Mattox Roesch, February 2010

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

mattoxphoto by Stacy Anderson




sometimes

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Mattox Roesch lives with his wife and daughter in Unalakleet, Alaska. Before moving to Alaska he played drums in an Minneapolis-based rock band, designed and peddled skateboards, and founded a T-shirt printing business called Screenarchy.

Mattox’s stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Narrative Magazine, The Sun, Indiana Review, AGNI online, Redivider, and the Best American Nonrequired Reading. Mattox has received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, a Loft Mentor Series Award, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and was a finalist for a Bush Artist Fellowship. He is currently a degree candidate at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Mattox’s story, “The Thing in Her Thumb,” appeared in issue 5.2 (Spring 2008) of Redivider and received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Some links from the world of Mattox Roesch:

MPR Interview

New West review

Current Weather Conditions in Unalakleet, AK

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Something with the Characters that I Couldn’t Shake

An Interview by Editor-in-Chief Matthew Salesses

At times, Mattox Roesch’s coming-of-age novel, set in a fictionalized version of Unalakleet, Alaska, seems a coming-of-age for the entire village. Characters must either come of age or perish: the narrator, Cesar; his best friend, Go-boy; his girlfriend, Kiana; even Cesar’s mother—those who don’t grow up, like Cesar’s brother, end up in prison or dead.

This community spirit has its champion in Go-boy. Go-boy is the engine of Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same, and a truly memorable character. Go believes in a community of goodness, a good conspiracy, and while his manic stretches sometimes seem to get in the way of his own growth, they capture the surging feeling of the townspeople, who wear his t-shirts that read, “Same-same,” and do seem to love each other more as he wills them to it. Cesar, the new insider, documents a memorable community the reader often wants to step into and join.

I asked Mattox a few questions via email about his stirring novel and the world he has created

Redivider: Tell us about writing “The Thing in Her Thumb” (congrats on the Pushcart mention, by the way). Are you a first draft guy? A revision guy?

Mattox Roesch: Thanks, Matt! I was so stoked to see that story in Redivider, and glad it got a nod from the Pushcart folks.

I’ve been waiting and wishing to become a first draft guy, but it hasn’t yet happened. I think, “Man, those folks have it nice over there writing and publishing their first drafts,” and then I curse them under my breath. “The Thing in Her Thumb” came more quickly than some of my other stories, though. I had a bowling piece that I hadn’t done anything with, so as I was working with these characters—writing linked stories—the bowling idea presented itself. I didn’t use any of the old material, just made all the characters go bowling together. And this technique of bringing emotionally charged characters together is a bit scary to me. Do they have a big blow out? Will that be too melodramatic? Do they ignore their issues? Won’t that be kind of boring? But I continually try to face this fear because the masters have shown us how this is where a bunch of literary gold can be found. It’s intriguing to me when characters are in situations that require them to need the people they don’t want to need. Flannery O’Connor was superpro with cranking up the mutual codependency between her characters, especially the tension between family members. I think of “Everything Rises Must Converge” when Julian and his mother are riding the bus. Also, the amazingly tense and strange dinner scene (I think there are more than one) between the grandfather, Mr. Fortune, and the Pitts family in “A View of the Woods.” The mastery is not only in finding the right places for the right characters to deal with this compression, but also showing and using their comfort zones before and after to give these moments their fullest realization.

RDR: Did you start out writing these chapters as stories or did you know they would become a novel? Were the sections that didn’t appear as stories filled in later or written at the same time?

MR: I started with one story. It sucked, but there was something with the characters that I couldn’t shake. So I started another story, and it was a little better, and I kept going. I threw a few away. I wrote some more. They were linked, but not chronological. It wasn’t until I got about six stories deep when I realized that I had something a bit more cohesive than a linked collection. So I started a second a manuscript, and that was the novel, and that was where I filled in gaps, added major sections, and rearranged some of the stories structurally to read more like chapters. I hope I never write a novel like this again, because it was very limiting and laborious, but it was the only way I knew how to write at the time. The important writerly thing I learned was to follow the characters, and trust them. The characters grabbed me and I knew I needed to experience them for a few hundred pages.

RDR: Let’s talk about Go-boy. How did you develop his character–did he come to you fully formed? Did you fill in details as you went along?

MR: Characters never come to me fully formed. I have to let them tap on my shoulder awhile. Life can get so busy that I forget to let my mind wander—I don’t give myself time to daydream. But daydreaming and mind-wandering is cash money in this writing business. Our subconscious is where these characters are accessed and realized. I’m working on a novel now that I’ve been restarting for almost three years. My problem is that I haven’t known my characters well enough off the page to effectively put them on the page. If I had to come up with a scientific formula for this, I’d guess that only about 25% of what the great writers know (or intuit) about their memorable characters ends up in the story.

Go-boy was inspired by a close friend of mine who died by suicide in 2002. I had tried many times to write characters based on this friend, Jason, to try and deal with my loss and questions and unresolved feelings, but nothing clicked. When Go-boy came along, I didn’t plan for him to be based on Jason. It just happened when I wasn’t forcing it. I think this is what compelled me with Go-boy and why I kept chasing him story after story.

RDR: Alaska seems so important to Go-boy and later to Cesar, and important to the novel. What fascinates you about this state? You live there, for goodness sake!

MR: I can only really speak about rural Alaska, and more specifically, Unalakleet, the place where we live (and where my wife is from). The majority of rural Alaska has a very specific history and a very specific connection to that history. Unalakleet is more Westernized than most of the small villages in western Alaska, but even Unalakleet maintains a rich local aesthetic and history, most of which is connected to the natural world.

I could also put it like this: I like my chances better out here, away from highways and malls and billboards. I like spending the majority of my outdoor time with earth beneath my feet, rather than pavement. I like having to consult the weather report rather than the traffic report. I like eating food that my wife and I have worked to collect and process and store. And I like that the natural world has gone from something that is visited and viewed to something that is respected and needed and feared.

All that slightly pretentious stuff aside, I still miss city life from time to time—the arts scene, eating out, movies, walking around, people watching. When you know everyone in town, people watching isn’t quite as magical.

RDR: The novel deals with a lot of violence, physical and mental, sometimes self-inflicted. As I read I was thinking about a Charles Baxter essay on stillness–have you read it? He talks about how the “still” moments work in juxtaposition with the violence. What’s your view on this? How do stillness and violence work together? Or, to put it another way, how does the violence help bring out the characters’ inner life?

MR: That’s a great essay!

The violence in my novel serves a pretty basic purpose, in my mind. The narrator had grown up in a world of personal violence, so much that it wasn’t odd. His older brother killed two fellow gang members, and well, to the narrator, it wasn’t all that weird—they had it coming because they chose that lifestyle. A rival gang member got raped because she shot one of the narrator’s friends in the leg, and well, she wasn’t innocent either. But when the narrator sees violence that can’t be justified and explained with his world’s logic, it recontextualizes the violence he had experienced. Maybe his dad shouldn’t have treated him like that. Maybe his brother didn’t need to end up in prison for life. Maybe his friends should have let that rival gangbanger alone. Recontextualizing the story is one great way of showing a first person narrator’s deeper story—the emotional and spiritual—without the narrator being completely aware of his/her own situation.

One great point that Baxter makes in his essay “Stillness” is that “Silence is an intensifier … it strengthens whatever stands on either side of it.” It not only juxtaposes well with violence, but the silences also work on the emotional level—silences prepare the reader to better see the moments when the ground cracks open and the hot oozing story seeps up from the depths. There are many ways to do “silences” (or stillness) in fiction, and even the most basic kind—white space—can serve to “strengthen whatever stands on either side of it.” The point, I think, is to use language and perception and details to create noise and silence, to create choruses and verses and guitar solos, to create explosions and glum conversations and crickets chirping in a muggy field.

RDR: What’s next for the great Mattox Roesch?

MR: I’ll probably keep restarting the novel I’m working on for a couple more years and then scrap it and look for a job. Haha, I’m kidding (hopefully). I’m writing a novel about a guy named Guy who plants gardens illegally and is trying to save himself and his family and his world by growing vegetables.

RDR: Have any reading recommendations?

MR: I’ve been trying to catch up on classics. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is full of amazing stuff once you get past the language (especially the constant use of preternatural!). The fantastically smart and gifted writer Stacey D’Erasmo pointed out how revolutionary it was for Hawthorne to use Hester Prynne as the heroine of a novel, for his day, and even for ours. I agree. Hester is the true moral center of Hawthorne’s universe in the novel, and it’s brilliant and revolutionary.


2/1/2010