Thank you, Steven Church—brilliant essayist, author of The Guinness Book of Me and
The Day After the Day After: My Atomic Angst, and editor of one of
my favorite literary magazines, The Normal School—for tagging me in The Next Big Thing.
I’ll be passing the torch to the stunning fiction writer, editor, and wonderful
person, Jennifer A. Howard, author of the book, How to End Up. Okay. Here is my self-interrogation:
What is the working title of the book?
My new poetry book, due out within the week (I’m told), is called The Morrow Plots—some crazy, murderous
Midwestern poetry. It blows the lid off
Illinois, it does. I also have a new nonfiction book coming
out in 2015 called Preparing the Ghost:An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It. It’s a segmented book-length essay full of
odd digressions, about Reverend Moses Harvey—the guy who, in 1874 St. John’s
Newfoundland, became the first person to take a photograph of an intact
specimen of the giant squid, thereby rescuing the beast from the realm of
mythology, and finally proving its existence.
The photo changed the ways in which we engaged the construct of the sea
monster.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
The Morrow Plots:
When I lived in Upstate New York—way up on the Canadian
border—during the awful winter, I became obsessed with The Morrow Plots, an
experimental cornfield on the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
campus. The local and campus agronomists
conduct important crop experiments there, and then disseminate the findings
among the U.S.’s farming industry. So,
it’s an important square of land, and hallowed ground in downstate
Illinois. You do not trespass on the
Morrow Plots. The legal and social
consequences for such things are dire.
The Plots are regionally revered.
Illinoisans lend the Plots this crazy holiness. I was born in Illinois, and I think I was
oddly homesick for the Midwest all the way up there near Canada among the
defunct Go-Kart tracks and Shining-esque hedge maze that my wife and I lived
behind (the area was a bedroom community for Manhattanite boaters in the summer
time, and so had all of these kitschy tourist traps that would go skeletal come
winter). Yes: We lived behind
MazeLand.
Upon researching old newspaper
articles from the 20s and 30s, I found that the Plots were then known as a
popular site for violent crime, and a dumping ground for bodies. And, if some mutilated remains went
unclaimed, the University of Illinois would claim them for “experimental
purposes.” And now, The Morrow Plots are
a National Historical Landmark. So
dealing with that discrepancy consumed me for a while. This is a great, if nauseating, way to sink
into the comfort of the winter blues.
But I was so glad to reemerge after that one. See some light after all the murder. But, the obsession came naturally, and acted
as that fulcrum on which I hung a bunch of murderous Midwestern things.
Preparing the
Ghost: At the AWP Conference in Washington DC, I went to the Smithsonian
Museum of Natural History and spied Harvey’s photo of the giant squid, strung
over his bathtub’s curtain rack in order to stretch it out to its full
size. The caption was about two skinny
lines long, and I copied it verbatim, next to the bourbon amoeba, onto the
cocktail napkin I stashed in my pocket the previous night. When I got home, I began researching Harvey
and found that the story of the photograph’s conception had not been
written. I thought I was going to
produce about five lean pages on the subject, until I tumbled down the
cephalopod rabbit hole, to invoke an inter-special metaphor.
What genre does your book fall under?
The Morrow Plots is some linked
research-based poetry. Preparing the Ghost is nonfiction—a
book-length lyric essay, I guess. But Preparing the Ghost is a weird one. I really don’t know what to call it. An editor at W.W. Norton, who rejected an earlier
version of the book, said some of the nicest things about it, and sort of tried
to categorize it in the (really nice) rejection. Here’s what he said:
Preparing
the Ghost is about how this photograph came to be, and how it’s lived on in
the cultural imagination. But whether or not Moses himself is the photographer
is actually up for dispute, as is almost every other piece of information in
the book--but this is not a weakness. Quite the opposite in fact; the
uncertainties, inferences, personal meditations, and historical reconstructions
that comprise the book make for a fascinating discussion of what mythology is,
why we cling to it, and how it ends if it ever does (after all, the giant squid
retains its mythical status despite the absurdly domestic photograph). This
lively piece of cultural criticism is shot through with discussions of just
about anything: period fishing equipment, ice cream, politics, religious
practices, and the Harvey family history that informed and contextualized the
Reverend’s obsessions.
Preparing the Ghost, overall, is non-narrative, or it is the sum of
three fragmented narratives: Harvey’s story, the author’s family history, and
the author’s story of conducting research on Harvey and the squid in
Newfoundland. Even those, however, are further fragmented by trivia, lists,
scraps of poetry, or historical bullet points...
What songs would you choose for the movie rendition’s soundtrack?
Just so I’m not too long-winded here, I’ll cite the opening credit
songs:
The Morrow Plots:
“Where
the Wild Roses Grow” – Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with Kylie Minogue.
Preparing the
Ghost: (over footage of a giant squid twisting around in the deep) “A Gringo
Like Me” – Ennio Morricone (vocals by Peter Tevis).
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
It’s been a tentacular harvest.
How
long did it take you to write the first draft of your book?
The Morrow Plots:
about
a year.
Preparing the
Ghost: about two-and-a-half years.
What
other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
When I was writing The Morrow Plots, I was teetering between reading Norman Dubie’s The Mercy Seat and Aimee
Nezhukumatathil’s At the Drive-In Volcano—the
former for it’s fever dream surprises which planted me more firmly into the
world, somehow, of an historical, bloody Midwest; the latter for its lushness,
its ability to rip me out of that world so I could function and not be
depressed all the time. I don’t know if
that’s a comparison, but...
For Preparing
the Ghost, I’ll quote that editor from Norton again, because it’s humbling,
and makes me wriggle:
The book is driven by Frank’s free
associations between the fragmented narratives and the tidbits, or better
stated, it is made entirely out of such connections. Here, we see that the
book’s true relation to Moby Dick is not a monomaniacal fascination with
capturing enormous sea creatures, but the free association that makes
Melville’s work so funny, so memorable, so encyclopedic. Really, there is some
truth to the agent’s pitch that this is Annie Dillard/John McPhee meets Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea/Moby Dick. With a touch of nerdy
Jew. And I would add that it is as large, luminescent, many-tentacled, and
elusive as its subject.
[The
book falls] somewhere between Chuck Klosterman and Nicholson Baker with a tiny
bit of our own Measure of Manhattan...
Who or what inspired you to write the book?
For The Morrow Plots, I blame
my homesickness for the Midwest, and the winter blues, and my misguided
attempts to solve both with an obsession for historical, regional murder.
For Preparing the Ghost, I
have to go back a few years to one of my favorite boyhood articles printed in the
May 1983 issue of my second favorite boyhood magazine (after ZooBooks), Boy’s Life, which includes what was my single favorite sentence for
the remainder of 1983, a sentence that revealed, in its simple concision, a
world far larger than the one I inhabited, a sentence that evoked something
beyond me—a future perhaps, or gargantuan adulthood that still then hung just
out of reach, a sentence that I repeated to my grandfather, Poppa Dave, when
Poppa Dave still had three years to live, lying on his hairy chest and Jewish
mafia bling chai necklace on his and
Grandma Ruth’s screened-in porch of their Palm Springs Phase II Margate,
Florida retirement condo, the interior of which was all peach and coral and the
kind of silver that reflected your face back to you in that distorted, funhouse
sort of way that made your eyes look far bigger than they really were: “There are
some who are convinced that species of giant squid exist that are still unknown
to scientists,” after which Poppa Dave exhaled a mouthful of postdinner cigar
smoke, and, lifting the lip of his white wife-beater undershirt, asked me,
seven-years-old, “Did I ever tell you how I got this scar?”
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Besides giant squid and murder?
Nudity, maybe? In The Morrow Plots, there’s a penis on
page 34.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Black Lawrence Press, an imprint of Dzanc Books, is publishing The Morrow Plots. Sarabande Books is publishing Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the
Giant Squid and the Man Who First Photographed It. The squid book is represented by my wonderful
agent. Thank you Black Lawrence, and
Sarabande, and Wonderful Agent!
