Glenn Shaheen is the author of the poetry collection Predatory (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and the flash fiction chapbook Unchecked Savagery (Ricochet Editions, 2013). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Ploughshares, The Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Kalamazoo where he is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University.
His story, "Body in the Dumpster," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Glenn Shaheen talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about dismantling syntax, elaborate pranks and his second manuscript, Energy Corridor.
What got you initially thinking about and eventually writing the story, “Body in the Dumpster”?
I’m always running horrible scenarios through my head, and one night when I was throwing out some garbage into my apartment complex’s dumpster I imagined what I’d do if there was a dead body in the dumpster. That’s an easy call, though—just get the police. Then I wondered what I’d do if there was a hurt living person in the dumpster. I’d have to jump in, obviously.
I find the logic of your narrator fascinating, especially the way in which he distances himself from responsibility and action by constantly second-guessing what he hears and sees. What was the process like in creating this character/voice and how did it change, if at all, during revision?
Most of us in contemporary America have this voice within us. A homeless person asks us for a dollar and we imagine they’d just buy drugs or something, so we might say no. We read a story about climate change and think briefly about walking to get groceries, but then we tell ourselves it’s only a mile drive, it won’t hurt that much. We’re experts at choosing personal comfort over the wellbeing of strangers.
Near the end of this piece the narrator decides not to help. He claims: “I decided it was a joke. I wouldn't even call 911. Some kids probably laughing in one of the buildings around me. I almost fell for it, too, leaping into trash and bugs. So I just said ‘Fuck this.’ and left.” Could you speak more about the narrator’s sense of paranoia, of being the victim of some elaborate prank, and how this informed your writing of the story?
I don’t think the narrator truly believes it was a joke being played on him. He’s just constructed the exact scenario in which he wouldn’t have to even try to help, which in this case is a voice recorder placed in the dumpster by some imagined kids. Some kind of elaborate prank! Even if there was a slim chance that there actually was a dying or injured person in the dumpster, he should have still jumped in and tried to help. It’s just so easy for the human brain to talk us into doing nothing in situations in which we clearly should act.
You’ve published books of poetry and flash fiction. What does poetry provide you that flash fiction might not, and likewise how does flash fiction satisfy you as a writer in ways that poetry might not?
In flash fiction I feel more comfortable with narrative (even if it’s fragmented), or setting a piece in an actual place in the real world. I also feel more comfortable playing with/dismantling syntax in my present poems than I do in my present flash fiction. None of this will probably stay true forever for me, though. I’ve written purely narrative poems, before, and flash fiction that tries to function without standard syntax. In my poems I don’t usually like to include a central character, a first person who speaks about his injuries or suffering or victories. In my flash fiction I always want there to be a strong central voice that comes definitively from a character, even if it is filtered through the third person. I’ll write about “me” in flash, or a translation of myself at least, but that’s really not the kind of poetry I’m interesting in creating, though it does seem to be the vogue in journal pubs right now.
What are you currently working on?
I’ve got my second manuscript of poems all “ready,” if you can ever truly say a manuscript is ready. It’s called Energy Corridor, and it’s about connective and communal necessity from an interpersonal to global level, and its failure in our present moment, told through the filter of Houston, where I lived for six years.
You’ve just missed your connecting flight and will be stuck at the airport for the next eight hours. What books are you wishing you’d carried on to keep you company?
I have to take medication to fly, but I’ll pretend that I’m not a big fraidy cat and that I could actually read at an airport, ha ha. I’d love to read back through Great Guns by Farnoosh Fathi and The Year of What Now by Brian Russell for some recent poetry. The Voice Imitator by Thomas Bernhard would kill some time, but these three books are pretty short. I just read Devil on the Cross by Ngugi wa Thiong’o which was terrific and dense, and I feel like I need/want to give it another go, too. Also I’d probably have my week’s pull list of comics, to be honest.