Graham Irvin Interview
[GS-INT-014]
Graham Irvin is a writer from North Carolina. He is the author of I Have a Gun and Liver Mush. Follow him on X (@grahamjirvin) and instagram (@_gram_irvin)
Graham, I don't know how else to ask this, but there's a rumor going around that I feel like I need to clear up before we go any further. Do you have a gun?
James, baby. You know I have a gun. I have a gun and you have a gun and God has a gun. Everyone’s got a gun. You simply have to. You can’t help but have a gun. It’s a gun world and I’m just shooting in it. With my gun.
I'm interested in how other writers decide to do a poetry or short story collecting, a hybrid, or a novel. Because ultimately it's up to the artist to say what it is. A painting is a painting no matter the size. But I was curious about how you would define IHAG, in terms of genre. And what led you to decide on the formatting you went with?
When I began writing I Have a Gun, and as I’ve talked about it with people after it was published, I’ve always called it a book length poem. But it still feels strange calling individual parts of the book, the parts smaller than the sections, movements or pieces or whatever. I typically think of those small pieces as poems too.
There are clear breaks in the writing, obvious pieces that, though benefited by the whole, could stand alone. But it’s not a collection. I don’t like collections. So it can’t be a collection.
Maybe it’s a novel in verse. Though I would feel embarrassed to call it that.
I did a reading with Shabby Doll House recently, when Oscar D’Artois and Kristen Felicetti were touring their new books, and introduced I Have a Gun as an object based case study. Maybe it’s that too.
But it’s mostly just a book length poem.
Tell me about the research you did. And why the subject interested you in the first place. And also tell me that I'm pretty. But I want you to mean it, Graham.
Some of the most meaningful books I read while writing were:
The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard
On Killing by Dave Grossman
Industrial Society and it’s Future by Theodore Kaczynski
The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound
American Sniper by Chris Kyle
Aberration in the Heartland of the Real by Wendy S. Painting
They were research in the sense that I wanted information and inspiration for the direction of the book when it was still in the project phase. I liked the idea of writing about and from the perspective of violence.
Fascist art interested me briefly, like maybe it would really open up something with the book, but that didn’t go much further than Pound.
The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez inspired the section about the FN Herstal .308 sniper rifle.
I also spent a lot of time on gunviolencearchive.org while writing the second to last section of the book. I knew I wanted to include some exhaustive, near unreadable list. But I didn’t know if I should focus on a specific year. Or which year would be best to include, if I should include multiple years, I didn’t know which year would be best to include, if I should include 2021-2023, if I should focus less on daily mass shootings and instead on monthly statistics.
Hey James, I love you. You’re beautiful. The streets were paved this morning and everyday for you to walk down them. Bless your heart (non-perjorative) for keeping you alive.
Your research must have brought some things to light that most people glance over, especially when perusing data. What was something that stood out/surprised you in your research? And Is anything (outside of lacking regulations on certain styles of firearms) playing into the uptick of school shootings in the United States?
I don't know if anything was brought to light while doing research. I didn't set out to come to any conclusions while working on the project. My main goal while researching was to possibly put myself in the mindset of gun owners, gun users, gun violence victims, gun violence perpetrators. It was an extension of the metaphor. I wanted to see how long I could play the word game that I started. I wanted to understand the various ways one could “have” a “gun.”
Some thoughts I had while researching and writing were:
1) Fascist creative writing often relies heavily on formal language, social etiquette, a "proper way to be." I suppose I assumed the art would mirror my idea of a fascist object correlative and, now I know, that's incorrect.
2) The reason there might be less mass shootings on national holidays is more than likely because there are less mass gatherings of people on those holidays. There were no mass shootings on December 25, 2022. There were no mass shootings on December 25, 2023. When I first came across that information, I thought, "the shooters were with their family."
And, maybe that's correct, but it doesn't explain anything.
A less interesting, more violent, way to spin it is that Christmas is magic. Holidays make people forget about their problems.
I am all for grand dramatic woowoo statements, but that seems the most fucked up. Shootings didn't happen on those days because there were less people to shoot.
Probably.
Because there was one mass shooting (0 deaths) on December 25, 2021 and there were two mass shootings (5 deaths) on December 25, 2020.
So, my earlier conclusion is probably wrong too.
Also, here are a few uninteresting, if not obvious, factoids I learned/ intuited while writing the book:
1) Ted Kaczynski was a bigot.
2) Chris Kyle was charismatic but probably did not experience empathy.
3) The Mossad was created to hunt and assassinate Nazis.
Maybe it sounds facetious, but I don't believe I have any authority to talk about why mass shootings or school shootings happen.
If I had to relate it back to the thesis of I Have a Gun, people who decide to kill in that way possibly feel powerless and therefore angry that they're powerless. They may feel they are forced to play a game that they will inevitably lose. So, the act of violence is a way to win the game, or change the rules of the game, or, maybe most likely, destroy the game and the players altogether.
I don't know why this is the response to that feeling. And I don't know why it is so often the response lately.