John Griswold is the author of Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays, (University of Georgia Press, 2014). He's also the author of the nonfiction book Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City (2010) and the novel A Democracy of Ghosts (2010) which was named ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year in 2010. He writes as Oronte Churm for his blog on Inside Higher Ed, The Education of Oronte Churm. A former colleague of our at the University of Illinois as well as a 9L contributor, he's currently an assistant professor of English at McNeese State University.
Steve Davenport recently exchanged emails discussing the Churm identity and the process of writing in various genres. We're excited to share their conversation here.
SD: Talk to me about the genesis of Oronte Churm and how he
ended up with a book. I know he drew his first breath at McSweeney's and then got his swagger on
at Inside Higher Ed.
JG: I visited Vietnam in 1995 with my old friend Frenchy, who's in this book
a lot and to whom it's dedicated. As we traveled from Saigon to Hanoi and back,
I taped some of our conversations and his memories of two tours in the war. Transcribing
hours of those tapes and typing up my journal pages helped me hear speech
rhythms, the mechanisms of humor, the way stories got told and ideas reasoned
out. The book-length travel manuscript I wrote was never published, but I
learned a lot.
A few years later I was waiting for someone to
please publish a novel I’d written. I scribbled a silly satire and searched online
for comedy mags. The editor at some place called McSweeney's Internet Tendency didn't want it—actually, he never
rejected it; it’s only been nine years, so I hold out hope—but he asked if I
wanted to write dispatches about being an adjunct lecturer at a Big 10
university. I decided to use a pen name that was a combination of names from a short
story called “The Real Thing,” which questions what’s authentic in life,
society, and art. My third dispatch was about Vietnam, and after it posted a
friend said, “You’re on your horse.” He didn’t mean high horse. (I asked.) He
meant something had cohered.
After a year at McSweeney’s I was hired by editors Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik at
Inside Higher Ed to be their first
blogger; they have 26 now, I think. I didn’t want to waste an excellent
platform—IHE now has 1.25 million subscribers—so
I wrote profile pieces, book reviews, essays, did interviews, and generally
tried to make posts interesting. My first contract was for alternating weeks of
three and two posts, so I wrote a lot. After half-a-dozen years and maybe a half-million
words, I thought there might be a memoirish collection there. To my delight,
University of Georgia Press agreed.
SD: You have long been, for me anyway, a master
of the concrete reference, effortlessly naming this and that thing or place.
How much homework do you do before you begin drafting a Churm essay? Do you
make lists of things/places beforehand?
JG: Thanks. When I was young and being taught to work
properly for the first time—by Frenchy in army diving, e.g.—I had to learn the
names of tools, processes, and places. Things matter in the world; words matter
in the mind. When your ship comes in, you'd best know your cleat from your
bollard.
Naming words make a concrete
poetry, even as the natural world gives us metaphors. The word
"bluff," e.g., which people where you and I are from use as naturally
as Twain did, can mean a steep bank, or to be good-naturedly direct, or to be
rough and blunt, or to try to intimidate and deceive. If you catch a glimmer of
how the phrases connect through the physical thing, the overlaid meanings can help
create structure and point the way to revision. (A student just today showed me
a draft of a story about a dying mother attended by her daughter; the writer
had used the word “ledger” a couple of times in different and slightly odd ways.
The tic became interesting for its connotations: Accounting [itself a metaphor for
sums of hurt in a human relationship], angling [for what, emotional dominance?],
and a meaning I didn’t know until I had looked it up—“a slab of stone laid flat
over a grave.” How’d “ledger,” which works on about four levels, get chosen
unconsciously? It’s why Mailer calls writing “the spooky art.”)
Aren’t words fun? For years I collected books such
as Opus Maledictorum: A Book of Bad
Words ("braising" as
sexual intercourse); Words,
by Paul Dickson ("benthos," the flora and fauna of the sea bottom); Forgotten English ("eye-servant," a covetous
domestic); Comfortable Words ("mare's nest," a cliche
from Swift's time that meant a thing very important to its finder but which was
nonexistent). Words for things, actions, and concepts help us understand
relationships. I like old books on etiquette for the same reason. You and I
grew up sitting below the salt, Steve, and if that’s ever gonna change we first
need to know how it means.
SD: My first experience with
your writing was the short story Natural
Bridge published and nominated for a Pushcart. Speak, if you will, to your use of fiction
techniques in your essays. I’m
particularly interested in your creation of recurring characters, Churm and his
family, of course, but also Frenchy, who becomes over time a double for the
father Churm looks for and finally finds.
Then there are the sidekicks or comic foils, Crazy Larry, who may be at
his funniest in “Geedunk and Geegaws,” and Rory the Cowboy Poet, who I must say
is one handsome sumbitch.
JG: “Techniques” are easy to
cover if you mean dialogue, concrete sensory details, scenes, exposition, interior
monologue, etc. As you know well from your own work, nonfiction uses them as
readily as fiction does.
People recur in my book
because they pop up regularly in my life to say colorful things, and I’m a guy
with a pen in every pocket. Having said that, I’m interested in what David
Foster Wallace says about how fiction comes from the void (indicating
invention) and nonfiction comes from the chaos and welter of life (indicating
selection, framing, organization). I find it interesting when people say and do
things, so maybe I tend to write and edit in their direction.
What I was afraid you were
about to ask was for some definition of nonfiction versus fiction, which is
something I’ve thought about a long time. After all, some essays (MFK Fisher’s
come to mind) could easily be read as short stories, and some fictions are meditations
or extended metaphors or philosophical dramatizations. I do believe nonfiction
should make every attempt to verify, use what can be known as a formal
stricture, or else signal otherwise—as with the intensely lyrical—but mostly I
leave the issue to the marketers and go have a Diet Coke.
Rory is indeed a handsome
sumbitch, and I anticipate he’ll age into someone with the admirable skull of
Patrick Stewart at his most angular. More importantly I’m grateful to you,
Steve-Rory, for making yourself interesting, especially when you’ve had a few
Diet Cokes.
SD: I would never drink a
Diet Coke. The University of Georgia Press made a beautiful book of your Churm
work. Describe the production process, your interactions with the press,
decisions about essay selection and ordering, and selection of the title (a
good one).
JG: It all started with UGA Press Director Lisa
Bayer, who’s long been a supporter of my writing. (Actually it started when
Rory texted from his bubble bath to insist I query Lisa.) Peer reviewers for
the press, as well as a former schoolmate, a former editor, an old friend, a
colleague, and my grad assistant, gave invaluable suggestions on selection. From
May through August I did little else but go over pieces countless times, put them
in different combinations to tease out meaning and coherence, and write new
material. There at the end, when my family went back north to visit friends, I
spent two weeks of 15-hour days with it, going a little whacko, albeit productively.
It was surprising to me that the project could absorb that much more time and
work, since most of the pieces had been revised endlessly before they were
published individually. It was a relief to finish and deliver the book to editor
Daniel Simon, who was sensitive and insightful when we worked together in the
fall.
The press was extraordinarily
generous with my role in cover design. (I’ve had great good luck that way; I was
allowed to choose the cover of my novel too.) I had a bunch of ideas, but some
were expensive and others jokey. The one you see is illustrated by the amazing
Tim Foley. The only downside is everyone thinks it’s me holding one of my sons,
when really it’s my dad holding me in Saigon, but that serves the motif of
fatherhood in the book too.
Until I wrote the first essay
(which I wrote last), the title was to be Killing
Pirates, and there was a dead guy on the cover. I realized only in the
process of putting the book together how much death, absence, and loss there is
in it, but it’s of the deeply-felt ordinary kind—father, mother, and childhood
stuff, not swashbuckling or even historical pirates—and I wanted something more
resonant. The gentler, more positive title and cover hint at connection, hope,
and small mercies (with maybe a whiff of sulfurous irony).
Designer Tim Peters pulled it
all together somehow, magician he is. Even at the very last, production staff
were thinking about little details such as typography for section breaks. We
looked at dingbats that might be thematic, such as skulls and crossbones. I
suggested little waves instead, and they kindly agreed. I am very pleased with
the result.
SD: For the record, that’s one part bubble bath
to two parts whiskey tub. So far, you have three books under your belt: a
novel, Democracy of Ghosts, and two
works of nonfiction, Herrin: The Brief
History of an Infamous American City, and Pirates You Don’t Know. What’s next? Collection of short stories?
Craft book? Cookbook?
JG: A novel that’s been in the works a long time,
meant to pay a debt I owe the sea. I’m doing my best to go whacko on it this
summer, though I am going to the Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, Lithuania,
in July, and I’m stopping off at Chekhov’s and Tolstoy’s estates south of
Moscow. It would be nice to get material for another collection of essays,
about what we know secondhand versus firsthand about other people....
Thanks, Steve!
SD: Back at you, John, and
back to work. Summer’s upon us.
