Writer on Writer: Ben Tanzer vs. William Walsh & Michael fitzgerald

Doing time with Johnny Cash by Ben Tanzer

I should begin by saying that assuming you can stand the ongoing lack of coolness in your life, well that, and somehow avoid becoming a stalker, being a fan boy is one of the easiest things in the world. You consume things you are overly excited about, and then you celebrate them endlessly anywhere and everywhere you can, regardless of what anyone else thinks. I recently had the chance to act on my own fan boy traits when I embarked on an effort to simultaneously interview two writers, Michael Fitzgerald, author of the quite killer Radiant Days (Counterpoint, 2007) and William Walsh author of the equally wonderful Questionstruck (Keyhole Press, 2009) respectively, whose work I have recently been consuming. While Michael and William didn’t actually know each other when I first approached them, I decided I could ignore this, because like any good fan boy I assumed they would be happy to ruminate on the kinds of things I tend to obsesses over.

Ben Tanzer (BT): A cursory glance at your bios reveals that you both spent time in prison with Johnny Cash. If you would, please discuss the impact that Johnny Cash has had on your work, and if you would, the need for veracity in writing, be it fiction or nonfiction.
WW: I was doing the back end of a double-nickel—some would call it a straight dime—at San Quentin when I met Johnny Cash. He was jailed, famously, for picking flowers. I was in for several counts of chicken hawking my neighbors laying hens and for animal cruelty related to my attempts to cook a chicken and keep it alive. I made it through a week of chicken dinners with this menu: wings on night one, thighs the next, a breast a night for two nights, then three nights of chicken soup. The hen kept laying until the first night of soup, but the eggs had gotten tinier and tinier.

Johnny Cash was at a crossroads in his career. He liked the looks of the hippie chicks he saw on the Vandy campus, but he wanted to remain loyal to the greasers who were there with him at the start. He was frightened of what Vegas did to Elvis, so prison it was.

I invited Johnny Cash to join my rockabilly outfit, Baby Spider Eggs. “We play all the oldies, Johnny.”

“Too soon to go retro,” Johnny Cash said, resting a boot on my upright bass.

“Johnny,” I said. “The rockabilly sound is coming back!”

Then Johnny Cash explained that he was renaming my band: Too Soon To Go Retro. “Son,” he said. “You just turned pro.”

Johnny Cash wasn’t the only celeb at the San Q when I was doing my time. Also in residence was John Cheever, researching and writing what would be his second-to-last novel, Falconer. He was a very pleasant man with a fine purple nose. Johnny the Cheeve, we called him. Loved his cats and shared his smokes. I declined two offers for parole, at Cheever’s request, so I could stay on to help copyedit his rangy manuscript.

I was intent on remaining untattoo’d while incarcerated, and each night I bunked down with the fear that I would be inked into some sect, or cult, or anti-social prison society. I almost made it clean. But on the eve of my release, I got drunk on the ketchup pruno that Johnny the Cheeve brewed in his toilet. Soon as I passed out cold, the needles and ink came out. Cash and Cheever went to town on my hands: CASH on the knuckles of my right hand, and CHVR across the left’s.

MF: In non-fiction, veracity gets in the way. In fiction, veracity of sentiment seems important. And veracity in context of the story’s reality...whatever it takes to suspend the reader’s disbelief. And maybe this shows shallowness on my part, but I don’t have much patience for writing based on fantasy. Motive must be true. The artifacts must be true or at least true to the perception of the narrative. Even books that come almost wholly out of the imagination need to live in some truth. Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities or any Barthelme, the facts might not be facts of our reality, but they are the truths of the story and in many ways result in a richer world than the dumb cube I’m sitting in this morning.

In my own work, I just find research fun and feel that leaning on true happenings, in my life or someone’s close to me, can make the story feel riskier. It should probably serve the story, but if you’re revealing something true from your life, you are risking something. You just are. The reader will feel that.

Yes, I spent time in prison, but what went between me and John is no one’s business.

BT: Having spoken about truth, or something that approximates that, please talk to me about humor. Well that and sex, cursing, blood, violence, and even pop culture. These are elements you both utilize in your work, all of which can serve to make a story richer and more engaging, but also risk being overdone and overshadowing what you are trying to accomplish. How do you try and strike a balance? And for that matter, do you try at all?
MF: I guess, laughter is a biological reaction to absurdity and most intelligent people recognize violence as absurd, so the connection is pretty direct. When I’m writing, I am pretty conscious to counter attempts at humor with sentimentality or sadness. I don’t do this to create balance; it just seems to be a true reflection to how I see life, as a bunch of highs and lows, mania in joy and sorrow. Also, this reflects a pretty traditional way of creating tension and momentum… watch any tv show… Friday Night Lights (which I’m presently burning through)… if a character has fun in one episode, he/she is fucked in the next, and vice versa. I like to do that in chapters, but also even on a sentence level, have the narration spits out a funny observation and then immediately follow with heartbreak or the true end to that observation, if possible.
WW: A few summers ago I was shopping for a writer’s retreat and discovered that Folsom State Prison, made famous in Johnny Cash’s song “Folsom Prison Blues”, offers two-week writing residencies in a decommissioned thirteen-cell trustee lockup adjacent to its newly-built, state-of-the-art medium security penitentiary.

The Folsom State Prison Retreat for Writers in Folsom, California offers to established and emerging writers the usual amenities: free Wi-Fi, a “healthy options” meal plan, and “time uninterrupted to pursue the craft of writing”. I applied online and was happily surprised when I scored a slot in this highly competitive residency program.

My plan was to complete work on a novel-length character sketch about a diffident sous chef, told entirely in an assemblage of menus and daily specials from the many restaurants he worked at over a forty-year career. But the jail setting, quaint and denatured as its renovations had rendered it, put me on edge and my writing took on a violent focus. I didn’t like being locked into a 5’ x 9’ cell, even if I could reach out for the over-sized skeleton key to unlock the rusty bars. My sleep each night was fitful, and when I did manage to sleep I had vivid and violent nightmares. My shy sous chef morphed into a serial poisoner, and I was certain that my morning oatmeal was laced with saltpeter.

Writers were issued campy, prison stripes to wear during our stay and we were locked into leg irons each time we were ushered from our private cells into the tiny mess hall for our three squares a day.

“They really extend metaphor around here,” a poet named Paula Morris from Connecticut observed.

“Quiet on the line,” shouted Sheila Eunice, executive director of the Folsom State Prison Retreat for Writers, whom we were urged to call Warden Eunice.

But to answer your question, I think that violence overwhelms its victims and its perpetrators and its voyeurs, who encounter narratives of violence in nonfictions and fictions. I’m thinking of two books: Zombie, by Joyce Carol Oates, which is a fictionalized Dahmer memoir, and Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s book of journalistic immersion about English soccer hooligans. Both books are very well written (and Buford’s is truly one of the great books of the last twenty years), but both are, in my memory of them, books about violence and only violence.

Sex can be better controlled when dramatized and as a subject it has more nuance in both its run up (selection and seduction) and in its post mortem (detumescence, detachment, divorce). My first novel, Without Wax, was set in the adult film industry, and it contains a significant amount of sex. But it is concerned with a narrow element of sex—its performance and marketing. There would seem to be so many more hooks and riffs to explore when the writer’s subject is sex.

BT: Your responses, as does your work, got me thinking about compulsion, or maybe just feeling compulsive. Either way, I am endlessly compulsive in my desire and efforts to write, just as I have been at times, about running, sex, drugs and even Friday Night Lights. I also tend to write about people with compulsions. But enough about me. Please talk about compulsion in your writing, be it how you go about writing or the ways it worms its way into your work.
WW: My new book, Questionstruck: A Collection of Question-based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin, contains one mention of Johnny Cash: “But who wants to hear a skin doctor saw away at the cello when Johnny Cash is right down the street?”

The question originally appeared in Trillin’s American Fried, published in 1974. It’s a book about compulsion, in a way. It’s about eating, a subject that Trillin writes about often in The New Yorker. Recently, Trillin was asked why he writes about food so much. He said, "I don’t cook and I’ve never reviewed a restaurant. I write about a eating as a way to write about American life."

The Questionstruck project was, for me, a long and compulsive writing exercise. I began excising the interrogatives in Trillin's book Killings (1984), a collection of field reports from around the country about murders, accidental deaths, and suicides. I was trying to locate Trillin's familiar voice in this, at times, very dark book. After Opium published the resulting text, I decided to do the same exercise with each of his books. I remember being at the library with my kids, checking out all of Trillin's books. I spent the summer of 2007 balancing my laptop on a pillow typing all of the questions from Trillin's books as I watched the Red Sox every night.

The Johnny Cash song that really speaks to compulsion is his cover of "Hurt," by Nine Inch Nails. Cash's version of the song has a gravity that the original, good as it is, doesn't achieve. Cash's "Hurt" versus Reznor's "Hurt" is like the difference between Judy Garland singing "Over the Rainbow" when she was a teenager versus the way she came to sing the song in the sixties when she was dying from alcoholism and drug addiction and her teary mascara was always running down her cheeks as she stumbled about the stage. Her original version was certainly sincere, sweet and sad, but in her later concert versions of "Over the Rainbow" she opened a vein when she sang that song.
MF: I’m pretty spazzy. Which used to bum me out, like I was somehow unserious, or less than thoughtful. But I’ve found when I try to think things through, it all end up looking pointless (which it all probably is) and I tend to get stuck and not actually do anything. So I try not to waste time worrying about whether something is a good idea or not, and just do it. Marathons, stupid jobs, sex with the wrong people, sex with the right. Also, I’m a pretty big fan of lists. And am constantly compiling an ever-changing to-do list and then when I sit down to work, which is usually pre-dawn, I don't have to think about the project from a two mile-high view and can just go, and then later in the light of day, see where the chips fall. This method has both been disastrous and, arguably, productive. Characters are the same. Writing, which over-explains a characters feelings generally feels flat to me. I’d much rather watch a character, maybe get a few insights here and there, and then assume how they feel through their actions or the sentiment of the narration. It also feels true to not see all the characters emotions, because people rarely, while in the moment, have any idea how to verbalize their ‘emotions’. P.S: This is great: “Sex can be better controlled when dramatized and as a subject it has more nuance in both its run up (selection and seduction) and in its post mortem (detumescence, detachment, divorce).” I completely agree. Sex itself is basically wrestling. It’s how we get in there (or fail to) and how we get out that is interesting."

BT: Building on William's very subtle reference to his wonderful new book Questionstruck, I want to finish this interview by offering you both the chance to hype, or if you prefer further illuminate us about, anything regarding yourself - new work, old work, fathering skills, musical tastes, prowess in bed - that you think we may not know enough about.
WW: I have been preparing myself to respond to the famous Orange Alert final question: If you could sit down to coffee with anyone (alive or dead) who would be? So, aside from Johnny Cash, who has presided over this exchange of ours, the obvious answer for me would be Calvin Trillin. I certainly owe him at least a cup of coffee, and he seems like he would be a very entertaining guy to have a cup of coffee with.

Over the last few years, Calvin Trillin has been incredibly generous with his permission to let me manipulate texts from his books. With his OK, the Questionstruck project began appearing in journals like Caketrain, Elimae, Opium, Word Riot, Pequin, Exquisite Corpse, and 5_Trope, which lead to an opportunity to present Questionstruck at the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing last year at Chapman University.

And as Trillin and I enjoy our coffees at Blue State Coffee on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, I will propose a toast to Peter Cole, of Keyhole Press, who took a real chance publishing a 45,000-word book composed of 3,883 interrogatives. Peter is a hard-working guy with a ton of ideas and a big heart. In addition to publishing Questionstruck, Peter also let me guest edit issue #6 of Keyhole. It’s a great, big 186-page issue with work from some amazing writers, like Sam Ligon, Peter Conners, Steve Katz, Amelia Gray, Sherrie Flick, Noam Mor, Kim Chinquee, Darcie Dennigan, Blake Butler, John Domini, Michael Martone, and, in place of conventional author bios, Michael Kimball wrote the Life Story on a Postcard for each contributor.
MF: I don’t think there’s anything interesting about me or my family that hasn’t already been covered relentlessly by the mainstream media over the past few years. But I’m presently working on a novel called ONE POTATO. It takes place in Idaho Falls in the near future, and is loosely-based on the true story of a water rights conflict among a trout farm, a fervent Mormon potato grower, and the 3rd largest meth factory ever discovered in the US. My hope is that the amazing Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint will publish it in the next few years.

For more on William Walsh, Michael Fitzgerald, and Ben Tanzer please visit their websites.