Gregg Gerke’s debut There’s Something Wrong with Sven was released by Blaze Vox in April of this year. Packed with darkly humorous prose, Gerke’s book is a wildly addictive collection. Gerke’s stylistic acrobats afford him the ability to bounce around subjects and story lines. His wit and attention turns the mundane into the mesmerizing. In one tale a man contemplates a fart in a library. In another, a newly wedded husband debates returning his foreign-born bride. In yet another, an over concerned mother gets her son laid as a substitute for sex ed. Gerke’s characters are often awkward and appalling. However, his stories are handled with charm, and his work deserves attention. In case you missed it, here’s a link to Greg Gerke’s Truth be Told, which ran yesterday on DSM. –Brian Allen Carr
Dark Sky Magazine: You’ve been publishing short-fiction for years, when did you know you had a collection on your hands? How did There’s Something Wrong with Sven come to be?
Greg Gerke: I didn’t know until Geoffrey Gatza (Editor at BlazeVox) asked what I had. And I didn’t really have it yet. I still wrote and edited for about nine more months before I delivered something to him. I was more obsessed with getting a “serious” novel out at the time, and had (like Oscar voters), looked down at the comedy in which my feet were more firmly rooted.
I was lucky to be in Buffalo and meet Geoffrey, otherwise I still might be querying agents to read my Here’s what happened when I went to Germany novel.
DSM: There’s Something Wrong with Sven is broken up into three sections: Bacchanalian, Saturnine and Mercurial. Could you discuss each section briefly? Do these sections represent different stages of your writing?
GG: I broke it up because I thought a big block of 50 stories was just not enticing. I guess it’s the fashion to fragment things these days. The Bacchanalian, the first section, was for the wild stuff, the comedy. The “sex” stories magically migrated to this section and I hope people will not read in order and think I am some deviant. But if they do read in order, beginning with comedy is the best way to loosen people, then you can bring out the knives and guns and unsettle them.
The Saturnine section is full of the darker, gloomy stories. The despondent and melancholy. Just looking at it now, it is dominated by father and mother stories, which I don’t think means anything except an attempt at understanding where I came from.
The Mercurial section is full of the moody, shifting stories that bounce around in all different registers. The darker humor.
The sections aren’t different stages of my writing. Ones written five years ago are next to ones written one year ago. Everything still comes out sloppy. The “Sven” piece is probably the only one that came out close to fully born. Just a few edits, but it took a year of reading it over and over to see what the edits should be.
DSM: Your flash fiction is often plot-based, but many flash writers seem to aim their pens at the ears. That is to say, they are often more language-based. How did you come to your style?
GG: It started when my teacher at the University of Oregon (Robert Hill Long) introduced me to flash fiction. He pointed out Jean Follain (his prose poems) and led me to Lon Otto (who I wrote about at the BigOther site). What were these little stories and why were they so seductive? We used the Sudden Fiction anthology in class and those greats were in there (Pamela Painter, Mary Robison, Lydia Davis, Russell Edson, Donald Barthelme), so I came to the style by reading.
The irony was I wrote just a few “flashes” and stopped for about five years while I worked on novellas and novels that seemed to inhibit my sense of humor. The ten or so very short pieces in the book like Blueberry were the first written.
Later on, experiencing the hilarious or the surreal in art or life would shake me up and made me want to go there too. Jesus’ Son produced Travels with Pawdy and Open the Sesame. After hearing Jennifer L. Knox and Aaron Belz read their poetry one night, I wrote the Vivaldi piece. They gave me permission to go further and take more chances. The Dead Father was Coetzee all the way, plus I had just moved to Red Hook in Brooklyn. Walking around those eerily deserted streets at night and seeing guys pushing shopping carts or muttering to themselves. I had to portray what I was seeing to make sense of it.
DSM: Does good flash fiction always tell a story?
GG: I don’t think so. I think it always shows progression but not necessarily a story.
DSM: Many of your pieces tend to be humorous. Shorts like Phone Call to Kyoto, Bret in Bordeaux and Ask for What You Want even seem to end with punch lines. Has humor always played a part in your writing?
GG: Like I said before, I let the humor go to be the “serious” novelist, but that didn’t work. It’s really dependent on mood. I still write serious things. I see something like Hannah and Her Sisters and just bow down because Woody mixed the comic and the tragic so well. Like George Saunders in the more serious stories like The Falls. That’s what I wish I could do.
The Barthelme Effect
DSM: One of your shorts is titled The Dead Father. Are you a Barthelme fan?
GG: I am, but more lately. I Bought a Little City is so pitch perfect. Barthelme, Auster and Carver were all these guys I read years ago but I didn’t think too much about. Then later when I was writing more, they rose up. I think they were lodged in my head and unconsciously exerted quite an influence over me, though I would have never claimed it.
In actuality I think Samuel Beckett is the overarching figure. I read almost everything he wrote when I was twenty-one and that has stayed with me. And Barthelme always spoke of Beckett in his interviews, so I had to go after him too. I’ve never read The Dead Father, but certainly knew about it and I couldn’t help myself. I’d written something with a dead father in it, what else could I call it?
DSM: Is Dreams of You a real manuscript? If not do you have plans on a novel? And, if so, will the transition from flash to novel be a hard one?
GG: Dreams of You is not real, but there were a few others I cut out. A person left my life and I had all these dreams about them. The dreams were pretty much verbatim and then I added to them.
I have this partly-autobiographical novel set in NYC. I’m shopping it. The transition is not a hard one because of all the failed attempts before. But they were all necessary stepping stones. Before I could write I had to learn how not to write.
____________________________________________
Greg Gerke lives in Buffalo. His work has or will appear in Gargoyle, Rosebud, Fourteen Hills, Night Train, Flash Forward Press 2009 Anthology and others. There’s Something Wrong With Sven, a book of short fiction has been published by Blaze Vox Books. His website is Greg Gerke.
