Spotlight On: Court Merrigan

Today we talk with Court Merrigan about life and literature in Thailand, why Dystopian fiction often fails, and how Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of Black Swan events inform and shape the life of a writer.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from?

From somewhere no one’s ever heard of, the Nebraska Panhandle. As an adult I like the obscurity of the place, though of course I hated it growing up. The Panhandle forms the borderlands between the corn plains and the Rockies. There’s a lot to see there, if you know how to look. Took me a long time to figure out how. Thirty-three years, more or less.

Your prior blog had the tagline “Competing with dead men.” Is this statement born out of a disappointment with modern literature? If so, why?

It’s a line cribbed from Hemingway. It seemed appropriate at the time, but the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realized that the whole idea of competing opens up oceans of confusion. A competition means winners and losers, which means deciders upon who are the winners and losers. Who gets to decide? Who are the gatekeepers? Who gets to choose them? By what standard? What does it even mean to win, or to lose, in literature? Who gets to decide that?

You see what I mean. You’d never get to the end of that question, and you’d never get any writing done in the meantime.

Not that I think there isn’t good and bad writing. Clearly there is. But it’s not some sort of brawl or foot race, as Hem had it.

Nowadays I don’t use a tagline at all.

What makes good writing good and bad writing bad? On the good side, who does that in a way that inspires you to write? Who does it so well you think about quitting?

Bad writing has something to do with too much repetition, clichés, overuse of passive tense verbs, too many ~ly adverbs, overly complicated sentence structure, pronouns that lack antecedents. Nuts and bolts. No formula for the proper use of the elements of English exists that I know of, but improper use kills the kinetic shimmer that good writing crackles with, that makes you feel the words at the base of your spine.

To me, writing is ultimately a workaday task, a blue collar endeavor. Inspiration is good for a page or two. Beyond that it’s work.

Right now, I am reading everything by Scott Wolven I can wrap my sweaty palms around. He is a superlative writer who makes me wish on a near-daily basis that I was him, and he was even better. Brad Watson is another, and so is Douglas Glover, who wrote the fantastic The Life and Times of Captain N, which I just finished. I also wish my writing brimmed with the energy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

There are legions of excellent writers working in obscure internet nooks, in barely-read journals. It’s a sort of golden age of writing, I think, even if that’s hard to see that for those of us toiling in that obscurity.

Every time I pick up anything by Nabokov, I end up thinking well, that’s it, then. Nothing left to say. Might as well go to law school.

Tell us a little bit about what it was like living in Thailand and how it compares/contrasts to life in the States. What sort of literary culture exists there?

I lived abroad for about a decade, in Japan and Thailand. Thailand for five years, the last two in my wife’s village out in the rice paddies. We lived in a family compound with thirteen family members within shouting distance. Nonetheless the imperative to earn a living remained. So I got up every day and commuted to my teaching job. I didn’t get to spend all my time staring at water buffalo and furiously scribbling at my desk in pools of sweat, is what I’m saying. Once the exotica wore off, which didn’t take all that long, I had a workaday life in Thailand, only with hotter weather and food. I had to fit my writing in as I do now, around the exigencies of work and family.

Having said that, the expat life does allow freedom from some of the grinding details of daily American life — the liabilities, the paperwork, and the entertainment options. So to that extent I was able to be a lot more focused. I worked, played with my daughter, and wrote. In retrospect it was a fine simple life, and sometimes I miss it.

There are some Thai writers I like — Chart Korbjitti, Pira Sudham, Kukrit Pramoj — but I couldn’t really speak to the literary culture. I can’t read Thai, for one thing. For another, I was pretty isolated most of my time out there. I never had internet at home, for instance. I preferred it that way but the upshot is I never got involved in any sort of literary scene or whatever.

Tell us about the origin of “The Haymaker’s” and what sort of world we’re being presented with here. There’s a real sense of the Dystopian in this and I’m curious to learn more. Is it part of a larger work? A series of linked stories?

“The Haymaker’s” is actually a chapter from a novel manuscript. So far it’s the only part to see the light of day. With any luck, more sections will be appearing in due course.

Like a lot of people, I’ve always been attracted to the apocalyptic, but over time I’ve become less and less enamored of the massive, world-shattering, Mad Max scenario. Also, apocalyptic works tend to disproportionately take place in cities and I always wondered, what about the folks out on the farms? The small towns?

So I imagined a world in a slow free-fall, all the past sureties and structures slowly winding down, and folks coping as best they could. A time when the glories of an interconnected, cheap-petroleum past were right there, but no longer reachable. So you’ve got a couple kids riding a horse down the shoulder of a crumbling superhighway looking for their dad.

In the Third World you might see a water buffalo tilling a rice paddy within sight of a petrochemical factory. So in a sense what I did was take the inverse of that, and set it in on the fringes of the American West.

What I liked most about “The Haymaker’s” is how even in this world of new and different demands, the characters are unable to escape their basic human desires. I’ve read several Dystopian stories and a good percentage of them spend so much time on world-building that they neglect what it really feels like to live in such a place. In the larger scope of your novel, how do you manage these competing narrative elements? Does character or world-building end up taking over?

I think it is very difficult to create a convincing futuristic or even science fiction story in one short story, especially one that is under 5000 words.  ”The Haymaker’s” was not created out of whole cloth by itself; it’s a part of a larger narrative, and that is why I think it works. At least I hope it does! The characters inhabit their world in the same way they do in the chapter before and after this story, and so are “natural” in that sense.

I spent a lot of time and about, I don’t know, fifty or so drafts, fine-tuning the world the characters inhabit in the larger novel manuscript. It helped, of course, that this world happened to be an extension of the milieu I grew up in, with some dystopian tendencies taken to logical extremes.

But I only built that world after I had the characters firmly in place. I dreamed up the brother and sister in this story long before I imagined a world that went south on them. For me, the world the characters live in is incidental to the characters themselves. A dystopian setting is a way to draw out certain aspects of the characters.

I notice what you’ve seen about sci-fi stories, especially dystopian ones, and even more the real high-concept ones. For me, stories that only explicate a world but fail to inhabit it with moving characters are just not that interesting. This is why the Star Wars prequels are so bad, for instance. A mechanistic world with all the moving parts, populated with characters about as interesting as wood slabs.

How do think setting affects characters? Or for that matter, how does place affect people? You’ve been in at least two decidedly different cultures. How has that affected your thinking or how you perceive the world? Did those experiences inform your writing?

I think there’s definitely interplay between the two. In fiction you can calibrate this by taking and leaving what works for a given plot or character. Of course, you have to have some familiarity with the culture and place you’re talking about. On the ground experience, I mean, not just some clicking around on Google.

For me, the decade abroad in Japan and Thailand and traveling opened up lots of writing possibilities. I don’t think you have to be an expat or climb to Everest base camp or bribe sandaled teenage foot soldiers with cigarettes and Coke at the edge of Khmer ruins to be a writer, but experience has certainly given me lots of fuel.

Right now I’m especially interested in bicultural characters; the children in “The Haymaker’s” are half-Thai, although I don’t think that is mentioned in the story. I find it constantly fascinating to write about two cultures breathing in one person. Of course, my own kids are half-Thai, so naturally I have a vested interest in the topic.

Living abroad, needless to say, broadens your perspectives; but conversely it also gives you an appreciation of the local, the parochial, and the insular. Great value resides in narrowly defined communities, especially rural ones, to say nothing of the fictional possibilities.

Earlier you mentioned Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Do you think Black Swan events have any relation to literature, either in publishing or writing?

Hell, just getting published is a Black Swan, isn’t it?

Taleb uses the wonderful phrase the “antechamber of hope” to describe the place where writers and other hopeful folks reside. Working and waiting and working and waiting, all while operating under the appearance of continuous failure. You can try to shrug that off, try to convince yourself that you work for art’s sake, that you do not crave recognition and success and, yes, money. You can try this as you are marooned on page 37 of your fourth novel manuscript, with nothing but hopes that have no rational basis in your own past. Meanwhile, your peers are buying nice houses and grand pianos for their brats.

The real cost of taking a real shot at the writer’s life isn’t the lost income (although there’s that, too), but in what Taleb calls the subtle humiliations at the watercooler. Faulkner pointed out fifty years ago that the writer has no place in American society. Little has changed since then, other than the growth of MFA-sponsored refuges, and your only choice as a writer is to keep on working. And hope.

Maybe you’ll get your big break, maybe you’ll get published in The Paris Review, get a hotshot agent, or sell 10,000 copies of your self-published Kindle book. But don’t count on it. As Taleb says, you may spend years working for a grand vindication that will never come.

If you are a struggling writer, you are not paid in currency. You are paid in hope.

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Court Merrigan’s stories have been widely published, appearing in decomP, Kyoto Review, Blackbird, Evergreen Review, Numero Cinq, Identity Theory, The Summerset Review, and others. After a decade of nomadic life in East Asia, he is at home in eastern Wyoming, having an American adventure with his family.