Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
“I really do feel like there’s a weirdo-verse, a world beside our universe we don’t quite see or understand, and all it takes is a little bump to knock us into it,” Murray Farish told Interview magazine earlier this year, the day his collection of short stories, Inappropriate Behavior, was published by Milkweed Editions. “I’m obsessed with people who cross lines and know the things they’re doing are wrong, but they think somehow they can make it right or crossing that line will make right whatever is wrong in their lives.” Lee Harvey Oswald makes an appearance in the book, as does a prefame John Hinkley Jr.; the real stars of these stories, though, are Farish’s own creations, including the weary, threads-pulled-to-breaking couple of the title story, who struggle to parent their emotionally disturbed son.
Farish reads from his collection—roundly praised by reviewers, including Publishers Weekly, for its grit, tenderness, and humor—to commence River Styx’s 40th-anniversary season. He’s joined by Cleveland poet and novelist Amit Majmudar, whose latest novel, The Abundance, tells the story of an immigrant family through food. It all happens September 15 at 7 p.m. at the Tavern of Fine Arts (313 Belt, riverstyx.org), a wine bar and café that might be the only logical second home for River Styx after many, many nights in the warm, magical environs of Duff’s. All in all, it’s not a bad way for St. Louis’ longest-running reading series to celebrate its black-balloon birthday. We spoke with Farish a few weeks ago about the new book; the Q&A follows.
This interview has been edited and shortened for publication.
So, I’m really curious about the stories that feature actual historical figures, like Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley, Jr. How do you write something like that? Are you doing a lot of hard research for these?
It doesn’t really work out that way for me, because that’s one of the aspects of American history that I’m fascinated by, for whatever reason, that I probably can’t even explain—presidential assassinations and attempts in general. I’ve got a couple of other stories. I’ve got a John Wilkes Booth story, and a Charles Guiteau story. Neither one of them made the cut for this collection, but maybe down the line somewhere. So I read a lot of that stuff. It isn’t really specific research to the story, it’s just that I read in that area.
With the Oswald story, for example, there are so many different Oswalds, different people, especially for those who really know the history. Trying to get that right for every single reader would have been impossible. So I just tried to make him do what I needed him to do for that story. You try to get historical facts right. You know, the name of the boat, the year they sailed, that kind of thing. But other than that, it’s just trying to make the character be what I needed him to be for that particular story, without doing any kind of undue violence to the actual facts of the matter.
With the Hinckley story, it was a little different, because less is known about him. I was sort of free to imagine him a bit more fully. Knowing some of the things that we know about him, his obsession with Jodie Foster, his obsession with Taxi Driver, which would have come out about a year before the story is set. That gave me a little bit more freedom to imagine what his life would have been like at that point. So it was just really a matter of trying to create the real person on the page. The germ of that story is the Hinckleys and the Bushes are old family friends.
Really? Good lord. I had no idea!
Yeah. You cannot go onto the conspiracy end of the Internet for very long without finding this out. And the night that Hinckley shot Reagan, reportedly, Vice President Bush was due to have dinner with Hinckley’s father. This of course sets off all kinds of bells in the conspiracy world, which don’t particularly ring with me, but that got me started looking around at those two families.
So you and David Clewell must be swapping books like crazy. I know he’s fascinated by the conspiracy stuff, too.
And that could be where a lot of my fascination with it comes from. He is, in a lot of ways—maybe not the father, but I like to think of him as the great-uncle of a lot of the stuff that I do. He’s been an amazing resource for me over the years, in addition to being the best friend a writer could want to have. The amount of knowledge that the guy has about every angle and aspect of 20th century American history and 20th century American literature, especially some of the weird places that those two things connect—he’s an invaluable resource in addition to being a remarkable friend.
How long have you been teaching at Webster?
Well, I was a student at Webster, I was a student of David’s in like ’96,’ 97. And then I took a year or so off, and went away to grad school. I graduated from the University of Houston in 2003, and I was planning on just poking around Houston and trying to pick up a section or two of comp at the various junior colleges there. I was in contact with David, we had written and talked over those years and he said, “You know, if you want to come back to St. Louis, I can give you one creative writing workshop.” So I did; that was in fall of 2003. And it just grew from there. I started teaching other things, and you know, just sort of dug in like a tick. [Laughter.] This will be my 12th year, I think I'm doing my math right, overall of teaching, but my second year full-time.
What was the timeline for the book? Some of these stories are so grounded in recent history—with specific mentions of the 2008 financial crash, for instance. And then others are just absolutely timeless. So I get the sense you’ve been working on it for a while?
Yeah. It took a long time. Part of that is that I'm just a slow writer, and part of that is just some of the things that happened in-between the genesis of the book and the end of the book. You know, having kids, moving a couple three times, just life stuff. Some of these stories go back, or versions of them I should say, to grad school. But the title story, that was the last one that I wrote for the book, and it took a long time. It became what it was over a long period of time, and then finding a way to end it took a long time as well. At some point it occurred to me I wanted to write a story about the difficulty of living in post-Great Recession America. The story wasn’t published until after the book was accepted. And it eventually got published at Five Chapters. David Daley is the guy that runs that site, and he did a wonderful job with publishing that story. It’s a great site. They run long stories in five-day segments.
In terms of the book itself, once I got that thing finished, for the better part of a year I figured that would be the title story of the collection and it would be the last story in the book. I kind of like the way the book moves as a whole from that morning that Bill Joe gets on the boat with Oswald, to the dark happily-ever-after at the end of “Inappropriate Behavior.”
I know couples like the couple in that story, and I felt like it was a very, very accurate portrayal. It felt human and literary, but at the same time had this very political consciousness to it, which I think it extremely difficult to pull of well, but you did—expressing that righteous anger without sounding like you were pontificating.
It is difficult. If I can cop to really one literary ambition, that feels like the direction I want to take things in. Of all the stories in the book, I think—well, I don’t want to say it’s my favorite. But it probably is the one that, to me, is going to hold up the best, for the longest period of time. At least I hope that’s what happens. It’s a trick to write fiction that has a political slant to it, and I think the key to doing it is grounding all of that in the things that are happening to the characters.
I love how grounded these stories are in place, specifically St. Louis. Even in the Norfolk story, St. Louis gets a little cameo. In that case, it’s “Ugh, this place is horrible, we want to go home to St. Louis.” And then in the title story, St. Louis sucks, but you don’t know if it really sucks, or the dad is just so bummed out that he’s seeing it as a bad place. It was interesting seeing the city through those two filters.
Yeah, well, for me St. Louis is kind of both. In “Inappropriate Behavior,” we’ve got to remember that's from George's point of view, right? And he sees St. Louis as a place that sort of let him down. And some of the time, he’s going on about the insularity and parochialism of St. Louis, during these times when he especially feels like an outsider. And you know, again, George comes from me; I wrote the guy. And I’m not a St. Louisan myself, so I have to say I’ve felt some of those things about St. Louis in my own darker times. [Laughs.]
Yep. I’m a transplant here. I know what you mean.
That’s probably true of many cities, you know, places where people are not from. It's hard to ever feel like you really are there, you know? You always feel sort of like an outsider. I'm sure that's true in a number of places. I think I'm trying to diagnose this in that story. And also as Americans, how we've sort of lost our collective imagination for how things could be different, or for how things could be better. You look at something as at once big and complex and yet as simple as this, this complete allegiance to free market economics or, you know, one person's version of free market economics. It does not have to be this way, right? I mean, we make decisions in this country about how we want to do things and, you know, this lack of imagination, I think, does hit places like St. Louis particularly hard. Because it is an old city, and it has old ways, and it has a lot of old families who have, have more or less, you know, been prominent for a long period of time. One of the things that George says in the story is every few years we bring these consultants in from outside to run these multi-million dollar reports and studies, and then all they do is tell us things that we’ve already known for a long time. And we don’t do anything about them until the next time it’s time to run a study. I do think that there’s an extent to which, again, that lack of imagination is especially hard on places like St. Louis. Places like Cincinnati…
Rust belt cities?
Rust belt is a term—see, my problem with “rust belt” is that it speaks exactly to that lack of imagination. That we’re still imagining that, that, you know, these things are gonna suddenly unrust and all of sudden, you know, everything will be beautiful again. If we can just figure out how to sell more stuff, how to pick up river barge traffic, I don’t know. In St. Louis you’ve got a central location, a reasonably decent transportation system, you’ve got good universities. You’ve got inexpensive land, inexpensive buildings. There is not reason why St. Louis couldn’t become a serious, important, and vital city again.
Well, the interesting thing to me with this book is that the way you write about cities, and this is not just St. Louis but the other cities in the book, they come across almost like characters unto themselves.
That’s exactly what I want to happen. You just said the right word.
Oh, good! [laughs].
It’s character. I tell my students this, I tell my students this all the time: your places have got to be characters in the story. You want to develop them the same way you develop the people in your story because places want things from us. Just like people want things from us, places want things from us. Norfolk is a great example. Norfolk, Virginia is one of the weirdest places I’ve ever lived in my life. I was there for a year, and it is absolutely like Patty says in the story. People will not talk to you there. It’s like they’re afraid of spilling some kind of vast government secret or something. If you’re not in the military, if you’re not a navy person, you are an outsider. You are weird in Norfolk, Virginia if, if you’re there for any other reason other than to, you know, to sail. [laughs] And it’s a weird place, but it’s a beautiful place, I mean it’s a gorgeous city. There are all these little canals that run through the city, and you wake up in the morning and you can smell the ocean. It’s a gorgeous place, but it’s a weird place.
A little almost like the Stepford Wives kind of atmosphere?
It’s nuts. I mean, you’ll walk up to people, you’ll pass people on the street and, you know, you’re not trying to start a conversation, you just say hey, how you doing and they just, they walk right past you. It’s crazy.
Speaking of weird, I wanted to talk about “Waiting for Schmelling,” which is definitely one of the weirdest stories in the book, and I mean that as a compliment.
Well, I take it that way. Weirdness is one of my subjects.
A reviewer had compared that story to Kafka but it seemed much more Ben Katchor-esque to me—like something straight out of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.
That’s cool. No that, I love that comparison. I mean, hey, there’s nothing wrong with Kafka, but being Katchor, for me, that would be even higher praise. [Laughter.]
Anyway, I wanted to ask you about your writing process, how you go about writing a story like "Schmelling."
I have no idea, typically, what I’m writing about when I sit down to write, and I think that I don’t think that there’s any question, at least in my mind, that my biggest problem as a writer is plot. You know, you know some people, whether they’re writers or not, they'll sit down and tell you a great story. I’m not that guy. And so [laughs], the way I have to write a story is I have to sort of write a lot to get to 20-page story. “Waiting for Schmelling,” who knows how many pages I ended up writing. It’s all so different now with computers, you just cut stuff and dump it somewhere else [Laughter]. It’s a process for me of finding out where I’m going. I don’t outline anything. I feel like the way I write is, I’ve got two or three subjects and I might not know really where I’m going when I sit down, but I know that if I sit down and write half a dozen weird sentences or half of a dozen weird pages of weird sentences, or a half of a dozen weeks’ worth of weird sentences, that I’m gonna find something in there that intrigues me and I’m gonna be able to follow that. “Schmelling,” specifically feels like one of my religion stories. I’ve got a couple of ghosts in the book. But in this case, it’s like the corporation for him becomes a kind of church. He’s kind of sort of initiated into priesthood at the end of the story. So that was one of the things that was kind of driving that story. But weirdness, transgression, extremity, these seem to be my subjects.
I was curious what people have been saying to you about the book?
Well, you know, I’ve gotten some reviews. And I’ve gotten some personal feedback, and that’s incredibly gratifying. There is a guy who read the book and wrote an email telling me about his child who has very profound ADD problems, and how much that story [“Inappropriate Behavior”] meant to him. And you know, that kind of this is worth a five star review in the New York Times. When you write a book of short stories and you publish it with an independent press like Milkweed, you’re not expecting to get rich… you’re going to sell this book to individuals, and not the masses. So when an individual takes time to really dig into the story, and then seeks you out to tell you, it meant an awful lot to get that. I’ve gotten a phone call from this guy who spent like six minutes on my voicemail at school, telling me about each one of the stories. That kind of thing is sweet, and it means a lot to hear from readers, and not necessarily from the people who review the book. Not that there is anything wrong with that, either! I’ve gotten some very nice reviews that also mean a lot. But when I hear from an individual reader, that really does ring bells with me.
