Vigorously Lazy

Gonna be in or near Brooklyn tonight? Come out to Soda Series, a new event where a bunch of talented writers get their brains together to talk about literature and writing and such. This evening’s line-up: Dawn Raffel, David Peak, Ana Božičević and Edward Mullany. Count on seeing me there.

Tonight in DC. 3500 K Street Northwest. My friends in Bluebrain are curating a night of jams and love. We sponsored the whole deal. What does this mean? Well, it means you may or may not be able to get your hands on a free copy of Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice. You’ll just have to go and find out.8pm. BYOB.

I was clicking around the Narrow House website doing a bit of research for this and came across The Understanding Campaign. Justin Sirois, author of MLKNG SCKLS, has made it his mission to erase taboos and stereotypes against Arabic cultures by starting with one word, understanding. Buy a button or a sticker, take a pic, send it to Justin and spread the word. Literally.

On a note completely unrelated to words:

Oil spill got you down? Shave your head! Matter of Trust collects human and animal hair to soak up oil spills not unlike the one that is murdering the gulf coast as you read this. Click here to sign up and donate! And, as the website specifies, no pubes please.

Random thoughts:

I lose books sometimes. Subway platforms, in the seat pockets on the plane, under friends couches. I try not to get to bent about it when it happens. I figure there was a reason the book left me before I had a chance to finish it. It was needed elsewhere. The universe heard someone’s plea for good reading, so the book cemented itself down and I moved on.

This happened with “Adam Robison and Other Poems by Adam Robinson.” It cemented itself somewhere, underneath a chair, I assume, according to the whims of the universe, and I kept walking. But I was really enjoying that book a lot. So I said, “You know what, Universe? Not this time,” and I went onto Narrow House and bought myself another copy. I usually don’t do this when I lose a book. I see it as a sign that it was probably in my best interests to lose the book, like if I’d kept it I would be reading and walking somewhere and get hit by a bus.

Still, I threw caution to the wind. I took my life in my own hands and I clicked “order.” Sometimes the universe tests you, to see how much you really care about something. It tests your will and fortitude. Not because the universe is trying to be a dick or anything, but to teach you something about yourself that maybe you didn’t know before. Or maybe to remind you of something you needed to be reminded of.

How often do people talk about the volume of a voice? I love these poems because they shout. They shout cause the PA is broken, so the folks in back can hear. Volume can sometimes be grating, but when the subjects you’re writing about are love, friendship and influential historical figures, that volume can wake the audience up.

There’s a recent Paper Cuts post that talks about the relevance of poetry. It’s an enlightening read, well worth you time, but I bring it up because of a David Foster Wallace quote that gets invoked:

“I think avant-garde fiction has already gone the way of poetry. And it’s become involuted and forgotten the reader. Put it this way, there are a few really good poets who suffered because of the desiccation and involution of poetry, but for the most part I think American poetry has gotten what it’s deserved. And, uh, it’ll come awake again when poets start speaking to people who have to pay the rent.”

Robinson’s poetry hasn’t forgotten the reader. In fact, it’s shouting at the reader, asking, “Will you please live your life?” asking them “Will you please recognize the beauty that is around you? Will you please wake up and live and love and get hurt and laugh and then love some more?” This is why I’m not that upset I lost my first copy of this book. These are sentiments that need spreading. And the universe knows that.

Buy it from Narrow House.

I don’t know if the online writing community planned it this way, but May is a kick ass month for short stories. Must be the weather. Everyone’s been hard at work for the last four months, holed up in their apartments, toiling away at the desk. Spring is the time to reveal all the madness you’ve been ruminating on over the winter. However, that argument is a bit dissolved up here in New York, where it’s 50 degrees out. And that sort of weather just doesn’t make any sense.

SSM (looks real dirty in acronym form) is in full swing over at EWN with an in-depth analysis of Alyson Hagy’s “Brief Lives of the Trainmen” which I have not read but looks interesting as all get-out.

Meanwhile over at Everyday Genius, Annalemma contributor and force-of-nature, Amelia Gray has been kicking ass for the past four days by producing work under the restrictions and restraints offered up by Adam Robinson.

Also, while I can’t find it on their website, the new issue of PANK apparently went live yesterday. Some great offerings this month by the likes of past Annalemma contributors Aubrey Hirsch and Ryan W. Bradley, as well as impressive work from Shanna Germain and Nancy Carroll Moody. But the one that really rocked my world was Kyle Minor’s piece. Mainly because it hit so very close to home with some of my past writing. Applause and ouch, all at the same time.

Some amazing things to read this month, so for those of you that just read this blog and no other writing online (I know you exist, I spoke with you recently) then I suggest you explore the world of strange delights known as the online writing and publishing community. This is your challenge for the month of May!

If you’ve got some time to kill delving into a Tumblr check out Now I Remember, an ongoing collection of cell phone photos from Tino Razo, Neckface, Jerry Hsu, Curtis Buchannan, Jen Reynolds, Kevin Long, Aaron Bonderoff and Issue Six contributor, Todd Jordan. These folks did a show of all cell phone photos in Tokyo recently, and apparently liked it so much they’re not stopping. Add it to your feeder for an intermittent dose of raw goodness.

Buy it here from Keyhole Press.

Random thoughts:

It’s a rare thing to find yourself smiling from a piece of writing. Not smiling because the piece is ha-ha funny, but because you’re making a connection with a writer. It’s the feeling when the writer is trying to tap into an impulse or an idea within the collective consciousness, but in a way others have never done before. And you’re there to watch him nail it home with staggering accuracy. Almost as if the writer puts his arm around you, leads you to a quiet corner of a crowded room and shows you a hidden design in the wallpaper that says everyone in this room is a talking bunny. For this reason, you will find yourself smiling at every piece in William Walsh’s Pathologies.

It’s also pleasing to see a writer having fun and inviting the audience to do the same. Usually when a writer comes out the other side of writing a novel or short story collection, the scars and bruises from wrestling with language are visible in between the lines on the page. The pieces in Pathologies feel like effortless one-offs, written to maintain sanity in between wrestling sessions. However, I’ve usually been wrong in this assumption in the past. I read Mystic River some years ago and what read and felt like an effortless voice was the result of one punched-out computer screen and a near nervous breakdown.

These pieces are origin stories presented in a different way. Walsh slices his characters thin, then chooses which slice will show you their eventual trajectory. In the approx. 150 word piece “So Much Love in the Room,” a failing couple has a baby to save their marriage, in order to combat their hatred of failure. “The Wrong Barthelme,”  the writers Don B. and Frederick are shown in an almost Muppet-babies form, toddlers with Abe Lincoln beards and pipes, Frederick being punished for destroying a toy train set up by not being able to write while the other Barthelme’s type away. The piece “Diagnosis: Mustache” is simply the outgoing answering machine message for the TV show Diagnosis: Murder, explaining why Dick Van Dyke will not shave his new mustache not for you, not for anybody.

Not only is Pathologies refreshing in the regard that we get to see a talented writer having fun on the page, but it’s also inspiring. Writing doesn’t have to be this endeavor that eats away at your soul with every story you complete, with every novel you drag across the finish line. There’s nothing saying you can’t make a connection with a reader while still enjoying the hell out of the process. Well done, William.

Buy it here from Keyhole Press.

Issue Six contributor, Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection, Big Lonesome, and curator of Vermin on the Mount, a reading series hosted monthly in LA. We spoke over the phone last week concerning writing, work and the Navy.

A: So we had to postpone this cause you were at work?

JR: Yeah, I was at work, and the big pacific west coast time difference thing.

A: So where exactly do you work?

JR: I work at an Indian casino.

A: So what was happening? You guys were doing an installation or something?

JR: Yeah we were putting together something for a new promotion. It involved a bunch of graphics down on the floor.

A: What kind of work do you do at the casino?

JR: I’m a copywriter. I write all the ads. Do all the copywriting for the marketing department.

A: Do you get any inspiration for stories from your work?

JR: I do. I got a novel out of it. It’s kind of a mingling of my sordid past with on-the-job details.

A: What about from past jobs, not necessarily from your current one, do you take a lot of inspiration from job stories?

JR: I wouldn’t say a lot. Lately I have been. I haven’t worked all that many jobs, and I haven’t written too much about my experiences in the Navy. I certainly haven’t written anything about teaching. Advertising presents plenty of opportunities, different things to draw on. So I guess I have.

A: I read that you were in the Navy, but most of the stuff that I’ve read of yours doesn’t really reflect that. Do you feel like the Navy had any influence on you at all?

JR: Oh yes. It was a huge, huge influence for sure. I went to a private school. I thought the world owed me something. But the Navy very quickly disabused me of that notion. It was a really great experience. It was also a really terrible experience in the sense that it’s a pretty instantaneous loss of innocence. And that has nothing to do with wartime/peacetime, it’s just from being around a bunch of sailors 24/7. I imagine it’s the same in the Army or the Marines. Just living on a ship, going out to sea, spending a lot of time with people in the service, you get a pretty different view of things pretty quickly. It’s definitely what every 18-year-old needs.

A: Why the Navy?

JR: Because my dad was a naval officer and I needed to prove that I wasn’t like him. Little sarcasm there.

A: What kind of private school did you go to?

JR: Catholic school. Went to a catholic school in the suburbs of D.C. There were about 400 people in my class and I think I was one of about five that didn’t go on to college immediately after high school.

A: When did you move out to the West Coast?

JR: The navy stationed me. I enlisted and I got sent out to San Diego. A place I hated and swore I’d never go back to. And now here I am again 20 years later. I don’t know why I hated it then. It’s beautiful here. Maybe I didn’t like beautiful things.

A: Did you start writing when you were in the Navy?

JR: No, that would have been a recipe for ridicule. I didn’t start writing until college. Incidentally, I wrote my first essay about helicopter duty on the frigate I was stationed on. My teacher loved it. Maybe because it wasn’t a cancer story or a grandparent dying story or a losing virginity story like so many people who teach composition get to read.

But his response to my essay and the idea that someone would be interested in something I wrote was a huge inspiration.

A: How old were you then?

JR: About 20 I imagine.

A: Was this the turning point when you were like, “I wanna be a writer”?

JR: I had ideas of being a writer but it was just that. It was just kind of a romantic idea. And I was always a big reader. And that didn’t slow down at all in the Navy cause I got in a lot of trouble so I had a lot of time on my hands when I wasn’t allowed to leave the ship. I’d just read. There were different things that made me interested in writing, but after spending some time in the fleet, with people telling me what a stupid fuck-up I was, I began to believe it. So that kind of quashed any notion that I could be a writer.

But there was a writer in my family. So I guess it was always in the back of my mind. It’s kind of like, when someone you know is a singer or an actor or an athlete or whatever, there’s always that awareness of it as a real possibility. I guess it’s the same with firemen and cops. You see someone work at it and ultimately succeed at it and that makes it real for you.

A: Who was the writer in your family?

JR: I had a cousin who was a screenwriter. Mark Patrick Carducci. He passed away almost 13 years ago. He was an inspiring person in my life, because he worked so hard. His passion was horror, monster movies. And it was something he took a lot of shit for, frankly. People thought it was a phase he would grow out of, but it was what he really loved. No one could talk him out of it. I understood it wasn’t something to be talked out of. It was his passion, it was what he wanted to do.

He stuck with it and wrote a bunch of movies. Probably the one that most people are familiar with is Pumpkinhead.

A: No shit! I remember seeing the box for that whenever I would go to the video store with my parents and I remember it always scared the shit out of me.

JR: He wasn’t really a slasher horror kind of guy. He was into moral horror. “The things you do on this earth matter” kind of thing. So the slutty chick, she’s gonna die. The douchebag, he’s gonna die. They’re kind of rewarding to watch in that way because that kind of behavior, you don’t see it get punished anymore. Now the douchebag and the slut get their own reality show.

A: (laughter) They don’t get punished in literary fiction either.

JR: No. Well, that’s hard to say. It’s an old fashioned way of thinking. Maybe in Cormac McCarthy novels they get punished. Eventually.

But he wrote a lot of interesting things. He wrote Neon Maniacs. He did an episode of “Tales of the Darkside.” He was very busy. He wrote and filmed a documentary about Ed Wood that came out a couple years before the Johnny Depp film came out. It was called Flying Saucers Over Hollywood: The Plan 9 Companion. He was a very influential person in my life in the sense that I always also had unconventional tastes, whether in fiction or in movies. And his example has been one that has always encouraged me. He killed himself thirteen years ago. I miss him.

A: I wanted to talk a little about “Fight Songs.” What was the original title?

JR:  It changed. Sometimes I’ll change the title just to change its luck. And now I kinda do it compulsively. I think it had a couple of titles. But they were all really long. “Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow Needs a New Fight Song,” was one.

A: So I take it you weren’t upset that we had to change it.

JR: No. I was at a fiction workshop at a conference in Utah and Thomas Mallon gave the advice, “When dealing with editors, never change your title because they know if you change your title, you’ll change anything.” Which is really good advice, but it just so happens that titles are titles. Sometimes it can work against you to get too attached to things. And the other thing was I’ve been in advertising so long, you write a piece of copy you get input from twelve different places for twelve different reasons, and you just have to go back and do it again. It doesn’t mean the copy is wrong or the copy is bad, it just means the right set of circumstances hasn’t lined up where you hit the target. And I think that’s something that, when you’re working with a literary magazine, you’re not just working with an editor, but a whole slew of people. I think you told me it was a design problem, that the title was too long.

A: Yeah, it wasn’t fitting in the table of contents. We had everything in a center column and it was sticking way far into the gutter so my designer was like, “You gotta tell him to change it because we just can’t make it fit.”

JR: I think writers sometimes forget. If you’re interested in publishing, then the precious little thing you do at your desk becomes a collaboration. You gotta be flexible.

A: Where did this story originate?

JR: Boy, I don’t really remember. I lived in Playa Del Ray, where the story ends, for about five years. It has a really interesting history in that it was one of these failed resort places. And it had this whole pleasure palace and this kind of weird lagoon where they did boat races. If Venice Beach was supposed to be the next Venice, Italy, then Playa Del Ray was supposed to be the next Coney Island. But it was right at the mouth of the LA river, which before the corps of engineers took a whack at it, flooded regularly. So that whole resort area got wiped out. There was a film studio there. The company that made the Keystone Cops movies set up camp there and eventually moved on. It was kind of like a bust town. And a lot of the streets are named after people who tried to develop it. Kind of interesting in that way. But none of that’s in the story.

A: (laughs) I initially liked the story because of the voice of the narrator and the character of his girlfriend’s daughter. They seemed very real to me of the first read. How do you go about writing characters?

JR: I tend to be more about situation. You hear a lot of people talk about voice, but I’m always interested in what makes a good story. When you read a newspaper, you’re like “Oh, this is something interesting” and it’s usually not because of a person, it’s because of something that happened and I think that’s just where my interest is. So I start there.

I worked at an advertising agency in L.A. for a number of years and moved around to a couple different offices. I really did move into someone’s (old) office and find all of their stuff, just like in the story. But I didn’t find a secret blog, much to my disappointment. But I was kind of surprised that the person would leave so much personal data on their computer. And that person didn’t get fired. They just left. I was surprised the company would be like “Okay, here’s an office open with all this stuff in it, just go right ahead and take it, it’s all yours.”

Around the time I was writing the story, I was dating someone who had a daughter around the same age as Jessie. But that relationship ended badly and took a long time to end. So I did everything I could to make those characters not like the people that anyone who knew me might assume they were based on. If that makes any sense.

A: Why did you intentionally not make them like those people?

JR: There was enough drama as it is. I didn’t need to manufacture more. And I certainly didn’t want my ex to think that I was writing about or inventing scenarios with her daughter, which I certainly wasn’t. But that tension was always there in the story. I guess I was overly concerned with people getting the wrong idea. As the story took on a life of its own and the years passed, and then more years passed, it became harder to remember all the details about them and then move in the opposite direction. The characters just moved where they wanted to go, and I fought it in every draft. Maybe that’s why it took it so long to get published. Anyway, once I finally relented and let the story go where it wanted to go, then it felt true and I was able to trim off everything that didn’t belong.

A: How many years were you actually working on the story?

JR: It was a long time. Five maybe? After Big Lonesome came out in 2005, I was more interested in long-form fiction. Various novel projects I was working on. And then there was all these other extra curricular things that got in the way on and off over the years. So I was only writing a couple stories a year. So because I wasn’t really invested in writing short stories, I wasn’t sending them out as earnestly. But I think (Fight Songs) still probably racked up 20 or 25 rejections.

A: Let’s talk about “Big Lonesome.” I was really surprised by stories like “A Terrible Thing in a Place Like This” and “Red Cap” by how incredibly dark they were. They betray this kind of lighthearted swagger that I’d come to associate with your style. Do you search for that sort of balance between light and dark in your writing?

JR: When I wrote those stories I didn’t write them with a book in mind. I wrote the stories that I was interested in. I wasn’t thinking about a reader. Now I most certainly think about that balance, especially the swagger and the light heartedness. I still think I go to some pretty dark places. I’m thinking of the novel I’m working on now. But I think more than ever I’m focused on humor, or the possibility of humor.

A: How do you pursue that humor? Because I think it’s really hard to be funny unless you actually are funny. I find it hard to try to be funny. I find that humor just sort of happens and you’re not even really aware of it.

JR: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in some respect. It’s like Kafka’s bug. You wake up and you think you’re a bug and believe you’re a bug then you’re a bug. If you believe that what you’re writing is funny then it is. I think that’s the swagger that you’re talking about.

It does surprise me how few novels are funny. I just finished James Greer’s The Failure last week and it’s hilarious. It’s funny in the same way that Sam Lipsyte and Jack Pendarvis and Patrick Dewitt are funny. Dark and bleak kind of humor. But then I look back as I’m preparing for a reading, I have very few relatively funny pieces and a lot of really dark ones. So, go figure.

A: I laughed out loud on some of these stories. Like “Kessler Has No Lucky Pants” like the back and forth that was going on there. I think it was Sam Lipsyte who was talking about dialogue and he said it’s like a push and a pull. And I saw that in that story and thought it was really effective.

JR: That device, everyone calls it a Q&A, but it’s really a catechism. I just ripped it off. And Joyce used it to great comic effect in the penultimate chapter of Ulysses. He’s a lot funnier than I am. I don’t think a lot of people associate Joyce with humor, but he’s extremely funny, and Ulysses is, essentially, a comic novel. So that’s where I got the device from. And the great thing about that story is that at readings anybody can read the questions, and they can do it in any particular style. They can ham it up or they can be serious or they can be stumbling drunk and it really doesn’t matter. When I was touring I would get a member of the audience to read the questions, and it seemed to go over really well.

A: There are a lot of good aphorisms in BL, especially in “The Eggman.” What inspired that style of dropping profound knowledge in a story?

JR: Wasting a lot of time and money in bars.

A: (laughs)

JR: That’s usually where you hear those kinds of things. That barroom wisdom. Good for a chuckle and works in the dark but probably not a good idea to carry it around with you in the screaming light of day.

It was definitely a time in my life when, not only did I spend too much time, but I aspired to spend more. So maybe something good came out of it.

You know how it is. You’re in a bar and you’re by yourself, but a drunk will sniff you out. He or she will say something funny in the first minute or two. They’ll make you laugh, so you let your guard down, invite them in. And then they just make you miserable for the next hour or two.

A: (laughs)

JR: And then they’re talking you into going to buy some bad crank and then your life is ruined forever. All over some supposedly hilarious joke they told you.

That story came out of a road trip I took when I was in grad school to a conference in Albuquerque. I drove with a bunch of friends from Flagstaff. And when I got on the campus there were some protestors or some kind of demonstration and someone gave me this flower.  I carried this flower with me for the rest of the day, all through the night. I was just struck by how differently people talked to me because I had this ridiculous flower.

I remembered that when I was creating the situation for the character with the egg, having to carry it around, which I guess is a real anger management tactic. It teaches you empathy. To care for something fragile. Or some horse shit like that.

A: What’s the fascination with these pre-existing characters like Popeye and Dick Tracy?

JR: I’ve always been interested in the history of things. Origins of things. Popeye was an endlessly fascinating figure to research and read about. Dick Tracy too. It’s fun to write about things that people bring a lot of knowledge to it. So much of the heavy lifting has been done. You don’t have to describe Dick Tracy or Popeye. As soon as you do you can introduce some irony or humor or spin it in a different direction. When people bring something to the story, you can work against there expectations. I’m doing that a lot now with the novel I’m working on now.

I’ve always been a fan of trash literature. Crime novels, science fiction, comic books. I don’t think I really got into spaghetti westerns until I was in my 30’s. I imagine my interest in these things will always come and go. I’ve got this epic war story involving sea monkeys that I’ve been writing forever.

A: Lastly, if there’s anything you can tell me about the novel you’ve been mentioning…

JR: It’s somewhat autobiographical, an autobiographical ghost story. One of the main characters finds himself in this remote place and is haunted by the life he left in Los Angeles. He goes to work every day and gets into a bad routine involving drugs and alcohol. He’s haunted by what he left behind and haunted by this need that undermines his best intentions. And like myself and like the main character in Fight Songs, he’s a copywriter. In many ways I guess the character in Fight Songs is a prototype for the one I’m working on now.

A: Is this your first novel?

JR: No. If I publish it, it’ll be my first published novel. This is my fourth one I’ve written.

A: Have you tried to get the other three published?

JR: Try is a really… uh, yes.

(both laugh)

JR: They’re kinda in the drawer. I think I need to go back to them, spend some time with them. The first one I have no interest in ever thinking about again. The second one could use some re-imagining. And the third one is pretty close and I’ll probably go back to very soon.

A: I’m always fascinated by the amount of writing that a writer does but doesn’t necessarily get published. It seems like a very 10% to 90% ratio.

JR: Yeah, but the great thing is, I wrote it. No one can take it away from me. It’s ink on a page. You could come over to my house and read it. My daughter can read it 10 or 20 years from now. We can have a conversation about it. There’s nothing theoretical or abstract about it. We’re so lucky in the sense that we’re not struggling singer-songwriters or comedians or actors. What if you had your best moment, your finest hour, at an audition for a dandruff commercial?

A: (laughs)

JR: That would be a pretty hard thing to live with. What we do is still on the page. It’s all right there.

Click here to read more about Jim Ruland.

It’s that time of year again over at EWN when we celebrate the coolest thing in the world, short stories.

Read White Apple by current feature author Nick Antosca.

Full disclosure: I had the opportunity to publish White Apple but it got picked up before I had the chance to. When I told him that I read and liked it and wanted to publish something of his, Nick was professional enough to have an equally good story concerning sex and New York ready to go. Hence, Sofianne.

Read both of these (unbutton your collar first, though) and remember that short stories are one of those things that make life worth living.

Shannon Gerard is an illustrator, designer and artist based out of Toronto, Ontario. Novelist and indie publishing guru, Jim Munroe, recently tapped Gerard to pen the images for the latest installment of his graphic novel series, Sword of My Mouth. In Munroe’s post-rapture universe, literal magic is possible when a “field” is lifted from the earth by a mysterious entity, now making anything in the human imagination possible, like casting spells, mutating oneself into a fish-person and the rapture of millions of believers up into the stratosphere. The first installment, Therefore Repent! took place in Chicago, with familiar locales and landmarks playing a large role in the story. SoMM continues this theme by adopting the people and places of Detroit to tell the story of what happens in a world where the impossible is possible and who’s playing the angles to exploit the situation.

I spoke with Gerard via email regarding her artistic process, collaboration and urban gardening. Enjoy.

A: How did the SoMM project get started?

SG: Jim asked me to give him some feedback about Therefore Repent! way back before it was published and I was pretty excited about the story because I’d grown up in Christian youth group watching the Left Behind movies and hearing pretty serious takes on the Rapture. When SoMM came around, it was a really great opportunity for me to explore some of that weirdness and also address the humor in those childhood experiences through being part of Jim’s fictional world.

A: How much of the completed story did Jim bring to the table?

SG: I think he just knew that he wanted the story to be set in Detroit and maybe had a loose idea about the characters. Early on we took a research trip to the city with a very sketchy framework in place. I wanted to take as many pictures of the city as possible and Jim (I think) wanted to meet people and find out what issues were most important to the place for people really living there.

A huge leap for the story was seeing some of the urban gardens that exist in Detroit, especially the Catherine Ferguson Academy which is this amazing, fully producing farm with a wide range of vegetables, so many kinds of animals, a solar barn, a little orchard and an apiary. It is smack in the centre of a seriously depressed urban area. I’m guessing it is like 3 or more acres big. Amazing. The volunteers working there on the day we visited were incredibly open to showing us around and gave us so much to think about self-sustainability.

One of the mottos I noticed on a lot of signage in Detroit was “Say nice things about Detroit!”– as if people living there really believe in the power of stories to transform popular (and sometimes really wrong) opinions about places. Almost without exception, the folks we met were so happy and so eager to talk about their city to us.

So those research trips (we took 2) helped the story in SoMM to evolve.

A: How much of the obligation was on you to tell the story visually?

SG: I would not call it obligation since the dynamic between Jim and I while working was really open and equal. I never felt it was Jim’s story that I was interpreting or trying to “get right.” Since he involved me so much right from the beginning by inviting me to drive to Detroit with him, I felt like I understood his way of creating and knew where the tensions and plots and motivations of the book came from. We talked a lot about the characters and their relationships since that is so much the focus in my own work and it was really great how much freedom I had to communicate those emotional sub-plots and back-stories through the images.

Also, Jim was really open to my panel-less structure. Even though he gave me a script with traditional panel breakdowns, he was really into just letting me work all of his described panels into a page without organizing them so linearly. In a few instances, he gave me really specific instructions for layouts and those ended up being some of my favorite pages. I think he will not like the word “instructions” though since there was never a feeling of him telling me what to do. I had so much freedom and he even rewrote some dialogue to accommodate my drawings! Who gets that chance as an illustrator?! In a word, (the collaborative process was) amazing. I am so lucky to have such a great first experience with collaboration.

A: Can you describe your work process? Do you work with models? Any computer programs involved?

SG: I work with models who actually act out the story in improvised segments as I take pictures. I give them a lot of background information about their characters and relationships but we don’t read the dialogue at all since I do not want the images to look scripted. Candid human moments between the models are what is most important to me in drawing, so this process allows me to capture as much of that quality as I can. There is also everything the models themselves bring (as improv actors) to the story that shows up in the drawings. By not reading the script but just playing the story out, I was able to draw upon so much that felt real and in that way told my own version of the story, along with and in support of Jim’s script. Lucky for me that he never felt threatened or weird about that but embraced it as part of the book.

After I have like 500 more photos than I actually need, I go through them and choose the ones that reveal or represent the best moments from people. So many times, I am compositing pictures from multiple shoots because the models are rarely all available at the same time. Then I make photo-based mock ups of the pages and print and trace those photos as drawings. (Using my beloved micron 0.2 pens. I went through literally hundreds of those pens on this book!) My favourite example of the compositing of separate shoots into one drawing was a page on which two characters hug. The models in that embrace could not meet on the same day, so in both shoots, they hugged a stand-in. Then later I drew them hugging each other. The stand-in was the same person in each shoot, so if you could see behind the curtain where he was edited out, you’d have a drawing of him hugging himself.

I don’t draw the pages as they look in the book but work on individual frames. Then I use photoshop to composite the drawings into the layouts that appear in the final story. It is a time consuming process to not draw the pages as whole compositions, but I like how much freedom it gives me to make choices about character relations and page design as I go along.

A: When did you do your first comic and was there a particular artist that inspired you to play with that form?

I guess I started working on comics in 2003 or so when I made this stupid inside-joke static type comic about the bookstore I worked at. That embarrassing PoS was called Five Finger Discount.

My inspiration to make comics did not really come from another visual artist but from essayist Annie Dillard. I was drawing a lot and also writing a lot and then read a piece in which she described the realization that she could be a writer without being a novelist. She said that deciding to write creative non-fiction and poetry felt like switching from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra. That made such exact sense to me and I started to play with mixing text and images and with making artist’s books.

A: How does working in a short form compare to a full-length graphic novel?

SoMM is my first long form project. It was a huge challenge to work for so long on telling one story, but I am lucky to have done it as a collab. I’m not sure I would have had the faith in my own work over such a long period.

A: Did you study any graphic novels before starting work on SoMM? Any influences?

SG: I didn’t study any works in particular but I looked to my heroes for a lot of inspiration: Rutu Modan, Jillian Tamaki, and Lynda Barry. I also read a lot of my favorite prose to keep up the moony, emotional floatiness I like while drawing: Miriam Toews, Michael Ondaatje and Kathleen Norris.

A: How long did the it take to complete the work?

SG: Over a year. I clocked around 1000 hours.

A: Do you have any plans for future graphic novels?

SG: Yes, I am working on a collection called Unspent Love; Or, Things I Wish I Told You. Not a long form story though. It is a collection of small prose-poemy vignettes.

There is also a slow burning story in the works about my father’s childhood.

And I am also trying to tie up, once and for all, my older series Hung by printing a fourth story over top of the first story. A printer’s error in 2005 ended up giving me an extra 200 or 300 copies of Hung #1, which I am now so embarrassed by (that’s good right?), so I am resolving some of that anxiety by using a letterpress to overprint Issue 4 on top of the older books.

Sword of My Mouth is available now and can be purchased here.