Timmy: Can you tell me about Kitchen Sink Fabulism? I take it that this movement is a heavy influence on A Jello Horse.
Matthew: Someone else used the term to describe my writing. I think it was coined by Kelly Link. My sense of what it means is this: a kind of approach to writing that marries the concerns of domestic fiction and the imaginative impulses of the fantastic, the fabulist, the surreal. All of these categories are slippery and imprecise, though. Sort of like when a person distinguishes literary fiction from genre fiction by saying that literary fiction is concerned with the story emerging from the characters in the story and genre fiction is concerned with, in the case of science fiction, the story emerging from an idea. There are ways in which this is true, and ways in which it is not.
We live in a world where the laws of physics don’t really break. They don’t bend. (Though any number of people are under the impression they do. How many people do you know that believe in possession by demons?) I’m disappointed by that. So I like to break and bend them. And I like to break and bend them in ways that affect the way characters relate to each other to see what will happen.
Timmy: I thought the second person narration was extremely effective in A Jello Horse, was it always narrated in such a way? What was the reason for using “you” instead of “I”?
Matthew: It was like that from the beginning. It felt right to me when I was writing the story. There are stories that are difficult for narrators to tell. And sometimes to tell those stories to others, they have to tell them to themselves first, to gather the facts. In cases like that, it’s often easier to distances one’s self from one’s story, to step out of one’s experiences and regard them objectively. Patrick deWitt’s amazing novel Ablutions is a great example of this, as well. Instead of being referred to as a novel, it is “Notes on a Novel.” Similarly, one might think of A Jello Horse as a draft. A narrator telling himself his story so that he can later tell it to others.
Timmy: I get this sense that the narrator of A Jello Horse is a sensitive soul, yet there is very little written about how he feels or his emotional state. Do the facts of this case, as you’ve laid them out, imply your narrator’s emotional state?
Matthew: I think I hope the quality of the narrator’s observing eye leads the reader to get a sense of how he feels. I don’t think the narrator has any real emotional distance, but he very much wants to control, to subdue his emotions, so he is artificially creating emotional distance tonally. The tense is a part of that, too. As one of my favorite teachers—T.M. McNally, whose work you should seek out if you haven’t read it—once pointed out to me, a present tense narration is not just distant, it’s flat. There’s a huge amount of power in being able to flatten the tone.
Timmy: This idea of distance is interesting. Do you think distance is necessary when writing fiction? What types of problems does it solve for you?
Matthew: Well, there are two distances to take into account. There is the emotional distance and there is the chronological distance. Exploring distance is part of the exploration of the character. With enough chronological distance, a character can have a new sort of perspective on the events of a story. And this changes the character’s emotional distance—usually. What about a character who carries an old, raw wound through her/his years, waits to tell a story, and then, when it comes up, when the opportunity arrives to tell the story, suddenly feels it as strongly as it was felt originally?
I heard Deborah Eisenberg talking about this once. She said that she liked to write about characters who are close to the story they are telling, close enough that they have yet to have sorted everything out, close enough to have not created an “explanation” for the events. The moment between the event and the long-term emotional lesson learned from the event.
I think A Jello Horse is a little closer than that moment, very close to the events. And I thought I needed to let the narrator admit to the reader that he wasn’t ready to confront his feelings yet.
Timmy: Your book was noted on numerous Year’s Best lists, which is how I found it. What other ways are you drawing people to your work?
Matthew: I’m lucky to know lots of wonderful writers with blogs and literary journals, and lucky enough to have been published by Adam, a guy who works his ass off to produce a bunch of really great books, all the while writing his own. So PGP’s reputation helped get the word out. Everyone who edits and writes for Hobart. Everyone who edits and writes for HTML Giant.
Timmy: What can you tell me about mustache wax? Have you tried many brands or do you just use regular hair gel?
Matthew: Hah! I can tell you almost nothing about mustache wax. I’ve let my facial hair get a little rowdy recently, and noticed that the mustache was sort of long, so I went to a local drug store and bought a little tube of mustache wax. Clubman. I was able to make some tiny little points.
Timmy: Is this a look you’re wearing out in the world? What kind reception is it getting?
Matthew: I’ve only done it a couple of times, and mostly on a lark. I have some male friends who like it. I have no female friends who like it, though. I doubt it will continue.
Timmy: There were at least three parts of your book that I remember thinking, “this is my favorite part of the book.” Do you have any particular sections or perhaps roadside attractions that stand out in your mind? Or are they all your children and loved equally?
Matthew: I don’t know if I have a favorite. The House of 2000 Telephones is a very popular section with readers, and it goes over well when read aloud. I like pinball and I like girls, so I like the pinball section, too.
Timmy: I just noticed the link on your website that points out you’re the editor of interviews for Hobart. I feel like I knew that, but am just now realizing the fact. How do you think this interview is going so far? Would you publish it?
Matthew: Would I publish it? Sure. The subject of the interview is endlessly fascinating to me.
No, seriously, I’m enjoying the interview quite a bit.
Timmy: Recently you posted an extremely funny and perceptive piece called “The five stages of publishing” on HTML Giant. I’m not sure how close you based that post on your own experience, but it made me wonder how A Jello Horse came to be with Publishing Genius. Did you always envision the book in the hands of a small press or did you try Knopf as well?
Matthew: I really never thought anyone would publish A Jello Horse. I sent it to Bear Parade a couple of years ago, and then figured I’d save the file and never think about it again when Gene, bless his heart, gave it a friendly pass. But after seeing Blake’s ebook for PGP, I thought I’d see if Adam was interested in publishing it online, too. He said he’d take a look, I sent it, and then I waited and sort of forgot about it. Eventually he got back to me and said he was considering doing another print book.
With the five stages thing, I have to one extent or another gone through all of them. Not with that book, but just with writing in general. As, I think, we all have or will eventually.
Timmy: You are a Literary Death Match Champion. Where’s the medal now?
Matthew: Hanging in my room from the same tack that holds up my 2010 calendar.
(Okay. It’s around my neck. I wear it every day.)
