The Owls of Literature | An Interview with Jack Pendarvis
Interviews
By Chelsea Hogue
I first met Jack Pendarvis when I took his fiction workshop as an undergrad at Ole Miss. It was 2009 or 2010, and that was what you did if you knew what was good around the English department. Jack had recently published The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure, Your Body is Changing, and Awesome. The last was the first book of his I read and loved, and it established my respect for Jack’s variety of humor: lewd and shamelessly strange. Awesome is about an egomaniacal giant, a 50-foot man who gelds himself, and it’s completely over-the-top. Maybe this is what I learned from Jack: not to take writing too seriously. Give yourself over to absurdity. After all, we aren’t exactly living in the zone of logic.
Jack’s most recent publication is a thirty-page chapbook of poems entitled Weird Sky, published by the enigmatic Keith LLC. Almost entirely rhyming, the metronome in Jack’s poems sounds a pattern so natural that, if it wasn’t for our burnished familiarity with the general shape of rhyming poems, it could be chalked up to a certain je ne sais quoi. For the Dorothy Parker cum Hilaire Belloc heads, there’s also magic for the Alfred Starr Hamiltonians among us: a resolve that could be called suicidal, but more so celestially aware, at rare times indulging in a rhyme-breaking parlance, which might read as Highly Designed. In “Ambrosia,” an introduction of sorts, the reader is invited to suck the speaker’s “dong,” but ambivalently. In “Bullet”—well, the entire poem reads: “My life is a bullet,/ It was shot from a gun,/ When it enters the earth,/ The bullet is gone.” Other poems in the collection include the seven-page tale of an impotent baronet stabbed by his wife; the sestet, “The Queen is Dead,” in which the speaker confesses to drinking the “water” in the creamed corn can; and the sentient “My Testicles.” Overall, Weird Sky left me with the feeling that, had I not already known and loved Jack, would I want to meet him? The answer would be a crushing yes. But what age would I like to be?
Jack has accomplished much over the course of his writing career. In 2016, he published the short story collection, Movie Stars, and Cigarette Lighter, part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series. Last year, he published the limited-edition novel Sweet Bananas, and this year he’s offering his serialized novel Sour Blueberries through Substack. He’s written for Steven Universe Future, Spongebob SquarePants, and, if you enter the right search terms, you can find pictures of him on a red carpet, holding a couple of Emmys he won for his work on Adventure Time. He’s been in The New York Times and frequents The Believer. He’s written for all kinds of magazines. Yet Jack maintains a sense of being outside of things, looking in, dipping a toe, peeing in the insider’s pond. This is partly due to his self-deprecating humor. I think it’s also because Jack possesses one of those minds that can make that bizarre curve beyond the range of expected ideas most clever people are capable of having.
I feel fortunate to have had Jack as a teacher at such a formative time, and it was my pleasure to reconnect and talk with him about this new chapbook of strange and funny poems.
Chelsea Hogue: The interview begins! What were you doing right before I snuck up on you with this question?
Jack Pendarvis: Well, I was checking our lottery numbers. We didn’t win. Criminal Minds was on TV. I don’t like it. It comes on the same channel that shows reruns of Law & Order and NCIS. I’ve come around on NCIS, but I can’t make the leap with Criminal Minds. I made margaritas for Theresa and myself, using a mix from Volta, a local restaurant I’m sure you remember. I actually have a lot of questions for you . . . the thought of you remembering Volta brought home again that you’re somewhere else, doing other things, and I have a lot of guesses, based on your limited social media presence.
CH: Of course. I couldn’t forget Volta’s margaritas. Some of my friends worked there, and I worked at Snackbar down the road. I think it’s been about twelve years since I lived in Oxford, though. You knew me when I was young. And now I’m getting old. I’ve lived in about half a dozen towns since, trying to write, looking for money. But ask me anything; I’ll tell you.
Here’s what I want to know. You seem like a prolific writer. You’ve published several books. You’re releasing a serialized novel through Substack. You write for TV. And now you’ve published a new chapbook of poems, Weird Sky. There’s a lot more than I’ve listed. Reading your tweets, it seems like new projects are always cooking, too. It’s inspiring. How do you do it? Have you always been this way? Do you write constantly?
JP: I don’t know if prolific is the right word. I had two books come out in 2016, to very little acclaim, and it had been eight years since my previous book. Then Hingston & Olsen put out Sweet Bananas in 2021, in a limited edition. So I’m just poking along. I did write five novels during the pandemic, ha ha! One of them was Sour Blueberries, the Substack novel, which you are kind enough to mention. The others are just stewing in their own juices, like me. After that, I really thought I would stop writing. And I sort of did. Writing five unpublished novels in a row probably shut me down for good. These new projects you talk about, mostly those go nowhere. You know how it is!
CH: Five novels during the pandemic feels pretty abundant. I guess what I mean is: regardless of whether things are finished or published, it feels as if your writing could go on and on. I think it can seem that way with writers whose work seems to be a natural extension of themselves, when their style is that distinctive. You might be live-Tweeting eating boiled eggs with your wife, but it’s got the touch of Jack. You can’t quit. I guess you’ve already decided not to, so you don’t need me to say it, but I am. Have you ever done that before, quit or come close? Do you really think you could? What would you do with yourself if you weren’t writing?
JP: Oh, I guess I’ll never exactly quit. But, in some ways, I already have. To answer your other question, I think it was Barry Hannah who said that writers are failed musicians. Not that I think I’m going to become a musician at this point. Writing for TV is similar to making music because of its collaborative nature. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about it. I like being in a writers’ room. I don’t think I answered your question, but, in another way, I think I did.
CH: I find that writing with others can be relieving, because there’s more than one person on the hook for being the dumbass. How did you start writing the poems in Weird Sky?
JP: I wrote most of them in the shower! After I ended a long TV-writing job, I just didn’t feel like writing anything at all anymore. Also, I was on some new medication, and I wondered if “stop writing” could be a side effect. I felt certain I had come to a dead end. But, in the shower, I was always singing songs to myself or saying nonsensical things. Ha ha, doesn’t everybody? Maybe not. But I started writing these things down when I got out of the shower. And I knew about Keith LLC because I read a book you wrote, which I loved. And there had been a business card in the package when your book came, and one day I was just staring at the business card, which happened to be lying on the table where I write (still is!), and I decided to send my poems there. I literally knew nothing about the publisher, and I still don’t! I loved your book ETHEL so much, though. It’s a certain kind of thing that really compels me, a certain kind of voice I respond to completely. So I took a wild chance!
CH: Honestly, I almost asked you earlier if you write all of the time, and do you even write in the shower? I wrote that down then erased it. But you do! I think my version of this is talking to my dog, which I do all of the time. I catch myself telling him the complete truth, and I sing songs to him, too, mostly about him being real because I think that’s what he wants most is to be a real man. Thank you for saying you liked ETHEL. That’s high praise from you. And to speak of voice because that’s important to me. The book began with my great-grandmother’s diary, which was given to me a few years ago, so it’s all about her life and her voice, which is funny because later in life she stopped talking altogether. She died when I was fifteen, I think, but I didn’t know her very well because she lived in a little cabin in the mountains in Idaho while I lived in Mississippi.
I can’t stop thinking about your poem “Chowder Song.” It’s catchy and snags on something in my mind. It’s like the Mother Goose a drunk stepdad would know and recite with a lot of relish. A lot of these poems feel old yet suburban.
JP: Thanks! Your description is funny because I remember my grandfather taking me to the mall when I was about nine, and he improvised as we walked along, “Old King Cole was a jolly old soul, killed his wife with a fishing pole.” I found it shocking! It made a big impact on me. We weren’t a family of drinkers, though, and he certainly wasn’t drunk. I saw him drink a glass of beer once, and I cried, ha ha. I was thirty-four years old. Not really! I mean, the crying part, that’s real. I heard stories of my poor old great-uncle Rayford, who drank too much and worked at the dog pound. My grandmother had worked at a bank, and a guy used to come in and sing “Besame Mucho” to her because her name was Bessie. He was a lovable, rumpled, singing drunk who eventually drowned in a ditch. My grandmother spoke of him with great affection and pity. But, you know, I’ve been writing some more poems, and you’re onto something, because I did realize that creepy nursery rhymes might be the genre to which I am most naturally drawn.
CH: This is what I like about your sensibilities. You hook into what’s quietly astonishing. What was Bessie like?
JP: She was great, but I’d rather talk about your great-grandmother for a minute. I love the idea of a diary as a starting point. I like diaries and diaristic material. I found my own grandmother’s diary (Lilla Mae, not Bessie) and was disappointed because it was mostly about the weather. But the few times I’ve tried to keep a diary lately, it has mostly been about the weather, so now I understand. I’ll tell you what was a big inspiration to me. I read a Norman Mailer book, Oswald’s Tale, which was about Lee Harvey Oswald, and it contained KGB transcriptions of recordings they had made of Lee and Marina in their apartment in Minsk. It was mostly things like: “Lee, why haven’t you washed your shirt?” I realized that I could read a whole book of that, and maybe that writers aren’t necessary. All we really need is the KGB, ha ha.
CH: Me too. I am never bored by this sort of thing. Diaries and letters are fixed in my mind as being talking, and therefore ephemeral. That might be what it is: writing that has a strange openness. I like this kind of truthful writing that doesn’t expect to have anyone listening. Especially when it has a cold eye. I collect and read a lot of oral histories, and I sometimes find them much more fluent and peculiar than a lot of contemporary fiction.
“Baronet’s Geese” is another favorite from Weird Sky. I love the word “surcease” and always appreciate when a potting shed makes its way into a poem. I thought about the earliest version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” where the cat tells Little Red Riding Hood, when she enters her grandmother’s hut, that she’d be a slut to drink the blood of her grandmother. Little Red moves right along to her grandmother’s bed and does a little striptease for the wolf lying there. “Baronet’s Geese” is twisted. Where did it come from?
JP: I’m not even sure what a potting shed is. I think I read about one in a Graham Greene novel when I was twelve and it just stuck in my head. Thank you for your nice words! I’ll tell you where that poem came from. I always have that A. E. Housman rhythm stuck in my head, the one from the poem that begins “Terence, this is stupid stuff.” It’s a bouncy rhythm, and once you start making up rhymes that utilize it, you just can’t stop. I had Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron in mind too, in ways I can’t explain. Well, jaunty rhythms coupled with bloody subject matter. “Each man kills the thing he loves.” Is that an exact quotation? And I think Byron’s “Don Juan” is in iambic pentameter (isn’t it?), but it still bounces along that way. I wrote the first four lines in the shower, and I thought that would be the whole poem. But, once I started typing, I couldn’t stop that obsessive jingling rhythm. Also, I forgot lines three and four, so I had to replace them. I think lines three and four were better in the shower. I stole one of the replacement lines from Shakespeare.
CH: Graham Greene would have a potting shed in a novel. I bet John Cheever or Evelyn Waugh probably stuck them in somewhere. I can see the Lord Byron—even though I’ve never read him, pretty sure, maybe in school at some point, but I know he was fussy and beautiful and had a club foot—and I envision “Baronet’s Geese” in an English moor. Does the gross stuff come naturally? Sometimes, when I’m in the shower, I look down and say “yuck.”
JP: No, I always feel bad when I write something gross.
CH: When I lived in Oxford and went to Square Books, at least a few times a week, I’d always swing by the shelf of “Jack’s Picks” to see what books you were recommending. Is that what it was called? I read Wuthering Heights because it was one of your picks. Give me the current Jack’s Picks.
JP: That shelf was retired. I don’t get to the bookstore as much as I used to. Aside from the pandemic lockdown (during which Square Books delivered to our house, thankfully), we moved away from the square, so I can’t walk to the bookstore every day like I used to. Last time I was in there, [Square Books owner] Richard [Howorth] said, “Hi, Jack! We haven’t seen you in a while.” And I said, “Well, I haven’t left the house in three years.” The last two things I read that I loved were The Andy Warhol Diaries and The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero. Oh, and In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin. A bear got her head in its mouth and cracked her skull open like a nut. Then she took out a little hatchet, I think, and gave the bear a discouraging whack in the leg. And the story goes on from there. It’s a true story! In general, I would say that when you go to Square Books, be sure to visit the International section, which is across from Faulkner. The staff has usually made some good recommendations, written on little cards there, to get you started. I’ve found a lot of good stuff that way.
CH: I have ordered In the Eye of the Wild. People who have followed your work likely know about your owl theory at this point: All great writing has an owl in it. I was thinking about this because it’s a major memory I have of the class I took with you. You had us write a story with an owl, and we talked about that for a while one day, tried to think of other birds that might have what the owl has, but none of them do. I remember the conclusion, but I wish I remembered more of the conversation. I went back and searched your blog posts for owls, and I found your lists of books with owls in them, but not as many reasons why. So, why the owl? You’ve written one of the best owl scenes. (For those who don’t know: in Your Body is Changing, a boy and his mother walk into their house and an owl is on the kitchen counter eating a sausage biscuit.) After years of owl collecting, do you have a favorite?
JP: If I recall correctly, you were the only student who did not put an owl in their story. Sure, I was a little hurt, but more than that, I was frightened, because it was clear you could see right through me. Over the years, my thoughts on the owls of literature have changed. I used to think great books had owls. Now I think every book has an owl. Almost every book I happen to read has an owl in it somewhere. My oldest friend, McNeil, says that I should stand outside Square Books and bet customers coming out $20 that the book they just bought has an owl in it. I like owls because they make something happen. If Mr. Darcy is proposing to Elizabeth Bennett and down comes an owl and pecks out one of his eyes, now you’ve really got something! I hear that in some cultures, owls are bad luck, which probably explains why I have so many problems.
CH: Jack, you’ve misremembered! I did put an owl in my story. I had a girl get pregnant with some owls, actually! Ha ha. Truth is, I see nothing and do what I’m told.
I’m sitting here right now, holding out my hand like there’s a skull in it and wondering: if you were doing that too, and it was a skull, or nothing too, or something different, what might you proffer?
JP: There is a small plastic skull on my writing table. I used to pick it up a lot in writers’ meetings while I was thinking. The top part of the skull comes off so you can look inside. There’s nothing in there but the shape of an empty skull. The bottom jaw is on a spring, so you can make it talk, but you have to put your finger on the chin and move the jaw up and down. It’s not a puppet. It’s a serious plastic skull for serious people! I recently got a really fancy pencil sharpener. It’s a compact tube made of black, icy steel. I pick it up a lot. It has a good shape and it feels great. It has a certain unexpected weight. If a bomb went off, this pencil sharpener would be the only thing to survive.
Chelsea Hogue is a writer from Mississippi. She is the author of the chapbook ETHEL (Keith LLC 2020). Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in The White Review, Quarterly West, Juked, Black Sun Lit, Tinge, The New Inquiry, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Full Stop, and elsewhere.
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