 I'm Rachel Harkness. I'm the programming manager here at the library. And we're thrilled that Brock Clark is here to talk about his new book, The Price of the Haircut, with Ron Curry today. Longfellow Books is here selling copies of both Ron's and Brock's books. And a percentage of those sales go to the library, so you're supporting both of us at the same time. And help yourself to coffee in the back. It's donated by Coffee by Design. I wanted to say something at the outset about how I first encountered Brock's work in this, your very first book, correct, his first collection. That's my second book, and third book, and second collection. Second collection? That's how well the first one did. So anyway, this is the first book of yours that I read, Caring the Torch, which was published in? Five, I think. Yeah. Was that big? So I published a story of Ron's in a magazine that he used to edit called The Set Review. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all about you now. Which might have been around the same time, right? I think it was a little bit before that. A little before that? Yeah, Brock was actually one of the first people to ever publish any of my work, believe it or not. God is dead. This is straight from God is Dead. It eventually ended up in my first book, but at the time it was just to stand alone. He had also, just with a record, had rejected a story of mine before that that also went into God is dead. Oh, really? Which one was that? I don't remember that. I don't even remember that. But so anyway, I first encountered Brock in Carrying the Torch. And what I noted then and what I note now, all these years later, is that more than anything what makes your work distinctive to me is something ephemeral, which is often the case with the best writers, I think. You can't really put your finger on what it is that's so good about it or what it is that makes it distinctive, but it's there. And I was thinking about the best word that I could come up with to describe it is sensibility. Your stories often appear to be about something mundane and work a day but then suddenly expand into surrealism, fantasy, or comic overstatement. So I want to ask a question, but I want to illustrate that question first by offering a little anecdote of my own. When my first book came out, my mother, of course, because mothers keep everything, my mother had kept a story of mine that I wrote in first grade. And when my book came out, she had it framed up and gave it to me as a Christmas gift, much to my chagrin. But what was interesting about the story was that it was actually called the story. So it was very post-modern in first grade. But there were so many hallmarks to that story that I could read it and I realized there were so many basic elements of that story that were present and accounted for in what I do today. And I wonder, this sensibility that I'm talking about, is it something that, for you, that's inborn and sort of indelible? Or is it something you've cultivated? Or is it something that continues to change as your career goes on? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I guess I don't know how early, can y'all hear me OK? I don't know how early whatever my sensibility is. And I think about this some. But I'm not sure how early it started. I have a really foggy memory of what that might have been when I was a kid. I guess it comes to my, yeah, I was constantly writing stories and constantly reading. For me, reading was a way to get away from other people so that they would leave me alone. They would not ask me to do the things that they really wanted me to do. I came from a really bookish family. My dad was an English teacher. My grandfather was an English teacher. My little brother ended up being one, I am one too. And they respected books even if they hated laziness. So it was a real quandary for them. So I would just stop and hide in the book and they would leave me alone because it seemed like something productive. And I think they also sensed that I wasn't going to be good at anything else. That was going to be it for me. Yeah, I would either do something with books or I would just live in their basement for the rest of their lives in my life, whichever I did first. I think my sensibility, though, I've read books, the books I gravitated towards. For me, it's much more of a readerly sensibility than a person's sensibility, I think, as a young person. So when I've read books like Huck Finn, I gravitated toward that. I gravitated toward books that had something important to say, but would say it in a way that made it sometimes difficult to figure out why it was important or how it was important. So a writer like Twain believes in he's saying something important, but wants to make it difficult on the reader, whether because of humor or because of voice or because of a number of different things. It's scary with humor more often. Yeah, and that's something I must have internalized. Because I don't come from a family of joke crackers at all, actually. I come from a really sardonic family, but the never-cracking jokes. And I think that sardonic quality sort of dripped into my work and into me, that's a nasty image, the dripping of it into my work. I have a leaky roof right now, so maybe I'm obsessed with this drippiness. I think for me, also, self-deprecation is the key. So I write about a lot of, I write about race in this book and I write about the war in Iraq and some other weighty things. And for me, humor and self-deprecation is a way to hedge against my own pretentiousness. I think that's something I thought about really early on. While simultaneously allowing yourself to be a little pretentious. Yeah, right, yeah, I want it both ways, yeah. Yeah, that's that. I do the same thing. Yeah, and you make fun of yourself for being pretentious, but that does not necessarily mean you're really not pretentious. Yeah, yeah, it's just a hedge. So sort of a nuts and bolts question. I always find myself curious with story collections, particularly those from older and more established writers, what the time frame is that those stories represent, right? Like what, so what are we looking at for a time frame here? Like over the course of how long a period of time were they written? I wrote the title story, which is the oldest story in the collection, about the price of the haircut I wrote in 2003. I was in Cincinnati. I think I wrote half of these in Cincinnati. I moved here from Cincinnati in 2010. I think I wrote half of them in Cincinnati and half of them here. Most recent one. There are really several really short stories in this collection, and those are ones I wrote in Maine. I'm not sure why the brevity has anything to do, if it has anything to do with anything, but they just happens to be that they were the ones I wrote in Maine. I think in part because I was working on novels when I moved here, and so when I wasn't working on novels, I didn't want to work on stories that were where length was a problem. I wanted them to be done, and then to move on to something else, usually back to a novel. So the most recent one, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago I finished. Do you see anything that's different in what you're doing, what you're aiming at over the course of that period of time, or is it all? The shorter ones seem to me to be a little less surreal than the longer ones, which is not the way it's supposed to work, and that's not the way I've been preaching about it for the last 15 years. But I just ended up being that way, and I think often when I'm writing something, it's in reaction to something that I've already written. And there's a story in here, it's one of my two favorite stories in the collection, it's called The Pity Palace, and it's set in Florence, Italy, and it's like a 45-page long story about a guy living in an apartment in Florence whose wife, who may or may not exist, and may or may not have been stolen from him by Mario Puzo, the writer of The Godfather, who may or may not be dead, and may or may not be sitting in the piazza outside the apartment. So I exhausted myself, even myself writing this thing, and I think the shorter stories were a reaction to that. I wanted them to seem autobiographical, even if they weren't, I wanted them to be short. I wanted to have an emotional quality, and then I wanted to get out of there and do something else. I feel like the idea, you're saying this is in the case, but I sort of like the idea that you're having gravitated toward much shorter pieces and more realist pieces, it sounds like, you view them that way. It has more to do with place than circumstance. Probably a little both, maybe. Do you mean place, what do you mean by place? You're supposed to sit there. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm loathed to say, I mean, so many, I'm not from Maine, obviously, and I'm loathed to say too much about it because so many people have a lot to say about it, and it's just not part of my, not the way I think of myself now. I thought of myself, I thought about place a lot when I lived in Cincinnati, because it's a place that no one really ever likes, which made me like it a great deal. Yeah, and I like places like that. You have to places you can stick up for. I think Maine's like that. I think Maine also has a lot of people for sticking up for it, and a lot of writers sticking up for it, and it means I don't have to, I have nothing else to contribute in that way. Yes, right, I can shoulder other burdens that probably don't really want to be shouldered. You said something earlier, though, about them. Oh, yeah, so about whether they're realist or not. Yeah, the shorter ones are, but then this morning, so do you know who Paul Bremer is? The, basically the architect of post-war Iraq. He's the, he was being ambassador. Anyways, he was in charge of the coalition government. He's the guy who always wore Timberland work boots and a suit. He's kind of Kennedy-esque. He walks around Iraq. He just totally fucked Iraq, among other people, and then he left after a year. I hadn't thought about this guy since he left, but then I heard from someone that he's a ski instructor at Okimo Mountain in Ludlow, Vermont, and I just have this image of Paul Bremer holding five-year-old kids between his legs as he skied down the mountain, so I just finished a 20-page story about that this morning. So I think I've swum back now in the other direction after the short realist. Yeah, I kept telling my students about the idea, and they're just looking at me like, like you're looking at me like, I don't understand, it doesn't seem funny at all. And I was like, well, not yet, it doesn't. As a writer and a human being, I tend to live in that borderland where pathos and humor mingle, sort of like brackish water, you know, which is why Android works so much because you never traffic in one without the other, it seems. There's no Brock Clark story I can think of that I would describe as simply sad or simply funny. What is it about melding pathos and humor that makes each stronger and more affecting than it would be on its own? And this is why I really loved the story we published with Ron's 15 years ago. It's the same quality. I guess for me, it's another hedge. So, I mean, I have this, people often talk, I'm attracted to premises to concepts because of their humor, often at first, because like the ridiculous Paul Bremer idea, there's some kind of superficial ridiculousness to them that makes me want to think about them a little more. But if there's not something sad that creeps in or that I can't tease out, then it's no good for me. And the other is certainly true, too. So if there's a story here about a race riot, it's the first story, and it's this really heavy material. And if I could only write about it in that kind of heavy way, then it wasn't much good to me as a subject either because lots of other writers could do that better. I guess for me, it's often I think, well, what can I do? What can I bring to this that other writers don't bring to it? I don't know that I think about that consciously when I'm writing it, but I think that must be in my head somewhere. And if I can't do something like, you know, Marilyn Robbs is in, to pick a random writer I just like does things one way, then I was like, well, that's fine, that she should do it that way. And I'll try to do something else entirely different. Yeah, yeah. I have the same sense, like sticking to, I feel like at this stage of my career, I understand my limitations. So this is the border within which I can actually work effectively in a way that people might be interested in reading. If I try to stray too far outside of that, chances are it's gonna be serviceable at best and not essential in the way that things should be when you expect people to pick them up and take time out of their day to read. I don't know if that's entirely true of you too. I mean, I can see from the last book, you pushing things in ways you hadn't in the first books. Yeah, right. So this interesting to me is that, this plug I mentioned this in another reading where I have a novel coming out next August. And my earlier iteration of it was, I was writing this first present tense novel about Portland, sort of like I kept thinking about as a kind of white noise, but Dunderlo's white noise set in Portland. And then I just wasn't doing it well. I mean, I could have finished the book, but there was something not right about it, not substantial enough about it. And then not long after I gave up on that version of it, Ron's most recent book came out. And I was like, God, that's why I didn't finish it because that's the book you, that's the much better, much, much better version of the book I was trying to write. So one person was trying to write it. And then I just, you know, changed and went back and did something that seemed, it wasn't more comfortable for me, but it felt like I was doing something that was my own and not someone else's. Does that happen to you a lot? Do you then come back to it that repeatedly until it finally works? It's all about feel, as you know. So speaking of the title story, you and I have both in our work weighted into thematic territory that could best be described as dangerous for white male writers. Poor us. Particularly in this moment. In your case with the book's title piece, you present an unnamed, he already references. You present an unnamed city where the black population is just rioted. And the ostensible reason you give the riot is that someone overheard an old white barber say something racist. And one thing led to another, that's a direct quote from the story. And then the black people rioted. In another story, the narrator who is white has had an affair with a black student. A fact which becomes the fulcrum for all kinds of impolite rumination on race. So let me ask, in the current environment or just within your own ethic, is there any subject you won't touch out of a sense that you, a straight white male, have no place doing so? No. I don't think there is one. But I go into these things knowing that people treat these subjects dumbly all the time. I mean people like me and you. Treat them dumbly all the time because they think, oh, I have a right to write about whatever I want. Sure, you have a right to do whatever you want and people have a right to tell you in an asshole you are for writing about it that way. So my idea is that if you care about the subjects, so race is one of our big ones. One of the biggest in the United States. You have an obligation. You can't just say, oh, I'm not gonna write about this because it's not my territory. On the other hand, you should write about it knowing full well that it's not a neutral subject. You have to do so intelligently, not because you want to be safe because you want to be. You want to bring something new to the conversation. And because that was my idea about the, the title story here. I'll be back today. It's a story I hope that it makes, it ends up making fun of the narrator's ridiculous self-justifications as much as anything else. Yeah. But it also, I think some of the best fiction, part of the reason I write about this sort of thing is because I believe it's a way, you can hide behind this group of fiction and you can have conversations about social issues that you would not be able to have otherwise. Right? And so, this is. Yeah, right, right. How can you do this thing in a new way where everyone says you can't do it in a new way? Well, that's a kind of challenge that I think most writers should take up. Like how, rather than saying you can't do this, the charge should be how can you do this in a way that makes me forget the reasons I think you shouldn't be able to do this. And I think fiction does that, is capable of doing that especially well. Nonfiction, unless so, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Something that's been on my mind lately and I think you're a good writer to ask. There's sort of a similar question. What obligation, if any, does a writer have to his readers and I'll unpack that a little bit because that's a shitty question to ask just on its face. Do you feel any sort of obligation to a theoretical reader while you're writing or put another way, do you see writing novels and stories as being one half of a conversation and do you, in turn, as a good conversationalist, feel it's your responsibility to acknowledge and do well by the person on the other end? A hypothetical person or a person you have in mind. Yeah, I rarely think about the reader. Except insofar as that I'm one and then I think this sounds really narcissistic, like the most narcissistic ever thing ever but I'm like my own ideal reader. That's actually not true. There are writers in particular. Like I don't think about my family. I don't think about what my, I mean I think about them in the world but in my fiction I don't think about my family what they're gonna think about a story or a novel. No, not at all. No, no. And again I think I have a really great sort of trusting family or they'll just avoid it if they think it's gonna be upsetting to them. Which I'm grateful for. I've never gotten any kind of grief from my parents. Yeah, right, it's really essential to me. But there are writers I think about. Like writers who I'm friends with who I trust with to give me their ideas. So I do think about them. I think about not actually when I'm thinking, well a friend named Alex Olin who has said various things to me over the year that then have crept back. Like don't you believe those figures people deserve some sort of grace. And I thought she was wrong about that particular thing whatever story she was talking about. But that kind of thing returns to me when I'm maybe writing too callously about something that deserves a little more slack. My friend Keith Lee Morris will often says you want this to be too important in the story, a forgiving story. Like you want a reader to feel about this the reader can't feel about it. And I might think he's wrong in the story he's talking about but that will come back to me at other moments. Because writers are aware of other writers tendencies and those tendencies don't go away. So it's not like I write to please people but I do have other readers and writers voices in my head when I'm writing especially when I'm taking things too far or not far enough. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, you know, often I was just talking to my editor the other day I'm doing revisions in this novel. And you know, editors say things because they have to and they want to. And he's considering a book by a writer in the audience I don't wanna say too many bad things about him because I think he's a genius. But he often will say we want this to be a big book. Can you, I want you to think about that when you're doing these revisions. No, I didn't even know what that was possibly mean. If I knew what it meant, I would do it every single time. Yeah, put that in a bottle for me so I can take it home. Right, it's like those bullshit writing, pieces of writing advice you get from famous writers like the Hemingway line, write the truest line you know, like, okay. I was writing a false one before so now I'll write a true one. Those aren't really helpful. And also readers saying I want this to be a big book doesn't really help either. So I try to keep those voices very much out of my head when I'm writing. Getting a little more specific to the book. Many of the stories in The Price of the Haircut are preoccupied with that most essential of business arrangements marriage. And specifically the dissolution thereof. Sometimes this preoccupation runs in the background as in the title story where it's mentioned that the narrator and all his friends find themselves divorced in part because they all have such awful haircuts which is a detail I really enjoyed. Other times it's in the foreground as in that which we will not give where the, which is what a third from the last in the collection, something like that. Where the first inciting incident is quote, that Thanksgiving when mom asked dad for a divorce and he wouldn't give it to her. Often you have male protagonists who are either literally running into their ex-wives or else searching for them to win them back. Can you say why even in a collection of otherwise unrelated stories this theme seems to run through the book? Is it an ongoing narrative preoccupation of yours? Was it an organizing principle when deciding which stories would go in the book, et cetera? Second, no, except in so far as I kept some stories out of the book because they were repetitive, maybe on this theme, maybe on other themes. The first, I think partly it's a generic concern of me. Like a lot of my work is about men who screw up and then in trying to address their screw ups, they screw up even more because they're addressing their screw ups is remotely honest. You actually have a great line, I forget which story it's in but it's about having to apologize for something so you can move on to the next thing you need to apologize for. Yeah, right. So this is an obsession of mine. I think it's obsession of mine maybe autobiographical and maybe not but it's obsession more than that, it's aesthetically. Like when things go wrong, then good things, when things go wrong to a character, to a protagonist, to a narrator then good things happen to the story and that's one of the ways that things that can go wrong. I mean, if I'm writing about people of a certain age and I don't know that I tag the ages here but my mind, it's always mine. So I wrote many of these stories in my 40s so there you go. That's one of those problems that people are screwing up their lives and then the screw ups then lead to more screw ups or lead to justifications about the screw ups and for me it becomes marriage is one of those, one of the most absurd categories, arrangements because you have to make these big plans and big promises and then you're like, then these people in my stories are constantly betraying them and so betrayal for me is interesting as a subject I guess is what I'm saying. The opportunity to fuck up a balance of marriage. Yeah, right. So that's what you're looking for then. I guess and for me also the fuck ups are productive because they affect so many people and that's to me what's really good about an engine for fiction, really bad in life but really good in an engine for fiction is that it's not just like a contained fuck up a contained betrayal, it's a betrayal that then reverberates out. Yeah, there's that great line. I think I mentioned this last time we talked but there's this great line by Donald Barthelmay who says something like, I rather have a wreck than a ship that sails things attach themselves to wrecks and I've always loved that line especially when it comes to writing about family in fiction because well, people are attached to the unit and when it fails then it affects everyone. Again, I try to write about this in the fiction less somberly than I'm doing now but for me that's the other good thing about it is that even if I'm writing about this thing jokely or sarcastically or sardonicly or ironically there's something serious and painful at the heart of it so. There's one thing I wanna make sure that you're gonna read, right? Yeah, sure. That I get to before we go to your reading. There's a beautiful little piece in the book called Good Night clocks in it about what I guess is 400 words or so, maybe 500. In that amount of space it manages to encompass the entire aching mystery of being a father and as such is a first class example of what is usually called flash fiction. This is a term that most of you are probably familiar with, I would imagine. Some people contend that flash fiction is a genre onto itself with different functions and demands than longer, more traditional stories. Can you tell me whether you agree using Good Night as an example of why or why not? And maybe I'll read that. I've never read that before. So, and it's short, so lucky you. I've never thought about flash fiction. I mean I've read a lot of it. I've never, I'm not sure I've written maybe another piece that might qualify as flash fiction. This one seemed, I wrote more of it. And this one seemed, when I wrote more I was just writing the same scene over and over again. And I just felt, well, what would happen if I just lopped it off after a page? And I thought I did them the best it could do. It's a trend, and it was the absolute right choice to make, is it? Well, thank you. I mean it was a weird choice for me to make. I'd usually against it. Like I usually don't, when my students try to write flash fiction, I mean they're young. So I think it's a product often of, they've read flash fiction and they're really into it because they could do it really quickly and then they often end up feeling like unfinished stories. So I was kind of, I don't like to be accused of doing the same thing I accused my students of, but I felt right in this particular time. What is flash fiction, I asked a couple of you. It depends on, I mean it depends on who you ask, but generally it's defined as fiction under 500 words in length. So very, very grief, as this is. I've got one more question I want to ask you and then I'll let you go. And this is really for my own identification, just because I've got you trapped here and I want to ask you something. I've heard you say in answer to a question about whether having a family and a demanding job at your fears of writing, that you can't rightly complain because you waste plenty of time all on your own. And I wonder for myself as well as you, what exactly constitutes wasted time with regard to the act of writing? Because if people watched us work, there's a lot of not working going on, right? There's an unintentionally hilarious live feed of the writer Robert Olin Butler, do you know about this? Or it's just him at a desk for eight hours, like time thing, and it's a camera on his big bald head and it's just excruciating, like it's just so dull. I don't, I can't believe he actually writes that way. I certainly don't. I mean I get up constantly, I'm listening to music, I'm washing dishes, I'm talking on the phone. And in your mind that's all right. Well that's what I tell myself. And I think sometimes it actually is, like I often go for, people get really annoyed, my family gets really annoyed at me because I'll go to a movie and like a, 1130 on a Wednesday morning and I'm like, well it's just part of the process, comma man. And they're like, no it's just you wanted to go see a movie in the middle of the work day. But I think often it actually is part of it. Even if I think it's garbage, I actually, there are moments where it actually seems productive. I cannot tell you the number of problems I've worked out by going for a run at one o'clock on a Thursday. Like it happens the whole time. And on that run, are you actively engaging the problem or are you thinking about anything but? Once in a while what usually happens is I'm so pissed off at something being that my, how terrible I've written, terribly I've written that morning that I'm just there to blow off steam and my mind just is just white. It's just nothing, just buzzing. And then after a while, if I allow my mind, it sounds awfully zen-ish. My mind often returns to the thing that I'm so annoyed by. And then I'm actively thinking about it when I'm running. And that's true when I like do stuff around the house. But it's mostly true for me with exercise. I do a lot of working of things out while exercising. I do even, you can even count my drive to Bowdoin as part of this, because I often write and then try to work out the things I've written, the problems I've written myself into on the drive up there. So yeah, I do think it's, you know, we talk a lot about it and I think it ends up mostly being true that this is all part of the same process. You can sort of beat yourself up for the self-perception that you're wasting time. That happens to me. I didn't really need to be cleaning this toilet right now. And, you know, writers have this reputation of justifying everything. Like, you know, well, this is what a writer does. And a lot of it's ridiculous. And it's all part of, I was just reading this article, do you know Alexander Chi, he was just in town. He's wrote this article about how diminished the, how people think so little of writers that writers have begun to internalize it and have begun to think they can't actually do anything. My version of that, I think that's probably true, although I try not to be so, I try not to be self-pitying about it. My version of that is I'm the one who's often belittling it because I don't want to seem too pompous about it or to make two grand claims for fiction that fiction can't then bear. Back to the self-deprecating reflex, right? Right, right. Yeah, and for me, that's vital even if it becomes a problem because the minute I start making grand claims for things I start thinking about all the ways I'm failing it. So if you shoot low then it's easier to shoot high, I guess, or achieve something higher. I'm not sure how we ended up right there. Yes, it's all part of the writing process for me, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I'm just gonna read really, this really short story that Ron's talked about if I can find it. I've not been reading from this because it's so short, but I figure at lunchtime it might be good. There it is, and I can talk a little bit about this. Maybe after I'm done reading. How about the, yeah, sure, might not. No, okay, so I actually write fiction that I think to people seems autobiographical because of certain superficial things. Often my protagonists look like me in some way or another or bear some resemblance or have the same name, the same height and weight, same clothes. I'm just being a jackass now. Or they're part of the family unit that seems similar. This one actually is based on my older son. And often for me, fiction is the thing that it's an exaggeration of the thing that you fear becoming. And so if you write it and then you change it, it becomes a kind of talisman. And I think that's the version of this story. It's called Good Night. I had this published in a magazine called The Sun, and I was horrified because they accepted it. And I was like, oh, great, I'm really happy to be in The Sun. They're like, yeah, it's gonna be, and we have really great nonfiction, this issue. And I'm really psyched to you. And I was like, no, no, no, this is fiction. I swear. And they seemed really unconvinced by that. And I understand why. Anyways, good night. And even after all that, even after everything I'd said to him earlier, he still came to say good night before he went to bed, the way he had every night, pretty much, since he was a little boy. He wasn't a little boy anymore, 14 years old and taller than I am. And I say this not by way of bragging because I'm not that tall. Anyways, he knocked on the bathroom door. I was brushing my teeth and said through my mouth full of paste, yeah? I spat into the sink and when I turned around, he was standing there in the doorway. He was bare-chested, wearing the sweatpants he wore to bed every night, which were not much distinguishable from the sweatpants he wore to school every day. This was one of the things we tended to argue about, although I can't remember if that was one of the things we had just argued about or not. We might have argued about the way his armpits or breath stunk, or why he chewed his fingernails so incessantly, or why he put those chewed off fingernails in his shirt and pants and coat pockets, or whether he was planning on saving his chewed fingernails for some special occasion, or whether he was capable of telling me the date and time of that special occasion, or whether he was capable of communicating in something other than one word sentences, or why he didn't look me in the eye, or why he was so weird sometimes, or whether he was actually not weird, but rather living in another universe, not a distant universe, just a universe, say, five seconds behind our own, because why else did it take such an odd amount of time for him to respond to the questions I asked him? Any question, like, do you have any homework? Questions that weren't rock tough, not even if you were a moron, which was another thing we sometimes argued about, whether he was a moron or not. I just wanted to say good night, he said, looking from the floor, his sky blue eyes trying to meet mine, and I thought, not for the first time, not even for the first time that day or hour, oh God, what is wrong with me? You're such a sweet kid, I love you so much. And I took two quick steps forward and hugged him, and he hugged me back, sort of. I mean, he put his left arm around me, but he kept his right hand up, sort of pushing at my chest with it, making it hard for me to hug him back, even with both arms, which is what I was trying to do. Had he always hugged like that? Would he always hug like that? What kind of person hugs like that? These, I knew, were exactly the things I shouldn't say, and I almost didn't. Yeah, so that's that. Whether or not you knew you were writing flash fiction, the thing that to me indicates that is very much a flash story is that you open in medias race, right? Like, we don't know what was said, we don't need to know what was said. That's a flash piece. Like, you open like, you're right in scene, and you might get a little bit of information or context, but you're just going. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way. And I think, part because I try to begin a lot of stories in scene, and then often page break or white space, and then go into context, and then go back to the scene again. Certainly it's not something exclusive to flash, but I think flash requires it in order to be successful. For me, I just didn't want to go in and further realize because the meanness in that story is incredible. And one, it was self-damning, and I wanted to get out of it. And two, I felt like if I continued on with it, and this is what happened when I kept reading, it had just been more meanness, except diluted meanness. And it was losing its effectiveness, I thought, but yeah. That's what I meant about Tal's men. Like, I've actually never been that mean to my children, but... Have you up here? Well, yeah. Of course, like, what's wrong with you? I think most parents have said that was people. I've thought that. And for me, don't say it in real life, but if you say it in fiction, you can do something productive with it in a way you couldn't do something productive with it in real life. Do you have any questions for Rob? Yeah. Do you ever do any work with young people to encourage them to do? I don't know anything about you, but to encourage them to write or, you know, I just think it's really helpful for young people to meet people who have been accomplished and to have people to learn about. I teach college. So by young people, you mean not of drinking age. I have done things. I did a thing in Lewiston with high school students. They had come in for the day and they were all interested in creative writing. They had written some, and it was the entire day, and the direction was really interesting, and we went through exercises, and then they read what they'd written, and then I asked them to revise it, and they read what they'd revised, and I was scared, because teenagers scare me in general, and I always have, because I was one. And so, I really liked them, though, because they were kind of both cynical and guileless. It was a weird combination. They both felt like, they acted like they knew a ton, but they probably knew in their heart of hearts that they didn't. I kind of liked that combination, and also it was a day, so I knew it was gonna be over no matter how poorly it went. But some of the most really interesting stuff. I think I come from a place like Lewiston in upstate New York because of Middletown on the Mohawk River, and I recognized a bunch of them. I recognized the kind of kids they were, what kind of world they were coming from. I mean, I came from a solidly middle-class background. I don't wanna make any great claims for me being those kids, but I went to school with a lot of kids who resembled them. And then I was really interesting to me, in part because I was always in the impression when I was really like a bookish teenager that I would have to write or read about other places in order to do something meaningful, and only later on when I was at college, and after college I'd be telling stories about my hometown, little falls, that were often exaggerated stories. I was making stuff up, that people were interested in them. I thought, oh, I have something to offer just by writing about this place that no one knows about. And I think that's true in a lot of places in Maine too. So yeah. But I'm a little bit with high school students though, not a ton. Yeah. Yeah, so some of your work is categorized as absurdist, and I was wondering what's your definition of that? Fiction. And then I know exactly what you mean. I kinda resist it. Yeah, I mean, I guess I imply, for me, I resist the label because often absurdity is just thought of as humor writing. I guess I prefer surrealism than absurdity because it suggests a kind of logic, a plan, and not just an inclination. But this is just me thinking way too hard about it. And I think part of it is that my novels, for me at least, are less absurd than the short fiction. I think they're plenty absurd, but I think the absurdity is connected to other things that aren't thought of as part of absurdity. Bigger things. So I guess I try really hard not to define it. I guess I let other people do it. And this is partly my, people have a hard time talking about comedy, about writers who have a sense of humor. They think of it as this freakish thing like you've got a horn growing out of your head. And they try to say, well, he's absurd or he's interested in absurdity, and that's a kind of way of controlling a writer. I actually got some dangerous maelstrom of a person. But I don't know, I don't think it's only that. I don't think Twain's got, he's absurdist in a number of ways, but that's not all he is. And I like to think it's just part of something larger. Yeah, does that help, that answer? Yeah, a lot of us have trouble finding it too, so I'm glad to see that it's not just me. I think for me, I think part of it, what I mentioned earlier, I think it's true of you too, is that I'm inclined toward absurd situations, but this absurd situation, if it's any good, becomes something else, or something in addition to absurdity. It develops a kind of, I'm much more interested in plausibility than I am in absurdity. I like to create situations where there's a kind of logic that takes over. And sometimes the logic is absurd, and sometimes it's really serious, but it's its own thing. Sort of stands behind. Some of the review of this book said, and this has been true of other books, it's been like people in real life would never make the decisions that the characters in this book make. And that's true, more or less. But they're related. It sort of stands behind the real life version. And so the way we feel about the decisions in the book is some ways influenced by the decisions people in real life make, and how close they are. I guess that's absurdity then. Yeah. Yeah. When you mentioned growing up on the Mohawk River, it made me think of Richard Russel, whose first book was Mohawk, and of course moved from that area to Maine too. And of course his novels at least are more realistic, but how would you compare yourself with Russel? Superior. Rick's a friend of both of ours. And I talked about there not being much to live down, being from upstate New York, but he's one of them. And luckily for me, he and I do different things. And I think of Rick as a comic writer, but he's working at a comic tradition that's much more Dickensian than mine. Much more, much more realist tradition. So I don't have to think. The good thing about that is that I love his novels and I also don't have to think about them when I'm writing because they don't resemble mine enough. The inclinations don't, right. Like my books are much shorter than his are. They're less realistic. So it's a great thing. I mean, writers are as threatened as any other class of human beings. And I'm really grateful one that Rick's such a generous guy. And two, that his works, his novels and stories aren't close enough to mine that I would have to be pissy and threatened by them. I can just give myself over to them and love them. Wow, that was a weird open hearted moment there. But I've learned a ton though from his novels. And I've learned how you write about a place that you love but you write about it in a way that's unsparing. And that's a really difficult thing to do. And he does that about as well as anyone. And yeah, so that's one thing I still do have a lot to learn from. I think his novels are really big hearted and mine tend to be a little more caustic. And yeah, I could learn to be a little less caustic probably from the novels. But other than Rick, like who else is in Upstate New York that you've heard of? Like John James Van Marcooper? Like no one really writes like James Van Marcooper at, thank God. Possibly. Yeah, right. So there's no one from upstate New York I had to actually ever worry about growing up. But the great thing was when I finally read, it was Mohawk in particular. I read a decade after it was published. I felt so excited. Like wow, someone's writing about this place that everyone else thinks is absolutely unimportant. And that was a real confidence booster at a time where I really needed it. It was for me, him and William Kennedy who wrote these great all-body novels, Iron Weed being the most famous of them. And Frederick Exley who lived in Watertown and wrote a great book called The Fans Notes. And when I found these writers I just hung on to them like grim death. Were there writers like that for you? Central Maine is probably even more hered in that regard. Yeah. Really? No. Short answer, no. By the time I was old enough to be cognizant of it, Rick was actually at Colby. And he, for me, lacking any homegrown sort of inspiration. Just the knowledge that there was a working novelist in close proximity meant something to me. Were you aware of Monica Wood at that time? Yes. He worked. But yeah, not really. There. Yeah, thank you everyone. It's a pleasure. Thanks a lot.