The following is an interview with Jeff Parker, author of The Back of the Line (DECODE, 2007) and Ovenman (Tin House, 2007) as well as the COO and Russian Program Director of the Summer Literary Seminars.
Dan:
Thank you, Jeff, for taking the time to answer some questions!
Jeff:
Of course, Dan. The EWN accounts for the vast majority of all my Google “hits”, which is the currency by which we calculate human worth. I’m in your debt.
Dan:
Your first two books, The Back of the Line, a collection of stories surrounding the same characters, and Ovenman, a novel, were published pretty close to each other time-wise weren’t they? Many publisher contracts have a clause stating you’re not allowed to compete with yourself for a certain amount of time, six months to a year. How were you able to negotiate past this aspect and get both books out when you did?
Jeff:
Not much negotiation there. Basically, TBOL is a chapbook, so I gather, it doesn’t count. DECODE—the publisher of TBOL—is an affiliate of Platform Art Gallery in Seattle, which represents my artist co-conspirator William Powhida on the West Coast. They offered to do it in full color at high quality. We had, I think, three other chapbook offers on that book, which was totally cool and surprising, but basically DECODE would do it with the highest production, and they’ve marketed it as art—thus the price, which led to at least one reviewer in a punk zine lambasting us as bourgeoisie pigs.
Dan:
Publishing the stories with DECODE, while from what I understand, a first for them, seems to make sense from the standpoint that there is the art of William Powhida in the book, and DECODE is an art publisher. How did you end up finding a home with Tin House for Ovenman?
Jeff:
I got freaking lucky. The book was rejected all over New York, but I have an agent who is stubborn. It eventually landed on Lee Montgomery’s (editorial director of TH) desk. Lee happens to be a brilliant editor as well as my savior and she and my other editor there, Meg Storey, helped me take it to a whole new level in the editing stages and the press really got behind it. But the publishing game to me carries roughly the same odds as Black Jack. I would recommend, stay on twelve and above.
Dan:
Ovenman seems to frequently have references to the idea of a voice novel in the write-ups I’ve seen (including, I admit, my own). Not that there isn’t an interesting plot, or an incredible array of characters – would you yourself characterize it as such, a voice novel?
Jeff:
I guess so. But then again, I would characterize Rihanna’s “Umbrella” as a voice song. Certainly there is not much high-dollar going on there in terms of musicianship. It works because of this ethereal ella ella ella haunting us seemingly no matter where we are anywhere in the world. There are song lyrics in Ovenman, and I have considered approaching Rihanna about taking them on. When I visualize her belting out lines like, A slurred speech creeps like a fat lip ip ip ip, I think to myself, “Grammy!”
Dan:
Not all that long before seeing your own titles, your work was included in both The Best Non-Required American Reading and the political anthology, Stumbling and Raging (MacAdam Cage). Did inclusions in these have an effect on you? How you looked at yourself as a writer? The possibility that you would eventually find homes for your work where Jeff Parker would be the only name on the spine?
Jeff:
Stephen Elliott, editor of Stumbling and Raging, told me that anthology tanked. And I take credit for that. The BANR was alternately called the best edition of that anthology ever and the worst, which I suppose I could also claim responsibility for. The great thing about BANR is that it was everywhere, and people actually read that thing. Imagine that. But I have and always and will always be rejected tons more times than I'm accepted/good things happen (like BANR selections). So you don't let the rejections get to you and you don't let the good things give you too much hope.
Dan:
You’re a university professor, currently at the University of Toronto, and prior to that at Eastern Michigan University. What aspects of your jobs have you enjoyed the most? What benefits to your own writing have you seen as a result of teaching?
Jeff:
I’m inclined to rely on intuition, but teaching forces me to read and reread things I should be reading and rereading and decide how to break them down and make sense of them. So I’m a believer in the idea that, at least for me, I don’t know anything until I’ve taught it. I simply wouldn’t have the flimsy education I have in the craft of fiction otherwise. But also, I learned from my good teachers that there’s more to teaching writing than teaching writing. (I won’t bore you with this silly debate about the not-wrong writing being teachable and the right writing being not teachable.) Like, maybe the most important thing second to teaching young writers to write sentences is trying to help them locate some reason why they’re writing or what exactly they’re trying to write about. A lot of students are trying to isolate an obsession or depict some vision of the world, and so it’s a lot of fun trying to help them make that happen.
Dan:
You’ve also taught younger students, acting as the Writer in Residence at Greenhills Academy for the 2006-07 school year. What was that like, especially in comparison to teaching at the university level?
Jeff:
The Greenhills kids blew my mind. I’m still in touch with a lot of them. They’re so incredibly talented and excited about the prospect of working on stories. We did group narrative projects and played around with the concept of Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”, which is essentially a book of “voice” lessons for writers in which you apply different styles to the same story. One of the styles a student applied was “pop song” and she reinterpreted a set story as a Britney Spears song about a barber shop evisceration titled, “Oops, I Cut Off Your Head”.
Dan:
Back to Eastern Michigan University. Prior to your leaving for the University or Toronto, it seemed as if you were pretty heavily involved in helping to set up their creative writing department to move towards becoming an accredited MFA Program. What sort of things need to be done behind the scenes so that a university can begin offering MFA’s in Creative Writing?
Jeff:
Lots of politicking and proposal writing.
Dan:
Beyond writing, you are the COO and Russian Program Director of the Summer Literary Seminars program. How did you get involved with them? Can you give a brief description of what goes on at SLS, and how much of your time you spend working on SLS – what does the COO and Russian Program Director do – I assume it isn’t just during the month or so the program is running in St. Petersburg and/or Kenya.
Jeff:
I was going to Russia in 1999 to visit my future wife’s parents in Siberia, and one of my favorite writers, Victor Pelevin, was slated to be at the SLS program in St. Petersburg that year. I figured I’d stop through on the way. At the time the program had about twelve participants. The founder, Mikhail Iossel, needed a lot of help to keep it going, so I simply started helping, and it’s since grown. Now we bring about one hundred and ten participants every year. Basically it’s a series of summer writing workshops situated in one of the most literary cities in the world. Participants come there to study writing; Russian literature, language, and culture; and immerse themselves in a totally foreign (by Western standards) street vernacular. What’s unique about the program is, well, yes you study with some of the best North American writers, yes you spend more time with faculty than in any other similar program, yes you’re given a front row seat to the city of St. Petersburg at what are by current standards -- St. Petersburg is the twelfth most expensive city in the world right now—bargain prices, yes you’re in a close-knit group of extremely talented writers of all ages…but I realize as do many of our participants that the experience has a profound effect on you both physically and psychologically beyond the general benefits of travel abroad. First off St. Pete is a completely improbable city, built on a swamp by a madman. It’s White Nights so the sun hardly ever sets and this round the clock giddiness obtains; your body’s biorhythms reset. It’s intense. Furthermore you’re immersed in a completely unfamiliar street vernacular and if you don’t know the language, as most participants don’t, the language is reduced to detail and nuance, exactly the kinds of things that so many young writers need to study. This year, as you know, we’ll be hosting the Dzanc Books/SLS Symposium on Intl. Literature featuring you, many of our North American writing faculty, local Russian writers, Kenyan writers, etc.
Dan:
You speak Russian, I assume aided by the fact that your lovely wife is from Russia. Have you considered translating English to Russian or vice versa at all?
Jeff:
No, I don’t know the language well enough to translate. I’m working on an anthology of stories by young Russian writers (under thirtish) right now but others are doing the translations. A few years back the founder, Mikhail Iossel, and I edited a collection called Amerika (Dalkey Archive), which included essays by contemporary Russian writers on their impressions of the United States, which was an interesting project in terms of seeing one’s self as one’s former enemy sees one.
Dan:
As a main aspect of Ovenman is set in a pizza joint, it seemed like a pretty cool idea that Tin House had you reading in some such locations while you did your book tour. What were those like in comparison to say, store readings? Is there a great difference reading before a crowd in a bookstore as compared to in front of a bunch of students, such as your Neutral Zone reading in Ann Arbor, or the reading folks can online down at West Flordia University?
Jeff:
I had hoped to do a lot more of those kind of readings, but unfortunately scheduling and travel gets complicated real quick. Especially when one has such bothersome things as jobs to deal with. So I only read in one pizzeria, Mississippi Pizza in Portland, which throws, I must say, a top-shelf pie. The main difference is that there was free pizza at the pizza restaurant and hardly any free pizza at all anywhere else I read.
Dan:
I’ve got to ask you about skateboarding. Many of the gang in Ovenman are boarders, and you seemed quite familiar with the descriptions and language – not as if you had merely done scholarly research. How much time did you spend in your high school/college years riding? Do you still own and/or ride a skateboard today?
Jeff:
I spent all my time skateboarding in high school and college. Most of my old friends are still skateboarders. But skateboarding is important to that book because it’s essentially the justification for the pace. I feel like I can resist the criticisms about When’s lack of contemplation because his whole ethos is one of relentless blazing urethane-on-asphalt movement. I still have one and now that I live in a city with lots of skateparks everywhere, I have to have knee surgery. I’ll let you do the math on that one.
Dan:
You had a piece of fiction included in PP/FF: An Anthology that had a truly gruesome incident happen to the protagonist. I realize it’s fiction, but did something specific trigger you to write that, or did the sickness just emanate from your mind?
Jeff:
My mind emanates mostly sickness. I had a friend who experienced a similar injury, slipping on wet leaves in the woods and winding up with a stick through his scrotum. The funny thing is I kept trying to write just that scene, and it didn’t work until I fractured the narrative chronology, which kind of made sense in that trauma tends to affect the machinations of memory, and included the subtext about the wedding.
Dan:
You also seem to have a nice knack with non-fiction. Is this something you’re interested in writing a lot of as well, or do you even really prefer one over the other?
Jeff:
I just finished a very homoerotic piece on the Russian bathhouse for The Walrus. I’ve been writing it for about seven years now. That’s my whole problem. I write very slow most of the time. But writing non-fiction is harder for me because it tends to be less voice-driven. So I struggle with structure in that mode much more.
Dan:
I have to ask you about poker strategies. Having had the fortune (no pun intended) of sitting with you at a few tables, I’ve noticed your strategies seem different every time you play. Have you pinpointed a single strategy yet? If so, how’s it working for you?
Jeff:
I once heard a strategy for betting on horses that I liked: Always pick the grey one. You are a keen observer though. My strategy in the past has been a chaos theory, intended to obliterate my opponents’ ability to read me. Drunkenness played a part in this only inasmuch as it increased my ability to play stupidly and erratically. This on the whole has not been so successful. (Before you came into the game I used to clean up.) Make of that what you will. Nowadays I think I’ve got a conservative can’t-fail strategy, but fuck if I’m telling you what it is. Nice try though.
Dan:
Lastly, if you were a character in Fahrenheit 451, what work(s) would you memorize for posterity?
Jeff:
I’d have to take a bitter comic like Isaac Babel or maybe Daniil Kharms, who was once the most beloved children’s author in all of Russia and loathed children. Of course, Stalin eventually imprisoned him and he died of starvation in a camp. There’s a new collection of his translations out edited by Matvei Yankelevich. The title comes from one of my favorite Kharms’ lines: “I wrote nothing today. Doesn’t matter.”
Dan:
Thanks again, Jeff.
Parker's the man! Great writer and all around good guy, even if his poker is suspect and his skateboarding days are slightly behind him. Read everything he writes. You wont be disappointed.
Posted by: steven gillis | December 08, 2007 at 08:46 AM