False-Starts,
Full-Stops, and Ice-Cold Thumb Drives
The longer life goes on, the more it takes on for me this kind
of David Lynch blue-wraith dream-state where everything, the eggy binder of
reality, could just come apart and slip away in the next frame. (Couldn’t it though?)
And so, it’s been a long, strange trip
getting here, getting this novel to materialize on this planet. Incredible, and in short, I’m stunned and
humbled: Unwarp Your Candy, this THING
I’ve been trying to will into existence for more than a decade, now actually
exists.
I started this book years ago in grad school when I was
roughly the same age as the protagonist, our ever-itchy Thomas Evans. Sometime afterward, I started submitting the
ms. around which didn’t amount to much.
I was learning how to engage the world while not understanding what my
place in it actually was. (How do you get a fucking agent? No seriously.) At some point the rejections
tallied up and I recognized it as a really good, slow fight—clean shots to a
face. Most to the guts. I wasn’t in fighting shape and the project
just sat. I questioned, as most writers
wonder, if I’d ever be able to endeavor with any seriousness on a new book
again.
But after a while, I came to wonder if Unwrap Your Candy might simply be an apprentice-novel—one that
could lead to another. Was I imagining a kind of Stephen Hero-situation? Sure, privately, sure. And would some heroic women I’d burn for retrieve
it from the flames? Again, sure. It’s just that it can get so binary with big
writing projects—success or failure, winner or loser. That’s all it can seem like. Conceiving of the book as something that might
lead to something else unblocked me, and quite honestly, pardoned me from the self-flagellation
I was used to. I don’t know how I did
this but I did. I’d ultimately begin
work on another project—this would eventually become ARK, my first published book, and soon to be rereleased from Common
Deer Press.
Unwrap
Your Candy sat around on a thumb drive in cold ectoplasmic storage for
years. I was a fool—I didn’t even think
I might lose it that way. (How many
stupid thumb drives have you broken or lost in your life?) Though maybe some part of me was hoping this
would actually be the case—there is a kind of quelling of one sadness by
weighing it down with another bigger sadness, right? I was sort of on ice there for a while too—removed,
working at night, writing during the day, everything out of phase and cut
off. Where it gets interesting and
harder then, I think, was what happened next: moving around a lot, dropping in
and out of a couple of near-career jobs, a kind of timeshare of my own identity—fast,
faster, fastest—the sizzling fever dream of your late twenties where your whole
world feels like Francis Bacon painting. Little did I know that this would actually
be an apprenticeship to my life as an adjunct professor down the line as I was trying
to find my way as a working writer while ingratiating myself within the
professoriate.
Eventually, I’d meet my Emily, who would go on to be my reader. Do you know what I mean by that? It’s the person who I am able to share work
with at various stages without feeling shame.
It’s as simple as that. Some people
find it awkward to share raw work with their partner, but I didn’t,
thankfully. It’s never been that way
with my wife—she’s it, baby. At some point, she encouraged me to revisit UYC and even gave me notes—good
ones. Christ, she even sat me down with
a copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
to help me get a handle on some of the snarling disgust stuff I had bulging
around in the book. She did this, of
course, because she saw something in what I was trying to do, and pointed me
toward a high priest who actually knew how to handle complex and unattractive feelings
on the page without engendering a disgust for the writer. My wife has a master’s in public health from one
of the best programs in the world, but she could probably teach a literature
class as well as I can most days. Emily helped to endow me with the kind of
energy I needed to really re-see and re-think about the book again.
From there, after a great deal of searching, I found a
publisher who was interested in my work.
Eventually they’d drop me, the bastards.
I won’t dwell on this—really, the work I did under that arrangement was
meaningful, and was ultimately a benefit to the novel. It was another good lesson, another good
fight to get in, I suppose. But lots of
shots to the groin. The world’s a cold,
cruel place for writers and artists.
Endless shit without fail, wall-to-wall.
Cliché, sure. But reality too.
Those ensuing months were bleak. Maybe I didn’t really write for a year or so. It wasn’t exactly like the ending of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, where our man has the butcher knife to his neck and then
reconsiders, but I had to come to that thought myself: Easy old boy.
Easy.
What felt like full-stops were more like false-starts. What it’s come down to, I guess, is if
everything could fall apart at some point, if that’s a real premise to living
and working and feeling your way through the world (and I am actually shocked to even imagine this), then
maybe, in some other, odder way, the opposite is also true. Maybe I’d rework my novel, I thought. And, well, then I did.
I would eventually find Common Deer Press and I am so
grateful we found each other. (How could
I not be?) I’m here now, the book is
here now, and the world may end full-stop tomorrow. But today, I’m sailing wild in love with the
way the book has turned out, and with the way so many things have turned out.
Unwrap Your Candy
Jesse Miller
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Common Deer Press
Date of Publication: September 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0995072985
Number of pages: 252
Cover Artist: Ellie Sipila of Move to the Write
Tagline: Imagine Woody Allen made a movie about Dilbert and James Joyce wrote the screenplay. That’s what you should expect from Jesse Miller’s Unwrap Your Candy.
Book Description:
Thom’s life has a soundtrack. Unseen glass phalluses—thousands of them—whirring softly along conveyer belts on the other side of the factory wall. The snap and splash of eggs against plaster. The scratch-fizz-tang of cigarette lighters being flipped again and again. A thousand throats swallowing a thousand swigs of beer; a thousand sets of lungs choking on a thousand French inhales. Hard fists sinking into soft flesh; soft chunks dropping onto hard sidewalks. Plop-flush-drain repeat. And moonsong, high above, forever calling and calling, “Stud, rub her with the Stud Rubber.” If only it were so simple.
Amazon.com Amazon.ca Barnes and Noble Common Deer Press
Excerpt:
He tried not to notice
Esther’s stomach cresting over her desk as he walked down the hallway. She
noticed him through the glass though, and as he peeled open the doors, she
began the procedure of rising from her chair. With only a few strides, he stood
before her, neck craning and head in a slight confused cock, as though peering
down into the unwrinkled skin of an empty swimming pool. Family photos lined
the edges of her desk, the frames gradually becoming smaller and smaller as he
surveyed from left to right. He tried to follow each picture frame, imagining each
one was a progressively smaller family member, like a nesting doll spread out
across her desk. He tried focusing on the four pairs of scissors variously
arranged in increasingly more libidinous positions, but mostly his eyes stayed
locked on her stomach.
–I’m very sorry, Mr.
Evans.
Her head shook gravely, and she pushed on her
thighs, both spreading in the limited facility of her ascension. Her entire
body, including her sour-bell ears, urged itself upward.
This was Step 1: The
Hand Plant.
The few of times he had
been in her office, this was how it had begun.
–No problem. No problem
at all.
Step 2: The Dismount.
This, predictably,
involved a groan or two. Today, though, there were three.
1) Emmmmmmmmmm.
2) Eeeaaaaaaaaaaaa.
3) Emmmmmmmmm.
With the added straining
sounds, he had difficulty not picturing her on the toilet. Her knees looked as
though they might buckle under the teetering gumdrop they supported, wrapped in
pattern-dazzle polyester. Momentarily, Thom was compelled to help her. It
seemed like such a waste, her standing routine—this long-standing routine to
collect his modest wages. He knew where the checks were, where it all was
located. He could handle it without a single groan.
She very well may end up
back in the chair or on the floor like an overturned truck. Would he have to
help her; would he be able to help her up? The deeper he thought about this
possibility, the more his mind began stretching away from the logistics, the angles
and leverage, the footing. He could see her without any clothing, could see
those two starving mottled gluttons squealing below her waist. And yet then,
just then, he was gone.
The pendulum swung the
other way. Now he desperately wanted her to fall. He felt passionate about the
fall. The polite mummery of suspension would finally be over. People should
point and laugh; she should be a shut-in, or filling the screen of a talk show,
or dripped on by a thousand pandemonic men. Beyond the beyond. He could crack a
chair over her head or slowly peel away her underthings to see if any
washcloths had been lost among the rippling waves in the sea of her stomach.
Make a million selling her body as soap.
Thom returned to the
rickety tableau before him and quickly extended a hand toward Esther. She
clasped firmly and smiled as she rose.
Finally, Step 3: The
Ascension.
She made it.
4) Ooohhhhhhhhhhh.
Thom’s hand returned
to his side after she released it; her feet tilled the carpet as she headed to
and from the safe. Her grey zebraic polyester pants, practically bellbottoms,
dripped past her off-white sneakers, and her back humped up, causing each arm
to come forward, closer to the ground. She stood in front of him. He smiled
fully.
–Forgive me, Mr. Evans. I
apologize.
She passed him the check,
her wedding band strangling her ring finger.
–Not a problem. No big
deal.
He reached forward to
take the check then quickly withdrew.
–Have a pleasant weekend,
Mr. Evans.
One long white hair swung
slowly from her protracted chin.
–Yes, you too, Mrs.
Polly.
Thom raised his cheeks
lightly to show her a slight smile then spun around, arms outstretched like a
tornado. Had someone been behind him they would have collided. The cracking of
teeth. A human toast. Maybe he shouldn’t have assisted. To help is to
whelp. And, as long as “maybe” is in
play, maybe he should not have delayed the enormous man in the cra behind him.
Maybe he’s a dentist. Or a doctor…or a liposuctionist. Thom passed through the
office, closed the door, and dreamed of pulling it off the frame.
I am a writer and a teacher.
I tutor and mentor students working on a variety of writing projects.
I'm always looking for new ways to share my work and insights on teaching the craft of writing, and I welcome new teaching and workshop opportunities. Please feel free to contact me to read from Ark, or my forthcoming novel, UYC!
1 comments:
Thanks so much, Roxanne, for hosting Jesse and Unwrap Your Candy!
Jenn
Post a Comment