apparently, Jesus is miffed about being constantly misquoted, not to mention my request to turn my water filter into a wine dispenser. We had Gandhi all set to chat when my idiot intern offered him a foot-long sub during one of his frickin’ fasts. And Helen Keller – don’t get me started…Oh, and the reason Elvis refused to be interviewed? He’s not dead yet. I’ll give you a hint: The Golden Nugget, Reno…

LR: Any follow-up in the works? Plenty of Dead Guys banging on your door to chat?

MS: I’m sitting with Jack the Ripper right now, though he’s got an odd habit of dashing out mid-sentence. I’d also love to interview Amelia Earhart, but her radio keeps cutting out on me. You know, all sorts of dead folks want to be interviewed – but there’s plenty of time. It’s not like they’re going anywhere.

Also, I write a monthly “Interview with a Dead Guy” for Mental Floss Magazine, so I’d encourage your readers to pick those up. It’s a great magazine – they nail the whole “edu-tainment” thing.

Thanks for stopping by the Park, Michael! And best of luck with your book!

*

You can “friend” both Michael and Lance on MySpace. Also, Michael blogs over at Penguin, and Lance blogs at his place. Hope you have time to check them out.

Lines marking the road.

Lines of a journey.

Lines on a map.

Things to be crossed, followed, broken and blurred.

As writers we deal with all kinds of lines, and everything we see between them.

A funny thing occurred to me in this interview, a certain subjective quality to literature. Those broken lines, what line a writer follows on the journey and the lines that the reader might pick up.

I followed a line of mild suspense, breakdowns in communication, fears, courage and misunderstandings. A line that felt a bit like a great Hitchcock film. Not an imaginary line; that story is certainly in there. Just not the full track of the book. There is another story. A story of love and loss, and a journey along 58 miles of highway to reconcile it all.

Not too shabby for a debut novel, an impressive debut from Claire Cameron in The Line Painter.

*

LR: Welcome to Litpark Claire!

Your book joins a vast literary tradition of road stories, with some shades of Hitchcock along a scant 58 miles of the trans-canadian highway, how did you come to find that setting?

CC: I spent a few summers working just outside of Hearst ON, where the book is set. I spent a lot of time out in the bush, days off in the town and nights off in the bars. That’s how I got to know the place.

It’s funny you mention Hitchcock. Many people describe, talk about the mood in my book, that it’s dark and creepy. I think of it as a love story–or perhaps the end of a love story.

That is one of the things I love most about my book being ‘out there’. Everyone has a different take on the story, depending on the experience they bring to it.

LR: Your personal bio includes a bit of time with the Outward Bound program, what of those experiences resurfaced while writing The Line Painter?

CC: I imagine you are referring to the bear encounter in the story, which didn’t come from my time at Outward Bound, but it is a mix of two different experiences.

The first was when I was hiking on my own near Canmore, Alberta. I was a two day walk from my van when I rounded a bend into an alpine meadow and saw a Grizzly bear in the distance. It looked over at me. I immediately backed up, but that took me back around the bend, so I could no longer see the bear.

I decided to drop my pack, as it had all my food, and climb a tree. This is, arguably, a pointless thing to do. If a Grizzly wants to get you out of a tree, it probably can. I sat in the tree for hours, unable to see the bear and unsure about what to do. When I finally got the nerve to come down, the bear was gone. I kept walking and never saw it again. Later, when I was telling the story, I could see a lot of humour in the situation. I was scared to the bone and the bear, as with most in the wild, couldn’t have cared less. When I remember it, I can almost picture the bear looking at me and shrugging. It was such a big deal to me, but nothing actually happened. It was an adventure I manufactured in my head.

The second was when worked up in Hearst ON. I planted trees to make money during University. Treeplanting is something a lot of Canadian students do, you work 11 hours days, planting saplings and get paid by the tree. Our camp happened to be in an area where the park service released black bears, from down south, that had grown accustomed to garbage as a food source. I wasn’t there at the time, but a few of my friends had a bad run-in with a bear that was sick and desperate. Three of them ended up in a tree, with the bear snapping at their boots. It was a close call.

LR: You’re touring your book at Husky stations. How goes the reception to literature in truckstops?

CC: I’ve had a good reception so far. Some truckers read in their downtime. Others just want to stop and chat as they spent hours on the road alone. I have sold and signed 11 books in 6 hours. I think that’s pretty good going? I’ve also heard a lot of stories about life, love and loss. As a writer, you can’t ask for more than that.

There is always an excruciating first half hour when I first set up. After about half an hour, someone decides to break the ice. It’s always entertaining after that. I’ve posted detailed reports from each truck stop on my blog.

LR: The story seems to effortlessly move in and out of flashbacks as a part of the narrative. Was the writing linear as such or did the story grow as two separate narratives?

CC: I wrote the story as a whole to begin with. I tend to write a first draft quickly and impulsively. That’s how I find the heart of the narrative. Then I start to rewrite, endlessly. It was during the rewrite that I picked apart the two narratives and developed them.

I’m glad it seems effortless. It never feels that way when I’m writing.

LR: How’s Alun Piggins making out on your tour?

CC: Alun Piggins played at the book launch. He wasn’t available to come to the Husky Truck Stops, because it’s now on tour in China. Out of the two, I suppose I can see why he chose China

LR: What do we see next out of you?

CC: I hope to find a US publisher for The Line Painter.

My next book is in my head, but hasn’t taken shape on the page yet. Most of my thinking happens this way, on the back burner, slowly simmering, for a year or more before I start to type.

LR: Best of luck with getting that US publisher, and getting the next book out of your head.

Thanks for coming to the park Claire!

Thanks so much, Lance.

*

Bios:

CLAIRE CAMERON was born in 1973 and grew up in Toronto. She studied history at Queen’s University and then worked as an instructor for Outward Bound, teaching mountaineering, climbing and whitewater rafting in Oregon. Moving to London in 1999, she founded Shift Media, a consultancy with clients including the BBC, McGraw-Hill and Oxford University Press. Claire now lives in Toronto with her husband and son. The Line Painter is her first novel and was published by HarperCollins Canada in April. If you’re on MySpace, you can “friend” her here.

When not locked in the pantry evading anxiety attacks and sacrificing large quantities of peanut butter cups and Stewart’s Root Beer to the most recent copy of Writer’s Market, LANCE REYNALD can be found doing what most un-agented writers do all day; practicing signing his name with a Sharpie on 5X7 cards in hope that creative visualization will pay off in a book deal. Once the Sharpie huffing wears off he settles in to finishing up a shopable draft of POP SALVATION, the story of a boy who wanted to be Andy Warhol. He also distracts himself plenty with his blog at Myspace.

Left or right?
A fork in the road?
College or Europe?

As writers we get to tinker a bit with our endings. Sometimes it’s the one perfect ending that consumes our long hours in front of the screen.

It’s that power over narrative that leads me into some trouble now and then. You meet someone new, the narrative takes off in your head. Just introduced and you’re imagining the great adventures, the journey ahead. Not always thinking about the choices in that impulsive narrative. Somewhere along the way the life story you imagined doesn’t look like your well crafted design. It must have gone wrong in a moment. You need to hit the delete key on a few chapters, you need to rewrite a bit, you deserve a Do-over. Right?

What would you do differently? How many right turns would you make lefts?

Point A to B to C into a tidy happy ending?

Does it look like this:

A->B->C= finished.

or, like this:

Some of you might remember the above from junior high. Back when I was a twelve year old we called them Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Well, those were for kids, not very adult themes. Your choices didn’t lead you to being a millionaire, being homeless, having a drug problem or a bit of hanky-panky with a primate.

Such a genre certainly deserves a good name.

Interactive Hyperfiction according to the press release.

The first Do-Over novel.

I had a lot of fun reading this one. I’ve gone through about a dozen threads and I’m nowhere near seeing the 150 possible endings yet. I’m pretty sure a dog-eared copy of Pretty Little Mistakes is going to follow me around all summer.

It’s an addictive read.

Without it I would have never thought of beef tenderloin, weaponized.

You really have to appreciate a woman who can handle a tenderloin with such style.

Litpark pals, meet Heather McElhatton!

*

LR: Welcome to the park, Heather. I’ve read that the genesis of Pretty Little Mistakes was your feeling of failure with your first novel. What of that failure led you to crafting interactive hyper-fiction?

HM: I think the feeling of being shattered and scattered made this broken structure seem natural. I felt like I couldn’t follow one story to the end, I had to follow them all at once. I honestly don’t know why I wrote Pretty Little Mistakes this way”¦it just sort of happened. Like if you blacked out and then when you came to there was this manuscript in your hands.

LR: I’ve read through a dozen different scenarios in your book, always amused and surprised by where I end up and how things turn out, but I have yet to have that wild monkey sex I was promised. Where am I going wrong?

HM: I am fascinated by the lives people choose, the threads they follow. Lots of folks have said, “But in the book I did all the right things! I was responsible and I still ended up homeless or working at Denny’s or having sex with a monkey etc…” I usually ask them if they know anyone, possibly themselves, who has done everything “by the book” and still had their lives blow up in their face. I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t know of one very unfair story in the world.

So the book gives you no guarantees. The moral of the story is do the right thing, or don’t. You still might end up having sex with a monkey. You might as well do what you really truly bone-marrow want to do. It’s your best bet. So Lance, to read the monkey-sex scene, you must dig very deep into your soul. Really follow your own true path”¦that or go to page # 351.

LR: Many of the choices appear to be the black and white of responsible or impulsive. As a rule, are you responsible or impulsive in your choices?

HM: Yes. Both. I mean, think impulsivity has saved me in a lot of instances. The ability to move quickly and act rashly has let me leapfrog out of bad situations. Sure, sometimes I’ve leapt right into something (or someone) worse, but eventually I always scramble to high ground. On the other hand, who doesn’t want to be super Zen and walk measured steps? In my life however, I’ve seen both methods work, and not work. I think it’s a balancing act.

LR: You seem to be having a great year, how has this quirky book and it’s deal changed your life?

HM: Am I having a great year? I’ve been too swamped to notice. Really, absolutely nothing has changed in my life except I got a little puppy pug named Walter and in general I have bigger deadlines looming over me. Yesterday, I did my taxes and spent the day comparing various pee stain removal products and then testing them out on my Walter-ized furniture. That’s a typical day right now. Not too fancy.

I think the thing about writing though, and life in general, is that you never “arrive.” Your horizon always recedes in perfect proportion your steps. So, after you’ve written one book, then you want to write another. If you can write two books, why not four? You’re never done. No one is. Every single person is struggling to get or get away from something. It doesn’t matter if they have a book, or ten books, or no books. We’re all in this shit storm together ”“ which is kind of beautiful.

LR: You’ve had the opportunity to be a part of the television version of This America Life with Ira Glass on Showtime. How was that experience?

HM: Being on the show was a strange experience. I started in radio for a reason. I love being the anonymous voice. Not being seen and letting the words paint a picture”¦so when I was being filmed and telling my story I was squirmy and self-conscious. I was sweating and there were bright hot lights in my face. Ira kept trying to calm me down ”“ but I was just a fish out of water.

The show itself however is phenomenal. I think the stories are gorgeous on film. Chris Wilcha is the director, and he’s got a great eye, which matches Ira’s perfectly. They both have this “other” way of seeing and it comes across on camera.

LR: Any mistakes you’ve made along the way getting this book out there that you’d like to share with all these writers in Litpark?

HM: My biggest advice is if you send your manuscript out to agents or publishers; keep that piece of information to yourself. Otherwise friends, family and co-workers will keep asking you, “How’s the book?” and after a month or two of hearing “How’s the book? How’s the book?” you want to throw a stapler at them and say “YOU CAN BE SURE IF THERE WAS NEWS ABOUT THE BOOK I WOULD TELL YOU. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP ASKING ME THAT.”

Then after enough time passes people either STOP asking you about the book, and just give “understanding nods” or they ask you about your book in the same gentle concerned tone they’d use to ask you about your contagious disease.

Just save yourself the entire ordeal and keep everything, (your ideas, your writing, your manuscript, your submissions) a secret until you have a book deal. Then you announce it all at once, people buy you champagne and no staplers are thrown.

LR: What do we get to see out of you next?

HM: The next Little Mistakes book will be called “Million Little Mistakes,” and it’ll be out in 2008. (I named it before the James Frey ruckus, but I think it ties together nicely.) There’s actually a section of it in the back of Pretty Little Mistakes. I have under a year to write another book. There’s so much more to tell you… I’ll be in New York on May 23rd at McNally Robinson in New York and the rest of the details are at www.prettylittlemistakes.com Excuse me, will you? I have to go take some aspirin and lay down.

Thanks for playing in the Park!

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Bios:

HEATHER McELHATTON is a writer and independent producer for Public Radio International. Her commentaries and stories have been heard nationally on This American Life, Marketplace, Weekend America, Sound Money and The Savvy Traveler. She also produces the radio literary series Talking Volumes. Heather’s audio archive can be found at www.mpr.org. Pretty Little Mistakes is Heather’s debut novel, available now from HarperCollins.

When not locked in the pantry evading anxiety attacks and sacrificing large quantities of peanut butter cups and Stewart’s Root Beer to the most recent copy of Writer’s Market, LANCE REYNALD can be found doing what most un-agented writers do all day; practicing signing his name with a Sharpie on 5X7 cards in hope that creative visualization will pay off in a book deal. Once the Sharpie huffing wears off he settles in to finishing up a shopable draft of POP SALVATION, the story of a boy who wanted to be Andy Warhol. He also distracts himself plenty with his blog at Myspace.

…but I’m sick and tired of reading novels, I want something that startles me. Something far away yet deep inside, hard to reason with and hard to hide. One day all of this will surface”¦ – “Until We Get There,” Coho

Ya’ll still with me? Crazy habit I have of adding a soundtrack to just about everything I come across. Stick around though, those lyrics didn’t get stuck in my head as an indictment of craft; more a rally cry. You’ll see what I mean by the time we’re out of here.

I like my gig here at LitPark. Susan lets me drop in once a month to chat about books and such with writers I like. No real rules and great freedom to do whatever I want (such as opening a column with possibly incendiary lyrics). It’s a good gig. I’ve already managed to chat with a poignant memoirist (Decker), a dynamic acclaimed novelist (Vernon) and the writer of a brilliant debut novel (Westfield). All open, generous and patient with my not so typical interview style. After those three, I found myself totally blank on where to go next.

Then I got a nudge in the form of an e-mail from a darling friend. Links to a MySpace profile, a blog, a brief bio and two sentences”¦ “I keep hearing about him from authors I admire. He’s a writer’s writer.”

Good enough for me!

I had a month off from LitPark for the holidays and had somehow reached a stall in my own novel. A great time for a writer’s writer.

I started snooping. Made a new friend on MySpace. Added a new blog to my daily reading. After some fun correspondence with my new friend I picked up a copy of his book. (Just for the record, the cover blurb by Edmund White sealed the deal for me.)

The book moved me, as a writer and as a reader. Painfully beautiful; the best kind of storytelling. Writing that reminds you that you’re a writer. Reminds you how great it can feel to read.

I could go on and on with my praise about this book, but my feelings about it are most accurately summed up in a few lines from page ten of this amazing first novel:

What do you want of him, I ask myself. I tell myself, to walk inside him and never leave. For him to be the house of me.

The whole book gave me goosebumps with language like that. Those few lines were the literary equivalent of, “You had me at Hello” for me. I love when that happens. Don’t you?

…LitPark friends, let me introduce you to Alexander Chee, author of EDINBURGH and a writer’s writer.

Alexander, welcome to LitPark!

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LR: The characters in Edinburgh mature into their lives carrying secrets, heartache and the associate pain of those experiences. When touring the book did you find yourself meeting readers that felt a connection to the story; as though they had known or been your characters?

AC: I did.

I found there was a moment before the reading where someone would say, “Oh. So there’s this guy who”…and it would be someone who had some uncanny connection to the material. It happened so often that I soon stopped being scared of it, about what it meant. They were a pretty disparate bunch. There was a young gay white man from Texas who’d had an affair with an Asian American teacher of his, for example, a woman whose brother took his life after giving up on trying to get over incest – something she was also trying to survive. A straight Korean American man who’d grown up in Maine. A photocopy of a letter from a convicted pedophile telling someone that my book was the first thing that made him understand what he did was wrong. He described being completely silent for four days while he read the book.

With that last one I understood how there was something I’d wanted in writing and publishing the book that had been fulfilled, without knowing it was what I’d wanted.

EDINBURGH

LR: Your writing seems to express a great love for your characters. They face some troubling demons. In the writing of the story did you find it difficult not stepping in to protect them?

AC: Sort of. But I do feel you’ve grown up as a writer when you let your characters do things you yourself would never do. At one point I decided I didn’t want this one character to kill this other character, for example. It seemed like too much. So I decided I’d try something else. But then I couldn’t write more for almost four months. Finally I decided yes, he has to die. And I say ‘I decided’ but I mean, I agreed. I agreed with the story.

You don’t write to show off what a good person you are, how upright and perfect. You write to show the world something you understand about people and life. And that can take you into some weird places. You have to go there, though. You think you get to decide and that’s about half right.

LR: There are incredible emotions in the reading of Edinburgh, I’d imagine it was difficult to write on that level. Any tricks you used to get away from that intensity and relax while working with it?

AC: Jack Daniels and yoga.

Not at the same time, of course.

The thing is, the actual writing of that novel wasn’t so very protected, though it might read that way. Parts of it were written in Maine, parts of it written in the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, parts of it at The Writers Room in NYC. But much of it was written on the subway going back and forth between my apartment in Brooklyn and the steakhouse where I worked in Midtown Manhattan. I would bring a legal pad. The trip was about 45 minutes each way. Subways are like these moving libraries, loud and public and random. So, a lot of it was written with me surrounded by people, gears screeching, someone talking about God or their breakup or their job. I have a waiter foodcheck with a sketch of the novel’s structure that came to me in the half hour between when my shift that night started and when my station was first sat.

It’s sort of like how my mom remembers standing in front of the chair I’m reading in as a kid, talking to me and me not hearing her. It used to scare her. I get like that when I’m writing also. Peace and quiet are nice but not necessary for me for writing, exactly.

LR: The voice of your work reads pure and true. Was that something you found right away or did it come through as you built the story?

AC: Thanks. I found it very slowly. For a few years I didn’t know I was writing a novel. Every so often I’d write something in between more organized writing events and think, Hunh. What is that? And it kept happening. Eventually I took all the fragments that seemed related and put them together. I was moving at the time. I put them all in a binder and I said, Here you go, decide what you are and then tell me.

When I arrived in my new apartment, I took them out and read through them and could start to feel what was missing in the gaps. And so I started writing to that.

I discarded almost as many pages as there are there in the book. I threw out at least 195 pages and the book is 224. I just kept throwing out everything that didn’t tell the story, no matter how beautiful it was. If it doesn’t somehow tell the story that part of the novel goes dead, and you can’t have that. But I had to wait until I knew the story, and that was a long time coming.

LOSS WITHIN LOSS

LR: You’re teaching creative writing this term, any advice you give budding writers to help them find their true voice?

AC: There’s the voice of the story or novel, and then there’s intuition, the voice in you that speaks to you as you make the things people read. I feel like a lot of what I do in teaching writing is getting people to communicate with themselves, to learn to work intuitively and take chances on what they suspect to be true but don’t yet know to be true. One of the most important things I ever learned about epiphanies, the oft-maligned, is that they come out of your whole intelligence. You’re taking in information all the time, and you don’t know it. An epiphany is when all of that information from what you’ve heard, remembered, seen, felt, imagined, when it all connects into something that tears itself out of the undifferentiated dark of your mind.

Sometimes students come to my office to tell me what they think they might do with their story, and all I can say is, Sounds good. Go try. Praxis. There’s a powerful illusion-projection that the teacher secretly knows how it should be done and just isn’t telling you. It’s just not true. We don’t know what will happen until it’s been tried in front of us.

My advice to aspiring writers is to make their work to their own satisfaction. Listen to the voice that makes all the other voices. It’s the only thing that really protects you in the world, your connection to that. You do need to listen to critiques and so on, but in the end, it’s your name on it. And if you’ve made it as well as you can, and you feel like you’ve been true to your intuitions and your vision of the book, then you’re protected for when people love it or when they hate it. Which is to say, if they love it, you know enough to know your intuitions matter and you can make work that will risk their not loving it, for being true to you. Which, is the only way to make something anyone really loves.

And if they hate it, well, you can say, This is what I saw.

A FICTIONAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

LR: What do we get to see next from you?

AC: I’m finishing the second novel, The Queen of the Night, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin in 2008. I can say there’s opera, that it’s set in large part in Paris in the late 19th Century, and that it’s about art, politics, rivalries and love. I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which the US resembles Second Empire France of late – George W. Bush basically is Louis Napoleon – but this wasn’t clear to me when I began the book in 2000. Back then I was just fascinated by the idea of an opera singer with a gift that was larger than her ability to choose to use it.

I still am.

For more details of what’s ahead, please check out my author blog.

LC: Alexander, thank you for joining us in the park!

xo-LR

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Bios:

Alexander Chee’s writing has appeared in Interview, Big, Out, and the anthologies Boys Like Us, Loss Within Loss, and Men on Men 2000. You can read his essay, “you write what you read” at Booksense.com. He is a winner of the James Michener/Copernicus Society Award, Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of the Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship in fiction, a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony, an Asian American Writers Workshop Lit Award and currently is the Visiting Writer at Amherst College. Edinburgh is his first novel. MySpacers can make friends with him here.

When not locked in the pantry evading anxiety attacks and sacrificing large quantities of peanut butter cups and Stewart’s Root Beer to the most recent copy of Writer’s Market, Lance Reynald can be found doing what most un-agented writers do all day; practicing signing his name with a Sharpie on 5X7 cards in hope that creative visualization will pay off in a book deal. Once the Sharpie huffing wears off he settles in to finishing up a shopable draft of POP SALVATION, the story of a boy who wanted to be Andy Warhol. He also distracts himself plenty with his blog at Myspace.

I was a late bloomer when it came to reading. Everyone around me seemed to pick it up with Dick, Jane and Spot in the first grade, I remained back in the special reading group until well into the second grade. Looking back I think this might be due to the fact that Dick and Jane just hovered there in white space without any background. They existed in no place. Once I discovered that books and stories could transport you to another place I became a voracious reader.

As writers we all know that Place can be not only the background, but also a supporting character to the work. It gives our characters elements by proxy. Fitzgerald’s New York, Faulkner’s South, Steinbeck’s California, Kansas via Capote and the Wyoming of Proulx. All vivid places, travels and landscapes drafted in words.

I have two favorite places that make me feel secure though they might seem as opposites of one another. The safety of my writing room and the bustling streets of NYC. That’s just the way it comes down for me. I would guess that the safety of my writing room is obvious, but the fact that you can walk the streets of NYC, anonymous and inspired… A thrilling place for a writer.

Robert Westfield’s Suspension is a book that charmed me in the fact that it features both of these places. The hero of the story, a Hell’s Kitchen shut-in. We see the city as a backdrop known just outside of the secure four walls of the main character’s apartment.

As a book it all made me smile. Dark humour, farce, cultural observations, a bit of paranoia, a reclusive hero and a journey within a modest apartment.

I’m still smiling.

These days, any book that makes me smile certainly makes me want to talk to the author and share them with my Litpark friends.

Litpark pals, meet Robert Westfield.

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LR: Hello Robert, Welcome to LitPark.

Suspension seems a mix of many things, but your love of NYC runs through the whole. A tribute to the city in some ways. Was this intended as a tribute to a post-911 NYC?

RW: I didn’t necessarily set out to write a tribute or, as it states in the jacket copy, an homage…though I wouldn’t argue with the terms; I set out to write about the emotional fallout and instability of that period. The majority of the narrative takes place during the nine months before September eleventh and the nine months afterwards. There has been an enormous attention paid to the day itself, but I was more interested in writing about the aftermath. It was a conscious decision to have Andy lock himself in his apartment a month before the attacks…we see Andy walk up the stairs at the end of that chapter and lock his door, there’s a sentence-long reference to the morning of September eleventh and then the next chapter opens in November. I was fascinated that fall by how people coped, how they struggled to find a new kind of stability in a stunned, shaken and now topsy-turvy world. Each of the characters in the novel responds in a different way to this loss of control, to the fear, hysteria, paranoia that comes with the awareness that most of your life is being decided by other people behind your back.

LR: Your love and knowledge of NYC seems great; Have you considered writing a hipster tour book? (I’m imagining it like Chuck Palahniuk’s Fugitives and Refugees)

RW: Definitely. I’ve been giving tours of New York since ’97 and would love to put that decade of experience and research onto the page. The project I’m working on now is a hybrid of sorts…part tour book, part collection of stories that are interwoven through a four-day itinerary. My goal is for the readers to feel as if they’ve gone on a tour of the city by experiencing it through the minds of ten or twelve characters. Each of the characters has an aspect of American culture that I want to engage. Overall, I want the book to explore New York, cities in general and what it means to travel away from home, what it means to be a tourist.

LR: You clearly enjoy the literary history of NYC. Any favorite legends you’d like to walk us through with a few words?

RW: In a city of competing and collaborating egos, one of my favorite anecdotes comes from Sherwood Anderson who, after publishing Winesburg, Ohio, moved to St. Luke’s Place, a few doors down from the literary god of the time, Theodore Dreiser, whose name was abbreviated “The.” One morning Sherwood Anderson gets the courage up to knock on “The Dreiser’s” door. And the author himself opens it. As soon as Andersen begins introducing himself, the door is shut in his face. Shocked, humiliated, outraged, he goes off to a few local pubs and drinks. Hours later, when he returns home, he finds a note from “The Dreiser” apologizing, explaining how nervous he’d been when he found himself face-to-face with such a great writer like Anderson.

In time for the holidays, here’s one of my favorites and explains why images of “Old Christmas” are almost exclusively Victorian. (Credit for this goes to Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas, which is a profound cultural history of the holiday and not related to the silly and shallow War on Christmas books.) Before the 1820’s, Christmas was a completely different holiday. The roots go back to the ancient Roman celebration of Saturnalia, a harvest holiday when Saturn was released, chaos reigned, the streets were full of bacchanalian revelry, and masters and servants would switch places for the duration. This served as a social gauge and was understandably popular with the servants. Hundreds of years later, a monk placed the birth of Christ atop this pagan tradition in an attempt to smother it. Religious leaders were riled, asking what shepherds would be tending their flock by night in Syria in late December? When the Puritans came to New England, the holiday was outlawed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The way the holiday was celebrated for centuries was with marauding members of the lower class knocking on the doors of the wealthy, caroling or wasailing in order to be invited inside to partake of the best wine and food the house had to offer. Think trick-or-treating. In the rapidly growing city of New York, there was a move to alter this tradition. The Knickerbockers, a wealthy social set with literary interests, which included Washington Irving (America’s first full-time writer and the man whose fabricated history of New York introduced the fictitious Knickerbocker family and the name “Gotham,” a man so respected that one bank printed his face on currency to attract investors and a developer named a street after him to lure residents to the newly laid out Gramercy Park), decided to celebrate the holiday the way their Dutch forebears did. Of course, it was all phony. The Dutch did have a St. Nicholas Day in the beginning of December (or at least the Catholic Dutch back in Holland did), but the New Yorkers pulled in several disparate harvest traditions and invented others. A poem was crafted…A Visit from St. Nicholas…the patron saint of New Amsterdam (the Dutch name for NYC). Whether Clement Clarke Moore penned it or someone else as was recently claimed, it was a radical poem that cast Santa as a worker (he smokes a short pipe, and everyone at the time knew that only workers smoked short pipes…they broke off the stems to fit them in their pockets while the wealthy left their pipes hanging on the tavern walls). In the poem, Santa (the worker) is someone who leaves gifts instead of guzzling your wine and is someone who comes down the chimney allowing you leave your front door firmly closed to the street. But what’s most radical is the idea that instead of masters switching places with servants, the children switch places with their parents. So these writers, mainly in Greenwich Village and the area now known as Chelsea, are responsible for turning this raucous street holiday based on class into a cozy domestic one centered around the family. And with it comes the birth of consumerism…the first goods in the history of manufacturing to be given away by the purchaser were Christmas gift books; the cult of the child; and the countless traditions we now consider centuries old. Who says poets can’t rock the world?

LR: As writers we all work with solitude, your protagonist rationalizes finding a Walden-esque existence within his apartment; Do you work this way yourself?

RW: Andy comes up with all sorts of justification for locking himself in his apartment, but in seven months doesn’t produce anything other than cranky letters and word games. I hope I’m far more productive. I used to be able to write anywhere at any time. I could sit at the kitchen counter and draft stories or scenes as my family yammered around me. I could borrow a friend’s computer and blissfully work while she rearranged furniture to paint her living room. I could have full conversations, which I later didn’t remember… “Sure, I’ll help you move that couch, just give me a few minutes.” Nowadays, I need to be alone, away from distractions, drafting on the computer with phones off and my Internet temporarily disabled. I can still brainstorm and edit in cafes or bars or on the subway, but when it comes to drafting I have to be alone. I prefer when I can work uninterrupted for a few hours each morning and then be more social for the rest of the day, but I do often disappear for a few weeks at a time. I don’t restrict myself to my apartment…I walk through parks, swim at my gym, stroll through museums…but yes, weeks can go by without “touching base” with friends or family. It was easier when writing plays, because, for one, they’re shorter, and I was more frequently meeting up with actors and directors to discuss the script or read scenes aloud. Writing a novel, however, requires longer, lonelier periods of isolation. For me at least.

LR: In addition to Suspension you are also a playwright. Anything going up on stage soon?

RW: I’m creeping back to it. I was just informally commissioned (for “informally commissioned,” read “not paid but asked nicely”) to write a play for four actors. At this point, I’ve written: “A Play with Four Actors.” So far, that’s all I have. It needs some work obviously. I’m also currently collaborating with a Dutch actress on a play about a woman she knows on an island in Croatia. This play is much farther along: “A Play for Nanette. Setting: Croatia.” Again, there’s work to do, but this will hopefully be co-produced in New York and Amsterdam in the next year or two. We’ll see. Hey! Wait a second”¦if I make this one a play for four actors”¦

Thanks for coming by the Park!

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Bios:

Robert was born in Maryland in 1972 and spent his early years in Japan, Hawaii, California, and West Virginia before his family returned to Maryland and settled in Bryans Road, a small, one-stoplight community south of Washington. In 1990, Robert moved to New York to attend Columbia where he twice won the college playwriting prize as well as the fiction award and the Henry Evans Traveling Fellowship which funded a writing/research trip to Greece and Italy. He spent his twenties catering, temping and leading tours of New York while writing for the theater (A Wedding Album, The Pennington Plot, A Tulip Economy, and A Home Without). He was the writer-in-residence for The Working Group and a dramaturge on Marc Wolf’s award-winning solo play, Another American: Asking and Telling. Suspension is his first novel. He currently lives in upper Manhattan.

When not locked in the pantry evading anxiety attacks and sacrificing large quantities of peanut butter cups and Stewart’s Root Beer to the most recent copy of Writer’s Market, Lance Reynald can be found doing what most un-agented writers do all day; practicing signing his name with a Sharpie on 5X7 cards in hope that creative visualization will pay off in a book deal. Once the Sharpie huffing wears off he settles in to finishing up a shopable draft of POP SALVATION, the story of a boy who wanted to be Andy Warhol. He also distracts himself plenty with his blog at Myspace.

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Okay, guys, you can friend Robert at Myspace. And if you’d like to catch him in person, his next appearance is December 5, 5:30 at Labyrinth Books, New Haven, CT.