The Tequila Tales anthology (edited by Millie Johanna Heur and Roy Anthony Shabla) is an eclectic mixture of genre, style and content that unites a well-published group of writers on the single and divisive subject of, yes, tequila. All of the work has in some way been licked by the liquid sting of the Mexican favourite and, like a night on the stuff, there are ups and downs in the success of each tale’s telling. But it has the kind of lively, straight-talking touch of some of the better literary magazines circulating today, the sort that these writers appear in regularly and consistently.

There is little posing here, little in the way of self-conscious and superficial intellectualism. It is lucid writing and, mostly, strong storytelling. This tequila is a kind of unknowing antidote to some of the throwaway posturing that has become fashionable in certain literary circles; the voice of an older generation, of the printed ‘littles’, that still have something they want to say.

There are two stand-out stories that make this book: John Brantingham is the writer of the first, and he has certainly done the rounds. He was fiction editor of the legendary (and borderline-defunct) Chiron Review and has been publishing strong work in the small presses since the ’90s. His short story ‘Even Puppets Must Die’ is simply a disturbingly well-told piece of writing, a booze-soaked memory torn out of a nightmare domesticity.

The other is a kind of mythical “devilish maze”, recalling Lautrémont’s prose poems had he been resurrected as a shaman before downing a bottle of hallucinogenic poison; ‘Naked Existential Woman’ by Hexham-born Philip Daughtry, is another great find.

There are others, though; a playfully experimental Gerald Locklin, a drunken but sharp Mike Muñoz, a brief Gary Keith, and a warped Tim Raab, to name a few more. And each of the tales employs the drink in a different way, be it medicinal or otherwise, though it isn’t always celebratory; there is a lot here about the trough after the peak, the grey guts of alcoholism, which make it more than a disposable collection.

Unfortunately it’s the first and last title to be released through Two Friends Press, owned and edited by Roy Anthony Shabla and Millie Heur. Soon to be released in eBook format, maybe they’ll have a drink and change their minds.

Crossing into similar territory to Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, The Terror of Living offers more than just plot twists and cliff-hangers–although there plenty of those. It also explores the lengths that people will go to when thrust into unfamiliar circumstances, and the unlikely heroism that can emerge from pain and suffering. If it’s starting to sound more like a literary novel than a genre thriller, that’s no coincidence–The Terror of Living is one of those rare books that transcends its genre with every page. Stephen King recently called it “one of those books you start at one in the afternoon and put down, winded, after midnight”.

Its author isn’t exactly what you’d expect, either. For a young man who’s written about organized crime, shootouts and extreme physical torture, Urban Waite is surprisingly laid back and amiable. You’d never guess that his calm, smiling exterior hides the gloomy depths that he sometimes reveals on the page. Currently living in Seattle, the setting for The Terror of Living, Waite has given the city–and the entire Pacific Northwest–a new voice for its dark places and hidden secrets.

Given that The Terror of Living is your debut, can you tell us a little about how you got to this point? What path led you to publication?

For about a third of my life I’ve been working to become a writer. I never thought it would turn out the way it has. I never thought I’d have a novel, or even a job that centred on putting words to paper. It was always just a hope, a sort of dream to aspire to. For the most part I really did think that my life would continue the way it had for so many years, working nights to pay my mortgage, while keeping up my hobby of writing during the day.

A few years ago that all changed. I’d been out of school for several years when things just started to click. The stories I wrote before heading off to work were starting to get picked up in small literary publications. As a result I started receiving summer fellowships, grants, and residencies, while the publications started to become larger and larger. All this attention soon led me to an agent. And while I was still so engrossed in publishing stories, I didn’t see that the opportunity to write a book had simply appeared as if from nowhere.

Perhaps that’s just how blinded I was at the time, not even able to see that everything I had been doing, publishing short stories, taking these fellowships and residencies, had led me to the perfect place. Where everything I needed to strike out, as an author, was right there in front of me. I never thought I’d publish a novel. The idea seemed too bold, but there it was in front of me, an opportunity to do just that.

Did you set out to write a crime thriller when you started The Terror of Living? Or did the characters lead you in that direction?

I started out with the character of Phil Hunt. At the time there was a lot I didn’t know about him that I wanted to know, while also there was a lot that I knew already. He was an ex con, released twenty years before, and in those twenty years he’d never really forgiven himself for the crimes he committed. In this way, as I was writing out his first few scenes, I was very much interested in trying to understand why a man like him was working such a ruinous living in order to get by.

Part of what I loved about writing Terror, was that as I went on I began to understand the characters better, the situations they inhabited and the circumstances that had brought them there. They opened up for me, revealing more and more as the pages went by. In this way, and with characters like these, I found much of what I was writing about did have to do with crime. Though I certainly didn’t intend to write a crime thriller, the characters began to lead me in that direction. The truth of it was that as I got deeper into the novel, the more I enjoyed what I was writing.

I know The Terror of Living has been published in several countries, and some seem to treat it as a genre crime novel, while others have given it a more literary treatment. How do you feel about the industry’s need to divide their ‘product’ into genres like this? Is there a point when a crime novel becomes so good that it transcends its genre, and becomes a literary work?

I really try not to pay much attention to things like this. I don’t really care all that much if my novels are placed in the genre category or the literary category. All I care about is if people will read them and, if they do, what their reactions to my work will be. I put my all into everything I do and I hope that comes across whether I’m waiting tables, writing books, or building a deck. Good writing is just good writing and it doesn’t matter what genre it comes in.

The title strikes me as interesting too. It perfectly conveys the thriller elements of the story, but at the same time it avoids the clichés, nursery rhymes and cheap puns of most crime fiction. Was this a conscious decision on your part?

Thanks for the compliment about the title. Sometimes I love it; sometimes I think I just went overboard. I don’t mean to throw myself under the bus here, but I also want to tell you that it was a very tough decision to go ahead with The Terror of Living as the title. At the time I had about 320 pages or so and I needed to present the manuscript to my agent. I didn’t have a title and I didn’t want to send him a nameless manuscript. While I felt the story and the characters within were well polished, I also felt I needed to present the novel in as finished a way as I possibly could.

The title, The Terror of Living, was a mix of a few things. It needed, at least for me, to be something that would link all the characters within. It needed to be strong and to infer the inherent danger of the lifestyles I was trying to convey. It also needed to be something that would catch the attention of a prospective reader, as the novel sat facing out at them from the shelf.

It was about a week or so before I was due to present the manuscript to my agent when by chance I happened to go to a poetry lecture. I was sitting in the audience listening as the speaker began to talk about the pain of the terminally ill, especially those that would die young. I listened, hanging on every word, wondering what I might have done in a similar situation. How I would react if someone were to tell me something like this, to give me the news that I would die of a disease that could not be averted. This moment haunted me for a time, and though I don’t like to dwell on it too much, it certainly stuck with me. Of course the thought that we all die is always there, it was the suddenness of that lecture and the ideas it stirred in me which truly led me to my title. Every character in The Terror of Living was running from that same inevitable problem. One we simply cannot outrun.

I want to ask you about your influences, as it seems that they’d be an unusual mix for someone who’s been published as a genre writer, but I don’t want to resort to the typical “which writers influenced you” question. So… which five people would you want to invite to a dinner party? Living or dead, writers or otherwise, the choice is yours.

I feel like I’m going to disappoint you on this one. I doubt very much there would be a single writer at this dinner party. The people I write about are not writers but people who usually are working some sort of blue-collar job, living pay check to pay check. Those are the types of people who influence what I write. And while I certainly learn a great deal from the books I read, I learn so much more from sitting back and having a conversation with someone about a subject I know nothing about.

I know you’ve been touring a lot with The Terror of Living. How daunting is this for a debut novelist? And how relevant is it in this age of blogging and online interviews?

Most of the promotional process I really don’t understand. There are authors who live for this sort of thing, for touring and shaking hands and telling jokes. Sometimes I wonder if those guys, the ones that almost seem like politicians, are even in the business of writing.

I guess what I mean to say is that I’m no socialite. I like having a beer every once in a while or telling some stories, but the whole business side of things is something I never even considered when writing Terror. The months leading up to publication and the touring that followed seemed more to me like work than anything I’d ever done before. It put me outside of what I was interested in, which in my case was writing.

I don’t mean to be so blunt about the business, but I do think that writers are artists and making art a commodity becomes tricky. It’s the reason why people like me have agents and publicists and people who know what they’re doing. Whose jobs centre on helping bungling shut-ins like myself get back to doing what we love.

To make a long answer short here, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing when it comes to touring, or blogging, or interviewing. I just try to make it up as I go along, and in that way it’s somewhat like writing. I’m just trying to make it up as I go, all the while hoping it all turns out okay.

Any crazy stories from your time on the road, promoting the book? Or has it all been cheap hotel rooms and early nights?

In Boston I worked in a restaurant waiting tables. I did it for five years and a few months after I left the restaurant went under. All of those people I worked with lost their jobs and a lot of them moved, some to other restaurants, some went back to school, or others still decided to go on and move into something else. Now, in every city I turn up in, there is an old friend I used to work with waiting to take me out for drinks, show me the city, and catch up.

A lot of them can’t believe this is what I do for a living now. Writing was always kind of a hobby, it was something I did with my alone time before I went to work. It wasn’t exactly who I was. I’d say it would be hard to define me by it. And so when I go to these cities on tour, I do my reading, I talk about books for a little, then I get back to life as I know it. A life where there aren’t readings or book discussions. There’s just a few old friends, a few drinks, and maybe some food. Pretty simple, but it seems to work out every time.

Locklin has somehow managed however, in his mountains of work, to remain indefinable, as his famed “alter ego” Jimmy Abbey observes in his latest collection (The Vampires Saved Civilisation): “it’s a constant struggle, against others and oneself, to remain undefined”.

Through his sheer prolificacy in the small presses since the 60s, working both as a teacher at California State University and of course as a writer, Locklin has influenced many, publishing more than 4,000 poems (catalogued here) along with over 125 books, a feat that would defy the most ardent of collectors.

He has worked in every genre, regularly putting out novels, novellas, short stories, essays, journalism and interviews, tackling all manner of subjects in his signature style, speaking directly in an unpretentious and seemingly casual, exact language.

Lisa Glatt (A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, The Apple’s Bruise), fellow writer and former student of Locklin’s, and now also a teaching colleague in Long Beach, says: “The main thing I remember Gerry telling me was ‘Don’t think too much!’” And though I’ve forced him here to think about ‘writing’, perhaps more so than he would have liked, he has still managed somehow to remain undefined, and an ever-expanding library unto himself.

How do you think comic books have influenced writers, like yourself, reading them when growing up? Is it a kind of first step into reading before becoming a writer? And is it the same with detective novels?

I can only speak for myself. My mother, who was an elementary school teacher, and a very good and enlightened one, taught me to read before I started kindergarten. At first she read books to me, two books a night, one of my selection and one of hers. After I could read to myself, she would let me purchase two comic books at a time: one of my choosing and one from the old Classics Illustrated series. Of the former category, I liked best the ones one might expect, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, Donald Duck, and such. But I immediately took to the Classics as well, voraciously, which allowed me a cultural literacy long before I ever read the actual books – although I, of course, did read all of them in good time.

My mother convinced the nuns to let me into the local parish school when I was four-and-a-half, which was no problem because I had been so well prepared for it by her. I’d breeze through the readers in a few minutes after which the nun would have to find me something else to read or do for the weeks the rest of the class was on the text, and when I was simply faced with boredom, I filled the time with daydreams of being able to fly like Superman.

My father, by the way, was serving in the boiler room of a destroyer escort in the South Pacific during this time, since I was born in 1941, and he did not return except for brief leaves until 1945. After my mother had returned to the classroom, I had a caretaker, an older woman, until kindergarten – there were no pre-schools in those days – so my early entry into kindergarten was also geared to save my mother considerable expense – not that the Catholic schools were free.

As a teacher she would also have known that the Catholic schools were significantly superior to the public (in the American sense) schools, not only because of the dedication of the sisters, but because of the strict discipline – any truly disruptive students were quickly dispatched for the public schools to deal with. There was the occasional private school also (what you would call a public school over there) but few Catholics could afford those, and I doubt they were as good as the parish schools.

The Church served the sociopolitical purposes of the generation of immigrants from Ireland, just as “Negro” churches were doing the same for their members. And the division was not between black and white, but among the different nationalities – Irish, Italian, Polish, German – that dominated one or another of the parishes.

Integration did not really get underway until the 1950s. When a black fighter fought Rocky Marciano, I rooted for the black fighter, not because I had much experience, good or bad, of blacks, but because I didn’t: it was the Italians I mainly had to deal with on the way home or at the playground. And the Irish themselves, of course.

At any rate, I think I simply grew seamlessly out of comic books and into books. I did get my one strong incentive towards writing fiction from the movie and comic book of Bambi – I was so distraught by the death of Bambi that I vowed to become a writer and only write books that had less tragic endings. By then I had already been launched as a poet not only by the poems my mother read to me but by my Aunt Pat, who, when I stayed overnight with my aunts, would stand me up on the bed, direct me to gaze upon the night sky, and instruct me to compose a poem about it. The poems may have been of the ‘Star Light, Star Bright’, variety, but she dutifully copied them down and archived them and from that early, pre-literary age, I took it for granted that I was a writer and would always be one, no matter what I might also aspire to. Because I wrote well in school, I also had that reinforcement from my teachers at all stages in my education. And in high school and college, the former taught by Jesuits, I had five years of Latin, four of Greek, four of French. In graduate school: reading German, and numerous courses in Old and Middle English language and literature.

My mother’s father had come from Ireland, fathered 14 children, and died at the age of 50, shortly before I was born. Of those 14 siblings, of which my mother was the youngest, none except her ever had a child. I was, in other words, the only member of the next generation, and all my surviving maternal aunts and uncles (four or five died during the flu epidemic of 1918, and another, after whom I am named, of tuberculosis) were my aunts and uncles exclusively. Few of them ever married. The ones who lived into middle age lived into old age as well – their 80s and 90s.

My father returned from the war with Type One diabetes and died at the age of 50 of a diabetic-related heart attack a week before my graduation from high school. He was a very good father, and I loved him very much, and it has only been later in life that I’ve realized the influence his death had upon my later life: the friends that, unbeknownst to them, filled successive roles of surrogate father for me.

My father had made the promise that I could be raised Catholic – his own father was Methodist – and he took the further step of becoming involved in all my youthful activities – which got me through cub scouts, for instance, because he could do just about anything, whereas I could do nothing of any useful nature except academics and athletics. I was encouraged in both by mother and father alike, and excelled in both. But I couldn’t change a light bulb and still can’t. And I’m technophobic and never took typing.

I have written many poems about the above, both fiction and poetry: Go West, Young Toad; New Orleans, Chicago, and Points Elsewhere; and any of my early experimental novellas, are good places to look for such materials, although all are fictionalized, as are all human memories and utterances.

As for detective novels, I did read those of the juvenile variety, which frequently involve the solving of crimes and outwitting of criminals, but radio and film were probably stronger influences. I read a lot of crime novels today, for the wit of the British ones and the maleness of the American ones. Where else in English can a male of a traditional sort find characters with which to identify in fiction of the last 50 years? I love to read of Inspector Morse, Dave Robicheaux, and Matthew Scudder. I also love Helen Mirren, Iris Murdoch, and A.S. Byatt – and P.D. James – but a lad does need his infusion of literary testosterone now and then.

I’ve never taken to “serial graphics” by the way – as much as I love dialogue – to read and to write – print is easier on my eyes. The only comic strip I still read faithfully is Pearls Before Swine. Do you get it over the there?

I’ll have to have a look.

Pearls Before Swine is truly pretty funny and sustains one’s illusion of sanity when confronted by the realities of Human Nature.

I read something you said in an interview you held with Rain Dog about “sacrifice of the ego”. How does the “sacrifice of ego” free a reader, or an audience as a whole, as well as a writer? Does it mean that the reader must accept what he/she is reading rather than rejecting it on grounds of previous education or taste?

Did I use the term “sacrifice of ego”?

Here is the quote: “And we really need appreciative readers more than we do more poets, but that requires a sacrifice of ego which few are willing to make (and which many no doubt feel that I should be the first to make)”. I am wondering now if the phrase is somehow related to Jung?

No, there was nothing profound in my use of it. Just that a certain charisma attaches itself to the image of the poet – or would-be ones assume that, at least, and are thus reluctant to relegate themselves to the less glamorous roles of reader, critic, scholar, reviewer, editor, teacher, etc., as important as those literary jobs may be, more so, in fact, than a large percentage of the poets – now that the writing of poetry requires so little aptitude, skill, practice, education, etc., although work of any permanent value will always require quite a few of those items.

I read widely in Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalysts at one time – especially when writing my dissertation of Nathanael West – but, no, I doubt they snuck into my use of that phrase.

You’re a long-time follower of the Lakers and the Yankees. What function do sports play in your life? As a supporter of a team I find myself questioning the reason why I support them, as if it is some arbitrary selection my ego must stand by at all costs (a refusal to sacrifice the ego).

I’ve published many sports poems. And I’ve stated often that my participation in sports as a youth saved my sense of self-worth in adolescence – when I was afflicted by acne that rivaled Bukowski’s – and saved my life, to some extent during my 30 years of heavy drinking, and even more so when I gave up drinking in order to lose over a hundred pounds in the wake of pulmonary emboli at the age of 52, and found a substitute for alcohol in the endorphins released by swimming (though badly), lifting weights (as I had from an early age), and occasional long walks.

My main point, though, is that athletic competition teaches you that you can always do more than you think you can – in any aspect of life, literary and academic even: I am, for instance, a very prolific writer. When I need to write fast, I can. And I knew I could quit alcohol when I had to, without going to any 12-step program or ever proclaiming myself an alcoholic. What does that term even mean? All such categories are designed to control us, pigeonhole us, keep us from being as independent-minded as we can be and should be. To humble us. Humility is a good thing, but humiliation isn’t. Self-confidence is.

You mention rooting for the black fighter against Rocky Marciano: Now, this may seem unrelated, but did/do you feel some duty to root for the underdog, and not just in sports? I’m not sure what it’s like in America with this sort of thing, but the British (and Irish) for example, always seem to take pleasure in supporting the underdog.

I would have rooted for Rocky Marciano because of his excellence if it weren’t for the Irish-Italian neighborhood rivalries of those days. Later, my best friends in high school, college and as teaching colleagues were Italian, and I consequently read voraciously in the Italian novels of Pavese, Vittorini, Moravia, Verga, Manzoni, all of them. I rooted against the Russians during the Cold War Olympics, but that didn’t deter my reading of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and the rest.

I root for some teams in solidarity with my kids. I root for the USA when we’re the favorite and when we’re the underdog. I become very chauvinistically American when my country is attacked abroad. But when the USA is not involved, I root for whatever place I’m visiting. Sometimes I do root for an underdog mainly for that reason, but I also hate to see a legend grow old and over the hill. So I often root for an “over-the-hill gang,” all the more so now that I identify with the aging gunfighter (though I’ve never fired a round of live ammunition in my life). My great film hero was and still is Shane – I’ve watched the movie more than any other. I’m an only child and according to psychologists who place an emphasis on the role of Birth Order, the only child, even more than the first-born, hates to see a king dethroned, or any kind of radical change.

I have my liberal sympathies, inculcated by an educated schoolteacher mother who was of an ‘enlightened’ bent way ahead of her time, but I’m not fond of the extremes to the left or right. Of course, one person’s extreme is another person’s mainstream. I’m a registered Democrat but more of an Independent, in fact, and I wish the Democratic Party had remained more libertarian and individualistic, and less socialistic and Orwellian.

A lot of my foreign policy is based on my experiences of human nature in the bars. I learned, for instance, that the person who is willing to fight is less apt to have to. I think that goes for countries as well. The more pacifistic the American public has become, the more wars we find ourselves fighting. I’ve taught courses in contemporary literary theory, but that doesn’t mean I swallow it whole – most of it derives from Marx, and I’ve seen the Marxist countries fail.

It’s assumed that one grows more conservative as one ages because one has more money, and it’s true that one hates to have one’s earned savings eroded by confiscatory policies, but it’s also because one has seen so many sociopolitical, psychological, and pedagogical theories fail in the course of one’s lifetime. Look at all the ‘growing-up’ in terms of political realities that Obama has had to do in just two-plus years. I’m glad he has moved closer to the center. I was never fooled by all his rhetoric anyway. The real racists were not those who voted against him because McCain was a much better prepared candidate for the office of the presidency, but those who voted for Obama only because he was black and because he told them everything they wanted to hear.

He’s been a quick learner – I have to give him that – but I’m afraid he’ll revert to his old ideological ways if he ever re-gains the electoral power of his first two years. I would have loved to have had a Colin Powell or Condoleeza Rice to vote for, especially the latter. And I much preferred Bill Clinton to Hillary, and I don’t give a damn how many blow-jobs he got in the White House.

I don’t usually discuss my political opinions because some people will just use them as an excuse not to have to read a writer’s work, to feel superior to it because the author’s opinions are, in their view, so barbaric. Almost all the great moderns held political views that are unfashionable today. And it’s a lot of work to read them. So those views are great excuses not to invest the effort that an Eliot or a Pound or a Joyce demands, and that their work repays.

The Four Quartets is profoundly beautiful verbal-intellectual music, no matter what one thinks of God, royalty, or the House of Lords. And ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ explained intertextualism decades before the term was coined. I’m not a fascist, far from it, but I don’t dismiss great artists as “elitist” either.

That’s about all I have to say on those matters, though. I don’t politicize my teaching or my friendships. And I tell my students they can probably reach more readers and accomplish more with a well-written letter to the editor than with a sloganeering poetic rant. But they’re free to follow their own literary instincts. I don’t teach them what to write, but how not to write poorly.

Do sports teach something to a writer, as a participant or a spectator?

Sports teach us that competition is not a bad thing. Feminists prefer cooperation, and it is a necessary component, but neither America nor the western democracies have been better off since they became less competitive internationally. And most of us know that committees are far less effective in making decisions than are strong, confident, decisive leaders – those, at least, who are committed to making the best choices for their constituents. Washington, Lincoln, or Churchill, not Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, nor, it would seem, Saddam or Gaddafi.

The best editors and publishers I’ve had were individuals. As for committees, judge by the recipients of literary awards, and the advanced age at which those most worthy of recognition are finally accorded it. I think the feminists prefer committees because they’re good at dominating them. Whereas the women who have risen to leading nations have all emulated male decisiveness.

There are, or course, exceptions to every generalization. Please remember that you’re asking me to attempt generalizations. I’m doing my best to do so provisionally.

Are sports another release of tension, like drugs or writing or anything else? Or is it much less serious than that? Why do you support ‘a team’?

I choose my teams or individuals for a variety of reasons, I think, most of them fairly common and superficial: I root for the Lakers because they’re a Los Angeles team and I’ve lived here since 1964, whereas I rooted for the Rochester Royals when I was a kid, because I was living in Rochester. I was convinced to favour the Yankees not so much because I lived in New York State – Rochester is 350 miles from NYC – but because a young, athletic priest upon whom I based one of my novellas convinced me that it made much more sense to root for a team that never lost than for one of the many that seldom won. And the Yankees, with their storied tradition, have given me years of pleasure as a result of that – especially, though, in my 1950s adolescence when Mickey Mantle (my great hero), Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Billy Martin, and other colorful all-time all-stars were comprising their roster. I’ve rooted for the athletic teams of the universities I’ve attended and the ones I’ve taught at.

Furthermore, I enjoy watching sports and rooting for teams, although not as much as I enjoyed playing them – God, I wish I could still compete at basketball. I’m not as fanatical a fan as I once was, but I’m loyal to the Lakers and the Yankees, because they are a part of my personal history, and, more importantly, because rooting for a team is fun… a pleasure… which, as Coleridge understood, is the best reason for reading or writing poetry also.

There is also the camaraderie that sports provide, and the sense of continuity with our own earlier selves. Nor is that camaraderie homo-erotic. Trust me: there is no sexual pleasure – even of a cryptic variety – in slapping a teammate on the hip-pads – which are composed of a very hard and un-phallic plastic.

Heterosexuals have many faults – which have been amply enumerated by others, but a frequent though not universal gay weakness resides in the need to assert that everyone else is in some way or other gay also. In truth, the closets of the world are simply not that capacious. If diversity is a value, doesn’t that include heterosexuality as well?

What you say about sports relating us to our personal histories I find particularly interesting; is it the same with literature and your own writing?

My own writing is postmodernist, but my literary heroes are moderns: Yeats, Thomas, Auden, Hopkins, Hemingway, Faulkner, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Greene, Waugh, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Robinson, Stevens, both Cranes, W. C. Williams, Cummings, Jeffers, etc.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed reading my contemporaries – hundreds of them, especially the novelists – I’ve read them all and taught 20th-Century British Lit and 20th-Century American Lit and Contemporary Literature at both the graduate and undergraduate levels for my entire career. I love Beckett, Byatt, Kureishi, Naipaul, Murdoch, Spark, Doyle, Roth, Mailer, Updike, Malamud, etc. all of them. That’s not even touching on the writers in translation, and the films of the New Wave that I was weaned on in the late 1950s and early 1960s or the earlier ones of the Angry Young Men. I saw them all… we all did… “we” meaning the students and writers of my generation. I side with the Modernists in their Aestheticism. I don’t believe in reducing art to a servant of society. I believe any demands outside of the aesthetic are secondary to it, and should be used for it, not catered to by it.

I know that’s not fashionable. So what?

Do you find yourself taking a dislike now to things you once enjoyed, perhaps a book or a writer or piece of music, perhaps? Or maybe the reverse, that you take a liking to something that once seemed unpleasant or simply bad?

I pretty much enjoy the same works I enjoyed the first time around. And new ones all the time. I don’t re-read many books. There are too many new ones. And my writing takes more time from my reading all the time.

Money has never influenced my writing significantly because I’ve never made significant money with my writing. I haven’t come even close to earning with my writing what I have for my teaching. Of course the writing contributed to promotions, travel, and such, but I never wrote anything for extrinsic motives that I wouldn’t have for its intrinsic worth anyway. I wouldn’t even have been any good at it.

Maybe literary wealth awaits me – though I greatly doubt it. But even if it did, to paraphrase Bukowski, it would be arriving too late to harm me much.

I’d use some of it to get back to Britain, Ireland, and Europe, though.

You’ve travelled quite a bit, also spending some time in the UK. What do you think differs in American and British appreciation of the arts?

I wouldn’t want to belabor our differences, because we are obviously more alike than different. We love your comedies. We admire your verbal genius. I tell people that you don’t raise children who can’t write over there; you put them out on the passing ice floes.

You seem to enjoy us most when we are least like you: a Bukowski, for instance. Or a Fred Voss – good friend of mine – who writes poetry out of building airplanes.

Your present is more rooted in your past than ours, but you have a longer history and less immigration. You have done a wonderful job of preserving much less green land, whereas we have a tendency to squander our resources and our talents.

Your schools emulate ours, which is a tragic error. You are a little lacking in confidence at times, whereas we are cocky to the point of obnoxiousness. (In some of these things, the Irish may resemble us more than they do the Brits.)

You are more aware of class than we are – and I do think there is more opportunity for upward mobility over here still – though it may be endangered by our fiscal indebtedness.

I spent a semester on a teaching exchange to the University College of North Wales at Bangor. We (my wife and two young children and I) lived in Menai Bridge, with one of the most beautiful views that side of Big Sur, California. My wife loved it so much it may have spoiled California for her.

I’ve traveled about on various trips giving readings. We had a car during the teaching exchange but it was not very reliable. We had a good rental car for a month a few years later.

We’ve stayed in a lot of bed and breakfasts. We’ve been to most parts of England, a few days in Scotland, a couple of weeks in Dublin and Galway. I spent two-and-a-half months in England while on Sabbatical in spring 1980, mostly in London, with ten days in Paris.

We’ve spent significant time there and other places on the continent. To paraphrase Hanif Kureishi, London just about effing killed me, but those were my heaviest drinking days, and I was lonely for too many weeks.

I was first in England in, I think, 1971, early summer and late; again for five weeks in 1972; back for two weeks of readings while staying with John Mowat and his family in Hull in, I think, 1987; back for Wales, London, Dorset, and all over in 1989; five weeks in 1992, but having had a deep vein thrombosis getting on the Piccadilly line at Heathrow; a few days each in Dorset and London in 1997 (or 1998) and 1999 to participate in the Dorset Literary Festival for Dave Caddy’s Tears in the Fence magazine.

Many poems and stories in that, and many poems in Ambit and elsewhere and on Ragged Edge, Keith Dersley’s online mag and press. A play I co-authored, The Toad Poems, played for a week in Camden Town early last summer, directed by Donita Beeman, but I didn’t get over there for it. I hope it’s revived again soon.

Is good writing more than many different people saying largely the same thing, just in a different way? Is it a natural progression then that things get a bit more money-oriented in this environment of writing, where it becomes a kind of trickery to say the same thing in a new way? Does it need to be more?

There are almost infinite and unpredictable ways in which writing can be good, but finite ways in which it can be really bad. I’m not a terribly judgmental person in any arena except, I suppose, sports. And there are people who are simply assholes. But they generally elicit a certain sympathy from me, maybe because my wife considers me such a consummate asshole myself.

Is there a kind of writer that you don’t respect?

Any writer who manages to stick with it deserves a certain amount of respect. But who am I to presume any other writer needs or desires my respect anyway. I spend much more time doing things – writing included, of course – than I do thinking in the abstract about them. Entertaining abstract controversies that inhibit or restrict a writer’s writing is not my nature. The same for teaching. I like to get things done, and I like to have fun doing them, or afterwards at least. People waste a lot of time on matters that are just pure bullshit. Action cuts through the theoretical shit.

Do you think self-taught poets/writers somehow differ with students of the arts? What can each offer?

Ultimately we’re all self-taught because we can always accept or reject what our teachers teach us. I just try to help my students in any way I can, mainly by telling them what my own experiences have taught me. And to facilitate their learning from each other, from their reading, etc.

I also teach them some things about the techniques of poetry and fiction that would take longer for them to learn on their own. And to point them towards reading works they may enjoy and which may serve as models or stretch their minds. And their own works serve as models for and inspirations to each other. I emphasize positive reinforcement. I tell them to increase their vocabularies and to expand their syntactical arsenal. Most of the time the principles of good prose apply to poetry also.

I also try to get them to write more prolifically and to open their minds to the vastness of subject matter in the world and in themselves. To break through our self-imposed assumptions. Right now at the end of the semester, when I see some good poems I urge the writers of them to submit them to periodicals, and I show them how and I tell them to tell their editors that I urged them to do so. Once they start publishing their work and reading it publicly, they’ll find they can go forward with a new confidence. Success breeds success (as someone more concise than I once said).

So do you think it’s important for your students to get published? I mean, the main concern must be writing something worthwhile, or new, but is it then about having people read it? I presume it is.

I never require that any of my students seek publication. But many are grateful for me giving them the benefit of my 50-plus years of experience with manuscript submissions – and I allow them to say I urged them to submit their work, and I tell them what magazines I am publishing in regularly, and I tell them not to hesitate to say that I urged them to submit their work to these mags that do at least know something of my own work. Without this help from me, most of them would be paralyzed by ignorance of and fear of the submission procedures. They wouldn’t know where to start; they’d be afraid to embarrass themselves, etc. I just give them the confidence to make these first attempts at publication. When they succeed, they gain tremendous confidence, and their writing generally is strengthened by that. And even though the editors who read their work will range from experienced to novices, they will at least be more objective than the students’ friends will be. The “market place”, even for the little mags and small presses, is a more valuable immersion in the literary world than are the endless series of “literary sewing circles” out of which many writers never escape. They become addicted to these captive audiences.

You know the statistics show that most graduates even of MFA programs stop writing shortly after graduation. Having to earn a living is part of it – it often leaves no time for writing. And when you don’t write regularly or ever get any success experiences, you lose confidence in your abilities.

So I try to help them get actually involved in the world of publishing IF they want to.

And I try to teach them everything I know in my creative writing classes, because I know very few of them will continue writing for very long – or will just “write for themselves,” consigning their work to boxes or drawers… forever!

They can learn a lot besides how to write poetry or stories in these classes – about literature, about society, about what and how to read, about how to get along with others, or how to retain your individuality under social pressures, about themselves – their repressed lives… I’m glad my degree was in literature not creative writing, but today with the politicization of literary study, it is less useful for a writer. At least in creative writing they learn the nuts and bolts of writing.

With the explosion of online journals in recent years, how do you view this fanning out of writing/writers, put into boxes and published in niche publications, where the readers and editors keep everything within the same style and limits? Is that a problem? As people on the Internet tend to read or look at things they are familiar with or ‘like’, is there less of a chance for someone to encounter something new unexpectedly?

The good side is that writers can get their work into at least this form of ‘print’ who might never have been able to break into print in the past. There are fewer dictators of taste and such… and when I started publishing, there were very few mags and thus the editors of the ones that did exist were very powerful. And I managed to step on almost every one of their toes: at APR, Esquire, The New Yorker, Poetry, etc. – it’s amazing how many shit lists I got on in spite of my existing in obscurity. And those editors never died!!! I got on The Shit Lists of The Immortals. So I was very grateful for the emergence of so many new magazines, some of them with brilliantly independent editors such as Marvin Malone at The Wormwood Review.

The downside of course is that there is so much more work out there that the wheat can get lost in the chaff. And I think there has been an overall decline of ‘taste’ as a result of that, and of performance poetry, of self-publishing, etc. But somehow the cream does seem to rise if not to the top than not too far from it. And sometimes that happens faster; and sometime more slowly. But a writer has to have faith that somehow it does eventually happen.

I’ve fought against joining the cybernetic world, but, ironically, the friends who have dragged me clawing and screaming onto the Net seem to have done me an enormous favor. I seem to have somehow achieved some modicum of a reputation in the last couple of years. And at the young age of 70!!!

With the web journals it seems (probably only from the ones I am reading) that a lot of writing is concerned with throw-away observation (like the worst of comedy) or a ‘timely’ aspect (like in journalism) and aimed more and more at a temporary effect. Nothing seems timeless from what I read. It becomes more of a titillation, an entertainment (my writing included, unfortunately). This is maybe the result of so much writing published all of the time that stories/poetry must have this ‘angle’ that is for a moment refreshing, but cannot be sustained. But perhaps things were only ‘timeless’ when there was not as much of it being written.

You’re no doubt onto something, though the trivialities you note may have been endemic to postmodernism itself. The modernists were such giants. I guess after WWII the whole literary world craved a bit of a rest – which has turned into a 70-year snooze.

Postmodernism contributed self-reflexivity, but the modernists were anticipating even that, and the modernists dramatized subjectivity and relativity, whereas the postmodernists took them to absurd extremes: to the extent that they mainstreamed the marginal, and marginalized the mainstream, though the marginalized themselves naturally rejoice at that.

I just finished re-reading Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, and having read it (too hastily) and taught it when it first came out. This time I was in awe of it. Talk about a giant. And last night I saw Woody Allen’s Moonlight in Paris, which is a wonderful film, only flawed (for me) by his jejune and stereotypically uninformed parody of Hemingway – when he first comes on screen, that is – gradually his greatness begins to emerge in spite of the filmmaker’s intentions.

I defend Woody Allen’s films, because he’s been an obvious victim of simpleminded feminist and puritan hostilities. But the film is pure parody of the Giants of the 20s, so as funny and engaging and appealing as it is (and God, the women are beautiful!), it makes one aware of how less a giant the parodist is, than are the giants he is caricaturing.

Parody was really the name of the game for the intertextualizing postmodernists, myself included. I’m glad I wrote in so many styles and moods that not all of my work is guilty of it.

I think a lot of people who haven’t liked [Woody Allen’s] recent films will find Midnight very hard to resist, as romance, as nostalgia, as fairly gentle parody. I’m one of them, but I also saw it in a romantic mood in romantic company, and I’ve long been a sucker for the 20s, like most of my literary generation. I’m guessing that for younger generations the 60s might fill that bill. Then again, with their flattening of history, and the pedagogical ‘privileging’ of the synchronic/ahistorical viewpoint over the diachronic/historical one, they may not even be aware that there were decades before their own.

Earlier in your career, did you ever feel as if you were following any writer in particular, as some writers have (becoming heavily influenced or obsessed by certain predecessors), before finding your own honesty/originality? Or did it come naturally?

There’s no question that I was influenced greatly by Edward Field first, in the 1960s, and a little later in the 1960s by Charles Bukowski.

Both were quintessential ‘Stand-Up Poets’, a term that suggests most of the qualities most common to poets of my ilk within my own lifetime. You could find it defined first in an article my former officemate here, Charles Stetler, and I published in the Minnesota Review in 1969, Volume IX, Number 1, entitled ‘Edward Field: Stand-Up Poet’.

Field’s first book had been entitled Stand Up, Friend, with Me. I discovered him through a poem, ‘The Bride of Frankenstein,’ from his second book, Variety Photoplays – the poem had also appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Field is still a good friend, and I consider him our greatest living poet. He splits the year between a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village and a flat near Paddington Station in London.

Later, my friend and colleague, Charles Harper Webb, a great poet himself, published an enormously successful anthology in various editions, the most recent of which is Stand Up Poetry: The Anthology, from University of Iowa Press. I use it in all my poetry classes, even though Field, and Stetler, and I were co-editors of The New Geography of Poets, from U. of Arkansas Press in 1991 or 1992.

It was a lesser sequel to Field’s Bantam Press anthology A Geography of Poets, that sold 31,000 copies in a pocket book edition in, I think, 1977. It was the first truly decentralizing anthology of poets in the USA, because Field had discovered via his readings around the USA that poetry was no longer the possession of NYC and Boston. The spread of university creative writing programs and the underground little mags and small presses had combined to ignite that phenomenon. Another aspect of it was sometimes called “the mimeo revolution,” a precursor, I suppose, to the Internet revolution. It helped to popularize Bukowski.

Webb didn’t know we had invented the term “Stand Up Poetry” when we used it for our article – especially in the first couple of pages, but he credited us as soon as I called it to his attention and showed him the similarities in our summation and his brilliantly organized and explicated introduction to his anthology. Field’s first Geography introduced many of us young California poets to a national audience for the first time.

Ron Koertge and I had become great friends at the University of Arizona in graduate school – I was there 1961-64 – and we were very much both in a learning stage, and much of what we learned was from each other – an ongoing mutual influence which continued into The Wormwood Review, which was the best poetry magazine of my lifetime, from the 1960s to the death of its editor, Marvin Malone, in the mid-1990s.

I’ve mentioned that I was inevitably influenced by poets I had learned to love earlier – Dylan Thomas, E. E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath – not to mention all the poets I read in graduate school and as a lifelong teacher and reviewer of literature. But Ron, Edward, and Buk (or Hank, as he liked to be called) were major influences from among the living. And so were many fiction writers such as Hemingway, Barthelme, Brautigan, and such, because my poetry was often highly narrative or dramatic – lots of dialogue(s).

Though it is your career, have you found yourself taking writing less or more seriously as it has gone on? Or has it been the same throughout? I guess I am speaking here of futility and purpose.

I always took my writing seriously, and I always wrote a lot and published more and more all the time (from about 1993 on), but my writing seemed more casual in the early days – more youthful, naturally – and I still write a lot of what I call my “smart-ass poems,” as they occur to me, and because my younger readers demand them, and I virtually invented the very short poem – one of mine was three words – although I got the idea from Norman Mailer’s collection Deaths for the Ladies, but I don’t think he wrote any poems after that, and I wrote thousands – I’ve published something like 4,000 according to one index that is linked to geraldlocklin.org.

But as my parenthood burgeoned – I have seven children by three marriages, and nine grandkids so far – my seriousness naturally increased – and I took my teaching very seriously, although I gave the impression of being highly unconventional and off-handed about it – and when I almost died of pulmonary embolisms in 1993, and quit drinking and hanging out in bars – the drinking life poems trailed off, and I began writing hundreds of ekphrastic poems in which I was often as irreverent as I had always been, but also celebratory, and mainly I used the art objects, or jazz or opera, etc. as starting points for poems that might end up who knows where, often in my memories or reflections.

I had always written books of travel poems and I continued to. But yes, one does begin to confront aging, death, and so forth, although I still tap dance vigorously at my poetry readings, and I toss in a Lady Gaga medley.

So I would say that I take things more seriously now – especially my progeny and other loved ones. I had always taken my friends very seriously also. I wouldn’t call myself somber or saturnine, but I do pontificate more than I used to, though I’ve long been a somehow agnostic ex-Catholic, who definitely took Catholicism seriously as a kid. I was practically a theologian, though also immersed in athletics: I was co-captain of my high school football, basketball, and track teams in senior year, but I was also Student Prefect of the parish sodality (a youth organization, non-political).

But by the end of high school I was growing away from the church, mainly just tired of sexual guilt, but also under the influence of James Joyce, Graham Greene, and Italian novelists such as Silone, Vittorini, and Pavese – actually all of them, because I had a very literary and Italian good friend. And I also had a high school sweetheart, who would become my first wife.

I definitely mined my childhood and adolescence in my early, often experimental stories and novellas.

With growing amounts of disposable fiction being published, do you think writing has become something too much of a profession, a moneyed ends, rather than a sincere exploration that is merely a necessity for a writer? Perhaps it has always been this way. I often catch myself revering the things from before my time, imagining they were somehow better, though I guess there was also a lot of chaff then, too.

I do think we’ve lacked the giants of the modern period during the postmodern period, but on the other hand we’ve had a lot more extremely good writers in the last 60 years than in the previous 50. Think of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt alone, how many excellent and many-layered novels they produced, and Martin Amis, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Roddy Doyle, Kureishi… I could go on endlessly, and what pleasure I took from them, and maybe they are a bit long in the tooth now – or worse yet, a bit dead, and maybe I haven’t found as many younger writers I enjoy as much, but their own generation probably enjoy their writers as much as I enjoyed mine.

My former officemate, Chuck Stetler, and I created a course, ‘Fiction Now’, and took turns teaching it for years, and we changed the reading list every semester, and we loved the books and the students loved the books, and we never came close to running out of current books to teach. And even in my graduate seminars in 20th-Century British Fiction and in 20th-Century American Fiction, we sometimes studied a neglected modernist in detail, but more and more I just assigned more and more of the current novels and let them do their papers on the modernists, whom I concentrated on in the double-numbered graduate/undergraduate period courses, the surveys as opposed to the seminars. So I don’t think the novel is dead by any means but we may be waiting for a few rough beasts to slouch their way into print.

Is it dangerous for a writer to a have a philosophy, even for a time, despite that philosophy changing? This brings me back to the message. Is there a place for a message? Or is it all eventually forgotten and lost to inculcation or early education and prejudices?

I think I’ve already noted that there have always been great novelists with a message – Tolstoy, Dickens, most of the Victorians, most of the writers of the 1930s; it’s just that for later readers the messages that were most topical when the books were printed are of least importance to later readers.

The same with poetry: who really cares about the politics or religion of Hopkins, Yeats, Auden, Thomas, Browning, Arnold, etc.? The fiction lives by its stories, not its messages, and the poetry by its music not its messages. But a message for its own generation can be one level of the work – it’s just ultimately not the most important one. No matter what the theorists tell us, there are such things as aesthetic universals – they are just not to be narrowly implemented.

Find a novel or novella you really like, and imitate its structure. I did that with Miss Lonelyhearts, and it served me very well as a starting point and scaffolding for an early novella of mine that I still like a lot. I used Nathanael West’s structure for my own characters and story.

We all learn by imitation. Look at Lady Gaga and Madonna. Look at Ulysses and the Odyssey.

Two messages that have stood the test of time – unfortunately – are those conveyed by Brave New World and 1984: the totalitarian carrot in the first (Soma, or drugs in general) and the totalitarian whip in the latter (threatening the greatest fear of the individual or the group).

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Dan Fante is one of the last surviving writers of his generation that could be called a “maverick”. Having spent years in his own personal wilderness, and never touching a typewriter, he spat his years of alcoholism and excess into a maelstrom of novels, poetry and plays. Continuing the tradition of Hubert Selby Jr. (his literary hero), Charles Bukowski and the works of his legendary father John, he has written about the sleep paralysis of the American nightmare from the perspective of someone who has lived through it.

Born in Los Angeles, Fante briefly studied acting at UCLA before going on to hold a number of low-end jobs as he went cross-country to New York working, amongst other things, as a telemarketer, private investigator and cab driver. He settled there, for a time, during the 60s. During this period he wrote plays for radio and local theatre groups and got heavily into drinking and drugs, giving up on his burgeoning career in the early 1972.

Years later and sober, he has written two critically acclaimed plays, both staged in the late 90s: The Closer (aka Boiler Room) and Don Giovanni. His debut novel, Chump Change, was the first of the Bruno Dante saga and a struggle to get published; he sent the manuscript to a slew of American publishers who all rejected it, before finding a home for the work in France.

He recently published Bruno Dante’s latest installment, 86’d and a second poetry collection, Kissed By A Fat Waitress.

What kind of writer is it that you do not respect?

That’s simple. Those who write simply to titillate. Disposable entertainment fiction.

How do you feel about ‘writing’? Are there particular things that have kept you going?

My father John Fante, felt being an author was nearly a sacred calling. I share that with him. A good book can change a life. I continue to try to write that kind of book.

Before you started to actually write, was it something that you felt always seemed to be waiting for you?

You mean other than insanity and death? It took years to scrape the crust of self-hate and madness away. Years. But even as a bewildered young guy I always wanted to write. Writers were my heroes.

What is art worth? What is life worth? Do they amount to the same thing?

Art is experience – a place visited beyond the reasoning mind. The sense of knowing and experiencing someone’s beauty and passion with awe and admiration. No, they are not the same thing.

Is there a purpose, an underlying intent, to your writing?

Any writer worth his own ashes believes that his words can change the world.

So, there is something worth believing in?

Yes! The living knowing of one’s self as a spiritual entity. The celebration of breathing in and out. All experience devolves to gratitude.

Should a writer have a ‘point’, apart from honesty?

That people will understand his heart. Books are scribbled notes sealed in a bottle and then thrown into the sea.

You have previously mentioned the influence of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but what else was it that drew you to playwriting? Is there something in it that cannot be done with another medium, say poetry or prose?

Yes, surely. The medium of speech has a profound impact. Live theatre – good live theatre – reaches passed the mind to touch the heart.

Have you considered film? Can it offer anything?

Yes. But ’film’ by its nature is a collaborative effort, which I believe compromises the experience. But there are not wonderful films nonetheless.

What about television?

I don’t know. I don’t look at television. But I do know that it poisons the brain and trivializes all emotion.

Have you ever thought about going back to acting?

Yes. Creating a character on stage can be magical. The experience of inhabiting someone else’s body and emotions is singular and amazing.

You once said, “My secret weapon is my anger”. What are some of the things that make you angry?

The ‘screwing’ of the American people by the merciless engine of corporate greed really does piss me off – when I let myself think about it. The USA has changed the Europeans view themselves. Out of control Capitalism is the plague of the millennia.

Do you feel as if you have to stand by your words or defend them against critics?

People ‘get’ my stuff or they don’t. Most critics are paid to think and not to feel. I don’t write to please critics.

Who is worthwhile to read (poetry, prose or otherwise)? Is Selby still important to you?

All of it. Selby shined a light into the darkness of my mind and allowed me to become friends with my mind.

How do you stave off complacency in your work?

By continuing, hopefully, to get better as an artist.

When you write, does it flow quickly? Do you re-work a lot?

I write two hours a day, six days a week – unless I’m really hot and on to something. I begin my day by going back in my manuscript three or for pages from where I left off. I start by re-working, then let my mind take me forward.

Do you think an audience must be great for a writer to be great, or the other way round, or neither?

Writers are village square evangelists. An audience is essential.

So do you think it is a writer/artist’s duty to wake up the audience?

Oh yes.

How does one escape the guilt that bores into the mind of a Catholic?

By re-experiencing the notion of God.

Was Catholicism a big part of your upbringing?

Sin and personal damnation was a bigger part.

And the publishing world? How did those initial rejections affect you?

A writer must believe he has something worthwhile to say. When he comes to know that his work is important, then nothing will stop him.

Does the ‘truth’ have to be marketable to get published?

The truth is always marketable if not always pleasant.

I sense some kind of compatibility with yourself and Bukowski’s opinions on contemporary literature that it is airless and false. Would you agree with something like that?

For the most part. Bukowski despised convention. It fed his rage and his work.

What function did drugs have for you earlier in your life?

Without booze and drugs I’d be dead. It helped for years – until it didn’t.

Is originality as important as honesty in writing?

Good writing is always original. Honest is always original.

What would a snapshot of modern life look like to you?

Chaos that leads back to the quest for peace of mind. The more fucked-up things get the closer we get to real metamorphosis.

And how about your own?

I spent the first half of my life pouring gasoline on myself – in search of a match. This second half I’ve set to music… Too many questions but all quite well asked.

Pop music and literature are two separate miracles, the silent shout and the screamed secret, two wonders working to their own, different and divided rules. Each has seductive thrills of its own. Pop music has no need to attain the form of literature to achieve greatness. A great many of its practitioners have thought otherwise however, and there have been countless pretenders of one form to the other. Whether its Iron Maiden raiding Coleridge or The Eurythmics mugging 1984, the straightforward homage, sad to say, usually rings false. Frank Zappa’s denunciation of rock music writing was “like dancing about architecture” and the ‘category error’ is just as stark the other way. The essence of one does not easily translate into the other. That doesn’t mean it is not possible however, that the breadth, sway, richness and ambiguity of literature cannot be captured in song. A true – successful – literary sensibility in pop music is a rare thing indeed, but it can happen. It doesn’t come from showboating references but a much deeper understanding of the texture of literature. Colin Meloy is firmly and defiantly in this tradition.

Meloy’s Oregon band The Decemberists have shone out in the past decade like a lighthouse through the murk of mediocrity, conveyor pop shite and landfill indie alike. Unfashionable dedication to virtuoso musicianship has played its part in this, and it’s certainly a special band which is capable of single-handedly rehabilitating the accordion as a musical instrument. But it’s the lyrics which make The Decemberists unique. Meloy uses words very rarely found in pop songs. Words like ‘frigidaire’, ‘ravine’, ‘parapet’, “odalisque” and “cardamom”. He rhymes ‘flue’ with ‘1842’ and ‘mirage’ with ‘shiraz’ and then ‘applause’. He sings “I was wedded and it whetted my thirst”. No other songwriter would write the couplet

And I say your uncle was crooked French Canadian
And he was gut-shot running gin,
and how his guts were all suspended in his fingers
And how he held them, How he held them, held them in.

Sometimes they are self-consciously archaic, especially when the scene being captured is explicitly rooted in the past (i.e. “and what irascible blackguard is the father?” from the Hazards of Love epic). More often than not though they are not so much archaic as parochial and particular, evoking an immediate time, place and essence. They are certainly unafraid to seem florid. Pop music, even in ‘sophisticated’ pose, usually sticks to a convention that verbosity strangles vitality and immediacy. Orwell wrote that Yeats was the exception to the rule that poets tend to avoid self-consciously ‘poetic’ language. Meloy is the exception to the rule that self-consciously literary language has no place in pop. When he sings that “Pretty hands do pretty things when pretty times arise / Seraphim in seaweed swim where stick-limbed Myla lies”, you could wince at a grandiosity that is ‘out of place’ in pop. Or you could delight at what is, quite simply, a gorgeous lyric.

Beyond phraseology, further proof that Meloy’s is a truly literary style is his single-handed one man revival of the Narrative – capitalise that N! – in pop songs. Storytelling is more common in both the folk and country musical genres that The Decemberists also straddle, but Meloy is rare in bringing this back to the indie-rock sound which remains their base.

And such Narratives. Laudanum-drugged French Legionnaires dreaming of home, the un-resting ghosts of poverty-stricken barrow-boys and stillborn babies, runaway 10th-century female harem slaves and 20th-century male prostitutes, vengeful sea-crew and psychopathic Ulster Protestant terrorist splinter groups, lovelorn honeytrap victims of rogue security service agents. From first album, Castaways and Cutouts, until the fourth, The Crane Wife, The Decemberists proved themselves the masters of capturing the skewed short story in song. Most pop lyrics are a bastardised cousin of verse poetry, but this was a truer poetry finding its form in novel or short story prose – to emphasise the fact, the lyrics in the liner notes to Castaways are written out in prose paragraphs rather than verse style. Stories in the true sense (though usually not true stories), these were vignettes which didn’t just carve out their scenes with precision, but also gave an inner life to the characters within.

The narratives do not always follow the traditional linear form, and to employ literary labels Meloy is open to the modernist as well as the realist style.

‘Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect’ employs a drugged, dreamlike drift in the narrator’s identity across different nations and ages. ‘Red Right Ankle’ takes the blood vessels and sinews of its eponymous appendage as the narrator of its first verse. Disjointed, displaced in time and space, they are narratives nonetheless. A broadly realist short story style predominates however, and this aspect reached the perfect peak in this form in 2005’s Picaresque, which, as its title suggested, captured the perfect form of tarnished anti-heroes battling through a colourfully grimy, chaotically uncaring world.

Picaresque showed also however that the Meloy’s sense of the literary goes beyond the Narrative. Its poppiest moment – ‘Sixteen Military Wives’ – is a sardonic satire on the Iraq invasion, sneakily taking the back-door route of mocking its media coverage: skewering the TV commentators, from distinguished academy chairs, to pontificating celebrities with “Wretched chequered lives” and “pristeen moderate liberal minds”. The unreal, disjointed disconnection between the fatuous media circus and the bereaved tragedy of the military wives is presented without a hint of either mawkishness or heavy didacticism, making its point all the more poignant, and wrapping it in a euphoric chorus. This isn’t a narrative as such, there is no beginning or end, nothing “happens”. But it has still evoked characters, and illuminated themes in a startlingly original way, shedding light into corners previously dimmed by dull cliché and repetition. Another song without a narrative is ‘Angels and Angles’, a brief, slight gorgeous meditation on the “angles” of a loved ones features as she fills in a crossword. A finely carved sculpture of a song, fragile in its material but immortal in its robust finish, a miniature marvel to behold. This is why Meloy is a literary songwriter, and not just a yarn-spinner.

Meloy perhaps reached his zenith on the same album with ‘The Engine Driver’. Against an impossibly gorgeous, languid, sonorous backing, he takes on a variety of brief two-line personas with their own brief, terse narrative – an engine driver “on a long run, so will be my grandson”, a money lender who has “fortunes” but is “ever tortured” – but whose chorus whittles these away to reveal that each one of these personas, these forays into fiction, are just the sad standbys, the necessary imaginary retreats of an author “writing pages upon pages trying to rid you from my bones”. A strange, post-modernist self-commentary (is the writer of fiction himself still a character? Or is it, finally, Meloy himself?) is injected with the vitality of raw, pulsing emotion to create a song which nourishes the mind as surely as it grabs at the heart. It also allows it the true status of the literary song.

And yet literate pop is not literature, it still needs a voice, not the authorial tone but a flesh and blood trachea that makes a noise. Meloy has self-deprecatingly dubbed his singing voice “my famous donkey bray”. “Mannered” would be a polite criticism, “whiny” a less polite one, and when one considers this voice is at times singing interpretations of folk tales from medieval Irish mythology, it is easy to see how some may think at first, second and even third listens that here is the nadir of clever-clever self regarding “college rock”, to coin a hideous phrase. And yet, ultimately, it is the raw, naked tremulousness of this voice which gives the final spark of life to these songs. What at first sounds mannered quickly shows itself as an instrument whose every stray inflection counts, not a syllable goes astray. When the word ‘tramp’ in ‘We Both Go Down Together’ extends one syllable into four, the effect is startling, and an anguished truth carries along its contours.

Some of the tales Meloy tells are so far out and fanciful they would be easy to dismiss as arch or pastiche. Sometimes, undoubtedly, the melodrama is played for laughs, as with ‘The Mariner’s Revenge Song’, a bloody, syphilis-ridden tale told from within the belly of a whale. Often there is an air of whimsy. But even in his most playfully outlandish narrative realms, Meloy’s red-raw voice, backed by the pitch-perfect instrumentation, manages to give the characters a hauntingly real emotional resonance – yes, even from inside a sperm whale’s stomach. With fifth album The Hazards of Love, the band moved from the short story to the novel, from the song in a single to a full-blown album length rock opera. In theory this should be the very height of overblown prog-rock pretension, especially when you consider that the plot concerns the star-crossed love between a young maiden and a fawn which shape-shifts into a man under the jealous tutelage of the Queen of the Forest… And yet, what could so easily seem risible, instead becomes magical, an emotional odyssey which sweeps you along with the characters, and showing that the narrative is a runic metaphor for the travails of the heart as well as a baffling medieval oddity. It is that too though, and the idiosyncrasy only in increases its lunatic appeal. Its centrepiece, ‘The Rake’s Song’, is an amazing piece of work which shows in the starkest relief the tension between the emotional honesty of Meloy’s delivery and the outlandish nature of the subject matter. We are once again into Meloy’s most melodramatic territory, a ‘rake’ who after his wife’s death following “her womb spilling out babies” seeks to “divest his burden” so he can live the bachelor life once more – by murdering each one of his children. This character is so monstrous as to be Tex Avery cartoonish and, on one level, it is certainly black humour. And yet once more that voice gives it a terrifying edge of sincerity. As the cod-Dickensian argot of the rake’s chorus “Alright! Alright! Alright!” ritually repeats itself the effect is certainly funny on one level, but genuinely sinister and shocking on another. This is the success of duality, the marriage of tragedy and comedy which the greatest works of literature attain.

Written while in pastoral retreat in the remote Oregon countryside for a year, with 2011’s The King is Dead, Meloy has swung the pendulum altogether away from the narrative epic of Hazards of Love – some would say one extreme to another. These are short, straightforward songs with neither extended nor individual story-telling narratives between them. At first listen The Decemberists aficionado may feel short-changed. With these relatively amorphous, impressionistic outings, where is the intellectual grandiosity which makes them the weird wonders they are? This however, is to forget the other more subliminal elements in The Decemberists’ make up being brought to the fore here, the sense of place (the rural West) more subtly hewn, itself bringing out a deeper edge to the contours of nerve-scratchingly raw emotion in its examinations of lost childhood and lost children, of joyous working solidarity and defiant class struggle, and most of all of the infinite sublimities of nature to be found in the year’s seasonal turnings. This is clearly Meloy at his most personal, not cloaked amid his ever-myriad personae. The paintings created are from a more subdued but no less beautiful pallet. Perhaps this is the album where the music and that beautiful voice are left to do the heavy lifting, but still there is time for a comedic dream about Armageddon, where apocalyptic Andalusian tribes lay waste to the world as our hero is exiled to a new civilisation below ground “and I’ll be crowned the Community Kick-It-Around”. Understated-ness, it seems, can only go so far in Meloy’s world. Long may that remain so.

Literature is sometimes held to be an elitist form. In strict literal terms it is, if by elitist we mean staying true to individual vision and not allowing itself to pander to crowd pleasing, quasi-democratic mediocrity. The Decemberists are the very definition of the ‘cult’ band, one whose followers have a fevered adoration to their idols and a snobbish view of the outsiders who will never “get it”. And yet this proud secret of their bookish acolytes are now finally breaking into the mainstream, with The King Is Dead topping the US charts, something beyond anyone’s most fevered imaginings even a year back. Already you can hear the whispers of “sell-out”. Yet this would be as unfair as it is untrue. There is no need for Meloy to water down his literary sensibility as wider popularity beckons, and nor has he. And nor, I strongly suspect, will he. One last literary parallel: what is at first denounced as a perverse irrelevance, of interest to only a cliquish minority, often comes to be accepted as genius by a much wider audience a few years down the line. We shall see. In “I was meant for the stage” Meloy claims his destiny is for applause and derision alike. There will never be any shortage of the latter from those who think that the literate has no place in pop. But a growing number are applauding, and this applause is sweet music itself.

01 Guernica: Launched in 2004 by New York-based writers Joel Whitney and Michael Archer, Guernica is an online journal of original creative and non-fiction work. Material is published on a fortnightly basis with a weighting towards the journalistic side. Many interviews discuss loosely political themes with novelists, as well as poets, filmmakers and others, whilst features generally investigate a wider pool of opinions and ideas. Guernica also publishes new poetry, short stories and slideshows of art (mainly photography). Their blog features a range of more politically focused commentators.

02 A magazine of art and politics: As the allusion to Picasso’s iconic painting implies, Guernica’s stated aim is to explore “the crossroads between art and politics”. This is an interesting fault line, which the site more or less traces. Sometimes this is explicit: Jamal Mahjoub’s recent interview with Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, for example, spoke of January’s uprising and Poulomi Basu’s photographs follow India’s first women soldiers. Often, though, the crossover is implicit, connecting liberal politics with an artistic sensibility.

03 Features and style: Long-form journalism is complemented by much briefer poems and short stories (including a recent experiment with flash fiction). American writing is frequently punctuated with new pieces from around the world and sporadic translations. Although opinions are drawn from across the United States, there is a hardcore Brooklyn writers and, although Guernica has an international perspective, it remains something of a New York project. Likewise, many contributors share a background in MFAs and teaching creative writing, giving the site a unique voice. The visual material is generally more global.

04 Behind the scenes: Something of Guernica’s philosophy carries over into its masthead. Having been incorporated as a no-for-profit two years ago, it is a collective effort relying on the goodwill of smart and engaged contributors. The 30-plus editors, broadly journalists and teachers, are all involved with a large collection of other publications and projects. Former Spike contributor Nancy Rawlinson is a contributing editor.

05 Features and interviews: The site has interviewed an impressive roster over its six year existence, including John Updike, Don DeLillo, Juot Díaz, and Arundhati Roy. The schedule usually includes two new features and two new interviews every fortnight. Recent highlights have been David Morris’ article ‘Public Disinterest’ and Meaghan Winter’s interview with Dean Spade. The former is a history of how vital channels of public information (the US postal service and broadcast airwaves) have been hijacked and the implications for the future of the internet, whilst the latter profiles America’s first openly transgendered law professor on an eye-opening range of issues.

06 Creative content: Whilst Guernica’s poetry, short stories and visual arts each get, on average, only one post each per fortnight, they have garnered a numbered of awards. 2009 was a particularly good year with E.C. Osondu’s story ‘Waiting’ winning the Caine Prize and Matthew Derby’s ‘January in December’ got a Dzanc Books Best of the Web award. Both were published in 2008. Recent highlights have included Melissa Ann Chadburn’s ‘Loose Morals’, with it immortal opening line “Did you know that more people jack off than pick their nose while driving?” and Albert Abonado’s poem ‘Snake Story’. Birthe Pionek’s photographs of life in Canada’s Yukon (‘The Idea of North’) have a View-Master depth and tone, the portraits look away from the lens, lost in thought.

07 Support: The not-for-profit philosophy of Guernica is reflected in its calls for support. The homepage is bordered with large advertising placeholders, suggesting different ways for readers to join the community. In addition to donations and subscriptions, there is a rather hopeful shop offering t-shirts, stickers, mugs and magnets. Guernica also offers a tiered membership scheme ranging from a $25pa Friend to a $1000pa Sustainer. The latter receives a quarterly newsletter, a messenger bag, various tickets to Guernica events, and a name on the website. The organisation frequently advertises for interns to help develop the platform.

08 Blog and opinions: Guernica’s blog offers near-daily material, often co-hosted on other blogs. More overtly political, these posts can offer a leftist defence of American liberal values, as demonstrated by Robert Reich’s writing on domestic policies. Reich served under Clinton and is now a Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley and much of his Guernica material focuses on the economy. The blog also has a global dimension, exemplified by Robin Yassin-Kassab’s posts on the Middle East. But there is also room for arts coverage on the blog, a recent highlight being Erica Wright’s promotion of the term ‘dude-lit’: “It speaks to a debate I’ve simply had one too many times about great novels in which Thomas Hardy and James Joyce win out over Brontë and Virginia Woolf every time. And by ‘win out’, I mean the dude I’m talking to speaks louder and more forcibly”.

I have a penchant for esoteric Russian literature of the kind that’s mostly found in frowsy second-hand bookshops which, I am unashamed to say, I frequent with steadfast regularity. About a week ago, during one such visit, I picked up a 1985 Picador edition of a book called Novel With Cocaine by M. Ageyev. The name denoted an author of Slavic extraction, which the précis confirmed he was. My curiosity was further piqued by the fact that very little is known about Ageyev or his work; except that it was first published in the 1930s by a Russian émigré journal in Paris, after journeying there from Istanbul. To this day Novel With Cocaine remains an unclaimed roman à clef, narrated by a 17-year-old schoolboy against the milieu of a crumbling Russian empire as the aftershocks of the February Revolution solidify into a new Soviet regime. The novel centres on the binary concept of war both as a social phenomenon and an inward battle between “the spirit and the flesh”. 

From the outset Vadim Maslennikov’s intense, monadic, time-warped narration fluctuates between extreme emotion, giving a clue to his mercurial disposition, his two-faceted nature and his moral adynamia. He leads us down a vertiginous path, navigating between the vitreous ethos and wreckage of a country in turmoil, and his hedonistic quest for shamelessness (“the most passionate trait of human depravity”), amidst the dirty boulevards with foul smelling stairways leading to whores and lechery. The son of a soldier killed in battle, a moral relativist and a closet nihilist, enlightened to a fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, the self-excoriating and self-aggrandising Vadim is bored of war and the echoing of nugatory anti-German sentiments. As he confesses, “I did not vilify the Germans because I hated them; I vilified them because the harder I pounded away with my abuse and invective, the more deeply I experienced the exceedingly pleasant feeling of oneness with the crowd”. This sentiment is later mirrored in his feeling of “sharp, sweet pride in the knowledge” he is Russian. Vadim emerges as both a listless defector and a patriotic zealot, but his opinion of the gruesome events unfolding in front of him is summarised best when he says, “Words like war, victory, defeat, the dead, the captured, the wounded – all those ghastly words which in the early days of the war felt as vibrant and alive as live carp in one’s hand – they were all, for me at least, suddenly drained of the blood they had been written in, and deprived of that blood, they turned into mere printer’s ink”. Not so for his classmate, the budding revolutionary communist Vasily Burkowiz, who confronts a scholarly priest by asking him how “conquest, defeat, murder and annihilation of one man by another” squares with his preaching and his “Christian values” before concluding bitterly that “war is no use to anyone except generals and quarter-masters”.

Vadim’s own bravado of perfunctory detachment wanes as he records his reaction to the squalor, poverty and depravation caused by the nation’s patriarchal collapse into chaos, through his profound embarrassment of his mother. Assailed by her penurious appearance on the school steps he says, “She stood alone, of to the side, in her fur coat full of bald patches and her ludicrous bonnet fringed with strands of grey hair peering into the streaming throng with obvious trepidation which only heightened her pitiful appearance”. Ashamed of her “tattered, patched, evil smelling rag of a dress” and her “crooked run down heels”, he tells his schoolmates she’s merely an “impoverished governess” but instantly feels “his heart going out to her”. This pang of remorse is quickly supplanted by a “rush of vicious thoughts” as he inwardly imprecates his ageing mother for embarrassing him in front of his peers. Sensing his hatred, her “thin lips, stretching cheek-wards, twist her face out of shape, and from the brown sockets of her closed eyes through the fans of her wrinkles the tears begin to flow”. His maternal disdain resurfaces sporadically throughout the book and, like a great contagion, afflicts his attitude toward all women, those “pitiable sluts agreeable to anything”, whom he surveys with a “terrifying wide-eyed look” of provocation and hate. While undergoing treatment for syphilis, this “erotic Wunderkind” pursues a prospective receptacle and takes her to a maison de rendezvous – but her naïveté and “infantile tenderness” disturbs him when she bestows on him “a small mound of tiny silver five-kopeck pieces” as a good-luck keepsake. Incensed, he qualifies “the entire incident as a waste”. Eager to dispense with her, he says goodbye and watches her “unjustly hurt moving off into the distance” then absentmindedly slips his hand into his pocket to the clink of the kopeks which hits him “like a whip lashing at his ignominious heart”. Vadim has only one persistent character trait, vacillation. Thus the novel revolves around the conflict between “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”. This pendulous state from good to evil, from hate to remorse, from “cruel lack of scruples” to “rushes of love for the universe” is the dominant and prevailing rhetoric in Novel With Cocaine and its endeavour to illuminate the murky nature of the human soul.

Speaking about rejection, Vadim perorates about revenging himself “on the insults of previous women by insulting their successors” and compares its “bitter perversity” to being rebuffed by a boy at school. This is one of several allusions to Vadim’s latent homosexual yearnings, as is his epicene desire to get close to Burkowitz which never goes beyond “normal scholastic intercourse”. The violence of feeling toward women is controlled by Vadim’s bracing narcissism innate in his explanation for shunning prostitutes because he has “no interest in intercourse legitimised by verbal agreement” and is only after the “cruel and covert battle, the gains and final victory,” of appropriation of that which cannot be procured “for a handful of roubles”. Vadim’s internal monologues align themselves with 20th century philosophical tradition when he says, “It was an odd thing about my life: Whenever I was happy, I would think my happiness could not last; as soon as I thought that, it would indeed go up in smoke. Not because the external conditions creating it had ceased to exist, but because I was conscious that in due course those external conditions would inevitably cease to exist”, a rumination in line with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pronouncement that “In a world like this, where there is no kind of stability, no possibility of anything lasting, but where everything is thrown into a restless whirlpool of change, where everything hurries on, flies, and is maintained in the balance by a continual advancing and moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place… no man is happy… it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present”.

This philosophical practice extends to Vadim’s meditations about love when he meets the “fox faced” Sonya, noting that “To a man in-love, all women are merely women except the woman he loves, who thereby becomes a person; to a woman in love, all men are merely men except the man she loves, who thereby becomes a man” – and yet Vadim is unable to express his feelings, which he justifies by saying: “My experience in matters of love seemed to have convinced me that no one could talk eloquently of love unless his love was only a memory, that no one could talk persuasively of love unless his sensuality was aroused, and no one whose heart was actually in the throes of love could say a word.” It extends also to the question of sensuality versus spirituality which he qualifies to be different in both sexes, namely that in women the two are merged and in men completely separate and if “womankind bandied together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel”. The relationship between this “callow youth” and his beloved comes to an end when Vadim’s sensuality evolves into depravity, prompting Sonya to retreat from the “foul and loathsome mire” of defilement. This denouement veers the course of events off-track and sees Vadim in a dingy baroque den snorting the “devilishly light white powder” and pontificating about the “emotion of motion and the motion of emotion” as his limbs tremble with a new dexterity and a “quietly pulsating core of exaltation”.

The ensuing chapters document both Vadim’s kaleidoscopic confusion and edification while under the influence of cocaine, as he takes preponderate detours into cyclical contemplations of death and life, and adrenaline-fuelled phantasmagorical excursions against the glaucous backdrop of the “naphthalene shimmer” of Moscow. And while the drug fuels his predisposition to pontificate, it also highlights the bleak reality; impassioned self-abhorrence and the “ever growing burden of despair” which hastens the thought of death and lack of desire to go on. Ageyev’s prose is enriched with an inextricable tangle of the sordid and the beautiful of the singularly complex and the bountifully ideological. His extrapolations about the diabolically lunatic effect of cocaine and its imposing immanence brings to the fore the inner conflicts that form the core of the novel, with a tantalising resonance stripped of all ornament and imbued with a bestial force. Novel With Cocaine contains all the components of a utopian idyll of artistic merit epitomised by social realism in Russian literature of the 1920s and 30s. Ageyev’s high melange of style combines both the materialist and idealist aesthetics, with eschatological undertones, giving this book much of its originality. The theme of control and escape becomes more overtly apparent with Vadim’s decent into addiction, propelled by his desire to find happiness, that “intense awareness of joy” that he may have felt with Sonya. But instead what he finds is a heightened inner discord, a resignation to torpor and dearth of action in the world beyond his own autological confines. Meditating on the psychology of inertia and the phenomenology of drugs in a bid to explain to the reader the strength of cocaine juxtaposed with his own weakness Vadim says, “The reason behind human activity, as diverse as that activity may be, is always one: man’s need to bring about events in the external world which, when reflected in his consciousness, will make him feel happiness” and the power of cocaine lays in “its ability to produce a feeling of physical happiness physically independent of all the external events”. In his pursuit for that elusive feeling of joy – by way of mitigating the pain and “immortal misery of the empty pocket”, the absence of love and lack of self-actualisation – through drugged-out stupefaction, Vadim overlooks the most important truth of all, namely that “Real happiness depends upon ourselves” and everything else is merely a palliative, a fallacy which sooner or later dissipates into nothing, like the drug itself.

Perhaps Josef K will get to testify in the ongoing wrangle over Kafka’s manuscripts in an Israeli court. The Czech author instructed his friend Max Brod to destroy his papers, instead two-thirds eventually made its way to the Bodleian Library via Kafka’s niece. The remainder ended up, after Brod’s death in 1968, with Esther Hoffe. When Hoffe herself died in 2007, the National Library of Israel disputed her will, claiming it contravened Brod’s original intention to bequeath the material to them. Elif Batuman tells the whole story in an excellent article at The New York Times. It’s going to make a wonderful novel. The case has already influenced a piece in the London Review of Books by Judith Butler, entitled ‘Who Owns Kafka?’, in which the ideological stakes are explored:

“The National Library’s most powerful adversary is the German Literature Archive in Marbach, which, interestingly, has retained Israeli lawyers for the purposes of the trial. Presumably, with Israeli counsel, this does not have the appearance of a German-Jewish fight, and so does not recall that other trial – Eichmann’s in 1961 – in which the judge suddenly broke out of Hebrew and into German to address Eichmann directly. That moment caused a controversy over the question of what language belongs in an Israeli court of law, and of whether Eichmann should have been accorded such a courtesy.”

Butler’s article was widely discussed and provoked a response from Michael Stein at Czech Position. ‘The Uses of Kakfa’ accuses her of a partisan reading of history:

“For Butler, with Israel occupying the role of chief villain, there is no room for mention of Kafka’s sisters, nor of Auschwitz, nor of the reasons Brod and Esther Hoffe and her daughters were all forced to flee Prague with those boxes of now (monetarily) valuable papers. Butler mentions that Brod ‘fled’ Europe just as she mentions Eichmann’s trial, yet in both cases without any context, as if there was nothing all that sinister about them, just ordinary, everyday fleeing and a man in the dock for embezzling funds.”

Whilst it is tempting to deplore this intractable and seemingly irresolvable state of affairs, there was perhaps something inevitable about it. Kafka’s own Trial was based on real-life litigation. His writings will only accumulate meaning and this court case is perhaps their ultimate verification.

Trials and Tribulations
2006: Samuel Beckett Estate / Pontedera Theatre: Beckett’s estate is notorious litigious, withdrawing permission whenever performers adapt the writer’s scrupulous stage directions. However, when twin sisters stepped in at the last minute to play Vladimir and Estragon, the court ruled in their favour.

2009: J.D. Salinger / Fredrik Colting: Lawyers for the reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye got an injunction against the proposed sequel. Whilst Colting argued that his book was a parody, the judge ruled that Sixty Years Later: Coming Through The Rye was too close in style to the original to support the claims of the defence.

2009: Edwyn Collins / Warner Bros: Although Collins owns the copyright to all his material, his manager and wife Grace Maxwell was prevented from uploading songs to MySpace by Warner Bros, who claimed they had the rights. In fact, it is record labels who have been selling the tracks online without his permission, a situation Robert Fripp has also complained about on occasion.

2009: Widow of Philip K. Dick / Daughters of Philip K. Dick: The world of sci-fi is rife with litigation and claims of plagiarism. Not a year goes by without Harlan Ellison claiming that the latest blockbuster has been ripped off from one of his stories. Similarly, Sophia Stewart has claimed that both The Terminator and The Matrix have come from her screen treatment The Third Eye. But the affairs of PKD always seem to bring a suitable air of paranoia. In 2009, his fifth wife filed suit against Electric Shepherd, the production company set up by Laura Leslie and Isa Dick Hackett to deal exclusively with their father’s works.

2010: The Estate of Philip K. Dick / Google: Isa Dick Hackett and estate issued a cease-and-desist letter over use of the name Nexus One for their Android phone. The Nexus line of replicants originally appeared in Dick’s famous Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

2011: Karin N. Calvo-Goller / Thomas Weigend: In 2007, Mr Weigend published a review of Ms Calvo-Goller’s The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court on the Global Law Books website, calling into question some of the author’s “conceptual grasp”. Israel-based Calvo-Goller took New York-based critic Weigend to court in Paris for criminal libel. The case was dismissed.

2011: Jay-Z / Terry Miller: The former winner of ITV’s Hell’s Kitchen and Tyneside chef has been in legal dispute with the music tycoon since 2006 over rights to the name ‘Rockafella’. Lawyers have been successful in banning the name from Miller’s Newcastle catering firm. I’ve got 99 problems, but a chef ain’t one.

Working out of the Burley area of Leeds, Peepal Tree Press has been a vital hub of independent publishing for just over 25 years. Founded by Jeremy Poynting to specialise in Caribbean writing, the company has expanded to include a significant amount of Black British titles: “Our focus is on what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world”. Poynting’s interest in Caribbean writing was kindled through a friendship with Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo at Leeds University in the mid-60s. Doctoral research in Caribbean literature led to his first visit a decade later. According to Poynting’s account on their website (see below), the Peepal Tree was seeded in 1984, when Guyanese author Rooplall Monar needed a book printing and there was no paper to be had: “I volunteered to organise the printing of a small run (400 I think) back in England… Backdam People became the first Peepal Tree publication, ‘typeset’ on a daisywheel printer and printed in the evenings in the college where I worked… Sadly the Guyana dollar was devalued from about $8 to the £1 sterling to over $100 to the pound just after these were sold. There was another lesson about the intricacies of export, one that was reinforced later when our former US distributors went bust, and when a certain Trinidadian bookseller skipped off the island with her new American husband, leaving her large debts behind”. But Peepal Tree survived and Backdam People is still in print.

Since then, the press has continued to bring new authors and poets to a wider audience, in addition to relevant memoirs, historical studies and literary criticism. They publish over 30 titles a year. I first came across them with Karen King-Aribisala’s tricksy, beguiling novel The Hangman’s Game but the range of titles is broad. In fact, Peepal Tree is as much an act of curation as publication. Along with Backdam People, they are dedicated to keeping more than 250 titles in print. As the poetically-named Hannah Bannister told Caribbean Book Blog: “Someone once said that being a publisher is a bit like being a midwife and I think that’s true, but I also have the privilege of supporting the books right through to their old age”. In 2009, this policy led to an ambitious and generous proposition: The Caribbean Modern Classics Series. The idea was to restore missing items to the Caribbean library, as Poynting explained on its inauguration: “Anyone looking for important Caribbean novels on Amazon will know that much of the writing published from the 1950s through to the 1980s is out of print… Over the next three or four years we plan a series of at least 60 titles, and then we will add to it as other key titles disappear from print”.

The piece goes on to make some crucial points about how books (and records) are the repositories of individual and collective cultural memory. It reminds me of Island’s commitment to keep Nick Drake’s records in print, despite poor early sales. Peepal Tree is investing in the future of their books:

these are the books that first captured me for Caribbean writing almost forty years ago. Then it was still possible to find nicely jacketed first editions of virtually everything for the fifties onwards for a couple of pounds, or buy new copies of Wilson Harrises or Andrew Salkeys from New Beacon Books or, if not originals, reprints from the old pre-Pearson Heinemann and Longman days, (before the accountants got in). Rereading those books carried me back to those times: memories of Orlando Patterson as a fiery young orator in the occupation of the LSE in London in 1967; treks to 2 Albert Road (before New Beacon moved) and long discussions with John La Rose in the kitchen upstairs; books read to a soundtrack of Don Drummond on horribly but atmospherically crackly Studio One LPs (and Toots, Desmond, Max, and a not yet global Bob Marley).

Peepal Tree Press receives financial support from Arts Council England. The following interview with Jeremy Poynting took place just as the latest funding announcements were being made. The company has been included in the National Portfolio with a financial increase for 2012. This will allow them to expand projects such as Inscribe, a creative and development programme for Black and Asian writers. The e-newsletters sent out by Adam Lowe (a novelist himself) are a valuable digest of book-related news. Taken together, Peepal’s contribution is immense and it would be impossible to replace 25 years of growth, roots and branches. The tree is an apt metaphor. It remains to be seen how the loss of funding will affect less fortunate organisations.

I read the excellent interview with you last year at the Caribbean Review of Books site, so I know how you Peepal Tree is approaching its Modern Classics series. I wondered how the process of finding contemporary writers works?

In the earliest days this was mainly through contacts, writers I knew who I thought were good, who had unpublished novels or collections of poems. Now we get more submissions than we can almost cope with in terms of finding the time to read them. There are always some (in addition to what we commit to) that if we had more editorial resources we might take on, though in truth we’re pretty much always at full stretch in terms of our schedules. So we don’t have to find writers, they find us, though I keep monitoring what is appearing in Caribbean literary journals, and we get recommendations from established writers regarding their protégés. In the earliest days our output was almost wholly Caribbean (including writers who were based in the UK or North America but who wrote as Caribbeans), but in more recent years we’ve also built a Black British segment of the list.

This has grown further since we took on a writer development role funded by the Arts Council, called Inscribe, developed initially by Kadija George and now also involving Dorothea Smarrt. Inscribe has become an imprint where we focus on chapbooks for writers who are heading towards full collections. Our poetry editor, Kwame Dawes, who is based in the USA, is also heavily involved in running writer development workshops in Jamaica, and several poets have come to us through this process. The other fact I’d note is that over the past half-dozen years we’ve had writers submit to us who have had publishing contracts with the big multinationals but obviously did not sell enough copies and were dropped. So there’s a mixture of building a reputation for high quality work that attracts writers, and the negative push from mainstream publishers who are only interested in anything Caribbean or Black British if they can sell it to a predominantly white, mainstream readership. Just recently, for instance, a number of novels came to us when MacMillan Caribbean dropped adult literary titles they’d already contracted.

As publishers like Heinemann, Longman and Faber have dropped a lot of their catalogue, has Peepal Tree become the global authority on Caribbean literature now or are there other publishers performing a similar role?

Yes, we are the major publishers of Caribbean literature. There are a few publishers in the USA who have dipped their toes in, but almost always with a focus on American-based writers, publishers such as Akashic, Red Hen Press, and Greyhound Press, but with only a handful of titles each. There are two serious publishers in the Caribbean – the University of the West Indies Press and Ian Randle Publishers – who publish roughly the same number of books a year that we do, but both concentrate on the academic market and scarcely touch fiction or poetry. Obviously the mainstream hangs onto a few big names – Faber with Walcott and Earl Lovelace, and our colleagues at fellow independent presses Bloodaxe and Carcanet have a few good poets on their lists.

There has been a long relationship between Britain and the Caribbean. Has this relationship changed much recently? How could we nurture this relationship more in Britain? Part of Peepal’s mission is to keep books in print. Do you have a reasonably clear idea of print run in advance? Do you tend to print in bulk or wait for more frequent reprints?

I think the truth is that the relationship between Britain and the Caribbean is a pretty defunct, amnesiac one. The killing off of the BBC’s Caribbean service is a symptom. Since the end of the Cold War the Caribbean has not even had the dwindling strategic importance that prompted a degree of interference and access to some fairly slender resources. The ending of preferential duties on sugar and other agricultural produce at the behest of US global free trade strategies is another symptom. Occasionally bad things come out of the Caribbean such as hurricanes and earthquakes, the occasional threat to tourism such as the Dudus affair, but as a region it is of virtually no economic significance except for tourism and the scandals of off-shore banking. Reggae obviously made powerful connections, (since there was an active Black British reggae scene as well), but recent musical exports such as Rihanna bring little by way of regional culture with them. This is obviously not how it should be and it is something that concerns us. There are important institutions such as the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, but I’d certainly hope that slavery wasn’t the only point of remembrance. There’s an absence of cultural flow from the Caribbean that’s in marked distinction to the flow from India, and I think because of that and the generally negative reporting of the Caribbean, there’s a younger generation of Caribbean heritage people who don’t really feel any great sense of connection. There are obviously exceptions, but I think the absence of cultural flow denies a potential enrichment of the lives of both Caribbean heritage people. The Caribbean classics series was in part inspired by that absence. We don’t really have the resources to do more, but we do what we can to raise profile, but principally to try and build a community of interest via our website and e-newsletters.

We used to make our own books, but now use a really good digital printers. This helps us keep books in print without tying up capital in stock. Our initial print runs are not usually more than the 500 mark, but then we may get reprints at a 100 a time as often as needed. It’s not POD, but it really helps cashflow, schedules and minimum stock maintenance. We still have stock from 20 years ago – before we realised that lower unit costs were worth nothing if stock wasn’t turning over.

Although I’m sure are asked this all the time, I couldn’t find an account of why you called the press Peepal Tree? There are many stories around the plant, I wondered which had appealed to the most?

The peepal tree (ficus religiosa) was brought from India to the Caribbean by indentured labourers and nativised there. In Indian villages it was often the tree at the centre of the village where people hung out, stories were told and that pattern was repeated in the Caribbean. So the idea was something that symbolized a transplanted culture, the connection with story-telling and the obvious pun. At the time I established Peepal Tree I was also making the point that the Indian presence was very much part of the Caribbean at a time when that was sometimes denied. At the beginning of our publishing, there was an more of an emphasis on the Indo-Caribbean, but always with the intention of diversifying in the way we have.

I read your comments regarding ACE in November. Is the funding landscape any clearer for publishers like Peepal now? With cuts to areas like the World Service, do you think Britain is beginning to squander the richness of its relationship with other cultures?

I’ve just learnt that our own funding has been increased, but there are some very regrettable rejections of other’s funding bids. I think as a group, regularly funded publishers were able to get across our case for our position in the literature ecology, and at least air the case for fiction as well as poetry. What happens will, I suspect, depend on who wins the argument that will almost certainly take place between the regions and head-office/London. I think that the Greater North regions (Yorkshire, Northwest and NorthEast, which contains a significant independent publishing sector) will fight for what they have against a degree of London-centrism (though one important Yorkshire publisher, Arc, has been abandoned). The context is that there isn’t currently a fair spread of literature organisations and there are new organisations applying for portfolio inclusion. Undoubtedly some funded independent publishers will be cut, though they will still have access to lottery funding. ACE is understandably nervous at the minute, so whilst there is still some support for what they called “international work”, the emphasis is currently very much on “public benefit” and that is very closely restricted to England. In terms of the BBC, British Council and I fear increasingly the Arts Council, relationships with other cultures tends to follow economic opportunity. Brazil, India and China are hot; the Caribbean is not!

You might want to come back to me on this later when the dust has settled a bit more…

Many major publishers are in trouble at the moment. What do you think they could learn from Peepal’s way of doing business?

Not a lot, I suspect in terms of the huge divergence of purpose. We try to operate in as efficient a way as possible in terms of maximising sales and holding down costs, but our basic model is about doing books that we believe will have a long shelf-life, so that whilst we can’t promote books to the level that the mainstream does, we don’t suffer huge returns. The commercial model is a speculative, gambling one. The one success will pay for the failed speculations. We depend heavily on the contribution of our backlist to contribute to our sales income. For us books are never just commodities, though we try to make them as desirable objects as possible.

Peepal is involved in projects such as Inscribe, does it help to meet your public (and future authors) face to face?

Very much so. Meeting our readers at launches and readings is almost always encouraging and we get quite a bit of response from the e-newsletters Adam sends out. Though we are never market-led, we do take the trouble to find out what our core readers think. For instance, recently we have been surveying our e-mailing list on their feelings about e-books and paper-books.

The Modern Classics series is the perfect statement for Peepal Tree and an inspiring act of curatorship. Do you have any other ambitions?

Yes. I plan to launch a shameless crib of the old Penguin modern poets idea – a generous selection of three poets in one 120-page uniform collection – but ranging across the Caribbean and Black Britain, with one current established poet, one recuperated, and one emerging. My other ambition is to do something about the gulf that exists between academia and the wider Caribbean reading public – wherever they are. Our readers are people who read for more than just diversion, but to explore themselves and their world. Too much critical writing has lost touch with such concerns and become impenetrably self-regarding.

The Caribbean Modern Classics Series:

• Wayne Brown On the Coast & Other Poems
• Jan Carew Black Midas / The Wild Coast
• Austin C. Clarke Amongst Thistles & Thorns
• Neville Dawes The Last Enchantment
• Wilson Harris Heartland
• George Lamming Of Age & Innocence
• Roger Mais The Hills Were Joyful Together
• Edgar Mittelholzer A Morning at the Office / Corentyne Thunder / Shadows Move Among Them / The Life and Death of Sylvia
• Elma Napier A Flying Fish Whispered
• Orlando Patterson The Children of Sisyphus
• V.S. Reid New Day
• Garth St. Omer A Room on the Hill
• Andrew Salkey Escape to an Autumn Pavement
• Denis Williams Other Leopards / The Third Temptation

New and Forthcoming Titles:

• Jamaican author Andrew Salkey’s 60s quartet for children: Drought / Earthquake / Hurricane / Riot
• Alecia McKenzie Sweetheart
• Una Marson: Selected Poems (edited and introduced by Alison Donnell)

Further Reading:
Peepal Tree Press website and online shop
Interview with Jeremy Poynting at The Caribbean Review of Books
Adam Lowe’s website
New Beacon Books
Creative Caribbean Network

Where: Canberra, Australia

What: Australia’s richest literary prize, the winning book in each category receives a tax-free award of AUD80,000. The categories are fiction, non-fiction, young adult and children’s fiction. Entries opened in January. The fiction panel is chaired by Professor Peter Pierce, editor of 2009’s Cambridge History of Australia Literature.

When: Shortlist announced by Arts Minister Simon Crean between 23rd-27th May 2011. Winners announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in July 2011.

History: The awards were first announced in 2007 by the incoming Rudd government, and the first prize was awarded in 2008. This year, following feedback from the book industry, the prize money has been redistributed to provide greater recognition to shortlisted authors. Digital books are now eligible.

Remit: “Excellence in literary works by Australian authors warrants rewards, whether through literary prizes or practical steps to ensure writers and publishing houses can thrive. Inaugurated in 2008, the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognise individual excellence and the contribution Australian authors make to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life”.

Previous winners include:
2010: Dog Boy by Eva Hornung: This dog’s-eye view of an abandoned boy living feral in Moscow beat Coetzee’s Summertime for best fiction. John Burnside in The Guardian: “The world that Hornung creates around Romochka is one of terrible cold and hunger, where physical harm and death are constant dangers, yet it is also immensely rich in sensual detail – and it is very hard to let go. At its painful end, where some fundamental questions about trust and manipulation are left unresolved, Dog Boy emerges as a novel that is not only very moving, but also morally and philosophically urgent in its core concerns”.

2009: The Boat by Nam Le: These seven short stories by Vietnamese-born Nam Le cover great stylistic and territorial ground. Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times: “Mr Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among veteran authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history”.

2008: The Zookeeper’s War by Steven Conte: In 1943, an Australian woman and her German husband take shelter beneath Berlin Zoo. Judging panel comments: “For its command of engrossing plot and vivid historical setting, for the ethical seriousness that informs its every incident and entanglement, for the freshness and vivacity of a new voice… the judges recommend The Zookeeper’s War”.

Further Reading:
Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Official Website