1. Where did your love of books/storytelling/reading/writing, etc. come from?

The question puts me in mind of a wonderful short story by the late Harvey Swados entitled “Where Does Your Music Come From.” The protagonist in the story realizes at the end that he knows where his music, along with his youth, has gone, but where it came from he doubts he’ll ever know. As for my own love affair with the reading and writing of books, it began quite early, in first grade, when I learned to read and discovered a whole new (and more agreeable) world between the covers of books. I didn’t explore fiction writing, however, until my sophomore year in high school. My teacher assigned the class a “creative” writing exercise. We were to write a short story of our own invention. It was the first writing assignment I had ever “got into.” Alas, my teacher, after reading my little story, immediately suggested that it was not “original” work. In other words, she accused me of plagiarizing the story (I didn’t). Her accusation crushed me. The upshot was that I didn’t write anymore from my imagination for a very long time. Furthermore, I was busy at the time pursuing a career as a juvenile delinquent. I didn’t write another line of fiction until the age of twenty-three.

2. How long have you been writing?

Since I was twenty-three. Next, I suppose you’ll want to know how long I’ve been writing.

3. What do you think most characterizes your writing?

I think the characters I have created. I recall what Faulkner once said about writing stories: “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

4. Who are some of your favorite authors that you feel were influential in your work? What impact have they had on your writing?

As far as inspiring me to write, dozens of authors have influenced me. This is not to say that I have ever tried to emulate a particular author in style or content in my work. As a preadolescent I enjoyed the writer Ellery Queen Jr., especially his stories whose protagonist had the unusual name Djuna. Djuna and his dog solved many mysteries and were in almost constant danger. I wrapped myself up tightly in these tales. As an adolescent I had the far-fetched notion that Mickey Spillane was the premier writer of realistic fiction. I identified with the hard-boiled private Dick genre. Pity that I hadn’t heard of Raymond Chandler at the time. Later I came under the thrall of Norman Mailer. In my mind today there aren’t many authors, living or dead, who have improved on Cervantes as a storyteller. In my life as a deliberate writer I am reluctant to read the work of my contemporaries for fear of the subconscious influence their work might have on my own. It is unlikely, therefore, that I would ever try to emulate Henry James. Lately I have confined my reading to long dead authors, most of them from the nineteenth century.

5. What process did you go through to get your book(s) published?

I finished writing my first novel, Gemini, in May 1998. I queried literally hundreds of agents in an effort to find someone to represent me with publishers. In the first two years I had been taken on by three different agents, none of them competent. They had no success landing a contract for me with any of the big trade houses. Finally, I decided to strike out on my own and restrict my target to the small press. I sent out query after query to many American, European, even Southeast Asian small presses. I spent a good deal of money on postage for sent manuscripts (in the days before the electronic submission was in vogue). Finally, in December 2000 (the day before Christmas) I received a phone call from the president of a small press in Denver, Colorado offering me a contract for Gemini. The book came out the following September, alas about the time of the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. I finished writing my second novel, Where You Are in April 2005. Again, I went the literary agent/small press route. It was not until June 2008 that I got a contract offer for that book from a small press in El Paso, Texas. The book was in production (presumably) when I ceased hearing from the publisher. I learned that she had contracted a life-threatening illness and was unable to continue in her work. That left me and a few other hapless authors in the lurch. After wallowing in existential disappointment for a short time, I went back at it again, querying agents and small presses. To my surprise and delight I received a contract offer from All Things That Matter Press and by July 2009 the book was in print. Gemini’s Blood followed on its heels in September. This July ATTMP re-published Gemini, so I now have three novels in print. Persistence, sometimes, pays off.

6. What projects are you working on at present?

I’m about fifty thousand words into a novel whose working title is Emilio Lives. After finishing Gemini’s Blood, my third novel, in 2007, I began a fourth and got into it to the tune of 133,000 words before coming to the stark realization that it wasn’t working. That work I have put aside in the hope that I may be able to fix it in future.

7. Do you count time or words in your daily regimen?

Neither. The goal I set for myself when I’m writing a first draft is three pages of lined notebook paper a day. This averages around 800-900 words. I strive for that, whether it takes me a half hour or the whole day. I continue in this fashion until I fill a fifty-page tablet, then I transcribe and edit on the word processor (at the same rate of three pages). When that is finished, I start another fifty-age tablet, and so forth. When I have finished the story I print out the whole thing and go through it from the beginning for further editing. This is when I should recognize anything that requires major revision. I have discovered that writing is essentially revision. It’s also the only part of the process that I might describe as fun. When I have finished editing the whole piece I put it away for a month or two and work on something else. I hope to have achieved enough detachment in that time to see what I have actually written on the page, not what I hoped would be on it.

8. Do you write about what you know or what you want to know?

I like what Robert Duncan said in answer to a similar question: “If I write what you know, I bore you; if I write what I know, I bore myself; therefore I write what I don’t know.” So I guess for me writing is a voyage, a kind of odyssey, a discovery.

See the following links to Amazon.com:

Gemini: Back cover blurbs:

“Mike Burns has carved out a piece of New England life, passed it beneath a powerful magnifying glass, and come up with Gemini, the compelling story of one man’s desperate struggle for an identity, a better self, a better life. This is a gritty, funny, sad, entertaining, and moving work, rich in detail, full of rancor and love, failure and wisdom, weakness and regret, and a host of memorable, expertly drawn characters. Burns writes with compassion, skill, generosity, and sharp-eyed verve.”

__Rosemary Mahoney, author of Whoredom in Kimmage and A Likely Story

“Michael Burns’ Gemini is a compelling, fully realized novel whose moral center is the stuff of all great literature: one man’s struggle against every man’s enemy—himself.”

___Sanford J. Smoller, author of Adrift Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Writer and Publisher of the Twenties.

Inside dust cover synopsis:
Set in rural Vermont during the 1968-69 academic year, Gemini is the story of one man’s effort to salvage his life. Jack Scanlon returns to the place of his birth after an eighteen-year absence. Due to his excessive drinking, he has lost his wife and young daughter, and subsequently his engineering job. He has retreated to his native Vermont and taken a position as a high school science teacher, and has moved in with his uncle and his wife.
A rather large cast of characters gradually emerges, which includes his new colleagues and students, as well as relatives of his uncle’s wife, who remember him as a boy growing up in the town. Scanlon encounters almost constant tension between the two cultures of the school and his hometown, exacerbated by the pain of the loss of his daughter and his increasing abuse of alcohol.

Scanlon’s ambivalence extends to his views on the war in Vietnam, the current hippie culture, and his own identity. He watches as one of his colleagues, a young Fulbright Scholar, agonizes over whether to defect to Canada or serve the war effort he abhors. After an incestuous dream, Scanlon is driven to seek psychological counseling. He begins weekly visits with his counselor, with the unlikely name of Robert Kennedy. Kennedy becomes not only his counselor, but his alter ego. The somewhat unorthodox therapeutic method employed by Kennedy involves whiskey drinking during sessions. The relationship that develops between the two becomes fundamental to Scanlon’s continuing struggle for a better life.

Gemini: Excerpts from reviews:

“Through sarcastic wit and striking honesty, Burns writes with a resonant realism.”

___Jana Brown in the Alumni Horae of St. Paul’s School

“For Gemini is in many ways a Horatio Alger tale in reverse. Jack Scanlon is a self unmade, and our task as readers is to watch all the layers fall away, which they do with help of his whiskey-drinking counselor, Robert Kennedy, whose alcoholic rationalizations include references to Emerson. The world is one of American individualism gone awry.”

____Jamie Neilson—“The Unmade Man,” Pembroke Magazine #34

”The weekly visit to the shrink’s office is the true axis about which this novel spins; Kennedy and Scanlon pathetically rely on sipping whiskey to catalyze their discourse. These sessions are the yardstick by which the reader measures Scanlon’s dubious progress toward his life’s overhaul, and Burns colors them with painful honesty and quirky, volatile, smartly-written dialogue.”

____J. T. Leonard, The Lowell Sun

“Scanlon is a strong, albeit troubled, character we can sympathize with and cringe at through Burns’ witty dialogue. Burns presents a believable, honest story full or irony and wit.”

____Karen L. Rose, Foster’s Daily Democrat

You may think that you’ve been to Garrison already, guided by Grace Metalious, but Peyton Place, just up the proverbial road, is a cheerful place in contrast to the depressing neighborhood Burns creates for Paul, his hapless hero, who, as the novel begins, looks back from 1998 at the newly minted bridegroom he was in August 1963.

Except for two years in the Army – he got as far as Inchon, Korea, but not in combat – Paul has lived all his life in Garrison. His father ran a bakery there, Paul went to Garrison High School, and married Laura Sargent, a Garrison girl, valedictorian of the class behind Paul’s, an “intellectual” whom he’d barely noticed back in the day. Enter our heroine! For reasons not entirely clear (but ‘love’ in a small town is usually never clear), Laura and Paul start their journey towards matrimony with a movie date to see La Dolce Vita, which he doesn’t understand – “symbolism” was not a word used by the Garrison High English Department. Laura tells Paul that his high I.Q. attracted her attention when she was working in the principal’s office.

She begins to “improve” him as their relationship deepens, dazzling him with her enthusiasm for learning and knowledge and urging him to think ahead to attending the University. In every way she is a class act – beauty, brains and, by the way, she has a trust fund.

Actually, Laura leaves the stage before the curtain rises. Paul returns from his job at Caplan’s Auto Supply to find his bride of less than a year not doing the Times crossword puzzle. A note scribbled on the back of an envelope informs him “I can’t take it anymore. Love, L.”

“It” is Garrison, of course. To understand that, Paul has to look with fresh eyes at his until now comfortable and familiar world. The author makes us see in more than Dickensian fashion the physical, mental, and emotional squalor of the town and its inhabitants closest to Paul. Everything goes wrong for him, from losing his job to losing his cockatiel and cat. More importantly, he finds himself drawn to Laura’s friend Noelle, who quickly establishes herself in his bed. Paul also finds himself returning to cigarettes and hard liquor.

For most of the novel, Laura is, as Burns tells us, “a face in the misty light’ for Paul, phoning him and finally revealing that she is in San Francisco and determined to bring him there to join her in a new and better life. A series of flashbacks reveals Laura’s personality, attractive and ambitious for herself and Paul. She is almost too good to be true, save her bossy and persistent nature.

The jolt of JFK’s death and the televised death of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. push Paul to make his decision about the world beyond Garrison. Bums gives his readers an epilogue in which the sun always seems to shine and the sordid shadows of Garrison fade into half–remembered memory.

Review: Alvah’s Book Reviews (to read the entire review, click here).
“[Musical Chairs is] well-written, which means Jen Knox knows how to string words together into comprehensible sentences.  And her ‘voice’ is honest, unapologetic and – vital! – likeable.  In other words, she’s like the Apostle Peter in the Bible.  She’s a weak, frail, vulnerable human being, who makes lots of mistakes.  Which means – thank God – that she is human.  Which means that despite all her flaws and failures, she is not a fraud or a charlatan.  She’s not pretending to be someone who has their ‘shit’ together.
Jen and most of her family are gloriously dysfunctional – just like most families.  And they have a tendency toward mental illness.  And – shockingly – she talks about it.  Which is what makes her story and her book so wonderful.  It’s downright refreshing to read a book that acknowledges what most people know is true, but are afraid to confess:  Most people are one brick short of a load.  Which is what makes them and life so interesting.”

To watch the Musical Chairs Trailer, go to Knoxworx Multimedia.
To purchase Musical Chairs, go to Amazon, ATTM Press, or Barnes & Noble.
For more information about Jen, go to www.jenknox.com or http://jenknox.blogspot.com/
For more information about ATTMP, go to http://www.allthingsthatmatterpress.com/ or http://allthingsthatmatterpress.blogspot.com/

Tags: Memoir, Psychology, Runaways, Teen, Reconciliation, Dancing

Where You Are. By Michael Burns.
Somerville, Maine: All Things That Matter Press
(allthingsthatmatterpress.com), 2009.
246 pages. $16.99.

Let’s face it—marital bliss is overrated. If you believe in Cinderella, Where You Are isn’t that book. But if you read literature in order to transport or transcend, Michael Burns’s latest work will take you there.
In the author’s second novel (Gemini, published by Poncha Press in 2001, was his first), Paul Embry is mired in discontent. Its murky undertones resonate throughout the book. Novels that begin with a happy couple usually end with a predictable schism. Burns twists a new marriage upside down by separating the newlyweds, Paul and Laura Embry, on page one. What happens next is anyone’s guess. This opening propels the book forward. The protagonist doesn’t see it coming. When he reads a note his wife left him, he’s forced to take notice. “I can’t take it anymore. Love, L.”
Embry is glued to the depressed New Hampshire mill town like the greasy film covering the meat counter in Archie’s store. Archie’s is the nexus where Paul’s friends—all flawed characters with a penchant for booze and broads—gather. The news of Laura’s departure is met with an inevitable malaise. No one seems to care. Got a beer? Have a smoke. Join me on the recliner for an evening of debauchery. Wash, rinse, repeat. The life cycle in this town inches along like its polluted river toward some unseen watershed.
Embry’s estranged wife comes and goes from the telephone receiver with capriciousness, leaving Paul at home to care for a cockatiel named J. Alfred Prufrock and beloved cat named Honcho. These pets are the couple’s only children. When Honcho ironically goes missing on the same day Laura heads to San Francisco, she chides her husband for his ambivalence. “You don’t sense anything. You’re perfectly content to…” she says, not finishing her thought. “You are so…irresponsible.”
“Right,” Paul counters. “I should take your lead. If the going gets tough I should just take off, leave my problems behind for someone else to deal with. Right?”
Love in this novel is visible only in the dark where the grit and desperation hide from the glare of working-class reality. Most of the female characters are predatory. They appear to take things from their men who are at cross-purposes with their wives or mistresses, but too weak-willed or passive to resist temptation. The “Black Dahlia” wants something from Paul he’s unwilling to give. This raven-haired floozy is Defoe’s Moll Flanders in hot pants and thick mascara. She offers her sex to anyone in Archie’s store willing to further her circumstances, while Noelle, the married stand-in who beds a reluctant Embry, searches for a way up and out.
Burns makes these women rakes at heart; they are the antithesis to Wycherley’s hypocritical aristocrats, Lady Fidget and Dainty Fidget, who hide their inner Dahlias behind 17th-century petticoats. None of the Garrison femme fatales become reformed characters. You can almost hear them as they turn to leave the novel: you pathetic people. Most of the characters have no history outside Garrison. They are born there, work in its shoe factories, procreate, multiply, divide and fester all within a few square miles. The exception is Embry himself, who explored the world during his stint in the service but willingly returned to a familiar key punch cadence in an auto supply store, the mill’s rhythm, and a town’s people ticking slowly forward like second hands. These are Paul’s anchor and his wife’s albatross. His rootedness opposes her restlessness.
The author’s consistent tone and pacing are evocative of Embry’s emotional quagmire. Though time occasionally appears to stand still in Where You Are, the prose travels like Garrison’s meandering river, delineating class and culture from one side of the mill banks to the other. Burns’s words are earnest, uncompromising, and rough in places like the people who slog through their days in Garrison. Raw and spare, but soulful—in other words, like the city itself—Where You Are is a fine novel from Michael Burns.