<\/p>\n
TC: Without getting too heady about “what constitutes a novella” was the Stonedust format one that you enjoyed, and is it something you see yourself doing more of?<\/strong><\/p>\n I really enjoyed it, though I never had plans of pursuing this form, which is usually seen as unpublishable. And I don\u2019t have immediate plans for another. I thought Stonedust would be twenty-five, maybe thirty pages at most. But the length was probably a result of the process, which was basically me writing the first scene years ago and then having no idea where to go with it. I had tons of images and scenes and little moments in my head but no idea what the exact trajectory of the story would be or where this guy was going to go. So it stewed and simmered in my brain for about four years, and I think by the time I figured things out it turned out I had a lot I wanted to get down on the page. And once I realized it was going to be over thirty pages I just said fuck it and decided to let it breathe.<\/p>\n The main character in Stonedust is a former pitcher, so let\u2019s talk baseball. What\u2019s your favorite position?<\/strong><\/p>\n The closer. I know it\u2019s become a ridiculously specialized position, but there\u2019s something so cool about the very best closers. In the novella, Luke was a starting pitcher and thinks about the kind of warrior mentality it takes to stand out there all alone on the mound. But that\u2019s amped up so much for closers. They\u2019re like placekickers taking the final field goal attempt in football, except with actual respect from their teammates, because, in their own way, they sometimes get hit hard. And I love the theatre of it nowadays, with closers trotting out to entrance music like professional wrestlers. It\u2019s ritual. I\u2019m just really into ritual these days.<\/p>\n The obvious follow-up here is: what\u2019s your intro music? <\/strong><\/p>\n It would have been \u201cThunderstruck\u201d but I think that was John Smoltz. I think I once tweeted that it would be the Stones \u201cGimme Shelter\u201d even though it has nothing to do with baseball. That or Bob Seger \u201cRamblin\u2019 Gamblin\u2019 Man.\u201d<\/p>\n Good choices. And what about your entry? Do you sprint to the mound or take the slow approach?<\/strong><\/p>\n Like pro wrestlers, there\u2019s sprinters and there\u2019s the methodical. I like the slow entry and drawing out the moment. I think all this begins with Wild Thing Rick Vaughn in Major League<\/em>. There\u2019s so much drama with the closer and there\u2019s no time to recover. The highs are so high and lows are so low.<\/p>\n What about Luke resonates most with you personally? What would you like readers to take away from him?<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot more of me in Luke than I should probably admit. I guess I envisioned myself if I were turned up to eleven\u2026 took those moments of personal depression and failure and ratcheted them up to a place I sometimes want to indulge in but usually manage to hold back from.<\/p>\n I\u2019m fascinated by professions where people peak at a very young age and are has-beens by the time they\u2019re forty. The idea of aging athletes who become coaches or broadcasters or car salesmen and know they\u2019ll never again touch the glory of youth, when they couldn\u2019t appreciate any of it. I\u2019m writing a story now about a woman who\u2014in her early twenties\u2014was a model and Hollywood actress and is experiencing the same thing\u2014the loss of physical strength and beauty, which we have for such a brief time.<\/p>\n I want people to look at Luke and relate, in their own ways, to the idea of trying to retrieve the irretrievable and how the same goals and glory that propel us in our youth can haunt us afterward if we obsess over them.<\/p>\n And if writers had Topps cards, what would yours look like?<\/strong><\/p>\n Man, if writers had baseball cards we\u2019d all be so vain about the picture on the front. I remember my favorite cards being the ones that said \u201cIn Action\u201d and where, instead of posing by the dugout, the guy would be sliding headfirst into second or something. Maybe my writer card would be me \u201cIn Action\u201d sipping coffee at my laptop with my cats crawling over the keyboard. Exciting stuff.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Your debut collection of short stories,\u00a0Freshwater Boys,<\/i>\u00a0was so firmly set in Michigan; what was it like to write about Mexico, and is this something we might see more of in the future?<\/strong><\/p>\n Not necessarily Mexico. I don\u2019t have any more Mexico stories in me at this time. But I\u2019m definitely interested in branching out from my home base. A couple of my new stories are set, in part, in Canada. I\u2019ve traveled quite a bit through Europe over the past five years, so there\u2019s a good chance some of those locales will come into play. With\u00a0Freshwater Boys<\/i>, once I saw the initial link of geography between the early stories, I think\u2014consciously or unconsciously\u2014I started writing stories that had more direct connections to the Great Lakes.<\/p>\n The setting is tranquil in a way: art, birds, sweet liquor, pools, nice weather\u2014a paradise, really. But the paradise is flawed, or at least in danger. Did you see this setting as being essential to Luke\u2019s story?<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019d done some reading about the Mexican tourism industry trying to fight the tarnished, violent image of the country through marketing. Despite the obvious physical dangers that Luke ends up confronting, I still see his own habits\u2014his own self-destruction\u2014as far more of a threat to him. The guy\u2019s lost in himself. In his own head. He can\u2019t appreciate paradise when it\u2019s all around him, and when larger forces threaten those close to him, he can\u2019t appreciate them or sympathize with them because none of it compares to his own personal, egocentric concerns.<\/p>\n Do you recall the first scene you had in mind, or maybe one big stand-out that really served as the foundation for the rest of the story?<\/strong><\/p>\n They weren\u2019t complete scenes or dramatic action; they were more strong images like hummingbirds. I taught a fiction workshop in Puerto Vallarta and the birds were everywhere. I had written a line during a writing exercise with my students about how the hummingbirds could out-fly their own sound. About how their wings flapping was like a ventriloquist in a way. I didn\u2019t have a thread of narrative, and I didn\u2019t know how the character would develop. I needed to figure out his backstory, about Luke\u2019s broken down body and his development in his 30s. Connecting that backstory with images and lyrical moments is a bit like connecting the dots.<\/p>\n The amount of booze in the story is reminiscent of the Lost Generation. I know you\u2019re a fan of Hemingway and that you recently taught a class on Hemingway in Spain. Did that experience and immersion have any influence on the writing of this story?<\/strong><\/p>\n Maybe at an unconscious level. It\u2019s been fun over the years to write in some of those places overseas where Hemingway drank. Filling pages in a notebook at the Caf\u00e9 Iru\u00f1a in Pamplona or at Harry\u2019s New York Bar in Paris. But the drinking culture of those novels from the twenties is highly romanticized, of course. The writers were young and strong and beautiful at the time, and as readers we\u2019re usually young and strong and beautiful when we discover them, so it\u2019s easy to overlook the fact that the characters in\u00a0Gatsby<\/i>\u00a0or\u00a0The Sun Also Rises<\/i>\u00a0are imploding. Drink is killing their relationships. It\u2019s making them violent. And as those writers aged, a lot of what happened to their characters eventually caught up to them, too. In the story, Luke is living in that borderland where the glamour has recently gone rotten.<\/p>\n With that in mind, who is the real sympathetic character in the story? Luke\u2019s wife, his family? Because in an odd way they seem like the villains, but then he\u2019s a bit of a villain himself.<\/strong><\/p>\n I was really concerned that he was too hard to sympathize with. I said to my wife that he would be too much of an asshole for the story to work. In the first draft of the story I didn\u2019t have the scene where Esteban loses his cool. I needed someone else to freak out so Luke could see that other people had problems\u2014to make him a little more self-aware. I wanted Esteban to be the one you love but, like in a marriage, if one person is really stressed, the other person naturally becomes calm. If the calm guy freaks out and is up against it then it forces the other to shift gears.<\/p>\n Your own drink of choice?<\/strong><\/p>\n Late morning is coffee. Nice restaurants is martinis. You\u2019ll be happy to know I stopped buying cheap beer. I like Founders IPA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Once I realized it was going to be over thirty pages I just said fuck it and decided to let it breathe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[232],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bull-interview","writer-tim-chilcote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17729,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6483\/revisions\/17729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}