Fantastic Metropolis

Steffen eventually placed the essay and the interview in Paradoxa. Subsequently, I became e-mail-friendly with the erudite and charming editor of Paradoxa, David Willingham. And when I suggested that his magazine devote an issue to all things noir, Dave said, “Great, you edit it.”

Neddal Ayad: You use a lot of strong Catholic imagery, yet you don’t come off as a lapsed Catholic. Would you consider yourself a Catholic writer?

Jack O’Connell: The answer probably depends upon what day of the week you ask me the question. In truth, most of the time I define myself as a Catholic. But I’m doubtful that anyone else would use that descriptor if they had access to my innermost beliefs. I don’t like dogma. I don’t like institutional hierarchies. I do like ritual. And I do like the notion of faith. But I think of faith as an energy that tends toward flux. I think that it comes and it goes and that if you’ve never experienced cold, core doubt, you can’t possibly have a true sense of the reality of faith. I’m suspicious when anyone other than a child describes faith as a constant.

I suppose I’d allow that there might be some benefit to some reader to use a Catholic lens to view my stories. But I’d add that it’s not the only lens to use and it’s not the first one I’d recommend. I was raised Catholic and as a young and deeply impressionable child, I was schooled by zealous and superstitious nuns. And let me say that, while there were a few terrors among them, the majority was pretty kind and loving. You don’t hear that too often from Catholic School survivors.

These days, I’ve actually been thinking of some of those nuns a bit and, from my middle-aged perspective, I realize just how much I owe them. After my mother, they were the ones who encouraged a profound, almost religious, love of the text. They nurtured a devotion to reading and writing. They instilled this belief that reading could save the individual and change the world, and a sense of work as vocation. (Of course, that lesson took root in me in ways they didn’t anticipate and would never sanction.) Beyond this, and somehow despite their dogmatic nature, they cultivated a sense of wonder about the universe, that there was more to reality than meets the eye. All of this is gold to the future writer. As is the solid work ethic they inculcated, that sense that, if you want something, you better be willing to really labor for it.

So, to some degree that I’m still attempting to measure, I’m ready to say that my Catholic childhood had an influence on my desire to be a writer and on the things I’ve chosen, consciously and otherwise, to write about.

Neddal Ayad: What’s your writing process?

Jack O’Connell: My “process,” such that it is, has remained fairly unchanged for the last 20+ years. I wake up before dawn every day, make some tea, and move quietly to a semi-isolated, book-lined room, where I sit for two hours and try to make a page of narrative. Beyond that, I try to spend the rest of the day and night being conscious of the world around me and open to any notions that might present themselves.

Like many writers I know, I have a notebook fetish. Your notebook is your net. You’re like Nabokov trying to catch his butterflies. The ideas, the notions, are out there in the air, flitting past you. You have to stalk them gingerly. When you’re lucky, you catch one in the notebook. You pin it to the page with your pen. Most of the notions die beneath the point. But now and then a strong one will live and, if you’re very lucky, thrive in captivity. Those are the notions that evolve into stories. But though that evolutionary progression is still mostly mysterious, it’s almost certainly, I think, symbiotic. You need to transfuse your lifeblood into the story in order for it to live. And it, in turn, needs to give you a sense of your mind successfully transmitted onto the page and (potentially) into the consciousness of others.

Neddal Ayad: When you start a piece, are you thinking of genre? As in, “I’m gonna write a science fiction story,” or “This one is going to be a straight up hardboiled kind of thing…”

Jack O’Connell: Never. Which has led to letters and phone calls from a frustrated agent or editor forced to point out uncomfortable instances where I’d failed to put any crime into a contracted crime novel. But I think I’d go crazy trying to operate that way. For me, a story arrives as a notion. And notions, by and large, are most often single-celled organisms. They’re not yet differentiated. They are images, lines of dialogue, an imagined conflict. Not to be too simplistic, but my stories are usually noir narratives simply because they take place in Quinsigamond and bad things often happen to innocent people in that city. God tends to fall asleep in Quinsigamond. And sometimes His dreams are perverse.

Neddal Ayad: Do you listen to music while you write, and if so, what kinds of music/which artists?

Jack O’Connell: Way back, in my misspent youth, I always listened to music when I wrote. (I honestly have a specific memory of writing something with Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” cranked up in the background.) But which artists or records played in the background is probably less important than the fact that I played the same record over and over again, non-stop, hour after hour, day after day and week after week. In this way, the music became a kind of partition, a way to block myself off from the world around me. The repetition of the music created a space, an invisible womb in which my mind could fall into the world of my story. But at some point, I simply stopped that practice. I’m not sure why. Possibly, it was after I married and, as I said, I began to write in the pre-dawn hours, while my wife was still sleeping. Maybe I didn’t want to wake her.

For the last 22 years, I’ve written in silence. Today, I can’t imagine writing while music is playing. These days, I see people writing in bookstores and coffee shops, tapping away on their laptops while the people at the next table order scones and discuss the bad movie they just saw. I don’t know how they do it. I couldn’t write a shopping list under those circumstances.