“Interview with Colin Gee: ‘The Penult’” by Nolcha Fox

To order: https://www.amazon.com/Penult-Stories-novellas-Colin-Gee/dp/B0CK1D5JFL/

358 pages

Publisher: Leftover Books

ISBN-13: 979-8985107050

Colin Gee (@ColinMGee, he/him) is the founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette (@GorkoThe), teacher and writer. Originally from Wisconsin, he has been in Mexico since he got there.

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NF: Why did you decide to put this collection together?

CG: Patrick Trotti at LEFTOVER Books wanted to publish my story collection, a tonally grim short collection of “a series of dreams I invented”, but said he had in mind “a compendium of sorts” of my writing, since he had read a bunch of my failures-at-novel. So I cut down my Battlerof Beowulfand Captain Singleton adventure novels from 150 and 120k words respectively to 40k each, added a few tonally different stories, and voila, the compendium.

I think this is supposed to be done for already famous writers, but horse before cart, suck it folks.

NF: There is a thread of surreal absurdity and astonishing imagery that runs through every story. Not to mention some excellent surprise endings. Please tell me what was happening in your brain when you wrote the stories in this book, and if I can get some of that, too. Served on a crossbow, please.

CG: Patrick and I settled on ‘absurdist’ and ‘surreal’ as descriptors, too. I used to think I wrote weird fiction but it turns out that weird fiction is a kind of awful Lovecraft-roll-over genre fiction. Tha-wang!

I love both O. Henry and Borges.

NF: You are a master of Give-Me-More. In stories such as “Zounds”, “There is a problem with boyfriend”, “Well that is the risk isn’t it”, and “The Golden Key” the stories end with no resolution. Tell me how you decide when to end a story.

CG: I am a very lazy person. If I can find a good punchline I take my laurels and stick them right on my butt.

Also I write short stories on my cigarette break, sort of thing…and the model is Borges, A universal history of infamy, what they call micro fiction, not Rayond Carver.

NF: I cackled as I read “The penult.” And of course, the way you described your friend, I had to look up the word. It didn’t look anything like the penultimate syllable of a word. Not a bit. What made you decide to use the word penult?

CG: Growing up parsing classical poetry, syllabication is all important, so penult, antepenult, ultima, iamb, foot is just survival diction. In the story “The penult” it means that this is probably not the last friend. I like the creeping uncertainty of second-to-last.

NF: In stories such as “Outside of a Dog,” “Dear John,” “The weather,” and “Flores para lxs muertxs,” you turn the priorities of human love upside down and inside out. It might be muscles, size, or clothing, or…. Talk about your interest in this theme.

CG: I don’t know anything about human love, so it fascinates me sociopathically.

Are you saying I am getting it wrong?

NF: Some of your stories, such as “Bluebird” and “Rocks for the soup” deal with how we name things based on what we see. Please talk more about this.

CG: Or based on what we ingest, to change the things we don’t like looking at? These stories feature beer and absinthe, which might both be placeholders. The role of memory is always fascinating in storytelling…we have all had that argument, the car was blue, no it was green, but it is even stranger when you are looking right at the car.

NF: Some of your stories about college professors, such as “Cocksuck me Tom Cruise,” display human behavior at its most disgusting, to the point of being funny. Please expand on whether the characters are based on behavior you’ve seen in academia. And how writing these stories keeps you sane.

CG: There are two stories in the compendium about ESL teachers I have known from teaching gigs in Asia and Latin America. You will recognize them because they stand out as being kind of normal depictions of people doing things. The characters and bad behavior have been conflated a bit, but certainly not exaggerated. NO ADAM, I do NOT want you to hypnotize me at your house this weekend. NO I WILL NOT BRING THE LUBE, you are supposed to hypnotize me before you suggest that part. JESUS ADAM. I was going to write an entire tome of stories from the ESL circuit/circus but kind of gave it up because 1) it is depressing and 2) everyone immediately knows you are talking about Adam even if you change his name.

NF: Your stories, such as the parody on Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop For Death” are about death. What is your philosophy on life and death?

CG: Avoid the latter?

NF: Speaking of Emily Dickinson, I noticed more than a few stories referenced her poetry. Tell me why you wrote stories that ran rings around her work.

CG: Like The Inconceivabible the ED stories are lifted from a larger body of unpublished work called Emily Dickinson in her own words. I thought it was hilarious to take Emily Dickinson’s own words, which mostly irritate me at a very fundamental level, and extrapolate completely random, even contrary meaning from them. My Emily is a hardboiled, take no shit from no-body lady who will kick your ass. And that cracks me up.

NF: Stories about possible deaths, such as “The buried cenote”, “Time is a too-large fake mariachi”, “I keep thinking I see Dick Veith”, and “Someday morning” are deliciously creepy and weird. What might the Grim Reaper think about them, and about you?

CG: … (Long Silence) ….

NF: The Inconceivabible story set is a (sometimes darkly) humorous parody of Biblical stories. I hope you didn’t hear me laughing over 2,000 miles away as I read them. (A car door? Great idea!) Other stories, such as “Visions from an unpainted cottage interior”, are lush with religious symbolism gone wrong. Please talk about your religious background and why you decided to use the Bible and Christianity as inspiration.

CG: My pre-to-late-teen NIV Bible is completely filled with notes and underlines, and double underlines, stars, triple exclamation marks, and colored brackets, from Genesis to Revelation. And I tried for a long time to keep from dunking on the wide open net that is the Christian Bible and Christianity, then just went for it. The Inconceivabible does, however (God if you are reading), only take the Bible’s own words and stretch them slightly. I mean, a kid makes fun of Elisha’s bald spot and he calls down two huge bears to rip the kid’s arms off. This stuff is comic gold.

The car door (lol) is actually just a retelling of a classic joke, which I first heard outside church when I was five, except the original probably featured Sven and Ole.

NF: Your Beowulf and Captain Singleton novellas are epic in many ways. Why did you decide to write them?

CG: They were both childhood/YA favorites. My mom knew I liked pirates so was always passing me pirate books that we would read together, Captain Singleton and Captain Blood two favorites. I was lucky in high school to have had the chance to study Old English with a weird classics professor, and at University of Wisconsin I weaseled my way into the graduate-level Beowulf course, in which we read most of the original poem in OE with one of the world’s experts at the time, of course at 7 am in winter under a dingy steel and concrete basement classroom that felt like a dungeon. Very menacing environs, working through Beowulf in long johns, winter coats, caps, everyone with the flu. From there: I can’t plot a story to save my life, so when I felt I was ready to write longer form, I just adapted my favorite books, but with a deadpan, hardboiled voice.

Copyright © 2024 Nolcha Fox

Nolcha Fox’s poems have been curated in print and online journals. Her poetry books are available on Amazon and Dancing Girl Press. Nominee for 2023 Best of The Net, 2024 Best of the Net Anthology. Nominee for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Editor for Chewers & Masticadores, Garden of Neuro.

Website: https://bit.ly/3bT9tYu

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nolcha.fox/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoxNolcha

Medium: @nolchafox_14571

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