Matthew St. Amand

Hello teenagers. I've got another great interview here for you today. It's going up a day early in the hopes that everyone (including me) will be starting the long holiday weekend early tomorrow. So today I bring you:

MATTHEW ST. AMAND

Novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, reviewer, interviewer, and blogger, Matt St. Amand is one of the more successful writers working today. His newest release is a hilarious and unique collection of correspondence, writings, and transmissions from one of the hardest working guys in the literary world. It's called Homunculus, and it's kept me up laughing many nights.

On Matt's interesting, extensive, and dynamic website, you'll be find plenty of information and links to his others writings. Among them is his brilliant collection of short stories, As My Sparks Fly Upward. Evocative, emotionally compelling, and beautifully crafted, this collection showcases Matt's range as an artist. Whether he's writing about a first romance, a chance encounter with a Vernor's can that spins horribly out of control, or a pilgrimage in Dublin, he commands your attention and often holds your heart in the palm of his hand. A couple of stories from this collection can be found online, including "Grudgingly" in FRiGG, and "And the Rocks and Stones Shall Sing" in Opium.

Forever & A Day is a collection of poems inspired by an ex-girlfriend's younger sister who got pregnant at an early age. Matt's poetry shows off a cadence and connection closely affiliated with rock-n-roll lyrics. In other words, it's amazingly hypnotic and readable.

His novel, "Randham Acts", has been acquired by Better Non Sequitur and is slated for release in late 2005 or early 2006.

His blog, Inside the Hotdog Factory, is a hilarious peek inside his everyday life – the life of a writer trying to make it.


Without further ado, Matthew St. Amand.

1) Who are some of your favorite writers, and how do you think they’ve influenced you?

Bob Dylan’s lyrics opened me to the idea that there’s more to language than literal meaning—there are considerations like how certain words sound together; stringing together disparate images, as he does in his song “Tombstone Blues”:

“Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, ‘Tell me great hero, but please make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?’”

The legendary comic, Lenny Bruce, also really inspired me. Not only by his humor, but the way he deconstructed moral problems, situations, and reconstructed them in a slightly altered way, highlighting the absurdity of our belief systems. For instance, he spoke a lot about “my right, your wrong,” and how a guy he knew received a medal for killing twenty Italians during WWII, and received a life sentence for killing one Italian in Brooklyn after the war. Or, speaking about the Civil Rights Movement during his 1961 Carnegie Hall performance, he compared the prejudice blacks suffered with that which Christians once suffered at the hands of the Romans—being fed to lions. Lenny’s comment on this was “There’s a quanitative difference between being refused the right to service and being served as refuse.”

Other artists whose work inspired me are Thomas Wolfe, Salvador Dali, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath (her prose, only!), Tim O’Brien, Jonathan Lethem, Frederick Exley, Mark Twain, and Johnny Cash.

2) What do you think is your greatest strength or asset in your writing? Your biggest weakness or flaw?

My greatest strength is writing dialogue. Readers tell me that how my characters speak and interact strikes them as completely realistic. My flaws and weaknesses are many—I’m ego/ethnocentric, my work can quickly veer into the self-indulgent.

Susan's note: I've never noticed his work getting self-indulgent, so he either doesn't publish those pieces or he re-works them before I've seen them

3) You’re a born and bred Canadian, and you’ve lived overseas in Ireland. How do you think this affected your prose writing and poetry?

I don’t consider myself a “Canadian” writer or an “Irish” writer. My stories are more about human experience than geography. Living away from North America showed me there is a whole universe of ideas and experiences different from what we take for granted as “normal.” While filling out job applications in Ireland, a clerk asked me if I had a “biro.” I had no clue what this person was saying. Turned out a “biro” is their word for a pen. Living in Ireland allowed me to indulge my propensity for eavesdropping on others’ conversations. I can’t help myself, I’m always doing this. But in Ireland the conversations were worth listening to—the Irish are the best speakers you’ll find anywhere. All of this has helped me—hopefully—move well beyond the pedestrian in my writing, striving for language that is outside of the normal course of zombified discourse that fills up daily life.

4) Your stories seem to have such a genuine and “real” quality about them. Even your poetry is completely readable and relatable. Do you feel it’s important to start off with seeds of truth and real-life scenarios?

As a kid, I hated reading. The idea of books bored me terribly. When I finally came around to enjoying books, and ultimately to writing, I never lost touch with that kid who hated reading. Every time I sit down to write, I’m always answering the question “Who gives a shit about this?” In order to get started, I do need to begin with a real-life scenario, or an idea easily spun-off an actual situation. This doesn’t mean my work is patently autobiographical; I’d make a lousy journalist. It’s not long before I’m making stuff out of the air, stringing together multiple partially-real situations together to form my fiction. And always, always, always, the kernel of the idea has to be fascinating, to hold something close to obsession in it—whether it’s the best man in my story “Best Man” about to watch his friend marry a girl he thinks is dead wrong for him, or making a pilgrimage to Bono’s estate in County Dublin. There has to be a substantial hook in the idea to keep me going.

5) You separate yourself from many modern writers because your stories are rife with emotion. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean that they’re sappy or overplayed. But that you have actual plots where things happen, but I also connect with the characters and can understand them and sympathize. Is this something you strive to achieve with your work, or does it come naturally?

Emotion is the blood that brings a story to life. If we don’t care about what a character is going through—whether that character is up to his/her neck in shit due to their own poor judgment or simple bad luck—that story won’t interest readers. For me, I focus so much on the emotional aspects of my stories because I am, in a way, creating alternate realities I wish I might have lived, or am glad I never lived. It’s hard to say how “naturally” this comes to me because I work very hard on ensuring the emotions evoked in any given story are real. Sometimes that means taking a story in a direction I don’t want it to go in—like the ending for my story “Hadley.” I hated writing that ending, but it was the only one that worked. Anything else would have been false.

Susan's note: "Hadley" is one of my favorite stories of Matt's, and he's right. The ending was probably very difficult to put on paper, but it's so truthful that it resonates very deeply and was definitely worth it.

6) Stock question: Dinner with anyone, dead or alive. Who is it?

Lenny Bruce at his favorite Hollywood Chinese restaurant.

7) What is the mystery/enigma/riddle of Xavier Lipshitz and Zemhep Co Group?

Rather than a riddle or mystery, I think that Xavier and ZemhepCo Group, in fact, dispel mystery and enigma. For instance, there is no cadre of billionaires running the world, nor does the Bildenberger Group, Trilateral Commission or Commission on Foreign Relations have any special powers or agendas. It is ZemhepCo Group pulling the strings behind the scenes in world events, affecting everything from the price of socks at Wal-Mart to the number of dead in any of the world’s current wars.

That great quote from the film The Usual Suspects, in which Kevin Spacey’s character says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” was written with Xavier in mind.

The Lipshitz dynasty is a Twentieth Century monstrocity, imposing and invisible as those crystal towers that loom on the dark side of the moon. It casts no shadow, but is as insidious as UV rays on our economy and our lives. Through a series of mishaps and unfortunate coincidences—involving the harassment and kidnapping of several of my family members—I was at one time enlisted as biographer of Xavier Lipshitz. A commercial belljar has been placed over me until I complete the work. When that will be is still unknown, even to me.

8) Publishing is a tough gig, and you’ve found ample success already. What, for you personally, is the most difficult part of the whole game, and what’s the most rewarding aspect? What’s the accomplishment you’re the most proud of to date?

The most difficult part of writing/publishing for me is gauging the effects I’m trying to elicit from readers without running to my outside readers with every paragraph I write. Showing partially finished work to be people has never been a good move, at least for me. Invariably the feedback I receive involves gaps in the story that will be filled in later on. It’s best just to complete a work, and then let people near me read it. So, trusting my instincts and third eye are paramount—and difficult.

The accomplishment of which I am most proud is probably seeing my first book into print. After years of rejection slips and self-doubt, it was truly a surreal moment to finally hold a copy of my book in my hands. And receiving reader feedback has also been quite satisfying. You have to understand that for the first five years of my writing career, I received on average 100 rejection slips a year. In the fifteen years I’ve been writing and submitting my work, I would conservatively estimate that average has held up. But once some of my work began making it into journals and zines, and my book was released, I was amazed to receive positive feedback from readers. I’ve never been able to reconcile editors’/publishers’ near-seamless distaste for my work with the warm reception readers have given my stories and poems.

9) You’re also extremely funny, especially when something is stupid or annoying, you’re great at finding the joke of the ludicrousness of the situation. Do you enjoy writing “funny” as much as writing more serious themes? And which do you think is more difficult to pull off?

I really enjoy writing satire and burlesque pieces. It’s taken a mighty long time to get to a place where I’m able to do it with any consistency. It’s much harder than it seems because the first impulse in writing humor is also the worst impulse—leap for the obvious joke. Sure, you’ll get it, but you have to ramp-up all over again and leap for the next obvious joke. The comedy that works best for me is rife with subtle humor with a few set-piece jokes strewn about like landmines. I’ve been a comedy aficionado since I was a child, particularly a fan of George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, whose humor worked so much better for me than the lame, piñata-bashing humor of David Letterman or Jay Leno, for instance. Carlin and Bruce had a point of view, a whole absurd vision under which any aspect of life could be placed and its ludicrous aspects revealed. The Jay Lenos of the world leave me flat. Listening to them is like trying to make a meal out of a bad of chips. So, with my own attempts at humorous writing, I aim for the territory blazed by Carlin and Bruce, where jokes resonate like echoes, where even untintentional humor fits in. That’s been some of the most satisfying writing I’ve done.

10) I usually only ask 9 questions. But you’re special, because you’ve done so many interviews yourself. Among the luminaries you’ve interviewed are Gary Britson, which can be found in your current release, Homunculus, Paul Toth, author of Fizz, and Yourself. So. You’re kind of an expert. So since this is all about me in the end, how’d I do with the interview?

You’re an amazing interviewer! There’s something artistically nourishing about answering your questions, they are so well conceived, and pointed at corners of my work I haven’t given much thought to. You’re a writer’s-reader, if that makes sense, and a fine author, too. Feedback and interest from you rates so much higher on my unscientific scale because you’re a fan and creator of solid work. Kudos from you are gold dubloons. Thanks for your support and interest in my work!

Susan's note: How could I NOT personally like a guy with a silver tongue like that? But professionally, his work is worth all the praise it gets.