A Conversation with Matthew Simmons

Today we talk with Matthew Simmons about repetition, Drone music, and how to distract or engage the Great Ruminator.

Dark Sky Magazine: Tell us a bit about yourself. Where do you live? What makes you slump with boredom and what makes you girlishly excited?

Matthew Simmons: I live in Seattle, Washington, and have for the last decade or so. Before that, I lived all over the Midwest — Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin.

I think maybe I’ve gotten to the age where I don’t really register boredom anymore. Or maybe it’s just the fact that I own a smartphone now. When boredom begins to creep in, I can always check my email or Twitter. Also, I really enjoy napping, so boredom seems more like an opportunity to me.

It’s also easier than ever to get me excited about something. Meeting someone’s dog makes me excited. Going to bed early makes me excited. Non-junk mail makes me excited.

BG: I was reading “The Wrath of the Weak” from your collection The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge and was struck by the repetition, mainly this:

It’s his.
It’s like razors, his shoulder blades. It’s like razors.
It’s like barbed wire, his eyes. It’s like barbed wire.
It’s like spoiled milk, his voice. It’s like spoiled milk.

Now, those are some startling comparative operators that are driven deeper into my mind with the repetition, but I’m curious if you had other intents there and what those might be. Can you explain your reasoning for the repetition?

MS: When I write a story, I type a sentence and read it out loud. And then I change it, and read it out loud again. And then I write the next sentence, and I read it out loud, and I read the previous sentence out loud, and I change that. And this goes on for a while. The repetitions tend to come out of a desire for a musicality to the writing, which follows from the fact that I am reading it out loud as I am writing it.

I want the stories to sound good when they are read out loud. But, of course, I don’t know how often people — other than me — read my stories out loud when they read them. So it is possible that the repetitions — which I think sound really good when you hear them out loud — are not as successful when actual readers actually read my stories. At least not in the primary way I want them to be successful.

On the other hand, a story with repetitions will include a lot of interesting moments of visual balance, where a word occurs and then repeats. You see and read “razor,” and then you see “razor” again, close on the heels of the first occurrence of “razor.” I like drone music and Agnes Martin and repetitions with slight changes, slight evolutions, calm my own sometimes hectic mind. A page with the same word on it a lot of times or with long gutters of white space can be really pleasant. I like the three It’s like’s in a row in the section you quoted above.

BG: I just read this paragraph while listening to Stars of the Lid’s album And the Refinement of Their Decline. An odd bit of synchronicity. Music like this tends to occupy a part of my mind enough that others are freed or at least not as labored with distraction as they normally are. Do you think repetition in a text might allow something normally glossed over or lost to be brought to the forefront? Any examples?

MS: I’m not sure. This sounds plausible, but it might take a neuroscientist to answer with any authority. The minimalist drones of a record like, say, DREAMWEAPON by Spacemen 3, affect me in two very different ways. I can put it on and let it spin around in the background, and I find that the anxious part of me is placated by that. With the Great Ruminator distracted, I can usually read without finding myself stopping to worry over something or I can write without finding myself stopping to worry over something. But sometimes when that manic part of me is otherwise occupied, the writing can come out a little dead.

Or maybe not dead. Maybe just quieter.

But then sometimes if I listen to it loud and careful and through headphones, I can hear all the stuff in the background — the audience, the wait staff, clinking. And then instead of being distracted, the Great Ruminator can take over. But he hates writing and he can’t really read. He can only sit and listen and rock back and forth.

So, I guess I’m saying it’s important to, if you want to use repetition, strike some sort of balance. Which I guess is what I’d say about pretty much everything.

BG: Do you have a favorite book(s) that you return to repeatedly for (and I hate this word) inspiration. Scratch that. Let’s call it fuel. What books make you want to sit down and write?

MS: I love to point readers to Ray Vukcevich’s Meet Me in the Moon Room whenever anyone asks this question. Ray’s stories are really bizarre and really beautiful and when I read that book for the first time, it occurred to me that any of the things I thought were rules about where a story should go were absolutely wrong. That as long as a story is true to itself, all other bets are off.

A recent book that did the same thing for me is Ryan Boudinot’s upcoming novel, Blueprint of the Afterlife. I started something moments after finishing reading that. I love how versatile Ryan is — how many things he can write about — while retaining his particular perspective. He can move into other voices, be true to those voices, and still be himself — still find humor, still skewer the skewer-able.

I find that reading work by people I know and have known for a while makes me want to sit down and write more than reading, say, George Saunders or Ben Marcus or Sam Lipsyte or any of the other authors I love but don’t know personally. Ryan, Shya Scanlon, Blake Butler, Matt Bell, Mike Young, Aaron Burch, Elizabeth Ellen, Amelia Gray, Matthew Specktor, Gabriel Blackwell, Bryan Furuness, Justin Sirois, Christopher Higgs, Adam Robinson, Lily Hoang, Molly Gaudry, Kevin Sampsell — and so, so many others. (I probably shouldn’t have started naming names because, invariably, I’m going to be missing someone I really love. Mary Miller and Kyle Minor, for example! See!) Maybe it’s me feeling competitive. I like to think that I want, on some level, to join in a kind of conversation with them. (Not that I expect them all to be reading me. Just that I want to put something out there for them to see if they have the time and inclination.)

BG: What do you mean by a story being true to itself?

MS: I think in this case, I mean internally consistent. The world of the story can be as far removed from the world we know as a writer wants it to be as long as it is as consistent to its own world as it can be. At least, that’s how I try to write.

BG: To expand a little on what you said previously about joining in a conversation with an expanding group of writers, is it more difficult now for a writer to engage the literary community than it used to be? We have the Internet, of course, which enables instant and world-wide communication, but with that easy medium we’ve also expanded the pool greatly, so much so it often seems like everyone is a writer and has a book. I have trouble keeping up. Is there a point where there is too much writing going on?

MS: My impulse is to say, “The more, the merrier,” or something, but you do make a good point. I’m sure I’m not keeping up as well as I could be.

I guess maybe I go in and out of the conversation. Sometimes I pay attention. Sometimes I lose attention. But, really, that’s what I’m like at a dinner party, too. So it makes sense to me that the literary conversation is like any other. Sometimes I’m paying attention to recommendations and reading lots of stuff online. Sometimes I’m hearing about a writer and following up leads and finding books. Sometimes I’m laughing at cat videos.

Maybe let’s all make a pact to forgive ourselves and each other when we miss something. And with said pact in place, let’s all say “The more, the merrier.”

_____________________________________

Matthew Simmons lives in Seattle with his cat, Emmett. He is the author of the novella A Jello Horse (Publishing Genius Press 2009) and The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge (Keyhole Press 2010). He is the interviews editor for the journal Hobart and a contributor to HTML Giant. More at matthewjsimmons.com.