Purgatory, by Jeff Mann

Read Lichen Craig’s review of Jeff Mann’s novel,Purgatory,at

http://bookworld.editme.com/Purgatory-by-Jeff-Mann

Interview with Bear Bones Books author Jeff Mann

Here’s an excerpt from a lovely long interview with Bear Bones author Jeff Mann by Lichen Craig:

I think that you are terribly important as a gay writer, because you represent something different – an alternative view of real gay life.  In the past you have spoken about the exclusivism, elitism, narrow-mindedness of the urban gay community – a community that much of gay literature caters to.  Is it difficult to combine things like traditional culture, American history, and rural life with gay life within your writing?

I should say first that if the urban gay community works for some, that’s great.  It just doesn’t work for me.  Many gay and lesbian friends I’ve known have thrived in big cities, and I’m happy for them.  It’s a world I enjoy visiting once in a rare while, but I couldn’t live in it.  Crowds and traffic and noise and busyness make me surly fast!  Plus cities are frigging expensive.

Got to admit, at one point, in my early twenties, I too felt that call to flee provincial intolerance and make a queerer life in the city.  I’d read the Violet Quill writers.  I wanted to check out that glamorous, promiscuous big-city gay life they described.  But when I moved to the Washington DC area, back in 1985, I hated it.  I missed the mountains and folk culture of Appalachia.  My grandmother had warned me about the pangs of homesickness, and she was right.  I moved back to West Virginia after only a few months, determined to make my peace with my native region, despite the hateful Christian fundamentalism that pervades it.

These days, I feel increasingly alienated from the urban queer community.  It seems youth-oriented and consumerist, and the emphasis on fashion, fad, and pop culture seems trivial and irrelevant to me as a middle-aged university professor living in a small mountain town.

I should emphasize the word “seems,” since, at this point in my life, almost the only contact I have with that urban gay existence is glimpses of it in two magazines my partner subscribes to, The Advocate and Out.  Two or three times a year, John and I might make it to a gay bar or stay at a gay-owned inn.  Those tend to be pleasant experiences, simply because it’s a change of pace and it’s a luxury to spend time with other queers.

My father, a great fan of Emerson and Thoreau, brought me up to dislike cities—which he equated with frivolity, excess, and environmental degradation—and to relish small-town and rural living, so that’s part of my attitude, along with my neopagan/Wiccan desire to live close to the natural world.  Appalachian values have had much more of an influence on me than the usually quite distant gay community.  Also, since I’m living in an area that’s economically depressed like so much of rural America, the lifestyles of big-city/well-off queers are of much less interest to me than the struggles of my fellow Appalachians to survive.

I guess it isn’t all that difficult to incorporate traditional culture, history, and rural living in my works simply because I’m immersed in those things.  Other than that abortive sojourn in the DC area, I’ve lived in the Highland South all my life, brought up by a father who taught me to love and respect nature, wild animals, forests and farms.  And history.  History seems very close here.  For example, our cat-sitter is a descendant of the man who found Mary Draper Ingles after she’d escaped the Shawnee in 1755, the site of the Civil War Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain is just up the road, our landscaper is a descendant of the Confederate cavalry hero Jeb Stuart, and my paternal grandmother, whose piano-playing I mentioned earlier, well, her grandfather, Isaac Green Garden, was an Rebel artilleryman in the War Between the States.

Incorporating all those things into gay writing?  That’s another matter.  The difficulty with that is that lots of LGBT readers and critics might not find history, regional identity and rural living at all interesting, and lots of Southerners and Appalachians who would find those very things appealing might find the gay elements not to their taste.  So I’m somewhat stuck between worlds.  On the other hand, that odd combination is easy to write about, since I’m basically writing about my experiences or imagining gay men like me who must have lived, albeit secretively, in this region’s past.  Plus few authors are writing about such a combination, meaning that I have my own little literary niche to fill.

As I’ve said, I am inspired when I see risk-taking in any writer, but especially in a person contributing to the world of gay fiction.  What are your thoughts on the state of gay literature today and the ways in which you would like to see it evolve?

Several presses are really doing a fine job of publishing LGBT authors and getting their work out there.  Steve Berman of Lethe Press.  Ron Suresha, who runs the Bear Bones Books imprint.  Sven Davisson of Rebel Satori/Queer Mojo.  Radclyffe and Greg Herren at Bold Strokes Books. Jameson Currier at Chelsea Station Editions.  Richard Labonté and Cleis Press.  Without those folks, most of the queer writers I know would be up Shit Creek without a paddle. I know I would be!  And then there’s Herren’s partner Paul Willis, who, with that charming Boston vixen Amie Evans, has unselfishly and with great labor pulled together the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival every year for a decade.  I’m immensely grateful for all those heroes and heroines of the queer literary world.

Read the entire interview at http://bookworld.editme.com/Purgatory-by-Jeff-Mann.