Michael Bible is originally from North Carolina, he lives in New York City.Little Lazarus reminds me of Beckett's writing, in that it's brief in length but loaded with material; minimalism with maximal story. Is there anything that helps with this outcome that you can pinpoint? Or is it unintentional?
Beckett is my hero for many reasons. He was incredibly intelligent but sought ignorance. His writing became closer to silence the longer he wrote. Like Christ, Beckett championed losers and outcasts, the sick and destitute. Beckett found hard-won hope in the most desperate of situations. And he was hilarious.
I feel that the whole "kill your darlings" concept is one I got on board with early, but still struggled with for a while if I remember correctly. In another interview, you said you have never struggled with that. Why hasn't this common hang-up ever affected you?
I think of writing as a commiseration with the reader about the absurdity of life, not a showcase for one's virtuosity. Whether I like a sentence I've written or not is irrelevant. So much writing now is abject narcissism masquerading as fiction. Art should be a turn away from the self towards the other. My consideration is always to an imaginary reader who might one day find my books in a time of need. My responsibility is to them, not my own desire for my work to be liked or the false allure of success.
Acting as a vessel for the voice of your characters, how did it feel when you recognized you were incorporating the voice of animals?
I'm not sure I'm that aware of what I'm doing when I'm writing. If I've done my job, the work will be unrecognizable as my own when I read it back. I write as close to a trancelike state as I can get with no regard for the outcome. Editing comes later. I don't know that I feel anything objective about the work when it's being written. I try only to feel what the characters are feeling like an actor might when playing a role.
My formative years were in NC as well. A tiny place called Pikeville. You're from Harmony, similar in size, and if I'm not mistaken West of Winston-Salem. Can you remember any moments growing up in a rural place like Harmony when you had the inkling to write?
I didn't grow up in Harmony but close by in a town called Statesville. I borrowed Harmony as the name for my fictional town as a bit of an ironic play on the darkness below the surface there. Unlike the real Harmony or Pikeville, Statesville wasn't exactly rural. It felt more like a Southern all-American town. I was recently rewatching Blue Velvet, a film that always came with a strong sense of deja vu for me but I didn't know why exactly. When I read that it had been filmed in North Carolina in the 80s and it all made sense. The houses in Blue Velvet were like the houses where I grew up. The doorknobs in Laura Dern's house were the same ones we had. The accents of the local actors were the ones I grew up hearing. The weird apartment building on the edge of town with a strange woman. That was all familiar to me. My childhood wasn't full of pickup trucks and beer and country songs. It was more like why is there a half-naked man smoking a cigar in the woods behind my house? Or why did the nice deaf woman who lived on my block kill herself with a garden hose in her car exhaust? I haven't lived in the South for many years and my parents moved away from my hometown during the pandemic so it's been a while since I've been back but I think about it constantly. I've lived in Manhattan for more than a decade and so write about North Carolina from self-imposed exile. It has become more fictional than real to me now.
Now, when writing for an audience who may have little to no knowledge or experience of a place, it creates a geographical surrealism due to the actual and existential distance. So the fact that you yourself have distance from that place makes it doubly removed, like you're working with a memory of a memory. I know you have a history with the locations in Little Lazarus, let's pretend you don't, because I'd love to know your opinion on this. What's the power and value of speculative fiction as it relates to writers writing about places they've never been?
What do you mean by speculative fiction? Not sure I've ever really understood that term. All fiction is speculative. God is a third-rate novelist. Best advice I've ever received about writing was from Tim O'Brien. I was in my 20s and asked him what I should write about because I didn't have any "real life" experience and he said, "I went to war and had to make it up. Getting out of bed every morning is war. Use your fucking imgination."
Before throwing a random object at them, what would you say to someone if they told you that something you wrote was not your story to tell? And do you think the writers are afraid of reaching beyond their own experience when creating for fear of the response, of being told they're doing it wrong? And should they be?
It's hard to address something so hypothetical. I suspect what you're talking about (could be wrong) are arguments that happen on the internet, which I could care less about.
I'm gonna touch on what you said about "abject narcissism masquerading as fiction", because I want to get that a little more concrete. Three things came to my mind as to what it could mean. First, an eloquently covert way to say "autofiction". Second, referring to writers grotesquely displaying their allegiance with the social issues that most impress the people they want to sleep with and publishers they want to work with to the point that it's suspicious. Or third, writers using the basic framework of a story to inject their own philosophies. Expand on what you mean, because I think it's important.
Most American suffering is due to the fact that people are convinced the road to salvation is through personal optimization. If one is not constantly striving to make their life more efficient and "successful" then they're seen as moral failures. That's bullshit. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned but I grew up believing that writing was an act of constant failure and sacrifice for the benefit of a reader who needs it and not a parade of self-aggrandizing anecdotes or intellectual navel gazing. Unsurprisingly writers have been dragged into becoming literary entrepreneurs when in actuality they should behave more like monks. I love that Beckett's biography is called Damned to Fame. When Beckett's wife got the call that he'd won the Nobel Prize and said it was a "catastrophe."