Daniella Engel’s poem “Mannequin Behind Glass,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

An excerpt from William Giraldi’s book “Busy Monsters,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

Robert Doe’s poem “Waste,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

Barbara Ungar’s poem “Recipe for a Long, Happy Marriage,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

Barbara Ungar’s poem “In the Kitchen, Dead, for Two Years,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

Barbara Ungar’s poem “PhD Apron,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

Gaye Chan

On Tuesday, November 29, Gaye Chan will visit Chester College of New England as the finale to this fall’s Visiting Artist Symposium.

A conceptual artist, Chan immigrated to the United States in 1969. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Though she is recognized equally for her individual and collaborative work, Chan’s solo work has exhibited at at Honolulu Academy of Art in Honolulu, Art in General in New York City, YYZ in Toronto, Artspeak in Vancouver, Gallery 4A in Sydney, SF Camerawork in San Francisco, YYZ in Toronto, and The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. Her collaborative projects include Eating in Public and DownWind Productions. Her work has also appeared in publication and online. Most notably, Chan’s work has been supported by the Creative Capital Foundation and the Hawaii People’s Fund.

Chan is a professor and the Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii. She is also working on a photographic installation entitled, Frass, which examines the 1,951 miles of the Mexico/U.S. border.

Chan will lecture in the Wadleigh Library classroom at 2:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

By William Mercier Jr.

I was given the amazing opportunity to interview William Giraldi, author of Busy Monsters, a novel that came out at the end of this past summer.  Giraldi was here almost exactly a year ago.  In this interview, I get to talk with him about family, reading, and porn stars.

Will Mercier: Do you prefer to be called Billy?
William Giraldi: People call me Billy.

WM: Just curious because that’s what you answered for Laura Evans’ interview last year and Steve Almond refers to you as Billy often.
WG: Yeah, it’s true.

William Giraldi reads from his novel Busy Monsters at Chester College of New England. Photo by Caitlyn Moran.

WM: I’ll start by asking about how’s the family.  You mentioned you had a son the last time you were here, so how’s that going?
WG: Well my son is two and a half right now and it’s like living with a tsunami.  He hurricanes from room to room, and we have another baby coming in March.  We’ll have another son.

WM: Congratulations.
WG: Thank you so much.  We think we’re going to name him Aiden.  We’re not sure about that yet. But the difficulties of fatherhood, the difficulties of domesticity, are about to double and so that’s not exciting, but we are very, very pleased to be having this new addition to our family. The only thing we have to do now is to get a bigger house because our condo in Cambridge is about the size of this small room we’re in right now, and when you live with a tsunami, believe me, those rooms feel smaller than they actually are.

WM: How are you feeling about your second visit to Chester College?
WG: Well, you know, it rained on my way up here and I hate driving in the rain, but once I got here I felt home again.  It’s a very welcoming campus.  I love the bucolic setting.  It’s very, very different from where we live in the city and very different from where I teach at Boston University and so it’s always a pleasure to come here because I like the woods, and I miss the woods, and you know, a part of being a new father or a relatively new father is wanting to raise your kids in the best possible environment, and so what I’ve been feeling since Ethan was born over two years ago is a real—I’ve been feeling a real conflict, and I still feel it now, about whether I want him to be a city boy or a nature boy.  Ideally he would be both, but it’s hard to be both unless you have money, unless you can have a house in the wilderness and a house in the city, and so, coming back here is always a reminder to me of how I need to be more in touch with nature.  As Wordsworth said, “The world is too much with us,” and I feel that in Boston every day.  The world is too much with me.  So coming out here is always peaceful.

WM: You teach at Boston University.  What kinds of classes are you teaching this semester?
WG: My classes are essentially literary criticism.  We’re reading books of American short fiction writers and I teach my students how to analyze these books in a way that tries to uncover their truths, their intellectual and emotional truths, and so we spend a lot of time reading literary criticism by the greats.  William Hazlitt for example, Samuel Johnson of course. I love the literary criticism of Christopher Hitchens because it has such verve and such punch, and he’s such a wonderful stylist in addition to having an all-inclusive intellect.  It’s a challenge with them sometimes to get them to gain entrance into a piece of literature and to be able to analyze it in a way that can be considered valid literary criticism.  So it takes the whole semester really to get them to understand that what they need to do is to have a sustained intellectual and emotional engagement with the text. They’d rather be playing Xbox.

WM: A lot of faculty here promote reading, being a good reader as well as a good writer, but it’s hard at times to balance what you want to read  with what you’re assigned to read for your classes.  I don’t know if you consider that when you assign your coursework or if it’s one of those things that work comes first and then you should read from there.
WG: The books I assign to my students are books that I know very well and books that have had a profound effect on me.  The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Cathedral by Raymond Carver, and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor.  Those are the four main texts that I use.  You know, for me, re-reading those books every year is both an act of love and one that is necessary, one that is dictated by my vocation.  I understand what you say.  I struggle with that in my personal life.  In other words, my work as a reviewer and a critic constantly has me reading books that I wouldn’t normally pick up, books that are assigned to me. Reading for me is always an act of pleasure, but most of the books I read are books that are assigned to me to review.  There are times, maybe several times a year, where I have a period when I’m not reviewing and I don’t have a deadline, where I can pick up something that I don’t have to write about, something that I can read without my critic’s hat on.  But you’re right.  There is this tense conflict between reading what’s assigned to you as a critic or a student and reading what you’d rather be reading.  It’s a balance.

WM: On the topic of reading, in an interview with Steve Almond, you talk about the books that you’ve read and how you take on the voice of what you’re reading.  From a faculty perspective, do you think it’s better for students to read pieces that are in the vein that they write in, or should they read things that are different, or do you think you should find a happy medium of the two?
WG: I think you’ll always gravitate to those books that stylistically match your own style.  But there’s a real danger in that.  One needs to be an omnivorous reader.  One needs to read in as many different genres and as many different styles as possible in order to get a full literary education. The poets should be reading fiction and drama, and the fiction writers should be reading drama, and non-fiction, and poetry.  I believe that an education in the classic books is of paramount importance.  It’s necessary to become an important writer.  It’s necessary to become an effective writer.  I don’t see that enough.  It’s something I think about a lot, but the style that you write in, for example, I’m not sure what good it does you as a writer, or as a thinker, or even as a stylist to read only the books that match your style.  You really need to expand your scope in terms of style.  Busy Monsters, for example, is a real stylistic romp.  I pull from so many different styles in that book, and it wouldn’t have been possible without a real amalgam of stylistic influences, so I think that’s important.

WM: I am conducting this interview through our Small Press Publishing class, where we manage Compass Rose, our school’s literary journal.  How did you get involved with AGNI and what’s a typical day working for AGNI?
WG: I got involved with AGNI in 2002 when I was a graduate student at Boston University and the literary critic Sven Birkerts took over the magazine and then took me on as a fiction reader, and over the past ten years I’ve gradually worked my way up the ranks from just an intern and a fiction reader to one of the senior editors.  The magazine is a real labor of love.  A typical day sees me going through the slush pile, responding to queries, and the actual editing where the essays and the fiction that Sven accepts for publication need to be edited.  We very rarely accept a piece— or I’m not sure we’ve ever accepted a piece—that was good to go without any edits made at all.  So I act as a liaison between Sven and the writer and I work closely with our senior editor Bill Pierce on the everyday functioning of the magazine.  We’re not a large outfit, there’s really just the three main editors at the office and then we have a poetry editor and we have a bunch of interns.  So we’re an intimate group; we work very closely together.  The day-to-day business is just this sort of nuts and bolts managing of the magazine, a lot of online work, as you can imagine, and dealing with the writers, which is the best part for me.  To be able to go through an essay or a story, edit it, try to get that essay or story to be the best that it can be, and then working with the writers on that.  It’s a real pleasure.

WM: What would your advice be for young writers who are trying to get into “the real world”?  There are some faculty who say, “Submit, submit, submit everywhere you can.”  Tim Horvath has mentioned these mass meetings or conferences of writers where you can exchange information in Boston.  He personally believes Twitter is a great thing to have.  I saw that you have a Twitter account, so what’s your input on that?
WG: Well, first of all, I don’t manage my Twitter account or my Facebook account; that’s something my social media person does, and my publisher.  I wouldn’t know how to work Facebook or Twitter, and if I did, it would be a real distraction for me.  My advice to any young writer is to read more.  Not even necessarily to write more, but read more.  Because as I said earlier, one of the main defects I see in young writers, and even experienced writers, is a real deficit of literary history, a real deficit of great books. In order to submit your work to magazines, you first have to be a solid, innovative writer, and in order to become that you need to be an astute reader, a voracious reader.  Busy Monsters is coming out when I’m 36 and not 26 because it took me basically 25 years of reading in order for me to produce a book that I felt was worthy of being in the world.  Samuel Johnson once said that a writer will turn over an entire library in order to produce a single book.  And he meant by that exactly what I’m saying.  The writing of a book requires a hell of a lot of reading.  My advice is always just that.  Don’t worry about so much about submitting, don’t worry so much about publishing, don’t even worry so much right now about your writing.  Get your reading in first.  Become an astute, talented, dedicated reader, and then go back to your writing, because there’s a necessary connection between being a good reader and being an important writer.

WM: To get a little more on Busy Monsters, in an interview you did with The Rumpus with Steve Almond, he mentions that you had sent him a draft of the novel three years ago.  Why did it take three years?  Was it revising? Was it not being happy with it and going back to it later?
WG: The book from start to finish was a five-year odyssey because, first of all, I’m a slow writer.  I’m always reading more than I’m writing.  Steve got that book about three years ago when I was finished with it, or when I thought I was, but then once my editor at Norton got it, he said, “You’re not finished with this.”  And it took another year and a half of revisions and writing and re-writing, so that’s why I say from the time I began writing this book until the time it was done, it was a five year process.  Now, Steve got my book before my editor got it and Steve actually liked the book very much in its original draft, but my editor at Norton, Bob Weil, one of the last of the breed, a real genius when it comes to editing, he had other ideas, and it just so happened that I agreed with all those ideas, so I needed another year and a half.  A writer needs that.  A writer doesn’t produce a book by himself.  He needs a good editor and he needs a trusty companion, someone to guide the book.  I think there’s this misconception that a book comes into the world solely by the writer’s will, by the writer alone.  That’s just not true.  Writing is a more collaborative process than some people would like to admit.

WM: During the process of revision, do you read as you’re revising or after you’re done revising do you take the time to make sure that it’s exactly as you’d like it?
WG: Both.  I revise day by day.  So when I sit down on Tuesday, I revise everything I wrote on Monday.  I do that every day.  I revise as I go.  But then there was a different kind of revision process that took over once the book was finished.  Then I went through the book, front to back, revising that way.  So the answer’s both.  I don’t know if other writers work that way, but for Busy Monsters, that’s just the strategy that dictated itself to me, and it worked well for that book.  I’m not sure the next book will work that way.  Every book has it’s own personality during the writing process.

WM: One of my favorite interviews that you did for Busy Monsters was for The Nervous Breakdown where you interviewed yourself through the protagonist of your story.  Would you recommend that to writers to get to know their characters better?
WG: It was easy for me to be interviewed by Charlie Homar, the narrator of my novel, because Charlie himself is a writer, and he’s someone who delights in language and someone who abuses language in many ways, so it was easy for me to sit down with this imaginary character and have a conversation with him because his voice is so infectious for me.  When I sat down to do that Nervous Breakdown interview, Charlie’s voice was still very much alive in me.  Would I recommend writers doing interviews with their characters?  Sure.  I’m not against any strategy that will get a writer to understand better his creations on the page.  If that is conducting an imaginary interview, or field research, or whatever it is, I don’t care, as long as it helps the writer better understand these human beings that he’s bringing to life on the page.

WM: Do you have an interest in cryptozoology?  I love the advertisements of Busy Monsters with the alien and Bigfoot leaving behind copies of the book. Do you watch Monster Quest on the History Channel?
WG: I have, yes.  I think cryptozoology is probably a step down from porn star as far as being a valid vocation.  Politician, porn star, cryptozoologist, in that order of degradation.  In fact, Charlie says in the book that the only thing you need to qualify as a cryptozoologist is a mouth that can say, “I am a cryptozoologist,” so it’s barely a job title.  But what I am interested in is the mythology that those people are after.  The hunt for Bigfoot, the hunt for the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster, and our obsession with flying saucers and space aliens is really a religious quest.  It’s really the human grasping after the sublime.  The reason why Bigfoot and UFOs and other kinds of monsters, vampires now and zombies, the reason that these are so important to us as legends and mythologies is because the mythologies that had prevailed for so long have since failed, by which I mean the whole Judeo-Christian construct of Western Civilization. It no longer works for people, and people will have their religion, people will seek the sublime however they can get it.  They will seek it, whether it’s with Jesus Christ, or Buddha, or Bigfoot.  That’s what interests me so much about these people who hunt Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster— they’re questers.  They’re real romantic questers on a religious mission to fulfill their yearning for the sublime.  Is Bigfoot out there?  Of course not.  Is the Loch Ness Monster out there?  Of course not, but I’d like to believe that they are.  Even though I know they’re not. It’s like the poster that Fox Mulder in the X Files had above his desk: “I want to believe.”  Not “I believe,” not “I don’t believe,” but “I want to believe.” And so that’s me, always wanting to believe.

WM: I love how in the book you mention Champ as one of these beings.  I grew up in the town on the last exit of I-89 before Canada in northwestern Vermont, so growing up we talked about Champ a lot. When I heard you read that passage in the Sitterly House interview—
WG: Yes, the one for Drew University.

WM: Yes. And I also enjoyed the piece that you read on the Emily Rooney Show,the same passage you read the first time you were here.
WG: Yes, the opening of the book.

WM: That hook, it’s so good, and you read very well too.
WG: You’re very kind, Will.  Thank you.

WM: My last question I’ll ask is: Busy Monsters has been referred to as a hero’s journey.  The hero’s journey in literature has many forms, from Homer’s epic poems to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and now we have the story of Charlie Homar.  What is your favorite piece that encapsulates the hero’s journey?
WG: The two greatest books about the hero’s journey are of course The Odyssey and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, both of which had a profound effect on me and the writing of this book.  I stole everything I could steal from Homer and Cervantes.  Every writer does it.  Oscar Wilde once said that a writer annexes all the great books in order to create his own. We unabashedly steal. You know the cliché, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” The other work about the hero’s quest that really affected me was by Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  He is the great American expert in mythology and had a thunderous effect on my thinking of the hero and the hero’s journey, and really how each of us quests after the sublime every day whether we know it or not.  Why do these stories of heroes affect us so much?  Because all of us are trying to be that hero.  We are all seeking the otherworldly, a kind of nirvana, a transcendent experience that is greater than ourselves.  There’s a very real human longing to escape our day to day.  And mythologies, religions help us do that.

Josh Blanchard’s poem “Lingering,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.

Jenn Monroe’s poem “Office Hours,” part of “In Place,” a creative collaboration between Jenn Monroe, Christopher Anderson, Meg Cameron, and Kyle Petty.