BROCKMEIER, CONT. Continued from page 48 My impulse was to take all the circumstances of my life — the person I used to be, the friends I used to know, the girls I used to like, the dreams I used to have, the movies I used to watch, the secrets I used to keep, the doubts I used to hide, the adulthood I used to anticipate — everything, whether good, bad or embarrassing — and gather it back together. The problems of trying to resurrect that long-gone consciousness and that long-gone time were difficult for me, and being anything other than truthful would only have com-
pounded the difficulty. I’ll admit, though, that as the publication date has approached I’ve been considerably more nervous than I usually am, because the material of the book is so intimate and I did so little to soften it. Was there a book or set of books that served as guideposts for your approach here, or that at least allowed you to think that this book was something you could pull off? I’m never sure I can pull my books off. If I were, I doubt I would feel compelled to attempt them. That said, writing this
one, I think I was under the imaginative magnetic sway of “Stop-Time” by Frank Conroy, “I Will Not Leave You Comfortless” by Jeremy Jackson, “So Long, See You Tomorrow” by William Maxwell and “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys” by Chris Fuhrman, though the last two are autobiographical novels rather than memoirs, and none of them are written in either the third person or the present tense, nor do any of them make a brief foray into science fiction, as “A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip” does. I hope it’s not graceless to say that while I was writing the book I also read a pair of
19 whole hogs! 19 chefs! live music! sAtuRDAy, mAy 3RD Argenta Farmers Market Plaza 6th & Main St., Downtown North Little Rock (across from Mug’s Café)
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— 5 p.m. —
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Doors Open
Public Serving Time
BEER & WINE GARDEN
Gated festival area selling beer & wine ($5 each) h e a d l i n e r
Ghost toWN BluEs BAND TickeT supply limiTed!
Dine on 19 pit roasted, whole,
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rain or ArkTimes.com/ shine HeriTAgeHogroAsT
heritage breed hogs from Scott Heritage Farms Saturday, May 3rd. Doors open at 5p.m. with
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craft beers and wine available. 1620 savoy
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50
APRIL 3, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES
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memoirs that I found dissatisfyingly sterile or lazy in very specific (and fundamentally opposite) ways: negative examples. One of them was carefully and deliberately composed and seemed wholly faithful to the facts of the writer’s life, but failed to offer anything like the lived experience of those facts, and the other was brimming with the lived experience of its writer’s life, and was probably faithful to the facts, but was very poorly crafted — passionate, but at the expense of some vibrancy or precision in the phrasing. I did my best to avoid those shortcomings. The city of Little Rock is a sort of enigmatic minor character in the book. How has your own relationship to the city changed over the years? Well, for starters, there’s a big difference between knowing a city by car and knowing it by foot. It’s tempting to think that the portion of a city that’s available for you to discover shrinks as you grow older, but the truth, I suspect, is that the shadows and the light simply switch places: you know more of the terrain, but you know it less intimately. I’m certainly more familiar with the highways of this place than I used to be, and the restaurants, and the arrangement of the neighborhoods, but I doubt I’ll ever again know a patch of woods as completely as I did the one behind Sturbridge Apartments when I was 10 years old. A city is something like a net, I think, and for me the net of Little Rock is a lot bigger now, but the knots are much farther apart. I’m sure there are things that slip through the gaps. I’ve written about Little Rock before, specifically in a couple of stories that I think of as precursors to this book, “Apples” and “Andrea Is Changing Her Name.” But “A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip” marks my hardest effort to capture Little Rock as it actually exists, or at least as it did back in 1985. It was a smaller place for me then, but no less mine. In the book, you take the opportunity to visit your seventh-grade self (a very strange and powerful scene). What practical advice would you give a younger you if this were possible, assuming this entire book isn’t already an answer to this question? There’s the kind of late-night timetravel conversation you might fantasize about having with your younger self — love this person; avoid that one; hold on tight when you meet this one; hold on tight and don’t let go — and then there’s what I actually wanted to do with the book, which was simply to say, This is what happened to me, this is how I remember it. Maybe that would be enough — just that — to look myself in the eye and say, “I remember you.”