Putting the otherworldly in its place
An interview with Gary Mawyer
by Lillian Howan
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Gary D. Mawyer, B.A., M.F.A., graduated from the University of Virginia in 1982, where he held a Henry Hoynes Fellowship in creative writing. He is a former member of the Council of Biology Editors and lives retired in Albemarle County, Virginia. His books include Shad River, Dark and Other Stories, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, The Tedboro Trilogy, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I. He blogs on gardening and travel.
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Lillian Howan's writings have been published in Alta Journal, Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, Jellyfish Review, the museum of americana, New England Review, South Dakota Review, Vice-Versa, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Charm Buyers (University of Hawaiʻi Press), received the Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award for Excellence and was named an Essential Book by Honolulu Magazine.
Can you tell us a bit about your background, and about going to school with Breece D’J Pancake?
I was born in Charlottesville, and now my wife Karen and I live just outside of town. I dropped out of UVa (University of Virginia) while Karen stayed in, being Phi Beta Kappa, part of the very first UVa class to have any females in it, and then went to UVa Law, graduating in the top 10% of her class as one of the very first females to graduate from UVa law. She soon began her lifelong career as a law editor, while I returned to school as an English major and then part of the first MFA group at UVa. I finally graduated for the last time in 1982. We had four children. I very soon began my lifelong career in medical journals, which was a reasonable step. I had done lots of editorial baggage-carrying as a Hoyns Fellow at UVa, and before that I had 2 and a half years of proofreading for The Michie Company, Law Publishers.
I went to school with Breece D'J Pancake at UVa (we were the same age) and inevitably met him several times. He was a Hoyns Fellow just before me – we must be nearly adjacent if there’s any list kept of such things. Breece and I shared the same academic mentors—John Casey, Peter Taylor and James Alan McPherson. I was an MFA student, though, and Breece had a much wider profile in the English Dept.
Breece was teaching my sister-in-law's writing class at the time he shot himself and the class had to be finished by a TA. In a veritable sea of lively young gossip, his suicide came as a shock to the department and a terrific shock to the writing section. It was no ninety-day wonder. Repercussions were still echoing when I finally graduated in 1982. It changed the trajectory of the program and made a fine warning for the thoughtless to ignore. No one came to terms with the suicide and some thought there were not quite enough repercussions.
I understand that The Collected Breece D’J Pancake: Stories has never been out of print, deservedly in my opinion.
In your collection, Dark and Other Stories, the worldly and the otherworldly are interwoven, appearing almost indistinguishable. A solid sense of geography and tactile reality permeates your writing, and, at the same time, your stories are suffused with the unknown. Tell us more about this interweaving of physical precision and the ghostly.
The nature of human perception—and how our perceptions affect us—is a very good subject. I believe nothing we could possibly make up is as weird as reality is. When I wrote the stories in Dark, that's how I was thinking as best I remember, and all the stories are, in part, merely a sincere homage to the great tradition. I was a likely candidate for that, because I loved the same restrictions James and Faulkner loved, and even today I feel the greatest reluctance to just literally make stuff up. I need to write from the texture of the lived world. It's just a wild irony that my lived world included the projection-booth poltergeist. It was a weak one that could only lift four ounces (usually much less).
That is a fine and quite specific detail, that the poltergeist in “Dark” could lift no more than four ounces. To quote you in “Dark,” these objects were “nuts, bolts, screws, paperclips, pens.” Can you elaborate more on the poltergeists in your stories?
A poltergeist claim is basically a statement about displaced objects. The outstanding feature about such a claim is its materiality. Object A was at Location A but now it is at Location B. We determine that we still think it is Object A and has not become object B. We determine that we think there was no one else there to move it. We consider that objects do not move themselves. At that point we no longer have an explanation for what we think we have observed (a displaced object). You can chart this out like a decision tree but first it would be helpful to get more information: what is the object, what are its properties, who usually would use it or move it, what can we say about Location A that might be useful for our questions, what can we say about Location B, and so forth. This would ruin a piece of fiction but not doing it would ruin your hopes of understanding the claim being made, outside of fiction.
The next step for the reasonable is to start drawing assumptions.
“I moved it myself but forgot.”
“A rat moved it.”
“Actually it was always at B to start with.”
There are probably others. This is the class of reasonable assumptions. They are still assumptions, untested and maybe untestable. The thing that makes them reasonable assumptions is that, of course, no poltergeists have been invited to join the explanation. And why would we, at this point? We would not.
If we decide to keep asking, at some point the question is “How do we think the movement occurred?” Would an observer have seen the object float away? I personally have never seen such a thing as that and remain skeptical about the fairly rare accounts that claim to be true but include that detail. It sounds like a post hoc “no, but it really did” embellishment. If we have at least for the purposes of the thought-experiment set aside the rat and the roommate as suspects, and don’t believe objects float away, there’s almost nothing left. A claim known only to particle physics that our Object A simply changed state, so to speak, relative to Location A. There’s really no setting yet where this simple claim of an anomaly justifies calling in the leprechauns.
So when do you have to consider calling in the leprechauns or going poltergeist? When it keeps happening--especially when it’s place-specific. When it keeps happening, you quickly run out of reasonable assumptions. Now the challenge is entirely real and very disconcerting. One might even wish they did see “the apport”, as parapsychologists would call it, actually moving. For the projection booth, as best I know, no one caught anything in the act of apporting. It was always a before-and-after with no apparent transition.
At this point in the argument (and believe me there were pages and scores of pages of various forms of this argument in the history of “Dark”) you can actually invoke a second tier of reasonable assumptions, mainly psychological/behavioral. My favorite is the observer’s bias. If the observer (or reporter) starts feeling uneasy or even spooked, or starts looking for anomalies, they might crop up everywhere, as every lost sock turns into a parapsychological mystery story. Loss of skepticism will quickly make any attempt to solve the little riddles impossible.
To sum up, you make your lists. You collate your accounts. You compare the versions. You consider the reasonable assumptions, provable or not. Then you see if you got anywhere. I found that I did not. That’s what I was hoping to capture in “Dark.” I got just so far and no farther, and wound up in the position of not knowing what any of that was about. And yet it was very interesting to me and remains so nearly forty years later.
Maybe that helps explain the background of “Dark” a little better, I hope without damaging its effects as a very spooky story.
I’d like to mention the other poltergeist story in Dark and Other Stories, “The Stony Point Poltergeist.” I bring that up not because it’s a poltergeist story, but because it’s also related to the old Cinema Theater. That is not, I don’t think, ever brought up in the story but in fact it was. The theater’s manager turnover was acute, and few lasted as much as a year. For several months at one point the candy stand cashier was promoted to manager, and her husband would come by around 9:30 or ten at night and hang around until it was time to drive his wife home (before the promotion she got off at 9). He was an OK guy by any standards and I mean no harm at all when I say he was a completely illiterate rural redneck doomed to a life of semi-employment doing yard work. These are some of our best people, though they do wind up in jail a lot. It’s more because of the fines they never get around to paying (generally traffic or vehicle related). And as described in “The Stony Point Poltergeist,” his idle chit-chat included the funny events associated with his dad’s and his brothers’ attempts to renovate an abandoned overseer’s shack close by a particularly large slave graveyard, easily as large as the slave graveyard conserved at Monticello, just down the road from Stony Point, and just down the road a couple of miles from my house for that matter. Country ghost stories are anything but rare, and the rest of the circumstances are described in the story, with no background except to be what they are. “The Stony Point Poltergeist” is more like a transcript than a story.
Your stories evoke a sense both of remoteness and proximity. In the first story, "Hanging Valley Breakdown," the valley feels utterly isolated, and yet, at the same time, not that far from Arlington and Washington D.C. This anomaly of being much farther and yet also much closer than expected also plays a role in the last story "Off The Map." How is this double sense of isolation and proximity related to the geographic location of the stories in Virginia and West Virginia?
Virginia and West Virginia are adjacent (they were originally just Virginia until WVa seceded at the outbreak of the Civil War). The West Virginia mountains are a thick belt of the Appalachian mountain range, separated from the Virginia Blue Ridge (a much older mountain range) by the Shenandoah Valley.
"Hanging Valley Breakdown" is set in the Virginia Blue Ridge. "Off the Map" is more or less on the map as the North-South Trail from Gaudineer Knob to Wildell in West Virginia, but the names have been changed. "Dark" and "The Stony Point Poltergeist" are set in Charlottesville, VA, east of the Blue Ridge (but we can see it from here). The story "Remote" is set in an imaginary county that probably best corresponds to Elkins, WVA. However, when the story was written, Elkins was a great deal smaller than it is now; there is now a large interstate hub and the current population is almost 7,000. Modern Elkins is about twice the size of the 1984 setting of "Remote."
I like the idea of familiar workaday worlds and nearly indecipherable "other worlds" on adjacent tracks and sometimes crossing paths. This idea seems to me to correspond with experience and it's just a coincidence that it's also good for stories. Of course the very strange isn't confined to the deep woods. Cities and towns include corners or turnings that lead "off the map." Part of my hope for these stories is to convey the further idea that maplessness is OK. We need our maps. We perhaps cheat ourselves a little if we shy away from the map edges, though. The stories in Dark are meant to encourage and amuse, mainly. I don't mind an occasional chill. We need chills. But I see these tales as affirmations that the immense web of correspondences making up our worlds is deep, old and strong, while our human maps of reality are cultural maps.
"Hanging Valley Breakdown" is a fun one to think back on. It might be the earliest story in the collection. The setting is Greene County, Virginia, less than two hours from DC. In 1978, when this story is set, the back sides of the Blue Ridge counties were effectively more remote than they were in, say, the 1930s. This was due to dense forest regrowth, bad roads, and increasingly few people. Just coincidentally, I was told just last week by a title searcher that a property was changing hands in the old "Hanging Valley" subdivision. I asked if the plat map was a mass of new homes now. Apparently not; the properties have changed very little. Some houses remain. The road has probably been paved. Maybe very little has changed since the death of Goober.
We might fear the supernatural because physical reality on the scale we appreciate as humans seems orderly and predictable. If a low-probability event does occur, it makes the news and we might even say at his funeral that Jack Sprat getting run over by a bus on the sidewalk was a random event. Of course there is no physical randomness at all--it's billiard balls all the way down. That is the ultimate lawfulness. We may comfortably think that in physical reality, everything is either forbidden or mandatory. The word 'supernatural' is reserved for things that seem to challenge the stable order.
I'm not a supernaturalist. There are not very many types of so-called "supernatural event." Compared to the number of species of flies, supernatural event types are quite few indeed. I think nearly everyone has personal experience of at least one such event--though the usual response is denial. Supernatural events are superficially lawful--they categorize easily and nicely--in short they aren't supernatural. That can be a source of fear because we don't know those rules, our expectations are worthless, and we definitely had other plans. Meeting a spectre of some (turns out kind of limited) sort is not really any more a-causal than meeting a bear. It's just that we think we know the bear's rules. So we hand it a sandwich, instead of having the type of emotional breakdown that features as the action in what I've called the Edwardian Ghost Story.
There is a spectrum from fantasy to supernatural fiction, and the gradient between them is the use of mundane details from the well-known world we are all familiar with. If events emerge from an already eldritch or dreamlike setting, we're on the fantasy end of the spectrum. Descriptions can be quite detailed as in Poe or Lovecraft, and be like the fine details in a dream or hallucination. You might say supernatural fiction creates the intruder, while fantasy creates the world such intruders might come from. Supernatural fiction is set in the familiar mundane world. How precise the physical descriptions need to be depends on a floating raft of possible factors. The point of the story is the shock of contrast between the very well known ordinary world and the sudden encounter with something (usually dangerous) that does not belong in it.
The familiar mundane world of supernatural fiction includes ordinary movie theaters?
"All theaters are haunted" is a saying we used to have when I was a unionized projectionist (IATSE Local # 711) in the 1970s. I think even brand-new theaters soon have ghosts checking them out for inhabitance and they move in fast.