"Things Idolized and Fetishized and Otherwise En-pedestal-ed": An Interview With Gabriel Welsch

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Gabriel Welsch writes both fiction and poetry. His third collection of poems, The Death of Flying Things, is due in June 2012. Previous collections are Dirt and All Its Dense Labor (2006) and An Eye Fluent in Gray, a chapbook (2010). Recent work appears in Southern Review, New Letters, PANK, Whiskey Island, Knock, and Chautauqua. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College. 

Welsch's story "A Litany of Stupid Things" appears in Issue Twenty-Nine of The Collagist.  

Here he speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about his work.  Enjoy!

1. Can you tell us about the origin of “The Litany of Stupid Things”?  Where did this piece begin for you, and how did it get to here?

Since about 2004, I have been working on a collection of linked short stories connected to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, and this story is linked to “Happy.” It gets its title from a combination of the song’s first two lines, “Well I never kept a dollar past sunset/ It always burned a hole in my pants,” and the fact of the longer plot involving the story’s speaker. The title is his bit of self loathing, realizing how much he spent (financially, emotionally, physically) on something doomed, and on his own abortive attempt to change something about himself. In the other stories, his lot does not improve.

I started it as a list, trying to find a core for the story, and once it hit me that the list itself might serve as a form to get through what is otherwise a fairly stock plot without having to rely on the usual connective devices of fiction, I began to expand the texture of the list and its specifics, so it could sufficiently suggest setting, plot, character and pacing. Then, the key was whittling it back down enough, and knowing when to leave it alone. J. David Stevens was helpful in that regard.

2. Although the title suggests that the narrator finds the objects and moments in his litany to be “stupid,” so much in this piece glows with rough charm, such as “a cheap mandolin with cigarette burns near the lower f-hole…a Peavey with a shredded cone gobbed up with nail polish.”  And certain moments are absolutely beautiful: “when we linger in the irrigation mists drifting over the production fields and let it cool our faces and later, in the orange haze of twilight, settling to condense in the small of my back, the caverns of hers, the fields fecund and earthy and pushing the sun’s warmth back into the evening.”  After my first read, I wondered: to what extent is the narrator struggling to nail down the relationship between “beauty” and “stupidity”?  (Has he been mistaking “the latest stupid, useless thing” for beauty?)  And—more broadly—do you think that this is an important struggle for writers to undertake?

The beauty is not lost on this character. As noted above, the “stupid” is more self-directed, an indictment created by the list and pointed back at himself. He obviously has some fondness for the pieces, as indicated by the details he keeps. For him, the relationship he struggles with is perhaps an embittered memory, recalling those things in which he invested much of himself, and being “fooled” into thinking the things would produce lasting stability in life, love, etc.

As for writers struggling with beauty and stupidity, you have me wading into philosophical waters in which my only answers are idiosyncratic. Without going too graven-image on you, things idolized and fetishized and otherwise en-pedestal-ed almost invariably lose that luster under scrutiny, and my own work has moved from investing greatly in iconic bits to being more skeptical. Hell, the collection from which this story evolved takes Exile as an artifact (given its importance to some of the other characters, all of whom are/were in a classic rock cover band at one time) and gradually finds its ideas, music, personalities, and critical praise complicated in different ways. From my own reading, it seems a common progression, whether that skepticism is directed at form, at devices, at language itself (see poets), at contemporary settings in which we work, and more.

3. I read in your bio that you write both fiction and poetry.  In what ways does “The Litany of Stupid Things” resemble your poetry?  Do you have a different writing process for each genre?   I’d love to hear about how/when you know that what you’re writing is a poem or a story.

I don’t know that “Litany” resembles the poetry I am writing now very much other than in its making use of very specific things. I still like what Williams said in that regard (no ideas but in things) and am a sucker, however uncool that is, for the specific and the literal, and the weight and implication they carry. While I struggle with the inefficiencies of language when you push at its edges, as I think most poets do, I am probably first and foremost a prose writer, and depending on who you ask, you can see it in my poems.

I don’t have a different writing process for the origins of each genre. Writing for me still comes out of a morning free-write, journal style, from which ideas develop. For the collection of linked stories that produced this piece, I actually have a little more deterministic a process. Once I had written a few of the stories and realized they had an artifact around which to organize, I sketched out an (evolving) set of notes about plot, characters, timeline, etc. Now, as I finish one piece and find the next one to work on, the start is more deliberate.

I usually know when what I am writing is going to become a story or a poem by the feel of the line that comes out. Usually, if the line suggests another voice, a different character than my usual poetic persona (that complicated pseudo-me), then I know it will be a story. Sometimes I will observe something in my day and it suggests a story, and then it will be a story. I occasionally work in persona in poetry (in fact, I am shopping a book now that is entirely in persona, Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse), and that is when the process, in its early stages, is the most uncertain for me—when I am not sure what form that particular voice and/or story will take.

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

I am kind of messy, so I am working on a number of things simultaneously most of the time. I’m in the middle of this Exile project, of which “Litany” is a part. I have a series of short-shorts that I am trying to figure out what to do with. I am always working on poems, and am in the middle of a pretty productive run. December through February is usually a good time for me, as my day job has me traveling quite a bit from mid-February through May (I am a fundraiser for Juniata College, and that keeps me hopping), so my current good run will probably be at a crashing halt once this interview is posted. I have a novel in the desk drawer that I can’t sell, and another abortive attempt stalled at midpoint. I have a review I’d like to write. So, there are things.

5. What great books have you been reading in this new year? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

I am reading Tony Hiss’s On Travel, a very interesting meditation on the effects of travel on our ability to observe, on the elasticity of time, and more. It’s one of those books you can’t read quickly because every few pages you need to write down something and let it all sink in. I’m spelunking in Christopher Hitchens’ Love, Poverty, and War, and rereading Kunitz’s Collected. I also just started Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s anthology out from Iowa, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, and am enjoying the various perspectives there very much. I just read B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, and she is not a poet with whom I was previously familiar, but the book is just incredible in its compression and narrative force. (That’s the review I’d like to write, incidentally. Here’s the short form: three thumbs, way way up!) I am looking forward to new books in 2012 by Mike Czyzniejewski, Paula Bohince, Judy Vollmer, and Mary Biddinger. I’m sure there are others, but those are top of mind.