Troy James Weaver

An Interview with Troy James Weaver

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(Apocalypse Party, 2020)

INTERVIEW BY KELBY LOSACK

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Troy James Weaver is the author of Witchita Stories, Visions, Temporal, and Marigold. He lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and dogs. I’ve been hooked on the kid’s writing since seeing his first reading ever in Norman, Oklahoma, where his words and his voice had a smoky bar full of tweakers using their handlebar mustaches to wipe tears from their faces. Weaver’s writing is refreshingly human, finding the beautiful within the ugly and vice versa. His characters are reflections. Though he writes with the experience and insight of a 700-year-old Buddhist monk, I refer to him as “the kid” because—in spite of the loss and heartache spilling from his pen—Weaver writes with a level of empathy only an unjaded child could muster. And that blend of honesty with compassion is hard to find in an increasingly nihilistic, cynical landscape. I reached out one night to discuss with the kid his most recent book, Selected Stories, and after our conversation, I ascended to the highest plane of enlightenment. 

Blood doesn’t come out of a puncture much more than a dot. You could run a sharpened dowel through somebody and yank it out and you’d barely see a drop or two. I don’t even know why they bother with the cotton swab after a shot. Just roll your sleeve down and move on. That’s how my brother does it. Sometimes there might be a smear of bleed-through, but it’s rare that you’ll see it. Dark-colored shirts, an expert. He doesn’t bother rolling them down for me, though. He knows I know what he does.

~Troy James Weaver, Selected Stories, 2020 [30]

KELBY LOSACK: The common thread through this collection seems to be this clinging to memories of a lost life, a lamenting of literal death, or what could have been, or of a lifestyle being reshaped around sudden changes. How often was death on your mind while penning these stories?

TROY JAMES WEAVER: All the time. I lost my dad and my father-in-law a year apart from each other. Most of these stories were written during that time, with a couple of exceptions. In choosing the stories, too, I wanted the tone to be consistent.

Experiencing death changes you.

I think my characters are working through the same state of confusion I was working through at the time, though I didn’t realize it then.

KL: There is a strange relationship that’s hard to navigate after a close one passes, right? The way you wrote about characters mourning in “Construction” and in “Instructions for Mourning,” for example—like, sometimes you find yourself mourning in very bizarre ways. Or you try to find ways to communicate with the spirit or memory of that person, in a totem such as an unearthed alien plush toy or one of those lifelike sex dolls. In a way, those are no different than an RIP tattoo, right? What are your thoughts on how we commemorate and communicate with our loved ones post-mortem?

TJW: Yes, it’s very strange. I don’t know that grief goes away and that’s why it’s confusing. Objects become sacred to you because the person who owned the object was sacred to you. I think I communicate through art. Sometimes it feels like an exorcism. In a way, it immortalizes not only them, but us, writer and subject, together.

I have a hard time articulating what I mean, because these immense losses still affect me every day. I’m still trying to figure it all out.

KL: I feel you on that, big time, and I think art is a great way to articulate what can’t easily be expressed. The tone of nearly every part of Selected Stories carries that sense of trying to maintain remnants of the past in a rapidly shifting present.

I remember you mentioning somewhere that this would be your last book for a while. Is this still the case and what made you decide that?

TJW: I’m just tired of publishing shit. I’m going to be writing, for sure. I’m just not going to send it anywhere. Just tired of giving a fuck. I don’t like all the shit you have to do. Like all the posting and the trying to sell yourself shit you have to do.

KL: Yeah, fuck being a brand, fuck selling shit. It’s almost like people turn their noses up, too, when you talk about just caring about the art and they’re like, “yeah, but I gotta put food on the table and blah blah blah,” like okay cool, get a job maybe?

I just dig art that comes from a genuine place that isn’t trying to pander to anything. Art that communicates something beyond “I really wanted a book deal so here’s this algorithmic bullshit.”

I’m of the mind artists should probably never live off of their art. There’s something lost in the voice of someone who’s not putting in some kind of daily grind separate from their art. And maybe that separation of monetary pursuit and creative expression is the key to making honest art? Just feels like a lot of shit is materialistic, lacking soul. How do you think having a regular job affects your voice as a writer?

TJW: Exactly. I just want to feel the pureness of it again. And I do. I think I got lost in the idea that anybody gave a shit. And that’s fine. But I realized I don’t care if anybody else gives a shit. I give a shit. Having a regular job makes the stories happen. Living a regular life makes the stories happen. I’ve never understood these Ivy League, Big Five writers, trying to write about shit they clearly don’t understand. And also, I find their books to be suspect in almost every way and just straight up fucking dull half the time. There are a few exceptions, but most of it is dishonest bullshit. If I see Rhodes Scholar on the jacket copy, I’m passing. That’s all I’m saying.

KL: I fuck with everything you said 100%. What is the remedy to the situation, do you think? Self-publishing, zines, keeping it all to yourself? Something else?

TJW: I don’t know. I mean, I’ll publish again, just not soon. And as for the Ivy-leaguers, they’ll always be there. I think small presses and indie lit and whatnot are fighting the good fight, I just think we should be slinging more molotovs at the establishment. Make them notice. Get in some shit. Sling mud. Talk shit. Burn it down. Don’t be nice just because you think it will help your “career.” You won’t have a career, or it’ll be a mediocre one, if you don’t say what the fuck is on your mind and mean it.

KL: You’re speaking my language, man. I love the attitude. You’ve had a good streak of small press relationships, speaking of… Disorder, Broken River, King Shot, Future Tense… what made you link up with Apocalypse Party for this collection, and whose awesome decision was it to start a love story on page 69?

TJW: Apocalypse Party is just a cool new press. I think [Benjamin DeVos] is a great writer and I love working with people who are truly enthusiastic about what you do. He’s like that. So that’s how that worked out. I half-jokingly tweeted about putting out a collection and he and a handful of other presses hit me up and I already liked Ben and knew what he was about, so I immediately sent him what I had.

As for that story on that page, that must’ve been the genius that is Ben. Or pure coincidence. I’m not telling.

KL: Hell yeah, Ben is good people. Dude’s got good taste in music, too. What have you been listening to lately? I remember thinking of your last novel, Temporal, as like a shoegaze album in literary form. Selected Stories feels like the blues. Like raw, deep south, hole-in-your-gut blues.

TJW: Sparklehorse’s first three records, mostly the first one. That song “Spirit Ditch” is my jam. (Sandy) Alex G. Lewis’ L’Amour. Polvo. Slint. JPEGMAFIA. Nick Cave. Rapeman. Elliott Smith. 100 Gecs. Robert Johnson. Blind Willie McTell. Skip James. Boredoms. Hasil Adkins.

KL: So I wasn’t too far off, got some Blind Willie in there. JPEGMAFIA is my favorite artist of the moment. And I’ve been going back and listening to Two Nuns and a Pack Mule since you turned me on to Rapeman a while back. I think noise music is the perfect soundtrack to our current era.

TJW: For sure. The insanity is a mirror.

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KELBY LOSACK is the author of The Way We Came In and Heathenish, both published by Broken River Books. He lives with his wife in Gulf Coast Texas, where he builds custom furniture and hangs out with rappers.

[REVIEW] Marigold by Troy James Weaver

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Image of MARIGOLD BY TROY JAMES WEAVER

King Shot Press, 2015
138 pages, $10.00, Paperback

REVIEW BY ALEX THOMAS

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Troy James Weaver’s Marigold speaks to suburban depression and 21st Century existentialism with a fresh new voice.  The novella focuses on a young man grappling with the issues of suicide and loneliness and their meanings in a seemingly meaningless society.  The piece opens with an epigraph by Franz Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops,” a quote that fits nicely into the Kafkaesque search for meaning that is the driving force behind the piece. Marigold is Weaver’s third publication and is published by King Shot Press which produces what it refers to as “literature for the unheard.”

In Marigold, Weaver appropriately casts a protagonist that is not original but rather plays the role of the everyman; he could be inserted in any existential fable.  In fact, Weaver seems to actively stray away from even naming his main character.  But he quickly establishes the lead man as somebody who is frustrated with life’s ambiguity through prose like “these lines point us toward our menial jobs, our stupid Wal-Marts.  The true rebels, the heroes to the causes of disorder and anarchy, are the martyrs who die in the easiest ways possible: accidentally.”  This Meursault-like character works in a flower shop, which is a superb setting, where he encounters different people but unites them in their struggle to make meaning of the world and their own demise.  These characters are also drawn very well, even though they are a bit clichéd.  There’s the kid-who-twirls-his-hair, the woman who will die from skin cancer and the tough Hawaiian and all of them are locked in this vicious battle for meaning.

The theme of the marigold as a parallel to the human condition is revisited throughout the novella with pages bare except a sentence or two of prose dedicated to the flower.  Weaver writes “Marigolds bloom from September to the first frost.  Then they die and return to the soil, where they wait for the next September sun.” And then later, “Marigold florets are often mixed with chicken feed.  Makes the yolks a brighter yellow, I’m told, for those who care for such things.”  The marigold excerpts can be interpreted as chapter breaks but they can also be read as a reminder that life is shit, but it’s also kind of beautiful and it goes on.  This may summarize the thinking of the main character, who at one point even says “I know life can beautiful for a lot of people, but not for me.”

Suicide plays such a large role in the novella that a fitting epigraph might have been the Camus quote “should I kill myself or have another cup of coffee?”  There are a lot of darkly comic bits where the protagonist calls the suicide hotline and nonchalantly chats with the voices on the other end.  About halfway into the piece, one of the workers at the flower shop kills himself and the protagonist is caught in the moment surrounding the incident.  He muses, “he was more than a hair-twirling coworker, he was a human being.”  But then Weaver brings him back to life for the second half of the text.  The last few pages paint a beautiful picture of the meaning of life and the absurdity of suicide when the hair-twirling kid calls and Weaver writes “and suddenly I’m crying, too, and we are in this immense moment of existential togetherness, astray in the wilderness of being, but hand in hand.”  He goes on to say “’Listen closely.  You want to know the best way to kill yourself?’ He sniffs, says ‘yeah’ I tell him ‘that’s good I’ll tell you tomorrow.’”  And there is the hard-hitting punch that the novella has been building toward, the coup de grâce.  It’s the subtle call back to the marigold which, like life, is beautiful and meaningless and sometimes people care about it and sometimes they don’t but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Though Marigold is a strong work, it does almost feel like this has been done before since the theme of suburban existential angst is nothing new.  But the power of the piece is in the presentation. Weaver pushes the text at us in short bursts.  Rather than berate the reader with existential musings he presents us with a novella that, when considered as a body of work, is one large existential statement.

[REVIEW] Witchita Stories, by Troy James Weaver

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Witchita

Future Tense Books

200 pages, $12

 

Review by Ryan Werner

 

Previous general portrayal of the Midwest has been decidedly not-my-Midwest: Garrison Keillor’s rosy-cheeked shitheads and the good-guys-win-bad-guys-lose world of John Hughes. My Midwest is boredom and its trappings—drugs and sex and Tori Amos tapes—and as those ideas run through Troy James Weaver’s Witchita Stories, it does to Wichita, Kansas what Gummo did to sub-rural Ohio or what Alice Munro did to small town Canada. It shows how those not on the map survive without the map.

Opening jam “Summer” is the best of them all. It doesn’t go far, because nothing in town goes far. “My sister is sixteen and she’s already at that stage in life where she’s bringing over guys that look like Fonzie or Vanilla Ice.” That’s the first sentence, and I wish I had written it. I wish I had written the next part, too, about these guys and their bad music, their misappropriated styles. How the sister is distracted to a point of neglect and how hot it is outside and how you just won’t die one way or the other, won’t melt away in the heat and won’t freeze to death in counteracting it.

And that’s it. 329 words and maybe ten steps off the front porch, a walk into the kitchen to eat what your sister didn’t make you. Continue reading →