Michael Stewart writes odd, short things that have been published in an array of journals and a couple of anthologies. He is the author of A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard), Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling), Sebastian, an illustrated book for adults (Hello Martha Press) and The Hieroglyphics (Mud Luscious Press). Later this year, Mud Luscious will be printing his next book, Answers, a series of unhelpful, but hopefully interesting answers to questions submitted by strangers. Currently, he lectures at Brown University. More of his work can be found at: strangesympathies.com.
His story "A Humiliation of Sparrows" appears in Issue Forty-Five of The Collagist.
Here, Michael Stewart talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about the lonely life of hoarders, the art of trimming details and the class distinction between the sparrow and the martin.
1. I’m always curious about the origin of a writer’s story. What was the seed for “A Humiliation of Sparrows”? There are a number of fantastic images throughout the piece. I’m curious if it started with say, “a lone downy feather falling like the first sign of snow” or the rewarding “smell of burning feathers”? Or did it begin somewhere else entirely?
My father tends to hoard things. He has binders of dead money, boxes of old trophies, rows of gutted pinball machines, more boxes stuffed with various magazines. This has always seemed to me a lonely way to live. Those boxes of newspapers or tools or board games start to make the walls of your house thicker, more impenetrable, and the rooms smaller, less livable. So, mostly this was an attempt to work through some of those ideas, and to imagine, really to delight in, the idea of tearing those walls down.
Additionally, I was looking into the history of the nouns of venery—a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens—and I came across a humiliation of sparrows. Sparrows have always had a particular place in my personal mythology, and something about that phrase opened the story for me. The rest was almost dictation.
2. Kate is a character that we only catch glimpses of, but is essential to the story. As a first-person narrative that deals, in part, with loss, I wonder if you could talk about the process of writing Kate’s character. Did earlier drafts spend more time with her? Or did you know going in that her character would be one that the narrator could not linger on for any extended period of time?
Aw, Kate! I spent a lot of time mapping out their relationship: how they met—on the bus, they talked for a week before he asked her out; their honeymoon in Alsace—his first and last trip out of the states, her third; and etc. Early drafts made more mention of her and hinted at her illness, the isolation is caused, but with each revision I trimmed back those details. It felt important that she only be represented by physical things, that any information we got about her should be sparked by objects in his collection.
3. I couldn’t help but think of Poe’s “The Raven,” as I read your story. Did Poe’s poem inform your story at all? I also felt compelled to look up information online about sparrows. One site states the sparrow calls on us “to keep our burdens as light as we can in order to avoid a heavy heart.” I thought that quite fitting for your story. At what stage in drafting did you start to consider the type of bird you would have your character deal with?
I didn't have The Raven or The Tell-Tale Heart in mind when I wrote the piece, but when I reread the story it is obvious that they were influences. You can't—and I can't imagine why you would want too—escape anyone you read under the covers with a penlight anymore than you can escape where you are from.
Sparrows, as I mentioned before, have a personal meaning for me. My mother was one of those backyard aviarists with a mania for purple martins. She bought books on attracting them, which lead her to putting up a tin birdhouse shaped like some Victorian manner in the center of our backyard. It had dozens of holes for the birds to crawl into, and it was so tall we had to sink it into the ground with a cylinder of concrete. Martins are impressive they dive a lot and the glimmer a bit, so everyone tried to cultivate them. She was, if I remember, pretty unsuccessful and inevitably sparrows would take over the cubbies intended for the martins, and my mother, just as inevitably, would lower the birdhouse and remove their nests. They were just balls of dried grass and a few eggs. For some reason I could never figure out, sparrows were pest; kids shot them with BB guns. This of course gave me an affection for them. I dreamt of littering a tree with birdhouses intended only for sparrows.
As I grew older, I couldn't escape the idea that this was all about class. We lived in one of the more rundown, prefabricated houses at the time and there was something aristocratic about the martins, something selective and precious that you couldn't buy. A group of martins is aptly called a richness. Sparrows then were more like us. Numerous and capable of living in between places, places intended for others from which inevitably banks or circumstance would remove us.
The story is about lack and the kind of pull, or orbit, lack creates. Just as Poe's narrator reads everything through the lens of Lenore, so does our narrator through his grubby altars to Kate. I mean, The Raven is really a mundane story. It's the lack of Lenore that turns an inconsequential event into a horror. The raven is no more than an echo, you have to supply the scream.
4. What are you currently working on?
Well, I am finishing up The Answers, a three-year-old project where I have been soliciting questions from strangers online and answering them in unhelpful, but hopefully poetic ways. The questions have been surprisingly great: everything from, "How did you lose your virginity?" to, "How do I remove a mustard stain?" It's been a lot of fun to write. Everyday there is a fresh prompt sitting in front of you and at least one unknown reader interested in what you have to say.
5. It’s summer time. What do you have on your reading list?
My reading list? What a wonderful question, here is what is on my nightstand: Wonderful Investigations by Dan Beachy-Quick; A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck (I love this bit on page 107: "The Germans say, 'That man has no ghost in him.' They say of a poor wine, 'This is an unghostly wine.' Thy say a person can be Rich in Ghostliness. That a person of wit possess ghost."); American Science Fiction edited by Gary Wolfe (a fantastic two book anthology of the early stuff); They Live by Lethem (I love this series); The Literary Conference by Aria; Kingdom Come; the most recentHawkeye comic (one of my favorite runs in years, but it's still no Hellboy); Remainder; The Lazarus Project by Hemon;The Giant O'Brien by Hilary Mantel; this seems a good of time as any to mention that the Japanese have a word,tsudoku, for people who collect books with no regard for finishing them; Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum; The Original Laura by Nabokov; Second Sex—de Beuvoir (should be required reading); Seamstress in the Wind, another by Aria;Red Doc by Carson (is Carson our greatest Canadian import?); The Lords of Salem, ghost written by Brian Evenson (I appear, briefly, on page 106); Intimate Memoirs, Simenon's memoir (he fascinates me, for example he claimed to have slept with 10,000women and he wrote nearly 400 books, if you count the novellas); But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer (recommend to me with such enthusiasm by Mona Awad); The Secret History by Donna Tarrt; Cinema Stories by Alexandra Kluge; All That Is by James Salter (I just interviewed Salter about this book, and he is, without reservation, my favorite sentence writer); and speaking of great sentences, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard; Memorable Days—Salter's memoir (rereading for the interview); Out of Sheer Rage, another by Dyer (who it should be said has take digression and made it an art form); The Devil by Maurice Garçon; Awkward Age by Henry James; The Invincible Iron Man (I'm not sold on the images: too many photo references—it's odd to flip a page and see a Pepper Potts panel that is directly lifted from a cover of last season's Vogue—but the story is fantastic); Recipes for Sad Women by Héctor Abad (the first book of his I've read, it's pretty great); Case Closed; Forgery by Jonathan Keats; The Complete Claudineby Collette (I always seem to have a book of Collette's near me); Xelucha an Others by M. Shiel; Modern Life, N+1;Magritte and the Enigmatic Left, one of the Simenon novels (I often find myself rereading the Margrittes unintentionally—there are 75 novels and some 30 stories. I discovered I had read this one before about 20 pages in, but I can't bring myself to stop rereading it); The Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier; and Cleavage by Chris Tysh.
There are usually a few more detective novels and a mound of comic books but I just cleared them out on an unexpected day off.