Robin Weeg: Your soon-to-be released short story collection, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged, explores an often nightmarish Southern Gothic world of faith healers and alligators. What drew you to this setting and these people?
George Looney: Probably being an admirer of the fiction of William Goyen is in part responsible, combined with stories I heard from my parents and my relatives who live in Kentucky who I visited often when I was growing up. The first story in the book, “What Gives Us Voice,” was the first story of this collection that I wrote, and I mined it for all the other stories that comprise the book. And this story was the result of a conversation I had with a couple of fiction graduate students in a bar in Bowling Green, Ohio while we were waiting for a pool table to open up. I don’t recall the entirety of the discussion, but I remember one of us at some point—I’m almost positive it was me but I cannot swear to it—said “Jesus is a shell game.” The three of us decided that we should all write a story with that as the title and, as I recall it, I was the only one who followed through and completed the challenge. To be fair, we were all drinking so it may be I was the only one who remembered the challenge. “Jesus Is a Shell Game” was the original title of “What Gives Us Voice.” The structure of the story, a narrative told by three different characters who all witness a particular disturbing event—a boy faith healer half-eaten on stage in the midst of prayer by an alligator—came from that title. The idea was that the “truth” of this occurrence was like the pea that is supposed to be under one of the three shells, but has actually been palmed and so isn’t actually under any of them. The trick is to make the person putting down their money believe it is under one of the shells, that they have a chance, a one-in-three chance (which, let’s face it, is pretty good odds), to win. Once I had these characters—in this world that came from stories I heard in my youth and which were given depth by the remarkable fiction of William Goyen, who my best friend Douglas Smith had introduced me to when we were in graduate school—I knew I wasn’t done with them or the world they inhabited. What I thought I was starting was a novel-in-stories, though that’s not exactly what it turned out to be. Though it’s not that far from it, I think.
RW: What kind of research rabbit holes did this project lead you down?
GL: Different stories lead me down different research rabbit holes. For instance, for “The Under the Rivers Humming Cross of Rome, Georgia” I had to research the town, its history and geography. Heritage Park is real, too, though much of the story is pure imagination, of course. But the names of the rivers are factual, and the fact that it was labelled “the armpit of America” by an actor is also true. Some of the scenes with the father in the institution were based on my experience with my father at the end of his life. And for “A Very Old Music” I researched Subligna and the Chattahoochie National Park. It’s a blending of the actual world and the imagination that fuels fiction, after all. Isn’t it?
RW: How long have you been writing these stories? And how much have they evolved since your initial plans?
GL: The first story “What Gives Us Voice,” which appeared in New England Review in 1999, I started writing in 1997, I think. Which would mean it took me around twenty-four years to finish the collection. As for how they evolved, I guess I sort of covered that in my response to the first question.
RW: Many characters appear in multiple stories, showing–or hiding–different facets of themselves. The interconnectedness of the world feels like an important theme of the collection. Were the stories already connected like this when they first appeared in literary journals, or did that come later?
GL: The interconnectedness of the stories comes from the fact that all but two of the stories began by being mined from the first story. “Fishing the Sky Without Bait” and “Old Time Religion” had different origins before I realized that they belonged with the other stories, and then they were revised to make them fit more fully into the collection. “Old Time Religion” actually changed very little, but “Fishing the Sky Without Bait” became a more fully-realized story with the introduction of Uncle Sid and Aunt Sarah, characters from “The Music of a Thing.” What had previously been a flash fiction about Daddy John became a richer and, I like to think, better story, where what had been the tale without a frame was provided a context which I hope allowed the tale to function with a bit more grace.
RW: Many of the healers in this book abuse their power and take advantage of peoples’ faith, but they’re never just con artists. They are usually tortured souls themselves, desperate for divine forgiveness and purpose. How did you find—I hesitate to say “the humanity”—but the dimensions in these people?
GL: I suppose that comes in part from the adage, that no fiction writer should ever forget, that everyone has their reasons. None of us are one-dimensional. As the Roman poet Terence wrote, “I am human. Therefore nothing human is alien to me.” We all harbor dark thoughts most of us never act on, and we all desire to be better, more humane, than we often manage to be. Every healer needs to be healed. For me, this is the basis of fiction. William Goyen once said, when asked what started him writing, “It starts with trouble. You don’t think it starts with peace, do you?” We are all of us in trouble, conflicted as we are.
RW: Some extraordinary miracles are witnessed and wrought in this collection. However, all of them are told through narrators with their own subjective worldviews and interpretations, making it hard to know for sure what’s real in this world and what’s become legend. Was this lingering uncertainty intentional or did it come as a natural byproduct of the characters themselves?
GL: It was intentional. From the very first story, as I discussed earlier. The truth—the pea in the shell game—is pawned and not really under any of the shells. But it is the belief that it is there, or that it might be, it is that faith which gives us whatever it is we need to continue to struggle toward making sense of our lives. For me, that is the struggle all art is engaged in: the struggle to give meaning to what it is we experience. Or create.
RW: We get to see through most characters’ eyes at one time or another, with the notable exception of “the boy”. We see glimpses of power and cruelty from the very first story, but never from his perspective. How did you come to that decision?
GL: It was not an intentional decision, though I think it is right that we do not get to hear from him. Maybe the truth is in him, this boy who has enacted such cruelty and continues to do so even as he heals. Maybe his duality is the purest expression of the human condition, and it is that very nature, that truth about what it means to be human, that the reader must find in the act of engaging every character but the boy. Maybe.
RW: Your book goes to some very dark and disturbing places. Do you have any advice for writers who want to explore dark topics in their writing, but aren’t sure how to approach them?
GL: Remember that fiction is the lie that tells the truth. And remain open to the role the imagination plays and never stick with only that which you know is. Allow yourself to create what the story needs, no matter where that may lead. Trust the story, and, even more, trust the language the story is being realized in.
RW: Along with fiction, you’ve written many collections of poetry. How has your poetry influenced your prose writing?
GL: Ezra Pound argued that poetry must be at least as well-written as prose (a paraphrase, not a quote). I have believed that for most of my writing life. (I was young and foolish once.) Perhaps working with the complexities of music and meaning poetry requires, because of the relationship between the sentence and the line, has led to me being very aware of the inherent music of syntactical structures. I’d like to think there’s a rich and varied music in my prose. I’ll let the reader be the judge, though.
RW: I’m a lover of poetry myself. Could you recommend a poem that means something to you?
GL: A single poem? That’s tough. I don’t think I can do that. I can say that the poetry of Richard Hugo—who I never met and never even got to hear read his work live—and Larry Levis—who luckily I did get to meet, and take a workshop from at Ropewalk not long before he died much too young—are the two most important poets to me. I recommend any and all of their books. And to them I have to add Stephen Dunn, who I was glad to have had the opportunity to know much longer and better. There are many other poets I admire and whose work is important to me, but these three are touchstones for me.
RW: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. The Visibility of Things Long Submerged is beautiful and disturbing and I’m very glad I read it. Is there anything you want to share or plug before we wrap up?
GL: I guess I should mention that in the fall I have a new book of poetry coming out, The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible. My twelfth full-length collection of poetry, it won The Cider Press Review Editors’ Poetry Prize. And, also, I just had a chapbook published by April Gloaming Press that won their Apogee Poetry Chapbook Award. Its title is Birds of Sympathy: Correspondences, and it’s a collaborative chapbook with responding poems by me and my friend Douglas Smith who, sadly, did not live to see it published.
