Spotlight On…

When Matt Bell recommended Chad Simpson’s chapbook PHANTOMS from Origami Zoo Press, I immediately hit “buy now” because Matt Bell is, well, Matt Bell. I had already read Chad Simpson’s excellent short shorts “Let X” in Esquire and “Glass” in Guernica Magazine and thus greatly anticipated PHANTOMS. I wasn’t disappointed. You can get my full gush on PHANTOMS here, and can buy your copy here. I’ll reiterate this much from my review: “A3″ ends this stunning collection and drives home the idea, the hope: There is no nothing; everything that was still remains, somehow; everything we imagine exists, somehow …

Here’s Chad, center-stage. — Ethel Rohan

Writing-wise, where are you now?

I’ve been working mostly on stories of various shapes and sizes for the past seven years.

Now that I’ve written that down, seven years seems like an awful long time. But short stories were my first love. They were what made me want to write in the first place.

I’ve cobbled together a chapbook of little stories, which is out now from Origami Zoo Press, and I’ve put together a book of mostly longer stories, which will hopefully find a publisher in the not-too-distant future.

I’ve also written what I think is a young adult novel, and I’m in the process of wrapping up what I’m betting will be my final round of revisions.

Writing-wise, where are you going?

Like a lot of writers I know, I’m typically most excited about the thing that I’m about to write, the thing that’s just around the corner.

I recently began work on what I think is going to be a kind of conceptual collection of flashes and short-shorts. Working title: Book Two in the Sapphire Fairy Series. I suppose I should explain that title: It comes from one of the prize-winning stories in a local Young Authors contest. I saw the list of winning story titles by students from all of the grade schools and middle schools in Galesburg in the local paper a while back, and I decided to use the titles as prompts for my own stories, because I loved them.

I also recently began writing my first novel for adults. I’m hoping it’s going to end up being a novel, anyway. Working title: Mary Todd Lincoln Would Have Loved Me.

In the past, I spent a lot of time writing things that weren’t necessarily connected to one another. I enjoyed being a singles artist just fine, but I’m liking, too, working on “projects.” It makes me feel like an architect. Or a graphic designer.

What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

I come from a very working-class background, and so have always taken a working-class approach to writing. It’s still a fun job, without a doubt, but in general I think less about creativity and inspiration and more about showing up each day and rolling up my sleeves, getting dirty.

That said, I love music and art and films and am regularly and thoroughly inspired by them.

I also have the good fortune of teaching undergraduates for a living, and they are a continuous source of inspiration. I tell them to their faces that I am like a vampire, feeding off their energy, their courage.

Tell us something that most people don’t know about you?

I used to want to play professional baseball. And I was pretty good, too. I spent six or seven Indiana summers playing baseball, and by the time I was eighteen, a lot of scouts were phoning me up, wanting to know my plans. I ended up playing one season of college ball and then called it quits. During that season, before we traveled to Arizona for our spring trip, I checked out two books from the library: The Sun Also Rises and The Sound and the Fury.

By the time we’d returned from Phoenix, I’d decided that I was going to be a writer. I have no idea now what it was about those two books that made me think such a thing, but that’s how it went down.

In the end, I think all those nights I spent alone up at the baseball field, hitting ball after ball off a batting tee into a chain-link fence, were a pretty good way of preparing for this other thing I’ve decided to dedicate my life to.

How has the Internet impacted your reading and writing? What is the future of print publication?

The first three stories I ever wrote as an adult were finished in three pages or fewer, so I like to think that I’ve always been drawn to flash fiction or short-shorts, but the Internet has certainly brought more and better briefer fictions to my attention. It’s also, of course, made it really easy to find ten or twelve or twenty stories by some writer whose work I discover for the first time in some magazine. I can thus print out a “collection” of work published online by some author and become fairly acquainted with it, even though that author might not technically have a book available. I actually do this kind of thing quite a bit, and it would be a lot harder to do without the Internet.

As for how the Internet has impacted my writing: I’m not sure. I remember reading once something by Shya Scanlon in an early online edition of Hobart about how, when he’s writing a piece, he ends up thinking at some point about a magazine or two where he might end up sending the piece, and how this thinking ends up having its own kind of impact on the shape a piece might take. I have certainly been privy to this kind of thinking on occasion, and I think that the Internet — and my virtual proximity to various magazines and their archives — has influenced said thinking, at least a little.

Despite how much I love online publications — and publishing my own work online — it’s my hope that print publications will stick around forever, and I think they will. There are enough of us out there who like holding book objects in our hands — in bed, on the treadmill, the porch, public transportation, etc. We want to be able to write in the margins, and dogear pages, and just look at these beautiful beautiful objects all covered in words.

If you didn’t write, what would your life look like?

Writing has been such a big part of my life since I was eighteen that I’m not quite sure what things would look like if I didn’t have notebooks and Word docs hanging out, accumulating letters. I think I may have ended up being a sports psychologist, talking to athletes about their mental blocks, helping them get past them. Or an elementary school teacher. Whatever I might have ended up doing, though, I think I would have eventually found my way around to reading, to putting words down on a page.

Please do a five-minute free-write with the word “flock,” and share:

R was the first and only shepherd I ever met. R with his pink cheeks and trucker cap. R with his hair as white as…

R and I worked in the pallet shop out at the pig plant. I was a few months done with a bachelor’s in English, trying to figure out how to be a writer. He was nearing sixty and a lot of years without a full-time job so he could dedicate his life to his sheep, his flock.

I never walked inside his house, but I saw his sheep from the road. They milled about the yard, shaved or unshaved, dazed, drunk on late-summer grass.

His wife was a chemist up at the plant proper, but I heard the inside of his house was a mess, that it was hard to believe humans lived inside the place.

R liked blackjack, and I went with him and his wife to the boats sometimes to play. We got off work at eleven, stopped at our homes to shower, and then he picked me up and we were on our way to those boats kept afloat on hope and the Mississippi.

I would lose forty bucks fast and R would play for hours by-the-book. He kept a ledger, and each year he wound up somewhere between $200 and $300 ahead. I would think about how all he would have to do was raise the stakes, go a little nuts, and he’d be out of that pig plant forever. No more pallets drenched in fresh blood and chunks of porkflesh. No more ten-hour shifts wielding a crowbar and a nail gun.

I used to wonder sometimes what R and his wife wanted with some 22-year-old wannabe writer, why they asked me along. R’s wife was younger than he was, and pretty. On our last few trips, just a couple of months before R died of a heart attack sitting at a table at a wedding reception, waiting for his entrée to arrive, I would sit in the dark behind him and his wife as we shot through west-central Illinois on our way home from the boats after R had won another $25 or $35 bucks and I would wait for him to throw his arm over the back of the passenger seat and turn to look at me.

I would wait for him to ask me if I was ready to just spend the night at their place. I would wait for him to ask if it was OK for him to just sit on the sidelines and watch.

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Chad Simpson is the author of Phantoms, published in April 2010 by Origami Zoo Press. His fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, The Sun, The Rambler, Esquire, and Orion.

Chad earned a B.A. from Monmouth College in 1998 and an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2005. He lives in Monmouth, Ill., with his wife, Jane, and teaches in the English department at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.