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Sabbath Night - Comparable to Other Falco Writing?

Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha is far from Ed Falco’s first book, in fact it’s his third collection of short stories alone, to go along with a poetry chapbook, two standard novels, a hypertext novel, a collection of short fictions, and other assorted individually published works.  So how does it fit in with his other work?  If you've decided to check out his work based on anything that’s been written or podcasted here this week, does the rest of his work fit the descriptions you’ve seen?

At least so far as the standard fiction goes, it very nicely fits what you’ve seen this past week.  Especially the short fiction, as Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha is a collection of New and Selected Stories, and the selections come from his past two collections – Plato at Scratch Daniel’s (University of Arkansas Press, 1990), and Acid (Notre Dame University Press, 1996).

Not that I’d go so far as to say that Falco has a specific formula, but many of his stories do approach similar themes and do so in similar ways.  Maybe I actually am just trying to convince myself that his short fiction doesn’t follow a formula, but if I do allow myself to agree with any who would state such, I may come away from such an agreement with even more appreciation for his work.  To be able to follow a formula over a dozen times within a single collection and have each work hold up both on its own, and within the collection is pretty damn impressive.

While there is frequently violence, or at a minimum disturbances, in Falco’s short fiction, it is rare that the violence is the focus of the story.  The violence is not even always the impetus that moves his main character forward, instead it is frequently an underlying violence, or tucked away behind the actions of the main characters.  It’s almost as if Falco is writing his stories while his local news report is on behind him, sneaking its way into his work.

Interview with Ed Falco

The following is an interview with Ed Falco, author of Winter in Florida, Plato at Scratch Daniel’s, Acid, Sea Island, A Dream with Demons, a prose poem chapbook , and many plays.  He is the recipient of many a literary award and teaches at Virginia Tech.  Much more information can be gleamed from his website and blog, www.edfalco.us.

ALL MATERIAL IN BRACKETS IS ED FALCO SPEAKING IN THE VOICE OF DAN WICKETT.

Dan:

Hello Ed, thank you very much for taking some time from your schedule to respond to some questions today.

Ed:

You're welcome, Dan.  I have to warn you, though, it's been a crazy busy day and it's late, so this will be a laid-back interview.  I hope you don't mind.

Dan:

[No problem, Ed.  Fine with me.]  How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a writer?  How did you come about realizing it?

Ed:

I started writing poems at age 17 to––what else?––impress a girl.  Guess I shouldn't tell you her name, huh?  We were both on the literary magazine staff, as I recall.  Good memories . . .  The poems, though, were terrible.  Bad imitations of e.e. cummings.  I published one in the magazine, and I still blush at its startling badness when I come across it.

Dan:

[You still have your high school magazines around?  So . . .] you published three books in 2005 – what was more exciting, this fact, or the publishing of your first two books within a couple of months of each other back in 1990?

Ed:

I guess getting out those first two books was a big deal.  I thought I never was going to get a book published.  I had come close to publishing a book again and again, through competitions, with commercial presses, but something always went wrong.  I was near forty before Arkansas took Plato, and then Soho took the novel a few months later.

Dan:

[Actually, Ed, you were 40 when that first book came out, which is really kind of old for a first book.  But since then] you’ve published with publishers of various sizes – both independent and university affiliated, not to mention hypertext.  What sort of differences have you seen between the various publishers who have taken on your work?

Publisher's comments

I’ve been a short story guy from way back and first became a fan of Ed Falco’s when we published one of his stories, “The Gift,” in The Missouri Review in the mid-eighties. This is a classic, by the way, one I think could stand to be in every anthology of American fiction there is. Over the years we published several more of his stories, and I began looking for his work in other magazines.  He has a voice that you trust as a reader, and a skilled, artful way of telling layered stories that are about something important. His stories are filled with plot and believable characters who are often so clearly realized you feel as though you know them. Often these characters have some dark flaw—either of basic personality or arising out of circumstance—that they must face, if not overcome, in order to protect their family, especially their children, from some real physical or emotional catastrophe that arises with sudden unexpectedness—a brush with outside evil—or from their own private demons that have been buried in the past. They ask moral questions, force risky moral choices, and in many ways are very traditional pieces, but with a distinctly contemporary edge, with a tension that can build to a razor edge in a flash, without a lot of commotion. Some of these turn out well enough, some become cautionary tales. All of them are emotionally complex, tinged with ironic or unexpected consequences.

            For a long time, Fred and I have wanted to publish a story collection. But they’re difficult to do successfully for a commercial publisher because the sales are so often not what you would hope they’d be. For whatever reasons—I have a few ideas, but they’re only theories—people don’t tend to buy story collections. There are, of course, exceptions every year, but the exceptions are so unpredictable. Still, we both admire the form and love reading stories ourselves. And part of our mission at Unbridled—as its been everywhere, really—is to support the best voices we can find, over the long haul whenever possible, and to publish work that we believe has a chance to last.

            I absolutely love Ed Falco’s writing—it has everything I look for in fiction. He has a large body of work but he hasn’t reached a broader audience that I think he deserves. We decided that if we ever were going to do a story collection, this one was it. We decided to make it a selected works because he has such a large opus that, for whatever reasons, hasn’t yet reached that large audience and we wanted to make a statement—we wanted to tell people that, hey, here’s a guy who is one of the very best practitioners of the short story form, and has been for years, and now you have this chance to read him, perhaps see what you’ve missed. I’m very proud, and Ed should be proud, that every story in this collection stands on its own. There are no fill ins. We were very careful about making sure that every story we included paid off.

Greg Michalson

From Ed Falco

I think it might be worthwhile to talk a bit about what exactly it is we mean by “literary fiction.” Ed Champion asked me, in the podcast interview, if I considered myself a literary writer, and I said that I did. Completely. I certainly aspire to being a writer of literary fiction. That answer was easy for me, because I think all good writers, all really good writers, are literary writers. In David Milofsky’s otherwise generous piece on the Litblog Coop, titled “Bloggers nudge literary fiction to the presses,” he defines literary fiction as “those books that champion style above content.” Since I’ve heard so many good and complimentary things about David Milofsky, I’m going to guess that was just a hurried definition tossed off for a newspaper piece––because it’s just not right. Can you imagine saying that about any good writer? “She’s a really good writer. I love the way she emphasizes style over content!” I can’t. For me, that would always be a weakness in the writing. Great stylists––a James Joyce, a William Faulkner, a Gertrude Stein––make the language their signature. Their voice is so particular that you recognize it immediately. Hemingway was a great stylist. My old teacher, Ray Carver, was a stylist. None of these writers emphasized style over content. Rather, style and content merge, so that meaning arises out of how things are said as well as what is said. Purple writing emphasizes style over content. In good writing, in literary writing, style and content happen simultaneously.

I’m comfortable calling any fiction that struggles to honestly explore its subjects literary. It goes without saying, doesn’t it, that a book can be a huge commercial success and still be literary? All of J.D. Salinger’s writing comes immediately to mind. How many million copies of Catcher in the Rye have been sold by now? And the remainder bins are full of crassly commercial efforts that haven’t sold well at all. The opposite of literary fiction is not commercial fiction, but bad commercial fiction, books that are interested in exploiting their subjects rather than exploring them, exploiting them for sales or fame or self-aggrandizement or (and one current book seems like a good example of this) all three.

I think we need to guard against literary writing being defined as esoteric or effete. Literary writing, for me, is just another way of saying serious writing, of saying good writing.

WINTER NOMINEE #4: EDWARD FALCO'S SABBATH NIGHT IN THE CHURCH OF THE PIRANHA

I first heard of Edward Falco from a friend who was reading his stories. He recommended I make it a priority to check this writer out. Unfortunately, I had long ago decided that the stacks of books in my home dictate that I can't follow up on many recommendations, no matter how trusted, so I put off reading Falco for a couple months until I received a proof of his novel Wolf Point in the mail.

A little ways into Wolf Point, I couldn't understand why my friend liked Falco's writing so much. Sure, the story was engaging (I finished it in less than a day), but the characters seemed stock and I figured I could tell where the book was going. But the more I read, the more I watched Falco reveal the intricacies of each of his three characters and the more I saw how exceptionally well Wolf Point was crafted. When I told my friend I had read Falco, our verdict was immediate: his work is extremely well-handled.

Like Wolf Point, the stories in Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha feature characters that you think you know. Most often, they're men; men with a very palpable masculinity that is being suppressed. They're responsible parents, or pimply teens, or lost twentysomethings.

At the start of any of these stories you know these characters. But over the course of 10-20 pages Falco shows you that you really don't. The protagonist's other side comes bubbling out, irrepressible, and the story is how they manage the transition. They learn--just as you learn--that they're not as straightforward as it seemed. Some of them embrace change, others struggle to maintain their former selves. What's constant is the fact of reevaluation, the continual shift of identity as people must deal with new facts that they remember and discover about themselves.

What I dislike about many short stories that depict internal transitions like these is they they're not really stories. They're more like internal meditations, prolonged monologues that never exit the protagonist's head. There's no scenes, no gripping interactions, no suspense, no drama, nothing to force me to read on.

But not Falco. If there's one thing the man knows how to do, it's tell a story. There's drug smuggling, father-daughter confrontations, teen sex, chess matches, cars lit on fire, arguments in diners--whether sensational or everyday, Falco's stories have meaty plots. There's always more than one thing going on, and Falco brings these multiple lines together in interesting ways. In Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, he provides the story; it's up to you to figure out what it means.

We're going to discuss Sabbath Night the week of February 6 through February 12. Be sure to read a few of these stories and then come back ready to talk. Among other things, on Thursday, February 9, Greg Michalson of Unbridled Books will discuss why they published Sabbath Night, as well as why they publish literary fiction in general, and will respond to your questions in the comments field.

Update: Ed Falco will be discussing Sabbath Night, publishing, and writing on Wednesday, Feb. 8. He'll also respond to your questions.