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An Interview with David VanDevelder

VanDevelder

Southern Legitimacy Statement: We were a prototypical southern nuclear family. My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner, Tennessee, and Cherokee, North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel hunting up on the mountain, and he avoided a sound late-for-dinner whoopin’ by running away with the circus. He didn’t see his own mother again for almost five years; she took him for a drifting mendicant child when he appeared in their doorway one night begging for leftovers and a place to sleep. He stayed home and worked on the family farm, and in time he got married and filled his own home with six children, all of whom were taken early by TB, among other ailments, along with his young wife.

To escape the tragedy of the loss of his family, Papaw left the Smokies altogether and eloped with the young English/Cherokee girl who had brushed his late wife’s hair before their wedding. He worked on the railroads as a cook, and he worked in the coal and zinc mines in East Tennessee and West Virginia and Kentucky. Their first-born child was my mother, and they had five more children after that in a little government-issue stick-frame house on Alabama Avenue, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where Papaw fibbed his way into a life-long career as a machinist at Y-12 and K-25. Papaw died of intestinal cancer in the late 1970s, though had he survived it, he would have died eventually from complications related to moonshine and general orneriness.

Since Mamaw’s Cherokee showed in her cheeks and in her hair in ways that were impossible to disguise, the only job made available to her in the Secret City was one washing radiation suits—her government-issued safety gear was a pair of Rubbermaid gloves. She died of a brain tumor almost forty years ago. Beneath her name, Julia Bryant, our family tree reads like a medical encyclopedia from a dystopian future, but we tend to bear it proudly as a clan. To quote Peter Benchley’s Cpt. Quint, “Anyway…we delivered the bomb.”

I was born on Mexican Independence Day in Mexico City, Mexico. From the age of three, I grew up in the lush, sun-dappled zombie headquarters of Alexandria Virginia, where I promptly forgot all of my Spanish during an intensive program of simultaneous civic and religious indoctrination from the brightest and most delightfully psychopathic in the military establishment and the Virginia Diocese of the Episcopal Church. As soon as I was able to cover myself in enough zombie slime to effect a forward escape, I embarked with heroic earnest on an epic journey with no clear final destination in mind. It began in ’90 on the island of Mindanao, down in the hot, sticky asshole of the world, and wound its way back toward a rough concept of home through the magnificently fragrant goo of the postmodern American circumstance. Suffice it to say that I never got home again, but that the journey both improved my conceptual definition of it and provided me with enough material for a few amusing books.



Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

Finding the title was a matter of solving a little word puzzle. Hokey Pokey is fiction, but because the story is based on my actual experiences managing a store called Hanky Panky, I wanted to find a name that 1) followed the exact syllable pattern, and 2) had at least vaguely erotic connotations. I could have mused on it for a long time, to be sure. The original working title, when it started as a blog way back in the days of Suite 101, was “Hanky Panky Chronicles: an Exploration of American Sexuality from the Counter of a Dildo Store in the Buckle of the Bible Belt.” (Can you tell I was still writing academic papers during that period?) Later, I changed the second part to “another Ramadan in the Buckle of the Bible Belt.” I think the universe gifted that final title to me as a way of congratulating me for giving up on the idea of writing it as a series of essays and tackling it as a single fictional piece.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

It felt wonderful, but also terribly sad.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

When I was a kid, I picked up a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and by the time I got to the end of that novel I knew I wanted to be a writer.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

All of them. I have done sales and telemarketing and sales management/consulting for mom-and-pop and enterprise-level corporate concerns

I was trained to roast coffee by Tarence Allen of Dietrich’s in San Diego, and was a Roastmaster/Master Blender and feature writer for The Coffee Palette and Java Monthly Magazine, in Tempe. (You can’t find those original copies online anymore, but they are, among others, “Taking the X out of Espresso; Roasting the Seattle Myth,” “When Jungles Freeze; Coffee Futures in the Brazilian Loop,” “Japanese Blue Mountain,” and “Bringing on the Bear; an Interview With New Times’ Founding Editor Mike Lacey.”)

I’ve been a graduate slave in the instruction of English Composition and Debate, and I have taught middle-school technology. I’ve been a pest technician on a golf course. I have worked as a cook (short-order and a la carte), a host, a barkeep, and almost every other role you can imagine, front-house and back, in the world of Food and Beverages. I have more than ten years of experience working in IT, in systems and network admin, and most recently worked for a group of colleagues who all left Tumblr support in ’14 to create their own support-for-hire enterprise—if you’ve ever watched Silicon Valley, then you already have all you need to know about my life in IT. I did write one short story about a meeting we had at Tumblr to decide where the brightline lay with respect to the sexualization of animated characters in blog posts (ie. How can you tell if an eroticized My Little Pony is of age to consent?). I was proud to be the only employee at Tumblr (in ’12) who did not carry a smartphone.

Oh yeah! I was an International Partner with Habitat for Humanity on the southern Philippine Island of Mindanao back before cell phones.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

The most meaningful part was learning the true price of a novel. Let me explain: if you buy a copy, you’ll pay sixteen bucks, but that isn’t the price, not really. The price of this novel was paid by me, was exacted from me, and is known only to me, and the sixteen dollars you pay a man on Grubb Street for the right to read it is just business and has very little to do with me or the story I wrote. The price of a novel has nothing to do with markets.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

“Althea” and “The Wheel” by the Grateful Dead

“Hot Pink” by Meat Puppets (and the rest of the “Up on the Sun” and “Meat Puppets 2” albums)

“Candy-O” by The Cars

“Heavenly Bank Account” by Frank Zappa

“Who Needs the Peace Corps?” by The Mothers of Invention

“Telephone-free Landslide Victory” by Camper Van Beethoven

“May the Circle Be Unbroken” by the Carter Family Fold

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I want readers to laugh. I want them to really laugh, and to take life a little less seriously. We have forgotten how to laugh at ourselves, and that is a dangerous place to live. We need humor to help shield us, as a human family, against the more scorching flames of earthly existence

for that humor to work, we all have to let go, to let our sacred cows remain on the table, because once we get tender and start removing sacred cows and throwing up strict rules of use, the whole system fails: in other words, nothing is funny in a world where we shame people for laughter. Laughter is sacred. If my laughter makes you feel small, the answer is not to kill the laughter, or to find a way to diminish me or my work; the answer is to find a way to grow. My perfect reader is someone wise enough to understand that this is all a game.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

My current project is a novel that plays in eighteen holes, each of which contains a piece of the narrative comedic tragedy that describes the succession of little challenges faced by a golf-course maintenance crew who have to figure out how to handle the transport and/or interment of a colleague who has been killed accidentally in the process of helping cover up what amounts to an environmental/ecological atrocity in a retirement community west of Phoenix. Because the man in question is undocumented, and because so are most of the rest of the crew, middle management has decided to handle the matter “in the family,” as it were. Unfortunately, circumstances conspire to necessitate a hasty removal, forcing the conspirators to work their scheme during a high-profile celebrity/charity golf tournament for special-needs kids. Comedy ensues…

Topically, I’m obviously exploring current issues of ecological stewardship, cultural identity (it bears mentioning here that I was born in Mexico, and Spanish was my first spoken language), immigration, and water control/usage, among others, but my goal was to write the piece without any of those issues too much in focus. Similarly, on another level, I’m writing about faith, dogma, superstition and ritual, but in a way that blurs intentional focus, resulting in an ecumenical collage that works as a conduit for humor and reflection, not as a sugary coating on a didactic pill. That’s a fancy way to say that I am not preaching on any of these topics, but rather encouraging the reader to engage with them in a way that enables healing and self-deprecation. We all need to take this life a little less seriously. And so, one motif throughout the novel is various characters, in various turns of phrase, saying, “This isn’t a game!” Because it most certainly is a game, one even more fun than golf if you approach it the right way.

Rules of Play takes place on a golf course, in part, because golf courses are gardens that we seize from nature to bend into systems we would like to believe reflect some of our best (or simply most reliably human) human characteristics: linearity, logic, order, progression, tidiness, cleanliness, self-sufficiency… Of course, much of that’s just an illusion, and the cost of our insistence on maintaining the illusion—which is considerable—gets passed straight to mother nature, because beyond the sticks and balls, golf is nothing more than a game of controlling Gaia. I should know; the character of Eddie, the Pest Technician protagonist, is one I wrote from personal experience.

Rules of Play is a novel about the game of life, and all the little games therein. It’s about how seriously we often take our play, and how often we trivialize what really matters; and it’s about how seriously we take ourselves, even as we forget our connection, seen and unseen, to one another and everything else in the Garden. It’s about values and priorities, and about good and poor judgment; it’s about artificial dollar-driven rules and natural love-driven rules. It’s about the Rules of Play.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

It sounds cliche, but my one regret is not going with Atmosphere sooner than I did.

If your prose can swagger, you will find no purchase in the current market. Period. Well, my prose swaggers…unabashedly…and I love that there is at least one publishing house out there willing to put its name next to that. As a humorist, I need to know that I can work without a muzzle.

Woke has no place in the arts, full stop, but perhaps least of all in the art of writing: I state that as my personal philosophy, not as a characterization of Atmosphere Press or their philosophy. My rule as a writer and as a man is that I will respect any philosophy that can imagine a place for mine in its universe. That said, and without getting into too much detail, I have learned the hard way that if your intention is to vie for the title of “Next Steinbeck” or “Next Twain,” you’re simply shit out of luck, because the vast majority of publishers making books today want nothing to do with anything resembling either. The guidelines are all skewed, and we have lost track of the conversation we were having about ourselves in American Literature, such that if your perspective is not just male but masculine, and not global but American, or even (gasp) regionally “Southern,” you are not welcome at the starting gate, much less at the finish line.

Hokey Pokey was accepted by two commercial publishers after a year of incessant marketing (a book about a dildo store in the buckle of the bible belt should have been easy to sell), and then killed in a way that simply left my hands bound for more than a year. In a word, I was creatively strangled, and that’s just exactly how it felt. I couldn’t move. Hokey was my ace in the hole. I had written and marketed (unsuccessfully) two other books, a collection of stories from Shockoe Bottom, in Richmond, VA (Nonesuch), and a memoir about my experiences with Habitat for Humanity on the Island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines during ’90-’91 (Nothing Declared). I marketed both with the blind constancy of a professional telemarketer, and heard not a peep in the space of five years. No one answered my queries. No one. I rewrote the Richmond collection entirely twice. Nada.

I share that story not for sympathy but to set up the reveal, to provide enough back story for you to understand how much it meant to me to know that Nick Courtright and his team at Atmosphere Press wanted to work with me on publishing Hokey Pokey. By the time I reached out to him, I was already in “concession mode.” For those who may be new to self-publishing, let me explain that in further detail:

Concession mode is what happens if you have made the decision to self-publish because you feel against a wall with regard to the publishing industry. Clearly, there are many who will look for a way to self-publish without any concern for traditional publishing, but for those doing it from a sense of “okay, what now?” there is a natural period of reckoning wherein you have to make sense of the expense and the loss of prestige. That’s concession mode. In my particular case, it sounded something like this: it’s better this way, since my book gets to have a unique cover (the traditional publisher was going to anthologize it), and since, if they have decent editors, I’ll probably have greater control over details in the dialogue. I’ll probably have greater control over how it’s marketed, too, and can set my own commitments with regard to readings, etc.

The prestige concession is something that you’ll probably deal with if you’re in Generation X or older, and it has to do with the notion of “vanity book,” or “vanity publishing.” For people that age, and certainly for me, that had a negative connotation. Self-publishing wasn’t “real.” To make matters worse, my father and my older brother were both published by “traditional” houses, if Yale and Little Brown are still traditional. Which brings me to my point: we are in the middle of a paradigm shift that extends across the arts and indeed across all things. Ironically, the new modus for the publication of literature—real literature, literature that is unafraid of itself—will be what we used to call the “vanity” press. Ironic, because in the end only you can say if your work is good, or ready for print. So, all good work is vanity work. It’s young yet, this new way of publishing, and needs to grow into itself more, but when the new Renaissance happens (and doubt it not when I say you are reading this from the very lip of that new Renaissance), it will spring from publishing houses like Atmosphere Press.

What strikes me about Atmosphere, and why I believe they stand out in this young industry and will continue to do so as it grows, is the honesty of their intent. I am a highly intuitive empath, and I can sense energy at the subtlest levels. Because I have a lot of experience in sales and marketing, I can smell an aggressive up-sale from a mile away. I never once felt with anyone at Atmosphere as if I were being sold something, from onboarding to editing and proofing to cover art development to marketing. What I felt was the presence of a succession of professionals who were genuinely interested in helping me manifest my work the way I envisioned it. Everyone was smart, abundantly talented, patient, and casual. I could decide my own stress level; their commitment was constant and sincere, regardless of how fast or slow I wanted to move. There was never a point when I questioned whether it was “my show.” I have to note that I was especially nervous about being able to find an editor who both “work purple” and have the patience to make sense of the idiom in my dialogue. I couldn’t have been happier to work with the editor—she saw a lot that I am ashamed to admit I missed, and she worked hard to help me preserve the poetry in my prose.

Working with Atmosphere Press was worth every penny, and I’ll definitely be back.


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