Described in the blogosphere as one of the nation’s most underrated writers, Kirby Gann is the author of the novels The Barbarian Parade (2004) and Our Napoleon in Rags (2005). He is also co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, which was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). His work has appeared most recently in The Lumberyard and The Oxford American, among other journals. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship and two Professional Assistance Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council, and an Honorable Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Gann is Managing Editor at Sarabande Books, and teaches in the brief-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.
An excerpt from Gann's novel Ghosting appears in Issue Thirty-Three of The Collagist.
Here, Gann answers interviews "in the form of excerpts"--with further exceprts from Ghosting.
1. What is writing like?
The light from his hand works like an intangible guiding rope drawing him behind its lead. He has been in this place many times before, yet at each entry feels utterly lost—even, in some way, bereft; his heart in his throat. It has always struck him as the backdrop to undesirable dreams: inexhaustible in its rooms, tangled by puzzling stairways and corridors, often presenting mystical compartments with no function he can divine. In dreams he has staggered from hall to hall with slow-thighed dogs panting unseen behind him; he has fled down stairs and stone slides; he has been swallowed altogether into the belly of the earth. As if this building masked a portal that led deep into ancient caverns, sculpted by slicked flues and hidden rivers.
2. What isn’t writing like?
When Ponder finds the desired verse he raises his free hand and signals the audience with splayed fingers again. “Thou has caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place. ‘How’s that strike you,’ God asked. I told Him He was the Man. He reminded me: God’s Will never leads you where God’s Grace will not protect you. And He reminded me again, ‘Check Deuteronomy eight-eighteen.’ But remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the ability to produce wealth.”
3. When you do it, why?
The shotgun sits across the Adirondack’s armrests like the safety bar on a thrill ride, the barrel anchoring his elbow to steady his hands (clothed in fingerless gloves) as he reads. Spillane and MacDonald novels, mostly, but he’ll take whatever mysteries they got at the secondhand shop in Foster, even the occasional Western. He especially likes accounts of the gangster heyday before the war, the stories of Capone, the Barker-Karpis gang, Pretty Boy Floyd (who was nowhere near pretty, Erly has seen pictures). Stoned or sober he reads deep into the night while Greuel and guests curse and joke over cards and business inside. He reads and then drifts into daydream—wonders if daydream is still the word for it when it occurs after dark—and considers how he might invent a better story than many of the authors he has read. If he were to ever recount on paper the things he has seen! In fact he has composed eventful beginnings, harrowing scenes of suspense, chases that lay waste to entire towns; designed foul murders and extortion schemes and methods of blackmail that would land him lauded in Hollywood if he could set them down, lay them out (what would Greuel and his illiterate cronies have to say to Professor Mule—that odious nickname—then?). But then with sunrise comes sleep. When he awakens his mind is a clear slate, empty of the scenarios conceived the night before. On the rare occasion that he can recall a snatch of story or a line of dialogue it never seems as thrilling as it had in the throes of creation. Characters never seem to get their due. Mule conceives a failure to all the murder mysteries he kills time with in that they center on one person only, an investigator who uncovers clues by clever wit and judicious brawn, and in real life no story works like that. In real life a story occurs among legions; to understand the story you have to know all the people it touches, too. The disappointment he feels after finishing a novel is that there’s nothing more than a problem solved, and everyone in it except for the main guy exists to tweak the problem one way or another, they’re either bad or good or torn between the two and have no life outside their brief appearance on the page. These authors narrow the scope too far; even a murderer with the coldest blood has his hopes and dreams.
4. When you don’t, why?
The moment was as he had hoped it would be, his tongue searching hers, this instant so longed for in secret and with the guilt of a brother’s betrayal, but these concerns fell aside easily as his hands, his arms, came alive. It did not take long before he was naked above her. She cradled his face in her hands, casting warm smiles into his own. They wrestled one another, twined themselves in the blankets; he pressed into her and tried to slide her jeans down but she was adept at preventing him, he couldn’t figure how she managed it, a twisting of her body or a flex to her legs so that, somehow, the jeans would not move. He tried everything he could, shifting his mouth from hers to her jaw and to her neck and then down, taking in the palm-sized wonder of her breasts and the smooth belly, managing to get his tongue to graze the top of her pubic line and inhaling the deep true smell of her there—but her hand grasped his jaw gently and tugged him up again. Over the next hour the bed turned on dyskinetic awkwardnesses: Shady over-ardent, almost penitent, Cole relaxing, forcing himself to a degree of calm in disappointment. The jeans stayed on. Soon the kisses shortened, died away, and he rolled onto his back, drawing the sheet over his waist, painfully aware of his full nakedness next to her half-clothed.
“I’m sorry, Cole,” she whispered. “I’m not ready.”