An interview and 42 book recommendations from Praying Drunk author Kyle Minor.
Kyle Minor makes words come alive on the page. Each word is a gift. Each word is a revelation. Whether he's writing about life or death or religion or any other topic, he opens up a whole new way of looking at the world. His sentences give meaning to the complicated and chaotic world that we live in.
His latest book, Praying Drunk , is a collection of stories and questions and essays. It's a book to read slowly, to underline and write in the margins of and quote from.
We spoke via email about the transformative power of literature, writing about robots, subjective truth and fiction, and so much more.
Jennifer Percy
Praying Drunk is fiction with autobiographical elements. How much of the autobiography is true? One of the stories was originally published as an essay, right?
Kyle Minor: Before this book was a book, it was a salvage project. For 10 years I was circling around a series of preoccupations in different modes and genres — the story, the essay, the letter, the lyric, the memoir, the vignette, even science fiction. There was a time I thought I was writing a book-length memoir, and for a while, I thought maybe I was writing a novel. I was failing at everything, and one day I hauled out all the wreckage and arranged it on the floor. I started moving the parts around, trying to see what they were saying one to another, and at first I was dismayed to see that so much of what I had was a retelling of something else I had. There was a darkly obsessive quality to all of it, and at a time like that you have to face the horrible truth: This is the most honest possible document of 10 years of my interior life, and if these things are united — and it was clear they were — what unites them is that they are cumulatively a portrait of the teller. A composite story-in-obsessions, a less rare thing than you might think, because anytime we try to tell the story of anyone else, or describe anything outside ourselves, we are telling other people as much about ourselves as we are about our subject. So the play with the autobiographical element — especially the dropping of the nonfictional pieces into the fictional frame, which, of course, immediately causes them to become part of the fiction — came about that way, organically. The material dictated the form.
At the same time, I was thinking about the traveling preachers of my childhood, with all their talk of hidden backmasked demonic messages in Beatles records and how when the sky turned red, look to the East for the return of Christ on the white horse, with the sword and the hordes of angels and the graves ripped open and the zombie army come to take the righteous away, and if you're left behind, watch out, because the evil Man of Peace from Romania or Bulgaria will start his reign of terror, and soon the United Nations helicopters will be chasing you through the mountains, and if they catch you, it's the guillotine for sure. After that, the Great White Throne Judgment, in a stadium the size of the world, and everyone's evil thoughts and evil deeds projected in 16 mm on the largest canvas ever draped, and the sheep are divided from the goats — that one part is a metaphor, people aren't actually turned into animals — and, as the trumpet band Cake prescribed, sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell. If you're lucky enough to be deemed sheep, you spend time without end singing church songs in the direction of the throne. You get crowns as rewards for your good deeds, but you don't get to keep them. You have to throw them back to the throne, because the only being worthy of the crowns is the one you're singing the church songs about.
Don't you think it would get boring after not very long? Everything interesting in the world comes with trouble attached. You've got skin in the game. And I figured, pretty soon, I'd sneak off and find a little study carrel somewhere in heaven, probably right next to Joyce Carol Oates, and the two of us would sit there forever grinding away at the old stories, from the good bad old days when things were still possible, and for sure it would be those same old preoccupations, circling them again and again, trying different forms, trying to get it right but never quite getting it right, because there never does seem to be an entirely satisfactory answer to the question: What was all that?
And then I realized: That's what this book is. That's its form, that sorry unlucky citizen of heaven, typing the stories now only for himself, because all the interesting people, all the ones who would enjoy them — who would enjoy anything, really — are burning away forever in the lake of fire, while the being who put them there sits on a throne and makes everybody else sing him third-rate songs of praise and glory.
You say, "Everything interesting in the world comes with trouble attached." I couldn't agree with you more. Do you find as a writer and a human being that you're more attracted to situations and scenarios that could potentially be bad for you, just because of the excitement attached? Do writers need to live chaotic lives in order to find inspiration?
KM: Flannery O'Connor said that everybody had all they needed for a lifetime of story-making by the end of childhood. I think that's right in its way, but I resist it. After a while, you write through those childhood preoccupations — or at least I have — and you want to stretch out into things you don't know but want to know about the world. I've admired writers like Richard Price, who turned himself into a different writer before he reached mid-career by hanging out with cops and drug dealers and learning their lives. Like so many great writers, he continued to pursue his personal fixations, but he found a way to look at them through a public lens. That's a vision of literature I admire. It's not the only one I admire, but it's one I hope to chase harder.
As to the other question, I think that writers, by time they're into the writing, are well served to live lives as orderly as possible, because this stuff is hard work. It takes a lot of time, and it asks your brain to do extremely complex tasks every working day, for months and years and maybe the rest of your life if you're lucky. It's good to go out into the world and gather, but it's also good to protect your body and your mind and to cultivate a space for reading and thinking and silence and reflection and the hard work of making those sentences one by one every day. When I think of my friends who are writers, this is what I wish them most of all: enough food, enough money, enough time, enough space, enough courage to keep stretching out into a dream no one else could dream until you're done dreaming it for them.
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