Adam Gnade

This was pretty exciting for me. ALARM Press interviewed me this week about bookwriting, independent publishing, and novellas. Here’s the story: http://alarmpress.com/41823/blog/columns/zine-scene-adam-gnades-hey-hey-lonesome-and-the-heat-and-the-hot-earth/

I’ve always liked people who wear glasses and now, as of tonight, I’m one of them. Was worried to see myself in them for the first time but they look pretty cool. Give it up for sight and seeing clearly. Fuck yeah to the wormers of books.

1) Farm chores. Wash dishes and watch the rain. Pack up recycling. Drive to town and get coffee. Take the dirt road. Listen to Under White Pines on the drive. (done)
2) Get home, open your windows, and let the cool air in. (What happened to winter?) (done)
3) Light incense and red candles in your room and leave the lights off and watch the rain. Listen to Under White Pines and Quiet Nights. (done)
4) Book work until dark. Map out the Carr boys’ trip from San Diego to Buffalo. Finish the funeral section of chapter ten. Foreshadow the fate of Joey Carr’s sister.
5) Go to town and get Spanish wine, kale, spinach, and sweet potatoes. Get home, drink wine, listen to Sketches of Spain on the record player and zone out. 
6) Be social.
7) Dinner. Social until 2am or 3.
9) Go back to your room. Read Tolstoy until you sleep. Make list for tomorrow.

Last night I sat on the floor of the Microcosm Publishing offices in the next town from me and blasted the Sisterland cassette and printed up some split zines with writing by me and Bart Schaneman. It’s called They Will Stand on You and Spit and I’m pretty happy with it. If you want one, go here to order. They’re free but you have to pay a bit to cover postage and the amount paypal takes out. Oh, and feel free to get one, copy it yourself, and spread them around the world. I’m okay with that.

-Adam

“It was a long time ago.” I kneel on the carpet next to Maggie and take the photo and stare at Allysia—15 years old, pale skin and bare shoulders, flat chested, her green formal dress, cranberry-hair parted down the middle and pinned to the sides with yellow plastic barrettes. I try to remember her—sitting on the boardwalk at night under the street light pretending I was drunk so I could get away with trying to kiss her. And her looking up at me and how beautiful her eyes were. And kissing her and it was our first kiss, my first-ever kiss (not hers), the thing I’d waited for for so long. I see her terrible baggy jeans, her flannel shirts with the cuffs over her hands, her retarded brother Maury with his gentle, cow-eyed stare. “Sistuh!” he would say. “Sistuh, bring me hugs!” Sweet kind little Maury. Gone four years now. Four years under the ground in the Sherman cemetery. Their mom a year later. Breast cancer. It all happened so fast.

I remember the smell of her room. The horrible sour cheese and dog poop smell of her sneakers the day I picked her up from school in the rain. The ripe tomato smell of sweat. The salt-chlorine smell of her on my fingers the first time I put my hand down her pants.

I hear Allysia’s mother cooking dinner in their kitchen, greasy vegetable soup, a steaming clattering pot, her little sister sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, small and longhaired, singing along with a car advertisement on the TV—Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan moves youuuu.

I see Allysia sitting on the edge of her tiny bed, fully dressed again, tying the laces of her shoes after we’d fooled around for hours, hours of kissing and at the end just down to her panties and socks and nothing else, her bra off finally after weeks of dreaming of it and then the sadness and a shock to see her back in clothes and knowing I had to leave. The singer on the radio singing, Oh my life it’s changin’ every day, every possible way. I see her clunky pink phone and answering machine next to the bed covered in cartoon cat stickers and I see her drawings of angels on the walls, her school books in a colorful stack by the door—some of them with covers made from brown grocery bags. One of them with my name and hers in Crayola marker—curled together with green marker ivy.

I see her and I feel nothing. I was so in love but she’s a ghost to me now. Someone I saw on TV and knew as a character. A face in the newspaper.

“I think she goes to art school in New Hampshire. Or Vermont,” I say. “Yeah, Vermont. Vermont. I barely remember her.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Maggie says playfully. “She’s cute. She looks like a little field mouse. You guys look happy.”

“We were. I mean, for a while we were. You know how it is.”

(Excerpt from the out-of-print novella California by Adam Gnade, published in late 2011 by Double Suns.)

Ben Frank is just in from Chicago by way of South Carolina by way of Florida. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and an old dress suit with a paperback shoved in the side pocket. His leather dress shoes are giant, like clown shoes. One has laces, untied. One is wrapped with duct tape. Across the duct tape is the word PIZZA written in black marker. Ben Frank pulls his knees up under his chin, wraps his arms around his legs, and tells me how he spent the spring. Greyhound buses, crosscountry. San Diego to Louisville. Shoplifting his dinner in Salt Lake City, paranoid about Mormons. Chased by cops in Denver. Sending postcards to girls, postcards with pictures of the Mississippi River or Oklahoma oil fields or Kansas prairie. He talks about getting jumped by a bunch of drunk guys who thought he was gay. He tells me about superhuman kids across the country who shoplift all day and dig for food in the dumpster and drink wine by the bucket and give themselves tattoos with each others’ names. He tells me about the photocopied magazines they make, stories of their triumphs, their battles with society, their great American tragedies. It’s the old west all over again he says. The new old west. The frontier now that the frontier is a stripmall.

(Excerpt from the out-of-print novella California by Adam Gnade, published in late 2011 by Double Suns.)

Got a thousand new tumblr followers in the last couple days which is pretty cool. I don’t really know how tumblr works but I wanted to say hello and tell you what this page is all about. Adamgnade.com is where I post about my books and records project. Short version, I write a series of books and records that share characters and continue each others’ plot-lines. It’s not necessarily sequential but it’s definitely a connected universe. (For more about what I do, here’s what wikipedia says about it.) If you want to check out my records and books here’s the online store. Thanks for stopping by, for whatever reason you did. Oh, and if you ever want to get in touch you can email me at adamgnade@gmail.com

Love,

Adam Gnade

Last night the five of us went to town and I bought Finnegan’s Wake at the bookstore. (Had a choice between Neruda’s love poems, Lost Souls, and that. Thickness won out. When you’re writing a book as thick as a telephone directory it’s good to stay in the same realm.) Reading plan looks like: finish Karenina, get through the unget-through-able Joyce, then the field is open. Proust? Infinite Jest? Death in the Afternoon? Cervantes? I’d like to reread 2666 and take my time this round and let all the oil and blood seep in. Last time I read it was on a train across the country. Might be nice to hole up in bed with it and wait out the cold days. We’ll see.

Oh, and speaking of books, LG overheard the following conversation in the bookstore.

Little boy: Mom, buy me a book. I want a book!

Mom: I got you a book yesterday. Don’t you remember?

Boy: You didn’t buy me a book. I want a book!

Mom: Remember? I downloaded it to my Kindle.

Boy: That’s not a book!

Fuck yeah, kid, good work. (Just because people are getting stupider doesn’t mean you have to. Maybe that kid’ll be buying his own telephone book novels in 10 years. I’ve got hope.)

Today I plan to work on Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden until it’s time for the evening farm work. Since Jan 5 I’ve written 100 pages (of that, maybe 50 usable.) Plan is to knock out the next half by Feb 5 and then add to the bones until June 5. I know that’s a little OCD but I like structure in the midst of formlessness. Number games keep me rolling and deadlines put on the heat when the only heat is what you bring with you.

Here’s to another day  at it…

Dear friends,

I think winter just hit. The wind is whistling around the farmhouse and shaking the window panes, and if you stand close enough to the walls you can feel the cold seeping in. 

Tonight involves driving to Lansing for Dukes’ birthday party. It also involves red wine and a ceremony of fire and JD speechifying about ancient Scottish rituals. 

The snow is coming down now and I’ve got the heater by my bed roaring. 

Fingers crossed for the livestock tonight. This’ll be the ducks’ and chickens’ first cold night. (The sheep and goats are veterans thanks to last year.)

I know a party will be good but I can’t wait to get back here and hunker down for the winter we’ve been waiting for. I’m ready to read Russian writers and drink red wine and work on the book and listen to Cat Power’s Moon Pix record and do nothing but until May.

-Adam

After a good day on the road I started the final section of the new novel, Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden. It’s moving fast. Did 20 pages and hope to do another 20 tomorrow. Initial estimate was 600 pages (begun in 2008, the day the first book came out, done in a year and change.) Now it looks like I’ll have a final draft at 800 by June. Wish me luck. This one’s going to be a BRICK. Four years of work…

Dear friends,

This is important: Tomorrow is international “Adventure Day,” a holiday started by one Jessie Duke (below), who co-owns Microcosm Publishing and runs the company that puts out my books and records. The idea’s simple: Get out there and do something that makes you feel alive. Get dangerous. Live out your fantasy. See something beautiful. Go somewhere new. Or, y’know, stay at home and drink yourself stupid and watch TV and look at videos on the internet and waste your life. YOUR CHOICE, but choose well. (On your death bed you will regret the adventures you missed out on.) So, tomorrow, January 5th, 2012, fucking ADVENTURE DAY. Do it.

-Adam Gnade

I’m not big on resolutions but I like the structure of lists. Last year my non-resolution resolution was to keep track of all the books I read. Here’s 2011…

January 2011
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg
Nebraska, Ron Hansen
My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, Daisy Fried
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzgerald (re-read)
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Stephen Hawking, The History of Everything
Paper Dance, Leroy V. Quintana, Victor Hernandez Cruz, and Virgil Suarez

February
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak
Youngblood Hawke, Herman Wouk
Mr. Vertigo, Paul Auster

March
Last Evenings on Earth, Roberto Bolano (re-read)
Lost Illusions, Honore de Balzac
O Pioneers, Willa Cather

April
Green is the New Red, Will Potter
Call of the Wild, Jack London

May
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

July
Amulet, Roberto Bolano
1984, George Orwell
Night, Elie Wiesel
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald (re-read)

August
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce (re-read)
The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Bloom
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (re-read)
Diario de Oaxaca, Peter Kuper

September
Kettledrum, Andrew Mears

October
The Green and the Gold, Bart Schaneman
Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolff
Don’t Stop the Carnival, Herman Wouk
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Billy Budd Foretopman, Herman Melville
Sons and Fathers, Ivan S. Turgenev
Deliverance, James Dickey
Sons of the Rapture, Todd Dills

December
The Third Reich, Roberto Bolano
Dubliners, James Joyce (re-read)
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

ADAM GNADE “THE WINTER/THEIR APARTMENT” FROM RUN HIDE RETREAT SURRENDER Lyrics: It is winter again and you are fighting with your woman. From outside the apartment on the hill leading up Broadway, pressed against cold window glass, the warm glow you’d see would be Norman Rockwell life—NBC and a Christmas tree—wrapping paper tubes unraveled on the couch, presents half wrapped, shoeboxes—their lids off—open and waiting, where the dregs of pizza boxes, chewed-on crusts, and red wine jugs sit. Sliced cheese or cubed provolone gone dark yellow on white paper plates.

Your hands thrown over your head; her eyes wet and red. And from outside the window you would see a symphony, a tragic comedy, and song and dance blues, or election year blues, wartime blues, love-life blues, growing up blues, the sorrow of ancient oak tree deep root pained. And San Diego winter where at 6 a.m. you and her drive to work and see your breath in steam billows, to jobs you hate and to making money that goes God knows where.

Up the street the cars line Broadway, their windows fogged with dew drops dripping on the concrete. Southern California morning, the bums are staggering out of wet bushes draped with spider web trails and damp pant cuffs, scratching brown beards and wondering where their life went, and how did they get to this and whether they’d ever touch a woman again and oh, for one last grasp of warm teenage breasts they felt in the back of a car, high school homecoming night maybe, 1985, or somewhere near there, an elegant young body or smooth long side and the eyes of shivering nervous, of a woman that wants you because you are good and you are worthy and you make her feel good. But never again and they are resigned to that—nothin’ but dollar coffee at 7-11 and another day waiting for handouts and hobo death.

The nights now are filled with talk and then quiet, where you feel dumb and thick-mouthed—can’t say nothin’ but mumble and plead your case. You were never brave like she is, so you sit and drink and grow hard skeleton face and scare her, scare your family too, while your body rots, while your muscle goes to fat, then sagged skin while your brain goes evil, the squiggling worms and flitting haints, the spirits of soul leaving your body.

So she delivers sermons and speeches, implores you to get the hell out of the city.

“We’d be so much happier,” she says.

You could quit your jobs and run away like you used to, back when you did things just because, and because it felt good to run away, and because you didn’t worry so much like you do now … just because and leave the assholes behind and fuck ‘em anyway, they don’t mean shit.

She says it doesn’t matter what; run, hide, retreat, surrender or your apartment will be your grave.

So now it’s controlled burns in fields, oil derricks, freight trains, pig farms, wheat crop, cloud-topped mountains lazy and humped low on the horizon as we roll toward Boise. And there are hazy blue skies that go on forever and stretch up in a huge ceaseless arc above us, the place between the sky and the heavens, where space begins and all is dark and unformed and silent in cosmic orbits and celestial gasses like red and purple flowers blooming or like egg drop soup in some Chinese diner in LA.

Frankie and I talk on the phone and as we say goodbye she says, “Well … see you soon,” to which I thoughtlessly reply, “No you won’t,” and we both go silent, separated by 2,000 miles. The cattle low softly in the fields, and onward we move.

(Excerpt from the novel Hymn California by Adam Gnade)

Out of high school and still living at my parents’ house I feel trapped and eternally 10 years old. I talk to Alex about going to see the country. “I just want to drive across the thing. Just to see it.”

“Let’s go to Vegas.”

“No, I want to see other states, places I haven’t been before. I need to drive across the country. I feel like it’s something that’s missing from my life. I can’t just stay here in San Diego forever,” I say before realizing I’m talking to myself. Alex doesn’t need this. He’s in school, has a job, has a straight path set in front of him. Alex is going to be a chemist. He wants to work in Los Alamos. I know nothing. I want nothing, besides these things I can’t have. To see America. To get the hell out of San Diego. The life of someone else.

I try to write about American life but I don’t know America. I sit in my bedroom in San Diego, the room I grew up in, and I feel like a liar, like I’m faking. I try to write songs, but each one feels wrong. Stories, wrong. It’s not my own life I’m writing from.

Alone, at home, after my parents have gone to bed, I take out maps and trace lines and say names that feel magic: Cross Plain, Elbow Lake, Greenville, Sioux City, Detroit, Chicago.

All I know is San Diego and Tijuana. There is no magic in these cities. There are no miracles and laughter and strange mornings here.

I dig through the books that keep me going and images of America break out in full gushing color. I lie back in bed and feel the cool of reinforced concrete-sided grain elevators. I think of ghost towns with names like Bodie and Calico, the saw grass swamp of the Everglades, islands, inlets, promontories of Maine, Niagara Falls, Cumberland Plateau, the Great Smokey Mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Allegheny Mountains.

I comb through my mother’s atlas and stare at pictures of the Chesapeake Bay, flooded tributaries on the East Coast, salt marshes like the Great Dismal Swamp. I see Cape Hatteras, Barrier Island, Harker’s Island, Cape Lookout.

These places follow me into my dreams: burning tobacco fields, cypress swamps of the delta, Cathedral Canyon. I wake up, have breakfast in the empty house on Saturdays, then walk aimless through the streets of Pacific Beach, long and clean and palm-lined and close my eyes and hear the poetry in American places; words like Guadeloupe Mountains, Lake Eire, Rio Bravo.

There is a big America out there that I don’t know and it’s bittersweet to think about.

(Excerpt from the novel Hymn California by Adam Gnade)