Unwrap Your Candy
by Jesse Miller
Date of Publication: September 10th 2017
Publisher: Common Deer Press
Cover Artist: Ellie Sipila of Move to the Write
Genre: Literary Fiction
Tagline: Imagine Woody Allen made a
movie about Dilbert and James Joyce wrote the screenplay. That’s what you
should expect from Jesse Miller’s Unwrap Your Candy.
BLURB
Thom’s
life has a soundtrack. Unseen glass phalluses—thousands of them—whirring softly
along conveyer belts on the other side of the factory wall. The snap and splash
of eggs against plaster. The scratch-fizz-tang of cigarette lighters being
flipped again and again. A thousand throats swallowing a thousand swigs of
beer; a thousand sets of lungs choking on a thousand French inhales. Hard fists
sinking into soft flesh; soft chunks dropping onto hard sidewalks.
Plop-flush-drain repeat. And moonsong, high above, forever calling and calling,
“Stud, rub her with the Stud Rubber.” If only it were so simple.
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Author Info
I am a
writer and a teacher.
I tutor
and mentor students working on a variety of writing projects.
I'm
always looking for new ways to share my work and insights on teaching the craft
of writing, and I welcome new teaching and workshop opportunities. Please feel
free to contact me to read from Ark, or my forthcoming novel, UYC!
The Book Junkie Reads Interview with
Jesse Miller . . .
How would you
describe you style of writing to someone that has never read your work?
I’m terrible at describing my own work—the eyeball can’t
see the eye is something I’m fond of saying.
I suppose at points a lot of my work teeters on the edge of the
surreal. And then there’s the occasional
fit, the phantasmagoric fever dream. I
know that’s a part of it. The tension
for me has always been how far and how deep can I coax the reader through what
might seem like purple passages before they have to portage for a while.
What mindset or
routine do you feel the need to set when preparing to write (in general whether
you are working on a project or just free writing)?
Years ago, when I was working the night shift, I’d find
my time to write when I got home. With Candy, reworking a draft, I’d be saving
ideas up all day on scraps and napkins, and these bank slips with precisely
sequenced holes along the edges. I
worked behind the scenes in a bank and brought home pocketfuls each night. When I got home I’d race to my desk—I had the
stamina and the focus to write deep into the night, 5, 6 in the morning, until
stone-sleep finally just about dropped me at my keyboard. That was then, many lives ago, and a good way
to work, actually.
These days, the only way I have the singular focus to
work is in the morning, first thing.
Fully reset. The world is a vampire, and it takes what it will
from you. If you teach, and if you love
teaching the way I do, this kind of vampirism reaches exponential levels. So then, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve heeded
advice from one of my mentors—you need to pay yourself first before you pay
Caesar his. Otherwise none of the day
will ever be your own.
Do you take your
character prep to heart? Do you nurture the growth of each character all the
way through to the page? Do you people watch to help with development? Or do
you build upon your character during story creation?
No. I used to,
real Stanislavski method stuff, I suppose.
But no, longevity isn’t top of mind for my characters. I will note that many of my characters have
and will continue to relish all of the cigarettes I’m not allowed to smoke
anymore.
I’m really interested in finding ways of being for
characters who are or who become pretty self-aware to what is happening to them
inside the book, if that makes any sense.
I like them seated there, playfully teetering just on the fraying of
their own consciousness and awareness. I
enjoy the glimpses of this with the Thom character in Unwrap Your Candy—I wish, frankly, there were more. More of that for the future, I suppose…
And sometimes the chemistry of the story bubbles out,
slips away; the writerly-ness of it all feels like you can hear the keyboard
clicking across the page as you read, and you need a real-life injection. Sometime you need a readymades—a character
you can see fully, wholly in little interactions or even observed glances—they
have a full thing going. A kind of synedoche, right? Mark Urie from the book is a little like
that, actually. You can see that in the
world. So people watching for sure,
lots. The living movie before our eyes
shows how people really sway and demur and disagree and smile and love
awkwardly, and just generally understand the constraints of their
surroundings. With people in public, I
just want to drink them all it in. As a
teacher, I’m always on stage in the classroom, like it or not,
always being observed. And, of course,
that’s performative at times, and in performance, even routine, comes
exhaustion. Outside of my academic life,
I usually just want quiet. Years ago,
I’d like to be telling the story at the bar.
Mostly, now, I’d just like to sit in the corner and absorb and edit the
atmosphere.
Have you found
yourself bonding with any particular character? If so which one(s)?
Now that it’s done and made external to me, I suppose
I’ve found myself feeling a bond with the father character in Unwrap Your Candy, Raymond Evans. When I was initially writing the book years
ago, my own father was very sick and dying, and I had this real need to write
about him, to try to preserve some of who he was in this book. But this was pretty tricky—he was disappearing
right before our eyes, and there was really nothing recognizable of his way of
being that went onto the page. I couldn’t seem to reconcile (probably still
can’t) the version of my father in a hospice bed with the one who, you know,
took me to Fenway Park for the first time in my life, or bought me my own copy
of Pet Sounds for my birthday. For me, the bonding came late, now, really,
in the revision, and in the remove from that time. Editing and letting go of the real somewhat
paradoxically brought the character closer to the essence of my father.
As time went on working on this character, it began to
feel like finding someone you love in a dream, but it’s not who they were in
reality. It’s a carbon-copied dream of
them materializing—a pour of flesh from a simmering cauldron—filling in your
unconsciousness. And then, of course,
having experienced them inside that dream, the jagged permutation of that
person, you yourself come out of the dream-state differently. I suppose that’s the version of my father in
this book. Not a nightmarish monstrous
version, but an altered one. A kind of
tuned down guitar. In deed and action,
the father character is mostly unrecognizable to my own, but there is a kind of
familiarity there.
Do you have a
character that you have been working on that you can't wait to put to paper?
I’d like to write from the perspective of a female
character. Despite the technical aspects
of the POV, my books for the most part are told through the experience of the
male protagonist. You know, it’s
familiar, and it’s safe for me in the sense that I don’t have very far to drill
into my own ideas as a human being to feel honest tension as I float around in
the bag of skin. But there’s way more
out there. And this could be a such an
interesting moment of growth as a writer.
I’ll do this in earnest before I die. That’s my pledge to you, dear conscientious
reader.
Have you ever felt
that there was something inside of you that you couldn't control? If so what?
If no what spurs you to reach for the unexperienced?
Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I feel like we often wake up from
our sleep as different versions of ourselves, you know? Something happens there in the machine of the
unconscious, in the memory processing/manufacturing plant of our dreams. We retrieve and also lose things in there
sometimes. We leave our shift different
than when it started. Anyway, for me, in
the aggregate of my life, there are some versions of me who emerge into the
sunshine of my life and are better than others.
Kinder, certainly, and more appealing to the better angels of our
nature. But in general, and in other
words, I’m a pretty consistent. I can’t
imagine that there’s someone galactically different lurking inside me ready to
snatch the handlebars when I’m not paying attention, so I think I’m in control,
generally, of this flesh and bone device.
Of course, all of these versions of me seem to find ways
to do some kind of creative work when they can, no matter how chaotic the
circumstances. There’s not some inborn
desire to write in me, but maybe there is some compulsion for revision that’s
in my DNA. That’s the best I can figure.
Everything could be better if I had 5 more minutes. So, in that sense I suppose I am without
control, or at the very least, conditioned properly beyond my own power to
change.
I’m also pretty fucking powerless to well-made veggie
burger and a Guinness. So, you know,
look out!
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