Michael Jeffrey Lee is the author of Something in My Eye, a collection of stories. He teaches at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and Tulane University. Recent work has appeared in XO Orpheus, Gigantic, and Room 220.
His story, "Three New Ideas," appeared in Issue Fifty-Eight of The Collagist.
Here, Michael Jeffrey Lee talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about starting 30 stories at once, pulling knives on friends, and the literary scene in New Orleans.
What was the initial image or idea that triggered this story?
Well, the inciting image I would say was one of someone very close to me pulling a knife on someone else very close to me. The knife puller had just had his computer unplugged, and lost his sense of right and wrong. I promised both parties that I wouldn’t reveal who the puller and the unplugger were in this interview, so I won’t. As far as the form goes, I guess I thought it would be a little humorous to aim really, really low, just feature ideas rather than fully fleshed out stories, ideas and nothing more, eschewing both depth and maturity as I worked through them. Do you think they might go viral one day?
You play around with time quite a bit, shifting back and forth between the past, present and future. These shifts occur during climactic moments. Were they present from the get-go, or did they emerge later on in subsequent drafts?
It’s nice of you to say that I play with time, but I’ve I have always thought myself a miserably linear writer, incapable of telling a story out of order. I’ve had some editors that have helped get out of my straight-line mind, but rarely seem to do it on my own. Let me think. Gabriel Blackwell gave me some good suggestions but I don’t believe they had to do with those moments. So maybe I did create them! I suspect that I was thinking it would be interesting if the narrator kind of blundered through these climaxes, and in doing so revealed other things, perhaps not. To me these moments definitely destabilize things, they open up this other void maybe, which is always something I’m interested in trying to do on the page. I kind of like the cinematic quality of them too, that maybe these are the movies playing in this narrator’s head. I always imagined these toeing the line between movie and story ideas. One thing is certain, though: our cultural narratives have done something to this person’s head.
OK, I just checked it out, and it seems that these shifts were in the first drafts.
What I really enjoy in this piece is the ever present threat of violence. At times it manifests, at times it does not, but in all instances it ultimately leads to quiet moments of intimacy between the story’s various characters. Could you talk more about this decision and how you see it functioning within your story?
It’s a really interesting observation that you make about the intimate moments. To me they’re kind of everything, although honestly I’m not quite sure how they are functioning. Given what’s lurking on either side of them, for me it just makes the intimacy scarier, or funnier. I guess for me most lives constantly swing between intimacy and terror, albeit less extreme forms than the ones experienced by my dear characters. Ah, the tender repression that makes intimacy possible. That breakfast scene with Mom after his bath really cracks me up. I think that I saw this intimacy business occurring in the first idea and then found it happening in the second (albeit in an even more agonized fashion) and then I figured what the hell in the third. It felt a little glib at first but then at the same time it suggested all this weird darkness in the narrator/idea maker and so in they stayed.
I had the chance to visit New Orleans a few years back and noticed a handful of poets busking around Jackson Square. As a resident, how would you describe your city’s literary scene?
Are you suggesting that we’re just a bunch of bedizened, bohemian phonies down here, hocking our provincial propaganda to the stumble-drunk, schlock-hungry tourists? Well, some days it sort of feels that way. The city …has obviously been very successful at selling a certain image of itself to the rest of the country (as well as it’s own citizens)—a place of constant inspiration and authentic art-making. And the food…don’t get me started on the food, ha ha. I think that a lot of writers and artists here fall victim to this romantic, highly marketable way of thinking at some point in their stay here, and their politics go to complete shit. This place sort of crushes people’s imagination sometimes, I don’t know—it happened to me. I wrote a whole section of a novel that was actually (I realized it too late) just an in-joke for New Orleanians. Whoops, a whole year down the tubes. But there are some really good writers who make a happy home here. There are fun readings sometimes, too, big-time authors and your standard open mics, and people seem to go to them, especially if alcohol is served. I’ve never thought it a particularly literary town. Actually many of my friends in the art and music community don’t really read books. I try to tell them all about how books make people lead more carefree, fulfilling lives, but it’s always been a hard sell here…too many parades, maybe.
Are you the type of writer who can work on several different pieces at a time, or do you like to stick with a single story before moving on to the next one?
I go on a spree sometimes and begin about thirty new stories, a beginning a day for thirty days, but when’s I’ve finally decided to devote time to it, I’m a one-story kind of person. And yet all my better stories seem to be written in a single sitting. If I ever decide to write a novel again I will have to devise a system that allows me to eat and use the bathroom while staying in the chair.
What are you reading this summer?
I’m reading late Burroughs and the famous Babel book, and Hugh Kenner and Katherine Mansfield, and Zach Lazar’s novel on devilry and Janice Lee’s rumination on Damnnation. I read that book about Stalker by Geoff Dyer. I’ve been catching up on my music criticism. Also crap news and sponsored content, always, always. I want to read Malaparte’s The Skin next but I have a fat Hamsun biography calling my name.