The Lightning Room with Katie Schmid

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.  Below, Simon and Katie Schmid talk about roots and brutal youth and hunger and “The Boys of the Midwest 1 through 5,” which appeared in the April issue.

 

1. When you write about the Boys of the Midwest, it’s always as a collective. Is this a generational thing?

In my mind, children go through a pack-like stage. At least, that was true for me. Especially around the ages of 8-11, I was a part of a neighborhood gang of girls in my mostly rental/apartment living neighborhood in Evanston, IL. There was a kind of rangey lazy quality to our movements – I don’t ever recall us making decisions about what to do, we just found ourselves in the midst of activities: playing in someone’s tree house, informing each other of the edible plants we could find in the grass (I remember eating crabgrass and onion grass, though we were not underfed). It’s a weird time. We didn’t live in an especially great neighborhood, but there was the sense that there was strength in numbers, and we were allowed to be on our own sometimes. Left to yourself, you construct a whole kid world that adults have no bearing on. Or at least, the wisdom of adults gets filtered down to the group through kid logic and becomes beautifully warped.

When my family tells me stories about their childhoods, it seems to confirm that lots of kids, given the opportunity, form their own little feral packs at that age, with their own rules and rituals and heartbreaks. It can be brutal and intense and emotional. They force each other to eat bugs, they tell each other wild insane lies and deliver these as gospel truth. Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, has that fierce little protagonist, Mick Kelly, and she’s simultaneously a leader-parent in her gang of neighborhood children and a child herself, given to all the whims and large, unbearable emotions of childhood. I am fascinated by that time, in my own life and in others’. Looming over all of that feral, emotional child closeness is the specter of the “right” world in the form of your parents, the true gods of your life, whose emotions are even more inscrutable and terrifying than your own.

2. You depict the Boys as animal-like, squirming creatures, undeveloped, masochistic and hungry. Where are your roots?

I grew up in Evanston and Skokie, Illinois. A lot of these stories are fictionalized accounts based on stories of people I know and love from Central and Southern Illinois. Poor them, they have the misfortune of being loved by a writer.

3. “The Boys of the Midwest” strikes me as a very physical and visceral re-imagining of adolescence. This stage of life is notoriously sticky – why do you think it’s such an attractive phase to writers? (This is a big question.)

Like I said, I hear stories from my family about their childhoods and for a while I thought that they’d all had extraordinarily strange, brutal, beautiful, violent childhoods. The stories I hear at holidays are some of the funniest and scariest I’ve ever heard. People nearly losing limbs, jumping out of windows, fighting each other. There’s blood and dirt and happiness and rage everywhere, and sometimes it’s hard not for me to get caught in the natural drama of all that stuff, and think, “That’s when life happened, for them! Why wasn’t I around then?”

I began to realize that my own perception of childhood was coloring my experience of their stories, or, alternatively, perhaps that is how childhood really is, for everyone…but it’s shocking to realize that because it’s so different than the sanitized version of childhood that we think of, and are given to expect all the children in our lives are experiencing or should experience.

In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Mick Kelly is a little, fully-formed person in a child body. She’s a philosopher and a kid, she smokes cigarettes and hauls her baby brother around in a wagon like a little mother.

You get older and you start to forget, maybe, that children have a world as serious as the adult world. Maybe it’s more serious, because it’s more overwhelming. The highs are so high and the lows are so low, and the difference between the two might feel arbitrary. And the stakes are higher, too – the experiences are maybe more formative and important than many you’ll have later. It’s a big time, I guess is what I’m saying.

4. Obviously, this is quite a regional series. I’m curious – what might differ if you took on the boys of the southwest, or the boys of the east coast, for example? What kind of patterns do you see?

Maybe different accessories? I’m not sure. I bet space changes things some – my cousins, for instance, had a huge backyard and seemed to be masters of it in a way that was awe-inspiring to me as a kid. We had yards, but being apartment-dwellers, ours were smaller. My cousins had, at turns, a mud-chocolate factory running back there, an impressive guinea pig colony, and sometimes we quit the house entirely and lived in a tent in the yard. They also had full run of a cemetery right next to the property where we spent a lot of our time when I visited. They had more space and that seemed to translate into grander plans and designs. One time they set off a rocket. That was a big day for me.

The midwest is the landscape of my mind. Everyone I’ve ever loved or nearly loved is from the midwest. I don’t know how to be outside of it, even when I’m not actually residing there. It’s hard for me to see other patterns elsewhere. I’m always here.

5. Is this part of a larger series? Do these Boys turn into anything else? Do they ever become men?

I wish I had written more of these, but I haven’t. The Boys live in their gooey boyhood for now. I have been writing about Girls, or really a character called The Girlfriend, and these seem related to, if not part of the same series, but who knows.

6. In No. 5, the narrator of these pieces slips into view, an observer now subjected to the affections of this plurality – the Girl of the Midwest, maybe. Will these boys eventually consume everything around them? Or is it the other way around?

I really love the phrase “subjected to the affections of this plurality.” That’s a nice way of putting it. I worried about No. 5 and almost cut it, thinking it was a little too on the nose. I wanted there to be that danger, yes, of everything getting consumed. But I wanted that danger to arise out of an understandable past corruption or rupture or wound. I didn’t want the Boys to be villainous. Just hungry. I am glad that the ambiguity exists – are they consuming or have they been consumed? The speaker too, who has been speaking the entire time but only reveals herself at the end, is engaged in a kind of sly violence against the Boys as well – she’s telling it (a kind of consumption), and she’s not without her grievances. Maybe she’s the real villain.

 

***

Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.