PAUL PERILLI -An Interview

Paul Perilli grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He has published fiction, articles, and essays in places such as The European, Baltimore Magazine, Poets & Writers Magazine, New Observations Magazine, Thema, Overland, Fairlight Books, Bridge Eight Press, and many other places. He’s won four short fiction contests and published five chapbooks. One of his chapbooks, “Orwell’s Year,” a story about the fate of blue-collar workers in the computer age, was published by Blue Cubicle Press (2018). Another chapbook of essays, “Words of the Day,” based on the words of the day he receives in his email daily was published earlier this year. His novelette “The Luckier I Get” is forthcoming in Aethlon. A novel excerpt “Another Day in Paradise” is forthcoming in The Write Launch. A story “Tomorrow is Tomorrow” is forthcoming in L’Esprit Literary Review. His website is: https://paulperilli.com/. He’s married to the artist Geraldine Erman.

Tell us a bit about yourself – something that we will not find in the official author’s bio?

The first thing that comes to mind was my obsession with sports. In fact, a friend of mine once told me I couldn't watch a ball bounce twice without wanting to get in a game. I played everything, and obsessively: baseball, basketball, hockey, softball, golf. I bowled, shot archery, and played a lot of pool. I liked athletics and games of skill. I liked competition. Most of all, I liked basketball, a game I didn’t know I was any good at until I was seventeen and friends told me I had a lights-out shot. My essay published in Volume 58 of Adelaide Literary Magazine titled “The Misbegotten Team” is an example of my preoccupation with the game. Despite being five-eight, I was a decent street baller. Through my late thirties I played on courts in the Boston area several hours a day four or five days a week. I couldn’t get enough hoop. In those days writing was a secondary endeavor. To paraphrase Balzac, there went another 100 pieces of prose.

Another personal bit was the range of jobs I had as a youngster, that continue to be a resource for stories and essays. By the time I graduated from college I had caddied at an exclusive country club, worked as a rubbish man, grave digger, taxi driver, landscaper, basketball referee, bartender, office clerk, and a few others. Rubbish man and grave digger were summer jobs for the Department of Public Works in Waltham, Massachusetts, where I grew up. In those days students were hired to fill in for vacationing full-timers. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but back then the money was good for temporary help, and I liked being outdoors and the physical part of it. Though I should add working in the cemetery was a relatively cushy gig in comparison to emptying trash barrels.

The cab driving job was for a company owned by an older cousin of mine and has a literary connection. For two summers and on winter breaks I picked up the whole gamut of local humanity in a Checker, one of those extra-roomy cars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle rolled along New York City’s streets on in Taxi Driver. My handle was 84, the number the dispatcher Chuck, a grouchy ex high school offensive lineman, used to communicate with me over the two-way radio, as in, “84 there’s a pickup waiting on the corner of Crescent and Moody.” Since there was a lot of downtime midmornings and midafternoons, I parked the Checker in a shady spot and read. Those days I was into Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom I had found out I shared a birthday with. In the office at end of one shift I remember Chuck looking at the big, thick book in my hand and wondering why the fuck would I (I as 84) want to read something titled Cancer Ward? I still don’t think it was an unreasonable question.

Do you remember what was your first story (article, essay, or poem) about and when did you write it?

My first published writing was for a now defunct weekly tabloid based in Rochester, New Hampshire, at the time a struggling former mill town. I was two years out of college and sharing a cabin in a rural area fifteen miles from Rochester. Looking for ways to make money and things to do, I answered an ad and for a short time I was a city correspondent, writing a column a week about the goings-on in and around Rochester. The content was open, though something about City Hall activities had to be included as well as any newsworthy items that couldn’t be ignored: a popular new business, a community expo, a moose spotted taking a daytime stroll on Main Street, a fair coming to town. Five hundred words of basic information a small city paper was responsible for reporting. That I banged out on the cabin’s porch on a portable Olivetti. While those columns of bold headings and short paragraphs were the opposite of a good read, I was happy to see my name in print for the first time even if it competed for attention with the ads back on pages 4 or 5.

After a few months the editor gave in to my request to write features. I recall one was an interview with the County Commissioner, who in the middle of our conversation pulled a bottle of whisky out of a desk drawer and offered me a hit, as if he thought it would influence my opinion and make me want to say nice things about him. He was right, which, I later concluded, was another reason he sat behind the desk and I was in front of it. Another feature I remember was about a guy who lived alone in a house full of fascinating World War II memorabilia. It was a big collection, museum quality stuff. At his house to check it out, he led me through the rooms of photos, uniforms, weapons, medals, and other items. In his basement to examine the overflow, I was happy he didn’t want to demonstrate the Gestapo handcuffs he brought to my attention with too much enthusiasm. Back upstairs and out the door, I recall breathing a private sigh of relief.

What are you working on right now? Anything new cooking in the wordsmith’s kitchen?

Right now, I have drafts of four new short stories. In one, I’m using a secondary character in a world-famous novel to narrate the back story of the novel’s events and thus change the view of it. In another, a man estranged from his wife and daughter loses a lot of money in a flash crypto currency crash and returns to NYC from Spain to face up to the damage he’s done. Two other stories are dystopian, one involving robots and underground freedom fighters, and the other about a corner of the internet that takes on a life of its own. I’m also revising a novel titled SEVEN SEVEN SEVEN, a first-person fictional account of the 2008-2009 financial crash, some of which takes place in the Manhattan investment firm the narrator works in.

Did you ever think about the profile of your readers? What do you think – who reads and who should read your work?

I don’t write stories with an audience in mind. I don’t think of a group of readers. I don’t set out to try to fit them into a specific genre or style. I develop the ideas that interest me in a way that seems fit and after that I look for a venue to publish them in. My winning story “Have a Nice Day” is a good example of my approach. In Turkey at a bus stop halfway between Goreme and Pamukkale, I had a coffee at a small stand and on my way back to the bus I tore up a few pages of notes and dropped them in a barrel. At that moment I caught the eye of the waiter who had served my coffee. It lasted a split second, but I knew right then there was a story in it. It took a few years to develop. I wasn’t sure about the opening, but I stayed with it, and it appears to have worked out.

What is the best advice (about writing) you have ever heard?

I never forgot the advice I received from a journalist who had published four books and many articles. I’d been writing fiction for five years or so and at a table in a Cambridge, Massachusetts diner we were discussing my story “Best Pizza in Town” that I had asked her to read and comment on. I was trying to publish it and didn’t understand why it kept getting rejected. She suggested I find that quiet place in my mind where she thought good writing was conceived and composed. Where she was sure I’d clear the confusion on the page and grasp the clarity my writing needed. Where my imagination would be freed to extend deeper into subject, language, and character. Until I did that, she thought it was unlikely my writing would develop as I wanted it to. Yet, instead of accepting the advice I had asked for, I viewed her a hostile witness to my talent. The quiet place she directed me to seemed an unnecessary writerly approach. I didn’t think practicing meditation would benefit my creative life. Years would go by before I considered the guidance she offered. The more I thought about it, the more I saw it as a vista to view my writing from with clarity and better judgment. A kind of open, dreamy space my imagination roamed in unfettered. I wished I had heeded her advice sooner than I did, even if, to this day, I continue to disagree with her and all those others who rejected it about the literary quality of “Best Pizza in Town.”

How many books you read annually and what are you reading now? What is your favorite literary genre?

The number of books I read in a year varies. This past year I’ve read a lot of short stories. Collections by Nadine Gordimer, Julio Cortazar, Roberto Bolano, and Philip K. Dick to name a few. I’ve also read and reread selected stories from the anthologies on my bookshelves. As for longer works, I recently read Flights by Olga Tokarczuk and several of Colin Thubron’s travel books including The Lost Heart of Asia and Shadow of the Silk Road. I intend to get to Tokarczuk’s giant work The Books of Jacob soon.

How does it feel being the winner of the literary contest? Did you win any other literary contests already?

I was happy to get your email saying I won then seeing the results posted on the ALM site. It was unexpected. It’s impossible to know what the reaction to any story will be, and something like this is always a boost.

In fact, I’ve won several previous contests. In 1993 I won a contest sponsored by The European. That was a weekly now defunct broadsheet published in London similar to The International Herald Tribune. The story was about an unhappy couple staying in a hotel Viterbo, Italy. I mailed the manuscript along with a return envelope and enough International Reply Coupons for the response. Surprised I was when the envelope came back with a copy of the published story and a check for £1000, which was a good amount of money in those days. In 2018 my speculative fiction “Summary Report to the Committee” was one of four selected in Overland Journal’s False Documents contest. That story was about a group of archeologists, academics, and others digging up discarded literary manuscripts from the now capped Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in the year 2082. I got the idea from a 2001 New York Times article about the landfill’s closing. After reading it, I wondered how many manuscript drafts were buried in it. Millions I was sure, including some hundreds of my own. In 2020 “Market & Fifth, San Francisco, 1986,” an excerpt from my unpublished novelette about the rise and fall of a jazz trumpet player, won the Jerry Jazz Musician fiction contest.

Thank you Paul.