Author Justin C Gordon describes how a photo of the ‘G’ shelf in a library motivates him to write
Justin C Gordon
After growing up living in fear of being kidnapped by his born-again-preacher father’s church, Justin C Gordon began a career as a writer. His short fiction has been published in anthologies and literary magazines, including Gutter Magazine, and The View from Here. Justin is a member of the Texas Writer’s League and is currently working on a novel called The Electric Pickle. He tells us how books provide him with “a sense of momentum and opportunity.”
What inspired you to become a writer?
My father converted from bricklayer to born-again Christen Minister when I was four. He abandoned us and didn’t send any means of support. My mother had to work her ass off, went back to school, learned computer languages when only men were doing this, got a job in the field, and with promotions eventually moved us from inner city to the suburbs.
Though we have since reconciled, for many years my sister and I lived in fear of being kidnapped by my father and his church, but my mother said the library was a safe place because Dad wasn’t a big reader. He’d never go there.
The library was a place of calm. The shelves felt like a maze to hide in. The books were all available and even free. C.S. Lewis, Madeline L’Engle, and especially Geraldine Harris’ books were an escape from the chaos I felt. The narrator’s words were intimate enough to make me forget my loneliness and anger for the length of a read. Then at school, I would regurgitate the storylines to classmates, make comic books in marble composition books, and eventually start writing my own stories.
It wasn’t all escapism. Understand, we had seen our mother do her college homework, which was reading a computer book, and then suddenly she didn’t have to wait tables late at night, but sit in a cubicle with a computer, have medical benefits, and a salary. Books provided a sense of momentum and opportunity.
What was your first short story about?
Unpublished: ‘Terror Strikes St. Pius X’ about a group of terrorists my dad hired to kidnap me from Catholic School. It was great because any 3rd grade classmate I was mad at got maimed or killed. It was written on a small yellow legal pad and was stealthily handed between desks during class.
The teacher intercepted it because there’s always one nervous kid that fumbles contraband. But my teacher made me read it in front of the class, my first reading, and it was terribly encouraging. Classmates started being nicer to me so I let them survive the sequels.
Published: The Dream Machine. It is about a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman who is trained to trap customers into a sale, but gets trapped by a werewolf. I had been a very bad Kirby Vacuum cleaning salesman in New Orleans. The story was slotted as a Southern Gothic genre, but the themes were actually success and mental illness.
At the time I was working in a marketing department working 80 hours a week. It paid very well though and that was the conflict: time or money, but then my health went to hell. I stopped sleeping. I was diagnosed with Bipolar and medicated until I resembled drywall, but my wife stuck with me.
The Austin Sketch Group would meet on Sundays at a coffee shop to draw and my family would participate. ASG has people who philosophise the outcome of a fight between Green Lantern and Wolverine, but a question came up about werewolves, like if you were bitten what would you honestly do. I said chain me up once a month in the basement, but someone said they would put an anchor around their neck and jump in a deep lake. This made me incredibly sad.
My wife said, stop brooding and write about it. I did and stayed away from water. My disorder was later changed to severe sleep apnea and I had something to publish. It was nominated for the 2008 Million Writers Award and then anthologised at Southern Gothic Shorts.
Do you face much rejection?
Yes, yes, yes, but over the last year it has changed from formal letters to personal ones. Some have even marked up the story and if you’re not able to afford grad school this is valuable guidance. I have a goal with a timetable of where I should be based on the amount of time I devote to increasing my skill level.
Go to a thrift store and buy a bunch of postcards you find amusing to paperclip to your submissions. Address them to yourself with the note: ‘Story received, now get back to writing.’ It helps to get that in the mail. It makes you feel like something is happening. This is a game of honing skill and endurance.
I’m like a band that practices in the garage everyday, plays family reunions, sneaks an original between covers at a wedding gig, hits a circuit of dive bars where the stage is beside the toilet, and maybe one day get invited to be the obligatory opening act only a few listens to.
My job as a writer is to write better than I did yesterday. This doesn’t mean faster or more, but clear precise words to convey a story. I don’t even think about headlining theatres. Stadiums? I could be a bouncer for stage divers when Michael Chabon or Junot Diaz comes to town.
How do you go about choosing publications to send your work to?
Duotrope.com. Everyone using it needs to donate money for the maintenance of this site. It is a valuable tool, but reading the publication you are submitting to is very important.
Volunteer to be a reader for an online writing contest or local mag. After you experience the slush pile, you’ll understand the slop people submit. Do everything you can before you submit, treat it professionally, don’t waste anyone’s time, and it gets noticed.
Right now I’ve stopped writing shorts to finish a novel. I want to have a book on a library shelf, but what I am paying attention to are agents, editors, and publishing houses who work with my version of literary fiction.
Tell us about the Texas Writer’s League.
It’s a not-for-profit organisation located here in Austin but with opportunities around Texas for writers to take classes, attend lectures. They have a resource centre and a list of writing groups and host a very large agent conference every year.
I founded my group, The Austin Fictionists through them and the stories I’ve published are a result of these critiques.
What do you find the most challenging aspects of writing?
Panic. I keep feeling like I’m going to be called out as a fraud. I pace my backyard and chain smoke and beat myself up about it. My dog listens half-heartedly.
I think the effort to write renders a person vulnerable to all kinds of self-doubt. Two conflicting things happen during process, the need to communicate and also isolate.
I don’t talk about a piece I am working on. I have talked a story out of being written. It was a fun conversation, but turns into performance art.
The panic only happens when I am not physically writing. When I’m physically writing I could be sitting naked in broken glass and not notice.
What do you enjoy most about the process?
The awareness of the present that I feel as I write. I have done a lot of things like construction, animating, Navy medic, raising chickens, but the only time I feel alive in a very aware present tense way, what I can not stop doing, what I must do, and am utterly convinced I am meant for is parenting and writing.
Whose writing do you admire?
I just finished reading two writers people told me to read for a couple years and because they told me to, no matter how good the intention, like an idiot I avoided them. One was J.D. Salinger and the other, Hurbert Selby, Jr. Both made so much sense to voice and narration. In high school, we read The Catcher in the Rye
Now that I’m an adult who has a very sane and happy life, rereading it was an awkward pleasure, like visiting someone I used to know. However, for me Catcher isn’t as important as his Nine Stories and Franny and Zooey. The voice in each, the choice of words used, and how they are used opened up a lot of possibilities for me. The characters are endearing and I think high school students should be forced to read the short story ‘For Esme - with love and squalor’.
I think Last Exit to Brooklyn should be taught to teenagers anywhere there is gang activity and housing projects. Anyone poor and pissed off could identify with these stories and might even get inspired to write their own tales.
Selby, Jr uses voice and typography to convey a story so powerfully I had to take out all the italics and caps I put into my manuscript. I used it in my rough drafts to isolate phrases that I feel are important to develop, the voice I’m working with demanded this way of typing, but in revision I realised that would be an editor’s decision and right now my job is telling a difficult story as clearly as possible.
Selby, Jr pulls it off and makes me feel the characters. It reminds me of being a kid growing up in the city and hearing neighbours yell at each other. In Pittsburgh during the summers all the windows were open and the buildings are close together. I’m sure most of the buildings have moved to a central air/heat now, so the windows are closed and this form of entertainment is gone, but Selby, Jr is always available on a library shelf.
What inspires you?
I have a photo on my phone from the G shelf of a library. There is a part between the books where my book belongs. I have Mary Gordon waiting to be my book’s neighbour.
Where do you carry out the majority of your writing?
At home. I have a mortgage, so to sit in a coffee shop and write makes me feels like some creepy old guy. I also need quiet. When I am in the moment distractions have to be minimised. I don’t listen to music. I don’t know how many years I have on earth and don’t want to waste it getting my concentration back.
Weather permitting, back porch full view of the chicken coop. Sometimes, I let them out and they scratch around my feet. Rainy days, I have a desk in a tool shed, keep the lit cigarette away from the gas can or hay. The key to both places I write in is they have a door to get to. I discovered having a threshold is extremely important. It makes me transition to work.
What has been the highlight of your writing career so far?
At the Parent/Teacher conference when my sons introduced me as their Dad the Writer.
What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
Write and read. I’m shocked by how little many aspiring read. There is a rich legacy we are vying to join. It is a privileged to be read. Create a safe place to work and do it daily.
Where to start? Check out John Dufresne’s book, The Lie That Tells a Truth. It has great exercises in it, but you have to write and rewrite and rewrite and then submit. Stalin told Bulgakov that though he enjoyed ‘The Master and the Margarita’ it would not be published in his lifetime and wasn’t. If you don’t have a psychotic dictator preventing you from getting your work out there, then it’s on you.
What are you working on now?
My novel ‘The Electric Pickles’. It will be completed by March for my birthday and under 450 pages. It’s about the end of the world and how Mister Roger’s Neighborhood might prevent it.
Find out more about Justin at http://justincgordon.blogspot.com/
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Great interview, good to hear some honest answers and some great advice for new authors like myself. Thanks
I attended a WLT summer retreat with Justin and his writing is a treat. He shares his work and feedback with such passion. I can’t wait to find him on the G shelf.