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Notes from Purgatory:
An Interview with Guy Lancaster
Molded from the gumbo-mud of the Arkansas Delta one town over from me, Guy Lancaster was the first writer I ever met. He was a student at Arkansas State University at the time, while I could barely pass my high school English classes. At some point, a friend of mine mentioned that her cousin was a writer and offered to show him some of my horrible poetry. Instead of brushing me off, Guy was encouraging and friendly, so I kept writing.
But this wasn't the only thing Guy did: he also "Got Out". Prospects in the Delta were few, and here was someone who had beaten a trail out of the wilderness. He showed me that it could be done (and how) and I set out to follow that trail as well as I could.
In many respects, Guy remains a trailblazer. His first novel THE QUEEN OF PURGATORY is being released through an independent press, and he has also taken over as the assistant editor for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas project. (Check it out, it's still in the early stages: http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/)
Seems like ever since I met him, I've been a few steps behind Guy. That's okay, though. I've been on worse paths.
1.
Tell us a little about this book. How would you describe it to someone
who isn't familiar with your work? I like to see what I do as an application of some of the standard genre methods to the literary enterprise. In this work in particular, I’ve been influenced by two authors above all others—Brian Azzarello and Thomas Pynchon. Azzarello writes the comic book 100 Bullets (DC/Vertigo), which I heartily recommend to all who love good writing, for what he does is rare—he provides a mystery for the reader. There’s an event that has occurred in the past of all the main characters, which defines the action going on in the present, and though they all know what it is, Azzarello writes the dialogue and the action in such a way as to keep the reader in the dark, giving just enough bits and pieces each issue to keep the reader frustrated. But at the same time, he never ignores the characters, creating these fully realized men and women whose own small lives, often filled with pain, sometimes drown out the bigger picture. No one else so commingles the intimate and the epic. Except, of course, Thomas Pynchon, whose work, even more than Faulkner’s, makes us realize the inescapable connection we have with the ever-expanding past. I try to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 on a yearly basis and discover something new each time. “But what is the book about?” people ask. I would say: imagine some mix of Light in August and The Song of Bernadette, if you can, with a little bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark thrown in, since it does have Nazis, too. 2. Why Parkin? That kind of goes into how I got the idea for the book. My grandmother lived in Parkin, and one day, while visiting her, I took my girlfriend (now wife) out to the Parkin Archeological State Park, where I saw a flier for the de Soto meeting the Casqui re-enactment (advertised, in part, as a re-creation of the first Christian ceremony in Arkansas)—and suddenly, the book started to form, as they usually do, all from the thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if….” Knowing that de Soto was Catholic, knowing that Parkin was Baptist, knowing that one of the things evangelical Protestants have against Catholicism is its Mariology, and things just started taking off. Throw in the fact that Parkin had a German POW camp during World War II, as popularized in Bette Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier, and you’ve got a wonderful background for a book. So you
see, it couldn’t have taken place anywhere else, though I did run into
a guy from Louisiana who noted that his hometown had some Indian mounds
as well as a POW camp. Makes you wonder….
Well, as a novel about a community, I wanted to include as many different voices as I could, because this isn’t the story of an individual or group of individuals but rather of a town. As the reader will note while going through it, the book is divided into three main sections, each of which tends to focus upon a particular group of people. Now, I actually didn’t write the chapters in order but had a general outline and would write one for one section and then skip over and do one for a different section, which allowed me to put down a character if I was getting tired of writing him and focus on someone else for awhile. Though now I’m really working on writing from beginning to end, doing QUEEN OF PURGATORY that way did keep things fresh. 4. How long did it take you to write the book? Oh, it took about three years of me working on it on and off. When I started, I really wasn’t that disciplined about my work and often let little distractions get to me. And there were plenty of those—during the time I was writing it, I finished up my Master’s degree, changed jobs a few times, started work on a theology degree, and got married. So there were several long spaces when I wasn’t working on it at all. Only really with the last half of it did I start buckling down and making myself write. That’s key, I think—discipline. As much as I hated hearing it from my Marine Corps father and Army mother growing up, without real discipline, you can’t finish anything. So I got into the habit of waking up a 5:00 and working on the book for an hour or two. I’ve turned into a morning person, which is a bit creepy, but one advantage of working in the morning is that you’re doing it before all the worries of the day hit you. It’s just you and the blank page and the coffee pot. I’m now writing at a much faster clip, and it feels good. If I get some time later in the day to write, then fine, but at least I have my mornings. 5. You deal with some big issues in the book. Again and again, you present the hopelessness of the Delta, even going so far as to have two characters named "Faith" and "Charity," but no "Hope." You allude to Parkin, or the Delta, as a kind of Purgatory. One line that caught me, especially, was: "Purgatory is how long it takes to admit the past and then ask...for forgiveness." In a broader sense, are you talking about race relations, the history of atrocities in the south? It’s an interesting dynamic: we as Southerners (white Southerners) are at the same time intimately attached to our past and yet in denial of it. I mean, Southerners recruited ancestors like the Freemasons recruit founders, scouring the fields of history for various cavaliers and noblemen to whom we could be attached, and yet at the same time denying the import of some of our more recent ancestors’ actions. I’ve been reading in various Arkansas newspapers here of late letters to the editor from people who simply are incensed that the U.S. Senate might consider issuing an apology for that body’s failure to do anything about lynching so many years ago. Why should we apologize? they howl. Why should we be made to feel guilty over something which happened so long ago and which we ourselves were never directly involved in? I wonder sometimes if it has to do with the evangelical Protestantism that is so much a part of the culture down here. Salvation is a deal worked out exclusively between the individual and God, and responsibility for the past is wiped away the moment one accepts Jesus as Lord and Savior. A professor of mine once said that the logical end of Protestantism is that each person is his own church, and I think we see it here—there can be no communal sin, no generational or intergeneration sin, in the schema of this radical theology. That popes or presidents or prime ministers should occasionally apologize for sins decades or centuries old simply mystifies people, for though we know in our American and our Southern heads (our little white minds) that we have this land because we murdered for it, that we have these riches because we worked others for it, we dismiss that swath of history with the statement, “Well, I never did anything like that.” And it’s strange, because as Southerners, we love our history, we laud our ancestors incessantly sometimes, and yet we are never willing to take responsibility for their actions. We sit atop the pile of treasure which they looted from others and say to the victim’s children, “Well, I never stole all your money.” All that matters in the long run is my relationship with my God.
6. Do you think the same sort of denial of our past is predominate in some people's attitudes to politics?
The late comedian Bill Hicks talked about sharing his views on the Kennedy assassination with some people, only to have them say, “Oh, come on, Bill! Give it a rest—that happened ages ago!” “Well, okay,” he said to them, “then don’t talk to me about Jesus.” If you say that we should just forget Jim Crow and lynchings and slavery and genocide, the murder of union members and immigrants who just wanted a bit of dignity, and all the patchwork of pain and suffering that is as much a part of this country as July 4th—if you say that we should forget all of that, then let’s be thorough and throw out the legacy of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who, by logical extension of the argument, are just as irrelevant.
We live in interesting times, because so much of the current scholarship in Southern history is looking at the untold stories, the lives of the oppressed and downtrodden, in so far as they constitute the victims of a system, not of individual acts. For generations, Southerners have stoutly defended their ancestors against any and all criticism and thus have been able to embrace only half of their history. Perhaps someday soon, we’ll be able to admit that some of our saints were also inquisitors and crusaders, and then we might take the first step toward healing. 7. What led you to publish the book with Chenault and Gray? As I was finishing the book, a friend of mine, Jeane Harris, was having two of her books, originally published by Naiad, reissued by Chenault and Gray, and she suggested that I send them my manuscript. At that time, they were just starting up, though Stephen Chenault and Todd Gray both had been in the publishing business for awhile, having founded and run Troll Lord Games for several years. It was a rare sort of conjunction—a new press, eagerly looking for books to publish, but already having established distributor connections and such. Not to mention that it’s a Little Rock publisher who was started business reprinting two lesbian thrillers—obviously not too worried about catering to accepted norms. So I decided to go for it and ended up having my book accepted. Though there have been some delays in getting the book in print, as happens with any smaller press, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with Steve and hope to do so some more. 8. So you didn't seek out an agent for your novel? You went directly to the publisher? Was this the first publisher you'd gone to? No, I didn’t use an agent, and yes, Chenault and Gray was the first publisher I sent the book to. If I remember correctly, Madeline L’engle had to shop A Wrinkle in Time, which is now considered one of the greatest children’s books ever, to about sixty or so publishers before finding it a home. Doesn’t bode too well for me, now does it? 9. Italo Calvino said, in his preface to The Path to the Nest of Spiders, that "Perhaps, finally, your first book is the only one that matters...the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then, or never again." Have you started on the second book? Is it daunting to write another one? I have, earlier this year, wrapped up a collection of short fiction and the script for a graphic novel, both of which are in the hands of a publisher for consideration, and I am currently working on a new novel. I don’t find it daunting at all. In fact, I usually have a policy of not reading the first novels of anyone unless I really, really like everything else they’ve written. Usually, with a first book, a writer’s just getting his sea legs. I mean, who reads Rushdie’s Grimus or Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay? Of course, there are a few good first books, such as Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, and the early works of Ellen Gilchrist are pound-for-pound better than her later stuff, but for the most part, it takes a writer awhile to hit his stride. When Akira Kurosawa, during the filming of Ran, was asked what was his favorite movie, out of all those he had directed, he answered, “The one I’m working on now.” Maybe he meant Ran, but I like to think that he was making a commentary on the artist’s life, about not letting past works keep defining us—if what we are working on now is indeed what we most enjoy, then we are certainly blessed. 10. Any closing thoughts? As the Zen proverb says, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” That’s as good advice as any for a writer to take to heart.
- C.L. Bledsoe |
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