THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Q&A: Brian Lam

Brian Lam is the publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press, based in Vancouver, Canada.

Q (Matt Cheney): What did you think when you first read ManBug?

A (Brian Lam): I immediately liked it -- I've always liked George's work, though, beginning with his contributions to some of our anthologies such as Contra/Diction: New Queer Men's Fiction. There is a sense of inquiry about his work that is gentle yet persistent.... George always wishes to challenge himself as a writer, and I really respect that.

Q: What was the editing process for the book?

A: It was a very amiable process -- George was willing and able to work on the book editorially, to hone the characters and make the narrative as compelling as possible. From an editor's point of view, it was excellent because the original material was so good.

Q: Did marketing considerations come into play at all?  Was there a particular sort of audience you thought would be receptive to the book, or one that you wanted to reach for?

A: I think positioning a novel as "gay" has both advantages and shortcomings; obviously it is a core audience and we need to identify the novel as such to that audience, but at the same time we don't want to ghettoize it, because the book's themes are universal. There is a double-standard about so-called "gay" literature that believes such works only resonate for gay readers, but that is absolutely not the case. The best "gay" novels are ones which touch on issues that have meaning for everyone. The Hours is a good example of that, which made more people talk about it, since its themes are universal, but could be construed as lesbian, and was written by a gay man.

Q: Is gay fiction a real category or a desirable category or a passe category or...

A: There will always be a need for "gay fiction" as a category because gay men and lesbians often first look to literature in order to better understand themselves and to give meaning to their lives. It isn't merely a marketing ploy. But again, there is a risk of ghettoizing, which doesn't happen with other books about minority communities. Would anyone suggest that Alice Walker only appeals to black readers? Of course not.

Q: Are there challenges to publishing in both Canada and the U.S.?

A: The main challenge as a Canadian publisher is the need to find an audience outside of Canada, since the country is so small--its population is less than California's. We wouldn't be able to publish the kind of literary books we do without having access to the US market.

Q: Are there similarities and/or differences in audiences between the two countries?

A: I don't think there are any measurable differences in audiences, but as Canadians we do look for books that speak to ourselves, being inundated as we are by American cultural products.

Q&A: George Ilsley

Q (Matt Cheney): With so many other possible things to do in the world, why write?

A (George Ilsley): This is the hardest question on the list, because there is no clear answer.  It probably has something to do with the influence of books in the life of a sensitive bookish boy growing up in a rural area of Nova Scotia.  Books and language brought the whole world to me as a reader, and now language and writing helps me somehow to better understand the world.  Books are still a major source of inspiration in my life, and books themselves make me want to write.  Reading and writing are very intimately intertwined.  Whatever the reason, I did start writing as a child, and my first "book" was about tropical fish.

Q: When a friend of mine read the back cover of ManBug, where Sebastian is described as "an entomologist with Asperger's Syndrome" and Tom as "a dyslexic bisexual", she said, "Why does every character in contemporary fiction have to have quirky descriptions!?"  I was a little scared when I started reading the book, myself, because I worried that it would feel like some kind of extended writing-workshop exercise -- "Give your first character 3 attributes and your second character 3 different attributes, and then write a story!" -- but I thought the labeling worked wonderfully, because the characters seem (to me, at least) aware of living in a label-addled world, and part of the fascination of the book for me was watching Sebastian and Tom play with, struggle against, embrace, and cast off labels.  I think there's a question in here somewhere.  Something like, maybe: What do you think of labels?

A: The fit and application of labels is a major theme in ManBug.  There is a human impulse to use clear labels (right and wrong) but we live in a world where meaning is incremental, relative, and contextual.  For example, the character Sebastian wonders as an adult if the diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome might have applied to him, but this diagnosis was never made.  Autism is considered as presenting on a "spectrum," and a particular diagnosis for an individual is often not clear.  Similarly, human sexuality is often labeled gay or straight, but the Kinsey scale gathers everyone together on a continuum of expression, where a label is best used to describe a type of behaviour, but not a person.  The binary expectations of a label-crazy world do not match the reality of experience.  Everyone uses labels, yet the meaning of labels often does not translate into a substance the literal-minded can comfortably grasp.  Sebastian at first looks to labels to help bring order and structure to his world, but eventually he learns that he must instead, in the world of men, become comfortable with paradox.

Q: How did you develop the narrative voice of ManBug?

The voice of ManBug developed over several years.  I have early drafts which I felt were unsuccessful.  However, the voice of Sebastian did emerge and then the book became his book.  At one point I had intended there be two voices, that Tom and Sebastian would each present his version of events.  However, I never felt comfortable with the "Tom" voice, and so now even the parts about Tom are intended to be Sebastian repeating what he has learned from Tom.

Q: Are there any books you've enjoyed reading recently?  Any perennial favorites?

A recent favorite is Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.  Works I enjoy even more with each re-reading are Mark Merlis's novels (American Studies and An Arrow's Flight) and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Q: Will you be dressing up for Halloween?

The short honest answer is "no."  However I do dress up every day as half-man, half-geek.  My personal fashion statement is "clashing is good."

Welcome to ManBug Week

It's ManBug Week here at the LBC, which means we'll have all species of posts popping up through the next few days.  Today we'll try to get some discussion going, and Tuesday I'll post a Q&A with Arsenal Pulp publisher Brian Lam and another with the man who made ManBug, George Ilsley himself.  George will, we hope, put up some of his own posts later in the week, as will various intrepid LBC members, and we'll wind things up with our now-traditional podcast interview.

I thought I'd start things off with some questions designed to get some discussion going in the comments.     For those of you who read the book and enjoyed it, what kept you reading?  What did you make of the characters and their situations?  I've said I found the narrative voice fascinating; was this true for you?

If you'd rather talk about something else, here's a topic that is central to the book and that both George and Brian address, in different ways, in their Q&As: What is the value of labels?  In ManBug, the characters try on various labels (Tom at one point calls himself a dyslexic bisexual Buddhist; Sebastian is identified as a gay entomologist with Asperger's), sometimes finding them useful, sometimes finding them constricting.  Are we in a post-label world?  What about the label of "gay fiction"?  Are you, regardless of your own sexual identification, attracted or repelled by books that are marketed as such?  Is it just a marketing category, or is it something more (or less)?

Sidney Thompson’s “The Chameleon”

Some of the stories in Sideshow are really violent; some are sexually explicit; some are both. I will confess, prude that I am, that I do not gravitate to sex and violence in my reading tastes. This is a beautifully written and disturbing book but it’s not my taste. Still, prudery aside, it can be easier to write about a “freak,” about someone who belongs in a sideshow, if you give her incestuous desires or an extensive knife collection. The freaks who interest me more are the less obtrusive ones. Like the chameleon of this story.

Shattered by his wife’s departure, Arnold spends weekends in bus depots, striking up conversations with strangers. He’s got five depots in a regular rotation—from home base in Memphis to St. Louis, Little Rock, Jackson, and then Memphis again. Having caught the bus in Memphis, and remembering vividly the plastic chairs bolted together, the cigarette smoke, the bay of five or six buses, I loved this story all the more for my being able to conjure the spot. The sorry, lonely location comes as a surprise—when you first arrive it doesn’t feel as disconnected as it is. Like so many bus stations, it is not a long walk from downtown, but just far enough to discourage you from wandering, lest your bus come early. So there you are, stuck, five blocks from anything you might want to do, wondering if it’s worth complaining that the JuicyFruit gum you just bought is stuck in the vending machine.

What’s so poignant in “The Chameleon” is the dramatization of intense loneliness and fear: Arnold has developed a system worthy of a Beckett protagonist. He carries a duffel bag full of props to make starting the conversation easier—campaign buttons, a “solid black mourner’s tie,” and an arm sling, “which he always wore for meeting elderly women.”

A great short story makes its own world and leaves us wanting more even as we are satisfied. This one does just that. We only get a few of Arnold’s rules (no talking to couples, no talking to anyone who is reading or writing), but they’re enough to evoke a whole world of rules designed—futilely, pathetically—to guard against future hurt.

LBC Podcast #1: Sidney Thompson

Nominator: Jeff Bryant

Nominee: Sidney Thompson

Subjects Discussed: Faulkner vs. R.E.M., Southern fiction, how music influences fiction, observing unusual behavior, Thompson's musical background, family as a starting point, taboos, the happy medium between shock value and playing it safe, stereotypes, believability, escaping into fiction, misfits and loners, connecting with despicable characters, morality in fiction, racial assumptions at the Atlantic Monthly, presenting racial conflict in fiction, and thoughts on the Southern fiction/blue-state fiction divide.

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky's Paperhaus, and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Sideshow's Sideshow: "The Romanticist and the Classicist"

Imagine that you're the fiction editor of a well-respected magazine, a publication that has devoted untold pages to some of the biggest names in the writing business.  One day you're digging through the submissions and you stumble upon one that catches your eye.   Maybe it's the title.  Perhaps it's the first paragraph.  Whatever it is, you decide to give it your full attention.  What you've found is an interesting story narrated by a young African American.  On the most basic level, it's about the revenge of a cuckolded husband, a plot you've seen a million and two times.  So what's the twist to this one?  Well, to start, the narrator isn't your typical teenager.  He can quote the Classics like no one's business.  His father makes sure of that, spitting out lines from Virgil and Aeschylus and making the boy finish the sentence or quizzing him on the origin or some other detail related to the quote.  And we're not talking a northern prep schooler here.  This is a rural family, Southern, probably poor.  So what does this have to do with the cuckolded father?  Well, the man has decided to use this act of revenge, what will end up being the murder of a lifelong friend, as a lesson for the boy, another brick in his Classical foundation.  He has the boy tag along to the friend's house where they find him "in his recliner in front of the television watching wrestling and eating a can of pork and beans."  Before long, the father and son go through this somewhat hilarious routine, an absurd Abbott and Costello, where they go back and forth quoting and referencing the Classics, basically confusing the hell out of this poor guy who just wanted to watch his wrestling.  Maybe that's why it reminds you a little of a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie.  Or maybe it's the way they ultimately kill him.  First the father decides to take out the poor guy's appendages, shooting him in the arms and legs, an act of torture forcing the man to admit his transgression.  But in the end, it's the son, angered by the man's repeated attempts to invoke the name of the Lord, who grabs the gun and, after quoting Keats--"Truth is beauty"--shoots the man in the head.  What really gets you is the fact that the father doesn't seem upset by the act, but he's rather miffed that the boy would utter a quote from a Romantic.  Didn't the boy learn anything?

So you like the story with its interesting take on a fairly common plot.  In fact, you like it enough to publish it in your venerable magazine.  However, there's one nagging question, one that needs to be put to rest before you're willing to put this one in a future issue.  See, one of the more disturbing parts of this story is the use of the n word.  There it is, first page, used several times by the father who is trying to make the boy understand that what they are about to do "does not make us niggers."  As the fiction editor of a well-respected publication with a vast, mostly educated and often liberal readership, you know that that word is a powder keg waiting to go off, and when it does, it'll probably take you with it.  So what do you do?  The story deserves to be published, that much is established, but only under one condition.  See, you probably don't hang with many black folks but you do know that they tend to use the word quite a bit.  After all, you've heard the rap music.  So if this writer is an African American, well, then it's a go, the writer's race being a potential "Get out of PC jail free" card.  Now, how do you find out if he's black?  He doesn't say so in his cover letter, but he did say that he went to the University of Arkansas, and damn if you don't know a professor there.  A simple phone call, a question, and holy mother of Mark Twain, this writer isn't black.  He's a white Southerner.

What do you do?

You reject the story, right?

Wouldn't you?

Well, that's what The Atlantic did.  Or something like that anyway.

Author Interview - Sidney Thompson

The following is an interview with Sidney Thompson, author of the short story collection, Sideshow (2006, River City Publishing).  He lives in Alabama with his wife, Jennifer Paddock.

Dan:

Hello, Sidney.  Thank you very much for taking some time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions.

Sidney:

Happy to, Dan.  Thanks for your interest.

Dan:

When exactly do you remember getting the reading and writing bug.

Sidney:

I first became obsessed with writing the summer after my sophomore year in high school.  My brother gave me a collection of poetry by Richard Brautigan for my birthday, and I remember it was quite an epiphany for me to learn that verses didn't have to end in rhymes.  I thought, that I can do.

Dan:

You received your MFA from University of Arkansas - Fayetteville.  Who did you study under while there?

Sidney:

I studied primarily under Donald Hays, Bill Harrison, and Jim Whitehead, a trio of great teachers.

Dan:

Sideshow has ten stories in it, how many of them did you write while you were in your MFA program?

Sidney:

Six of these ten were my thesis, but two of those six were first written while I was an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi, studying under Barry Hannah, who was actually the first person to graduate from Arkansas' MFA program.  Essentially, and thankfully, I went where Barry told me to go.

Dan:

How did you end up with your collection being published by River City Publishing?

From the Author

Hi, I'm Sidney Thompson, the author of Sideshow. First, I'm grateful to be a Litblog Co-op finalist, so thank you, everyone, for nominating my collection (Jeff Bryant), voting for it, reading it, and giving it (so far) such high praise. Happy stuff.

Now, for today, as if I'm not grateful, I'm asking for more. As the day's guest blogger, I'm inviting any and all questions and comments about Sideshow as a whole, or the stories in particular. I'm always fascinated by readers' reactions to my work. Often I get the sense that people are hesitant to admit their reactions. (I've come to that conclusion based primarily on the queerly vague, sometimes highly positive, rejection notices I've received over the years from countless magazines and literary journals). It's obvious, I suppose, that I'm making an effort in each story to be, at some level, sensational, to elicit the reader's emotions, but my goal might be less obvious: to encourage an honest self-examination as to why the reader responded with laughter or with shock or with embarrassment, etc., and for him or her to consider what this says behaviorally or philosophically about his or her assumptions, or biases, or about our human state in general.

My father disowned me for writing one of the stories in this collection. What will your reaction be?

Sidney Thompson short story: The Man Who Never Dies

"The Man Who Never Dies" is the kickoff short story in Sidney Thompson's collection, "Sideshow", and it's also the apparent source of the book's title.  Life is definitely a parade of carnival characters in Sidney Thompson's world, and in this warm but comic story the hero has to deal with one particularly tough character: a show-off father whose oppressive personality and over-enthusiasm for sports soured this narrator from a young age.  But he's now a relatively happy and centered FedEx worker, husband and father, and when he takes his family to a town carnival and visits the eponymous tent of freaks, a haphazard array of life metaphors fill his senses: an eternally old man (the "man who never dies") who remembers the narrator's father, an alligator woman whose uniqueness is rooted in skin disease, an enticing "world's smallest horse" that simply isn't there at all, disappointing the narrator's sweet daughter.  It's a very satisfying story, especially at the end when the quietly-suffering narrator finally takes his anger out on an unwitting ball game operator in a very human way.  Great start for an excellent collection of stories ...

The Floater

"Larry Havard had spent almost every free weekend of his life hunting in the South Mississippi woods of his home county, but for almost a month now, at age thirty-three, he hadn't had the heart to kill one thing.  Not after his house caught fire and he lost the best bird dogs he'd ever owned or heard of, two full-blooded retrievers, to smoke inhalation."

So begins The Floater, one of the stories from Sidney Thompson's story collection.  With these two sentences, Thompson pretty much completely sets his readers up for what will follow over the next 17 pages or so.  Reading that first paragraph we know who we're going to be reading about, Larry Havard, and we know what his biggest problem is, his sudden inability to kill, and what caused this problem, the horrible death of his two dogs.

As we get later into the story we find out more, of course.  We find out just how important King-Size and Copperhead, the two deceased dogs, were to Larry.  We find out that his ex-wife has left him, while those dogs remained faithful.  Meanwhile, Thompson puts the plot into motion.  Larry, hoping to get by this sudden inability to kill (and it's just killing he's suddenly troubled with ("He could still clean meat and knife it up, but just couldn't bring himself to kill it."), goes looking for a replacement dog or two.  Not being flush, Larry goes looking at the pound where he finds "...was what the dog catcher had promised.  Nippers, lungers, and broken dogs withmange or missing parts."

The only dog that really grabs his attention is a quivering poodle.  He is warned that the dog has heartworm and was only brought in to be put down.  After trying to leave, Larry goes back in and takes the dog.  Hoping for a win/win situation, Larry plans on giving the dog a good final day, and maybe just find it within himself to kill again.  It is this decision that leads him down a path of more decisions and actions.

The title of the story refers to Larry's abilities in the area of hanging sheetrock, a floater is one who can make everything in that process seamless, eliminating problems from the house not being perfectly square, getting everything set so that when painted the appearance is a smooth one, no nails showing, etc.  It's a nice bit of irony on Thompson's part considering nearly every other aspect of Larry's life.

The Floater, brutal as it seems at times, comes across as something that could have come from the sad background of a real person.  Thompson gives Larry just enough of everything, hope, despair, sadness, and pain to make his effort and plight through the story more than just a little bit interesting.