It's . . . The NEXT BIG WHATEVER!

Many thanks to poet, critic, teacher, podcaster and Kennedy-assassination historian Tony Trigilio for tagging me for this undertaking.

What is the working title of your book?

Hmm. That’s a tough one. I had one out a couple of years ago called Things Come On (an amneoir). But we’re talking Next Big Thing, not Last Big Thing, so . . . Well, I’ve got a chapbook forthcoming (from Bedouin Press) called Of Some Sky. But that’s a chapbook, not a bookbook. I do have a completed manuscript called No Soap, which is under consideration by a publisher (and has been for some time now, in fact). Let’s talk about that one, how ’bout.  Is that OK?

I’m not allowed to give answers. I am merely a pre-written list of questions.

Ah. OK. Carry on.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It’s part of a series of books about my mother’s life and times. No Soap is kind of a prequel to Things Come On. That book dealt with the end of my mother’s life. No Soap deals with the beginning of her life - before the beginning, in fact. I’m writing her biography, but writing about a lot of other things in the process – the south in the Great Depression, women artists, Capitol Hill during the Cold War, memory, aporias, the archive – but I’m getting ahead of myself. In answer to your question, actually, my mother died when I was 12, and I wanted to know more about her than I did. That – and a compulsive desire to research, think, and write – got me started.

What genre does the book fall under?

“Fall under” is a great choice of terms. I’ve been filling out an NEA fellowship application, and you have to choose nonfiction or fiction, poetry or drama, but no combination of these, let alone some new genre that hasn’t been invented yet (like the NOVEL was, in the early 18^th century). In other words, generic boundaries are part of official US government policy. So we all fall under, in a way.

But I have a hard time answering this question. My book is a mixture of prose and verse, dialogue and photographs. One page might be laid out like the Soncino Talmud, the next like a medieval manuscript, the next like a braided narrative poem. I guess I was thinking of the scrapbook as a model, more than anything – the post-WWI scrapbook, when American families started to use it as a memento and record of the family and immediate community. Those scrapbooks not only contain newspaper articles, like the older ones, but also artifacts: concert programs, coasters, bits of wood, whatever. So it’s a sort of wunderkammer.

??

You know . . . those curiosity cabinets they used to do in the 19^th c. – where a platypus skull would be next to a rock from the Parthenon or whatever, next to an African mask, etc. etc.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Nobody you’ve ever heard of. Just: NO FAKE SOUTHERN ACCENTS. You think we can’t tell, but believe me, we can. I wouldn’t mind having Ken Russell direct it, but he’s not available, apparently. Wes Anderson could bring the right sensibility, but I think our storytelling styles are rather different.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

In No Soap, an adult son, who as a child lost his mother, tries to speak with his mother when she was a child through a scrapbook-like montage, and ends up taking an unforeseen tour of the early twentieth century. Does that make sense?

I can’t . . .

Oh – right. Sorry. Never mind. It sounds cheesy as hell, but it’s the best I can do.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Well, the term “no soap” is 1930s slang for “no luck” and a term my mother, Lib Peoples, used frequently as a teen. Her grandfather, a timber baron, went bust; her father died; her house burned down; she grew up in a race- and class-divided South during the Depression and the Great Flood of ’37; she studied at the Chicago Art Institute but had few creative outlets in her small town. This is by far the most exciting story-line I’ve ever worked with. But, like the traditional romance plot, the story has a somewhat happier ending, as the heroine discovers how to gain a little power, escape her hometown, and open up new possibilities for herself.

Throughout No Soap, I try to ask Lib questions, to talk back, to (literally) write between the lines. What results is sometimes sober, sometimes wacky. A lot of it has to do w/displacements – of past/present, memory/document, self/other.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Are those my only choices?  “An agency”? . . . Uh, I write experimental nonfiction and poetry. . . . But like I say, it is . . . currently looking for a home. Like the boll weevil.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Jeez – I don’t remember. The whole multi-part project blurs together. I think I got the idea for the whole thing in around 2002, and it has grown alarmingly. I’ve been writing while I researched, and revising one part as I put together the next. And I’m now composing the last part. I try not to think about things like this, actually.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My mom, first of all. And innate curiosity and epistephilia. As to models – I can’t imagine having written any of this project without the example of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictee. Michael Ondaatje’s early mixed-genre work; Susan Howe’s “historical” works (esp. The Midnight); Eleni Sikelianos’ The Book of Jon; Lyn Hejinian’s My Life – all these went into the mix, in different ways. I’m also inspired by the tradition of American “documentary poetry,” from Muriel Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” to Olson’s Maximus Poems to the many practitioners today – as well as mixed-genre work, from William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All down to recent titles from places like Coffee House Press and Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series.

(For a whole slew of influences and “further reading,” see the “Reader’s Guide” to Things Come On at Wesleyan University Press’ web site.)

So . . . is that it? . . . Can I go now? . . . Wait – don’t answer that – 

But, hemm. Whom to "tag"? Everyone I asked is either too busy, has already been asked, or considers it beneath their dignity.

Cheryl Pallant, perhaps? Aby and Matthew Cooperman? Lea Graham? Rachel Loden? Grant Jenkins? Jonathan Stalling?