Dzanc’s Best of the Web Blog Tour. Guest Post: Corey Mesler

Corey Mesler, author of “Rock Paste” from Cezanne’s Carrot:

I became a reader late in life, around 18 or so, after public schools spit me out onto the sidewalks of a hot Southern city, leaving me there to fend for myself, to beg bookishness, to beg knowledge, to beg literary coin of the realm, from kind passersby. I wanted to educate myself about books, assuming there was more to them than what I had been fed in high school. After I graduated I visited a small branch library and stood in front of the fiction wall and said, “Teach me.” The three books I plucked from that wall, like plums from a pie, were Kafka”â„¢s The Metamorphosis, Vonnegut”â„¢s Cat”â„¢s Cradle, and Camus”â„¢ The Stranger. What recondite power led me to these three books, which still, here 35 years later, resonate within me like a plucked harp string? It”â„¢s a mystery.

As I taught myself books, as I read, hither and yon, here and there, helter and skelter, Heckle and Jeckle, Jekyll and Hyde, I discovered something important about myself. I loved experimentation; I loved the experimental writers. I loved the guys and gals who were taking language apart and putting it back together with their own spit. Joyce, of course, Woolf, of course, but also David Markson, Raymond Queneau, James Tate, Donald Barthelme, Flann O”â„¢Brien, John Barth, and on and on. These writers spoke to me in secret code, in a private tropology. I didn”â„¢t always understand but I followed anyway.

Hence, as we say, experimentation became my badge, became my shield. And I was reminded of my childhood desire to be an inventor. When I was in my room or my backyard, mixing things, dreaming of discoveries previously hidden from the eyes of Man, I was really laying the groundwork for a different kind of experimentation, one having to do with words, with novels and poems that reached for the metaphorical stars, from their own jerry-built Towers of Babble. Rock paste became a shorthand phrase for that kind of foolhardy bluster, that kind of rodomontade, that kind of, say it with me, freedom.

Find links to what other writers have to say about their work here.