All Things Pankish

Ask the Author: Erik Smetana

Catch up with Headlines by Erik Smetana in the February issue then enjoy our conversation about robots guarding St. Louis, fictional reporters and how everything is better when set to music.

1. “Headlines” reminds me of the Dadaist cut-up method they used to compose music and literature. Did you use the cut-up method to create “Headlines”? If not, what was your approach?

There is a part of me that wants to say I had no idea what I was doing and just ended up getting lucky, which for most of what I write is the truth, but in this case is oddly enough a lie.

One of my former MFA instructors, Mark George, told us a story about Tony Earley and his writing process as it were related to “The Prophet from Jupiter.” Without butchering too much of what Mark told us, the gist was that Earley had all these story fragments written on Post-Its or notecards or such things and in a stupor of some sort he started making this giant word collage on his floor — trying to force it together like a puzzle when you’re not certain you have all the pieces. So that was a bit where my head was at.

That said, the version PANK accepted was something like my fifth or sixth “final” draft. There were versions that were almost entirely comprised of news snippets, others that had no internal logic regarding the story within the story and how it all fit together, and some were shabby versions of what ultimately won PANK over. Those other versions collected a ridiculous number of rejections that I’m a bit embarrassed to share here (but ultimately, helped me figure out what the hell I was trying to do with the story).

2. What makes you stay in St. Louis?

Aside from the giant robots guarding our state’s borders? I guess the easy answer would be that this is where I’m from, where I was born and raised, where I went to school (both undergrad and graduate in-state), and where my family (what I have left of it) still lives.

What keeps me from moving elsewhere, at least in terms of my own writing and such, is that we have an outstanding literary community that only seems to get better year after year. From journals (River Styx, Boulevard, Natural Bridge, etc.), independent bookstores (Left Bank, Pudd’nHead, Subterranean, Big Sleep, and Main Street Books), writing programs (Washington University, SIU-Carbondale, University of Missouri-St. Louis and Lindenwood University), community based projects (StudioSTL and others) and more — the St. Louis area (at least the one I’ve discovered in the last five years) has so much to offer.

Though, like anyone aspiring to write and teach, I both fear and welcome the idea that one day I may call somewhere else home.

3. Describe your life in a headline.

Finding Yourself in 1,021 Easy Steps

4. Who is your favorite fictional journalist?

That would be a toss-up, depending on what decade of life I might be referencing: Kermit the Frog, April O’Neill or Clark Kent. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which journalist goes with which decade.

5. In the novel you’re working on, who would you like to see in the musical adaptation? Bonus if snakes are involved.

As long as Ben Gibbard wrote the score, I’d probably be pretty happy. Though, a cameo by Neil Patrick Harris in which he performs a song-and-dance that has nothing to do with the novel, but grabs the audience in the way that only completely unrelated third party creative additions in adaptations often do, I’d probably smile about that. And of course David Tennant would need to be involved somehow, that goes without question.