Stephan Eirik Clark was born in West Germany and raised between England and the United States. He is the author of the short story collection Vladimir's Mustache. A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, he teaches English at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. Sweetness #9 is his first novel.
An excerpt from his novel, Sweetness #9, appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, he answers questions in the form of excerpts from Sweetness #9.
What is writing like?
He rattled on like some excitable professor, speaking of abortion doctors stalked by pro-lifers and animal research facilities that had been ransacked by masked activists. He knew of a nuclear physicist who’d been blinded by battery acid, and a scientist with the CDC whose work with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines had so enraged the mothers of autistic children that the government had offered him the use of a new name.
"And you think it could be something like that?"
He squirted more cheese into his mouth, nodding.
I wanted to take a knee. "So what should I do? Call the postmaster general?
"Please. A man who deals in lost mail?"
"What, then?"
What isn’t writing like?
Oh, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, members of the Twitterati, hear my dolorous sigh. I had awoken at the age of forty-nine, wondering what I could do about my wasted, ill-spent life.
When you do it, why?
He picked it up, ready to dump its contents into the sink, but before he could, his nose passed over the test tube's mouth and he smelled something sweet. Something warm. Something light and somehow pink. He breathed it in a second time, drawing the odor deep down into his lungs, and it was so divine, a sensation so vibrant and alive, that he imagined he might float up out of his boots.
When you don’t, why?
My performance as both a flavorist and an administrator was suffering—so much so that I feared even Ernst must have noticed. I had become a born-again doodler, a man enthralled by open windows and spiders crawling up the wall. I was sure everyone could see it. My coffee breaks had become more numerous, my “working” lunches more lingering, and if I wasn’t coming in late one morning, I was cleaning out my test tubes and driving home early that same day.