Ask the Author: Christopher Newgent
[J. Bradley / July 27th, 2011 / Interviews ]Christopher “ARMS” Newgent’s elegant fiction is part of the June issue. He talks with us about whiskey, burning, breaking up, and even his fiction.
1. What was the last thing you lit on fire?
Some pages from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) periodical, The Writer’s Chronicle, I used as tinder to start a campfire in my backyard. That probably sounds all FUCK THE MAN, but really, I gravitate toward newsprint for starting fires. Simple nostalgia.
When I was a boy, my dad owned a house with an old wood stove in its center. He kept a wicker basket full of newspaper next to it. Each morning in the winter, we scraped out the ashes, built the fire anew. He taught me how to crumple the paper into wads tight enough to burn hot and slow, loose enough to allow in oxygen to burn at all. Afterwards, my hands would be covered in black, whether from ink or ash I couldn’t tell. It had become impossible to distinguish between what mattered to the world and the remnants of what once kept us warm.
2. Does my apartment seem larger without your things?
Are you inviting me to see your apartment? Is this the new, “Would you like to come up and see my sketches?” I don’t know how to answer you.
3. When we break up, why do we burn things?
I’ve never been much of a burner, to be honest. Too much trouble, too much ritual. But, some people are predisposed to the cathartic ritual, and there is a ritual around fire that’s existed since before we could express ourselves in language. We dance around it, chant to it. Fire shows up everywhere in our stories as a way of purification or sanctification. We burned our witches and our heretics and our books. All these things we thought we wanted to forget. Somewhere deep in our history comes alive when burning old love letters, it’s like when we rip the liver out of a hunted buffalo and eat it raw.
4. How is the lit scene in Indianapolis?
I like how casually you’re able to say “lit scene.” There’s still a part of me that cringes when I call something a “scene.” Sometimes I wish I could use language without thought or regard to connotation, but I can’t. I’ve known people who say “scene” knowing full well what others think of “scenes,” and they say it in this, “I don’t give a fuck!” sort of way, which is silly, which is a lie. We are all of us liars. Generally, the more we say we don’t give a fuck, the more we do. And I appreciate people who are the most okay with saying they give a fuck. I personally give a rather large fuck, and I appreciate that about myself and I hope people appreciate that about me. I want people to give a fuck about the the city of Indianapolis, about its literature, and about the language they use to describe it. I’m finding more and more people here who give the same fuck, and it’s encouraging and wonderful to see, to feel less lonely. That’s really all I’m trying to do.
5. If you could drink whiskey made out of a person, who would it be?
The image this question brings to mind terrifies me. I recently went on a camping trip to tour 6 distilleries along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and learned a great deal about the process of making whiskey, one of the steps being fermentation in these huge cypress tubs called mash tuns. Carbon dioxide is one of the byproducts, and during a few of the tours, our guides warned us not to get to close to the mash line, because at a certain distance the air above the mash is almost pure CO2. They warned us of passing out and dropping into the mash tuns.
When first reading this question, I laughed. I thought immediately of Einstein or Ray Bradbury or e.e. cummings or maybe my wife because that would be cute. But upon further reflection, I thought of them drowning in the mash tun, I thought of them sinking into it, unconscious, unable even to thrash and fight for air. I thought I would never want to drink whiskey made from anyone ever.
6. Where did “The Last Time” come from?
Last year, I jotted down the line, “We are such flammable creatures,” on a napkin or a receipt or the inside of a matchbook. I thought it’d be funny to try to get people to incorrectly attribute it to Thich Quang Duc, that monk who set himself on fire in the middle of a Vietnamese intersection to oppose the Buddhist persectution. I posted it on facebook and tweeted it and stuff, and some people liked it and passed it on, but the whole idea was kind of silly and probably irreverent.
Awhile later, that line “suffocating ourselves with big, loud words” came to me, first thinking of it as a screaming match between a couple in a tiny apartment, they scream so much they use up all the air in their apartment and die by asphyxiation, but then the fire element came to mind, how fire is so much like a human, it needs oxygen to breathe, and how consuming anger and fire can be, and how hungry for change we all are, even if we say we’re afraid of it. Fire changes everything it touches. The only fire on record that didn’t change what it touched was God and the burning bush, and when I think of that, sometimes I get really sad because I feel like the burning bush.
I kind of lost myself there. What was the question? I feel like I’m always asking that. What was the question? What did You say? I think my hearing is going bad.
[...] mentioned this interview yesterday, and it is up now at PANK, and I’m really excited about [...]