GR: How did you get started as a writer? I would imagine the journey from however you began to the kind of work you're doing now to be a rather long, interesting one.
VF: It's been very long and very interesting. Looking back, I think I was "born" to be a writer. I used to make comic books at home with stick figures and my mother would stitch them in to "chapbooks." I did my own comic strips when I learned how to read.
My decision to become a writer at age fifteen has a lot to do with my undiagnosed case of Tourette Syndrome. When I was about twelve, I developed a severe stutter which, as it turned out, wasn't a developmental stutter but a complex vocal tic resulting from the Tourette I didn't know I had. My stutter made me a school scapegoat during the 9th and 10th grades. In addition to the name-calling, kids put gross things in my lunches and knifed up my winter coats. My parents complained to the principal and the teachers. Nobody seemed able to stop it. Around Thanksgiving 1960, my stomach started aching. For a fifteen year old to be on the verge of developing ulcers, I figured something had to be seriously wrong. Shortly after the Christmas break, a kid kicked my chair in class on a day when I no longer cared what I did. The abuse had to stop. I punched him a few times, bloodied his nose and the kids finally left me alone.
About two weeks later I discovered Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. The book showed me another way of life, a world in which had a chance to be accepted, and writing was a part of that world. It seemed that whenever I tried to talk, people would ignore me, and then give credit for what I said to the person next to me, who repeated my idea. I decided that I was going to make sure that I would communicate and that the world would listen. Given my stutter, I could only do that by becoming a writer. In a matter of three weeks I permanently changed the entire course of my life. I still marvel at how quickly it happened. In a span of two or three weeks I went from scapegoat to intellectual outlaw.
GR: Your work doesn't just end with music and abstract poetry. I've been fortunate to have read your wonderful short story collection, Stay Tuned to This Channel. Could you tell us a little bit about that, the history behind these admittedly very strange stories? I'd really love to hear more about "The Boxtops King's Ten Tips for Business Success."
VF: I wrote fiction for twenty years before I started writing poetry seriously. While my poetry got published quickly, my fiction didn't. My influences weren't the common ones. I've written my share of conventional realistic fiction, but writing it doesn't hold my interest as well as working in the areas of reality I first discovered when I read Naked Lunch as a teenager and expanded as my reading included Borges and Calvino When I write realism, I feel that I have to stay within the limits of the "plausible," whereas with the fiction I usually write, I still have the option of creating a situation that surprises me. I have to enjoy what I'm doing to finish it. If I get bored, which I usually do when I follow "the rules" too closely, I lose interest.
Stay Tuned to This Channel compiles most of the short stories I wrote from the mid-1980s to about 1994, I guess. At the time, I felt a kinship with Fiction Collective Two and their Black Ice Fiction anthologies. In 1995 I compiled the stories into a book-length manuscript titled A Matter of Form and Other Matters of Fiction and submitted it to their Black Ice Fiction Contest. The manuscript had the dubious luck, I'm told, of being a finalist in a contest whose judge couldn't decide a winner. I tried a few publishers, and then decided to self-publish it under its current title.
In the "The Boxtops King's Ten Tips For Business Success," I fused the cereal ads from my childhood that promised you a square inch of land in a place like Alaska in exchange for more cereal boxtops that I could ever accumulate with the upbeat feature articles I used to read in Parade magazine and other, similar publications. To satirize the offer and the article's positive attitude, I created a psychopath based not on any single person I knew but on a number of administrators and politicians I'd encountered whose aggressive and vindictive natures led them to not only refuse to take no for an answer but to punish anyone who turned them down. I really enjoyed the challenge of telling a story through the point-by-point article format instead of a conventional narrative and creating outrageous situations. But it took a while before I found a publisher for it.
GR: Of all the books of yours I've read, however, Relic's Reunions is easily my favorite. It has that same sort of strangeness as Emblematic Moon, with a writing style that suggests inspiration from guys like Burroughs, Kerouac and even a little Kurt Vonnegut. At the same time, it also seems to be very much a straightforward story of how a man deals with the general madness of getting older and not knowing if he has enough to show for it. I'd love to know more about this one, the history behind what went into its conception and what compelled you to take the approach you took with its overall style.
VF: I've read most of my Burroughs and Kerouac several times over and have at least a half-dozen of Vonnegut's books. Kerouac and Burroughs are seminal influences. Vonnegut wasn't so much an influence as a writer whose work contained the kind of outrageous plots and humor that I enjoyed reading and writing.
Relic's Reunions is definitely my most autobiographical work of fiction, although not nearly as biographical as I thought it was while I was writing it. The novel was a struggle to write. I thought of its opening scene and the triumvirate of young artists reuniting as accomplished adults when I was in my teens. I tried writing this autobiographical novel any number of times, starting around 1980. It just wouldn't come together. Then, around 1990, after I very reluctantly attended my 25th high school reunion, I started the manuscript from scratch and gave it a working title of "Star," a reference to the shooting star seen or hallucinated in the novel's opening pages and to incidents that take place later in the novel. " At the time I was writing a lot of poetry and running the poetry band, so I worked on the novel when the poems weren't demanding that I write them. I had about a 400-page manuscript that included the reunion, but the events wouldn't cohere. The narrator had a certain political awareness even though he wasn't an activist. I couldn't figure out why.
The novel finally came together after I received my diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome March 18, 1994. I'd lived 42 years with an undiagnosed condition whose social stigma made me less popular than your average leper. Once I realized how my Tourette had contributed to my social isolation, my treatment as a person far less intelligent than I really am, my being fair game for any person who felt that my presence meant they didn't have to occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder, I realized that the narrator's —and my— political awareness had resulted from a history of discrimination. Once I recognized that, I was able to pull the novel together. I finished it in 1995, I think, although I touched it up a little before publishing it in book form.
The narrator's invitation to attend the 25th anniversary reunion revives his doubts about his past life. Should he ignore the invitation or go back to seek resolution? In a kind of parallel plot structure, Edsel Relic lives his present life, while reliving his past as he wrestles with attending the reunion. To me, the question is not so much whether he has enough to show for his life, but whether his classmates will respect what he's accomplished. He knows his former close friends won't attend and his living inside his own head allows him to create a resolution, imaginary as it might be, to their reconnecting. His classmates represent a reconnection to the mainstream. In the have-it-all eighties, he's trying to see how much he really has. And the results are mixed.
I used a variety of techniques, shifting from past tense to present to render certain scenes more immediate and others more introspective. I used play and screenwriting techniques to achieve immediacy. I also wanted to create a more contemporary feel; we live in a mixed-media age. I like to think the techniques I used make the work move at the speed of life in the time it was written, instead of the slower pace of a traditional narrative. The format also allows the narrator to attempt to create some distance from himself; the documentary formats give at least an illusion of a third-person narrative running counter to the first-person narrations.
In all, it was one of the most difficult books I've ever written. Finding the focus that made writing it possible took decades, but allowed me to finally write some scenes that had been waiting to come out of my head since at least 1962.
GR: We've mentioned a couple other books of yours over the course of this interview. However, there are certainly several more and numerous other projects you've released over the years. Is there anything you'd like to draw special attention to? A book or something else that maybe just didn't find the right audience at the time of its original release?
VF: If I judge by my sales, I can't say that anything I've written has ever found the right audience. Every one of the books I've discussed I this interview has deserved far more readers than it's received. Commercial Fiction is a short novel that never even got a review, but Stephen-Paul Martin, to my thinking America's best short story writer, praised it and assigned it to several of his writing students at San Diego State University. Improvisations, which I consider my magnum opus, caused a stir when it first came out, but not much has happened since. Avenue Noir is also a personal favorite. A reader can get a handle on my work in 45 pages or less through that book. I've also published two books of poetry, Holiday Idylling and Bodied Tone that never received a single review. They virtually became "lost works" the minute they came into print. All of these books are available online.
GR: Tell us about your art work. That seems to be where a lot of your attention is these days.
VF: Actually, I haven't done a lot of visual poetry lately of the kind that stands alone like a painting with words. I 'm hoping to do more of it now that I have software that will allow me to explore more possibilities in that area. But I have about four unpublished works I've written using Quark that have strong visual elements, although they're done in black and white.
GR: You career has spanned a three decades, a virtual universe of varied material and what I assume to be enough experience for a few more dozen more books. What are some of the biggest changes you've seen in the literary scene? Is the market for work like yours better or worse than it was twenty years ago?
VF: The biggest changes I've seen in the literary scene is the corporate takeover of book publishers and booksellers, the mimeograph revolution and the development of literature on the internet. Around 1973, the corporations started to buy out publishing companies and change their emphasis to the bottom line. When I first decided to become a writer, Grove Press, Dial Press and New Directions would take a loss on a book that they believed had literary value and try to offset the loss with a line of steady midlist sellers and a blockbuster. They perceived themselves as maintaining a standard for the culture. Now the standard is: what genre will make the most money?
The mimeo revolution of the 1960s provided outlets for writing that even the literary presses found too controversial. It also allowed new forms of literature to develop and for more "identity" literature to appear, representing African-American writers, Feminist, Gay and Lesbian writers and Latinos. While this opened the doors to many previously unrepresented people, it also increased the fragmentation of the literary scene. Publishers saw that building "niche" markets around certain groups could get them a tidy little profit. The Beat writers and their critics and historians have become a niche market. In the 1980s the proliferation of MFA programs created a corresponding proliferation of literary magazines. These helped me get published much more frequently, and provided venues for writers whose work no longer had a chance of finding an audience through the corporate-controlled presses on Publisher's Row.
The advent of e-zines did a lot for my own work. They publish more daring material than many literary magazines of some standing—which you can seldom find in bookstores the way you could in the early sixties. The online magazines are at least equal in quality to the print zines and have opened the doors to experimental writers who otherwise would have no hope of publication. Also, online zines generally have larger audiences than print literary magazines.
Print-on-demand publishing seems to be the way of the future, given that Publisher's Row won't touch many innovative authors—try to find a poet in a major publisher's catalogue these days, or, for that matter, a fiction writer such as Ishmael Reed or Raymond Federman in a chain bookstore. But print-on-demand has built-in economic problems since some arrangements require authors to pay full retail price for review copies, which can be prohibitive when you're spending twenty dollars to order a book and send it to a reviewer who might not even look at it. And the publishers, not the authors, generally get the royalties. It's a promising system, but it needs some economic revamping. Because of the situation, an increasing number of authors have turned to self-publishing. If nothing else, it will reduce the ridiculous stigma against self-publishing, which some how has survived even though Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein and Mark Twain self-published their work. Publishers will tell you the worst writers self-publish. The writers I just mentioned rank among the very best.
GR: What's next for you?
VF: At this point, what's next is finishing up a backlog of at least a year's work. I'm trying to finish a short novel that I've been wrestling with for at least thirteen years off and on. I'm about two poems away from completing a new collection of poetry. I've begun some mixed-media work that I won't be able to complete until I learn more about my new software. No matter what I'm working on, some new idea demands expression whether I'm ready to do it or not. So, I have a lot of work in a lot of different areas and stages of development. I can't predict the order of appearance of completion, but I have a lot of work to finish and more to start. I've always loved Bob Dylan's line: "I've got a headful of ideas that would drive a man insane." All I need is the time and energy to keep mine coming out before the excess creative energy overwhelms me.
Gabriel Ricard is the Assistant Editor at Unlikely 2.0. You can learn more about him at his bio page.