You’ve all seen this movie before.
You’re humping along in writerly misery, working the adjunct professor racket – because it’s always been your dream to work for an institution of higher education that demonstrates its respect for the pedagogic mission by paying an hourly wage nearly equal to McDonald’s – when you encounter a class that appears entirely devoid of talent. This is always especially disheartening when the class in question is an advanced fiction workshop.
But it happens. It’s part of the deal, along with poor dental care and passive aggressive rejection letters from The Atlantic.
Such was my sitch several years ago, when I was teaching at Boston College, just a few years before its administration made the totally classy decision to award Condi Rice an Honorary Degree in Luxury Shoe Shopping/War Promotion.
This class roster in particular included two young men, Jason Mulgrew and Patrick Thomas Casey, both of whom have just published their first books.
I will pause here to reattach my jaw.
Last month, I interviewed Jason. It did not go well. Nonetheless, I felt it only fair to inflict the same abuse on Patrick, particularly given that his novel, Our Burden’s Light, is a dark lyrical exploration of sin and redemption that made me feel like the literary lightweight the rest of your already know me to be. So thanks for that, kid.
But enough about what I think of me. Let’s find out what young Patrick thinks of me…
***
The Rumpus: Somewhat eerily, you are the second student from the same Boston College fiction class to publish a book this Spring. To what aspect of my awesomeness as a teacher do you attribute this astonishing fact? Take your time.
Patrick Thomas Casey: Which is eerie, because I don’t remember thinking any of us were particularly promising or even interesting. You were a patient and generous man. I think that was the time My Life in Heavy Metal was coming out, though, so you were probably having a particularly good semester. I know there was just something about a skinny, manic man in his mid-thirties occasionally dressed in gold lamé and two-tone platform shoes that I found personally inspiring.
Rumpus: Is it possible you have forgotten an aspect of my awesomeness?
Casey: No, I think it was pretty much all sartorial.
Rumpus: Actually, I’m pretty sure you did.
Casey: Well, there was all that dithering about being honest and compassionate and respectful of your heart and those of your characters and readers, but that didn’t really touch me like the lamé did.
Rumpus: Do you have any other memories of that class?
Casey: I had a girlfriend who gave me drugs. So a lot of it is a haze. The only real memory I have is of the girl who said that if your class was a part of her body she would cut it off with a razor. That, and the smell of chicken fingers. I don’t know how they go together, but it seems those two things fairly sum up the experience.
Rumpus: Moving on to your novel, Our Burden’s Light, I couldn’t help but notice in reading it that – along with the lyric prose and exquisite sense of place – it was incredibly depressing. Why?
Casey: Well, it’s about childhood, and, structurally, thematically, it borrows both from the Book of Genesis and Greek Tragedy, and if that confabulation is not enough to depress you right into bed with its author then I have missed my mark.But actually, my hope is that the book moves you toward something deeply undepressing, an awareness of what remains after our disillusionments, even after the brutality of our own implication in them, which is beauty and the profound if complicated grace of being human.
Rumpus: Ron Rash had this to say about your book: “From the opening paragraph, I knew I was reading a writer of extraordinary talent. Patrick Thomas Casey is an exciting new voice in American fiction, and this striking debut should gain him a wide and appreciative audience.” What was it like to sleep with Ron Rash?
Casey: I think it would be fair to say that the man has meat.
Rumpus: In addition to teaching you in class, you were my thesis student. Which of these statements did I NOT make in my final evaluation?
a) I had trouble getting into Patrick’s thesis. Is it okay for me to wait until the movie comes out?
b) Patrick seems to have trouble distinguishing between “good touching” and “bad touching.”
c) It has been one of the great joys of my teaching career to oversee Partick’s work, to see him get stronger as a writer – and wiser, and more compassionate, as a person. I have no doubt Patrick will go as far as a writer.
d) Which one is Patrick again?
Casey: Well, the only one I can’t remember you saying directly to me is A. But I do recall you assuring the rest of my class, despite my claims to the contrary, that even if I were a midget named David Foster Tolstoy smeared in caramel and bananas, and you were in fact wearing a crotchless spandex unitard, you would still never end up interviewing me on any literary website. So, I’d like to take this opportunity to say, What’s up now, bitches?
Rumpus: When do you first become aware that I had the ability to destroy your career at any time I chose?
Casey: I think the more appropriate construction would be: when did I realize that released into even the vaguest interaction we would together surely ruin my career? And I think the answer would be right now.
Rumpus: Do you have any advice for beginning writers, other than that they should enroll in my classes?
Casey: While it seems to me that that, just from the odds of my class, would be good advice, I think that the most important thing for anyone is to read. Read everything.
But I would also say not to be afraid of ambition, which is not the same thing as being a jerk-off and showing everyone how smart you are, but is in fact the simple idea that you may be both worthy and capable of engaging straight-faced and straight-forwardly with the big, important truths. Of course, you will always fail, but this may be the one human endeavor in which proximity to success counts. I think there is such a cultural aversion in America to the appearance of pretension, that honest, real ambition is often looked down upon. The pose of irony, already so prevalent, ends up being the only tone available, which is a particularly ugly form of cynicism and can lead headlong into the glancing and timid terrain of the middling.
Rumpus: Have we forgotten anything?
Casey: No, I don’t think so. But I do think it’s worthy of sharing that there were some people—clever, ironic marketing geniuses, perhaps—who really wanted this book to be titled, Hot Wet Asshole, but everyone told me no.
