Gabriel Ricard: Tell me, what led to The Portable Obituary? Was it the work you had done on Final Exits?
Michael Largo: Final Exits was an ongoing project that I started in the mid-90's, chronicling the 3,000 ways Americans currently die. I amassed a tremendous amount of data and needed to find a way to retrieve it. One such method was to put certain people afflicted by any one of the demises into categories. Such that files began to grow containing, for example, information about clowns, or cowboys, or religious zealots. That categorizing mind set was one of the organizational impetuses for the new book The Portable Obituary. In order to work on Portable Obituary I needed to retrieve more actual obituaries, which wasn't necessarily part of the research required for Final Exits. I like the art of a good obituary; how a person's life can be summoned up, like a prose haiku, in a few hundred words.
GR: How long did it take you to put this thing together?
ML: I like the "thing" in this question—because what is it? Is it a collection of obituaries, a political statement on the celebrity culture, a book that can be held up to a mirror and read backwards to find the secret plan for world domination (I wasn't supposed to let that one slip out) or a study in the lives of those who, for good or bad, influenced our history? It took two years to write.
GR: Did you always have an interest in death and celebrity, or was it something you came into later in life?
ML: Death, yes. I was in first grade I think, when we had drills to get under the desk in the case of a nuclear war with Cuba and Russia during the Kennedy years. They showed us films how a nuclear holocaust turned people into instant skeletons—I had nightmares about that for years. My first published poem was called The Wake. It went: "Kneeling before a wax figure/they tell me it's you." It was about the sudden death of my grandfather when I was a kid that made me think that what I was seeing on Leave It to Beaver was an attempt to preoccupy me away from a much more sinister world view. I didn't like the notion that death was part of this "being born" contract, one without loopholes. As far as celebrities—what does that actually mean? Let's assume there were twenty-six billion different people born since homo sapiens first showed up. How many are actually remembered, and why? As you see in Portable Obituary, my idea of a celebrity runs the gambit, from Socrates to the patron saint of fire prevention.
GR: Do you find it more interesting than death and the non-famous?
ML: Stalin—one not noted for humanitarian quotes, said: "One death is a tragedy, a million, a statistic." I don't think looking at any death is more or less interesting, though I was interested in seeing if a person's life pursuits influenced their particular mode of death.
GR: Have you learned anything surprising in your research?
ML: I learned that fame or celebrity, if you will, seemed a greater liability when it came to longevity. For example, when I studied the deaths of all the kings and queens of England, the average lifespan was only forty-eight years. That might be a price of power not often looked at in typical biographical studies or reference books.
GR: Tell us a little bit about your three fiction works.
ML: My first novel, Southern Comfort had one reviewer in Library Journal say that I was exploring the mystery of death as transformation. It's a theme I tried to tap into with my longer fictions, and in a number of the micro fictions.
GR: Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction?
ML: I like poetry, fiction and non-fiction. It's like playing the flute in an empty room, or working out a longer piece on the piano, or getting up on the stool with two sticks and banging out a percussion beat with a high hat cymbal for effect.
GR: Who are some of your influences?
ML: I love Keats, Rimbaud, Poe, Harry Crosby (Red Skeletons) Jack London, Gary Snyder, Burroughs, Harry Crews, or any good junkie, drunk (not that they all were) that wrote what they believed to be the essential. But I read everybody. I'm reading Joan Didion now—I always like her.
GR: Getting your work published with a company like Harper Collins is definitely a big deal. How did you come into it?
ML: It may sound goofball—but persistence was the only equalizer. I have a file—you get the sense I like real paper files, not just the icons of one on the computer—that has at least 400 rejection slips in it. So basically, I'm an overnight success—just that my a particular night lasted twenty years before I finally found a publisher and editor that got the gist of what I was doing. Take Rimbaud—here's a guy that completely stopped writing when he was twenty-one. He didn't like the reaction to his book, so he gave it up. If it wasn't for his friend Paul Verlaine who published one of his manuscripts years later, thinking Rimbaud was dead-his work and the record of his life would've been lost. I think the rage, rage against the dying of the light—that another good drunk, Dylan Thomas wrote of— is all about this life-death thing. I think a mag like Unlikely Stories is like the Black Sun Press during this age of pixels where writers can practice their persistence and get the occasional sound of one-hand clapping that we all need to keep at it.
GR: Where do you go from here?
ML: I'm finishing a collection of poems in Lieu of Flowers and a short story collection titled the Mortician's Wife. I also am in the middle of finishing nonfiction book three in the Final Exits series that has to do with creativity and self-destruction, to be released in September 2008.
Gabriel Ricard is a Staff Interviewer at Unlikely 2.0. You can learn more about him at his bio page.