Q: Congratulations on High Street, your first published book. When did you begin working on it, and at what point did you realize you were writing a book?
A: The idea for High Street first came to me in the Autumn of 2006, shortly after I’d moved out of the High Street house. At that point I knew the book would begin with the third burglary. By the late Autumn of 2009 I knew how the book would end, and knew it was time to write it.
Q: The book’s construction and content is not that of a typical memoir. What decisions did you make along the way that led to the book’s eventual structure?
A: Initially I thought it was going to be a more standard memoir sort of thing, both in tone and form. The idea to begin with an interesting event that occurs in the middle of the larger story is one I got from Mary Carr’s The Liar’s Club, which I read in 2006 and read again right before I started writing High Street. The broken chronological structure I pretty much got from Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which I also read right before I started writing High Street. I had copies of letters I’d written while I lived on High Street and started reviewing them for incidents to include in the book. I quickly realized they were the book. All I had to do was edit the hell out of them and find the book they contained. I also tossed in some poetry that I reformatted as prose poems. There were even a couple of short stories in early drafts, but I edited those out. On my morning walks I worked out the larger nine-book structure. Before I started writing, I read a select eighteen books, including everything by W. G. Sebald that was translated into English, Carr’s and Flynn’s books as noted above, a couple Kunderas, a couple Bernhards, Dillard’s For the Time Being, and a few others, to inform myself with mood and voice and structure.
Q: The book opens with the story of a break-in to your home–for the third time–which seems to characterize life on High Street: You both need and fear authority, are part of the legal system and in some ways a victim of it. How does this dichotomy shape the culture of High Street? In what ways do you personally represent the two sides of the coin?
A: As an Everyman, I think. We all of us live within a larger social structure we need to be both protected by and protected from.
Q: There’s a mentality that accompanies marijuana use among marijuana users, which you articulate throughout the book, but most poetically here:
I was walking by the candy store when I tripped and stumbled over myself, fell into a sticky-bud bush, lay there for about a week, stuck. It was hard to get up when I had only one free hand, the other gripping a loaded roachclip. A delightful dark light, an accursed, cursing, curvaceous bitch, my sweet lover, the loaded roachclip. Stuck to the bush, flat on my back, I suck on the loaded roachclip, my lollipop.
It’s keeping you down, it’s keeping you up, it’s comfort and candy and it’s forbidden. Do you see the marijuana culture as representative of a larger social issue? A human issue?
A: The piece you quote is one of the poems reformatted as prose. As for larger issues, social or human—it’s hard to be a person. Fucking hard! This is no secret. We all find ways of coping. For any one way of coping to be outlawed is part of the human comedy. What the group will demand and tolerate and what the individual will demand and tolerate have always been—and please pardon my French—shifting nodes of contention along the webs of discourse where power is deployed.
Q: Your son Owen appears throughout the book, a poignant counterpoint within the milieu you describe:
He and I really do not belong in this neighborhood. I think he feels it more than I do. A couple of years ago I realized that poverty is not just poverty of money: it’s poverty of hope, poverty of imagination, poverty of intellect, poverty of desire. There’s a lot of that kind of poverty in this neighborhood; people who live in small worlds they have no clue how to enlarge.
How was his childhood influenced by the decision to have him live with you? How do you think he would be different if he’d stayed with his mother?
A: He would have to speak for himself to answer these questions. I know he changed my life, and changed it for the better. More than once I have told him that the three smartest things I’ve done were to go back to school, marry his mother, and father him.
Q: Throughout the narrative, there is a persistent sense of longing, a feeling of, Is this all there is? There’s a quest, but the quest is internal and somewhat circular. Can you talk a bit about that?
A: I did not know that was there, but I am not surprised. It is the being-in-the-world of the artist. We are always yearning to be someplace else. Hell, it’s probably part of what it means to be human. We artisty writery types just chase after it and show it off more.
Q: What’s next for you? What are you working on at the moment?
A: I could be too clever by half and say that at the moment, I’m working on this interview, but ha-ha-ha and that’s not what you’re asking. I’ve been these past four months and more working on a novel that was a novella I wrote a few years ago and I was just going to do a tiny bit of tweaking and polishing to it, but you’re a writer too and you know how these things go. It was a caterpillar and it’s going to be either a butterfly or a moth. We’ll see.
I’ve spent the past hour looking though my drafts for a scene I wrote a while back. I can’t believe how many pages I’ve accumulated. And now awful they are! Characters I barely remember, scenes I’d have sworn belonged to another story entirely except that my main character’s name is all over them. Here’s a poker game, a writers group, the death of a drag queen named Stilts. A dog, Lulu. Before that, Lulu the cat. Penelope the hippy chick. Meg the monster. Oh look, another long passage which I assume was meant to be lyrical. I blush deep purple when I’m trying to hide the story.
