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Episode 192: Paul Lisicky — The Book Teaches You What It Wants to Be
139 Plays5 years ago
Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020), talks about his latest book.
Big thanks to Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and to HippoCamp 2020 for the support.
Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for the monthly newsletter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
You can only go for so long without drinking water. Without that, I'm using ridiculous metaphors, but I'm going to go back and examine what I say and roll my eyes at myself.
00:00:19
Speaker
That sounds like Paul the Sickie from the Wayback Machine. He of episode 27 fame. He is back with his new memoir. But first, CNF Pod is sponsored by Bay Path University's fully online MFA in creative non-fiction writing. Discover your story in Ireland.
00:00:39
Speaker
A destination renowned for its natural beauty and rich literary and musical history. Yes, this summer from August 1st to August 8th, study under such instructors as Mia Gallagher, Tommy Shea, and Anne Hood, and take your writing to that next level. They're reading groups, Tea and Talk, and also get outdoors in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Paul Asicki's Memoir and Influences
00:01:03
Speaker
Visit baypath.edu slash MFA for more information.
00:01:10
Speaker
Well, here's a quote to chew on from George Herman Ruth, otherwise known as Babe Ruth. Quote, never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game, end quote. Ugh, that's so lame. I mean, it's true, but it's so rote. How about, never let the fear of striking out keep you from riff.
00:01:43
Speaker
I don't know about you, but it's much better, right? Hey, Paul Asicki is here, so stoked. His latest memoir, later, My Life at the Edge of the World by Grey House. Grey House? It's not even a publishing. Oh my god.
00:02:02
Speaker
Grey Wolf Press is incredible. I know the year is young, but it's the best book I've read this year. It's a front runner for the CNF Pod Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Oh hey, by the way, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey. This is the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, memoirs, narrative journalists.
00:02:28
Speaker
about the art and craft of telling true stories where I kind of try to tease out some origins and some tactical things so you can get a little bit better at your own work and that award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence it's gonna be a real thing I mean why not but it's also a Simpsons deep cut go look for it it's pretty funny
00:02:49
Speaker
But I'm serious, it's a killer book.
Host's Reflections and Offers
00:02:51
Speaker
Later is an awesome book, my favorite kind of memoir. It's the kind that drills down on a time so perfectly with such focus. It's inspired me to dive into this project I have called The Last Summer or The Final Summer about my time in Lake Placid in the early 2000s. It's three summers I spent there.
00:03:11
Speaker
And it was about, you know, the whole thing is just about summer, ending forever, summer as we know it. That time when there was no ambition, you just kind of work hard at your day job. Mine was waiting tables and so forth and I love it and I think per hour it's probably the best paying job I've ever had and I kind of like it and I probably should do it again.
00:03:33
Speaker
because probably pays better than what I'm doing now. You know, live in that moment, no career, can you get the girl, all that stuff. Trust me, plenty of unsavory shit, unbecoming of a decent, well-adjusted human, but Paul's book gives me the ticket to go for it. I mean, that should tell you how good that book is, right? Trust me. Gray Wolf Press and the book is called Later.
00:04:03
Speaker
Hey, here's another review from Apple Pods to Worth Reading. If you leave a kind review, I'll be sure to read it on the air. It means a lot to the show to get them, and I want to show my appreciation for you by giving the best of shout outs here in the intro. It's from Bill, and his last name's part of his Apple handle, but I'm just gonna, I'll leave that off.
00:04:27
Speaker
Alright, each episode has a unique personality. Quote, I first checked out the CNF podcast a while back when I somehow heard about the interview with Laura Hillenbrand. I'm sure he's been interviewed, she's been interviewed a zillion times, but you could really hear her enthusiasm as Brendan drew her out of her love for researching and interviewing in particular. I've now listened to about two dozen episodes, hopefully more by now,
00:04:56
Speaker
That's just me. Obviously, the guests are different, but I appreciate how Brendan adapts his questions in questioning style to each guest. Each show has an absolutely unique, quote, personality. As someone who writes while working another job, I also admire Brendan's hustle in the best possible meaning in airing this podcast every week. It's a welcome source of inspiration and ideas. End of review.
00:05:23
Speaker
Bill, that's amazing. Thank you so much. That's why we do this show, baby. I love it. Keep it coming. Head over to Apple Podcasts and do the thing. Hey, also, do you know that registration is open for Hippocamp 2020? The early birds are gone, but there's still a way to save some dough. Visit hippocamp2020.hippocampismagazine.com or just Google Hippocamp 2020 if you don't want to type all that in.
00:05:53
Speaker
and use the promo code cnfpod2020 to get $40 off your fee for this conference. It's from August 14th to August 16th and I know for a fact I'm gonna use the promo code if I just get off my ass and register.
00:06:10
Speaker
best money you'll spend on a conference this year I promise you in that $40 can go towards buying books at the little book fair there there's gonna be stuff from the keynotes there's gonna be all sorts of goodies there and you can buy it probably three four maybe yeah maybe like three or four books that's amazing
00:06:31
Speaker
or go to the bar. In any case, also one more thing in terms of sponsor things. Hey, we all need editors, we all need editing, and especially accountability. If you've got an essay or a book that needs coaching, I'd be honored and thrilled, seriously, to serve you in your work. Email me at brendan at brendanomerra.com, hey. And let's start a conversation, because the world needs your work, we need you to show up, and I wanna be there to help you out.
Interview with Paul Asicki Begins
00:07:01
Speaker
Also show notes and the monthly newsletter or of course are at the website brandonomera.com Follow along social channels if you'd like at CNF pod Twitter Instagram Facebook and subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts
00:07:20
Speaker
All right, it's high time for you to hear one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite guests. Paul came to play ball and this episode will not disappoint. You ready? Let's do this.
00:07:41
Speaker
of the
00:07:59
Speaker
2016 feels like lifetimes ago. Oh, I know. I mean, just yeah, so much has happened and so much is just like worn at our collective psyche in the last four years. Right. Right. Oh, man. But how have you been? How's it going? Well, yeah, it's it's a busy time is ahead. And the book is is actually coming out this week at AWP. So
00:08:27
Speaker
It's not officially out till the 17th, but this just feels like I'm on the verge of a big marker.
00:08:38
Speaker
it's going to be a relief to be in it rather than to keep anticipating it. Oh yeah, for sure. Are you finding that there's any kind of fun riding the wave or you just want this thing to come, you just want to get this in motion and start the next phase of this process? There actually is fun riding the wave and I think for me it's hard to anticipate it
00:09:05
Speaker
from a month out when reviews haven't come in and you start second guessing every move you've made and thinking about all the possible people whom you've offended, etc. It's just generalized anxiety that focuses on the book.
00:09:27
Speaker
So yeah, it feels a lot better now. I think I can put my anxiety toward the coronavirus.
00:09:36
Speaker
like everyone else appears to be doing right now. Exactly. Nice. Oh, cool. Well, you know, I read it this week. It's been on my shelf for several weeks. And I've just been itching to get to start reading it because I haven't enjoyed The Narrow Door as much as I did. And then, you know, when this came out, I was just like, oh, I'm like so excited to get into it. And it didn't disappoint. This was such a good memoir.
00:10:03
Speaker
Thank you. Do you feel like, I mean, is it okay if I ask you a question, a quick one? I mean, does it feel...
00:10:09
Speaker
substantially different from the previous book. It's hard for me to think of the two in connection to each other. It's funny. I had only read Narrow Door once and it was four years ago, so I had a hard time. I can't make that much of a connection in terms of... Right. But what was... It wasn't meant to be a technical... It wasn't meant to be all loaded.
00:10:37
Speaker
question at all. I'm just curious about your answer of one book up against the next to a leader. Right. Right. But from what I recall of that one, of course, it does feel of an
Writing Process and Inspirations
00:10:54
Speaker
author's body of work, if that makes any sense. Sure.
00:10:58
Speaker
they, you know, they play well together, you know, you know, that they're, you know, of the same voice in mind, even though it's it's one was far more current in this one goes back 30 years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:11:12
Speaker
Yeah, but no, it was, uh, yeah, it was, uh, you know, both were, you know, I enjoyed both tremendously. And this one being the most, uh, you know, recent one, I w what I particularly loved about it too. And what I love about memoirs of, uh, this nature is that it focuses in so, uh, so tightly on one particular period of time. And I love memoirs like that. And that's what I, you know, particularly was one of the many draws of this as I was reading it. Thanks so much.
00:11:43
Speaker
This story, too, I mean, it's in a sense, it's like you've been with it for 30, 30 years. So what about it? What what about it made you want to take it on at this point? Yeah, I mean, I started it about four or five weeks after my father died. And I think I needed some container for all of that complicated feeling. And I wasn't able to write about my father directly. But
00:12:12
Speaker
Honestly, the story of those early years in Provincetown have been with me, have been present with me for decades in a way that other periods of my life haven't been. And I try to write about that particular era.
00:12:32
Speaker
in other forms. There's an early novel version of it that I wrote in my 30s, which just I abandoned. And then there are other versions of the story. There's a small version of the story in my book, Famous Builder. But I knew that I needed a larger canvas and I just happened to be
00:12:59
Speaker
lucky enough to be at an artist colony at, you know, in this period. And I just, you know, it was before the narrow door came out. So this was 2015. And I gave myself permission to, you know, to explore and play and to be bad if need be. I mean, it was possible that I was going to put this side yet again, and I wouldn't be satisfied. But
00:13:29
Speaker
I think it was the confluence, sounds like a pretentious word, but it was the confluence of my father's death and this particular artist residency that I had that managed to, I don't know, keep me settled and focused on this particular period.
00:13:52
Speaker
And going back to our conversation from a few years ago, I was just kind of looking at a couple of the poll quotes from the show notes of that. And you know, you had you had said, you know, what would it be like to be an amateur again? Oh, wow. That's my old mind. Yeah, I was just like, that's great. And it's kind of speaking to that how you wanted to find a sense of play to approach the story. Right. Right. I mean, the earliest version of this book was in past tense and it was fairly linear.
00:14:22
Speaker
And I was excited by the fact that it felt straightforward and readerly because, you know, one of the concerns I've had about other books of mine is that, you know, the structural fluidity puts some readers off. So I had a fairly straightforward book and I came to a point
00:14:44
Speaker
where it did not feel like it honored the complexity of that time. And I put it away for a while and, you know, was disappointed that the book I'd written ended up feeling too neat and resolved.
00:15:05
Speaker
It felt like it was arching toward a kind of order that wasn't true to my own experience and the experience of many people I know. So I went back a year later and started pulling it apart. I wanted some of it to be a narrative time, but I thought, oh, you know, there are places here that could live in a kind of poetic time. I mean, there are opportunities here to write
00:15:33
Speaker
prose poems, even though I don't use that word into the material to complicate its sense of forwardness. I also flipped it into the present because I think the book needed a kind of immediacy. And one of the things that it hadn't done in the prior draft was that it felt a little too distant and wise. And, you know, ironically, I think I needed
00:16:02
Speaker
to write this material in an immediate way in order to push it back into the past.
00:16:11
Speaker
Yeah, and you probably couldn't approach that having not, you know, sat with it in writing, you know, the first, you know, the first raw, you know, stab at it, the first audition of this book and then having tabled it and then coming back to it. It's something to be said for, you know, just muscling through some iterations so you can then start shaping it into, you know, a form that's more, you know, just more congruent with what's your current vision of it.
00:16:40
Speaker
Oh, exactly. I think, you know, when after there is that that temporal distance, it's like, it feels more like an object. It's, it's kind of not yours anymore. You're a different person. So I always think of it like, you know, I'm stripping the finish off a piece of old furniture. And it doesn't matter if I if I make a mess, like it's not, it stops feeling so precious and concretized on the sentence by sentence level.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's so much of this. I pulled out so many great passages that I want to unpack and I think it's something you just said kind of about the technical aspects of it and how you put it aside for a bit and then came back to it. There was a moment in the book too where you were at a reading in town.
00:17:29
Speaker
from a novel that you say called Bad Florida, but a novel you said you soon put aside for good. And sort of a question I had about that is like, when do you decide to give up on projects versus tabling them indefinitely? And it looks like later was tabled for a time and you were like, yes, I do need to come back to this with a different set of skills.
00:17:51
Speaker
That's a great question. I think I put that first novel aside because after a year of being out of grad school, out of my MFA program, I was aware that, I don't know, I developed a different set of aesthetics. And the book I'd written was so bent
00:18:20
Speaker
toward emphasizing connectivity and control and coherence, it was really well behaved. And I knew it was a book that probably would have done okay if I presented sections of it in workshop. But it, you know, it felt structurally out of out of sync with
00:18:45
Speaker
what I was learning. I mean, I, I moved to Provincetown and Provincetown back then was a haven for people with HIV and AIDS. And I was there as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and was just quite aware of, it was impossible not to be aware of the extremity in town. I mean, there was
00:19:15
Speaker
there was a convivial everyday surface to how people interacted with one another. But death wasn't a theory. Death was something was the house you walked past or the apartment you were heading toward. And I think all of that intensity led me to reconceive my work around
00:19:43
Speaker
kind of structure that was much more fragmentary. That felt closer to my true way of seeing. And I knew it was the kind of work that probably would have been, I don't know, dismissed by my MFA classmates as much as I respected their opinions. But it just, I think I was finding a form that felt truer to who I was.
00:20:07
Speaker
And with respect to the fragmented nature of how you compose the book and the chapters and everything and the micro chapters within each chapter, and the immediacy of it all too,
Impact of AIDS on Provincetown and Writing
00:20:23
Speaker
What was it what was that like for you having written it past tense and then having sort of that distance and then maybe like flipping the script and making it immediate like what did it did it really conjure conjure the memories in a more vivid way and did it really put you back there in a way that in a way that could almost be scary.
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it initially felt super awkward to me. I mean, I thought, you know, this man, this might not work. And I would look at every conceived chapter, and read it aloud, and then read it aloud in past tense. And I'd say, the past tense is so much better. But
00:21:01
Speaker
I lived with the tentativeness of it all for a while and gradually it felt like the book taught me what it wanted to be. And I think I just needed to learn to sit with the temporal shifts and the shifts in voice that this new structure had been suggesting and it
00:21:30
Speaker
After a couple of years, it felt, okay, this feels as true as I can get it, as emotionally accurate as it was to be in those times.
00:21:45
Speaker
You alluded to it in that death was this house you walked by. It's always this undercurrent. The HIV and the AIDS epidemic of that time and the fear that's always alongside you is also something that, at least through my interpretation of the book, is also something that makes you guys
00:22:06
Speaker
and makes everyone in your community really kind of feel alive and drawn together as well. Like this is kind of... Absolutely. And yes, maybe give us a sense of that and like kind of take us to that how living with that fear actually kind of gave you a sense of life too. Yeah, it was just that sense of life that, you know, it came up out of nowhere. This was a scene that I never put in the book.
00:22:36
Speaker
I have a memory of being in the Provincetown gym, which was this shambly little place with broken equipment, right on the water. And it felt like everyone, or at least all the cool people, the artist in town came to the gym at around 4pm. And the woman who ran it said, she stopped everything and she barked out in a military voice, someone smells in here.
00:23:06
Speaker
And it was at first really horrifying because it came down with such intensity. But we never found out who was bothering her. But I just remember everyone, male and female, straight and queer, smelling each other and making jokes for about an hour. It was like a legendary moment. And it was so sweet.
00:23:37
Speaker
the kind of experience that only would have happened in a place that was at that time being forged by a health emergency. It didn't, you know, there's something about that health emergency that ended up, you're probably hearing sirens outside. Yeah, that's fine. You know, leveling hierarchy in a lot of ways. So that was one of the loveliest
00:24:06
Speaker
uh, the loveliest qualities of that time. I mean, I felt like people felt a need to check in on one another, if only simply to say hi at the grocery store or at town hall or whatever public place in town. It just, I felt like
00:24:29
Speaker
people were attuned to one another, whether they were known to be HIV positive or not. It was just a terrific sense of participation at that particular point in time. And I don't mean to idealize because I'm sure plenty of people hated each other. And the poor enemy says, you know, there are always
00:24:53
Speaker
you know, enemies and cliques and human, you know, human social relationships, but but by and large, it was an incredibly welcoming time. And I know I, as a law with many other people, you know, needed, I guess needed the energy of all that to get us through complicated days. Hmm.
00:25:19
Speaker
And there's a point where you write where we're all going to die anyway, and I'm tired of living on the outside, and then I'm afraid of never moving into my life. And it kind of takes us to the sentiment of that, having come to town, and that's kind of something that's bubbling underneath your surface.
00:25:42
Speaker
Right. I've been, you know, I kept my light pretty low throughout much of my 20s. I mean, I'd lived in Florida, I'd lived in New Jersey, I'd lived in Iowa, and in all those places, I'd gotten the sense that in order to exist as a gay man, I'd have to, I don't know how to say it,
00:26:10
Speaker
I just said, keep my light low, but just keep, you know, keep a low profile, kind of blend in. Yeah, not not make a big statement of myself. I mean, I know there are people who live in those environments who do the opposite and make like outside statements of themselves. But I was aware that, you know, that self subduing was, was having a cost on me.
00:26:40
Speaker
And there was something terrifically enlivening about moving to a place where queerness wasn't on the outskirts. It wasn't marginal, but it was the dominant culture. And I felt that shift into my body during my first walk in town. I was aware of my shoulders falling back.
00:27:07
Speaker
and holding my chin up and standing differently and sort of claiming myself in a physical way that I'd never had before. And, you know, I really didn't know what I was missing until I entered a space that felt, you know, safe and energizing and inclusive.
00:27:33
Speaker
And it's like you don't have to tiptoe around anymore and you can fully step into your own skin. Yeah. I mean, I think all of us know what it's like to be in certain parts of our lives, a part of a culture where you think, oh, I've found my people. So I felt like I'd found my people.
00:27:53
Speaker
But I also found my town because this was a town where I could both be a writer slash artist, but I could also be an LGBT person. And there really weren't that many places where those two aims could be so compatible unless, say, you lived in New York or another big city. And I don't think
00:28:20
Speaker
You know, in my late twenties and early thirties, I had the confidence to, or, you know, the will to make a lot of money in order to live in a place like this. So, um, yeah, yeah, it was, it was just, it was the right place.
00:28:37
Speaker
for me at that time, but as I say it, it fills me with melancholy given what was happening then. Right, yeah, because it was, I think you write too that with death always in the air, death was always in the air and there was something you referred to about intimacy and it made me wonder if with death always being in the air, was intimacy all the more dangerous?
00:29:07
Speaker
probably so. And yeah, it felt like there might have been more of an imperative to go there, even though, you know, I think for many people in order to survive that experience had to enclose themselves and build up walls and, you know, refuse to feel because if once they started, they'd crumble. I mean, I
00:29:37
Speaker
I read some statistics or some stories about some of the nurses in town who just who, who talk about shoring themselves up in a way that almost felt inhuman because they knew that
Character Portraits and Community Influence
00:29:55
Speaker
It would be the end of them if they started mourning, you know, Tom or Kenny or whoever, you know, whoever they lost within a period of two weeks. Yeah, you also, you know, you know, it sort of piggybacking off of that too, you know, you write that, but anyone who's ever had sex knows that sex has a life all its own, and that's true if you're straight or queer.
00:30:21
Speaker
And it's just like, that's that overpowering thing where you just say, like, fuck it and throw care to the, you know, to the wind. And, you know, that's. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's it's eating your food. It's it's, you know, it's like taking care of yourself, drinking water. It's listening to music. It's just part of the, you know, one of the essentials that keep us alive and.
00:30:45
Speaker
you know, you can only go for so long without drinking water. And without that, I'm using ridiculous metaphors, but go back and examine what I say and roll my eyes at myself. But you know, it's yet like sex is not especially in those times, like felt, you know, it felt like an act of rebelliousness and
00:31:11
Speaker
and subversion and central to claiming one's identity.
00:31:17
Speaker
Yeah, and within that context as well, part of what you write too in a time of barriers, skin to skin feels transgressive, close and alive. And I think this piggybacked off a little micro scene where you were seeing some of the older men maybe in their 40s or 50s at the time. And it was just something like maybe they didn't take the risk that we have the courage to take.
00:31:44
Speaker
Maybe so, who knows? Yeah. I mean, there were so few men in that town who made a past 40. That's the astonishing thing. I mean, it's hard to conceive of a place like that now, where a large segment of the population was like wasn't from their 20s to 40s. And
00:32:09
Speaker
Yeah, so it was it was it was hard to conceive of futurity if you realize if there weren't, there weren't role models in the air, you know, there weren't, you know, there weren't the possibility of friendships with, you know, people who were 45, which is, I mean, the irony right now is that Provincetown is a place where most people are 55 and over most of the people who live there and you know, like
00:32:36
Speaker
Palm Springs and some other, Fort Lauderdale, or even the Castro, most of the people who live in those places tend to be older.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah. And there's lots of lots of characters that come into come into this book. And you know, one who comes in, you know, kind of briefly about halfway through and is is is Lucy. And I just kind of thought she was kind of charming and and with the confidence with which she comes into the story. And I was like, maybe maybe you can talk about Lucy and the way she parachuted into your life.
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah, she instantly had a presence. And I still remember that scene out on the parking lot at the Fine Arts Works Center where, you know, she came up to the poet Tim Siebels and I and pretty much announced herself and like let us know that she was here and she was someone to know. And I mean, there had been a lot of buzz about Lucy because
00:33:47
Speaker
she had already sold the manuscript for the manuscript that would be what's Lucy's book title blanking out the autobiography of my face before she came to the work center and that book was sold for at that time a substantial amount of money so she had a kind of
00:34:12
Speaker
shimmer and glow about her. We knew she was going to be a star and she did too. And she had a lot of energy and she was funny and she made you feel like you were her best friend when you were in her presence. And at the same time, she also knew how
00:34:42
Speaker
to push your buttons and to, you know, to be to just to be a bit what's the word techy? Is that the right word? And just to just kind of poke a little bit to see how she would react. And I think for for Lucy, that might have been a way into intimacy. She was not one of those people who
00:35:09
Speaker
so much interested in maintaining a friendship of calmness and equilibrium. I mean, she liked a friendship that had a little pushback in it. And yeah, I think people fell in love with her because of that, because you felt like you were
00:35:31
Speaker
you were being taken seriously and challenged. And I mean, I think plenty of my memories are how Lucy are vaguely exasperated. But I hope that that exasperation is just, you know, expressed, it's another expression of love, I think. Yeah.
00:35:50
Speaker
Was there ever any, knowing that this rising star is coming in with a huge book advance, what was the feeling among the other writers around town who are just like, ah, come on, really? You've got this giant advance and here we are, like, scraping by. I wish I could, you know, this sounds, I don't mean to sound Pollyanna. I don't remember people feeling jealous of her.
00:36:15
Speaker
maybe because we knew that to write such a book would be a very difficult project. And, you know, to bear up against a big advance is, is always tough, like there were there, she had a responsibility, and it wasn't easy. And she never made it seem like sitting down with that book came easily at all. I mean, I think
00:36:43
Speaker
I'm positive she tried to avoid writing that material as much as she can and look for every opportunity to take her away from her desk. So yeah, I don't I don't remember, you know, I might have excised, you know, anyone's jealousy out of that out of that story. I mean, there were also I mean, I
00:37:10
Speaker
I one person I remember who was a fellow during that year was a Matt Clam or the writer Matthew Clam who got into the New Yorker and maybe a few months before the end of the fellowship and I you know it that that felt exciting because he sent that piece um he sent that piece unsolicited and Dan Menaker or whoever was the editor then just took it out of a slush pile so he didn't
00:37:37
Speaker
tell us about that with any sense of entitlement. He was in awe and confused and excited and scared and wanted to tell his colleagues, his pals, his buddies around us.
00:38:00
Speaker
I'm sure there's always competition in the air when in a group of artists who all want the same thing. But honestly, I think we were all audacious enough to think, well, if Lucy could get that, or if Matt can get that, I could get it too. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great, it's a great abundant mindset to take that like, if you see the success of others, that it's not some zero sum game, like, oh, shoot, like that's exactly. Yeah, exactly.
00:38:29
Speaker
Yeah. And, you know, too many people have that wiring. And I think that there's, I don't know if it's possible to correct or fix that wiring, but it's, it's disabling. You know, someone else, your buddy comes into, comes into success or good reviews or appreciation. Why not? Yeah. Why not think that, Hey,
Family Dynamics and Artistic Pursuits
00:38:55
Speaker
he can do it. I can do it as well.
00:38:58
Speaker
And in the book too, I love how, you know, the smallest apartment in the world. And I love this little place of just trying to envision how tiny it is was like an exercise in my own imagination. It was crazy.
00:39:13
Speaker
It also comes in a book too where I think the world is kind of shrinking around you as well or you're retreating just a little bit. Maybe you're more settled and trying to get some work done and just having been there, you're like, okay, as you settle into a new place, you can afford to retreat a bit. So this apartment kind of felt to me like, oh, this is Paul's way of
00:39:38
Speaker
kind of claiming a little space of his own, but also away from everybody else. And I wonder if maybe you could speak to that. Well, I think that the very particular small apartment just felt like a negotiation with more precarious financial standards, because that came right after my two subsequent fellowships.
00:40:07
Speaker
you know, Provincetown is a super expensive place now, but it was much less expensive than and it took, it took a lot of work to find a little place. First, you had to know someone in town and get, you know, verbal references from a friend. But they also required maybe the full summer's rent by, you know, by May 15.
00:40:34
Speaker
at a time when no one was making any money in town because I, you know, the town back then was full of flakes and people would just say I'm not into this and, and depart. And a lot of rents were were verbal rather than written down. So yeah, I think that particular move is about, you know, making do with the fact that, um,
00:41:02
Speaker
my life might be a little less luxurious. You know, financially, this is gonna be harder to do, but it's a way to stay in town, which is nourishing me, and it's a way to continue working on my writing. Right, and I think you write that it was something like six feet by six feet. You know, was that the actual dimension? You know, one of these days, I mean, I think I've, I mean, I know that building and I've been inside and I'd be curious about
00:41:32
Speaker
measuring it, but I really think it's about six feet by six feet. It was enough to hold a single bed, a really narrow desk. There wasn't a closet. There was a tiny strip of kitchen figures with a with a kind of toy dorm refrigerator beneath the sink. And it had a shower stall. And you know,
00:41:57
Speaker
and the other things we have in the bathroom, but it was about as austere as it could get. It's like something you would give, you would give a nut on a priest or a priest in some seaside monastery or convent. But it had the most amazing view on the other side of a staircase, but it was still an amazing view of the harbor. And there was something tremendously
00:42:27
Speaker
enlivening about that, seeing the day change over the water.
00:42:33
Speaker
Something I want to ask you too is, every chapter, maybe every other chapter or so, you use your mother as a grace note every so often. And I was wondering how you chose to want to drop in a little thing, a conversation you had with your mother, or something illustrative of the relationship with your mother. Every so often, and it's spaced out, it seems, strategically. I was wondering what was the approach there.
00:43:01
Speaker
I mean, I think I was aware on some level of how precarious my time in this place was. It felt like I'd entered the place that I'd finally found my world, but I knew that
00:43:24
Speaker
that was not to be taken for granted. And I knew there was the pressure of another world always bearing up on me. And it was, you know, the pressure of, you know, my parents own complicated relationship. They seem to, I don't know, they seem to need their children for their complicated relationship. I know there's a long, long story.
00:43:53
Speaker
behind that like they needed us as characters. But yeah, they wanted my father was always trying to get me to come back home. And I had grown up in a family in which, you know, art and achievement and drive was encouraged. But
00:44:19
Speaker
I think only to a degree and they were so afraid of, of losing me in multiple ways. And it seemed important to, to enact that pressure on my everyday life. Because I think, you know, aside from the dread of illness being an obstacle, it also, the
00:44:48
Speaker
all the complexity of family life needed to be a part of the equation as well, because, yeah, I didn't want, I didn't, it hurt, it hurt that my leaving hurt my parents. And it's still, you know, when I even, my parents are no longer around. And even when I summon it up now, it just like throws me into this,
00:45:17
Speaker
you know, this position of bewilderment, I don't know why, why it was difficult for, you know, for my parents children to leave, I mean, I think it was probably related to the cultures in which they grew up. Yeah, he's you stayed, you stayed close by you, you, your primary
00:45:43
Speaker
Your primary task was to be tied in some way to your family.
00:45:49
Speaker
Right, yeah, these days, families are so disparate and fractured geographically. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it can be really hard for people who didn't move, let's say, more than, say, radius of 20 miles outside of their hometowns. And when they get sick, it's like the kids will take care of them, and then someone else, like that whole lineage will just manifest itself. Exactly, yeah.
00:46:17
Speaker
And I think in part, my mom had had a really rough childhood, had suffered some serious losses and trauma. And in most, I think one of the projects of her life was to look like she wasn't hurt to other people. And it was really important that we look as a family
00:46:48
Speaker
we're all okay and successful and a model group of people. The team of us together seemed really imperative and it was pretty clear that that was unsustainable.
00:47:08
Speaker
The drama of that was ongoing behind my time in Provincetown. It would be a much different story if I simply moved there and came into my own and didn't think about my parents, even though HIV was in the atmosphere. It would not be true to the experience of those times for me.
00:47:30
Speaker
Did you get a sense that even though parents, of course, want their kids to be successful, but success sometimes means that they will go far away? Exactly. Yeah, and then during this time, of course, in this fellowship, you get it for a consecutive year, which is very rare and very validating in terms of your writing and the trajectory of your career.
00:47:59
Speaker
But did you ever get a sense that your parents were, or did you feel a pressure that maybe that they were hoping that you would fail because failure would mean you would come home? You might be right. I never voiced that to myself. The failure would have to be coupled with the look of achievement somehow.
00:48:26
Speaker
I don't know what that could be. Those two things would have to be concurrent.
00:48:34
Speaker
The math would be alright.
Ambition, Authenticity, and Writing Evolution
00:48:40
Speaker
There's parts too where you write as you're getting more settled and more among having found your people as you say. You write that what's boredom but invisibility, power, the freedom to move among strangers without anyone making a target of you. Isn't that what I wanted to?
00:49:01
Speaker
I don't know. I just wonder if you could speak to that as well, because that seems like it's something that you want, but also you struggled with that. Right. Well, and certainly true for I think in that particular part of the book, that's my mother's goal as well.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, what, what would it mean to be, you know, a part of a world in which you're, you know, your flaws are your idiosyncrasy, we're not, we're not the defining marks of you and what would, what would it be like if those qualities were simply Paul, you know, I think that's what
00:49:54
Speaker
I think that's what I was trying to evoke in that space. And you were kind of talking around success and failure and ambition too, and sort of that achievement that your father was always striving for as well. And I wonder what your relationship is to ambition and drive and achievement in the arts and in your career now. What are your
00:50:23
Speaker
your relationship to that at this point in your writing. Yeah, that's a great question because those words make me so uncomfortable because I can't help but associate them with capitalism and all of the qualities about our current times that make me really nervous. But those ambition
00:50:47
Speaker
aspiration, all of that keeps showing up in my work. I mean, it's all the way back to Famous Builder. And yeah, I mean, I think, I think those forces can help us be help us, you know, do our best in our work and help us like, you know, push our work into places we wouldn't have expected and to have
00:51:16
Speaker
high goals for what it should be. But I think the danger is that one is participating in a kind of hierarchy of currency or value, if that makes sense. And I think part of my own artistic career has been an attempt at the same time
00:51:44
Speaker
to write what I need to write and not write better than my friend, Tom, but to write at the very best thing that like to write in a way that sounds like me to like turn my own liabilities as some would say into assets, you know, to make use of my interest into disjunction and tonal shift.
00:52:14
Speaker
and do it in such a way that it didn't feel indulgent or sloppy, but to make it sound exactly like me. So I guess ambition is sort of an ugly word. I remember my therapist telling me 10 years ago when I was
00:52:36
Speaker
talking about, I use the word competition. He said, Paul, it's not a bad thing. I would never have gotten my PhD if so and so did not finish his dissertation before I did. And he was trying to teach me to be friends with that impulse in myself and to find a way to manage it so that it didn't dominate me.
00:53:02
Speaker
And in my conversation a week ago with Alexander Norman, this guy wrote a biography on the Dalai Lama. And yeah, he was talking about for the last 30 years, he's been really, it's an ongoing challenge for him to find his voice as a writer. And it's kind of refreshing for someone who's been in it for so long to actually still be having that struggle.
00:53:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. Yeah, and the fact that you said trying to find that tone of the writing that sounds like you, I wonder, at what point did you start to feel comfortable in your own writerly voice, or is that still evolving? I think it's still evolving. I don't want to rely on the same –
00:53:47
Speaker
voice from book to book, which is probably why I asked you that question from the get go. Does that sound different? And I think I was hoping you'd say yes. But I mean, that can be that the desire to shift can, I mean, I think it's possible that that can be fake and engineered. And, you know,
00:54:16
Speaker
and done for its own sake, we all change in time. I'm a different person now from the person I was when the narrow door came out. I mean, we're all different, given
00:54:30
Speaker
the multiple crises in the air. And I think the trick is, is to, you know, to be attuned to how you've changed and, you know, to the descriptions and music that feel, you know, most authentic to how you move through the world at any point. But so
00:55:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I, I would really love to do something with the next book that that surprised me, that did something different in terms of sound and structure or thinking that sounded like nothing I've done before, but might also suggest, oh, this is just another mind.
00:55:27
Speaker
with a particular set of terms moving and morphing across time.
00:55:38
Speaker
I think it's all the more important that when you embark on a book project that you actually have to have a sense of urgency to finish it because the writer you are at the beginning, if you take too long, might be way different than you are towards the end. Absolutely. You probably should be because the work is teaching you something about your seeing and your patterns and obsessions and what you want.
00:56:08
Speaker
Yeah, the question has to the question of why am I writing this? Why do I need to write this needs at some point to be no, it's an abstract, it's abstract, but it needs to like, reside somewhere above your work. If only as a way to find your rudder. Hmm.
00:56:33
Speaker
And with respect to this book, it's something that we were talking about that you've carried with you for a long time. And I'm going back to another thing you said from our previous conversation where you said if you put too much focus on one thing, you can kill it. Interesting.
00:56:55
Speaker
It's pretty smart. And it's great. It's brilliant. I forgot about that. Yeah. And this is something that is so hyper focused and hyper local to that time. What was your relationship to the focus and how did you not kill the thing you were trying to bring into being?
00:57:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, early on, I'd say in the first third of the books, there are a number of passages from other figures, whether they be queer theorists or townies.
00:57:34
Speaker
people. There's Holland Cotter, the art critic, I wanted to like the early parts of the book to feel to have a coral effect. I didn't want the eye to be too dominant. I just I was uncomfortable with uncomfortable with it being simply my story. And I wanted it to be a community story or the story of a sensibility. And
00:58:01
Speaker
That certainly helped a lot. It helped to bring, I think there's a wider net of characters on the page in this book. Some of them only appear on a half page, but I just, I wanted to give room to, you know, to do as much as I could to at least imply that I was part of a large community of,
Community and Complexity of AIDS
00:58:30
Speaker
various individuals who had very distinct personalities of their own.
00:58:36
Speaker
Yeah, you do get that sense that all these people kind of zooming in, zooming out, that it was just an incredibly vibrant community. Everyone's got their lives and their bullshit and their drive and their art and everything. And here you are just in the slurry of it all. So that does come across very well.
00:59:03
Speaker
Oh, good. Everyone sort of stood out like a like a character. It felt like everyone had a persona. And it's hard to actually, you know, evoke how that played out. I mean, it wasn't simply it wasn't simply about how people dressed, but it I felt like I was part of a theater and all these people were acting.
00:59:31
Speaker
And I don't mean to suggest that people were not being themselves are authentic. But, you know, there was a sense of the liberation of the mask, if that makes sense. Yeah, like, I
00:59:55
Speaker
a determined building of character that helped you move your way through town, that helped you be seen. Yeah, and it might not even be so much maybe a building of character, but more of a revealing of character, given that this is finally an area where you don't have to be so... It can be more out in the open.
01:00:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, yeah, and you didn't necessarily have to be so reactive, but you could, you could make something you could you could, you could build a personality and change your name, for instance, and, you know, come to this place without a history and without, you know, the burden of, of prior stories, weighing, you know, weighing who you were down.
01:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like going to college again for the first time where you can kind of. It's true. I wonder, too, like in the in the writing, you know, as we kind of wind down here, was there ever a danger in in glorifying coming out of town during the height of the AIDS epidemic? Because you write towards the very end of the book, like, quote, note, AIDS isn't the good old days. Right.
01:01:17
Speaker
Yeah, I did not want the book to be soaked in nostalgia. I mean, didn't want the book to overemphasize the sense of, you know, community and tenderness and belonging that was certainly there because that's that's that feels that doesn't feel altogether true to me. And I think that narrative is a
01:01:46
Speaker
little problematic. So I wanted there the book to have enough of a sense of chaos and uncertainty that would, if not upend that, live side by side with that. So the book moves to a point where the speaker simply says, you know, representation is impossible.
01:02:15
Speaker
you know, you try to think you can do this. Well, if you think you have the story, I've got this, you're wrong. And yeah, I think that's a point of, you know, just the point of humility. In the book, there's probably a better word than humility, but speechlessness,
01:02:39
Speaker
And also in a section titled Refusal, it's not about getting tested for HIV. It has lots to do with what good is knowing if we're all going to die or that there are all kinds of suicides. And you write of dread, too. So I was wondering how did you come to live with that dread and holding it back, as you say?
01:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if I did a very good job of holding it back. I mean, I, you know, I, I did not get tested for HIV until some point in the in the aughts, because I didn't, I didn't want to know the news. I didn't want it to impact my relation to the future. I didn't want it to be the primary story of me. And I know that that sounds irresponsible from at this point, but
01:03:33
Speaker
you know, there was no guarantee that the drugs that were then available were going to sustain anyone for any more than a few years. So I remember, I remember that, that dread that anxiety sort of remember just slipping into that every day, you know, at least
01:04:01
Speaker
it would just come out of nowhere as you know, any anxiety comes out of nowhere and you sit with it and you take it as long as you can take it and move on, you know, but it was not, it was ongoing. And yeah, yeah, it just felt after a while like the texture of life.
Conclusion and Listener Appreciation
01:04:30
Speaker
Maybe we could certainly I mean, think of how many people are you know, there's no I it seems unfair and simplistic to compare AIDS anxiety to what people are talking about or around the coronavirus. But you know, there's a lot of there's something about that anxiety around a disease
01:04:56
Speaker
You know, an illness that could possibly go out of control that seems like what people do when we're confronted with the fact that we really can't control our mortality as much as we think we're controlling it.
01:05:14
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Paul, I want to be mindful of your time. I just you know, this book is it's an incredible memoir. You know, I loved it. And you know, yeah, ate it up. I just I wish you great success with it so much. Of course. You know, where can you know, where can people get more familiar with you and your work? And of course, you know, pick up this book.
01:05:38
Speaker
Um, it's, um, you can look at my website, which is paul, p-a-u-l-l-i-s-i-c-k-y dot net for lots of information, but you can pre-order the book now through all the book channels that, um, that are available to us. I have a link on my website to Indie Bound, which can, I think it's important that we, um,
01:06:05
Speaker
that we keep our independent bookstores in mind. So it will be out in the world in a couple of weeks. So I would really appreciate it if you took a look at it. Awesome. Well, Paul, yeah, like I said, best of luck with it. And thanks again for the time. I'm glad we were able to do this again. And hopefully not another four years we'll go by. Yeah, I hope not either. Thanks so much, friend.
01:06:33
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:06:53
Speaker
follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpod across the mall get that newsletter at my website win books win zines hang out with your buddy bo once a month no spam can't beat it are we done here we must because if you can do interview see ya