AS ITS TITLE SUGGESTS, Trebor Healey’s short story collection, Eros and Dust, wrestles with life’s inherently dual nature—life and death, love and heartbreak, crime and punishment—as well as the artist’s role in the endless struggle to reconcile these opposing forces. Having previously explored these themes in his award winning novels, short stories, and poetry, his new book is remarkable for the breadth of literary styles on display, and for Healey’s knack for making us laugh and cry at life’s absurdity and beauty, often at the same time. Among his previous books are the novels A Horse Named Sorrow (2012) and Through It Came Bright Colors (2003).
This interview was conducted by phone this past November.
Jim Farley: What are some of your obsessions as a writer—recurring themes, plots, or subjects you find yourself returning to?
Trebor Healey: Well, I think my Catholicism greatly informs my work. Sometimes I’m embarrassed by it, but I also love the pagan aspects of it so much, the Catholic rites of passage that echo through all of my work. For example, coming out as a rite of passage or a sacrament (Through It Came Bright Colors), the sacrament of marriage (A Horse Named Sorrow), acceptance of one’s existential uniqueness, weirdness, or greatness (Faun). And of course the theme of death has always been there.
I’m also a bit of a pessimist, so things tend to go off the rails in my stories, but still, no matter how badly a character has screwed up, there’s usually going to be a Phoenix rising out of the ashes—that Catholic impulse to break characters in order to watch them transform and redeem themselves. Which is how my life has been, actually—my karma or whatever. On the one hand, I’m the most hopeful, life-affirming pessimist you’ll ever meet, but still, having to reconcile the thrill of being alive with aging, suffering, and death—it’s a real conundrum.
JF: I was struck by your ability to write in such a variety of genres, from epistolary stories and Southern Gothic to fables and magical realism. Could you talk about your versatility as a stylist and what it is about homage and parody that inspires you?
TH: That’s an interesting question. I think the fact that I’m curious and easily bored might explain my versatility, but I also think, as a writer, I have this desire to try my hand at everything. Writing short stories, my current passion, gives me that opportunity in spades. Also, when I start working with an idea, I find there’s usually a literary form that works best in confronting and wrestling with whatever the subject is. For example, parody seemed like a good way to approach my homage to Kerouac (“Queer Theory”), who had a big influence on me early on—I think primarily because he was a wanderer and a gay man, though he couldn’t make peace with who he was, which I think was his central tragedy. By parodying his work as a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy about the fabulous gay life he might have had if he hadn’t denied himself one, I was trying both to honor him by cheering him on as an openly gay person and to parody gay life and sexuality itself, which I often do.
As for the other more serious homages in the book—“El Santo” for example, which is about the poet who died of AIDS, or “Puppets,” about a deceased painter—those were also written as a way to honor people who have amazed and touched me, using whatever form or genre felt best for those particular stories. The stories about Chile and Argentina are really homages to those specific places, the people I met there, their histories. In fact, I think almost everything I write is an homage to some chapter in my life or experience I’ve had, a salutation and recording of something I want to praise and share. Which brings us back to parody, which is basically just a joyful shout or funny song about something dear.
JF: That reminds me of Tennessee Williams, who said he wrote because he found life “unsatisfactory,” and that his plays and stories allowed him to salvage his own failed relationships. I wonder if the urge to write autobiographical fiction is the same for you, allowing you to reshape your past into something more æsthetically pleasing.
TH: I like the Williams quote, and I do see myself doing this sometimes—in my novel A Horse Named Sorrow, for instance. In this collection, ”Pilgrim Soul” and “Three Things I Pray” would be examples of where I did that. I certainly did it in “Trunk,” my Southern Gothic story about a gay meth addict who attempts to find renewal and redemption by helping to rebuild New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (I was working out an unrequited crush in that one, believe it or not!) When I was writing “Chile,” “Junkyard,” and “Puppets,” it was more like I had to create specific scenes in my head in order to get at the essence of past relationships I’d been in. Also, finding redemption in life’s unsatisfactoriness is a very Buddhist concept, and as a Buddhist, that’s really the essence of my own spiritual practice. So, becoming okay with unsatisfactoriness—I think that idea influences my work considerably.
JF: You’re also a poet. Does your ability to distill the emotional essence of an experience into a poem inform your prose style and vice versa?
TH: I’m glad you asked that. I started out as a poet, and I think it really gave me a great foundation for writing fiction, not only lyrically speaking, but also, as you point out, in being able to distill ideas, themes, and characters down to succinct, concise moments or scenes. My poetry background also influenced how I construct interactions between characters, like how to pack an emotional punch that will reveal what’s happening in a powerful way.
As for distilling the emotional essence of living in Chile, I was aided by the fact that what happened after the coup is still palpable, giving everything a sort of poetic presence—the numerous memorial parks (often community-made), the museums, even the continuing police violence against citizens felt surreal. I saw junior high kids who were protesting increased bus fares literally hosed off sidewalks by big water trucks the police use for crowd control. I would often visit the statue of Salvador Allende outside the presidential palace as a testament to good overcoming evil, but of course seeing all that police brutality made me wonder if that’s even true.
JF: You’ve spent many years traveling and living in Latin America—Chile, Argentina, Mexico—where several of the stories in Eros and Dust take place. In “Pedro and the Mark,” for example, you write about the hordes of gay tourists and retirees who flock to Mexico for the cheap living and sex tourism. What’s your take on that scene?
TH: Well, I think that story says a lot about the main character’s anxieties about aging as well as his alienation from his own country. It’s also about how tourism has pretty much consumed the entire globe like mildew at this point. It’s inescapable, even in the remotest of locales. Theo is clearly an adventurer and an escapist—dare I say narcissist?—who resents and feels oppressed by this. But as to my take, a lot of the retiree migration has to do with the rising cost of things in the US and how so many people can’t afford to retire anymore unless they leave the country. Mexican culture is also much more inclusive, and as an older person one is welcomed more or less as a family member, whereas we tend to push older people aside in our culture. Numerous older gentlemen pointed this out to me. It seems to be a healthier way to age than on a golf course or in substandard housing where the neighbors never talk to you.
JF: Several stories in Eros and Dust deal with crime and punishment. In “Los Angeles,” for example, a broke Chaturbate queen tries to lure a group of online hustlers into murdering an elderly friend who’s dying of cancer, as he stands to inherit the woman’s house and can’t wait for the disease to run its course. They’re an entertaining mix of crime and farce that are like campy crime shows. Have you ever written for television?
TH: I never have, but I met a TV writer who wanted to make Faun into a cable series. I was understandably suspicious, as Hollywood is about 99 percent talk, but he turned out to be the real thing, and we wrote six episodes and pitched it a bit. Then he got distracted by a Swedish TV series he was hired to write. We stay in touch, but who knows if anything will come of it? I’m a bit intimidated by TV work—those people work like twelve hours a day in a much more commercial environment than the average fiction writer. But the process was fun—we created new characters and scenes, and it was great fun to write as a team and hash things out together. My dream is to make a film out of A Horse Named Sorrow, and wouldn’t it be a kick to have a series made up of one story after another, like “Lolito” and “Los Angeles”? The best-laid plans of mice and men…
