Writing Time: In Conversation with Michael Parker

There’s a forty-year gap at the center of Michael Parker’s latest novel, I Am the Light of This World, out this month from Algonquin Press (On sale date: November 15). The novel centers on Earl, an awkward, music-obsessed teenager from Stovall, Texas, who likes nothing more than ‘70s rock, pedal steel, and his copy of His Life and Times, a biography of the bluesman Lead Belly. But when Earl meets the mysterious Tina in the 1970s, his life is irrevocably changed.

The story that ensues finds Parker, the author of seven previous novels including 2019’s Prairie Fever, at perhaps his most playful and most devastating. Earl’s coming-of-age happens at a breakneck pace in the novel’s first act, in which Earl falls in love, uses “substances” (his term for the mixture of drugs he is introduced to during a frenetic three days in Austin), and makes a series of increasingly consequential decisions.

The forty-year gap that devastatingly divides the novel into a before and after is an uncanny device for “representing” the portion of Earl’s life spent in prison following the events of this first act. (Unlike his icon Lead Belly, whose skill as a songster supposedly won him not just one but two early releases from prison, Earl has no outward talents.) As the novel picks up for its second act, Earl has been transformed into a sort of Rip Van Winkle character, yanked out of time and reinserted into a bewildering but parallel reality: ours. What comes next is a devastating story of redemption and discovery as Earl, now in his late fifties, struggles to make sense of his past and come to terms with his freedom.

Ultimately, it is Earl’s unique voice and vision, his ability to notice—and not let go of—those details of our world that both are and are not what they seem that keep us hooked to the page. In Austin, there’s the pool that’s really a pond and a river everyone calls a lake. And then there’s the concept of the “negative adjectival,” Earl’s term for the grammatical construction used by the men in his neighborhood in Stovall who define people by what they don’t have, as in, You-No-Time-Knowing-Son-of-a-Gun. This pattern of absence and of identity through addition or negation runs deep through the novel. It is present in Earl’s investigations into time and memory, and it is central to understanding Earl’s own sense of himself. After all, Earl may not have committed the exact crime for which he was sentenced, but neither was he exactly innocent of it. While most of us have learned to accept or mostly ignore these sorts of cognitive dissonances in service of living our own lives, Earl remains transfixed by them—not merely because to notice them is interesting, but also because of how profoundly his life has been impacted by such incomprehensibility. After all, Earl knows that between the idea of a pond and a pool there’s as much distance as there is between the ideas of punishment and justice.

Or, to say it in terms Earl would appreciate, it’s like trying to distinguish between Eric Clapton’s and Duane Allman’s solos in the outro of “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” For most of us, there can be only so much certainty. Beyond that, there’s only the deliciousness of sound.

I was one of Parker’s former students at UNCG, and I reached out to him over email. The following conversation has been edited for length.

EVAN FACKLER: When I reached out to you about this interview, you said this one might be harder to talk about than your last novel. How so?

MICHAEL PARKER: Well, I kind of wish I would not have said that, for now it seems I have to explain myself.

I was referring to the violence in the book, which is, I know, difficult to read about and there are other places in the book which some readers have described as “brutal.” I know they are difficult, but they also feel necessary to me. There’s an inevitability to what happens to Earl, the main character, beginning on the first page. I hope it remains unpredictable while building tension and creating new but attendant tensions.

The other issue with this book: while I am certainly interested in the systemic injustices of the American justice system and the book is pretty clear about this, and about wrongful conviction, that is only a part of what the book is “about.” Earl’s dual consciousness-his “also-elsewhere” way of moving not through the world so much as around its edges—is just as important, and of course, it contributes to his ending up in prison. I would hope these themes and others compliment and inform each other. But the last novel was easily described with a so-called “elevator pitch.” It would have to be a pretty long elevator ride for me to do justice to this novel. Maybe in one of the high-rises going up here in Austin on every other block downtown. Then there is the issue of other riders trapped in an elevator with some guy trying to describe his novel to them. Yikes!

EF: Perhaps paradoxically, Earl’s “also-elsewhere-ness” makes him an entertaining observer of his surroundings. One observation he makes here is to identify what he calls “the negative adjectival,” a grammatical construction used by some of the men in his neighborhood. Where did “the negative adjectival” come from? It’s such a great concept.

MP: The negative adjectival is something I heard growing up in Eastern North Carolina in the 60’s and 70’s, though there was no name for it, certainly not the pretentious name I’ve given it. It was a kind of trash talk, obviously, to define someone by what they lacked. It might sound mean-spirited, but it was actually wonderful word play. Often the descriptors got long and detailed: a no-singing, no-guitar-playing, can’t-even-play-a-radio, calls-himself-a-musician, fake-ass wannabe. That was actually short, compared to some.

My friend and former colleague Jim Clark was a fan of the negative adjectival. He grew up in Miami, in the 50’s, which suggests that it is not just a “Southern” thing (Miami, as I understand it, is not the South) though it was certainly prevalent in racially mixed communities like Clinton, North Carolina, where I’m from. I heard it from black people, I heard it from white people. I heard it from some boys and from some girls. I heard it from a teacher once. In that case, the negative in question was a pencil.

Earl lives in East Texas, but he’s from Bossier City, Louisiana originally, and Stovall, the town in Texas where his family settles, is just across the Texas border. East Texas is far more Southern than the rest of Texas. Parts of it resemble the eastern N.C. of my youth. I wanted the book to be set in Texas for obvious reasons and once the action moves to Austin, the “southern-ness” of the book is gone. But there’s some North Carolina in that novel. If I had set it in Central or West Texas, I would not have called upon the linguistic repository of my youth. I had some fun writing the scenes where the negative adjectival appears. Having “fun” writing sounds a little dubious to me. I don’t think it should be torture, and I do think the excavation that leads to mystery and meaning is joyous, but fun? Fun somehow suggests indulgence. This morning I was reading an essay by Marguerite Duras (“The Black Block,” in her collection Practicalities) and she talks about writing being, early on in the process, “a tangle of tenses: between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it’s all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up in meaninglessness.” To be caught in this tangle is many things—gratifying, aggravating, fulfilling, impossible, and, yes, joyous. But fun? I take what little fun I have where I can find it, and the negative adjectival was my playground in this novel, I guess.

EF: The last time we spoke for StorySouth, I asked you where you found inspiration for your writing and part of your answer was to list a few bands you were listening to. Nearly every page of I Am the Light of This World finds Earl soliloquizing about the sound of pedal steel, quoting from a biography of Lead Belly, or tossing out a song reference. Just flipping through some random pages, Earl mentions Glen Campbell, Bob Dylan, Blues Image, the Zombies, Eric Clapton, Tres Hombres, Santana, Ten Years After, Blue Öyster Cult, Steely Dan, The Rolling Stones, Commander Cowboy, Joe Cocker… So while we’re on the topic of fun, it seems like you’re not having a bad time here. Do you and Earl go in for the same music?

MP: Well, I mean, fun?

Actually, you’re dead on, Evan, as usual. I had fun, in some places, with the music, particularly in the conversations Earl has with his lawyer, Arthur, about music. Because they share some of the same musical tastes, Arthur is able to understand Earl a bit more, and Earl is a little less scared of Arthur, though he is rightly terrified of the predicament he’s in. Earl has a distaste for a certain stripe of disposable pop music—which he refers to as “garbage food from a chain store”—that secretly, I really dig. In the 70’s I played “Exile on Main Street” non-stop and would not stop talking about it with my friends, but at home I would listen to Carole King’s “Tapestry,” now lauded by Pitchfork as one of the best records of forever, but back in the day? You cruelly made fun of your sisters for wearing out their copies as you hummed “It’s Too Late” and “So Far Away” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” under your breath.

Of course back then, there were so few female musicians getting the attention they deserved. I won’t say that this imbalance has been corrected, because it hasn’t, but I listen to—and read—more women than I do men. (At this moment I am listening to Beth Orton’s new record and on the way to the pool I listened to Snail Mail and on the way back I listened to Land of Talk). And so do a lot of men I know who are thirty years younger than I am. If there is some cultural stigma to liking the current equivalent of Carole King, I don’t know about it.

The not-fun part of this was pairing the songs in ways that complimented the dramatic action. I wanted it to be a score, not just the sort of movie soundtrack which includes snippets of songs heard from passing cars, or playing in the 7-11. Some of the songs that are most dear to me I used in this novel in ways that underscored actions that were difficult to write about and difficult for some people to read. (See first question.) I did not want the songs to be sullied, for me or for the reader. But finally it is a technical decision, this pairing of song with action, and I remind myself to think of it in the same way as I think about point of view, or narrative rhythm. Except it has a better beat than either of those things.

One more thing: who, and where, would Earl be without the music that he is shocked to find is still being listened to forty years later? As in some previous books (Virginia is for Lovers, If You Want Me to Stay, and many of the stories in Don’t Make Me Stop Now), music is for Earl and those like him, a way to ratify his feelings and to connect with the world beyond his rich but pretty limited sensibility. It isn’t the only way out, but it certainly feels like it when you’re 15.

EF: There’s also an element of, I’m not sure, irony or cruelty or just dumb limitation around, maybe, the nexus of life and art explored here. I’m thinking about Earl’s obsession with Lead Belly. Like Huddie, Earl is sent to prison on a murder charge. After that, though, their stories diverge pretty starkly. That seems more like a thematic choice than it does a moment of ratification for Earl’s feelings.

MP: Earl’s pretty perceptive in some ways–he’s certainly a noticer, as we talked about above, and he’s pretty good at reading people. His intelligence is emotional. Of course he knows all about Lead Belly’s time in prison, and the section where Lead Belly is freed from prison by the warden after playing for him and his family (which may have been fabricated a bit, from what I’ve read) is the passage he chooses to read to Tina when they first meet. I wish I could say that I chose the biography of Lead Belly only after writing a draft and understanding the way the book he’s obsessed with connects, thematically, with the plot. But it was there from the beginning. Obviously I had to examine and question and third-guess my choice to make sure it worked. The irony is dramatic, in that the reader (or the readers who know the first thing about Lead Belly, a select group I am going to presume) understands more about Earl’s obsession with the book than Earl does. Arthur tells him that Lead Belly is a dubious role model. Earl, even after he’s imprisoned for murder, still focuses on the musical side of Lead Belly, which is the side that delivered him, finally, from a life in prison. If there’s anything thematic in this choice–and I mean intentionally thematic, for the reader is going to make thematic assumptions and connections whether I put them there or not–is that Earl still chooses to believe in art over life. He believes in the power of music to save Lead Belly and wants to believe that it can save him, which is why he’s so overjoyed by the simple but really kind of astonishing renascence of “vinyl” that allows him to fall in love all over with the music of his choice.

I’m not sure I answered your question. But let me ask you a question. Can it not be a thematic choice–Lead Belly bio as Earl’s bible—and also serve an emotional role? I hope so. I think we’d be in trouble if thematic choices limited the ways we find to express the character’s emotional state. I think of this novel as driven primarily by observations Earl makes that form a trajectory in both his mind and the reader’s. Also, of course, there are the decisions he makes, which are thematic in the sense that they determine the outcome of his situation and allow me to examine, glancingly, the issues of wrongful conviction. My heart is with Earl and his survival. I’m not smart enough to take on the criminal justice system. If I were, I would do it in a book of nonfiction. I’d make a mess of it in a novel.

EF: I want to circle back to something you’ve touched on a few times now, which is how the novel speaks to some fairly big-picture cultural and social questions. You’ve mentioned the book’s engagement with the systemic injustices of the American justice system, but there’s also this sequence in the novel I find very provocative and at the same time really beautiful and organic where Earl mentions having liked Robinson Crusoe. The character he’s speaking with says, “I believe Robinson Crusoe might be one of those books which have been deemed a kind of imperialist fairy tale.” At first, Earl is lost. Like, Robinson Crusoe? What’s wrong with Robinson Crusoe? But fifty pages later, Crusoe returns. And this time it’s Earl’s turn to reflect on the false view the novel gives of the prisoner, or cast-away, tallying his days until he can return home. Maybe I’m wrong, but this seems like some kind of very precise commentary, dare I say even pedagogical? It reminded me of a quote that you used to have taped to your office door, something about the importance of nuance or the danger of losing nuance.

MP: To me that sounds like the sort of advantageous move writers make without realizing its import. I did not think of that until you brought it up. I contemplated pretending that I was trying to do exactly what you’re suggesting, but I respect you too much (and those of you reading this interview) not to give you props for making that connection.

Earl knows nothing of “imperialist fairy tales,” but he knows a lot about what it is to spend decades behind bars. So his objection to Robinson Crusoe is the impression it gives about the way prisoners approach time. In a sense, Earl’s objections to this notion of crossing off days and doing one day at a time determined the structure of this novel. Except for a very few flashbacks, there is no present action set in prison. I skip over 40 years of his life. I did this for two reasons. There have been quite a few books that brilliantly depict prison life: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, Theodore Weesner’s The Car Thief, Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, Brian Hart’s Then Came The Evening. That’s just to name a few contemporary examples. We can go back to Defoe, Dumas, Hugo. It’s been done too well for me to attempt it, but there’s another reason I stayed away from it and it has to do with time. Prison is static. The same thing happens daily. (Of course you could argue that people not in prison live static lives, but they have options prisoners obviously don’t have). Earl’s attitude toward time in prison dictated that I not cover it in the present action. If his survival tactic is to not show up except in those moments where he has to, why would I force him to show? Time, to the story writer, is always a problem. But it is tricky in novels as well. I just read a contemporary novel that was too long by a third. It was much celebrated and the prose was stellar and the sensibility winning but the writer did not seem to understand that you can summarize six weeks in a sentence. And that there are times when you absolutely should.

There was an early review of I Am The Light of This World that said that the wrongful conviction topic had been far better handled by other writers. I would have been a whole lot more upset had the reviewer said, “Never has there ever been a novel that so brilliantly deals with wrongful convictions,” etc. That might have been the one line I never want to read in a review of my work.

This takes us back to nuance. What I love about the Romanian novelist Herta Muller is that she is able to write convincingly and with outrage about the horrors of growing up in a totalitarian regime, but the characters are not stock, they are not victims, they are capable of mistakes. She is not afraid to make her characters nuanced and still point out the inhumanity of Ceausescu’s regime.

I wish I knew what I had posted on my door that commented on nuance. I remember there being a postcard of Vanilla Ice? Not much nuance there.

EF: I’d guess that’s the only time Vanilla Ice and Herta Muller have been mentioned in the same paragraph. I did want to ask you about that decision to leave forty years of Earl’s life off the page, though. When I got to the end of the first part of the novel and turned the page for part two, I was floored. I mean, the effect was incredibly haunting, disorienting, complex. I think I was actually shaking. Several years before I ever stepped foot on UNCG’s campus, the poet Elly Bookman told me about your Structure of Fiction course. I wonder, because this decision to leave a forty-year hole in the novel is partly a structural one, how has your approach to structure changed over the years?

MP: I’m so glad to hear that shift worked for you. I assume some readers will be put off by it, but I also think there are other things in this book they are more likely to be “put off” by.

My first four novels were linear, for the most part. I was putting energy into sentences, and into making sure that the prose sounded different in each novel. Structure was beyond me. It wasn’t until Watery Part of the World that I began to think seriously about how the structure embodied both thought and feeling–and that its rhythms would have an effect on the reader regardless of whether the reader was aware of the structure or not. (Far better if they are not.)

I have two quotes typed out and taped above my desk. The first is from Marguerite Duras: “The only alternative is to say nothing. But that can’t be written down.” The main takeaway, as they say, from that quote is that if you say it, it better be worth saying. But it also speaks, to me, of the way you write things down, and their relationship to saying nothing. I am increasingly driven by the need to include some manner of replicating silence—or absence—in my work. (Duras is very good at this, as is another French writer, the novelist Patrick Modiano.) The obvious way is to employ white space, but that often feels too easy to me, like reflexively hitting the return key. So while this quote does not directly have to do with structure, it has pushed me to find, formally, some means of mimicking the way the mind moves, the shape of consciousness, the rhythms of awareness.

The second quote is from Peter Handke: “What does it mean, that one sentence follows another?” It’s a seemingly simple and straightforward question, at first glance. But it’s a question, really, about Time, and it has pushed me to investigate other ways than simple chronology and traditional plot structure—this happened and had a causal effect that produced this–such as juxtaposition as a means of transition. All of this is in service, again, in representing the shape of consciousness. In the new novel, it is most evident in the early sections of Earl’s dreamier musings. He tends to leave out the obvious link from one thought to the next.

But it was teaching the class that Elly mentioned that really taught me about the importance of structure. Over the years we read books by–and this is of course an abbreviated list, and in no particular order– Flaubert, Cormac Mccarthy, Toni Morrison, Malcolm Lowry, Glenway Wescott, William Gass, Katherine Ann Porter, Lydia Davis, Mary Robison, Marguerite Duras, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Handke, Maggie Nelson, Mary Gaitskill, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Mark Richard, Joseph Skvorecky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elizabeth Harwick, Evan Connell. I chose the books because they represented different approaches to structure and I changed them up every year so I would learn a few things, though of course reading a book you think you know well with new readers often reveals how little you know.

EF: Before we close out, I wanted to ask you briefly about your old colleague, Fred Chappell, whose impact on Appalachian literature is the focus of a new documentary. Did working with Fred impact your own writing?

MP: He would cringe at what I am about to say, so let’s make sure he never sees it. But I would say that any writer who knows Fred sees him as a model for a life of writing, and also of a reading life. There might be writers who have read more than Fred, but do they remember as much as he does? One of my many Greensboro pleasures was sitting in Fred and Susan’s garden and listening to Fred and Stuart [Dischell] trade lines of poetry.

Fred’s approach to writing often feels like the opposite of mine—he thinks before he writes. But he makes it all seem organic; there is nothing canned about it. And his work is often devilishly funny. I can’t recall having ever used the word “devilish,” but it seems to fit the playful wit of Fred’s work, underscored always by high emotional stakes.

I cannot imagine this program without thinking of all I have learned from my colleagues over the years: Fred, Stuart, Lee [Zacharias], Holly [Goddard Jones]. Tom Kirby Smith and Bob Watson, who retired the year before I got here but I was lucky enough to spend some time with Bob and Betty. And of course Jim Clark and Terry Kennedy. We might think of them at the helm, keeping us shipshape, but they are both wonderful teachers.

Hackneyed as it may seem, I have to say that I learned the most from the students. The ones I am not in touch with, whose accomplishments I don’t know about…. I often come across them in the pages of magazines or on the shelves of bookstores. I don’t think, “there’s one of ours!” I think how lucky I was to have learned alongside that person.