Hallucinations Blog - Scott Sparling

Hallucinations, a blog about writing, trains, and Wire to Wire

“Stunning emotional depth”

Posted on May 15th, 2011.

The June Playboy has Mick Jagger's daughter undressed, but my favorite pic is the one of Wire to Wire next to a great short review by Anthony Vargas.

"In this impressive debut, Scott Sparling lends contemporary grunge to the genre as he embraces its trademark obsessions with sex, cash and dead ends. His all-too-human cast of contemporary boxcar drifters, glue sniffers and thugs is drawn in an impressionistic style that makes for stunning emotional depth."

The issue also features a food article by Jim Harrison and fiction by Robert Coover, so this month you really can buy it for the articles.

And in case Ms. Jagger wants to know, my turn-ons are Seger, power lines, and long romantic walks in the freight yard.

“Things on fire…”

Posted on May 6th, 2011.

Kirkus Reviews calls Wire to Wire "A dizzying, speed-laced debut novel...with plenty of peek-between-your-fingers moments for good measure." Including some combustible stuff. Here's the full review:

With Dexedrine-slamming rail riders, a glue-sniffing femme fatale and a lead protagonist whose point of view is skewed under the best of circumstances, the book is a worthy combination of Bob Seger nostalgia and dope-fueled noir, but it’s not always the easiest story to follow. The framing device: video editor Michael Slater’s editing suite, where the pill-popping film slicer screens scenes from his own life. Michael has never been quite the same since a peculiar, life-altering incident. While riding on top of a hurtling freight train with his amigo Harp Maitland, a power line zaps the young adventurer with 33,000 volts to the forehead. Now Slater has a head full of holes, and he sometimes sees people who aren’t there.

From there, it’s a hallucinatory road trip from Arizona to Michigan, which Slater describes in loving detail. It’s a blistered postcard of passing Americana, stitched together with diners, pool halls and pickup trucks, not to mention the freight trains that Sparling himself rode.

Technically, it’s a crime novel—there’s violence and sex and things on fire. But it’s obvious that the author is more interested in what’s bouncing around in his hero’s fractured head and spilling it out onto the page than he is in tidy endings. Slater explains his peculiar interests to a fellow traveler as a train narrowly misses a cow on the tracks. “I was disappointed,” he says. “I wanted to see the cow explode. Things start to go wrong and I like to watch.”

A strange, formidable novel about crossed signals and damage done, with plenty of peek-between-your-fingers moments for good measure.

I love that "violence and sex and things on fire" part, but also their tip that it's really not a crime novel in many ways. At least not to me. Though I would like to see a cow explode.

The Strip Club and the Grange

Posted on Apr 20th, 2011.

Okay, I didn’t actually do a reading in a strip club, despite various statements that I may have made on Facebook and elsewhere. Not everything you read online is true – I mean, I'm trying to promote a book here.

And technically, I did do a little reading in a strip club – Portland’s Club Rogue – but only as part of a video shoot for the book trailer. No one else was there except the film crew from Juliet Zulu, Tony Perez from Tin House, and Sandria Dore, a dancer who was oddly unimpressed to meet an author. Although that was in the script, so maybe she was just staying in character.

We were filming in Club Rogue because Michael Slater, one of the main characters in Wire to Wire, has a habit of going to strip clubs at various points in the book. He doesn’t go to see naked women, however. He goes there to feel the fear of exposing his loneliness and need:

“One dancer in particular had his number. She made him look left, she made him look right. She had him on a little string. She was extremely good-looking and the fear she inspired scoured a month of crap off his soul.”

And yes, that's a Bob Seger t-shirt I'm wearing. Perhaps another reason why the stripper ignored me.

After the shoot, just to see what it felt like, I stood by the pole and read to the empty room as the film crew packed up. I’ll be replicating this experience in bookstores soon, minus the pole, but hopefully with an audience. The tour schedule is here. Come and make it rain.

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I did, however, read, at the Springwater Grange in Estacada, Oregon, last Saturday night. Friends, acquaintances, and passers-by who were quick to believe that I gave a reading in an empty strip club were suddenly doubtful when I claimed to have read in the Grange Hall. People, you’ve got it backward – the Grange was amazing. Writers Night at the Grange was like three levels better than the best reading you can possibly imagine.

It attains that status through the goodwill, generous heart and friendship of Stevan Allred, who has organized the event for the Estacada Area Arts Commission for the past nine years, and from Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange, who teaches with Stevan at the Pinewood Table and shares the stage with him at the Grange.

Every year, a third person is invited to join in reading – often one of their students – and this year it was me. Go ahead, take a guess as to how many people come out on a Saturday night in Estacada to hear writers read. Nope, you’re low. Double it. Still low. I counted nearly 70 people. It was an amazing experience – a perfect, confidence-building way to debut Wire to Wire and start the book tour.

The theme of the night was On the Road. Joanna read a beautiful piece about a road trip through rural Oregon, snow, and memories. Stevan read an essay about a real 1970s freight-hopping trip that took me back to my youth – reminding me that, originally, I jumped freight trains for the same reason Slater visits strip clubs – to scour the fear off my soul.

After the reading, there was a huge party at Stevan’s house, as there is every year. When I say it was a terrific time, that’s true. When I say I regret starting a fight and stabbing a guy, that’s not. But feel free to spread the rumor. I’ve got a book to promote, and I could use the buzz.

Thanks to Juliet Zulu for the production still at Club Rogue, and fellow writer and previous Grange-reader Steve Denniston for the shot of me at the podium.

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Say it takes you an hour to drive through rural Oregon to the Springwater Grange. Say you've been waiting for this all your life. Roll down the window and play this fucking loud. Steve Earle, "Feel Alright."

Posted in Trains | Wire to Wire | Writing

Louder

Posted on Apr 10th, 2011.

Next weekend I’m reading an excerpt from Wire to Wire at the Springwater Grange in Estacada, Oregon. It’s a big room, and I’ve been practicing for it, working on getting it loud.

I can do loud, but I don’t do it naturally. My speaking voice is normally a little bit quiet. In fact, a long time ago I adopted the line from the B-side song “The Quiet One” by The Who: I ain’t quiet – everybody else is too loud. (For younger readers, The Who are an a cappella group from Leeds, known for their delicate harmonies.)

On the other hand, when I started learning fiction, my writing voice was the opposite of my speaking voice: I always wanted the writing to be loud. A blast of voice is how I would describe my early style now, though at the time I called it incantatory – because I had read that Kerouac and Joseph Conrad, both of whom I liked, were incantatory writers. I wanted sentences that went on for pages, doubled back on themselves, and emptied the bench of every punctuation mark known to man, especially semi-colons. Dashes were good too.

Of course, I was doing this at about the same time Raymond Carver was revitalizing the short story with short, direct sentences that displayed exactly the opposite signal to noise ratio. (In Carver’s case, all signal, no noise.) My allegiance to the sound of a sentence (caring more about how the syllables fell than the story being told, would be a harsh way of putting it) might have been an early warning sign of the long road ahead. But I wasn’t deterred.

In fact, I once sent a friend an unmarked cassette tape with a message, written in Sharpie, probably in all caps, that said: “This is how I want my writing to sound.” On the tape was an Elvin Jones drum solo. I bought some of his albums to listen to when I wrote.

(And I still have them. Filed under J right next to Joan Jett. Go ahead - imagine me as a vinyl aficionado if you like. It’s not really true, but I like the way aficionado sounds on the page. Which explains why I once changed my name to Johnny Revillagegado for a very brief time. But that’s a whole nother post, as we would say in Michigan.)

Eventually I finished a story built around voice. It opened like this:

It was a new time and we rode slam hard, rode it on flatcars and hoppers and bulkhead flats, in empty woodchip cars, gons, auto ramps, and piggies all over the west, the prairies and dirty western towns of district nine, Kalama, Lillooet, Sutter’s Portage, dozens of towns seen from the frame of a boxcar and eyes numb past blinking. Towns of dust where dirty kids threw rocks at the train – in laziness, not maliciously – and empty towns on the straight flat where the last lit beer sign burned thirty miles into the night.

The story worked, sort of – it got published in a low-circulation newsletter – but soon I discovered the limitations of voice (like the problem of wearing the reader out). And I started reading Robert Stone. Since then I’ve read the opening sentence of Dog Soldiers about 7,000 times. “There was only one bench open in the shade and Converse went for it, although it was already occupied.” A setting, a character, and an action, all in 19 fairly quiet words. My admiration for that, and for the rest of the book, started me on a new path – one of looking beyond voice. Beyond loud.

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I would still be lost on that path today – wandering through the woods, eating acorns, clutching an unfinished manuscript for warmth – were it not for Stevan Allred and Joanna Rose. Stevan and Joanna teach writers in Portland at The Pinewood Table, named for the table in Joanna’s living room. I joined the group in the early 2000s, thinking I would stay for five weeks or so. I stayed for five years instead. I read every word of Wire to Wire around that table; the parts that puzzled me most (and there were lots of them) I read two or three times. If not for Stevan and Joanna and the other writers at the table (from whom I learned nearly as much) there would be no book, no blog, no readings. Among the many things I learned at that table was when and how to stop writing Wire to Wire.

Stevan and Joanna are both reading at the Grange this coming weekend – Stevan organizes the Writers Night event once a year. This year, the theme is "On the road." I’m thrilled to be reading there with them. I’ll be going to a lot of great bookstores this summer – places I’ve always dreamed of reading. But nothing could be more perfect than starting with Stevan and Joanna at the Springwater Grange in Estacada.

As far as I’m concerned, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

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Elvin Jones explains how to build a drum solo around the melody of "Three Card Molly."

Posted in Wire to Wire | Writing

Crossing the Big Lake

Posted on Mar 26th, 2011.

When you’re growing up, you see the world at a certain scale. And if you grew up on the outskirts of a small town in southern Michigan, years ago, that scale was pretty small.

I can remember two things that shook my sense of size when I was a kid. One was the Ford Rotunda in Detroit. Like thousands of other families, we went there to see the Christmas display – before it burned down. The other world shaker for me was the fleet of Ann Arbor Railroad ferries – mammoth ships that carried entire freight trains across Lake Michigan. I didn’t have any idea what big was about until I saw those ships.

The railroad ferries also carried passengers across the Big Lake, from Northern Michigan to Northern Wisconsin and back. These ships were so foreign to our experience, that my friend Deeg (that was his name at the time; it keeps changing) speculated that a ticket to Wisconsin would certainly cost $100 or more. I happened to know it cost only $10, and began to plot ways of tricking the other $90 out of him. A few years later, Deeg or Doug or Jesse or D.C. or whatever he’s calling himself these days, showed me how to hop freights, and the situation was reversed: he knew stuff I didn’t, like what it meant when the hoses were hooked, and which boxcars would be set out first on a train. To his credit, he never tried to trick me.

As I wrote Wire to Wire, set in the Michigan of my imagination, I knew I had to include the railroad ferries. I discovered it was hard to write about something so big. I found myself putting mammoth in every sentence. The cliché “as long as a football field” kept trying to get in the prose. In the end, I’m not sure I captured how much space they filled up in my head. They were freakin’ big.

Of course, by the time I finished the manuscript, I’d learned it was the small things – words that aren’t said, a touch, a glimpse of loneliness or friendship – that really matter, and that they are even harder to put on the page.

The ferries still stun me though. I’m going back to Michigan this summer – the schedule for the W2W reading tour is up on the Events page – and though the railroad ferries are gone, some of their car ferry cousins still remain. I hope I get a chance to ride them again.

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