Self-Interview: The Next Big Thing-Thing

Self Interview: The Next Big Thing

Big thanks to uber-essayist and all around Normal dude, Aaron Gilbreath for tagging me in this “Next Big Thing” blog-chain-thing. Next up is Matthew Gavin Frank, poet, essayist, and nonfiction editor for Passages North, as well as a contributor to our Fall 2013 issue of The Normal School.

What is the working title of your book?

I’m working on one book about Parkfield, California, the Earthquake Capital of the World, and I’ve published a couple of pieces from it in The Rumpus (here and here) but it’s a book that is still very much in-progress and harder to talk about. So for the sake of this self-interview thing, I’ll talk about the other book project that is foremost in my consciousness right now, Ultrasonic: Essays.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote a series of essays that all spawned from one essay, “Ultrasonic,” an essay published in Fourth Genre 2009 that I think of as a “constrained essay,” or an “assignment essay.” I rarely know where I’m going with a particular essay and sometimes I have to give myself a direction. Sometimes I have to limit that direction. So I basically gave myself an assignment with constraints. Every time I sat down I was going to write about either “blue” or “noise.” This idea came, I think, from my interest in trying to understand a rekindled love of racquetball. Or it came from beer. I’m not sure. I was trying to write about the “blue noise” of racquetball but do it in a way that allowed me to explore some of the emotional territory of being a father to a daughter. I don’t think that makes much sense, honestly, but I don’t really care. That’s how it started. And I can’t explain it any better than that. So from that spawned the first three essays (“Auscultation,” “All of a Dither,” and “Ultrasonic,” and a short piece, “Lag Time,” that was published in Brevity and a later piece “Speaking of Ears and Savagery,” that was in the Fall 2012 issue of Creative Nonfiction. The book sort of took on sound as subject, source, and form, operating to create connections through what I think of as echolocation, where the book is unified by the pings or echoes of recurring ideas that resonate throughout the book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Well, I suppose the genre is nonfiction and the form is a collection of essays. I tried for a while to make the book into something more like a unified, linear memoir, but it didn’t work. I ruined the pieces as essays and made a half-assed attempt at memoir. It sucked. And I pretty much scrapped that idea. So I’m happy to call them essays because I like them as such. I think these are some of the best things I’ve written and to tear them down and rework them into something else just seemed wrong. It killed their charmingly unruly essay personalities.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Puppets or chimpanzees in diapers and funny hats with voice-over narration done by Bob Edwards, former host of NPR’s Morning Edition.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

"Ultrasonic: Essays is an idiosyncratic meditation on fatherhood, fear, and violence through the lens of sound.”

Either that, or just, “Ultrasonic: Essays is a book about you.”

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It often takes me 2-3 years to write one essay that I feel really happy about sending out. It takes a while for the ideas to develop and find their focus. Most of the pieces in Ultrasonic were written between about 2007 and 2010, and I’ve spent the last three years or so trying to get them into something resembling the shape of a book.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I’m going to combine these two questions because I think they’re sort of asking the same thing. Two writers, Bernard Cooper and Lia Purpura, and their books, Maps to Anywhere and On Looking, were very influential in the style and form of Ultrasonic, but I’m not sure I would have the audacity to compare my book to their books. Those are brilliant and beautiful books that mean a great deal to a lot of people.

What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

In the book I have an essay about the music our government uses to torture people and another very long and strange essay that was in the Fall, 2012 issue of Creative Nonfiction wherein I basically defend Mike Tyson for biting off a large portion of Evander Holyfield’s ear. I also talk about Travis the psychotic chimpanzee and my infant daughter. There are trapped miners, endurance runners, racquetball, Elvis, a drowning, Blue Velvet, metal music, and lots of dark stuff—all in a book ostensibly about fatherhood.

When and how will it be published?

Yes. 

On the "Stealth Memoir" and The Confessional Expectation

At first when I saw the invitation to be on a panel at the 2013 Associated Writing Programs Conference on the “stealth memoir,” I thought the moderator might be referring to memoirs that fly under the radar, go unnoticed, and bomb.
   I figured I’d be the perfect panelist.
   Then I kept reading the description of her panel where she quotes another writer’s description of his book as being like a Swiss Army knife, and I tried to think of my book as one of those really cool big ones that has a screwdriver, and tweezers and is so big it needs its own carrying case. Then I got distracted thinking about that little plastic toothpick that comes in those Swiss Army knives and wondering which part of my book would be the plastic toothpick and which part would be the tweezers.
   Then I ran out of beer.
   And then I decided I should probably focus more and consider how my book, The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, might speak to the most important ideas of the panel, how it might accomplish some of the aims of memoir while focusing on subjects outside the self or by using different forms and styles.
   OK, so the book is about the nuclear fear I felt growing up in Kansas in the 70’s and 80’s and how the made-for-TV post-apocalyptic movie, The Day After (set and filmed in my hometown of Lawrence, KS) brought these fears home in more ways than one. It’s also about the violent, apocalyptic history of Lawrence and of Kansas, culminating with a 2007 F-5 tornado that destroyed my father’s hometown of Greensburg in southwest Kansas. It’s also about the movie itself and the lasting cultural resonance of a film that even the director, Nicholas Meyer told me he didn’t consider art but instead a giant “public service announcement,” a video essay of sorts that at the time garnered the 2nd highest Nielson rating in history. And finally, the book is about the seemingly sudden and apocalyptic implosion of my parents’ marriage. The book uses a variety of forms and styles, from outright fiction and fabrication to more straightforward journalistic interview, memoir and film criticism.
   I struggled with many decisions in the book, including the nagging problem that, though the movie scared the crap out of me, I really didn’t have a lot of direct personal experience with it. I didn’t have the material for a memoir. Even my experience watching the movie was like some half-remembered bad dream constructed from a mish-mash of 80’s disaster films and stock footage of atomic tests. Though many Lawrence residents were extras, I was not; and I only watched them film a couple of scenes. Most of my personal experience was second-hand, which isn’t really personal experience at all, is it? All I had was my curiosity about the lasting legacy of a film that scared the crap out of an entire generation and my conviction that a bad movie mattered then and now in ways that are still hard to define. All I had was research, revision, research, revision and more revision.
    I knew that there would be some thread of the confessional in the book and I spent a lot of time grafting material about my parent’s divorce onto to other material, hoping it would work symbiotically; and then I spent just as much time hacking it away, asking myself how much I really needed to tell the larger story I was after. The 70’s and 80’s were a strange time and I was sort of trying to write a book about a generation, a book about a bad movie and the pop-cultural identity of an entire state, a book about the idea of apocalypse. Divorce was part of the story but only one thread. Besides, the last thing I wanted was someone to describe the book as narrowly a memoir of divorce in the 80’s. I begged, in fact, during production, that it not say "memoir" in the title or subtitle. I didn’t want it to be reduced to that one word label, perhaps because for the last few years, especially at conferences like the AWP conference, the “memoir” tag has been like the herpes of genre labels; but more importantly than labels, I wanted the book to behave differently than a traditional memoir. I wanted it to be something more like a book-length braided personal essay with fictional and journalistic elements. And I didn’t want readers to look at the cover and expect something different.
    Again, I didn’t necessarily have the material for a more confessional memoir. My parents’ divorce was traumatic but not in a really unique or memoir-worthy way, certainly not in a way that I felt like exploiting on the page. I sort of dealt with the divorce long ago and didn’t really need to work it out on the page. Or I did but I didn’t need to publish it. I wasn’t interested in exposing anyone or blaming anyone. Writing out of spite or for vengeance rarely turns out well. Divorces happen. Pretty regularly. My parents had equal custody of my brother and me. I didn’t lose a parent. I gained another house and a happier mother.
    I tell myself and my students that it’s often better to begin by looking away from the personal, by starting not with confession but curiosity. I did this with my book because I believed it would make it a better book and because I knew the material was there anyway, fueling much of what I was writing about. You don’t have to see the engine to know it’s running. But whether I wanted to write about it or not divorce was a big part of 80’s culture. It was one kind of apocalypse that defined those years—the end of one reality and the beginning of a new, somewhat alien world; and as such it made a good literary device. I also tell my students that their responsibility as a nonfiction writer is to be an ethical and efficient parasite. If you’re going to use the personal, the confessional to explore some larger ideas, your responsibility is to do it for very good reasons and to do it well, with the minimum amount of collateral damage. In the 80’s divorces were as hot as parachute pants, Def Leppard, and post-apocalyptic fantasy. A book about that time and place needed that thread as a kind of universal touchstone, a hook for the reader of memoir who expects some personal stakes right up front; and I knew that the challenge was one of balance.
    I want to believe that we can also think of the expectations of memoir more generously, more broadly than the confessional or traumatic. I want to believe we can think of memoir in terms of the author’s personal connection to the ideas in the book; that the form, at it’s best, can use personal experience to gather up the distinct threads of a book and bring them together into a narrative of thought that is more compelling and nuanced than a simple summary of the crazy shit that happened. Perhaps memoir can be about a place, a state, or about an entire generation and less about trafficking in humiliation or confessing some pain, loss, or sorrow. Perhaps like all literature it is aiming to capture the sublime confluence of these and other human experiences through the synchronicity of ideas and emotions.
    I hope the more compelling “memoir” thread in my own book is the one that happens in the last part, when I return to Greensburg, Kansas with my father to help my Aunt clean up after the F-5 tornado of 2007. It was this trip, this tornado and the experience of seeing a post-apocalyptic landscape firsthand, of sifting through the rubble of my Aunt’s house that really brought all the ideas and narrative lines in the book together. So while I consciously avoided making the book a “memoir,” I also have to admit that it was this “memoir” thread, this visceral and personal connection to the experience of apocalypse, one that wasn't so much confessional but confrontational, that forced me to emotionally confront many of the ideas I was essaying, an experience and a corresponding choice in writing the book that and helped me gather up all the disparate threads into something that was less like a knot and more like a tight braid.

Nonfiction Thursday at AWP

This Thursday, Feb. 3 is shaping up to be Nonfiction Thursday at AWP. There's a veritable smorgasbord of nonfiction panels scheduled for that day. Check them out below:

Tearing Your Heart Off Your Sleeve: The Problem of Pathos in Creative Nonfiction
Thursday, February 3, 9:00 - 10:15 a.m.
Virginia C Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level

The Essayist in the 21st Century
Thursday, February 3, 9:00 - 10:15 a.m.
Hampton Ballroom, Omni Shoreham Hotel, East Lobby

A Sense of Where We Were: Nonfiction Writers on Setting
Thursday, Febuary 3, 10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
Hampton Ballroom, Omni Shoreham Hotel, East Lobby
(I'll be paneling for this one.)

Imagining Ourselves: The Narrative Stance in Memoir
Thursday, February 3, Noon - 1:15 p.m.
Virginia B Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level

What's Normal in Nonfiction?
Thursday, February 3, 3:00 - 4:15 p.m.
Maryland Suite Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Lobby Level
(I'll be moderating this one.)

Status Update: The Personal Essay in the Age of Facebook
Thursday, February 3, 4:30 - 5:45 p.m.
Thurgood Marshall East Room, Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level

See all you nonfictionistaz there! - SC

NewPages on Sonora Review and "Confessions of a Parasite"

This is a little old, but it's a nice mini-review of my essay, "Confessions of a Parasite" from Sonora Review #57.

Thanks to the good folks at Sonora for the pub!

-- SC

ATOMIC LOVE

OK, so here's the truth. I know Brent McKnight. He's easily one of the coolest people I've met in years and I would probably pay money to hang out with him and talk about Red Dawn and Zombies. Not only that, but he GETS me (or at least my book). You know? I mean, I'm not so old that I can't appreciate that. Read his review if not the book itself. And next time you see him, give him a big ol' greasy man-hug from me. This is probably my favorite thing that anyone has said about my book.

peas. -- SC

On Craft and Form in TDATDA: Newport Review

Friends,

Click on the "Nonfiction" link on their Home Page to read an excerpt from TDATDA and an interview where I talk about the use of fiction in my memoir, our collective understanding of apocalypse, and other stuff in the latest issue of the Newport Review, edited by the super-cool, Kathryn Kulpa.

Oh, and don't miss the art! I LOVE this image from the nonfiction page.

-- SC

Grassroots Reader Recruitment

My Fellow Mutants,

I've recently been forced to face some new realities about the publishing world. And inspired in large part by the work of my friend, Dave Griffith, I figured what better way to explore/essay into this new landscape than by "publishing" an essay of mine, "I'm Just Getting to the Disturbing Part" that appeared originally in what may be my all-time favorite magazine for nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and was nominated by them for a Pushcart Prize and included as a Notable Essay in the 2008 Best American Essay. It's also included in the textbook, Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction alongside many of my writing heroes. The essay is now part of a larger manuscript (very tentatively) titled Bright Orange Fear: Adventures in Adulthood, a manuscript. I'm proud of this piece and I hope you'll read it and pass it on to others.

Thanks for reading!

BIG LOVE. -- SC