Jamie Iredell

Great to have Jamie Iredell as the sixteenth interview in The Fine Delight series, and the first since the site's relaunch. I've enjoyed Jamie's work for years, and was happy to offer a blurb for his collection, Fat and Other Essays, coming this fall:

"Jamie Iredell's Fat impresses through his ability to shift from clever wordplay to smart social commentary to heartfelt moments with his daughter, and to do so with lyric control and emotional authenticity. To say that Iredell lived this book is not to be redundant: the prose pulses with the strength of experience reconsidered. Sometimes Augustinian, often hilarious, Fat moves from Reno to Atlanta to California. Readers will appreciate, and return to, this linguistic ride."

Happy to share Jamie's thoughts here, as he talks about his newest manuscript, as well as Catholic influences and tensions in his life. A bio note and links to Jamie's books follow the interview. Thanks for talking with us, Jamie!
 

1. Tell us about Last Mass, your manuscript-in-progress about growing up Catholic in Monterey County, California. Why did you write this book? What's been the process of drafting, revising, etc?

So this book, Last Mass, is as you point out about how I grew up in California as a Catholic in Monterey County, near where the Franciscan who was the first European to settle California—Junípero Serra—is buried. Not only did Catholicism structure my childhood, but Junípero Serra and the missions were a big part of the cultural and historical tradition of the region, and we learned all about this stuff in elementary and middle school, as part of California’s history. But as I grew up, I grew farther away from the Church, mostly because of my developing sexuality. All this stuff about chastity just didn't make sense to me; I liked girls, I wanted to be around them; and when I knew what sex was, I wanted to have it. I didn’t care about getting married or anything. Like in those 18th century didactic poems, the body definitely won in its battle against the soul in my case. 

It’s called Last Mass, as the last mass I attended was my grandmother’s funeral, which was very much a symbolic end to my association with the Catholic church: Granny died, so too died Catholicism for me. It’s not that I lost faith; it was more like my childhood, and the indoctrination in Catholicism that came with it, died when this generation died. Still, for years prior to my grandmother’s death—because of the things you learn in college—I’d become more critical of the Church, and I should mention that Last Mass is critical of the Church as well, in particular of the Mission system in California and the fate of Native Californians. But on the rare occasions when I find myself in a Christian church, I cannot help myself but genuflect (in the Catholic manner) upon entering and before leaving. Many of the values instilled in me via Church doctrine remain: I feel an obligation to love and honor my parents through good works for them. I keenly felt this after my father suffered a stroke a couple years ago. I flew out to California so that I could do some work around the house that needed doing, but my dad couldn’t do it. When I see my daughter I see god. There’s something spiritual—even if it is secular—in the swell of emotion in my chest whenever I look at her face. My family—everyone who loves me, and whom I love—will keep me from destroying myself (and trust me, I’m prone to such behavior) and all that love has got to be god, if god is nothing else. So that is my personal kind of Catholicism. Sure, I’m drawn to the ritual of the Roman order. The principle structure organizing Last Mass is based on the Stations of the Cross. But I look at that order as an artistic rendering of the universe’s chaos. 

All that said, this has been in many ways the most difficult book I’ve ever written. While I’m talking to you about it right now I’m in the midst of a full rewrite, which will be the ninth draft of Last Mass. Originally, I wanted to write a historical novel about Junípero Serra. I spent a year researching Serra and the Missions. At the end of that year I had a residency at an artist’s colony where I planned to write the book’s first draft. Those were some lofty ambitions, and I sat and stared at the blinking cursor for a long while before I just started typing out the first things that came to my mind. I was stuck in this cabin in the north Georgia mountains for two weeks. Everyday I woke and wrote whatever came to mind and drank coffee. Then I went for a long jog, sometimes up the mountain from the base where my cabin sat, sometimes along the country road that meandered through the valley. It almost would’ve been an ascetic experience, if not for the panic attack I endured while there. Anyway, by the end of two weeks I had 15,000 words, all of them random paragraphs about Junípero Serra, the Missions, growing up as a Catholic in California, and about things I saw or did or thought about contemporaneously, while there in the country. I decided that what I was writing was a book of nonfiction, and that’s what the book’s always been in its multiple drafts. Some of those drafts were more cohesive, in terms of structure. I re-wrote and organized sections of the raw material into distinct essays that made chapters. But what I’m doing now is going back to that first draft, the wild accumulation of random paragraphs of seemingly disparate information. There is organization and structure, but the original draft was more poetic than the subsequent drafts, and I want to go back to that poetic source. I’m thinking of Last Mass as a hymn.

2. Has your “personal kind of Catholicism” bled through in your other writings that are not as explicitly Catholic-themed?

I suppose some of that comes out in pretty much everything I do. I wrote a novel in stories called Our Lady of Refuge about a family of Mexican Americans in Castroville, California. In that book the Catholic themes are prevalent. But, while I published almost all of those stories in magazines, I stopped pursuing publication for the book a long time ago. It’s one of those “apprentice” books that you have to write before you can start getting the real work done. In my first book (Prose. Poems. a Novel.), the main character certainly goes through a coming-of-age. He literally gets older (duh) over the course of the narrative, but also grows up in many ways and one of those ways is, I think, spiritually. In general, though, I guess I’d say that I’m an emotional writer, in that I feel a lot, and I’m always wanting to generate in the reader the same kinds of feelings I have when I read something wonderful—whether that’s an extreme sadness, or joy, or horror. Often, that incorporates a kind of redemptive quality in the case of characters, when I write fiction, or in myself when writing nonfiction. I wouldn’t say that these are epiphanies that my characters or I have; it’s more like we all are trying really hard not to be assholes, but are failing miserably at it, until finally we figure out a way not to be assholes. Maybe that’s what I would say the ideal Christian—or let’s just say human—ought to aspire to: not being an asshole. 

3. This redemptive sense is definitely present in your non-fiction. I like how many of the pieces in Fat & Other Essays shift tones from the sardonic to comedic to the heartfelt, particularly when talking about your family.

I think there’s a tradition in Catholic-influenced non-fiction of imbuing confessional narratives with a larger, and worthwhile, point—the work of Brian Doyle, Andre Dubus, and Alice McDermott, to name a few. Any favorite or notable Catholic writers of your own?

I love Flannery O’Connor. Obviously her fiction, but her nonfiction, too, in Mystery and Manners. She turned me on to Paul Horgan, though I already had a number of his books that I’d never read—passed down to me by my grandmother, whose maiden name was Horgan. He’s a very underrated writer. You never hear about him today, though he’s one of the few writers to have won multiple Pulitzers in different genres.

The influence of Saint Augustine’s Confessions should be very obvious in both Fat and Last Mass. I am a big fan of both Dubus and Dubus III, even if the Catholicism is subdued in the latter’s writing. This is going to sound like a cliché, but Kerouac was the first big influence on me as a writer, and Catholic themes are probably the most consistent of themes running through his work. Other Catholic writers who have been or remain important: Bocaccio’s Decameron, Joyce, Barry Lopez, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne (huge influence, especially since I began writing as a poet), Seamus Heaney.   

4. I’m really happy that you mention Dubus III. Townie is a very Catholic memoir in the most hard-nosed, and as you mention, subtle way. When he talks about his father’s death, he says that “Pop had eaten life, and his death had left a cavernous, gnawing hole in the air we moved through.” Apply that line to yourself: is there a “cavernous, gnawing hole in the air” that your writing is working to fill?

Townie is exactly what I was thinking about with Dubus III as a Catholic writer. I don’t know if there’s a “cavernous, gnawing hole in the air [I move] through.” That’s a really good question. There are things I’ve done in my life for which I feel intense shame. Most of those things happened while I was under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. I think I try to atone for some of those things in my writing. Perhaps there is some guilt associated with leaving my family in California (everyone else is still there; I see them a few times a year, and it’s not like we have a bad relationship, or anything, but I’m definitely the odd guy out in my family), for ceasing to be a practicing Catholic. But, it’s not very tangible guilt if it’s there. I’m happy with my life, with my wife and my daughter, with my friends, and the city in which I live. I wanted to be a writer deliberately (to paraphrase Thoreau), and with that deliberation I set out to make that my life and it’s consumed me. If there’s a hole I’m trying to fill, it’s one that was eaten away by the desire to write something that made readers respond in a powerfully emotional way, and I’ve been trying to meet that desire the only way I know how. I wouldn’t say that I “write what I know.” I bumble around trying to figure shit out. That seems like what Andre was doing throughout his life, too. And I assume that’s what he’s still trying to do—what we all are, I guess. I’m distrustful of anyone who seems to think he knows what he’s doing.  

5. I think that distrust comes through—in the literary sense—in “Form Over Genre” from Fat. It’s an essay I think most students of writing should read to get a wider sense of why these conversations about definition happen, but I was especially interested in the anecdote that Last Mass originally began with this phrase: “I am a Catholic.” So, it’s an essay about literary definitions but it also has that moment of personal definition. I’ve noticed that you often place “practicing” before Catholic, and it seems like a deliberate gesture. When you write that you “care about language that makes words and I care about what form those words make. I care about the great mystery that is the Truth in the written word,” do you see Catholicism (the ritual, your identity within it) as connected to how you perceive language?

Absolutely. In the beginning was the word, right? There are forms within Catholic rite that lend themselves perfectly to literary expression, that have distilled down to other religions, or versions of Christianity, and that have become literary forms themselves, like the homily and the epistle, for example. I wrote a story once, the structure of which was shaped by the Rituale Romanum. It was not a successful story. But it was an attempt. One time, in another story, I detailed an entire mass. My creative writing professor said, “Cut all this.” Now that I’m thinking about it, I think I traded up Catholicism for Poetry. Poetry is pretty much always formal, even in the oxymoronic “free verse.” There’s the marriage of form and content, and I say “marriage” purposefully here, just like I often add “practicing” before Catholic. I would not say I am a “lapsed” Catholic, although I like the assonance there. So much of what I learned as a Catholic is a part of who I am that no matter how many years I might go without attending mass I don’t think they could get beaten out of me. So I prefer to call myself a non-practicing Catholic. I do believe in god—not the Old or New Testament YHWH, but what I have no other word for than “god.” I really love science, and some of the mysteries of science—like what was there before the big bang?, or why can we not achieve absolute zero?, and the uncertainty principle—lead me to believe, at least for now, that there are still things we cannot define about the universe, and that there are things we cannot understand about ourselves, and those things seem to come from a place that I can only call god. To go back to language for a moment, that’s why the book’s called “last mass.” I love the assonant slant rhyme there, and at the same time it makes literal sense. I talk about my grandmother’s funeral being my “last mass,” but the book is the last one, really. But as I said above, it probably won’t really be. It would be cool, though, if Last Mass ended up on the Vatican’s list of banned books.   

***

Jamie Iredell is the author of a number of books of poetry and prose (fiction and non). His writing can be read at The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus, The Good Men Project Magazine, and elsewhere. 

Books:

Prose. Poetry. a Novel.

The Book of Freaks