Michael Greenwald
NOT Michael James Greenwald
By: The Parking Lot Confessional
Hello, and welcome to the Sunday edition of the Parking Lot Confessional Interview Series. Today, Amy K. Nichols, S.C. Green, and Amy McLane (PLC) will be tossing questions at the sometimes-cagey, chronically-complicated Michael James Greenwald.
We met him on a sunny Sunday morning at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Indian School in Scottsdale, Arizona. Michael showed up twenty minutes late wearing a blue “I’m Like a Superhero Without Powers or Motivation” t-shirt, ripped jeans, and dark bug-eyed sunglasses. We were sitting at an outside table and he walked right by us into the coffee shop, emerging at least ten minutes later, with a medium chai, one pump vanilla, latte and an odd grin on his face.
“I knew that girl in there.” He took a seat, sipped from his hot drink. “We took a writing class together at ASU with Ron Carlson. She wrote these amazing sci-fi stories. Stuff that would just blow your mind, man.”
He took out a pack of Parliaments, lit one with a skull&crossbones Zippo. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you,” he asked, exhaling a cloud away the opposite direction from where we sat, watching the grey cloud shifting and shaping in air. “She said she applied to like nine MFA programs, got universally rejected. Send out over three hundred short stories and got back three hundred rejections. Ran up ten grand on her credit cards and ended up crashing at her sister’s apartment until her sis married some real estate tard and they ditched the apartment for a house with a pool in PV.”
Michael shook his head. “Now, she works here on the weekends, temps at an office during the week. Taking classes at Scottsdale community for criminal studies. Hasn’t written word one in two years.” He shook his head. “Man, if you let it, the writing life’ll kick you when you’re down.”
“Any suggestion for writers in our audience?” we asked.
“Yeah. Don’t fall down.”
Michael James Greenwald’s novel-in-progress, Haply, first in his Worthington Series, is one-part family-saga, one-part ghost story, spotlighting a young family dealing with inevitable loss. His short story collection, Stories from a Bowling Alley, catalogs lives of working-class people from and around his hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago.
He has a family house in Scottsdale, that his grandfather bought thirty years before, where he escapes “the pressures of societal life”, as he put it, in Chicago. He took his sunglasses off to reveal eyes creased beyond his thirty years. Well into his third smoke, we began the interview.
PLC: Let’s start out with a softball. How long have you been pursuing a writing career?
MJG: My conscious self has been pursuing a writing career for four years now. I had moved to Arizona to go to law school and in the 11th hour realized if I took on 100,000 dollars in debt I’d never be a writer. My subconscious self has always wanted to be a writer. I guess I’ve been a closeted writer since I was really little, but I was always very athletic and my mother pushed me into sports. I found sports was a mainline route to coolness and girls, which at the time were the most important things for me. But now I’m perfectly happy with be uncool, alone, and poor. And if you believe that I have some land for sale in Utah.
PLC: Utah, huh. My cousin has a house there.
MJG: Then he can literally use that line.
PLC: He does. Trust me. Thinks it’s hilarious. Anyway, back to work, do you have any totemic writing subjects?
MJG: Fathers and sons is a subject that I am drawn to. And mental illness.
PLC: Why those?
MJG [shifts uncomfortably]: What happened to those softballs? Okay. Well, both subjects, I guess, derive from the tumultuous relationship I’ve had with my father, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, and my constant fear–and my siblings’, too, I think–is that someday our brains will short and we’ll end up just like him. I guess you didn’t ask about my biggest fear, but that would be one of them–I’m flush with fear– to end up suffering and struggling as much as my father has.
PLC: I’m sorry about your father.
MJG: It is what it is.
PLC: Any other subjects that grab you?
MJG: Well, I’m fascinated by the inner workings of family and children. I guess that biological clock is really ticking. [chuckles] My current novel and my next novel both center around young families, struggling with finances, balancing career and family dreams, and dealing with events which threaten the delicate connection between husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and siblings.
PLC: What is the worst story you’ve ever written?
MJG: I just mentioned them.
PLC: All of them?
MJG: Yep. I have a big-time loathe-love relationship with all my work. I’m the kind of writer who requires an audience to justify my work. That could be because I’m still learning how to write for an audience, or what works and doesn’t work in my own writing, or because I have been using such an intuitive approach to my work, so I really don’t know what’s funny until a reader laughs, what’s sad until a reader cries, what’s dramatic and interesting until I see a reader’s engagement. I’m hoping I’ll get much better at knowing what works and what doesn’t as my career goes along, because I’ve found that there is a fine line between writing for an audience and pandering to an audience.
PLC: Can you explain that last point for our readers?
MJG: What I mean is, you can’t please everyone. No matter what you do, what you change, a good cross section of readers will not “get it”, will not be able to engage, will outright hate your work. And if you are reliant on external justification in your creative process, you could find yourself in a constant state of editing to try and address every readers’ concerns. As a writer, I warn you to not fall prey to the please all, please no one trap. You need to be like a stomach and become very adept at knowing what criticism to break down into proteins, what criticism to chemically alter for the body to use, and what criticism to just push into the small intestines for excretion–to use a crude analogy. You’re body–in this analogy, your manuscript–can’t use everything.
PLC: Okay, lets switch gears here, a bit, and move from focusing on you–
MJG: Thank you.
PLC: What? You aren’t comfortable with talking about yourself?
MJG [shrugs]: It comes with the territory, I guess. I’d rather my work speak for itself. This, of course, flies into the face of a lot of my goals beyond writing, though, so I don’t know.
PLC: What would those goals be?
MJG: Well…I don’t know if I should be revealing this here. Someone could steal it. I want each of my books to be linked to a cause. For instance, I have a novel which really directly probes a relationship between a son and his bi-polar father and I want a portion of the book sale proceeds to go to either research for mental illness or to organizations that in some way provide support for families debilitated by brain disease. I want to build a platform, both through speaking arrangements and book discussions, to both serve the needs of people in the world suffering in silence through this issue and hopefully raise awareness and make a difference in people’s lives.
PLC: That’s very admirable of you.
MJG: Yeah, well, don’t downplay the marketing potential of it, either.
PLC: Is there a book you find yourself re-reading again and again?
MJG: Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses has some kind of hold over me. I can’t quite explain it. It’s just an amazing book. There are paragraphs of writing in that book that leave me breathless. There’s one page in that book, where Cormac describes this girl riding a horse and there are no sexual words on the page but for some reason the words he chose elicit a physiological sexual reaction I cannot quite explain. He captures a mood in that book, a masculinity, that is so powerful to me. Other people I’ve talked to say, “yeah, it’s a good book,” but for me, somehow that books taps into my soul. Brilliant piece of work.
PLC: We really enjoyed No Country for Old Men.
MJG: Don’t forget about his earlier work. Early on in my career, my best friend gave me Child of God to read, a book about a Lester Ballad, a murderer and necrophile–half your audience just decided they’d never read that book–which only McCarthy can reveal a depth of the humanity we all know is in there, but fear to bring it out, hold it in our hands, and try and figure it out. And only he can make a character like Lester sympathetic to the reader.
PLC: So, what are you saying, deep down, we’re all necrophiles?
MJG: Well, you three are [Laughs] for sure. No, I’m saying there are really dark, darker than most of us can even imagine, parts of ourselves, which most of us will spend a lifetime ignoring, denying its existence, and McCarthy forces his readers to see the evil in his character and at the same time maybe recognize the evil within ourselves.
I mean, for example, lets take Stalin, Idi Amin, John Wayne Gacy, or Osama Bin Laden. They’ve been branded mythic-like creatures of evil, but really they are all human beings, who need to digest food and water, breath air, just like we all do. We have that commonality, too. And to say we also don’t have, somewhere within us, similar depths of evil, is flat-out denial and fear. We recognize their evil, Lester Ballad’s evil, in whatever form it projects, in some way, because every human being–even Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Jesus Christ–possessed and possesses that same evil, projecting in specific forms for each of us, which we either have the ability to control or not.
Evil is evil, is my point. And McCarthy, through Child of God, forces us to look at the evil within ourselves.
If you can create your work to force your audience to examine something they may had been too fearful to see in themselves, force them to examine their life and their world, you are doing an amazing job as an artist.
PLC: What is the best opening of a novel you’ve ever read?
MJG: The greatest opening for me would be Charles Dickens’s magnum opus Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
PLC: Why do you like it so much?
MJG: It’s just a beautiful set-up for the novel. It really captures the period in a brilliant way. I recall being completely floored the first time I read that introduction.
I really love: “Suddenly it was June and there were strange towels in the house.” From Ron Carlson’s short story “Towel Season.” It’s a wonderful thing when a writer can spin your world on it’s side in the opening line. Something about the strangeness of this line, how the words collide in this sentence. Something about the immediacy of this opening line really sticks with me. Right away, you feel like you’ve missed a whole lot and instinctively you’re called to attention to try and catch up. Brilliant. If you want to go to school on opening lines, look no further than Ron Carlson U.
PLC: What about an ending?
MJG: “The End” always seems to do the trick.
PLC: Really? Seems bland.
MJG: Bland can be good. If you don’t have bland how can you appreciate flavorful? No, but I think the best endings, the ones writers strive for, are final lines that propel you to pop the book closed, take a deep breath, then open the book at page one and begin again.
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
That might not cause you to begin to read “The Dead” over again, especially because if you’ve made it through Joyce’s story, you’re probably exhausted, but this line takes the story and raises it up to another level. This end sucks the air out of your lungs.
PLC: Speaking of the end, we’ve reached the end of this interview. So, thanks again, for sitting down with us.
MJG: Sure. Not like I had anything better going on. Except drinking, and there’s always time in a day for that.
PLC: We look forward to reading your finished novel.
MJG: So do I. So does my agent, for that matter. I’ll just keep plugging away and see what happens.
PLC: Famous last words?
MJG [grins]: Sure. Any questions?
If y’all want to get to know Michael a bit better, check him out on FACEBOOK, follow him on Twitter, or a his personal blog.
SleepSunshine 