Matt Briggs packs together enough “big themes” in Shoot the Buffalo for several novels. Yet he does so with such attention to particulars that they only stand out as “themes” in retrospect. While reading, you’re aware only of the candid generosity of the family portrait.

Shoot the Buffalo is about the Bohm family—a counter-culture group of five growing marijuana outside a small town in the foothills of the Cascades who uneasily welcome a sixth member into their household. This new family member is the husband’s brother Oliver, just back from serving in Vietnam.

Narrated by Aldous, the eldest sibling in the family, the book traces the impact Oliver has on the Bohm household, especially as it relates to the death—early in the novel—of his younger sister. Though a sophisticated and structurally complex book with much to recommend it, two core strengths stood out as particularly notable. The first of these is the sense of place.

The book has a second narrative thread that follows Aldous through his first weeks in the Army, but much of the book takes place in a rather remote Pacific Northwest wilderness. Briggs beautifully captures the sights, sounds, textures and smells of this wilderness, using language evocative without being showy. Having spent most of my adult life in that part of the world, these pages made me acutely nostalgic for a land as fecund as it is mysterious.

The other core strength of the novel is Briggs’s ability to conjure the voice and perspective of an intelligent, watchful child, with all his limitations intact. Aldous Bohm is a brilliant portrait of youthful consciousness in its attempt to negotiate the complex emotions of early adulthood. To watch him grapple especially with a generous measure of misplaced guilt around which much of the book revolves, is nothing short of heartbreaking.

The book is of course haunted by the impact of war. But because it remains true to the perspective of a child, and because in the Bohm family—as in many families home to Vietnam Veterans, my own included—the war is not discussed, the narrator gropes around for the haunting’s true source. It’s both everywhere and nowhere, and the reader, along with young Aldous, is forced to confront the impossibility of solving problems that aren’t even allowed to be named.

Shoot the Buffalo, which won a 2006 American Book Award, was originally published by Clear Cut Press—a house that’s since gone out of business, it seems. However, it’s recently been rereleased by The Publication Studio. Briggs has information on the various ways you can read it on his website.

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Listen to ULGM’s debut EP here.

The Rumpus: Let’s start out with the basics.  Who is ULGM?

Eric Leuschner: ULGM is me, Eric Petterson, and Myke Fedyk. In a sense ULGM has its roots way back in the mid nineties, in a slum between the Alpha Delts and a bona fide crack house in the University District (long since demolished and turned into respectable student housing). Eric and I recorded a song back in 1994 called “Stealing Stuff’s Alright With Me”. The band name was “Eric, Eric, Eric, and Some Asshole Banging a Chair with a Golf Club”. There was actually a third Eric and an asshole, and we sat around slapping piles of loose change for rhythm and banging a crappy vinyl chair with a crappy 9 iron and feeling brilliant and free. I couldn’t play guitar by then, so I only belted out “Stealing Stuff’s Alright With Me” over and over again with as much soul as I could manage. I felt invisible, through a kind of the underachiever Buddha mind a la “Slacker”. So I could make art at any time in any way, all without consequence but with what I thought was radical authenticity.

Rumpus: How would you describe your sound? What music is influencing you right now?

Leuschner: The sound we were going for with these three songs was not very deliberate, but we definitely wanted to play with vocal harmonies and show off Petterson’s guitar. I was really into on Neil Young’s “On The Beach” while we put these together and I feel it had an influence. The lyrics on that album are exactly the sort of highly evocative nonsense that I love. The other big influence was obviously ULCC, the last formal “band” I was in, unless you count the Whitey Joe Dork Band. Bear in mind that I’ve been in “retirement” for about 5 years and now that I’ve got the music bug again, not surprisingly I sound a lot the same. This is not a bad thing. I’m looking forward to a lot of experimentation and evolution, but I think I’ll always come back to the folksy bedrock. I’ve been covering a Sun City Girls folk hymn called “I deal a stick” that just hits home for me. It’s a three chord rambling paranoid fuck-you to the conspiracy. A nice campfire song for the end times. This makes me happy and angry.

Rumpus: Can you talk about this “highly evocative nonsense” you mention?  Your lyrics, it seems to me, deal in thematics more than linear progression.  They seem to have a narrative, in that events or anecdotes are creates or related, but the thread holding them together seems impressionistic.  What you say your “concerns” are as a lyricist?  Or is that even a sane question to ask?

Leuschner: I may start with an idea when I get to writing, but unrelated phrases or words emerge and stake out territory in a refrain or rhyme, and I always run with it. The story becomes secondary to the mood or emotion, so it’s more expressionist than impressionist.  Pixies and Wolf Parade are great at this, dropping you without warning into the middle of a weird movie, you get a sense of action and drama but not much of a thread actually holding anything together.

As for my “concerns”, it might be a sane question if I knew what you meant. Like, subject matter or themes?

Rumpus: Yeah, there seems to be a rather significant political strain running through your songs. Are there subjects–political or otherwise—you find yourself returning to?

Leuschner: Looking back, I’m honestly having a hard time pointing to any strong themes. Apocalyptic colors for sure. Political in that I don’t sing flatteringly about the state of affairs around here. There is an ecstatic tendency in there, sometimes zany madcap EJACULATIONS, other times tense and windswept. But there was some sweetness in there too, like the Pablo Neruda covers or the lullaby for my niece. I like telling stories via hints. I like plagiarism. Combined, you get ULCC’s “Banjo”, Mark Twain verbatim mixed with a story about euphonium player in the Marines who confesses that he had killed Anwar Sadat. That felt political to me. Therefore, I can’t actually write message songs. I can relate to the grumpy Bob Dylan from the 1966 Playboy interview. I don’t necessarily want to be understood, and that’s great.

Rumpus: What’s wrong with the world, and can art make a difference?

Leuschner: There’s no shortage of what’s wrong with the world. Violence, corruption, exploitation, ignorance, complicity, poverty, insanity, catastrophe, it’s hell, really. Now try to conceive of all the bad stuff happening simultaneously, every day with no end in sight. I really like Andy Goldsworthy. He stacks rocks, and I’m suddenly astonished and connected with the cosmos. My life is enriched. Art can move mountains, heal the sick, and entertain. Most art is insipid decadent crapola that diminishes my life (even if I like it). There is no excuse for this much art. We need nurses, dammit. But I won’t stop anybody from making art, and I can only hope that tolerating this many artists means that a handful of them might be geniuses enough to nourish me and save the world.

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Hunts In Dreams follows four characters–a family–in alternating chapters. Charles, the father/husband, is trying to recover a rifle important to his understanding of the past. Joan, the mother/wife, is bored with her family life, and we see her have an affair. Micah, the son/brother, gets a goat or something, prowls the town, and Lyris, the daughter/sister, gets into a vaguely menacing, sexually charged situation with a kid from town who’s into knives.

The chapters aren’t exclusively “about” the character whose name acts as their titles, and this fact pleasantly dislodges a good deal of the action, letting the reader almost free-associate the meanings of various scenes, in which tertiary characters often interact, the primary character listening in, waiting for his or her turn, or just lurking. In a recent Bookworm interview with Mary Gaitskill, Michael Silverblatt argues that Gaitskill utilizes a deep sensitivity to objects in her stories, letting the physicality of her settings speak for her characters in a way that’s both profound and out of vogue today. If Gaitskill does this with objects, I might say that Drury does this with peripheral characters. The host of people who populate the small town of Boris–which serves as the primary setting for the novel–are drawn with depth, economy, and most of all, sympathy. But the structure of the text insists that these people act in some way as extensions or comments on the more central characters.

Hunts In Dreams sits safely within the realist, pastoral genre, and like many others in this category, it’s strange. Drury is perhaps a scrappier, less self-indulgent Richard Russo with undertones of David Lynch. As in Russo’s work, Hunts In Dreams exhibits a strong element of situational comedy. But Drury’s timing is perfect, and despite working on a large canvas, he’s at heart, like Lynch might be, a miniaturist. He knows just when to end a scene, and he does so often; the chapters are short, and each chapter is broken into even shorter sections, so there’s a constant, rhythmic lurching forward and backward in time, like a rolling oval. Impressively, he’s able to build up and release pressure in interesting ways using this narrative strategy. Furthermore, each section almost acts as its own stand-alone, beautifully rendered scene. They remind me, in fact, of a number of the newer writers working in flash fiction today: Kim Chinquee, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Burch and others, all of whom seem determined to create the perfect lived moment in time.

Tao Lin recently wrote about Joy Williams in this column, and I’d say that some of what he says about Williams and Lorrie Moore is true about Drury–I’d put them in a similar camp–but Drury uses far less irony (which I found, upon discovering him, unexpectedly refreshing). His characters often make strange decisions, and you feel that they’re coasting a bit through life, but they also care deeply about one another–perhaps in the place of caring about themselves–and this comes across in most cases (in another book, The Black Brook, there are a few gangster characters which seem to border on caricature).

In the end, Hunts In Dreams is not a particularly deep book. But it’s rich, strange, comforting and sad all at once. If it were a day, it would occur toward the end of spring, when it’s beginning to get hot, and you’re glancing up through a tree overhead, at the full summer leaves, at the light filtering through, and are momentarily blinded by a ray of sunlight shooting through, which makes you forget, for a second, that you’re speaking to your neighbor, who you don’t know well, despite having lived next door to him for years, about the poisonous snake he found in the garden that morning, and killed with a spade.

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