In the spring of 2005, Karrie Higgins interviewed me for her e-zine, Invisible Insurrection. However, the site seems to be down at the time of this writing. My thanks to her for her interest.

Can you tell us about your writing process? Do you write in public? Alone? One might assume alcohol is an important part of your creative process, based on the book's dedication (For Dylan, because friends don't let friends write sober). Is that the case, or do you mean this metaphorically?

Ah, the writing process question – the very act of writing is a crazy and sacred thing to me. It’s where zazen meets speaking in tongues, and I’m a junkie for it. Given any free time at all, I’m scribbling something somewhere. As for the setting I have a 9-month old son, so I have learned to squeeze in writing whenever I can. Most mornings I drag myself out of bed early to write in the quiet before the day begins. At lunchtime you’ll find me eating my microwave entrée in ten minutes so I can go write for fifty. On a good day, I head to the corner of my favorite bar after work and settle down with a pint and a pen, feeding off the energy around me. And, after I get home and take care of household business and after my wife and son go to sleep, I try to stay up and do some overdue reading or editing…or answering of interview questions. Ah, I see its 1:00 a.m. now.

As for the role of alcohol in the creative process, I mean it in both senses. I do enjoy riding the waves of a good buzz while writing, but it’s bigger than that; it’s drunkenness. “Be always drunk – on wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.” Baudelaire’s poem has always spoken to me when it comes to a life of expression. Part of real fulfillment, I believe, is seeking out and connecting with that thing which blows the top of your head off and makes you feel holy. When you are at one with that thing, you are drunk. And I would also contend when you do that thing with everything you are, you do become holy.

Now for The Tequila Chronicles (www.tequilachronicles.com) the drunkenness is also very literal. It was an experiment in stream-of-(altered)-consciousness writing. In 2001 I picked one evening a month and actively set out to get spiffed and pick up the pen. My friend, poet and novelist Dylan Garcia-Wahl (the Dylan referenced in the dedication) convinced me to assemble these entries into a chapbook and voilà. They’re pretty much transcribed verbatim from my journals with titles added, and it has received positive response. I wanted to keep it raw to preserve the integrity of the moment – Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought” axiom, I suppose.

One thing I find really interesting is the idea of "moments preserved in alcohol." Most people tend to think of "lost memory" or "blackouts" in relation to alcohol, but you seem to find clarity (and of course, preservation) in drunken states. Can you talk about this? How does alcohol preserve moments? By making it possible to write them down? Or again, do you mean this metaphorically? (Or perhaps both literally and as metaphor?)

The subtitle, “Spontaneous Moments Preserved in Alcohol” was chosen partly to be clear about what one was to find inside (though most reviewers still seem bent on considering the entries poems), and partly to have fun with the idea of preserving things in alcohol. It definitely takes advantage of both the literal and figurative connotations. Scientists preserve once-living specimens in alcohol for later use; that is precisely what I tried to do here. The main difference is the choice of preservative. Give me Knob Creek over Isopropyl anytime. Alcohol “preserves” the moments by fostering an inner clarity as well as a connection between the living moment and me. Every instance in your life is slightly different from the next, and how you perceive or interact with that moment is also unique. By allowing myself to observe this connection on particular nights, I hoped to bring to life both the idea of appreciating the moment and serve up examples. For the record, I have had the blackouts you mention – bad ones, too – particularly on whiskey or sloe gin. For those nights I take full responsibility. There’s no excuse for drinking sloe gin.

In "Next Mourning," you write: "The elusive grail of Mallarmé’s heart." Do you consider Mallarmé a strong influence? Why Mallarmé? What about his aesthetic attracted you?

Yeah, I would call him an influence, in his goals as much as his poetics, as I would the Symbolist slant in general. His was some of the first poetry I read when I began writing, and it struck me from the get-go as something unflinchingly honest, coming across like some mysterious but vital communiqué from the aether.

I think what attracted me most about his aesthetic was the way he expressed his commitment to his subject matter. He wrote what he thought, saw, and felt the way it demanded to be written, even though it meant straying from the paradigm of the reigning Parnassians. Beneath much of his writing (poetry and prose) one can see his eye fixed on the Ideal. Such a concept is very attractive to the would-be poet – the striving upward with singular purpose. I was no exception. This sense of the ultimate is probably best illustrated in his prose piece “On the Book” which is referenced in “Next Mourning.” Here Mallarmé does not embellish his grand vision: “…all earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book.” A fledgling lover of the word, this proclamation floored me. I was excited to hear of his bold vision. He goes on to describe that it would be no book in the traditional sense, but rather “…a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for some miraculous and glittering occasion.” This is the pinnacle of Mallarmé’s Ideal, and even today I find myself ruminating on just what this is and how I might help bring it about in the concrete world.

On a related note, I recently happened across a description that made me laugh: “Symbolist poets tried to capture sensations and states of mind that lay beyond normal consciousness by disordering their senses, indulging in decadence, occultism, and opposition to sober bourgeois values.” I have to say, I couldn’t have described my intent with The Chronicles better if I tried.

You divided the chapters or sections by calendar month. Why did you choose this particular structure? And on a related note, why self publishing? A lot of talented, young writers are turning to smaller presses and/or self publishing these days to escape (or avoid) the corporate and over-themed, strictly-genred climate in big publishing houses. Was this true for you? As a reader, I enjoy the intimate feeling of this book. I can feel your personality and presence in the pages - it feels very real.

Thank you. That was the feeling I was going for. In this age of e-this and e-that, I like something you can feel in your hands, stick in your pocket, pull out on the bus and read, and know its yours. As for structure, that grew out of the nature of the project itself. I wanted a format that highlighted the work as a chronicled formal experiment and distinguished itself from the traditional chapbook. I decided to self-publish mainly because I wanted to get the work out there before I lost my nerve. With its theme, it seemed like something that should not be overly produced, so I sat down at my computer and cranked it out. I didn’t want to deal with submitting it to a small press and waiting around to see if they wanted to publish it or not. I wanted it to get into people’s hands, so I put it there myself. With self-publishing you have to do all the leg-work yourself, but you also have total control over its production and distribution. If I do another chapbook, I might try a small press, just to compare experiences.

Talk about your next project, the poetry collection Pimping Grace. Do you experiment with new forms? What themes are important for the work? What was the inspiration?

Not so much inspiration as wanting to finally put together full-length book, Pimping Grace is a motley collection of my writing. It is broken up into sections of poetry, prose, and combinations of both, with the poetry ranging from traditional forms to those more modern (read: free) in structure. Formal forms are a strange thing to deal in these days. Read a piece in recognizable verse and there is a part of you cannot help but feel the piece is “old fashioned.” Not that such a piece cannot hold something important for me, but sometimes I am distracted by the poem’s poemness. Poetry these days seems more about the expression first and form second (or last). If only more of this type of poetry had more to express! I try to find a good balance of both with Pimping Grace. As it is essentially a collection of a sampling of my work from the beginning, themes range from the bright-eyed take on the poetic charge to modern culture to pure thought experiments. Some of the pieces have been published on the Web already. Grace closes with a section entitled “The Farewell.” That part is, well…you’ll just have to wait and check it out for yourself.

You host readings and collaborate on a cable access show called DIVE!, focused on the arts. Can you talk a little about the importance of community and collaboration in your work? What about the intersection of visual and textual arts?

Writers are strange, freaky animals. I see calls for collaboration all over the place with little response, as though these organizers don’t understand that writing is by and large a solitary endeavor, and writers would rather gargle broken glass than think about working with another writer. I have collaborated on the rare poem with someone, but I, too, primarily create alone. What I am interested in is getting writers together to talk about what they do, share information, and generally get out of their own heads for a while so they can return to their work refreshed. With that in mind I have just recently organized a writer’s gathering here in the Cities for that express purpose. We are going to meet at bars and coffeehouses once a month, no agenda, just show up, have a drink, talk about whatever you want, and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. I was hungry for connection with others who shared my passion for the word, and I didn’t see anything around town that fit the bill.

DIVE! is a project I am doing with Dylan Garcia-Wahl and will be a local, cable-access program. We will sit, drink, and discuss local writing topics from publishers to poets, what we like and what we hate. It will be honest. Names will be named. Each episode will also include special segments like short-experimental films, interviews with local literary figures and institutions, and random things like discussions with pedestrians about what they think of the new Walker Arts Center and why. It should be a blast.

I think the intersection of textual arts and other mediums is a woefully under-explored one. In 2005 I think we need to experiment with other modes of expression to better engage the psyche of the modern individual. I have plans to combine writing and music, film and web site interactivity to bring a new kind of life to that which already exists within the words. My web site will house all of this: www.thedayonfire.com. It is in its infancy at the moment, but it will soon become much more. I see community coming into play here, too, as I plan to have people submit work as part of a larger, multi-faceted piece, and put up poems I have given up on, in hopes someone will complete them. I could then post the results on the site. Creative recycling! My goal is to make the web site the next evolutionary step in the expression of the word.

Yes, that is a bold statement, but hell, if Mallarmé had the guts to envision The Book, the least I can do is take a crack at it.