ROY KESEY - Interview



 
Photo Credit: Lucy Cavendar

BLOG INTERVIEW - AUTHOR OF THE WEEK
Author of the novella "Nothing in the World"

  


Hi Roy. Thanks for your participation. I'm always curious about the origin of a story and a writer's creative process. You've had an international life: born in California, lived in Peru and now in China, but your story is based in the former Yugoslavia and is about war, so I'm wondering where the spark of life came from for you to tell Josko's story?

A: Well, for that we’re going to have to dig into history a bit, I’m afraid. I am the great-great-great-great-(keep saying that, thirty-two more times)-grandson of Queen Jelena (“Jelena Lijepa,” Jelena the Fair), whose husband was Dmitar Zvonimir (King of Croatia and Slavonia, 1075-1089), and whose brother was King Laszlo I of Hungary. (And I say ‘grandson of Queen Jelena’ and not ‘grandson of Jelena and Zvonimir’ because Gojislav, the son of hers from whom I am descended, was illegitimate.) As it happens, Zvonimir died without legitimate issue (they’d had a son named Radovan, I think, or something like that, but he died in his late teens). Now, Zvonimir’s death occurred right after he’d committed Croatia’s army to assist in the First Crusade (organized by Pope Urban II--it didn’t actually get underway until six or seven years later) and it was whispered that Queen Jelena had something to do with Zvonimir’s demise, and perhaps with others, given that the following regent, King Stjepan II, only lasted a year or two, and immediately thereafter the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia was swallowed up by Hungary--ruled, of course, by Jelena’s own brother.

Anyway, so now skip forward 900 years: in January of 1990, Zvonimir appeared to me in a dream. No shit, it really happened. And he said that the one thing in his life that he truly regretted was sending Gojislav, my ancestor, into exile--that if instead he’d claimed Gojislav as his own, and raised him properly, the kingdom would have remained intact, and in Croatian hands. Then he said that it was my destiny to reunite the lands of Croatia and Slavonia, and to rule over them in a manner befitting Zvonimir’s own reign. (Not that he was any angel, but he did some good work--extensive social reform often benefiting the poorest and weakest citizens, strengthening the judicial system, outlawing slavery at a time when that was hardly the done thing…)

So when the war in what used to be Yugoslavia broke out, I saw that as the ideal opportunity to get to work. I traveled to Zagreb on a forged passport, and…

Oh, wait, hold on. Sorry. Let me just check my notes, I’ve got them here somewhere, and I think maybe the time-line…

Right, here they are. Sorry. Right, okay, so, there was no dream and no Gojislav and no royal lineage, and the reason I went to Croatia in 1990 was that I was chasing a girl. Yes, I remember that now. And then I went back in ’92 to help rebuild a friend’s house, except by the time I got there it was already rebuilt, so I caught up with him and other friends on the coast. The war was on, and things just kept getting weirder. The scene from the book, the thing with the waitress and the head, that happened while I was in Split, and I knew I had a story.


Q: Ha! You had me believing the royal blood line story. Oh, but that's another book! I mentioned previously that the story reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," not only because it deals with a young person's transformation as he experiences the anarchy of war, but also because of the attachment the reader feels to the young protagonist. Who are some of the authors who have had an impact on your writing?


A: Impact is a funny thing. Tony Earley saved me with a story called “Charlotte”--a gorgeously lyrical heart-wrencher about, naturally, professional wrestling. That’s when I knew it was okay to keep trying to be funny and odd at the same time. George Saunders and Nicola Mason deepened that sense when I came across them a few years later. Not that odd-and-funny is what I always shoot for now, but at the time it was all I wanted to do, and if I hadn’t gotten the sense that it was a legitimate project in spite of all my failure to that point, I might have quit altogether.

And speaking of wrestling, Carver and Barthelme are perpetually beating the hell out of each other in my brain--the tension between those two styles and sets of interests and whatever else is perpetually stimulating to me. In Spanish, Borges and Cortazar foremost, but also Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Ribeyro and Sabato. In French, Gide and Giono and Le Clezio. Back further in time, all the usual suspects, but especially Faulkner and Nathanael West, Flannery O’Connor, Durrell and Woolf.


Q: Even though the story is about war, it also seems to be about the need for peace. What were your goals with the story, when you first began writing this novella?


A: I’m supposed to have goals? Damnit. How come I’m always the last to know?

Let’s see. I’m as in favor of peace, and as despairing at its general prospects, as anyone else, but that’s not really what I was thinking about while I wrote. I wanted to make a world that could hold some of the things I was seeing and hearing and thinking about at that time. I wanted to play a little bit with the standard relationships between realist fiction and nonfiction and fables. I wanted to build a life. I wanted to get its details right. Will that suffice?


Q: Yes. That's a good answer. Can you talk about your relationship with your publisher, Bullfight Media, and what it is like to be on tour with the readings?


A: Bullfight did a really good job on the book, and the tour was fantastic. I met up with any number of terrific people--readers and writers, old friends and new, some family, some punk rockers in the throes of the music who even so were kind enough not to break any bottles over my head.

That phase just ended, at least for now, with a final reading at a bookstore here in Beijing called The Bookworm. It was just what you think of when you imagine an ideal reading--big crowd, folks laughing at the right moments, an hour of good questions at the end. Of course, there was the obligatory weirdness--someone asked, ‘If you could choose any one person to read your book, who would that be?’ I tried to get off a one-liner about Michiko Kakutani, and someone said--shrieked, actually--“Michiko Kakutani is not a woman!” Which set me back on my heels a bit. Not that I was going to argue about it, though, so we moved on to characters and their motivations, or whatever the next question was. And then a goodly number of us headed out for pizza and Beamish at the Hidden Tree--it’s a bar, see, with a tree--and it would be hard for me to imagine a better time.


Q: What's the writing life like in Beijing where you currently live?

A: As good as anywhere else, I’ve found. The writing life as such, of course, is everywhere and nowhere at once: staring at the uninflected wall, hoping for something to connect up to something else, hoping for the language to share its gifts. But then one has to get out of one’s head every so often, to stop mumbling about tapirs, to rub one’s eyes and look around, and Beijing gives me all kinds of nice corners for that. And the food is spectacular. Also, I think this is a really odd, schizophrenic time in the history of this city--all the more reason to be here.


Q: You write fairly regularly for McSweeney's. How did you first connect with them?

A: The first thing I sent them was back in 1999, I think, and Eggers liked it, but said he couldn’t publish it because it was set in New York, and he didn’t want any New York stories; he knew that was kind of weird, and apologized for it, but still, no New York. Then the first thing they published of mine was a very short, strange piece called “The Workshop”--this was in 2001, the issue with the They Might Be Giants cd. I’d never sent the story anywhere, because it just seemed too short and too strange, but then I heard that McSweeney’s was looking for just such brief weirdnesses, so I sent it to a guy who was reading for that issue, and it all worked out. (But not without some drama. Eggers called me in Peru to say that he liked it but didn’t want the ending to be quite so open, and could we talk about some options for closing it just a bit. Which, sure, so we started talking. And it turned out that the final paragraph had simply gotten lopped off at some point in the email-transfer-process before the story got to him.)

And over the years I sent them a few more, and some they took and some they didn’t, and then when my family and I were getting set to move from Peru to China, John Warner, the web editor, asked me if I wanted to do dispatches for the website. And I said no. I just had no idea how to go about such a thing. But then we got here and some funny stuff had happened on the way, so I gave it a shot. It took me a while to hit my stride, voice-wise, I think--the first few are pretty flat--but then stuff started to click. It’s been a lot of fun.

Q: What advice do you have for developing writers in order to improve their craft?


A: I have no business giving advice on anything to anyone, frankly, and while that never stops me in individual cases, I can’t think of anything non-banal (Trust your instincts! Trust your heart! Trust no one wearing batik!) that will be particularly useful to anyone.

Oh, hold on. There’s my answer.

Young writer, I say unto thee, beware all generalized advice given by writers in interviews. Especially if they’re wearing batik.

Q: Hmm, batik is the dead give away? What are the current writing projects you are working on?

A: I just finished a new story and started sending it out, and there’s another one through to the third draft or so. Ditto for a new novella. Plus some random jottings about another book, some sort of China thing, but at this point I don’t know what I want it to be. I know only what I don’t want it to be, which isn’t nearly as interesting to talk about.

Q: If you didn't write, what other creative outlet would you pursue?

A: I honestly can’t imagine. I suck at everything else. Maybe shuffleboard?


Thanks, Roy, for taking the time to answer these questions. Good luck and take care.