Michael Keenan Gutierrez is the author of The Trench Angel and earned degrees from UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of New Hampshire. His work has been published in Scarab, The Pisgah Review, Untoward, The Boiler, and Crossborder. His screenplay, The Granite State, was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival, and he has received fellowships from The University of Houston and the New York Public Library. He lives with his wife in Chapel Hill where he teaches writing at the University of North Carolina. His website is michaelkeenangutierrez.com.
His essay, "Click, Tally, Reset," appeared in Issue Seventy-Two of The Collagist.
Here, Michael Keenan Gutierrez talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about odd jobs, temp agencies, and learning from poets.
What can you tell us about the origins of your essay “Click, Tally, Reset”? What sparked the initial idea and/or caused you to start writing the first draft?
It was of all things, a call for submissions, something I don’t often do. The prompt asked for stories about your worst job, or something along those lines. “Click” was one of my go-to barroom stories for years and the first job that came to mind, though I’ve had other jobs that were worse (cruel supervisors, sexual harassment, data entry). It seemed that it also fit into a larger metaphor of where my life was during my early 20s. I’d gotten a degree, had some success as a journalist and then everything fell apart—partly because I was a fuck-up at 21 and partly because the newspaper industry collapsed in 2000 when I got out of college—and I found myself doing a job I could have handled when I was eight. It was a low point, but I was also relieved for the money and that seemed like a good conflict to build off of.
The essay begins with a few short lines where you are being addressed by some unknown speaker, starting with the sentence, “Here is your clipboard and here is your pen.” Why start the essay in another person’s voice? Why distinguish these five opening sentences from the rest of the essay, which is written in traditional first person?
Working as a temp feels like one of the most base, robotic sections of capitalism. We’re entirely interchangeable and temp agencies generally treat you that way. You get a call at 7am and you can take the job or leave it. You don’t get to call in sick. They’ll just replace you with another man or woman who has your skills, which are usually the ability to type and work Excel (or at least that was the case 15 years ago.) There are no benefits. There is no security. And I think—though I was never a temp at an actual temp agency—that the people who worked at these agencies had to keep some sort of emotional distance from the people they were hiring out, people who were broke, often desperate for work, and really counted on getting any sort of job that week to make rent. So I started with a sort of robotic voice talking to me. That was the main idea.
The other reason is that while I remember the conversation vividly, I couldn’t quite recall who was actually talking to me so many years later. There was a man who worked there and there were two women—a blond and a brunette—but I can’t remember which one gave me the job that day. I think it was the blond but if I’m not positive I won’t include it an essay, so I found a workaround.
Although this essay is mainly about your job tallying people, you mention a number of other odd jobs that you briefly held during this time. What’s the present-day importance of these jobs that you worked for a matter of only days or weeks? Why look back on them and include them as parts of your life’s narrative?
It seems like such a strange part of my life, one where I am sort of wandering aimlessly, one where I started out cocky, only to be quickly humbled again and again. Or, let me put it another way, for the past 12 years, I’ve either been in graduate school or teaching at a university, but there was that three year period before grad school when I wandered the country, working odd jobs—like the one in “Click”—just trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life and how I was going to survive. It’s the point when I grew up, when I figured out what I did not want to become. I was drinking a lot, smoking a lot of pot, and blowing off my responsibilities, mostly because I was scared to think about my future or to consider that my dreams might be hard to achieve, so I instead focused only on the moment I was living in, and most of the time, during those moments, I didn’t want to do any work. Eventually I went back to school, discovered I loved to teach and that I was good at it (which is almost as important) and moved on with my life, but those three years stick with me.
Your bio says that you are also the author of a screenplay, The Granite State. What lessons have you learned from screenwriting that you have applied to your writing of fiction and essays, or vice versa?
I’ve co-written a handful of screenplays with the poet Brian Wilkins, who I met in my MFA program. We started out thinking it would just be fun to collaborate on something, because both prose and poetry are usually lonely endeavors, while it’s common to collaborate on screenplays. I don’t know what I’ve learned by actually writing screenplays, but I have learned a ton by working with a poet. He forces me to push on every line, to make sure it’s not just a good image, but also the right one. In a screenplay you still have to work on imagery, even though it might seem like the director would handle that aspect. Your audience—the people reading the script—need to imagine what it will look like on the screen, and Brian has shown me a number of ways to convey emotion this way. Poets are an odd species and I have a lot to learn from them.
What writing projects are you working on now?
I’m working on my second book, a historical novel about a female-owned bar in New York City beginning in the 19th century through the 21st century. My first book, another historical novel called The Trench Angel, comes out in October so I’ve been doing a lot of work on the galleys.
What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
I went back to E.L. Doctorow last week, after he died. The March is one of the best books about war I’ve ever read and it also has a lot to say about our current north/south divide. Billy Bathgate is my favorite coming of age novel. If you get a chance, look over that first page, that first line. It’s the opening metaphor I keep coming back to when I need help on my own book.