Needless to say, he’s a pretty busy guy; however, I finally caught up with Parker at the airport right before he left to go to Portugal to teach at the Disquiet International Writer’s Conference. We talked basketball, poetry, and used the phrase “syphilitic chipmunks” more than it has ever been used before.
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| While eating a sandwich purchased at the airport, Parker said, "It's even more disappointing than I expected." |
You wrote a poem, Erratic Fire, Erratic Passion, assembled entirely from quotes by basketball player Metta World Peace. Can you talk about your impetus for writing it?
Most sports personality interviews are boring and predictable and cliche, but not when Metta is involved, so I’d been collecting his quotes for some time. I had them arranged on sticky notes on my Mac, and there were some interesting rhythms accruing there. So mostly to entertain my friends on Facebook who only pay attention to my posts when it has to do with Metta World Peace, I began constructing a couple verses and I put a whole poem together.
Were you surprised at all the attention the poem received?
Yes. My sister sent me the most practical reaction, though. After I sent her the links to Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports and the Ball Don’t Lie Blog, my sister said, “Cool, but what do you get out of it?”
And? What do you get out of it?
Joy! What I’d hoped to get out of it was a correspondence from Metta in the form of a cease and desist order. Or better still, he’d say, “Hey, how about you ghost write my biography?” But nope. Nothin’.
And without looking it up, can you tell me the final score of the Heat-Spurs game?
I can’t tell you the score, no. I was too crushed by that point, I couldn’t remember anything. It wasn’t a wide margin though.
You watched that game after giving a terrific reading from your new work, which is a collaboration. Talk a little about that project.
This British photographer, Brendan Berry, contacted me saying he read my stories and enjoyed them and had just finished driving across the United States taking pictures of empty hotel rooms. He asked if I wanted to write a small piece for each of the photos and I was totally too busy at the time, but this plays into my strategy of structured procrastination.
So I looked at the photos and thought, “Man, this is something I really want to do!” I love hotel rooms, I love the blankness of them. I finished my novel [Ovenman] in a hotel room.
Actually, the story you heard last night might have started as part of the project, but that was a really long story and it wouldn't fit because these are supposed to be snapshots.
Seriously? But it was a story about a creepy hotel room!
So here’s how I work nowadays: I used to think that because I’m writing a short story about, say, syphilitic chipmunks, I’d say “okay, I have syphilitic chipmunks in my short story, so I can’t have syphilitic chipmunks in my novel.” Or I’d discover a sinkhole in Florida, write a short story about it, and think that I couldn’t write a novel about it too. I write everything in three different forms now. I’ve got that sinkhole in short story, novel, and in a nonfiction piece. I’m plagiarizing from myself in each work, and that’s okay.
You’re from Florida, where no one is really from even when we’re born here, but you’re about to move to Amherst, Massachusetts. Define the word “home.”
Well, I thought I was returning home when I came back to Florida after eighteen years. I found that I feel more at home now on the streets of Moscow than I do in Florida. It isn’t really surprising after eighteen years, and there are a couple cliches about it, among them that you can’t go home. The question becomes what is your home?
There’s a really nice Proust quote that says a writer is a foreigner unto himself, something like that, and I think that’s probably true. You have to remove yourself to be able to write about something, but what is home once you’ve been removed? Maybe it doesn’t matter so much.
So what next, hot stuff?
Sigh. Airport security.
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