Ghoti: Your new novel, We Are Billion Year Old Carbon deals with Memphis during the 60's. Why the 60's and why Memphis?

Corey: Why Memphis is easy: it’s where I live. The only place I know anything about. Why the 60s is a bit more psychological, one might say. When I was a young pup, through trial and error, especially error, I found that I couldn’t be the one thing I really wanted to be which was an athlete. I was small and wispy and had girl arms. So, I had to move on to Choice #2 and I looked around and saw that the most exotic, the most interesting, the most colorful people in the world were hippies. So, I longed to be a hippie. They were sort of the antithesis of jocks. I was only 14 when the 60s ended, though I was 18 when they ended spiritually, that is when the Vietnam War finally limped to a halt. And I was in Memphis where the trickle-down took a few more years. We grew our hair out about the time The Mod Squad first aired. All this to say that I missed the prime hippie years. So, fast-forward to my adulthood and my writing life. How better to realize what I longed to be than to write about it? Tom Robbins says that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. He must have been thinking about being a writer because one can, and should, revisit one’s childish desires as a writer.

I should also mention the music. 60s psych-pop is in my blood. I’m not sure how it got there but it may have been injected into me by my friend Jay one night when we were chemically altered.

Ghoti: The novel has a very interesting collage structure, incorporating poetry, short stories, dialogue pieces, music reviews, etc What about this form appealed to you?

Corey: I ought to say my lack of mental cohesion. The splintered narrative best mirrors my splintered concentration. But, more seriously, the form fit the subject matter. The 60s, as viewed in the rear view mirror, appears as if through a kaleidoscope. Or so it seems to me. I wasn’t interested in getting at some kind of sociological reassessment of that marvelously gaudy decade, the kind of hindsight that is now saying how destructive those free-wheeling times were, or how deluded were the flower children. Instead, I prefer to think (1) that it was a time of explosive creativity especially in the arts—think of Dylan from Bringing it All Back Home through John Wesley Harding or the Beatles from Rubber Soul through Sergeant Pepper. Or the American and French filmmakers of that period. Or the American writers of the period, Barth, Updike, Roth, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Gaddis, David Markson, the Barthelmes. Or the New York painters. And on and on.

And (2) I prefer to think that the hippies were right. Putting flowers in gun barrels is the most courageous symbolic act I can think of.

Also, history is a collage. The artist Robert Motherwell said, “Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation.” So, my appropriation of the term is utilitarian….and, um, I suppose, pretentious.

Ghoti: You own Burke's Books in Memphis. Can you tell me a little about the history of this store – who founded it and why? What made you want to buy it?

Corey: Burke’s is a 131 year old business, making it one of the oldest if not the oldest continually run bookstore in the U.S. It was in the Burke’s family until the 1970s and my wife and I are the third owners since the family sold it. Traditionally it was an antiquarian and used book store while also handling textbooks for the city’s Catholic schools. We still do some textbook business and we enthusiastically still sell antiquarian and second-hand books. During these dire days when many folks have turned to the internet for their everythings and while many more prefer to shop Big Box superstores we are struggling mightily. It also doesn’t help that reading is on the decline and book collecting perhaps even moreso. We are witnessing a time when a first edition Faulkner is about as valuable to the average book buyer as an umbrella is to a fish. Which leads smoothly to the question of why we bought the store. The plain answer is: we’re simpletons. But, the more complete answer would have to include (a) to keep a good thing going, that is, a time-honored and important part of the Memphis community and (b) to be our own bosses.

Ghoti: Is there a website to buy books online from Burke's?

Corey: Yes, indeedy. It’s at www.burkesbooks.com. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a secure online order form. Just our contact information. But we sell a lot of our best second-hand stuff through www.abebooks.com. If you go there Burke’s has its own online store, a small corner of the Abebooks megastore. Well, even if you don’t go there Burke’s is there. See?

Ghoti: Your new book was published by Livingston Press. What led you to working with them, and what has your experience with them been like? Are you happy with them?

Corey: Joe Taylor has made Livingston Press into an oasis in the publishing world, a place where literature is honored and writers prized, where fiction is still read and appreciated. Imagine that. What led me to them was their stated goal of publishing “offbeat literature in the heart of the South.” I read that and said, huh, that sounds like me. The offbeat part perhaps more than the literature part. They are creative and industrious and honest and enthusiastic. I love the small-press world and have reservations about the bigger houses and what they are doing and where publishing is going. I say this as someone, of course, who is as far from being published by Knopf as my jump shot is from Dewayne Wade’s.

Ghoti: What are you reading?

Corey: One of my favorite questions (I’d like to nominate it to replace “Would you like to go for coffee with me?”). Let me answer by listing my last 5 books, as good a sequence as any I’ve read in a while: Ross MacDonald’s The Blue Hammer, Anthony Powell’s A Buyer’s Market, Diane Johnson’s Dashiell Hammett: a Life, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Harry Mulisch’s The Procedure. That’s some good reading.

Ghoti: Would you mind telling me a little about your previous novel Talk: A Novel in Dialogue? (Also published by Livingston Press.) What led you to write a novel completely in dialogue?

Corey: Thanks for asking. What led me to write Talk is that I hear voices. I answer this flippantly because it’s basically true. I’m always talking in my head, sometimes with two voices, in other words, conversations. In my head I hear conversations. Sometimes it’s a party line and I have to ask the two arguing about their cat, Little Richard, to please get off my line. This staccato chatter is similar to the racket a popcorn machine makes. Perhaps everyone invents these conversations in their own leaky noggins. How would I know? So, anyway, what started as a series of back and forths between two friends, the kind of chats I so enjoyed in my sad bastard bachelor days, turned into one short story written in unattributed voices. This is not something I invented, of course. It has been famously and much better employed by the late great William Gaddis, among others. That story, for whatever reason, wouldn’t shut up. So it became a series of stories, adding characters and new voices. Suddenly, it was all clear to me, as it must have been to those bored shepherds who saw the star. This could be a novel. And, lo, it came to pass.

Ghoti: Congratulations on winning Southern Hum's poetry chapbook competition. What are you working on now?

Corey: Thank you. I think the Southern Hum chapbook, titled The Lita Conversation, has turned into a lovely thing, in no small part because the cover is a Syrie Kovitz photograph and I love her incandescent work.

I am finishing up a new novel, one that I hope will prove to be a little more commercial. Of course, a little more commercial for me would be to hit a sales mark in the four digits. Time shall tell.

Ghoti: The biggest complaint I hear from writers has to do with lack of financial compensation. A friend of mine once described writing a novel as working his ass off for two years, unpaid and with no guarantee of ever being paid, and thousands of people would kill for the job. Have you had a similar experience? Do you find it difficult to reconcile the work with the (monetary) rewards?

Corey: The stock answer to this is that a real writer doesn’t write for money. I have said this often, but perhaps only to friends, that what a writer craves more than money or fame is feedback. I can float all day on a positive note from a friend, or maybe moreso from a stranger.

Since I have written for over 30 years with almost no monetary compensation I suppose it doesn’t enter into my equation. Like every other writer, however, I long for the Hollywood phone call that will change my circumstances for the better. And my circumstances, right now, could use some getting better. See, for the movie version of Talk, I envisage Hope Davis and Campbell Scott as the married couple and…um, Scarlett Johansson as the mistress…

Ghoti: You are incredibly prolific. Do you hold to a schedule of writing (2000 words every morning, that kind of thing) or do you just write when it hits you?

Corey: Nothing as defined as that. I have found discipline here during the downward arc of my life. In every other way I am a slugabed but, for my writing, I do it every morning. I wake early, between 5 and 6, and so, on work days, I have at least a couple hours before the world intrudes. On my days off more. Annie Lamott says that if you sit down to write in the same place at the same time of day your body will make itself ready to write. I find this for the most part true. And, of course, having agoraphobia gives one more time to pursue the pleasures of the mind, which are writing and reading. I should say here also that being in Jungian therapy for over 7 years has opened me up in unforeseen ways. I have written more and better over the past five years than in the previous twenty. I don’t really recommend agoraphobia as a way to get more done but I would recommend therapy for writers, even the sane ones, though I suspect there are few.

Ghoti: Do you set aside a specific time of day to submit work and do research? I guess I am asking about the life of the working writer, here.

Corey: No, I don’t. If the story I am working on requires research, something, let me say here that I am not very good at, I will do it at the time it is needed. I do so little planning ahead. I have called We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon the anti-research historical novel because of the deliberate untruths in it. I am fully prepared for someone to attack me for this.

When I find myself at a lull in my writing and, knock on wood, I have never had writer’s block, I use that time to submit things. I still enjoy the process of putting together a submission so it doesn’t seem onerous. I do have an agent now so I don’t have to spend the time submitting my novels I used to, freeing me to spend more on poetry zines.

Ghoti: Would you rather be recognized or good?

Corey: I only want to get better, so good, of course. Even though I am over 50 I feel like I am still in training. Especially as a novelist. I never thought I could write even one novel and having backed into two of them now, you know, writing one in dialogue and another in crazy-quilt fashion, I find I like the long haul and can now commit myself to a couple years work on a single project. But I am still learning how to write a novel and my next two will be, how shall we say?, more conventionally structured. Recognition, well, it doesn’t have anything to do with how I write. But getting better does.

Ghoti: How would you say that therapy has helped you as a writer?

Corey: I’m not sure it’s a process that can be described, or maybe it’s simply not one that I understand. But, after plumbing the unconscious for months, after analyzing my dreams deeply, I guess those underground current, the River Styx that flows in all of us underneath our daily lives, these things start to bubble up, to allow for fresh images to appear, fresh ideas, deeper mythologies, if that’s not overstating it. I think perhaps that poetry comes from the same midnight candy store as dreams. It’s that great dark area outside the flashlight beam. It’s scary but you gotta do the shadow work. You gotta go after that deeper, darker side of yourself with courage and honesty. Or so I say.

Ghoti: Do you think that suffering from agoraphobia has directly affected your writing?

Corey: Well, of course. And not just because the time at home is best spent at the keyboard diving for pearls in the ether. Anything this huge, and agoraphobia is one Pantagruelian mother, you’re forced to deal with it. I have an entire chapbook entitled The Agoraphobe’s Pandiculations, poems where I tried to describe the indescribable, to limn the unlimnable. My therapist wanted those poems to be my last word on the subject. His thinking is that I identify myself too much as The Agoraphobe. I’m still pondering that. I’m not sure I can stop talking about my dis-ease. I have found myself full of tremors on the most average day and I have also found myself afraid of the world right now, a not-so-irrational response perhaps to the horror-house that is America and the world beyond in the 21st century. These things must be discussed. I cannot ignore them because they try to suffocate me. So, onward I go, Mr. Chicken in a homemade suit of armor, trying to make sense out of the senselessness that is inside me, that, in a sense, is me.

Ghoti: Any closing thoughts?

Corey: Just to say thanks for the opportunity to mention my struggling bookstore and my fledgling writing career in this public space.