Saturday, December 12, 2020 · 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Pacific time

In conversation with

Jewelle Gomez

Patrick Earl Ryan discussed If We Were Electric with Jewelle Gomez, hosted by Greg Newton of New York City’s Bureau of General Services—Queer Division.

Greg

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this conversation between Patrick Earl Ryan and Jewelle Gomez. My name is Greg Newton, and I am the co-founder with my partner Donnie Jochum of the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. The Bureau is a queer bookstore, event space, and gallery in pre-pandemic times, and it will be again in post-pandemic times, but for now we are on the internet only. We are doing online events like this, but we also have an online store... We’ve added a ton of titles. I think we now have over 400 titles on there, so it’s moving along. We also have gift certificates on there too, so if you’re doing the gift thing, please consider the Bureau. We appreciate the support. We are an all-volunteer organization. Primarily, right now, I’m the main volunteer, in normal times and especially right now since we’re just online, but we will go back to in-person events as soon as we can and have exhibitions and all that good stuff and maybe we’ll get to host Patrick and Jewelle in the flesh someday… I also wanted to let you know that we will do a Q&A with Patrick and Jewelle, so if you have questions, you can type them in the chat function, and I’ll read those aloud to both of them in the last 15 minutes or so…

Patrick Earl Ryan was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the author of If We Were Electric, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in Ontario Review, Pleiades, Best New American Voices, Men on Men: Best New Gay Fiction for the Millennium, and James White Review. He was the founder and editor in chief of the LGBTQ literary journal Lodestar Quarterly.

Jewelle Gomez, playwright, novelist, poet, and cultural worker, is the author of eight books including the first black lesbian vampire... Jewelle, I meant to ask you this, vampire or vampyre?

Jewelle

If I’m reading it’s vampyre, but in print it’s vampire...

Greg

...black lesbian vampyre novel The Gilda Stories. In print more than 25 years, the novel will soon be a television miniseries. Excellent! Jewelle’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in over 100 anthologies. She is playwright in residence at New Conservatory Theater Center in San Francisco.

So please give a warm welcome, put your hands visibly together, for Patrick and Jewelle, and we’ll get started.

Jewelle

Great! Greg, thank you so much for inviting us to participate and giving me an opportunity to chat with Patrick. We’ve known each other… I was thinking about this the other day. We met at San Francisco State and it was probably ’97 maybe? Was it?

Patrick

I was thinking of that, too. I think it’s somewhere around ’96 or ’97… because I came into SFSU in ’95. I think you came in a year later maybe… ?

Jewelle

Yeah, like a year later. So that’s a very long time!

Patrick

Yes, enough for me to have some gray on my beard.

Jewelle

I’ve got some gray up here!

So I really love the opportunity to get to talk with you about your new collection of stories. I had started writing down quotes, but I had to stop writing them down because I found too many that really grabbed me. But this one in particular in the first story, which is called “Before Las Blancas,” when the young the 13-year-old boy meets Neil, who he’s immediately enraptured by, and he says, “…like he just fell out of the sky for me,” and I thought, oh yeah, that is such a unique and wonderful way to express what happens with that first love, that love that is there and it’s gonna be for you, at least for a period. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you’re so able to capture that youthful passion, fierce desire, so well, and make us feel it as we’re reading it. Desire is a big part of this book.

Patrick

It is… I think desire is a big part of the book, but it’s also a big part of New Orleans. Growing up in New Orleans, in a city where really desire has this way of taking over, it becomes a priority, we give in to excess, we give in to it everywhere in life, in food, in sex, in just living. That’s where it comes from… I don’t know exactly how I put that onto the page. I just try to embody a character and for me that was Evie, a character who really pays attention to the small things around him, so there’s this minute attention that he gives things. It makes sense when Neil, this older man, comes that Evie takes it as something specific for him.

Jewelle

Yes, I love that his passion is so focused and feels… right. I think we often dismiss, if we don’t remember our own, we dismiss the desire that young people feel, and it’s very significant, it can shape your entire life, especially if you’re a young man desiring another man in the South, although I don’t think the North or anyplace else is that much different when you’re young… but how to take that and make it significant, I think that’s one of the things I find exciting about your writing, especially in that story… and then the Neil character who’s older but he’s not… you know, he’s young, too!

Patrick

There’s a bit of immaturity in him, yeah, definitely.

Jewelle

Yeah, I mean to run off with a 13-year-old boy, I would say, hmm, not the best choice. [Laughing]

Patrick

It’s really not... and I think he realizes that, I think, at the end… that he has to do something to change this.

Jewelle

Yes, and the way it happens is perfect. I was going to ask you, and you started talking about it a little bit. How do you think Louisiana and New Orleans shape your style and your ideas?

Patrick

Well, first of all, I’ll point out that I’m wearing a New Orleans t-shirt today especially for the event. Peaches is a record store that was around back in the 60s, 70s and early 80s in New Orleans, so in honor of New Orleans, I’m wearing that. Because New Orleans really is my writing. Everything that I write comes from the point of view of a New Orleanian. I haven’t written anything outside of that. So regardless if the person is in New Orleans or not, I think that New Orleans itself is always there in some capacity.

But before we talk about the influence of Louisiana on me, I think that I would differentiate between Louisiana and New Orleans. Not to put down the rest of Louisiana, because there is something very yin-yang about the relationship between New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, but New Orleans, really nothing like it exists in the rest of America, whereas the rest of Louisiana blends into other parts of the South. There’s this wonderful melting pot in New Orleans that is what we always say America is, which really America isn’t. Some of it was forced, some of it was not forced, but we have so many cultures coming together in New Orleans that it gets mixed up like a jambalaya and creates this sort of openness towards other that you might not find in different places in America. So I think that comes through a little bit in how I write. I think that I inhabit a lot of different types of characters, people coming from different places around the world to New Orleans.

Jewelle

Yes, absolutely, and thinking of New Orleans, I think of people having a curiosity about things that they haven’t seen before. Their first impulse is: well, what is that? Rather than: get away from me, I don’t know what you are. When you’re in New Orleans… I used to go every other year for the LGBT literary festival Saints and Sinners… you see the layers of colonizers who came, the French and the Spanish, then the Americans. All of these different kinds of people with different ways of living slapped together. It’s very interesting. It makes for New Orleans being really different from any town I’ve ever been to.

Patrick

It’s so true. I feel lucky that I grew up there. I feel like I’m also a manifestation of the city, because the city has so many different ethnicities... Although you look at me and I’m white, my ethnicity is actually quite complicated. Just four generations back in my family, my great-great-grandparents on my dad’s side were native Chilean, Filipino, West African… there’s this wonderful mix of people coming together in my genealogy, trading ideas, trading recipes. It’s a wonderful city. I really love New Orleans. I think it comes through in in my writing, that there’s a real love for the city where I was born.

Jewelle

Yes, absolutely.

I feel like your writing is both gritty and gothic, and at the same time there’s a kind of gorgeousness, and in part that comes through because of the kind of language you’re using. Can you tell us who are some of your writing influences?

Patrick

You know, that’s a wonderful question, because I’ve been asked that already, but I could fill a bag with my influences. There are so many writers that you come across through the years who have an influence on you and your writing style. Whether it be the beauty of their words or how they take risks or their backgrounds, you just find a connection with them. So I like the question because it gives me a chance to talk about other writers whom I haven’t mentioned already. One who I want to mention in every reading, because he was such an influence on me, is James Baldwin. He was basically the reason that I started writing, or the reason that I started writing fiction. Giovanni’s Room especially because it’s a queer book, but it shows the possibility of having gay love represented in literary fiction, in something that really understood the word and understood the power of the sentence. So it was really remarkable for me. I think I was envious of Baldwin, so it spurred me on to kind of mimic him at first, but then just to really admire him as a writer.

I was thinking about early influences, like when I was a teenager… Mary Renault’s A Persian Boy, do you know that? I was obsessed with the Greeks because the Greeks obviously knew how to get it on the way I wanted to get it on. So that was really an epiphany for me, to read her book when I was a teenager, because again it showed me that you could have this be legitimate, what I was… That’s kind of where I found myself, at first, was in reading books that included people like me. I think that’s very common with queer writers.

Gabriel García Márquez was a really big influence on me, especially his short stories, because when I first started, I only wrote short stories. I’ve since branched off into writing novels, but I started as a short story writer, and I feel like that is the perfect form for fiction for me, if I had to choose one, that’s what it would be. Gabriel García Márquez’s short stories, their magic, the presence of angels or spirits in the physical world, that you can just take for granted there, really influenced stories of mine like “The Blue Son.”

Jewelle

Yes, I was going to ask you about that next, because there’s one quote I wanted to say, “Freedom, a new way of feeling things,” and I just love that symbiotic relationship of freedom and feeling, and that expression led me to think about the spirituality in your writing and the thing about ancestors and how they don’t really go away. Even though I’ve written historical plays, I think of myself as a speculative fiction writer, that’s what I spend a lot of time on, so I really love the way you use ghosts in stories, which I think grows out of a sense of spirituality… so talk a little bit about “The Blue Son,” because it’s a complex and amazing story that brings in a lot of things…

Patrick

“The Blue Son” was the first story that I wrote for the collection. It’s the oldest. It goes all the way back to the mid 90s. It has that close influence of Baldwin, his type of language, his sort of oratory language.

The spirituality… I think growing up in New Orleans gave me a different perspective than some more modern cities like San Francisco where I am now, about death, about where living ends and where death begins. There’s this kind of cloudy murkiness to it all. I grew up hearing ghost stories. Family stories were passed down about my grandmother haunting her boyfriend. I believe it’s in Saint Roch cemetery, the cemetery that’s on the cover of the book, where there’s a statue of a little girl, and when I was growing up, we would visit our family’s graves there on All Souls Day, and my mom would always tell the story about how this little girl raised her hand to hit her own mother and was turned into that statue!

Then there’s voodoo, right? I grew up in a city where not only is there voodoo culture, an authentic, true voodoo practice… but there’s also the tourist and commercial side. If you grow up there, the voodoo is always there, and you kind of know some of the language about it, but you don’t know the deeper aspects. You have all of these people who might not otherwise be interested in that spirituality, but they’re drawn in because it’s there and vibrant and alive in the city. I think in my book, there’s that spirituality, you have people trying voodoo who are not voodoo practitioners, but they’re trying these voodoo spells, and they’re just messing with it because… in New Orleans it’s part of living here. You just give it a try, burn a candle, poke a voodoo doll. I did it!

Jewelle

Well, you know, Catholics go to church and light those candles. It’s all parallel universes really, although the pope would not like to hear me say that.

Patrick

I grew up Catholic, so I went to Catholic boys school. All my childhood education was at Catholic schools. I was gonna be a priest. I was gonna go to the preparatory high school for priesthood. My mom was deeply Catholic, so I think I just wanted to impress her and make her happy. But then they closed the school a month before I was supposed to start. The entire high school boarded up. So I had to go somewhere else.

Jewelle

And aren’t we grateful?

[Laughter]

Patrick

I was attracted to the monkish lifestyle.

Jewelle

Yeah, yeah! Well, I think there is something about your intellectual and spiritual discipline that you practice that might lead you to that.

I do want to make sure you decide when you want to read something. I don’t want to go over and we forget that.

Patrick

And I have no sense of time.

Jewelle

I do love the spirits that inhabit your stories. Not just the cranky brother who’s in “The Blue Son” who doesn’t want his returning brother to sleep in his bedroom even though he’s dead! I think you have a sardonic humor that plays its way through whatever the story is about which I appreciate. So why don’t you decide what you want to read?

Patrick

You know, since we’ve been talking about “The Blue Son,” why don’t we do that. It started as a writing exercise… I wanted to take an idea from the bible stories. It’s just a retelling of “The Prodigal Son,” where I was like well, what would happen if one of the sons is a ghost? “The Blue Son” is also the oldest of the stories, so this is great, this is special for me.

The Blue Son

My brother’s ghost is twenty-eight. Younger than when he died. This is the way Ma has Jess in her head and likewise the way she birthed him again. As a ghost he has no bandages or beat eyes or swollen cheeks that had made her heart ache the days before he died. She is getting along better since I last saw her. She cleans the parlor while I wait in the hallway, and I see her through the doorway moving her hands back and forth across the top of my brother’s urn. She speaks to it in a fussing voice and asks him if she should let me back into the house—if I can have his room because my room has been born again as laundry room. That would clean me out, I suppose. Where my bed should be are suds and huge jugs of bleach, but no place for me.

She is murmuring now. Hardly moving her lips at all, but I can hear a faint hum as I pace between the stairs and the living room because the wood floors resonate her voice. She is bent over the urn waiting for his reply. He will speak his mind about me. The things I’ve done are not dismissible, and according to him I shouldn’t be let back into the house. My wickedness is that strong.

So I sit outside the parlor, its high ceilings and fiery gold angels cast in the molding, and wait too. As noon passes, from inside the room, a warm glow arises from her questions. It ignites the furniture with new color and excites the faces of my ancestors who are carefully lined on the mantle to watch the goings-on. The ghost forms from behind the furniture grate until our mother’s cheeks fill up like his. His arms grow out of the lampposts and his legs from the end tables. His body swells out of the yellow wall. A sudden whirl of light and he has eyes—gives a quick look at me, then a sneer.

“He can’t stay,” the ghost begins.

“I know,” she answers and hunches her shoulders up as if to say, After all these years what can he expect.

I’m not surprised by the talk; it’s the way things still go, the fairness of being younger by nine years. Since my flight arrived in New Orleans this morning, and for the three or four hours that I’ve been back in the house, time has skipped back a whole decade. I told her I was dying before I told her anything else, and she looked away, out into the hot black streets, then asked, “Why did you steal money from my purse?” as if I were not there and that child with all his teeth intact was sitting in the seat with arms crossed.

She brought me in the house and asked, “Was it not having a father that turned you bad? Wasn’t I a good enough mother?” That’s always concerned her. Then she questioned if I was up to no good with that skinny neighbor boy way back when. I answered no. But it’s all fresh now—I remember so well that skinny boy and me bare-chested and him kissing my cheek out back behind the bicycle shed. Then exploring each other’s bodies like playful white-skinned monkeys. Those are the days when I was alive. And somewhere in the Midwest, Paul was alive too—years before we were meant to be lovers—thrashing in boyhood with other boys like me.

Jewelle

Mmm, yeah… it’s a very powerful story about the brother coming home to a mother who’s asking about money that was stolen a decade earlier, and how they can reconcile, especially reconcile with the ghost… who’s kind of cranky!

Patrick

But isn’t that how it is? Isn’t that how the dead are? Isn’t that how they really weigh on us… that way?

Jewelle

Yeah, all the things that were unsaid between people kind of pile up when they’re gone. It was a very moving story for me, particularly the specter of HIV, which is also the ghostly presence that is quite affecting. There’s whole generations that don’t even know about the specter. They don’t feel it in the same way that earlier generations do. So I was very, very happy to hear how you brought that in…

So let me talk a little bit about what I thought was the funny story!

Patrick

I actually have a funny story? My god, I wouldn’t think of myself as a funny person.

Jewelle

Well, maybe it’s just me…. “An Undisturbed Dark Place,” that’s funny, right? The story about two friends, a gay male and a straight woman, who fall in love with one of them’s roommate and sort of plot together how to get him to fall in love with one or both of them.

Patrick

It doesn’t matter!

Jewelle

It doesn’t matter. Either or. It is so wonderful, and you use the voodoo very well. It’s New Orleans… so of course the first thing you’d want to do is find the right spell!

Patrick

When you see something that has that much promise of power, then how could you not want to try it? You hear all of these stories about people being turned into zombies, warnings when you’re growing up to stay away from that voodoo. It gives you this sense of… well, I can use voodoo to get what I want. I thought it was fun to play with that… and it’s also a story about their friendship, aside from the boy that they’re in love with, right. It’s very much a boy-girl friendship story.

Jewelle

That’s one of the things I really love about it—that they can come to a place where they feel like the love object, because it is a love object, they don’t care who gets him, you or me or maybe he’ll take both of us, but what really remains important is how they end their evening together. Yeah, that was very touching and very funny. I love people with obsessions. That’s always fun!

Let me ask you, there’s a particular way, I think it was true in that story but especially true in the final story “The Tempest,” where you have of creating hapless characters, we used to call them, but I guess it’s stoner kind of characters, that you might think on first reading why do I care about this person?, but you imbue them with this kind of center… emotional… I don’t know what it is, you’ll tell me… but you really do care about them. Talk about creating that.

Patrick

Should I talk about the idea of the stoner as a character? or at least my particular brand of that character? Because I think that there is this sort of kindness and a way of seeing the world that is not so limited. In Jude’s case, in “The Tempest,” his attitude about the world and the universe is a little more opened up because he is a stoner. The way I look at him is like when you look at a dog. Dogs are perfect little Buddhists. They understand the world a certain way. They understand that love is the answer for basically everything, that if they show love to their owner, or their friend, or whatever you want to call it, they’ll get something in return for that. They understand the reciprocity of love, and I love that. They’re willing to just wait by the door and hang out. They have this patience so that they’ll wait there for someone to come home. Jude is that sort of person, so that’s why you care about him. Who doesn’t love dogs?

Jewelle

There’s a lot of people who love dogs, and I think it’s also the way you write him. I love this line… Jude, the character, “He wanted to kick himself for not planning ahead yet again.” So he finds himself in the midst of this hurricane he has not planned ahead for… and he does live down there where the hurricane is a way of life… but he kicks himself because he didn’t plan ahead yet again! Although, he decides to stay behind in case he can be helpful since he’s a volunteer firefighter. I just felt there is that way of… it’s also a class thing sometimes, people, they see a kind of a working-class person or some class outside of their own, and they don’t want to trust them to have the emotional breadth that they have or they don’t trust the perception…

Patrick

There’s something there because you’re touching on how my class, I think, comes across in my stories. I’m usually writing from the point of view of somebody from my own class, that is, I grew up very poor. We were on food stamps. We didn’t always have a full table of food. Sometimes we had the government blocks of cheese.

Jewelle

[Laughing] I only laugh because I had the same cheese!

Patrick

I really didn’t know that I was poor. I thought everybody got that cheese. But I think that does come across in how I write characters. I write them from that perspective of being somebody who grew up poor, because my dad was a janitor, and my mom was a nanny. I went to high school on a scholarship, so I was able to go to private Catholic high school, but everybody else in my class at Brother Martin High School, which I still love, but everybody else there did not come from that background. Their mothers and fathers were lawyers, were doctors… so I was this oddity. I think that part of my queerness comes from that, being the different one. I felt that with my family, as well. Being the only one who looked at the world the way that I did.

Jewelle

I think you captured the thing you talked about earlier, how people in New Orleans, their eyes are open. I think for me it’s like they have a sense of curiosity that keeps their eyes open. It doesn’t mean they’re perfectly accepting of everybody obviously, but Jude, the character, the stoner, he sees what could be a vision, this Chinese woman in a robe in the middle of a hurricane standing on top of her submerged car and his impulse is to help! I love that. It’s hard to create that kind of character, who has his eyes open, and he’s seeing a human being that maybe he could help, even though…. anyway, I don’t want to tell the story, but do you want to talk about how you thought about those two characters, and how they come together? The Chinese woman who’s very subtle. She knows more English than she’s saying, I think!

Patrick

That story blends the two parts of me… I am a writer, of course, but I also have another side. I’ve been studying tai chi and Chinese martial arts for 25 years. I’ve taught. My shimu, who lives in Chinatown, is a little Chinese woman who taught me everything that I know in martial arts and health. I wanted to have something, some sort of artistic project, that put those two worlds of mine together. I started working on “The Tempest” right when Hurricane Katrina happened. I wanted to write about a hurricane because I felt so helpless being in San Francisco when Katrina was striking. I wanted to write a story about my world, my Chinese martial arts world, and how that might look mixed with my Louisiana. How could the Chinese philosophy redeem my old world in some way, give it a new direction, help to save it. The woman in that story, Li Jun, is who is in some ways a savior figure.

Jewelle

But she’s also someone who is adhering to her culture and her beliefs. She keeps her eyes open, too. Jude is very aware that she could see him as threatening, that he’s disheveled, he’s stoned, he’s come up out of nowhere, and he’s a man who’s obviously bigger than her. But they both have their eyes open, and I feel like your work says something about that as a way of living in the world. I like that.

I don’t want to talk too much in case people have questions, so Greg, if anyone has a question they want to ask, you should bounce it out because we could keep talking…

Patrick

We could! Yeah, so if you have a question, go ahead and ask. Type it in.

Greg

Michael is asking, “New Orleans is terrific, but then why would you leave?”

Patrick

I left New Orleans in 1993 to come to California. My partner at the time wanted to come out to California because it’s a bit easier to live here as gay men and the health care is a little better. University was one of the draws for me staying out here. But I would go back every single year to New Orleans up until this last year, 2020, so I don’t feel like I necessarily left New Orleans. I still think of myself as a New Orleanian. But it’s a hot city. Growing up there, after a few summers, you get really tired of the humidity and the heat. Or I did. You shower, you get all fresh, you walk out the door, and five steps out you’re sweating. It’s just ridiculous!

Jewelle

It’s like wearing a wet coat.

Patrick

Yeah, so that’s part of it, too. I have to admit that the weather out here in California is much better. But this is the first year I haven’t been able to go back home to visit, and I do miss it.

Greg

A former tai chi student of yours, Celia, says, “I love that there is a story that ties in his tai chi!”

Jewelle

Yes, and it’s very effective! I have to say, it’s very effective… and moving.

Patrick

I haven’t really seen much martial arts in Western literature, taking martial arts and really describing it, put it on the page with the knowledge of the background, too, and paint a really beautiful picture of it.

Jewelle

Yes, and it’s hard, because it’s different from when you’re watching a movie, but the beauty of the movement that you create, I think it serves the practice very well.

Let me ask you another question about this other story, because I don’t really know anything about… is it feux follet? I’ve never heard of that before.

Patrick

It’s a true thing! I mean, not true in the sense of actual spirits, but in Cajun and Creole culture, outside of New Orleans, is this mythology of little lights in the swamps, considered fairies or sprites, who lead you to treasure. For my story “Feux Follet”… Mason has lost his young daughter and… there’s this kind of magic compassion that comes across from the feux follet, drawing the father back to this little girl’s grave.

Jewelle

And I see a question, “How magical do you want to go with your stories, Patrick?” I love the balance that you have. Most writers don’t want to, they want to go one way or the other.

Patrick

No, I like being able to move fluidly between different things, even genres. Throughout the short story collection, my narrators, even though they come from a similar place, as far as how they look at the world, I think that the style of the writing changes throughout the entire collection. You can’t really nail down a narrative voice that is consistent through the entire thing.

Greg

We have a comment from Matthew saying, “Love the two stories you’re discussing! I wonder if they’re related in your mind?”

Patrick

I don’t see a big connection between those stories in the sense of how they’re dealing with magic. I do see a connection in the sense of how both take place in the swamp. I think that there’s a magic to the swamp itself. When you travel through a swamp in the middle of the night down the highway, there’s this kind of unknown, there’s this mystery, there’s this kind of way that you can be interpretive about what is in there, that if you see something, it could be this or it could be that. I like playing with that. I think in those two stories you do have that… that sense that you’re not sure what’s happening in the swamp. You have a stoner, Jude, is this a reliable narrator? Did any of this happen? Or is it all up there in his head? Does he really see two Chinese people fighting in the middle of a swamp the day after a hurricane?

Jewelle

I love that, the sensibility of it, and your vocabulary and your love of words takes you into whichever situation you create, which is I think what you’re saying about no stories are the same.

Patrick

Yes, if you look at the language of “The Blue Son,” you see a very rich, very dense language there. Whereas if you look at a story like “I Wouldn’t Say No” then that’s very clean and not very dense at all.

Greg

Aaron Jason is asking “Is there a connection between stoners and Southern Gothic?”

Patrick

I’m pretty sure they were all stoners. [Laughing] I know Carson McCullers was! I am definitely in that tradition. I think that there’s a line you can trace from Carson McCullers, at least, to me, with how we look at the world, how we approach tense situations or really dramatic events, you know, the brevity perhaps in the language at those specific areas. But is there a connection with stoners and the South? I mean you have to be a stoner in the South, don’t you? I mean to get through it!

Jewelle

To manage the heat alone!

Greg

And once you’re smoking pot, you’re seeing connections between everything!

Jewelle

Everything!

Patrick

Well, you know what, though? “The Tempest,” that last story in the book, has since become a novel, which Jewelle read. It becomes a story about Jude, the stoner, not having marijuana anymore, healing, and trying to find a path without cannabis in his life, and he has to get through this adventure without it, so it’s an inner journey that happens, too, smoking all day, every day to finding his own power to be in the world without it, if he needs to… anyway, that’s a novel that’s coming out in the future hopefully.

Jewelle

It’s a lovely novel! In the meantime, I think your stories do have… I don’t know if people have said this to you before… but a cinematic quality to them, as well.

Patrick

I have heard that. I think that cinematic quality is there because of my obsession with setting. Setting is so important to me. Setting can have a resonance. It underlines or underscores your themes. I learned setting from writers like Eudora Welty, to use the environment to amplify the message that you’re getting across.

Jewelle

Do you have another short section you’d like to read to us before we have to disband?

Patrick

Oh, do we have time for that?

Jewelle

We’ve got like… five minutes.

Greg

Sure!

Patrick

Definitely then! I’ll read just a short section from the story “Where It Takes Us.” This is the other story that has to do with a brother, a straight brother who’s dying of HIV.

Where It Takes Us

I haven’t told you about my real brother. Jack Perry Dunstan, Jr. Oldest of five boys. Named after Jack Swersie and Perry Como. Tower supervisor at the sewage and water board. Pot smoker and rock-and-roll man.

One day he wanted to go to the drag races in Destrehan. The Sunday before he’d cut out the newspaper ad and taped it to the fridge. Hot Summer Drags. Kenny Bernstein and ‘Four-O’ Joe head to head.

Jack had raced cars every Saturday afternoon since he turned sixteen. But then two weeks after his 30th birthday a line of pink blisters blazed across his stomach to his butt cheek. Like hundreds of cigarette burns at once. By the end of the day, his face was sprouted with them, too. Two months he was quarantined in Charity Hospital with shingles and two other unidentified opportunistic infections deemed symptoms of HIV. The doctors waited six months before prescribing AZT and DDI. My family suddenly spoke whole conversations in verbs and acronyms. Then Jack snapped back, came home in a squeaky wheelchair, and worked on his Camaro again. He never looked the same though.

“I swear I’m all better, Ma,” he insisted on the morning of Summer Drags. “Two hundred and fifty percent!”

“Jack, baby, why the races? It’s fifty miles away. Cars can flip into the audience.”

So Jack pouted and turned on his stereo. But she was a rock.

“What if you feel sick, honey? What if you get dizzy? No one can help you at the race track.”

Then Jack answered quickly, “So come with me, Ma. Or let me ask one of my friends to go.”

“Stan can go with you,” she pleaded.

“Me?” I complained. “What about Billy?”

“Spend some time together,” she suggested. “You never talk.”

“But, Mom," I implored. “I was going to the Quarter. I have plans with—”

Disappointment careened down her face. “Yes, you do, young man. But not with that no-good Rusty boy.”

The races were everything to Jack. Burned rubber was his blood. Motorcycles, cars, or sprinting down the street on his tiptoes. He used to compete in the amateur drag races at the Spillway before he got sick. He always came home with a trophy. Everyone knew him.

“You boys have to be back before seven,” my mom instructed both of us while she packed an old ice cooler with root beers, two Mooseheads, and three plastic-wrapped ham and cheese sandwiches. “He needs to take medicines at seven-thirty, and the home nurse comes at eight tonight. No being late.”

From the door, Jack hollered, “I know what I need, Ma.”

In the Camaro, his world was suddenly right. Mom and I watched from the porch as he popped the hood open and carefully looked things over, polished the golden carburetor with a clean white rag, and tightened the spark plugs by hand, drawing the dipstick from its sheath to check the oil. Even in the diligent sobriety with which he performed his chores, he was flushed with happiness. He beamed. I hadn’t seen him with so much energy in months.

The car responded in the same way. It came to life with a boon thunder as he turned the key. No wonder because he’d spent hours and hours putting it together. Made it with his own hands. The car was his baby. I don’t really believe in those sorts of connections, but I understood the love he maintained for the metal beast. Year after year, every free moment devoted to the car. He’d rebuilt the engine and the transmission, put in big Rally wheels on the back, custom chrome rims, a Holley carburetor, Bose sound system, and painted the body cherry red, then midnight blue, then cherry red again.

We drove the old route, up Airline Highway, avoiding Blue Bayou traffic on the interstate. Every now and then, when the road was clear ahead, he shifted into overdrive and zoomed us forward into the swamp, up to eighty, maybe ninety, not even shooting me a glance to see if I’d react, but a giddy grin spread across his face anyway. He pushed a tape into the cassette deck and I tapped my fingers on my knee as the rock-and-roll swarmed out at us like invisible locusts. A beautiful song that I could never place when I wasn’t with Jack, but with him I knew it was Led Zeppelin because it was always Led Zeppelin. Like we were moving across the desert. Hammer of the Gods. He rolled his window down, shook the hair out of his face, and proclaimed, “This is the way life should be, Stan! I missed driving so much!”

I’ll stop there.

Jewelle

Mmmm… thank you, thank you!

Patrick

You’re welcome!

Jewelle

And in future discussions, we’ll talk about the complex and interesting female characters you create. Some of them are just so amazing. We didn’t get to that discussion. There’s one quote that I’ll finish this up with because I love the sense of it and I think I may put this on a business card, “The party went on as long as my mom could force a drop of juice out of it.” I want people to say that about me!

Patrick

Every party in New Orleans is that way!

Jewelle

That’s right, that’s right! Thank you…

Jewelle

Thanks, everyone, for coming! Go to the website and buy books and check out the website!

Greg

Yes, please do! I’m going to type that in right here now. Yes, please… BGSQD.com and then our store. We do have a long name. I apologize for that, but we wanted to make you think a little bit. So I say we’re a government agency for a government that does not yet exist.

Jewelle