1) Where are you from? Why?
Memphis, Tennessee. Why? Because I’m an Old-Man-River delta dirt badass. Because if you wonder/wander off Beale Street and down an alleyway with your little three-beer tourist buzz I’m going to gnaw your phone out your fist and crush it between my kidneys—then I’m going to throttle you with a river stone I keep secreted in my Elvis boots. I love to throttle. (I also enjoy alarm bells, Lorcet, and the odor of WD40.) My Elvis boots were given to me by one King Elvis Presley, at a carpet-burn key party, circa 1983. I say given but really I was playing Elvis in barefoot Whiskey Pong. It was doubles: Muddy Waters and Elvis versus Booker T Jones and me. Later I jumped in Elvis’s little spleen-shaped pool (which he had filled with BBQ sauce) and made out with W.C. handy. The sky was big and low and broken like the underside of a quilted bus. The women arrived with spectacular cleavage and bags of bocce balls. Music filled the air. A metronome of split pills and stiff drinks. B.B. King insulted my mother. I said fuck you and Lucille is a gymnasium whore, too. Silence, finally. I was asked to leave, by blued-steeled Isaac Hayes…never bring a rock to a gunfight, etc. On the way out I left my shoes pool-side and took the boots.
2. Generate a relevant formula.
At some future time, meet Lady Gaga for drinks at a bass pond. The idea is BYOB + fishing rods + some Hank Williams Jr. songs on your IPhone + whipping persimmons in the air with sticks + later frying the largemouth tails over a low fire + they taste like some form of potato chips + you have this summer heat/beer buzz pelvic stirring + you and Gaga wading into the pond, holding hands + frog thrum in the air + she says what did I just step on, it was like a smooth football made of marble and you say it’s only turtles, you stepped on a turtle’s back + both of your underwears sprawled out on the bank + warm currents and eddies and toe-sucks of mud + 14 geese over in a honking V + you and Lady Gaga slipping away into the torn tops/swaying reeds of the cattails…I don’t know how you’re going to achieve this but make an actual date. This is going to take some effort, some persistence, now that Gaga’s all famous and etc, but we are a tenacious people. I mean look what Nick Nolte did with his looks and talent. Check out Mandy Moore. So. So? Make the appointment with Lady Gaga. Do it. Today. Write down the actual time and date.
Now just wait.
This is the best formula I know to avoid depression.
3. So you like fishing. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever caught?
Sipsey River, Alabama, I caught my first bowfin and brought it into my canoe, a bad idea. A bowfin is damn near prehistoric and armed with rows of serrated dagger teeth. It is also a Spaz. It flopped/twirled/hissed/clacked/seizure-assed all over my canoe. It destroyed my rods, my fishing tackle, my beer cooler, my bags of roasted peanuts, my little radio, my left shin, my right kneecap, and made my rat terrier leap from the boat and into the river. (I later found my dog way downstream on a sandbar island. He was pissed.). Never put a bowfin into a boat. It was like I invited Sam Kinison into my canoe and handed him a decanter of vodka and a fistful of throwing stars. Finally, I kicked the damn fish out. From that point forward, when I catch bowfin, I bring them to the edge of the canoe, reach carefully down with a filet knife, and cut the line. Sometimes the best way is to get near, but not too near a thing. Etc.
4. Your piece “Snakes” ran in Kill Author’s 6th issue. We loved it. Why was that?
It’s because we are taught to fear snakes but no one knows why. This of course becomes a metaphor for life. One day you ask why about everything you have been taught, or you never ask—and this will define your stay/short days/understanding of anything while slithering this rock we call Earth.
5. Another Kill Author contributor suggested that “Snakes” has the “urgency,” or perhaps the odor, of drunkenness. What role does alcohol, or inebriation, play in your writing?
In the writing, none, ever, though I do often edit while drunk. That’s one aspect of stage three of my drinking (I have 14 stages), to attempt editing. Past stage three, I go onto four: Impulsive Ebay Purchases or I walk the dog along the highway shoulder and down to the The Mouse (local dive bar that allows pets [or anything else]). And then further into five, six, the abyss. I never edit past stage three.
In the actual work, alcohol and drugs are often present. My work sometimes tries to explore the terrain of reality/appearance. Substances are a metaphor. I mean I place them as technique, hopefully with purpose. Look at us. From happy hour to reality TV to toilet-tossing to Just Say NO while taking more prescribed drugs than any other People to tanning salons to all of the odd hypocrisies we have with any sort of drug, caffeine to BioShock to heroin, “nerve pills” to robo-trolling to marijuana, chocolate bars to dog tranquilizers to light beer to Thomas the Train, on and on.
I like your term, inebriation. Sometimes I get hyper and write hyper and it makes my fingers glow and my head feel hollow and my pelvis a polyphonic horizon and all Gaga/Gaga/Gaga inside my grippy veins and etc. I can’t imagine another reason to write. It is intellectual play, it is fun.
6. What is there, and what should we do about it?
Nothing is there so do nothing. Unless you’re depressed that nothing is there. At that point, see Formula in # 2 above, or make something up to be there. Say _______ is there. OK, fine. There you go.
7. How do you describe your writing to yourself? Does it have a distinct voice? How does one identify a Sean Lovelace forgery?
I think everything is connected, so number one: juxtaposition. I leap and place and rage like boar-lightning, when I can.
Possibly humor. It’s tough to be truly funny on the page, so I fail a lot. But once in a while, humor, the real kind I hope, the type that has human layers, thought, certainly a strata that most likely including other emotions, some painful, some glowing…Again, this is just an attempt. Anything I do, I fail more often than I achieve the effect.
It took me a long, long while, many years of ripping off anyone possible, to have a voice, but I think I do, now. Naturally I still rip people off. Who cares? And go ahead, rip me off. Stealing is an act of love.
