TRAMBLINGS. . .

Greetings. Our guest author today is DARCEY STEINKE and I cannot thank her enough for being here. Enjoy!


1) When you wrote SUICIDE BLONDE, UP THROUGH THE WATER and JESUS SAVES what did you know for sure about each book?

With each of my books I feel a sort of emotional/atmospheric particle before I start. It's real to me, lucid and dynamic but also vague. It's a question or a sort of mystery, albeit a vivid one and I try and lean into that. I want to evoke paradox in my books through story. That's really all I have to go on at first. A feeling of wanting to communicate a certain tone, a particular way of being human.

UP THROUGH THE WATER was my first book and that came out of a sequence of stories about OCRACOKE ISLAND, a place I had worked summers when I was in college. Ocracoke had a sort of startling beauty for me. I worked the breakfast shift and so I would rise at 4 a.m. - in the dark - and ride my bike, this old red Schwinn with a wicker basket, around Silver Lake inlet to the restaurant. The people I worked with fascinated me. An old junkie was the prep cook and the chef, during the school year, was a Latin teacher. The other waitresses were all Coast Guard wives. A middle aged lady came in the morning to make the dinner deserts, Key Lime Pie and this thing she called THE FLOATING ISLAND, which was a piece of meringue floating in a raspberry sauce. She was probably 40, which seemed very old to me at the time, but she was extremely, electrically beautiful and sexy. My interest in her as well as life on Ocracoke was the beginning of that first book.

SUICIDE BLONDE, which is set in San Francisco, was my attempt to create that city anew for my own narrative purposes. When I lived there I was fascinated with Chinatown and some of the seedier bars around the TENDERLOIN. San Francisco is so physically beautiful, the Bogainvillia and all the flowers and the hills. I became fascinated with how that beauty manifested in a sort of androgeny. That was the first place I had seen drag queens on a daily basis. There too I saw Drag Kings, I remember seeing what I thought first were straight looking business men and then realizing they were women! It was fantastic for me. Very freeing. But also scary. SUICIDE BLONDE came out of wanting to communicate the way the city, with the fog rolling in at dinner time and the neon hotel signs and all the variety of human creatures, seemed both exciting and frightening to me.

In JESUS SAVES I was most interested in language and the talking animals that appear at the end of the book out of one of the characters imagination. Though none of my books are really what you would call realism in a straight forward way, I wanted JESUS SAVES to be able to go to other places besides the material plane, to sort of be able to fly off. One of the problems with realism is that it's only really interesting when the character is in extreme conflict, emotionally. Insanity is the best really for realism, as the writer feels they can finally cast off the material world and write lyrically or symbolically.

Also the summer I started the book two girls went missing, POLLY KLASS and another whose name I can not recall. But I was drawn to the cuteness of the imagery around the girls, the teddy bears and pink bunnies the rainbows and ponies and then the darkness of what happened to them. In JESUS SAVES, I got interested in the Mega church movement and suburban sprawl. It's my darkest book, the one most like parable.

2) To borrow a question from NOVEL IDEAS: CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS SHARE THE CREATIVE PROCESS, how did MILK "gather" for you? What was the seed of that project and how did you pull it all together?

I was working on a historical novel about the earlier SEVENTH DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH, and I had gotten stalled out. The leader of the cult which were the first seeds of the church, Father Miller, is my great-great grandfather. He predicted that in 1842 Christ would come down in the flesh. I did a lot of research but I could not get a feel for him, the extremity of his belief kept tripping me up. I decided to put that book away for awhile and work on what I thought was going to be an erotic novel. As it turned out MILK is as much about God as it is about sex, but this was not what I intended. I wanted to write lyric sex scenes but they kept taking on a sort of mystical feel. During the years of writing MILK, I had a growing interest in religion and divinity and this manifested as the book gathered.

3) Is there a single book that has influenced you more then others?

The Bible. My father is a minister. My grandfather was a minister and all my uncles are ministers. Even my father's two sisters married men who became ministers. I grew up in church and many of my first memories have to do with being both fascinated and confused by the language of the Bible. The New Testament was a puzzle and a delight for me with all the odd trippy things Jesus would say about your mother not being your mother and a rich man going through the eye of a needle. I love that the Bible is written in a very simple way, but is also so moving. It almost feels like its been broken up and put back together again. It is always - or the best parts anyway - held outside finite meaning. It seems to not know itself. Everyone talks about the Bible being definitive but I find the opposite, I find it like all religious text, held away from complete meaning. It is like life itself in that way.

4) Do your dreams influence your writing? If so, how?

I have been thinking about this lately, not that I have any direct examples. No image from a dream has gone into my work of late. I do think memory and dreams are connected though, and I use my memory, as all writers do at every moment. Not so much actual events as the tone and mood of events. I'll remember say sleeping on a pile of coats at a party that my parents went to when I was a child and I will sort of use that very dream like memory in something I am writing. I think there should be more parts of my books that aren't related directly to the plot, more details and surreal imagery. I think in narrative, meaning it should always be nuanced and never direct, more like it is in dreams and less like it is in say a television show. So I am all for cultivating dream influence.

5) Are you ever surprised by your books? Your characters?

Not one of my books has turned out anything near like I at first anticipated. I will usually have a very extreme idea of what I want to do. I will say to myself, sort of naively, I am going to write a book about Island Life (my first book) or I am going to write an erotic novel (my most recent) and the book I write is always so much more nuanced and more complicated then what I set out to do. This is a gift. This is where other realms come in, call it physiological or spiritual. I think in the writing of a book if you are open to what comes, this is where art is made, as its sort of co-created, you and the universe, or you and a part of you that is a stranger. I am not at all sure how it works, but I am always surprised by both the process and the final result.

6) What other artistic mediums influence your writing?

There was a period after I had my daughter Abbie, who is now ten, that I got very interested in visual art. I would take her, when she was a baby to galleries in NYC. It was a thing we both liked to do and I became fascinated with much of the art I saw during this time. Rita Akerman and the photographer GREGORY CREWDSON, both had a strong effect on me. I realized what I was doing prose wise was more like visual art, I was interested in the image and also how images related to one another. I am much more interested, as a writer, in image and detail then I am in character development and plot. So I saw things during this time that I identified with.

Having said this I am never really sure about the idea of influence. I think one does not always have much control over what one is influenced by. You can go around saying that your main literary influence is PROUST, but really it may be the copy of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, or FEAR OF FLYING that you found as a child on your father's nightstand. I think the things that move you are the things that influence you and it's hard to pick these.

7) Are their stories that you, or your family, have deemed off-limits?

This is a complicated question for me. I feel a writer writes out of their experience and so no part of that should be forbidden. You need to tell your story, it's in a writers very destiny to do so. But having said this I know I am very careful to be fair. In my new book, EASTER EVERYWHERE, I write about my daughter. But I have to say I would not write about her in any way that made her uncomfortable. I would keep private things private. It's a stewardship issue with her.

8) Do you have a writing ritual?

I have an office in the attic of my little house in Brooklyn. I have a thrift store lamp with a very pretty fabric shade. I think there are magnolias on it! And fringe! I have a desk, the same desk I wrote SUICIDE BLONDE on, I have had it for awhile. And I like to work best in the morning. I usually warm up by writing in my journal or writing a letter. I love to write paper letters, though usually I do not have time to do so. So I write a bit and then go at whatever I am working on. I feel very drawn to my work, I fight this off at times, but I feel I am nearly always leaning toward my desk.

9) Have you read anything lately that just knocked your socks off?

I have read several good books lately. I read FAT GIRL by JUDITH MOORE in one sitting on an airplane. It's an angry moving book, very very well written. I have been reading alot of memoirs and I have to say so many of them are not well written and not well put together. They are more reportage then art and so many are sort of canned emotionally. Others that have moved and amazed me though. . . BORROWED FINERY by PAULA FOX. The book is poetic and the tone, so hard to get in non-fiction, is perfect. I loved it. Right at the moment I am reading A FAN'S NOTES by FREDERICK EXLEY and I am amazed by the prose and the ideas about life in America. All these are raw, true books as good as any novel.

10) Name a character in your writing that is closest to you. How?

Many of my characters have been shades of myself. Jesse from SUICIDE BLONDE and Ginger from JESUS SAVES. I think Walter from Milk is for me the character I feel closest too right now. I feel his suffering and messedupness as very familiar. His longing for God and his melancholy. I feel close to him in these things.

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The MISSISSIPPI WRITERS AND MUSICIAN PROJECT OF STARKVILLE HIGH SCHOOL.

KEXP features Darcey Steinke.

IN CONVERSATION, Darcey Steinke and RICK MOODY.