Mark Derks, Vinyl’s Fiction Editor, talks with Matthew Vollmer about his new collection of essays inscriptions for headstones recently released by outpost 19. Matthew is also the author of the short story collection Future Missionaries of America and co-editor of Fakes: an Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts and Other Fraudulent Artifacts from W.W. Norton.
MD: inscriptions for headstones is remarkably human. The detail and specificity bring the pieces to life for me. I’m also a huge fan of the way these pieces defy categorization. They’re essays, as the back of the book says, "crafted as epitaphs, each one unfolding in a single sentence." My question: Why epitaphs?
MV: I think that writing an epitaph for yourself is or can be a way of stripping away pretense. The form also generates a sort of automatic urgency—it’s a narrative that memorializes the dead. If I set out to write an epitaph for myself, I become—automatically—a mythologizing truth-teller, a true liar. I am attempting to do what artists do, which is to set things in stone—so to speak—for the ages. Or at least for a little while. In each of these epitaphs, I wanted to get to the heart of the matter, which is to say I wanted to burrow into the actual meat of my brain-life and attempt to represent my anxieties, fears, dreams, joys, rhapsodies. To bring out from the interior as much of that stuff as possible.
MD: There are thirty epitaphs in the book. We have #33 for this issue of Vinyl. How many of these epitaphs have you written?
MV: I probably wrote in the neighborhood of 60-70 epitaphs. Many of those remain incomplete. Some simply lost steam. Others I couldn’t seem to find a way to end. (I had one about bumper stickers and tattoos I really liked, but just couldn’t finish.) Some I decided not to include because they felt too personal, which may seem like an odd thing to say, since the book is obviously quite personal.
MD: Pieces that have appeared previously often have different numbers in the book. What process did you use to wind up at the final numbering and to decide the final shape of inscriptions for headstones?
MV: The original numbers of the epitaphs reflect, basically, the order in which they had been written. But then I’d scratch an unfinished one and have to go back to number 7 or 15 or whatever and write another to take the deleted one’s space. Also, I liked the look of Roman numerals. There’s something grandiose and historical about them. Or maybe I just wanted each epitaph to resonate in some way with a particular Super Bowl. (Just kidding.)
I’d always wanted the project, if it were to end up as a book, to be slim—like a book of poetry, something you could read easily in an afternoon. (I’d also wanted it to be pocket-sized, but alas.) Thirty seemed like a good round number. So I went with that.
MD: Several of the essays seem to have epiphanic moments. In VIII, for example, the last couple of lines read, "the deceased continued to forget to take walks after dark except on the occasions when he almost by accident found himself strolling through his neighborhood and if the stars were out he’d look and if the lights in his neighbors homes were on he’d stare wondering as he’d continue to do as long as he lived why in the world didn’t he do this more often and what beside himself was holding him back" Here, the epiphany seems to be one for the reader to have rather than one that the speaker of the piece has arrived at. Could you talk about integrating this sort of fictive devices into the form of an essay and whether (and how) these devices accurately reflect your lived experience of going for a walk after dark and other events contained in inscriptions for headstones? Does it matter, even in an essay, how real or true any particular line, sentiment, scene, or detail is?
MV: Let’s take this in two parts. First, any representation of anything could be said to be false in that it fails to reproduce the actual thing in its entirety. The represented thing, then, is a blend of presence and absence. It is powerful, though. A representation can emanate with a completely different kind of energy than the real. A tree has its own power, its own mysterious and palpable life. But a representation of a tree—a drawing, a poem, a photograph—calls into questions all sorts of things about why it exists, what artistic choices have been made, and what (if any) meanings can be said to exist. A child’s name on a page, a teenager’s self-portrait, a homemade sign, the words on a tombstone, a novel, a comic book, a found grocery list—each one of these things is powerful because each one is a representation of the actual and can suggest to a conscious mind a string of who knows how many associations. I’m interested in that, in the magical act of reading and interpreting and what that conjures for human beings. But I think we have to be careful in that we should not mistake an actual thing for a representation, and vice-versa. That thing in the yard may look like a rock, but it might also be a plastic rock-shaped hiding place for a house key. Both serve very different functions.
Second, I find that if you immerse yourself in language, if you’re harnessing ideas to language, if you begin writing a sentence that begins by telling the story of a particular event or phenomena that you observed, and your only assignment is to keep that sentence going until you find a way to explore what you want to explore and somehow find a way to end it, then you’re going to generate a certain amount of locomotion and linguistic energy and the by-product of that is probably going to be a certain amount of surprise. You’re going to discover that one thing leads to another. You’re going to discover twists and turns and connections that you maybe weren’t aware of. Like when I wrote about the angel shutting the mouth of the snake when I stepped on it, I didn’t know that I would end up writing about being stung by yellow jackets, but I did. And I’d forgotten that my sister, moments after stepping on the snake, had gotten stung by a bee on that same hike, and had wondered (she reminded me of this recently) where her angel had been.
MD: I love the image of "harnessing ideas to language." It’s beautiful, and it gets at the sort of unruly nature of language and of ideas, of the their shared capacity to run away, to bubble up, to overflow and to drag us—simple mullers-over or readers—along with them. Are there other writers who have hooked and surprised you with the ideas they’re harnessing? Who are you reading and loving right now? Are there any currents in contemporary prose that excite you?
MV: Thanks to my friend Zac Zimmer, a Spanish professor in Foreign Languages at Virginia Tech, I’ve gotten a lot of great recommendations for South American literature. Making my way through a book called The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. Very strange. It features a self-aware narrator who is constantly making asides, getting defensive, admitting that he’s making stuff up, obscuring some things and making others clear. And I recently finished The Waves by Virginia Woolf, which was absolutely breathtaking. One of the best reading experiences I’ve had in a long while. Such an oddly moving book. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Woolf has described it as a poem-play, and that’s a great description. Just read Dylan Nice’s Other Kinds, a collection from Short Flight/Long Drive books whose characters, like me, are haunted by mountains and the people who live there. Also: The Orange Eats Creeps, which is a book about teenage runaway vampires in the Pacific Northwest. Still trying to wrap my head around that one.
MD: What place do you see these epitaphs as occupying in the larger culture? Are these pieces in some way a necessary response to the information age and the volume of “fraudulent” and actual artifacts we encounter on a daily basis? Is there something about the real world you and I inhabit—a world of Pinterest and texting, reality TV and ultra-targeted advertising—that demands this fraudulent format? Or is the form itself what is exciting and enlivening to you.
MV: As for where these epitaphs exist in popular culture, I’m not sure I could say. I wrote them at a time when I was frustrated with convention—namely the novel. I was and am a writer, but the joy of writing had less to do with writing in a particular form or playing by the rules than it did with, simply, the unleashing of language. I’ve always loved words. Always loved being able to harness the power of language. And I think we’re being dishonest if we imagine that language always sets out to do what it wants to do. We are inundated by language now maybe more than ever. But most of that language isn’t trying to redefine the form in which it inhabits. I tried to do that, to a certain extent, with the epitaphs. I want the experience of a piece of writing to be larger than its form, to give the language the opportunity to burst apart the genre that purports to contain it, so that the writing becomes... something else.
MD: Is the epitaph a form you see yourself continuing with? Could you, perhaps, write epitaphs for your wife? Your child(ren)? Your parents? Total strangers?
MV: The interesting thing about this project was that it could go on indefinitely. I thought about maybe starting a series: "EVEN MORE inscriptions for headstones!" But I need to move on. So I’ve stopped writing epitaphs for now. The only ones I write now are personalized ones for friends when I’m signing books.
