Interview with Mike DeCapite

Mike DeCapite's writing fascinates me for being both impossible to stop reading and impossible to pinpoint. His latest chapbook, Creamsicle Blue, (which I reviewed in January), is a 27 page piece of nonfiction with the scope of a novel and the depth of a meditation. He's also the author of the novel, Through the Windshield (Sparkle Street Books), the unpublished novel Ruined for Life!, and the chapbook Sitting Pretty (CUZ Editions). Recently I asked him some questions about writing.

K: I was particularly struck in Creamsicle Blue with how closely entwined I found the writing and the living. Not merely that it was “autobiographical” but that you were walking through your life hand in hand with writing: The consciousness born in writing mattered to your life and your life lived mattered to the writing. Are you a “daily writer,” or do you think the practice of writing is more than just what happens between pen and paper?

M: I don’t write every day, not anymore, but I’ve developed a form that’s open to chance, that allows me to write things down as they happen. If I’m working on something, I’m working on it all the time, although days and even weeks might go by without my writing anything down. Since quitting smoking a few years ago, I have an aversion to sitting down at a table with a typewriter or computer. It’s the last thing I want to do. I’ve dismantled all my rituals around writing, and now I just write on the fly, wherever I am. So now more than ever, writing is more for me than just what happens between pen and paper. I feel like I’m living inside what I’m working on, gathering observations and bits of conversation, climbing up a ladder to add a detail here or there. Since my work is no longer localized at a green Formica kitchen table in Brooklyn, it’s generalized. Wherever I go, I’m in it. It’s a daydream. And as I get older, I’m less and less inclined to betray the dream by putting it into words. It’s so pleasant to go around in the dream. I’m trying very hard to avoid saying I’m lazy.

K: When did writing enter your life and what made you start? Did you explore other art media along the way, or was it always writing?

M: I’ve never explored another medium since I started writing in earnest, in my late teens. The first book I wrote was a book of journals when I was 18. I wrote it as a book, typing it as I went and showing it to my friends, with an idea that it would somehow be published when it was done. It covered a year, October 1980 through October ’81.

K: You’ve said that “Creamsicle Blue is as close as I’ve gotten to the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to do.” How would you describe that thing? How did it show up in your earlier chapbooks or books?

M: I don’t have any interest in telling stories. Which, let’s face it, is a handicap in a writer. Even Through the Windshield, which is full of stories, isn’t interested in telling a story. It imagines the novel as flat surface, like a painting or mosaic. That book has a dailiness, a diaristic quality, a feeling of the sufficiency of now. It stops time. It’s a place to go, that book. Because it doesn’t go anywhere. There’s no plot, so there’s more room for food and weather and the way the city looks at night and stray, momentary feelings and bits of reverie. Anyway, without especially trying to, it gets past linear time.

My second (never-published) novel, Ruined for Life!, attempts the same thing in a more deliberate way and with less success. It does compile a lot of different textures: narrative, journal entries, conversations, essays, prose poems, notes. But it’s not as disjointed as I envisioned it, and it turned out to be fairly linear after all.

Creamsicle Blue, I hope, manages to be nonlinear while still describing an arc. The form of it I developed in a column I was writing for a couple of years for a magazine in Cleveland called angle. I was living in a little room in San Francisco, drinking a lot, between drafts of Ruined for Life!, which I hadn’t even been able to look at for a couple of years. I didn’t think I could write anymore, I’d drunk the ceiling down on my imagination. And I knew a woman in Cleveland, a poet named Amy Sparks, who was starting an arts magazine with two other people, and I heard myself ask her if I could write a column. I told her I’d write a monthly weather column. Figuring everything’s weather, so I could write whatever I wanted. And she said okay. I only did it to get myself back in shape to write another draft of Ruined for Life!, but that column became the only writing I’d been happy with in a long time. It was called Radiant Fog. I wrote maybe fifteen or twenty of them, just going around with my eyes open, leaning on street corners and sitting in bus stops, collecting details and piecing them together till they took on some life or pull of their own. And after I quit writing for the magazine I continued to write in that form.

K: As a reader or a writer, how would you describe the sometimes-fine line between autobiographical fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and fiction based closely on life observations? Why do you think poetry is rarely tagged as autobiographical?

M: I don’t know what they mean by creative nonfiction. All writing is creative. I think it’s an attempt to put a literary shine on a piece of nonfiction. Or it means a book is entertaining even though it’s nonfiction. It’s reassuring. And I guess in creative nonfiction you’re not writing about yourself, and in autobiographical fiction and memoir you’re writing about yourself. Autobiographical fiction is a label someone else sticks on you. No one says, “I write autobiographical fiction,” right? Who wants to say that?

I just call myself a writer. All writing is imaginative work. You can use your imagination to invent a world or to illuminate the world around you. I do the latter because that’s what I’m better at—it’s my natural inclination. It’s just a matter of what your interest is, as a writer, as a reader.

I guess poetry isn’t tagged as autobiographical because that’s its default position. Which isn’t true of prose.

K: Which writers or books stood out for you or influenced you along your path? What did you see they were doing that excited you?

M: Celine, for the directness and intimacy and force of his voice, and also for the speed and jumpiness of his style. James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with its variety of textures and Agee’s statement near the beginning that if it were up to him, the book would be just pieces of wood and iron, and bits of cloth and food and excrement. Sometimes it’s not even a book but just a line. Exterminator! [William Burroughs], for instance—just the words a novel on the front—I can still see them, next to the big roach: that classification in itself was inspiring! You open it up and it’s all these unrelated short pieces, but on the front it says “a novel.” So that forces you to do some reassessment. It’s a novel because he had the nerve to say so. A book like Naked Lunch shows you that you can put whatever you want between two covers and call it a novel. Which is true back to the beginning of the form—look at Tristram Shandy. Nothing’s more freewheeling than that. But my influence from books was secondary to my influence from music. I probably got more from Freak Out! or Lumpy Gravy than I did from The Wild Boys. With music you get it right away, what’s cool about cutups and collages, why this works.

Also from music I got the idea of standing up there and singing your song, if you know what I mean. Rather than fooling around with fiction. For which I’m unsuited anyway.

If I had to pick one signpost work, it would be “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Where Are You Tonight?” My whole life, those songs. And what Dylan does later, on Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft—that method of conveying information—that method of composition, taking lines from here and there—is exactly what I’d like to be able to do in prose. That method of narration. Nonlinear, cinematic. This quality is always called cinematic, but songs do this kind of thing very naturally and no one seems to notice. The way old blues songs are put together, with verses chosen here and there from a common pool to supply a rhyme, is much more radical and nonlinear than works that set out deliberately to play with narrative. The guy’s in Georgia, he’s in Tennessee, he’s lost his woman, he’s got a woman, she’s an angel, she treats him like a dog, and when he gets in a jam for a rhyme he goes down in the ocean and sees the crabs doing the shimmee shee. And this method does a better job of describing or hinting at the dimensions of experience—the dimensions of a mind, a life—than loading the work with every memory and sensory detail, which would be a common inclination in prose. Songs like “Trying to Get to Heaven” and “Not Dark Yet”? Doesn’t get any better than that. All those images, all those scenes. Those songs, rather than summing up a life, suggest its dimensions—while retaining its richness and leaving its mystery undisturbed. Dylan doesn’t even confine himself to his own era. “I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary Jane.” How’s he get away with that? I don’t care how much he steals—that’s part of the point of what he does, it’s part of the meaning of those songs, and it’s part of their effectiveness. Well, that’s enough about Dylan. Van Morrison’s song “St. Dominic’s Preview” was a big inspiration for Creamsicle Blue. The way he goes seamlessly from washing windows while listening to Edith Piaf to Paris in the first verse, the way he jumps around in time. Great, great song.

I’m more excited by works that are put together than by works that are written. But I’m not sure that influence is anything more than confirmation. It’s a reminder of what you already know. Maybe encouragement is more a more accurate term than influence. Certain works encourage you to trust your instincts. And you’re influenced by your own work. You write something that leaps forward, ahead of where you are, and then you write to catch up with it.

*****

Find Mike DeCapite's books here:
http://www.sparklestreet.com/MikeDecapite.html

You can find excerpts from DeCapite's novel Ruined for Life! at spots around the web, including these chapters on the blog Boogie Woogie Flu and the litmag Sensitive Skin.

Some Thoughts on Small Press Readings

Michelle Tea reads at the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh) with Sister Spit, April 23, 2010

1. When organizing a reading of out-of-town emerging writers, put one or two well-liked local writers in the lineup.

I learned this one when I organized my own cross-country reading tour a decade ago, with me, me, me-only on every bill. Friends in each city came out, but unless the venue itself hyped the reading, very few strangers showed up. I’ve seen this more recently from both the organizer side and the audience side—advertising a little-known name doesn’t go half as far as people coming out to see a familiar face or support a friend.

2. If you want to be supportive to those out-of-town writers, there’s various ways you can make them feel welcome and want to return to your city and your reading series.

An audience is the best thing you can offer, but there’s other ways to say “thanks” to that author who traveled on his or her own dime to get to your reading series.

*Is it possible to get a review for their book in your city, in advance of the reading? Can you hook them up with the local newspapers, and/or local book bloggers? At the very least you can have them send around some publicity materials (such as author JPEGs, links to reviews & the book’s webpage), to try to get a blurb or recommended event listing.
*Take them to a good (and affordable) restaurant and give them good chat before the reading
*Take them to a great bar and give them good chat after the reading
*Introduce them to local authors (at dinner, at the reading, at the bar)
*Buy their book
*Take photos during the reading
*Record the reading on audio
*Blog about, photo-blog, or post audio of the reading afterwards (for audio, get the writer's permission)
*Post the photos to Flickr (especially if they came out well) and include the author’s name
*Post photos to Facebook and tag the author


3. If you’re invited to be in a group reading in your own city, don’t slack on inviting your friends and fans.

This is one way a reading gets low turnout—each reader expects that a readymade crowd will be there waiting for them. How? Based on the other readers notifying THEIR friends and fan base. I think that some writers get worried about “annoying their friends” by constant self promotion. But often enough, your friends actually want to see you read, and your false modesty isn’t helping you or anyone else. In fact, if you’re in a group reading, some of your friends might come because they see that you AND another person they’ve been wanting to hear are reading together. But how will they know if you don’t tell them? (Don’t forget to list the other readers on the bill.) The reading organizer is counting on you to help get the word out. You don’t have to send out 15 email announcements, but send out at least one or two. Keep fliers on your person for when you run into people who’d want to know about your reading, and make the announcement at one reading about your next reading. Put in the labor and they will come.

4. For group readings, don’t take up more time than the organizer requests. Especially, don’t take up a LOT more time that the organizer requests.

It’s a bad karma move against your fellow authors on the bill, and when you wake up from your ego-stupor, you’ll realize that the audience didn’t want to listen to you for 24 minutes, either. They came for a group reading, and the best way to keep the event entertaining is to keep things moving at a good pace. If you’ve been asked to read for seven minutes, don’t rebel--just make it the best seven minutes the audience has ever heard. In other words, dare to be remembered for your writing and not how much time you commandeered.

5. Speaking of group readings, do they really need to be more than four or five people?

This one is certainly up for debate, and there are definitely circumstances that might warrant long lists of readers (AWP, or sometimes a book release party). But generally, those readings where I’m expected to sit in a chair and listen to 11 or 13 readers in a row make me feel like I’m being held hostage. Judging from the number of people who leave at intermission or after their friend reads, I don’t think I’m the only one. My vote is that excessive writer lineups are usually a nasty situation to subject the last two readers to, not to mention the audience. Among other things, it makes for bad mingling because everyone’s darting away under cloak of dimmed lights to avoid looking like the jerk who left early.

6. When asking out-of-town writers to a group reading, consider (and communicate) how much time you’ll give them to read.

Would YOU want to travel far in order to read for seven minutes? Probably 15 minutes is about the minimum you should ask out-of-towners to read. Again, certain circumstances like writing conferences or festivals may be an exception.

7. Speaking of out-of-town writers, take a moment to de-mystify your city for them.

Is there an affordable hotel you recommend, is there an area you recommend avoiding, is your city a new stop on the Megabus line? Is there a must-see attraction or a great bookstore in your area? Can you send them a link to a local restaurant blog, is there a regional driving idiosyncrasy they should know about? Etc.

8. So you’re running a reading series: How do you get, grow, and keep an audience?

These things can be a bit of a mystery, whether you’re a performer, an author, a reading series: who succeeds and who stagnates, or who explodes like a supernova and then fades quickly? I can’t pretend to have the secret formula, but here’re some thoughts.

*First ingredient: Good readers. Even something this obvious is tricky, because some series with “open door” policies can attract a really interesting mix of readers and performers inbetween duds, and in those cases, you don’t want to over-curate the lineup. But otherwise, I advocate a healthy degree of quality control so the audience you do get believes that every reading they attend will have something they want—even if they haven’t heard of the writers.

*Think of it as creating a community. Who is your series attracting and why do they keep coming back? Do they like certain publishing houses or sub-genres more than others? Do they appreciate a wide variety of writers or do they want all poetry, or strictly fiction? Are you offering a type of “scene” they want to be involved in that they can’t get anywhere else? Is your audience an extended group of your friends who come for the free beer you secured from that brewery sponsor? Are they foodies who come for the amazing pot luck? Do they come for the hip, unique, or well-known venue you’ve chosen, or the monthly music act that follows the readings?

*Advertise widely. Don’t rely on ONE method to notify your audience—just telling your friends, or just making a Facebook event page. Give people from different walks of life and different areas of your city a chance to discover you (to me, this is part of what the small press is about, at its best). Fliers at coffee shops, bookstores, and college English Departments; announcements on radio stations; asking your friends to forward emails to their friends; listings in the weekly paper and any relevant blogs; pushing for local book reviews; getting onto literary event lists; maintaining a good-looking blog or website for the reading series, etc.

*Get good at the technical side of the readings. Nothing kills the mood of a reading like long delays due to technical difficulties. If your reading requires a microphone and lighting, have someone on hand who knows how to adjust these should something mishap. Lighting should let your writers see what they’re reading, and hopefully flatter them, too.

*Offer consistency. The quality of the readers, the “extras” your audience comes to expect (whether food, music, low cover charge, etc), the reliability of the readings (EVERY month, not taking random months off), the general size and tone of the readings—nothing has to be set in stone, but when what you’re offering is virtually unknown writers, there needs to be something consistent for your audience to return to, and for.

Any experienced readers, reading series hosts, or audience members, feel free to comment with your own thoughts and observations.