Always Reading as a Writer: Curtis Smith Interviews Clifford Garstang

Clifford Garstang is the author of House of the Ancients and Other Stories, recently released by Press 53, as well as two previous story collections, In an Uncharted Country and What the Zhang Boys Know and a novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley. He is also the editor of the anthology series, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet. A former international lawyer, he now lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. To learn more about Cliff, visit CliffordGarstang.com, and to learn more about his new story collection, visit Press53.com.

Curtis Smith: Congratulations on the House of the Ancients. You’ve published a couple collections with Press 53. Can you discuss your relationship with them? What rewards do you find with working with a publisher you’ve worked with before?

Clifford Garstang: I have been working with Press 53 since they published my first book in 2009 and I have a great relationship with the Publisher and Editor, Kevin Morgan Watson. It has gone beyond my own books, though. I remember going down to North Carolina to do some readings shortly after that first book came out, and as Kevin and I were driving down the highway I told him I thought a literary magazine would be a good fit for the press. Kevin said he’d been thinking the same thing, and by the time we got to the event we had worked out a lot of the details, including the name, Prime Number Magazine. I stepped down as editor of the magazine after five years, but it’s still going strong and will celebrate ten years of publishing this July. After my second book came out in 2012, I pitched an idea to Kevin for an anthology of stories set all over the globe. He loved the concept and the result was a three-volume series, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, which came out from 2014-2018. So when this new collection was ready, it was a no-brainer to take it Press 53. Kevin and I have become friends, I know what to expect from the process, and there are no surprises. I also know that Kevin knows short stories—he loves them—so it’s great to listen to his advice. But he’s also going to listen to what I have to offer, as well. I’ve also helped out with his new literary conference, the High Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction, as a contest judge, and other projects.

CS: I talk with my students about understanding the themes that obsess us—and I think that often we don’t really see them clearly until later in our careers. And once we understand these themes, we can work with them instead of wrestling blindly with them. You have a number of books under your belt now—can you identify any such themes in your work? If so, has the act of writing altered your understanding of these concepts?

CG: It’s great that you share that wisdom with your students, but my guess is they’ll have to rediscover that lesson on their own. First of all, I don’t usually start writing a story with a theme in mind. I start with a character, a situation, or an image, and let the story unfold organically. It can be messy, but eventually I’ll get wherever my subconscious is taking me and recognize what the story wants to be about—its theme. Then I can go back and revise so that the story’s elements generally point in the same direction. When I assembled my first story collection, which was linked by the setting of the stories and a number of recurring characters, I realized that they were also linked thematically. The next book, which was very different in terms of structure and setting, also dealt with some of the same themes. And the novel that came out last year does, too. I don’t think you have to be a psychiatrist to note that maybe, just maybe, I was saying something about myself by tackling those themes in three books. Now, though, I think maybe I’ve moved beyond them and am beginning to explore different subjects. Maybe.

CS: I enjoyed your novel last year from Braddock Avenue Books. With this collection coming so soon after that, I’m guessing that in the previous years, you went back and forth between that book and this collection. If this is the case, how do you approach balancing two projects in various stages of completion? Do you work on one as long as it’s calling you then put it away and return to it when it calls you again? Or do you set aside specific periods of time and give yourself guidelines to follow? What are the rewards and challenges of having a couple projects versus having a singular focus?

CG: I have a complicated to answer to what you probably thought was a straightforward question. The novel that came out last year was a long time in the making, but then so was the story collection. There was a point at which I was writing two books at the same time—sometimes working on one in the morning and one in the afternoon—but the new collection of stories wasn’t one of them, at least not as a fully imagined collection. Some of the stories were written more than ten years ago and some were written last year. But more or less simultaneously I had an idea for two different novels, and I was pushing them both forward until I realized how insane that was. I put one of them aside to focus on the novel that became The Shaman of Turtle Valley, the book that Braddock Avenue Books published in 2019. But it takes time to find an agent and then a publisher, so while that was happening I returned to the other novel and also kept writing short stories, although still without thinking of them as a collection. Finally, when Shaman was under contract and I had also found a publisher for the other novel (it’s coming out from Regal House Publishing in 2021), I was able to look at the stories I had that were finished—most of them already published in magazines—and several that were still in draft form and start putting together a complete manuscript. When I was happy with it, I sent it to Press 53 and they took it. It’s an accident of the publishing industry that it’s coming out now, a year before the other novel, when it was finished more recently. But to actually answer your question, I don’t think working on two novels at once is really tenable. On the other hand, writing short stories can provide a great break if you need to get away from a longer project for a while, which is often advisable. And of course there are times when you’re just waiting for something to happen—for an agent to get back to you on a query, or for a publisher to read your manuscript—and you need to be doing something. For me, that would be writing. 

CS: You’re very involved in the literary community—and I assume you get a lot of hits for your annual ranking of literary journals. First, when did you start doing this ranking—and what motivated you? Can you explain the process of how you compile the rankings? And then a question about the literary community in general—do you see one’s involvement in it as a privilege? An obligation? What hopes do you have for our community in these strange times? And speaking of strange times, can you address the challenges—and perhaps the unique opportunities—to releasing a book now?

CG: So many questions! To start, I’ve been doing my rankings of literary magazines for something like 15 years. It began as a tool for my process of deciding where to submit my short stories, because until then I was using a scattershot approach without giving it much thought, or rather, my choices were based on hearing from other writers that Magazine X is “good” or Magazine Y might like my work. Logic told me that I needed to be more systematic. It made sense to submit to the best magazines first, but how was I supposed to know what those were? Eventually I hit upon a formula that took into account the number of Pushcart Prizes and Special Mentions a magazine had won over a ten-year period. I settled on the Pushcart Prize, as opposed to the annual O. Henry or Best American Stories volumes, because I liked the way stories are nominated by magazines and contributing editors, which somehow made it feel more democratic than the other prizes. And I felt that my formula was as objective as I could make it. Yes, the editors are subjective when making their selections, but I’m not letting anything else influence the rankings such as my own feelings about the work that a magazine might be publishing. Initially, I only ranked magazines for fiction because that was what I was writing. I shared the list with friends and then, realizing that others might benefit, I posted the list on my website. Eventually I created separate lists for nonfiction and poetry as well as fiction, and I’ve been doing all three for at least ten years. (Another advantage of using the Pushcart Prize anthology is that it contains work in all three genres.) Second, I do think writers have an obligation to serve the greater literary community in some way. I do book reviews for the same reason, and I always post about books I’ve read on Goodreads, and sometimes on Amazon also. Especially for writers who aren’t published by the mega-presses, it’s hard to get noticed by the reading public. We can all do more to lift each other up by doing reviews and interviews (thank you, by the way!), and spreading the word. My advocacy on this subject isn’t entirely selfless, of course. I’m hopeful that while I’m talking about other people’s books, maybe someone else is doing the same for me. But another reason I still do the rankings is that I get a little thrill when I meet someone at AWP or an artists’ colony and they thank me when they discover I’m “that guy” who does the rankings. And third, boy these are strange times indeed. Personally I’m very fortunate because I’m not as severely impacted by the isolation we’re experiencing because of the pandemic as many others. I don’t teach, so I’m mostly just doing what I always did, which is writing at home. If anything, I’m more disciplined now that I can’t visit my favorite coffee shops. But like a lot of people, I’m using Zoom to stay in touch with friends and my book club and even to promote the new book. That’s maybe not a bad thing. I recently joined another writer for a reading from our new story collections. It was a Zoom meeting streamed live on our publisher’s Facebook page, so we had way more people watching than I’ve ever had at one of my bookstore events. Plus, the video is still on Facebook and I’ve sent it to some people as part of my promotional efforts. I will always love visiting independent bookstores and meeting with readers, but the way we do events may have changed forever. 

CS: As a consumer, how is the experience of reading stories and novels different for you? Do they hit different parts of your brain? Do they stay with you in the same way? When you’re writing stories, do you find yourself focusing on reading stories? Then let’s switch to the writer’s perspective—how is the process different for you? What do you find rewarding (and challenging) about the creation of each of these forms?

CG: I’m not sure I’m capable of answering this question from a consumer’s point of view anymore, because I’m always reading as a writer, looking at different aspects of craft and structure. With stories, especially, I’m looking for certain elements, as if I’m preparing to critique a student’s work (never mind that the student’s name might be James Joyce), and judging it by what I see or don’t see. I’m pretty sure non-writers don’t look at short stories that way, if they read them at all. As a writer, I don’t narrow my reading to the particular form I’m working on, unless there’s some structural peculiarity I might learn something from. Also, I usually have several books I’m reading at the same time—poetry, nonfiction, a novel, a story collection, sometimes a book on the craft of writing. Plus an audio book in the car (currently a memoir). As for the process of writing, I’m a bit schizophrenic. With stories, I have a pretty clear picture of the structure I want before I start, but I have no idea what the ending will be. With the novels I’ve written, the ending is just about the only thing I can picture in advance, and then I’m trying to write toward it. For me, one of the biggest challenges for both forms is deciding where the best entry point for the reader should be. That is, at what point on the timeline of the story do you put page 1? The answer in both cases might be to drop the reader into the work at a point where things are already happening, even if, as a writer, you’ve written pages and pages or thousands of words to get yourself to that point. Those aren’t wasted words, I keep telling myself, but the reader might not need to ever see them.

 CS: What’s next?

CG: As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got another book coming out, a novel, to be released by Regal House Publishing in spring of 2021. I like to think of it as a mystery, because the protagonist discovers a family secret that no one will talk to him about. As a philosopher obsessed with the source of knowledge, he travels the world in search of this hidden truth. So there’s that. But I’m also pretty far along with a new project, the most ambitious book I’ve attempted so far. It’s a blended historical and contemporary novel set in Asia that deals with unequal power dynamics in a variety of relationships. Some days I think I’m close to finishing that book. This is not one of those days.

 

 

Internet Box #1: Slow Drive Through a Strange World by Plush Gordon

There’s something kind of cool about a band that (almost) nobody has heard of releasing a deluxe edition of a slick and lushly-produced EP complete with a bevy of bonus materials — including, among other things, bonus tracks, a video, a short film, illustrated lyrics, a short story, and a manifesto. It’s the kind of move that another band might have made in another time as it slid comfortably into its imperial phase, that moment of bloat that followed a string of chart-topping albums and signaled a slide into relative obscurity just over the horizon.

But since Plush Gordon is coming from nowhere, their motives appear to be rooted less in a sense of hubris than in a sense of the sheer possibility of the moment — and, it should be noted, less of a desire to cash in on their good name (since a: they don’t have one yet and b: everything in their self-described “internet box” is free) than to establish themselves as artists who want nothing more than to push the envelope not only in terms of music but of what a band can be.

The music on the EP is hard to pin down. The first track, “Silver Nissan,” is part car tune in the vein of early 60s tracks like “409” and “Little Cobra,” and part cartoon in the style of a Merry Melodies animated short. The subject matter sees to the former while a wild, dizzying slide trombone line provided by Aaron Buchanan takes care of the latter. That the song is clearly about a stalker only adds to the mystery, and the only answer to the question posed in the song’s pre-chorus — “Is it weird to follow you?” — is a resounding and likely self-aware “YES!”

Continuing the car theme, the other three tracks on the EP depict motorists in various states of unease: a lost and lonely driver watches the world fall apart behind her in “Rearview,” a similarly lost driver tries to find his way home in “Red Door,” and a down-on-their-luck couple eyes a dreams of a new life in the dramatic closer, “Madrid.” Throughout the proceedings, lush string arrangements bring cinematic flare to all of the tracks, perfectly complementing the impressionistic storytelling of the lyrics.

Other highlights of the “internet box” include a short story that fleshes out some of the details of “Madrid,” and a five-minute film titled “Milk Fudge” (inexplicably attributed to “Team Humanity”), in which three members of the band argue over the nature of candy as they drive toward a rendezvous with a potentially malevolent forest entity named Jerry.

Perhaps most interesting — at least in terms of explaining who Plush Gordon is and what they’re up to — is the band’s manifesto, “Invasion of the Potato People.” And, yes, including a manifesto with a debut collection of songs is admittedly pretentious, but the page of epigrams culled from Laura Dern, Bob Balaban, Manny Farber, Epictetus, and the Mysterious N. Senada speaks directly to what the band is trying to do. Quoting Laura Dern, “If you’re in it for the result, then you can’t experiment, but if you’re there to redefine art, you can do anything.”

Which more or less sums it up for Plush Gordon. They don’t appear to be in it for the result. It’s more of an ongoing experiment. That being the case, there’s a good chance that Plush Gordon can do anything.

Slow Drive Through a Strange World. Everything in the “box” is available as a free download!

Compression

In a word, Tim Cundle’s Compression is gritty. The novel follows quasi rock-star Michael Flanagan as he returns to the seaside town of his youth for a class reunion. Complicating matters is the fact that he, band-mate Elliot Kurtz, and a handful of other friends witnessed and participated in the cover-up of a killing ten years earlier. Haunted by his crime, Flanagan has spent years on the road evading his ghosts in a haze of music, drugs, and pornography. As a result, he’s never quite grown up. As such, Compression is as much a late-bloomer coming-of-age novel as it is a crime novel, and the narrative is all the richer for it. Though an act of manslaughter haunts the proceedings, it’s learning to confront his past and embrace life in the here-and-now that gives Flanagan’s story it’s heft and arc.

What gives the novel added depth and texture is Cundle’s skill at describing the ins and outs (mostly outs) of Flanagan’s rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Throughout, the protagonist weighs his own real-life experiences against the myths, images, and expectations fans associate with their hedonistic heroes. Despite rumors to the contrary, he’s a lonely guy whose life consists largely of long stretches of time spent in planes and hotel rooms. Any pretense of glamor has long since departed from his life. That he fancies himself a punk only adds to his existential dilemma. Among his greatest fears is that his anti-corporate attitude is all bark and no bite — in essence, that he’s a fake.

But the novel itself is certainly not a fake. Cundle clearly knows his stuff, particularly with respect to music. Part of the fun is picking up on the hidden and not-so-hidden references to music of the 80s and 90s that punctuate the novel. Is the observation that God’s got a sick sense of humor a nod to Depeche Mode? The reference to someone being touched by the hand of God a reference to New Order? The name-checking of Darby Crash a reference to… well, the late Darby Crash of the Germs? (Okay, so that last one was a little more obvious.) Even the conceit of the novel — a rocker returning home for a high-school reunion — itself feels like a page out of Janis Joplin’s tortured life.

All told, Compression is a gritty, smart, and surprisingly sensitive tale that spans the divide between crime and coming-of-age novels and, in so doing, underscores the universal necessity of coming clean — if only to oneself.

Review by Marc Schuster.

 

Dick Cheney in Shorts

Maybe it’s because he’s working with a new, more progressive press, but Dick Cheney in Shorts finds author Charles Holdefer in a puckish, experimental mood a few beats off from the more realist tone and style of his previous works like The Contractor and Back in the Game.  As the title suggests, the specter of former US Vice President Dick Cheney playfully drifts through this collection of short works and takes a variety of forms including (but not limited to) a curious if somewhat prudish customer in a “luxury pet shoppe,” a little boy with butterscotch hair who taunts his father’s demons, a figure very much like the historical Dick Cheney who shows up in short pants at a cookout attended by a man with a pair of horns protruding from his forehead, and — in the biggest stretch of the collection — admitting that he misled Americans about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In addition to Cheney, the figures who populate Holdefer’s imaginative landscapes include a man haunted by a phantom penis (a Dick of sorts, one is forced to wonder?), a syphilitic Bavarian baker who invents the fruitcake, and Leo the Lion of MGM films fame. Marked by a combination of repressed desire and existential angst, the characters all search for meaning against a backdrop of blabbering televisions and endless stretches of highway. In other words, these characters, as bizarre as they may seem, essentially inhabit the “real” world that you and I call home. This juxtaposition gives Holdefer’s fiction a dreamlike quality akin a David Lynch film in which identity is a fluid concept and the bizarre sits neatly and without comment next to the quotidian. Indeed, if the “Book Club Questions” that accompany Dick Cheney in Shorts (e.g., “Do you think enhanced interrogation would improve the honesty of your group?”) were ever actually used to guide a book discussion, Holdefer’s miracle would be complete as such an act would allow his fictive vision to bleed over into reality. Who knows, dear reader? Maybe you’ll be the one to make it happen.