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| Christopher J. Helvey | |
Christopher
J. Helvey
is a graduate of the Spalding University MFA in Writing program. His fiction
and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Kentucky
Monthly, Idiolect, Kudzu, Nougat, The Chaffin Journal, Ace Weekly, Kentucky
Blue, Modern Mountain Magazine, Minnetonka Review, Issue 4, and Best New Writing, 2007. On the Boulevard is his poetry collection and his
novel, Purple Adobe, is available from AuthorHouse or fine bookstores
everywhere. He lives and writes in Frankfort, Kentucky.
In addition to his current writing career, Christopher J. Helvey is Editor/Publisher of the journal, Trajectory: Writing That Illuminates. He is Fiction Editor on the staff of the Annual Anthology of Best New Writing. Part 2 of our interview will look at his work as an Editor/Publisher.
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Part 1 of our Interview will focus on your work as a poet, novelist, and short story writer.
Jan: Thank you Chris for taking time for this interview. I didn’t realize it until I began
to prepare for this interview that I had seen your poems in Minnetonka
Review, a literary journal I used to enjoy reading and subscribed to until recently. In fact that journal
was on my list of journals that I had hoped would someday publish my work. Sadly, it has ceased
publication. I
sent them work for their contests on several occasions.
Minnetonka
Review published some of your early poems, including “On the Boulevard,”
the title poem for your poetry collection by the same name. Tell us about
that collection. What is the story behind the story for the birth of your
favorite poems in this collection? I've downloaded "On the Boulevard" below.
Chris: First, Jan, let me echo your sadness
on the passing of the Minnetonka Review. What
a wonderful little journal that was. Troy Ehlers, the Editor in Chief, is a
friend of mine from Spalding Days, and a fine writer himself. "On the Boulevard" was one of
those poems that came full-blown into my mind. It pays homage to Hemingway and
Bukowski and the noir works of the 1950's. I thought it was a good poem and
that it made a catchy title. In addition to the title poem, I suppose two of my
favorites are "My Mother Bares Her
Breasts in Church." which is based on a true story of my
mother baring her breasts to show her Sunday School class her scars following
cancer surgery, and "Missouri
Nocturne," which evokes my childhood memories of hearing my
father singing on our front porch during summer evenings in Crane, Missouri.
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On the
Boulevard
It is three a.m.
and I am reading
Bukowski
writing about
Spain and bulls and Hemingway
and
outside on the boulevard
it is raining
like
pouring piss out of a boot
and
I pour myself another
cup of coffee
and
remember you,
and the shards of
your memory
slice me like
rusty razor blades
and
I bleed,
and
outside on the boulevard
it is raining
like
pouring piss out of a boot.
Jan: I especially liked the poems about your mother and your father, too. Powerful and starkly realistic work. Now, let's talk about your novel, Purple Adobe
(2001, 2002). I recently read and enjoyed it. The plot follows a hard-boiled private investigator, Ward Evans
who goes looking for a missing, drug-troubled young woman, Melissa Gibson at
the request of her mother, Gloria. He meets up with an equally crabby
detective, Hank Nichols. And justice prevails. Tell us a bit about this novel and the traditional
detective story models that influenced you.
Chris: My novel owes a
great deal to a man named Kenneth Millar. Mr. Millar wrote under
the name Ross Macdonald and his Lew Archer detective series is
one of the finest by an American. Lew Archer was always driven by a sense of
justice, tempered by mercy, and I suppose my protagonist, Ward Evans, shares
those qualities.
Jan: These characters
are memorable, but ‘place,’ by that I refer to the western setting, seems to
take on the role of a character too. What drove this novel and which came
first as you were writing: characters, plot, or setting?
Chris: Purple
Adobe began with the opening sentence which came to me from another
dimension very early one morning: "The day died a purple death against the
cracked adobe wall." Jan, you are a perceptive reader. Place, indeed, is
very much a character in this novel. I have long loved the American west,
especially the lonely, and starkly beautiful deserts. I suppose what drove
this novel was a sense of encroaching darkness in all our lives, and the
light (of love? justice? humanity?) which saves so many of us in the end.
Jan: Writers learn
new things as they evolve as a writers, what did you learn from writing Purple
Adobe? What would you change if you sat down to write this novel now,
ten years later?
Chris: I suspect that
one learns more by our failures than our successes. While Purple Adobe has a number of good
qualities (strong sense of place, a story that moves along nicely, a theme that
justice prevails), it is far from a perfect work. It suffers at times from the
dreaded "purple prose" syndrome, and in the days when I was
working on that novel I was afflicted with "simileitis"
(too many similes). Brad Watson, author of The
Heaven of Mercury, first recognized that I had this illness when I was a student in one of his workshops at
Spalding. Today, I would utilize a much more sparse language, utilize less
description, and cut down on the sex scene. Less, indeed, is often
more.
Jan: You are a
graduate of the MFA program at Spalding University. Tell us what you
gained and what you may well have lost as a result of your graduate program
experiences.
Chris: I don't know that I have lost anything
as a result of my time at the Spalding MFA program. I met so many wonderful
people and learned so many lessons. Two of those lessons that stand out were
how to take criticism and how critical rewriting is. I gained a sense of
belonging to a greater community of writers, a better understanding of what
makes a story work, and many wonderful friends.
Jan: I agree. Having a community of writers provides support. And most new writers don't fully appreciate the importance of rewriting in the writing process to bring out the best of a work. If you were to
describe your idea of the (almost) ‘perfect’ short story, what elements would
it have? And which stories come closest to your vision of a perfect story?
Chris: Jan, that is a really tough question
to answer. Of course, there is no 'perfect' short story, but for me it would be
written with an almost brutal economy of language, yet at the same time contain
a new vision, a new way of looking at the world, and I am a huge fan of what I
call "hammer-time" endings, endings that leave you changed, endings
that leave you a different person from who you were before you read them. As for an
almost perfect short story, I'd have to select "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver,
or maybe,"The Killers,"or "Hills Like
White Elephants," and "The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" all by Ernest Hemingway.
Jan: Your literary
journal, Trajectory keeps you busy meeting deadlines, but in your own
writing life, what are you writing now?
Chris: I'm polishing up a collection of some
of my best unpublished short stories (my working title is Clawhammer) and I will start sending it
around soon. I've also just finished first drafts of a novel and a novella. It
is way too early to know if they will be keepers, or merely good
workouts.
Jan: Who are your
literary influences?
Chris: Hemingway, without question, would
have to be foremost--for the freshness of his language if nothing else. Ross
Macdonald, as noted above, is another. I would also have to give credit, or
blame as the case may be, to Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, for his early
stories, Bukowski, Larry Brown, and, for his glorious, moving descriptions
of place, James Lee Burke. One of my core beliefs is that every writer we read
influences us to some degree, in one direction or another. Some influence to
write in a certain manner, or on certain subjects. Others send us
scurrying in another direction, vowing never to write like that.
Jan: What book has
had the greatest impact on your writing life?
Chris: Without a doubt,
I'd have to say The Sun Also Rises. In
that novel Hemingway made me aware for the first time that there was another,
often better, way to say things, that language was pliable and could be
molded. Also, in that work he also taught me a good deal of what I
know about writing dialogue.
Jan: What are you
reading now? What are the top four books on your ‘to read’ stack?
Chris: I'm one of these people who keep
dipping into several books at once. At the moment, I am reading The Same Terrible Storm (stories)
by Sheldon Lee Compton, a promising young writer and friend from Kentucky (by
the way the stories are brief, dark, brutal, and beautiful), Men in the Making (stories) by Bruce
Machart, Rope Burns (stories)
by F.X. Toole, The Sojourn (novel)
by Andrew Krivak, Welding with Children (stories)
by Tim Gautreaux, what matters most is how
well you walk through the fire (newly relased poems) by Bukowski, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Works and Days (collected
essays) by Scott Donaldson, and a number of Slave
Narratives (interviews with former slaves collected by state) from
the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA (1936-1938).
Jan: Is there a "must
read" book on writing that you would recommend to any aspiring writer?
Chris: There are several good, useful books
on "how to write." Three that I've found beneficial are Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie
Goldberg, and Writing Fiction, A Guide to
Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. Oh,
and I want to mention as helpful, Burning
Down The House, Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter. Richard
Goodman has a book on writing out that is both edifying and
challenging. The title is The Soul of
Creative Writing. One that is replete with literary gems is Ernest Hemingway on Writing (a collection
of his comments in letters, interviews, commissioned articles, edited by
Larry W. Phillips).
Jan: What is the most
useful writing advice you’ve ever received and what advice have you wisely
chosen to ignore?
Chris: The two best pieces of writing advice
I've ever received are "Quit talking about writing and sit down and start
writing" (paraphrased from a number of excellent teachers and writing
gurus) and "Baby, you don't want to take five pages to get your hero from
one end of a barn to the other." That one is from my wife and it stuck a
dagger through one of my greatest weakness as a writer, which is never use one
good adjective or simile when you might be able to squeeze in two, or
three, or four...
As for the piece of advice I've chosen to
ignore: "Write only what you know." What bad advice! If we listened
to those words most of the novels and stories we write would surely
be rather boring. If everyone followed that advice there would be no
science fiction written and darn fewer murder mysteries. The person who
first gave that advice must have blanked on the use of imagination. Perhaps it
is okay to start a novel or story writing about what you know, but my advice is
to start letting the imagination flow, and sooner rather than later.
Tune in Next Tuesday for - Part 2 of Christopher J. Helvey's Interview. For Submission Guidelines & Subscription Information for Trajectory - Go to: www.trajectoryjournal.com
Jan Bowman’s work has
appeared in Roanoke Review, Big Muddy,
Broadkill Review, Trajectory, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato
Eyes, and others. She won the 2012
Roanoke Review Prize for Fiction. Her
stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories
and a story was a finalist in the “So To
Speak” Fiction Contest. She is working on two
collections of short stories and currently shopping for a publisher for a
completed story collection. She has nonfiction work pending publication in Spring
2013 Issues of Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of
“Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews with writers and
publishers. Learn more at:
