Peter Schumacher's fiction has appeared online at The Summerset Review and Smokelong Quarterly. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and currently lives in Colorado.
His story, "Mars," appeared in Issue Sixty-Two of The Collagist.
Here, Peter Schumacher talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about genres, humor, and popular culture in art.
What was the original idea that led you to write your story, “Mars”? How much did the concept change from the first draft to the final?
About a year ago I wrote a series of stories about weird habits. I was trying to investigate the extent to which our daily lives are determined by habits. I didn’t revise this story much, but the composition took shape pretty slowly over a period of two or three months. The Mars stuff came suddenly one day and I was happy about that juxtaposition, and tried to see it through to its natural end.
How did you decide that the entire story should consist of one long paragraph? How do you think this choice affects the reader’s experience of the story?
I began to see that the story wanted to express an entire life, but it was achieving this through a very narrow, very focused view. To me, the long paragraph is both maximal and minimal in a similar way. It is expansive, rhythmic, entrancing, torrential, but it’s also completely unadorned and monotone.
What stood out to me as most unique about this story is the juxtaposition of the mundane with the extraordinary. A seemingly inconsequential act, picking the skin off of one’s foot, becomes how the narrator identifies the main character, the “foot picker.” In one part of the story we read a list of this man’s favorite menu items at a tapas restaurant, and in another part he is on a spaceship bound for Mars. What attracts you to this balance of oddity and the everyday?
Well, I like juxtaposition of tone, genre, situation, etc. Genres are like moods or beliefs or perspectives: one day we have this mood, that view, and the next day we’re somewhere else completely.
Also, the more outrageous the juxtaposition, the more fun you can have. I learned that when I was a kid watching The Simpsons, and nowadays I get the same kick reading Cesar Aira.
Another aspect that caught my attention was this fourth-wall-breaking moment: “It wasn’t true that his foot picking was a Freudian neurosis with its roots in a cesspool of repressed sexual urges. Nor is this an example of unreliable narration: I am simply stating that it wasn’t a neurosis. The foot picking was bad, it was gross, but it wasn’t a Freudian neurosis.” Why give a mostly third-person omniscient narrator this brief moment of first person? What are the benefits and risks of injecting a story with metafictional elements?
It occurred to me during composition that the story invites a Freudian reading—“Why does this guy pick his feet, and what does this all say about the author?” The metafictional moment is a playful, ironic defense against Freudian readers. A joke!
I’m not above jokes and I don’t think of metafiction as a risky technique. Rather it’s a staple technique—it has been in the fiction writer’s toolbox since the beginning. To me, metafiction is honest. Writers know they’re writing stories and readers know they’re reading them.
I’m also interested in this story’s references to television shows. For example: “He pretended he was a Ninja Turtle, usually Donatello. When he was an adolescent he worried over Donatello's sexual orientation. It seemed to him that Donatello was the gayest of the turtles.” Also: “His favorite shows were Breaking Bad and Mad Men. These were popular shows. The foot picker was impressed with the quality of writing in these shows.” How and why does popular culture intersect with your writing?
Popular culture is normal. That the foot picker liked Ninja Turtles when he was a kid or Breaking Bad when he was a young adult tells us very little about him. It’s only normal, and the same can be said for the vast majority of our lives. What we do is normal. We get up in the morning, eat breakfast, shower, whatever. And yet life feels urgent and mysterious at the same time. We can identify a person as a foot picker or Breaking Bad fan and this may be useful or descriptive to some degree, but ultimately no amount of labeling or storytelling will ever get to the bottom of what, exactly, a human life is. The foot picker is the foot picker, for sure, but that’s certainly not all he is. Identity is restrictive; you select a few pivotal bits of personal history, a few personality traits and hobbies, and there you have it: a sense of self! It’s the same in fiction—we use back story and action and physical detail and dialogue ticks to create a sense of character, but this is always conventional and limited; we’re always leaving out the vast majority of the picture and it’s impossible not to, because there’s so much going on at any given moment. That’s what Tristram Shandy is all about, right? The impossibility of rendering in fiction the totality of an individual’s life, because life always escapes perfect expression. Life is lived and experienced, but it can never be fully expressed through art. All art can do is suggest or point and that’s a wonderful thing, totally enough.
What writing projects are you working on now?
More stories.
What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
Recently I have read and loved: Gerald Murnane’s The Plains, Eihei Dogen’s Genjo Koan, and Mijenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro.