10 Questions for Pete Duval
- By Danielle Brown and Amal Zaman
"The alarming nonchalance of her gesticulation is fascinating. She’s in control, but more than this. She radiates. In her Jordache jeans and home-sewn camiseta, the white earbud wires of an MP3 player draped over her shoulder, she seems outside time looking in. This is serenity. The more he looked, the more radiant she became. He found it difficult to put a label to what he felt—other than shame, because he wondered whether such thinking might be the ghost of colonialism talking shit in his head." —from Strange Mercies, our May 2016 Working Title. Read an excerpt or purchase on Weightless, Amazon or Kobo.
Tell us about one of the first pieces you ever wrote.
I used to write science fiction stories when I was a kid, but my first published piece of fiction, written somewhat later, involves an S&M encounter that ends in disappointment.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Moby Dick. Bartleby the Scrivener. Flannery O'Connor. Cormac McCarthy. Denis Johnson. George Saunders. The Power and the Glory. Faulkner. Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife. Tony Earley's Jim the Boy. Toni Morrison. Andre Dubus. Robert Stone. Thomas Merton. John Cheever's "The Swimmer." The Gospel of Mark. Barbara Holland's The Joy of Drinking. Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and The Sacrifice. Kafka. James Baldwin. Chris Hedges' jeremiads. Josef Koudelka's Gypsies, Exiles, and Chaos. Anders Petersen's Café Lehmitz. Billy Wilder. Hitchcock. Kikuji Kawada. Richard Rohr's The Naked Now and Adam's Return. Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. The original Star Trek series.
What other professions have you worked in?
I used to mow the grass in the cemeteries of my home town.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I'm from the coastal town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, but I was born in New Bedford, a post-industrial city across the river. It’s a beautiful area full of history and sadness. Money hasn’t completely destroyed it yet.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I visited Cartagena, Colombia, with my friend and novelist Mark Powell. I knew from the moment we arrived that I would set something there.
Why this length for your work?
It used to be that from the moment I started a piece of fiction I was looking for "the way out." I luxuriate a little more now within fictional time. So the work gets a little longer. But for the most part, length is a function of the subject and the angle of incidence. This is why I usually find it difficult to expand a piece of fiction—unless I completely start over.
Is there any music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless is a solid go-to source during the walk to the coffee house where I write. It gets the synapses firing. Mornings often require a dose of something like Royal Headache, to clear away the toxins and plaque.
If you could work in another art form what would you choose?
I'm a photographer. Not professional, but definitely obsessional. I go out every day with my camera. It's refreshing to work in a thoroughly non-verbal medium. It’s almost like a spiritual practice; it reduces me to the act of seeing. It's like in Emerson's Nature. That actually happens. That's a good thing—for me as a writer and as someone interested in unmediated encounters with Incarnational reality. I’ve learned how to appreciate and understand light, which has absolutely no downside.
What did/do you want to be when you grow up?
Someone free of institutional structures. Someone with plenty of unstructured time and the discipline to both use and enjoy it. A pilgrim. An ecstatic. A mystic. A holy fool. I knew this from the very beginning. Perhaps only now can it be told. School, work, chores, conversation, neighborly chats—these all seemed (and often still do seem) to me obstacles to my spending time with that which cannot be articulated. My worst nightmare involved being at school and realizing that it was Saturday. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. I can't recommend it enough.
What are you reading right now?
The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker.
Pete Duval is the author of Rear View: Stories, a Bakeless Prize winner and finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at West Chester University and in Spalding University's low residency MFA in Writing Program and lives in Philadelphia.
