The first story in your chapbook, “In My Mother’s Kitchen,” sets the tone of the collection with this absurd yet serious tale about a boy born onto a cutting board in his mother’s kitchen. From there, many of your stories continue to toe-the-line between real and make-believe, between symbolism and truth. Do you find it easy (or conversely, difficult) to write in this fashion? How would you define the type of stories you write?
I find writing all types of stories to be very hard. It isn’t something that comes easy for me. That said, I find it necessary as an artist to push myself to write as many different kinds of stories as I possibly can. Real/make-believe, symbolism/truth, I try not to think about it too much. Like many of us out there, I grew up watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I liked his sweaters, and when he fed his fish. But I also liked when it was time for the trolley to roll up and take us to the Land of Make-Believe, or whatever he called it. There was something there for me in both worlds. Mainly I want to entertain the reader, keep them interested in what I have to say. The baby on the cutting board I suppose is a nod to my love of fairy tales. I loved hearing stories before bed. They freaked me out. But in a good way.
In “The Wall,” a man purchases a wall from a salesman he meets in a bar. An actual wall, complete with graffiti and crumbling boards. What prompted this idea? How do you make the bar angle work for you in this piece?
I had always admired Frost’s “Mending Wall” poem. You can’t grow up in New England in the 70’s and 80’s and not get a significant dose of Frost. Also, I’ve always appreciated that story Sartre did. And, well, who my age (37) didn’t listen to Floyd at some point in their miserable lives? So, those were the prompts. Then I guess I went looking for a container to put this stuff in and well…I guess I see the bar and the salesman and the buyer of the wall as characters in a joke (i.e. a guy walks into a bar and…or, what did the salesman say to the man from Dubuque?), only there is no punch line, which for me is much more interesting and strange. Some people think I’m taking a poke at Frost in this story, but honestly I don’t see it that way. He was fantastic. Still is.
Talk about the title of the chapbook and the phrase that appears on the back cover: “you’ve got to hide your happiness.”
One day I was home alone. My wife was at work. My kids were at school. It had been a long time since I had been home alone. I stood at my window and watched all these people walking to the train–it was like watching animals migrating. A friend of mine caught me standing at the window and motioned for me to open it. Then he shouted, “What are you doing?” I said I was taking the day off to do, well, nothing. “I’m spending the day at home,” I said. “Well,” he said. “Ducky for you!” He said it real mean-like.
So, later that day, I popped some popcorn and did some channel surfing, where I ended up on VH1 or whatever that channel is called, where they show all those rock documentaries? And, well, they were showing this one on John Lennon. Now, I’m no Beatles fan or anything. Don’t know much about them. Never got too into their music. But this documentary wasn’t too much about the music. I came in at the part when John Lennon has quit the band and has decided to stay home full time and raise his children and have fun with Yoko and whatnot. And you could see on one hand he was enjoying these things immensely, but then the reporters started coming and interrupting everything he did. It got so he couldn’t even have lunch with his family on the back lawn, and the reporters kept pressing him: “What are you doing?” “What are your days like?” “When will you go back to the Beatles.” He would just look at them all and say the same thing: “I know it’s hard for you to believe, man, but I’m enjoying myself right now, taking it easy, learning about who I am.” You could see that everyone he was talking to couldn’t believe that someone would want to do that, and well, that just got me thinking about the morning and the window, the neighbor and his ducky comment, and I wondered: does even a regular person who isn’t a Beatle have a chance at feeling free around here? It seemed to me, and still does, that if I were to go about getting to that sense of freedom I’d either need a thick skin (hence, the rhino in the story) or I’d need to be more covert about my happiness, which I think is demented and sad, but maybe a little true.
Anyway, that feeling of freedom, whatever it’s called, I wish that for my characters. And I wish it for you, Kelly Spitzer.
Why thank you Geoffrey Forsyth! I often think that being a writer allows a person an ultimate amount of freedom. He/she can be an astronaut one day and drug dealer the next. In the mind, anyway… And then I remember that writers don’t often get paid, and when they do, it’s not very much. But still, we can sit around in sweats all day drinking coffee or wine or both and imagine whatever the hell we want.
Astronauts and drug dealers are really hard folks to pin down. There’s so much technical stuff you have to know about with being an astronaut, you almost have to work for NASA to be able to pull it off, and the same is true with drug dealers. So much has to get weighed, and the terminology is always changing, and also the potency of the product has to be considered…and I mean are we talking about a dime bag in the early 80’s vs. one sold a year ago? I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of freedom in writing stories or poems or novels. I think maybe there’s some freedom that happens afterwards, when you’ve done your darnndest to pull off whatever you’ve set your sights on. There’s the freedom to go on to the next thing. And, well, in writing, you’re the boss, for the most part, which may explain that dress code of sweats and t-shirt with barf stains all over it. The quest for freedom isn’t easy on anybody, including writers. Achieving happiness is no walk in the park either, I suspect. I think probably when you’re talking about the pursuit of freedom or happiness you’re really talking about the same thing: that state of being fine with who you are, and having others maybe being okay with that, too. When you think about it, it’s almost impossible to achieve, but we all die trying, which is kind of beautiful, say the poets.
Of all the stories that appear in this chapbook, do you have a particular favorite?
They’re all a little too weird to be lovable. I guess I would say I enjoyed writing “Coins” the most. I liked working with two characters on equal footing. Nobody dies, or even gets injured. It’s hard to write a story like that–one whose motor is fueled not by anger or sadness, but by something else entirely. In this case maybe it’s the recognition that not all failed relationships are destructive. Some just end, but are worth remembering. I stand behind that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good rant, too. But, again, I was trying to push myself into new territory, and I guess, in the end, I’m glad to be the author of a story that is maybe more hopeful in tone than most stories you come across, including mine, especially mine.
There are a number of striking (and perhaps a bit disturbing) images and metaphors in your stories. This one, from “Hunchbacks,” for example, caught my eye:
“He didn’t want to think of the twins with wings growing out of their backs. It reminded him of the time a bird accidentally flew into his house and bashed itself against the wall of his bedroom. He had been sleeping, so when it flew in and struck the wall the first time, he pulled covers over his head. He lay there listening while it thumped itself to death, and when the bird dropped on his chest, even through the blanket he felt the small warm weight of it over the place where his heart was, and for a moment he thought that the dead bird was actually his heart lying there, loosened somehow and flown free of his chest.”
It’s beautiful, but at the same time, it leaves me, as it left the narrator, unsettled. How much time do you spend crafting images and metaphors? Do you think they can make or break a literary story?
Images and metaphors are the meat and potatoes of very short stories mainly due to the fact that so much has to get communicated in a short amount of time. An image or metaphor, when it’s brought off correctly, can convey the very essence of a character, or a place, or even a conflict. Much time and space can be saved with a well-oiled metaphor. Also, let’s face it, these are moments when you can feel the writer working on your behalf, shaping her ideas, thinking always and trying to sharpen what it is– exactly–she’s trying to say. It takes years of writing to get any good at writing them, and even good writers struggle with this aspect of writing. Yes, I spend a lot of time crafting them. Mostly I fail. But sometimes I don’t. I would say from a reader’s perspective that they are extremely important. Good images and metaphors are what I remember about a story. They are what bring me back to a particular story again and again, because they are what make a story particular.
It took you a long time to start submitting your work. What held you back? What advice would you give to others who are afraid to send their stories into the world?
I still have a hard time submitting work. I don’t know what holds me back. Low self-esteem? I don’t know. Fear of rejection? All that shit. But, ultimately, you have to send it out. Because it does no good sitting there in a desk, or saved onto that part of the computer that doesn’t have a Send Now button. In the end the process of writing a story is about making contact. It’s about connection. And while it often doesn’t seem this way, it’s about participating in a life you love enough to criticize. In the end, despite your fucked-upness, you have to get it done, because, it turns out, you care enough about us all not to, and because you’re worth it, Meatball. You really are.
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