Somerville Writer Nick Mamatas pens “Under My Roof"

Somerville Writer Nick Mamatas pens “Under My Roof"


Somerville writer Nick Mamatas is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, the Mississippi Review, and numerous anthologies. His most recent novel is: “Under My Roof” (Soft Skull Press). In an article about Mamatas the book is described as: “… a short novel told from the point of view of a young telepath who lives on Long Island. His father has declared his independence from the United States and planted a nuclear device in a garden gnome on the front lawn.” I spoke with Mamatas on my Somerville Community Access TV show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: I’ve read a lot about the “Soft Skull Press.” a small press that publishes a lot of non-mainstream and innovative writers. Can you tell me a bit about them, and how you got involved with the press?

Nick Mamatas: It happened years ago. I was in a political group. I was thrown out of it. And I happened to see on the Web that the previous owner of Soft Skull Press was thrown out. So I wrote him a letter. I went to a party at his place, which at that point was a basement in Manhattan, where he worked as a janitor. He sort of roped me in to do work for them. I read the slush pile etc…Then a book came out “Fortunate Son,” published by St. Martins, which was a biography of George W. Bush. It was the infamous one that dealt with his drug abuse. Soft Skull republished it and it put them on the map. When I finished “Under My Roof” Soft Skull went under new management and I published with them, after being rejected by more commercial publishers. From the mainstream publishers, we got interesting rejections. I should mention “Under My Roof” is a book about a kid whose father makes a nuclear bomb. We would get letters like: “This is a really good book. You got the kid’s voice. Fantastic. Instead of a nuclear bomb can’t the kid have a girlfriend?” So we had to go an independent press like Soft Skull.

DH: If “Soft Skull” had a mission statement what would it be?

NM: Oh it has changed over the years. It started out primarily with poetry. It eventually moved to political nonfiction. 9/11 politicized it. It has gone back to fiction, innovative poetry, and graphic novels. It also has been sold. It is the imprint of a larger small press company “Counterpoint”

DH: Long Island seems an unlikely place for “Under the Roof” to take place.

NM: The most likely. Long Island is a very strange place. I grew up there. On some levels it is very suburban, with a shopping center, and a Starbucks in every town. But there is also an older Long Island that exists. That Long Island has local color and weird local traditions. There are people who are farmers and independent minded. Long Island is crazy both in the right and left wing. Long Island is a place where you go when you can’t deal with Manhattan anymore. There is a lot of high technology there, so to have a nuclear device somewhere can be a probability
.
DH: Would Somerville be a good place for the novel to be set?

NM: I don’t think so. Somerville has an idea of being free. Somerville probably has different countries in different apartments.

DH: The book has a very comical conceit. It reminds me a bit of Woody Allen. Have you been influenced by him at all?

NM: I like Woody Allen. But not this. Kurt Vonnegut would be more accurate for this. This book is really an adaptation of a play by Aristophanes.

DH: The kid Herbert Weinberg has a father who goes off the deep end. He has a lot of keen insight into the hypocrisy of the adult world; much like the protagonist in “Catcher in the Rye.” Could this be a 21st century version of the book?

NM: On some level. I am very interested in the idea of “Cult”fiction. I very much want a “Cult” audience, and have it replicate with every generation. The character in “Catcher…” has been crushed by hypocrisy. Herbert succeeds against hypocrisy. I wanted to raise the “freak flag” as cult fiction often does. My previous novel was about Jack Kerouac and H.P. Lovecraft, two other cult figures. I am really obsessed by cult figures and cult authors.

DH: What interests you about these disparate writers?

NM: On some levels they have similarities. They are both New Englanders; both tortured, and both lived with their mothers a long time. Both started movements. Kerouac the “Beats.” Lovecraft, the horror genre in the 20’s and 30’s. Kerouac was influenced by pulp or horror novels.

DH: I read in an interview that the Internet was instrumental in your development as a writer?

NM: I grew up in the Internet. I started using it in 1989. It was all text based. But there were a lot of people out there that I was exposed to. I learned a lot and I was in a good position to write about issues of emerging technology.

DH: How is the life of a freelance writer?

NM: It’s either feast or famine. There have been days when I made 6,000 dollars. There have also been years when I made 6,000 dollars. I live very humbly. I don’t have a car. I also teach at Grub Street. I write corporate copy for Websites. You can’t turn down anything. When you have to pay your bills writer’s block vanishes. I tell my students you have to be on time. It is more important than talent sometimes.

Dh: Do you think the ascent of the Internet spells the end of the book?

NM: The book is still revolutionary. It is infinitely tradable, and portable. It doesn’t break easily, easy to ship, and it is easy to learn how to use. The Internet will augment book sales.

Breaking It Down. Rusty Barnes. ( sunnyoutside.com Buffalo, NY) $12.

Breaking It Down. Rusty Barnes. ( sunnyoutside.com Buffalo, NY) $12.

Look—Rusty Barnes lives in Revere, Mass. but don’t expect his fiction to reflect the drama of the urban environs. Barnes was born and raised in Appalachia. De Witt Henry, founder of “Ploughshares” magazine writes of Barnes: “ His characters like Robert Frost’s are mostly rural, poor and farm-bound…Voicing these inarticulate characters with image, gesture and narrative eloquence, Barnes opens the core of their imagined lives.”

In the first story in this collection of flash fiction, a rural, long-suffering wife starts the day snapping green beans with her mother-in-law, and later winds up rollicking in the carnal hay with a farm boy many years her junior. In this scene she prepares to make love to the young “Purl”, one of her mother-in-law’s younger “boys”. Barnes has the boy’s penis rise in accusation:

“Purl had laid the blanket out already, wisps of hay stuck to his hairless chest. As I loosened his jeans, it wagged like a finger, an accusation I could never answer to anyone’s satisfaction but my own.”

But this woman understands her life of quiet desperation had to be addressed:

“ Thirty years of snapping beans, of lying placid while drunken Robbie poked away at me occasionally in the dead of night…”

Barnes portrays the tragedy of this woman’s life, and perhaps in small part her redemption, in plain language. The woman justifies her affair with the matter-of- fact
attitude she would employ to shuck an ear of corn. She says:” I was doing what needed to be done.”

And in “Certitude” Barnes focuses in on a couple: Mathilde and Warren. Barnes writes of the woman:

“Mathilde knew that Warren wanted to be nothing more than to be feral… a man who might chase down a kill with great loping strides like a wolf, neatly hamstring it, and howl his success to the stars.”

It seems that Warren is in the midst of a Robert Bly moment or a bad mid-life crisis. And like some scared, wounded critter, he is licking his wounds in some warren, or in this case a finished basement. In a beautifully rendered scene Mathilde comes to him and reaches out in a primal and touchingly vulnerable way:

“ Naked, she stood before him as a sob rose in his chest. She took the phone from his hand and lowered herself onto him. Even in his pain she could feel him stir beneath her, and it was no trick at all after so many years of marriage to put him inside her with minimal effort, and less a trick to take his head and firmly press it between her breasts as he convulsed.”

Barnes writing shows a true understanding of the human condition. And what happens in these gone-to-seed, rural burgs happens, with better props in the tony homes of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill sections of Boston or Central Park West in New York city.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update ing It Down. Rusty Barnes. ( sunnyoutside.com Buffalo, NY) $12.

Look—Rusty Barnes lives in Revere, Mass. but don’t expect his fiction to reflect the drama of the urban environs. Barnes was born and raised in Appalachia. De Witt Henry, founder of “Ploughshares” magazine writes of Barnes: “ His characters like Robert Frost’s are mostly rural, poor and farm-bound…Voicing these inarticulate characters with image, gesture and narrative eloquence, Barnes opens the core of their imagined lives.”

In the first story in this collection of flash fiction, a rural, long-suffering wife starts the day snapping green beans with her mother-in-law, and later winds up rollicking in the carnal hay with a farm boy many years her junior. In this scene she prepares to make love to the young “Purl”, one of her mother-in-law’s younger “boys”. Barnes has the boy’s penis rise in accusation:

“Purl had laid the blanket out already, wisps of hay stuck to his hairless chest. As I loosened his jeans, it wagged like a finger, an accusation I could never answer to anyone’s satisfaction but my own.”

But this woman understands her life of quiet desperation had to be addressed:

“ Thirty years of snapping beans, of lying placid while drunken Robbie poked away at me occasionally in the dead of night…”

Barnes portrays the tragedy of this woman’s life, and perhaps in small part her redemption, in plain language. The woman justifies her affair with the matter-of- fact
attitude she would employ to shuck an ear of corn. She says:” I was doing what needed to be done.”

And in “Certitude” Barnes focuses in on a couple: Mathilde and Warren. Barnes writes of the woman:

“Mathilde knew that Warren wanted to be nothing more than to be feral… a man who might chase down a kill with great loping strides like a wolf, neatly hamstring it, and howl his success to the stars.”

It seems that Warren is in the midst of a Robert Bly moment or a bad mid-life crisis. And like some scared, wounded critter, he is licking his wounds in some warren, or in this case a finished basement. In a beautifully rendered scene Mathilde comes to him and reaches out in a primal and touchingly vulnerable way:

“ Naked, she stood before him as a sob rose in his chest. She took the phone from his hand and lowered herself onto him. Even in his pain she could feel him stir beneath her, and it was no trick at all after so many years of marriage to put him inside her with minimal effort, and less a trick to take his head and firmly press it between her breasts as he convulsed.”

Barnes writing shows a true understanding of the human condition. And what happens in these gone-to-seed, rural burgs happens, with better props in the tony homes of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill sections of Boston or Central Park West in New York city.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

FENWAY IS THE MUSE FOR THESE LOCAL WRITERS

FENWAY IS THE MUSE FOR THESE LOCAL WRITERS

By Doug Holder



Writer Adam Pachter may no longer live in Somerville, but he tapped the Somerville talent pool for his second anthology of stories revolving around Fenway Park, “Further Fenway Fiction.”

Somerville writers such as Steve Almond, Jennifer Rapaport, Mitch Evich, Tim Gager, and Lenore Myka contributed work to a collection of poetry and prose that has a focal point of Fenway and its beloved denizen: The Boston Red Sox. Even the front and back covers are graced with the artful photography of Somerville resident Mary Kocol.

Pachter said he hatched the idea for the first anthology “Fenway Fiction,” (2004) when he was inspired by a short story written by his friend Rachel Solar. Pachter originally wanted to compile a literary travelogue with stories set anywhere from ‘Vegas to Venice. But Solar’s story about Sox slugger Manny Ramirez inspired him to edit a collection of writing around the iconic Boston institution Fenway Park.

Like any undertaking it requires talent and not a little luck for a project to grow wings. Pachter put out a call for manuscripts on the Somerville Arts Council email group, and got submissions not only locally but from around the country. Later, while watching the Sox at Fenway with a friend of his, he mentioned he was working on an anthology of fiction with a baseball theme. The friend, a former employee of Rounder Records, told him to “pitch” the idea to the powers-that-be at “Rounder Books,” a publishing division of that company. It seems the owners love baseball, and Pachter had the goods. So after Pachter made that fateful call, it was, as it was said in “Casablanca,” “The beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Besides luck, timing is a very important element of success. “Fenway Fiction” was submitted just before the World Series. Of course that didn’t hurt sales. And now with “Further Fenway Fiction” sales are in an upswing with the Sox happily in another Series.

Pachter felt the work in the first anthology was interesting because it dealt with the history and the tragedy of the long suffering fans and their losing team. But since the Sox became the team to beat Pachter was worried they wouldn’t be as interesting. Happily Pachter has found that victory has it rewards in everyday life as well as fiction.

Pachter, now an Arlington resident, the father of three children, and former Washington, D.C. lawyer, plans a third anthology. “That would probably be the last.” he said. But for now both Pachter, as well as the dyed-in-the-wool local Red Sox fans want to ride on the comet tail of a Red Sox winning streak.

* This article originally appeared in The Somerville News.

a nobody’s nothings ($12.00 U.S.A.) (Bone Print Press, P.O. Box 684, Hanover, MA 02339)

a nobody’s nothings ($12.00 U.S.A.) (Bone Print Press, P.O. Box 684, Hanover, MA 02339) www.boneprint.com or www.askewreviews.com
By Denis Sheehan

Review by Pam Rosenblatt



Imagination is a wonderful and effective writing tool – when you use it correctly and don’t abuse it. Denis Sheehan’s a nobody’s nothings is a 160 page collection of short stories, poetry, and “Brain Scribbles” that are developed out of Sheehan’s imagination.

Sometimes the works are morally acceptable and other times they’re outrageous, even
repulsive. Usually, the works contain sarcastic humor and wit.

Through vivid and concrete imagery Sheehan writes about ordinary observations and experiences and, while the reader is following his train of thought, something totally unexpected happens, something which may be good or bad. Let me show you what I mean:

In his “Brain Scribbles 6”, Sheehan has the speaker recall a childhood experience.

When I was in the second grade, my pals and I were
running through the woods playing S.W.A.T. While
playing, I ran right into a tree branch. About three inches
of the stick was in my eye socket and punctured the tissue
under it. I remember screaming my lungs out and seeing
through my good eye the look of pure horror on my friends
faces as I ran by them to my pal’s house.

With such graphic description and element of horror, Sheehan draws the reader into his story, which is confessional but may or may not be fictious. The reader is probably panicking for the young narrator too. But all is not lost in the fantasy world of Denis Sheehan, as the narrator says, “I was one lucky little prick, and I got to ride in a police car with sirens on to the hospital. I needed surgery to remove the stick but everything turned out OK.”

A nobody’s nothing is a difficult book to read. Sheehan writes of harsh realities in a down-to-earth style that makes the reader feel like he or she trying to swallow a very large pill. You know you can do it, and you know that it is there, but you wonder if there’s an easier way to accomplish the task. In Sheehan’s work, he has the reader swallow a lot of large pills, but very few of them make us the readers better. The narrator is generally mean and likes to be that way, except when speaking about his four-year-old daughter. He often gives cute anecdotes when discussing his daughter.

Conversation I had with my four-year-old daughter the other day:
‘Daddy, can we go to the store and by a mermaid doll?’
‘No.’
‘Daddy, why can’t we go buy the mermaid doll.’
‘Because I don’t have any money.’
‘Well, let’s go buy some money, then buy the mermaid doll.’

This humorous story is beautifully written and captures the naivety of a young four year old girl. It breaks up the other sometimes silly but yet serious and irking vignettes.

Sheehan’s anecdotes often make the reader uneasy and often repulsed, but that may be just what he wants to achieve. Such can be viewed in “9 Minutes in the Flophouse”, a short story in which an innocent abused housewife meets with unfortunate circumstances when she flees to a flophouse to escape her husband, and in “The Squeeze”, another short story where the narrator describes a sexual experience with his girlfriend with very graphic words.

In a nobody’s nothings, Sheehan seems to raise the question what exactly is the writer’s responsibility to his reader? Is Sheehan taking advantage of the reader’s faith in the power of the pen and word? As a reader, you trust the author to write good material.

In a nobody’s nothings, the writing style is excellent and Sheehan’s twists and turns
of the stories’ plots are intriguing but sometimes the content is difficult to handle. Sheehan’s imagination is at full force.

Sheehan gives the truth as he sees it. As in “Go Away”, he confronts us with negative and often mean observations. He writes about “Jared, ‘I used to be a fat slob’ spokesman for Subway Sandwich Shops” and “Gas Station attendants who are nice enough to clean your windshield, but leave streak marks all over the place” and “Cops who pull you over for speeding and say, ‘You better slow down when you drive through my town’” and “Inconsiderate maggots who invite me over and insist that I don’t bring any beer because they already have beer, but when I get there, mentioned beer is Amstel Light”. Here, in “Go Away”, the narrator is just a moody son-of- a-gun who is complaining and saying “Go Away” to everyone, including “Anyone who likes a second bite of their sandwich before chewing the first.” This is a funny, sarcastic piece, gentler than other works in the book, and makes the reader think about ordinary situations, happenings, and people in a different light.
His list isn’t short. It never seems to “Go Away” as it is seven pages of insightful insults. He even includes Hillary Clinton whom, he says, “has done nothing to help anyone. It’s time we put her to good use.” He mentions “Terry McAuliffe, former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Not because he’s a lying, cheating, money hungry socialist, but because he can’t string together more than two sentences without saying ‘at the end of the day.” He writes about “Ziggy, the unfunny, ugly, and bald comic strip character who doesn’t wear pants.” In “Go Away”, Sheehan seems to have stopped degrading woman, something which he does throughout the book, until the end of the piece that is. He abruptly changes his train of thought and reveals he doesn’t like “sluts who fart while fucking.”

While the narrator seems like a genuinely dislikeable character, Sheehan creates a character that is actually meaner than his narrator in “A Death Notice and Obituary”. The character is called “Mean” Russ Taff. “Mean” Russ has just been killed by a lawn mower driven by his brother Chester Taff. Sheehan writes:

My fondest memory of ‘Mean’ Russ was the second time
I ever met him. I was attending a bash at Ben’s (Medved’s founder,
who Russ managed) apartment when I made the mistake of
referring to ‘Mean’ Russell Taff as ‘Mean’ Russell Taffy. Within
a blink of eye, ‘Mean’ Russ charged across the room and got me
into a reverse headlock. This effective hold had ‘Mean’ Russ’s
thick arms wrenched around my neck with my face pointing
towards the ceiling. Russ had my body bent over backwards
which took away all of my leverage and left me helpless
to resistance. As Russ gently squeezed my neck, he looked
down upon my face and told me never to make fun of
someone’s name again.

While every reader may think the “mean” narrator finally got what he deserved,
Sheehan once again offers a creative alternative way of thinking about a pretty
black and white situation. The narrator says,

Some might find what ‘Mean’ Russ did as extreme. I think of
it as more along the lines of a ‘tough love’ thing. If ‘Mean’ Russ
had simply given me a slap on the wrist, his lesson may not have
stuck with me.

Sheehan’s a nobody’s nothings is not for the weak and sensitive reader. If you want to read a book that is filled with sarcastic wit, lots of sex, and skillful unexpected twists and turns of content that may be disturbing, this book will capture your interest.

Pam Rosenblatt/Ibbetson Update/Nov. 2007



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More Pictures From The Somerville News Writers Festival 2007

Photos: Steve Glines



1-- Left to Right: Mike Amado, Molly Lynn Watt, Linda Larson

2-- Walter Howard

3-- Front to back: Irene Koronas, Julia Carlson, Emily Singer, Tim Gager

4-- Emily Singer

5-- Left to Right: Robert Pinsky, Doug Holder

6-- Right to Left: Rita Holder, Irene Koronas

7--Right to Left: Rita Holder, Lo Galluccio

8-- Errol Uys

9-- Tim Gager

10--Gloria Mindock

11-- Michael Todd Steffen

12--Robert K. Johnson

13-- Coleen Houlihan




* click on pics to enlarge