EPB 002: Partial Clarities

For years, each January, the Canadian writer Tom McSorley sends me a few dozen pages of poetry he’s written over the previous twelve months. They’re sort of a Happy New Year’s greeting. But deeper. A real life in flashes. Better framed than selfies. Deeper and more complex than the most thoughtful text message. Sudden fits of intuition, sculpted. A frank gesture to whoever might be listening. Like saying: Here, look, I have my hand on the live wire of a normal life. I’m electrocuted by the everyday. Don’t mind me.

I find them fresh and genuine. And they’re significant, too, in that they follow concerns and approaches encouraged by other poets who have come before—particularly Canadian, like Al Purdy and Lorna Crozier, for instance. But there’s the winsome provocation of Leonard Cohen, too, (who can avoid Leonard?) and the angular passion of the great American, William Carlos Williams.

McSorley will cringe when he sees me mention him in such exalted company. But all of us come from somewhere, right? What the hell. In this first brief but rich collection, I think McSorley claims his heritage confidently. 

Born in New Brunswick, raised there and in British Columbia, he earned his BA in English at Carleton University in Ottawa and an MA in Communications from McGill University in Montreal. A film critic and scholar, he is the Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute, teaches Film Studies at Carleton, and comments weekly on cinema for the CBC Radio One program, Ottawa Morning. 

His poetry is witty and self-effacing. But it’s all resting on a genuine sadness that is not resignation, a willingness to look without the need to prove anything. He resists the rush to generalize, to tag, to brand. Everything is seen for the unique, irreplaceable phenomenon it is. He reminds me of one reason poetry might exist: as an antidote to polemic. He intrigues by bending the ultra-mundane into an intimation of the real terror of the situation—as in this:

AN APPROACH TO WD-40
aching metal bike
croaks along the river
asking why I am so slow
to lubricate
accelerate change
rather than plow
through this known
noisy not-so-perfect
now

The DJ Mendel Interview

This winter I interviewed DJ Mendel about his novel A Smile Shy.

How long were you working on A Smile Shy? What was your process?

I started working on this book what feels like one-hundred years ago, when I was around twenty-seven. I’m fifty-three now. I decided to take a break from acting and theater around that time, my mid-twenties. And, anyway, I’d been writing short stories for years. So, I decided, fuck it, I’m going to attempt a novel. Maybe it’ll keep me out of trouble.

I had no computer back then, so most of it was written by hand and then transferred to a manual typewriter. I didn’t start out with an outline or anything like that. I just wrote whatever seemed fun and interesting to me at the time. No rules concerning form. That would all come later.

But I wrote constantly for a couple of years. I’d attend writing groups and read what I wrote. I did a few public readings of some early chapters and people seemed to enjoy it. That kept the fire going. 

Then, a couple of years into it, I had the opportunity to work with Richard Foreman, one of my theater heroes, and was suddenly thrust back into acting. So, I set the book down. The next ten years were spent acting, directing, writing plays, acting in your films and plays. And, every once in a while, I’d take out the notebooks and pound out a few pages. Nothing steady. But I liked going back to the book because it kept revealing itself as something new each time I returned to it.

Do I remember correctly that I read a typed draft of a novel you wrote 20 years ago called Teenage Jesus?

Not quite. I sent you a novel—probably a year after I met you—and, in fact, it was this book. It was A Smile Shy. At the time, it was called Pickled Eggs and Slim Jims, an Easy Reader for Drunks and Dregs. It was, essentially, the same book. Obviously, not detailed the way it is now. It was probably in a really rough and raw form. I find it interesting that you remember the Teenage Jesus character because it wasn’t about him. He played the same role in that version. But, like I said, I think the earlier parts of the book were not fleshed out. Since I wrote the Teenage Jesus section so much later, I think it had more impact, which may be why you remember it that way. But no, it was essentially this book. That’s how long ago I started writing this thing.

Where did you get this idea of Penn Inc? You seem to like reading history and it gives you ideas. Or are there particular sources you used in conjuring this background story?

I do like reading history. I was reading a bunch of American history at the time. David McCullough comes to mind. But I was reading all kinds of stuff. A lot of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme. And Brautigan, of course. Dorothy Allison, who broke my heart. They all influenced how I approached what I wanted to say. It was the wildness of the avant-garde mixed with this kind of realism.

I think I approach acting the same way, thanks to Richard Foreman and you and others. I want it to be true but I also want it to really live on the edge of what you expect. 

But I want to get back to Coover, who is probably most responsible for my rewrite of this book. The freedom with which he writes blew my mind. David Markson, as well. I thought, “There are no rules.” The whole ending with Teenage Jesus running from the cops, that’s the influence of Coover and his willingness to say, “I’m going to trust the reader to put it all together.”

How do you think this novel relates to plays you’ve written? I know Birthday Suit and My Dick Done Broke and the screenplay, Start Here. I certainly hear a storytelling voice similar to those, but were there ideas and motifs that migrated from other projects?

For sure. When I put this novel down because I went back to theater, I started writing plays and the first plays were primarily based on the women in my life. My sisters in particular. I mean, certainly Make Pretend, the first film I wrote, has to do with a lot of family stuff.

But the plays do, too. I’ve known a lot of women in my life who I admire. In fact, all of my best teachers are some of these women. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, man. It was a rough, rough time in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. And so, there’s always these violent men, tough women, smart women, lack of money to pay the rent, etcetera, etcetera. It seems like that runs throughout all of the things I write because that’s how I grew up.

Actually, I think the plays migrated from A Smile Shy. It was the most serious attempt I’d ever made at writing something complete. With the plays I just sit down and start writing dialogue. To write a book of fiction, you also have to do other things right. Paint pictures. Take your time and spend time with the reader’s imagination. Where this place is, what this time is.

I think about the early chapters of A Smile Shy and, in particular, the main character, Weezal—his nightmares. I don’t know how I’d ever be able to stage that. It’s another reason why it was great to come back to writing the book. I could do things that I’d never be able to do on stage or in a film without a lot of money. But when you’ re sitting at a typewriter or putting a pen to a piece of paper, you can do anything! So it felt like an unlimited budget.

I think the way you write women is very fresh and special. And maybe even somehow dangerous. Can you talk about your relation to this as a man and a creative artist from your youth until now?

My relationship to women comes from my mother, my sisters, my aunts, and my teachers. There have been so many more women who have influenced me in my life than men. I grew up with women. I grew up in a house full of women. My mother is one of the toughest chicks I’ve ever met.

There’s always been a fear, though. I can remember that from, like, five years old. Fear that one of them was going to get hurt. But the women in my life were so tough that, more often than not they protected me. But there’s always been a sadness to it—for me. And I don’t know how to describe that outside of writing, outside of creating, outside of presenting what I saw. I don’t want to apologize for any of the violence I saw growing up. I also don’t want to exploit it. It was present. 

Related to this, of course, is all this potential violence in men towards women, principally. Marty becomes increasingly interesting as a character, in a scary way, when he hooks up with the waitress and demonstrates this violence one wouldn’t have expected of him.

Violence against women is something I grew up with. Maybe it’s just me trying to understand it. The only reason I write, the only reason I act, frankly, the only reason I direct or make theater or do anything in art whatsoever is because of the conflict between what I feel and what I see. If everything was even and I saw the world I want to live in, I think I’d be a carpenter or a plumber—or anything useful versus what I do, which I’m not sure is useful. I would just go out and do my job and help people. But I feel like part of my job when I write or when I direct or when I act is to expose our faults. And I feel power in that. Especially when I’m acting and I get to play a horrible character. Especially if I didn’t write it and it’s a horrible character. There’s a freedom in that because I didn’t write it. It’s not my mind. They’re not my thoughts. But, when acting, I’m allowed to get in there and imagine what it feels like to be that horrible person—who, of course, doesn’t consider himself horrible at all.

Marty feeling shamed by a loving wife who is the biggest fan of his writing when he totally doesn’t give a shit about it anymore. It’s a great idea, great comedy, and I wonder how that came to you. 

I know a lot of people who have given up art, whether it’s acting, writing, painting. It’s about when—and how—do you say, “I’m not who I thought I was.” I myself have done it. I’ll probably do it again. There’s always a struggle. We make art in America and you can’t actually make a living out of it except in spurts—if you’re lucky. I think I just feel for anybody who has to make that choice of not creating and getting on with other things—raising a family, paying the rent.

I think most people who make art in America, outside of the lucky few who get a break, come from families with money. I just kept my nose down and kept working. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some great people and travel. But that’s rare. I say I’ve been lucky. And by “lucky” I mean I’m currently on unemployment. I didn’t have health care for 15 or 20 years. So that’s me saying I’ve been lucky. That’s our country. And I think that’s what that’s about. I feel for Marty on that note. Maybe he is a great artist. I don’t even know. The problem is he doesn’t even have the opportunity to find that out.

Darlene’s masturbation scene and the subsequent dueling quotations through the bedroom door is, I think, one of the best character driven comic bits in the book—its chief rival being Jesus and Millard breaking up in the woods. They’re both great set pieces. Did they come to you as you wrote this novel or did they, perhaps, exist as ideas earlier?

They totally came while I was writing it. I would get bored from time to time and want to challenge myself. I’d read these passages and go, “Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. Yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever…” So, the masturbation scene was me throwing my hands in the air and saying, “Let’s get back to the original energy, why I started this, which was no rules. See what happens.” 

This novel bears the imprint of a consciousness that started out in Kunkletown, PA, and somehow wandered through the NY avant-garde and European art theater and dance. Tell us about your education, formal and otherwise.

My education was all of the incredible people I met. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with the people I wanted to work with. You’re included in that gang, of course. But there was Richard Foreman, Bob Cucuzza... I have a list. Cynthia Hopkins, Susan Feldman over at St Ann’s, Rosanne Cash. And I’ve been able to teach, which is also an education. 

But at the start, I went to a high school, in rural Pennsylvania, where, oddly, most of my teachers were in their early 20s. Smart, passionate people who allowed us some freedom and fostered our creativity. I was mostly an athlete in high school: baseball, football, wrestling. But I had an incredible drama teacher who introduced me to acting and Stanislavski and all this stuff. I threw myself into it. I got accepted to a college in California that my family couldn’t afford. So, my two best friends drove me to New York City and I auditioned to study acting at Pace University. I even got a scholarship. I had to miss a baseball game for that, which my coach wasn’t happy about at all. 

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