Her



I did a short radio interview today about the Flannery O'Connor art exhibit we're pulling together called "The Meanest of Them Sparkled."  (The show won't debut until June 28, 2914, reception 6 to 10 pm at Thunder-Sky, Inc.; the radio interview comes out in July on WVXU.)

 

Last night I started jotting down reasons why we want to do a show featuring Flannery's work, and basically it's because I love her and everything she stands for, and by "everything she stands for" I guess I mean her strangeness, her devotion to her religion, her curt, sardonic authorial voice, her mean-spirited yet somehow life-giving sense of grace -- just her, as a figment of my imagination as well as a figure in literature that never really has been replicated.  She was a devout Catholic in the Bible-belt south; she was a person with a disability staring death straight in face and making serious jokes at her typewriter daily.  She raised peacocks. 

 

All of that seems to dictate some kind of respect that would eventually end up transforming into tribute. 

 

I'm reminded Raymond's strangeness too, of his devotion to his way of seeing the world, of his serious jokes in the face of absurdity and desolation.  (Read through some of the captions he installed on his drawings, and you'll see what I mean:  www.raymondthundersky.org.) 

 

Her writing has the crystal clarity of a how-to guide merged with the slam-dunk poetry of someone who does not ever mess around.  Her metaphors and similes and other devices aren't devices or tricks as much as necessary portals.  And when she writes about evil she does it with a sense of both dread and the capacity to know what evils feels and tastes like.  The Misfit in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a fine example.  He's all black-hatted, sun-burnt sinew and bone, but also jovial, even respectful, in a snaky, sweet manner that's disgusting and seductive simultaneously.  And the counterpoint to The Misfit's evil, the Grandmother, is a fluttering dimwit who somehow in the end rises up from her own ashes to show us what "good" truly is. There are moments in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" that are hilarious and there are moments that are horrifying, and all those moments often intermingle into art that goes beyond being art, into a realm of faith or philosophy or whatever, without losing a sense of groundedness, of precision based on the need to make something live beyond what it is.

 

Flannery was an outsider artist.  One of the greatest.  Spinning her tales from her porch at Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, putting up with her mother's stupid questions, listening to her peafowl scream across the hills, their feathered tails exploding into lush plumage and  reasons to live.

 

We've invited 16 really great artists to take on Flannery's universe, and to use it to inspire visions.  Cannot wait to see the results.  

Under the Stars

One of my collages.  It's directly linked to a couple of the stories in Next to Nothing.

This week a really nice reporter from Cincinnati Magazine called me up to do a short interview about my book that's about to come out in March (from Lethe Press, thank you LA Fields and Steve Berman), Next to Nothing.  It was a pleasure to talk to someone so kind and sensible about the stuff I write.  A lot of people, at least in the past, have not taken too kindly to my stories and what they mean and do.  That's not patting myself on the back or anything, just the way it is.  I mean many people get it of course and I'm grateful, but when they don't get it boy it's hurtful, as in your day job being threatened, etc.  The main reason many people have turned up their noses at my oeuvre is because the people I focus on are poor working class trash who also often happen to be gay, and they are living in situations and places that are not conducive for the "coming out" story or even hopeful tolerant little ditties about "fitting in."  I mean they "fit in," but often times they fit in with people who are "morally objectionable" as well.  And by putting air-quotes around "morally objectionable," I'm stressing the fact that every person I concentrate on in the fiction I write helps me at least question what that term means.  And then I usually go back to that epigram I'm always tossing about, the Flannery O'Connor one that actually starts off Next to Nothing:   "It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” 

 

I centralize freaks in a way that doesn't allow codes of morality to interrupt their transmissions.  And for me at least that's one of the most moral actions to take.  Sounds self-aggrandizing, but that's it. 

 

Next to Nothing is a drastic, off-kilter parade of homosexuals, alcoholics, pedophiles, philanderers, adulterers, robbers, wife-beaters, transvestites, foul-mouthed kids, and so on.  It is also a Wednesday night after work where everyone is too tired to breath, some going home and feeding the kids, others having a drink, others going to their part-time jobs as caregivers at the group-home.  Some are getting ready for Wednesday night services at church and others are bracing themselves to ask other relatives for some cash till pay-day and still others are hoping their cars are going to start tomorrow morning and a few more are doing laundry, watching HBO, taking the garbage out.  It's that mix of "morally objectionable" parade and the mundane everyday where I find meaning, and even grandeur, in lives that often don't mean shit to others, and when I write those stories I don't feel anything but a connection, a direct link, to both myself and to others. 

 

We are all sinners, and we all sometimes bounce checks because we wanted to buy really good Christmas presents.  We all are evil, and we also help the old lady get her groceries into her car. 

 

By foregrounding lives that are not heroic or even upstanding, but just there, I can mitigate the need to judge and forgive, and find a place to examine my own shortcomings, my own stupidities and my own goodness.

 

I just finished reading The Great Gatsby again, which is a much more elegant and brilliant book than I will ever be able to write of course, but still it has always informed what I want to do.  Gatsby is the freak here.  He is all desire and lies and crimes, and yet he is the central figure of Nick's displacement, and ours.  "Morally objectionable," Gatsby owns a different metaphysical space, an ethereal world of wishing and hope that's completely tainted and diffused by the means he has gone to attain what he wants.  And yet he is better than most people we will ever know.

 

One of my favorite moments in the book happens toward the end, when Gatsby is summarily banished from the Buchanan household, but he still waits to see when or if Daisy will come to the window to let him know she loves him.  He is an outcast on the edge of his own paradise, and Nick is leaving after hanging out with him out of pity.  It's nighttime in West Egg, that blue-gold glow Fitzgerald loves to conjure, and Nick shouts across the lawn on his way to his train:  "They're a rotten crowd.  You're worth  the whole damn bunch put together."

 

That shout always makes me cry. 

 

Look:  God knows I'm no Fitzgerald or O'Connor, but I do have a reason to write, and it's probably linked to those two great American writers' needs to not only stylize life into a form they can create from, but also their needs to find morality outside of the "hive mind," outside of the "crowd."  Both of these canonized geniuses found ways to canonize freaks, to displace us from ourselves for a little while so we can know our own shortcomings, and understand our place under the stars.

 

  

anomaly, noun (pl -lies): Deviation or departure from the normal or common order, form, or rule.

 

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc.'s 2014 Exhibition Season: Anomaly Lessons

 

Thunder-Sky, Inc.'s 2014 exhibition season includes paeans to an idiosyncratic fiction-writing genius, a local hat-wearing folk hero, and other wonderful outcasts, including Mr. Thunder-Sky himself in a season-ending installation that incorporates his desire to build a Utopia while destroying whatever got in his way. We're using "Anomaly Lessons" as the organizing concept and title for a whole year's worth of shows that teach us all what it means to be gorgeously abnormal.

 

"Head Shots: Portraits by Bob Hoke and Stacey Vallerie" opens January 10, 2014 with a reception 6 to 10 pm. The show closes February 14, 2014. Hoke, from Hannibal Missouri, creates whimsically bizarre and bizarrely whimsical portraits of people with a Paul-Klee flourish; Cincinnati-based Vallerie finds inspiration and serenity in reality. Side by side, their works seem to whisper sweet nothings to one another.

 

"Deep in Thought: Paintings by Mark Betcher and Scott Carney" opens February 28, 2014 with a reception 6 to 10 pm. The show closes April 11, 2014. Northern Kentucky's Betcher layers his work with words, pictures, and word-picture hybrids; Carney looks for Utopia in his storybook paintings.   Both approaches feel thoughtful without belaboring the point, both visually appealing and a little off-kilter.  

 

"Rejoice!: A Retrospective of Avtar Gill, the Cincinnati Hat-Man" opens April 25, 2014 with a reception 6 to 10 pm. The show closes June 13, 2014. Avtar Gill (pictured above), known by many downtowners as The Hat Man, passed away early 2013, but he will always be remembered (like Raymond Thunder-Sky) as a Cincinnati folk hero for the sign-emblazoned hats he wore while walking all across the city, and for his dedication to maintaining a strong, cultural voice and presence throughout his life. This exhibit will feature photographs, video, testimonials, stories, and actual hats and signs The Hat-Man left behind.

 

"The Meanest of Them Sparkled: Visual Artists Respond to Flannery O'Connor's Fictional Universe" opens June 27, 2014 with a reception 6 to 10 pm. The show closes August 8, 2013.   "Meanest" commemorates the 50th anniversary of Flannery O'Connor's death. A skilled, humorous, dead-on writer of short stories and novels ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and Wiseblood chief among them), O'Connor's prose is steeped in beautifully unsettling images and set-pieces. O'Connor was a painter and cartoonist besides being a fiction-writer, and this sensibility informs a lot of what she wrote and depicted. We've asked several artists to create art inspired by O'Connor's genius, no limits on media or style. We'll also be sponsoring a reading of some of O'Connor's works to go along with the show.

 

"Outcasts from Hollywood (the Greatest Celebrity Art Show Event): Antonio Adams and Emily Brandehoff" opens August 22, 2014 with a reception 6 to 10 pm. The show closes October 10, 2014. Adams and Brandehoff often work side by side on Saturdays in the basement at Thunder-Sky, Inc. They will be creating separate suites of work that investigate/celebrate/satirize the poetry and absurdity of celebrity culture and its aftermath. "How Deep Is Your Love," a Thunder-Sky, Inc. fundraiser happening in the basement gallery, opens as well.

 

"New Clownville Amusement Park: Constructing Raymond's Perfect World by Matt Waldeck Jr. and Sr. and Marc Lambert" opens October 24, 2014 with a reception 6 to 10 pm. The show closes December 12, 2014. The Waldecks (a father and son team), along with Lambert (whose painting of Raymond is above), are taking over the gallery to create a Raymond-Thunder-Sky-inspired installation that pays homage both to his drawings and to his life. Sculpture, drawing and other media will be on display. As well, we'll be presenting a new show of some of Raymond's more obscure and eccentric drawings. 

Gag Gift

 

The other night I stumbled across The Wrestler on TV.  I remember seeing it at a Cineplex in West Chester, Ohio back in 2009, and halfway through it I had to get up and go to the restroom because I was crying so hard.  That doesn't happen very often.  I mean I cry at sad movies, but it's the normal wipe-a-couple-of-tears-off-your-face way.  The Wrestler sent me into spasms.  It had everything to do with Mickey Rourke's performance, as well as the director Darren Aronofsky's ear and eye.  The scenes were so devastatingly specific they crushed me in a way that only real life does, almost as if I had lived through them with Randy "the Ram" Robinson. 

 

It's very hard to depict working class trash in literature and in movies because there are so many traps and tropes and tricks, you can kid yourself into creating a stereotype while also feeling your doing the world a favor.  Aronofsky's gift is taking a cliché -- a professional wrestled completely down on his luck searching for redemption -- and recalibrating the atmosphere and action so that it has a haunted, lived-in feel that makes you believe this shit is more than real:  it's alive.  The scenes when The Ram works at a deli-counter in a grocery-store are so vivid and dead-on you feel embarrassed and elated simultaneously, as The Ram doles out fried chicken and potato salad in plastic containers with a Vaudevillian shuffle and a showmanship that he just can't drop, even if he is working minimum wage and recovering from his latest heart-attack.  And the scenes with his daughter have that same bruised tenderness, that sense that The Ram understands his own joke and yet can't stop telling it over and over and over to an empty house.  The daughter, played with a glum effortlessness that fits each scene perfectly by Evan Rachel Wood, doesn't want to see The Ram in her front yard, but there he is, stepping out of his white-trash customized van, offering her gifts, haphazardly wrapped in old Christmas paper.  First off he gives her a "gag-gift" to warm things up:  a lime-green 80s bomber jacket.  You can see by the look on her face what she's thinking:  business as usual.  But then The Ram gives her the actual gift, the real thing:  a Navy blue pea-coat that seems just like her, sensible and working-class and a little glamorous too.  That's one of Aronofsky's great touches:  allowing The Ram enough self knowledge to understand the situation he's in, without losing the authenticity of being exactly what he is. 

 

There's a stubbornness on screen that is not acted out; it's lived and somehow embedded in every move the camera makes.  That desolate working-class neighborhood where The Ram's estranged daughter lives is in both my dreams and in my history, that feeling of being lost and wanting to be found but unable to tell anybody where you're hiding.  And The Ram's trailer home too:  nasty but not too nasty, a place you can see yourself living if you had to.  Nothing is too much, and yet Aronofsky and Rourke capture the extremes to the point you feel them as a part of your own world.  No judgment happens.  There's a crystal clear connection between who you think you are and what you are seeing.

 

It's empathy, but without any sense of uplift or heroism involved.

 

In my stories I try to construct characters that live in the same cosmically disjointed and kind of dirty universe The Ram populates.  It's truly hard because if you think about who might end up reading them it gets a little screwy.  The artistry comes from not shellacking over faults and perversions and creepiness, but finding a way to make "sins" universal, implicating people in these lives with an effortless sense of connection and nonchalance.  Or as Flannery O'Connor puts it (and by God I'm using this quote as an epigraph for the new book of stories):  "It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”  

A Visionary Light Settled in Her Eyes

I've been obsessed with the Paula Deen thing since first hearing about it firsthand via Matt Lauer pissing and moaning about it on The Today Show, miffed because Paula was too exhausted to come onto his show to be drawn and quartered for saying the n-word.  Then there was the now infamous public apology/humiliation she and her team posted on her website, in which she begs for forgiveness.  Above is a photo taken from that session:  her face is grotesque-drag-queen clownish, the eyes so sad and old-lady hurt you want to comfort her, even while everyone else is saying she's goddamn guilty.  I guess what I'm feeling, what I always feel, is that she is both goddamn guilty and goddamn innocent.  She's essential now to me; her meaning, what she represents, is now completely universal.  Her sins have turned her into a lightning-in-a-bottle freak.  Her suffering is a lesson in keeping your mouth shut.  But she also now has the power of her sorrow to make us all see who we are.  We're her.  Ignorant, big-mouthed, insensitive and too sensitive, wanting to please everybody with how cordial and sweet we are, but also wanting to throw a great big plantation wedding with African American men dressed in white tuxedos, you know, like back in the Shirley Temple days.  We defend our little brother even though he seems to be a total douche-bag.  We make horrible food that causes Type-2 diabetes.  We want lots of money and fame and power, but we also want to be personable and chatty and get-along kinds of gals.  We don't want to confront history; we want to forget it so we can sit down and eat.  We just want to make good old downhome food that's all.  We hate controversy and meanness and yet we indulge in it selectively, whenever it suits the conversation.  We're kind and donate to charity.  We love people, no matter what their skin color.  We really, really do.  But sometimes we just need to let off a little steam in a roomful of the likeminded.  We all like to think we're decent-minded and wonderful.  We all want to be forgiven.

On Friday, on Facebook, I posted this photo, along with an allusion to Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Revelation," comparing Paula to Mrs. Turpin (the proud, loud wife of Claud, and the story's main character), and the media stirring the shit-storm to Mary Grace, the pimple-faced, sour-apple young college girl who literally flings a book at Mrs. Turpin in a doctor's office, sick of listening to her self-congratulatory bull-shit.  Mary Grace says, after doing her violent act:  "Go back to hell where you came from you old wart-hog."

Mrs. Turpin is beyond shattered.  She feels violated in ways that go beyond mere rudeness or impropriety.  Her very soul has been shaken to the point that she has a vision at the end of the story (as she is spraying out the pig pen in her backyard) that is both horribly lovely and perplexingly simple:

There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who , like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.

"Shocked and altered" is the expression on Paula's face in that picture.  I think all of us should have to come to grips with that sense of loss and that sense of shock, that feeling that who we think we are, and all the comfort that comes from that, can be completely obliterated simply by a spoken word or an angry glance.  The lesson here isn't about political correctness or character assassination for me.  It's about how all of us indulge in what Paula indulged in:  thinking that who we are is more important than the situation we're in.  She has been humbled and may lose everything she ever loved because of that.  I forgive her because I think she is the norm.

Utterly Meaningless

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."   Ecclesiastes 1:2

 

 

I have been making these collages on 4 X 6" notecards, using crayons, magic markers, glue-sticks, masking tape, magazines and junk-mail.  I've almost made 50 of them now.  As I do them I try to push everything out of my head, pursuing meaninglessness.  The main reason, I think, I need and want to do something so silly and worthless is because making images and ideas that are meaningless is sort of like envisioning actuality.  A realness sets in as I go through the process of it all, culling the most mundane images from junk-mail and National Enquirer and Time Magazine, cutting them out (usually quite sloppily, although Bill helps out, and his cutting is much more careful), applying it all on notecards of official size, scanning in each card, and then slipping the finished product into little plastic photo-albums for preservation. 

 

It's all so stupid that it is beautiful, and I don't need anyone else to see what I'm doing, even though I know I'll end up posting it just for kicks, and also storage.  I feel like I am connected to a strain and cult of artists who don't give a fuck.  I know that sounds preciously punk, like I'm proud of such a thing, but all I'm getting at is the comfort of knowing nothing really matters.  Anyone can see.  Nothing really matters.  To me. 

 

And in that refrain comes a sort of peace you can only get at by understanding, as the Bible says,  "Everything is meaningless!"

 

A lot of the time art-making and fiction-writing seem to be constructed around the rational enterprises of meaning-making, of creating objects and worlds that will be understood and consumed and spoken about as if they have broken through meaninglessness in order to give us a new way of celebrating what we already know.  I guess in everything I do creatively I'm trying to do the exact opposite.  I cling to the notion that nobody knows anything, and that the pursuit of knowledge makes sense with microscopes and telescopes, but cutting out pictures of Marie Osmond and deep-dish pizzas is a whole other quest.  It's a quest for absurdity without a tongue in your cheek.  It's a search for something beautiful that isn't. 

 

I write short stories about people who have often given up.  Hopelessness pervades most of my creative decisions, not because I'm hopeless, but because hopelessness is a part of being alive and aware of your situation, and in that hopelessness, often, is where the people I write about find a sort of recognition and sanctuary from a world that is always trying to push hope and decency down their throats without giving them the economic and social tools they need to make "hope" matter.  I write about low-rent nobodies and I try to stylize their nobodiness not so that it is palatable, but so that the writing and the style replace the need for relatability.  Flannery O'Connor one said,  “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

That process is the process of pulling meaning away from itself, and allowing people who think they are not freaks a moment of pure beautiful nothingness, a taste of what it is to have meaninglessness intervene and win.  The "depth" Flannery is talking about comes from that comeuppance, if that's what it is.  Who really knows?  But the collages and stories I make have that mean sense of upheaval, the bad manners and the awkward yelling of a drunk crawling into a room full of upstanding citizens about to pledge allegiance to something.  And the drunk says, "Ecclesiastes Volume 1, Verse 2 motherfuckers!"

 

I'm not iconoclastic.  Or even unruly.  I just have a bull-shit detector, and it  produces documents such as this:



 

 

And paragraphs such as this (from one of my short stories called "God Knows Where"):

 

 After we leave Urgent Care, me and Misty and Shawn go to Walgreens to get Shawn’s antibiotic, which costs 124 bucks.  I don’t mind, I keep saying, and Misty keeps saying she will pay me back.  I also get Shawn some coloring stuff.  We drive back to Misty’s place, where we find her boyfriend in the shadows, watching Survivor.  The place smells like chili and old water.  I carry Shawn, and Misty flicks on the light.  Chuck is the boyfriend’s name, and he opens his eyes wide.  He has the top of his Arby’s uniform on, and below that just underwear and tube-socks.  

 

At the end of day I guess I'm haunted by the fact that everything is shapeless but still causes shapes.   Everyone is stupid but hey we did get a man on the moon.

 

"The Meanest of Them Sparkled"

 

 

I read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor to my class on Monday.  It took about a half-hour.  "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida."  What a great first line.  The story zooms forth after that pronouncement.  Flannery lingers but never stops, allowing landscape and sky to leak through, imitating what can't be said with words.   As I read it I felt the pace kind of take over my mind.  It's movement she's after in this story, a flashpoint in motion, and the vision comes from the speed being slowed down through translation:  "The trees were full of silver sunlight," Flannery writes, "and the meanest of them sparkled."  That's a jarring turn of phrase because in its elegant banality there is blissful and unnerving transfiguration.  You know when the light in the trees gets mean you are on your way to something.

 

The whole sad show, as the family heads into danger, has a comic meanness to it that allows you to laugh without losing the seriousness of the journey.  The grandmother, Bailey Boy, John Wesley, June Star, their feckless mother and the baby she carries -- they are all headed toward annihilation.  The way they get there is a comic nightmare, but once they get to the hill after the car crash you begin to feel that sparkle turn into radiation.  "The gaping mouth" of the woods across the road is just that.  The Misfit just had to appear.   No story without him, Flannery wants us to know.  There's no use in trying to make a story out of the grandmother and her clan unless there's those gunshots in the woods.  It would just be hundreds of miles of bitching and moaning and wanting and needing and mouthing off and slapping.  

 

Everybody always goes to the very end to find the moment that matters most in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."  That scene when the grandmother gets shot, the falling action as The Misfit tells his henchmen, and us, that there is no real pleasure in this world, "only meanness."  This time, reading it aloud, I found myself lingering on another scene, right after Bobby Lee and Hiram shoot Bailey Boy and John Wesley, Bobby Lee dragging Bailey Boy's shirt along like a souvenir:

 

The children's mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn't get her breath.  "Lady," [The Misfit] asked, "would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your husband?" 

 

"Yes, thank you," the mother said faintly.  Her left arm dangled helplessly and she was holding the baby, who had gone to sleep, in the other.  "Hep that lady up, Hiram," The Misfit said as she struggled to climb out of the ditch, "and Bobby Lee, you hold onto that little girl's hand."

 

It's chilling but also somehow a relief, that "Yes, thank you."  It carries with it a grace that you can't really understand until you move through that moment when you are about to die, and you're treated with a sort of kindness and gentility by your killer.  The mother and the baby up to that point in the story have been comic relief, but now, almost at the end, they become devastating angels.  I almost got choked up reading that part aloud.  I've read this story probably a thousand times, and each time it lets me know different things. 

 

This time it was about that "Yes, Thank you."  How exact and horrifying three little words can be.

   

Beautiful Souls




"Holding Hands for Safety" is in my collection of stories The Smallest People Alive, available on Amazon...

 
L. A. Fields, a sweet and kind MFA student from Chicago,  messaged me about answering a few questions she had about what I do fiction-wise for a class she's in.  Here goes...

I looked up the anthology where I first found “Holding Hands For Safety” (in Men on Men 7) and found a review calling your story “fierce and funny,” which is not at all the impression I got (it seems very quiet and serious to me). How would you characterize this story? Or at least what is the impression you hoped to give with it?

It’s both funny and sad to me, and I don’t think you can have either in a story like that without both humor and tragedy working at the same time together to get you through. That said, I also think the class aspect of everything I write can sometimes be misinterpreted as insouciance and “black comedy,” when really it’s just the way people live, point-blank. Poor people, like rich people, have beautiful idiosyncrasies – it’s just that rich people often have more elaborate and intricate ways of hiding those idiosyncrasies, or to transform them into sweet little eccentricities. When Flannery O’Connor talked about why many of her stories featured “white-trash” people, she said something about how many of her characters are stripped of manners and decorum, and that allows the reader to look into their souls. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. And I think in “Holding Hands for Safety,” all the characters are stripped down to their essences to the point you have access to their souls, and while those souls might be a little ugly and a little worn out, they are beautiful souls none-the-less, especially the souls of the three main characters: the teenaged gay narrator, his punk step-cousin, and the six-year-old girl the step-cousin kills.

You said in an interview with Donald Ray Pollock that you’ve written another novel since The Life I Lead—would you mind telling me what it’s about, and if it’s any closer to finding a home?

Actually it’s Holding Hands for Safety turned into a novel, funny enough. I opened up the story to include many other points of view (including Courtney and Troy), and what happens after the murder. It’s going around now to different places. No good news, yet. Or maybe ever. But I keep trying. That’s the essence of all this stuff: you can’t get deterred. I have a draft of another novel I’m working on now called Johnson City Divas. It’s a homage to James M. Cain and other noir writers. It’s kind of like Mildred Pierce spliced with Jean Genet. A middle-aged drag-queen who lives in Johnson City, Tennessee is one of the central characters. I liked the idea of going with a plot-driven gig for a change. In The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Cain’s plots have both an artificial dexterity and a weird existential necessity. It’s the nexus between reality and phoniness where murderers live. A lovely place for a story.

Having written both novels and short stories, which do you enjoy writing best? Are there differences in how you approach long and short pieces of fiction?

I like writing short stories, but then I get sick of them because I want the terrain of a planet instead of the intimacy of a condo. But they go well together, and most of the novels I write come from the short stories. They intermingle. And some of my favorite novels, actually, read like collections of interrelated short stories. The best I’ve read recently: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

The Bare Bones of Belief and Decency

We went to Finster Fest at Paradise Gardens in Summerville, Georgia over the weekend with a booth of Thunder-Sky, Inc. art.  It was one of those experiences I'll never forget -- being in the epicenter of a universe I have been circling most of my life. 

Art is often a way out for many people:  making it, buying it, loving it...  Art-making for Howard Finster was a way for him to find a sort of heaven on earth.  He seems to have relished the idea of Slipshod Utopia, and that aesthetic is in full-bloom now, with all his sculptures and installations slowly (and some quickly) deteriorating.  But it is a spiritual disintegration, isn't it?  All that art and love and godliness left to the elements, being eaten up by rain and time.  It seems almost like a prophecy, Biblical, humble and small.  Finster's art has the same effect:  his paintings and other works may come off to some as Bible-belt kitsch, when in reality he was doing what William Blake did, creating his own aesthetic and philosophy using organized religion only as a platform for something bigger, stranger, and kinder.

I felt as if I had drifted into somebody else's dream being there, but it was my dream too somehow.  Finster has made sure of that.  Concrete facades built from bear faces and pop bottles, old costume jewelry and broken dinnerware.  There's that initial whimsy to it, of course, but that has worn off now, and what's left is the bare bones of belief and decency.  Finster did not construct a Paradise that would last.  I think that's part of his meaning:  you can't get there from here.  You can only find glimpses and create idols that crack and melt into grotesques.   

The area around Paradise Gardens is residential, and many of the other homes are abandoned.  There's a state prison in Paradise's backyard.  Highway 27 toward Summerville is green and raw, a landscape of hollow trees and overgrown grass and static cows, old ranch-style houses and barns, and a sky above it all as blank as thoughts before you go to sleep.  I kept thinking of a phrase Flannery O'Connor said of her version of Georgia -- that it was "Christ-haunted."  That's the feeling.  A holy ghost barely visible, being chased away.

Paradise Gardens is not paradise of course.  Its poetic decay is incredibly moving, but also very sad.  It makes you wonder if Finster had not been categorized in the way he was (as an "outsider/folk/self-taught/visionary artist"), maybe we would not be losing Paradise in this way.  Finster made immense contributions to culture from this location.  Respect needs to arrive soon in the form of conservation and curation.  Here's the website if you're interested in providing any kind of support:  Howard Finster's Paradise Gardens.

Below are photos we took...  An incredible place...