He's an iconoclast who manages to mix humor and depth, and I've had the pleasure of hearing him read live. His new book captures the quirky and unexpected essence of the fab work he's been writing, and reading around town for years. Below, my interview with Daniel Nester.
JD: How long did it take you to write
How to Be Inappropriate and what was your process like?
DN: I guess there were two periods when I was writing the book. One was when I was writing pieces over a ten-year period-from, say, 1998 to 2008-- that ended up being collected. Then there was the period writing-about a year ago-when I knew I had an essay collection to finish up that would be called How to Be Inappropriate and it would be a humor-slash-nonfiction book.
Not that anyone cares, but I didn't write all the completely funny pieces in that lead-up period. I wrote a lot of serious-minded pieces, like the "Goodbye to All Them" personal essay. I thought they would fit in and give the more wacky pieces some emotional heft. I did write the mooning essay ("Mooning: A Short Cultural History"), however; I had been doing research on mooning and rear-end exposure for many years. It seemed obvious to finish it in time for the book. Some of the pieces benefitted from not knowing what the book would called, what the overarching theme was going to be, or whether there was going to be a book or a theme at all.
JD: How did you organize the collection? Your mind works in--shall we say--unpredictable ways... how did you figure out the arrangement of the different forms?
DN: That was fun, actually. For the more memoir pieces, I decided to go with a straightforward chronological order, so the book begins with me arriving in New York City, and ends with me leaving and the city, then living in Upstate New York. There more essay-type pieces that cover more topics than my biography per se were arranged in a little more elaborate fashion. If there was a reference to me living upstate, I put it toward the end-so that means my experiences in extreme tanning fell toward the end, as does the guitar playing/talk box piece.
I began to write what I thought would be a title essay, one called "How to Be Inappropriate," and it ended up as shorter pieces I put in different parts of the book-connective inappropriate tissue or through-line, if you will. In some respects, I think of my "Notes on Inappropriate" chapters to be one thing, but I liked the idea of re-introducing my ideas here and there to make the book feel more like a cohesive whole.
JD: You are pretty self-revealing scribe; where do you draw the line between what's too much or what's wild and crazy, but not revealing enough?
DN: I believe we can't ever reveal too much about ourselves. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that "There is no history, only biography." That's my general philosophy, too.
When I think about what I would really love to do with my writing, I dream of being in the same camp as people like the late writer-performer Spalding Gray and poet Allen Ginsberg, filmmaker Ross McAlwee, the poet Sharon Olds, all first-person "I" people who employ extreme self-revelation, or at least the artifice of it, as a source of catharsis and effect in their art. That being said, I think I am more uptight than your average solipsist; I think there are points where dialing it down and drawing back has greater power than laying it all out there.
When I look for reasons behind all these tendencies for self-revelation, the easy answer might come from being a lifelong Catholic-turn-ex-Catholic who has forever dealt with boundaries, guilt, and confessional booths. I think I like the power of the direct address, the way it feels when one person is talking to another. As far as where to draw the line in my own stuff, I'd like to think I know when to stop or when to start. But if I did know, I wouldn't be a writer anymore.
JD: As Ray Liotta said to Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, "You're a really funny guy!" Do you ever feel boxed in by that one persona? What can you tell us about your non-humorous writing? Do you approach that work in a different way?
DN: And as Joe Pesci says back, "Funny how? Am I clown to you? Do I amuse you?"
I don't feel boxed in. Not yet, at least. I am fresh out of 20-plus years in the super-serious world of poetry, where if you were funny in your poems, you were set aside into this little corner-subgenre of funny of poets/poets who are funny/poets who use humor in their work. And for that, I felt very boxed in for a long time, very limited in what I could write about, how I could write about it, as well as how I was received. It probably had more to do with me being zany as opposed to being witty, and there's plenty of witty poets, but not many kooky-zany ones.
I do think there's some serious pieces in the book, like the one piece that covers my the journey wife and I go on to get pregnant with our first child ("Garden Path Paragraphs") as well as "Goodbye to All Them." In those, I do see going for the funny as one strand of many when I write, and perhaps the funny takes a backseat.
Part of what I have had to admit to myself over the years is that trying to be funny or saying funny stuff is just something I just do. It has to be there in everything I write. Like a lot of writers, I have been learning when to do it, and when not to. But it is there.
JD: What are you reading now that you are most excited about, and what's your next writing project?
DN: I dug into A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron to feed my head as I finished teaching this blogging class, started Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon, finished The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier, been poking around Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, and just started Gerald Stern's new book of poems, Save the Last Dance.
I've been writing some more essays lately, one on my love for the Outfield's 1986 hit "Your Love," another on a Christmas alone I spent in Philadelphia in 1993. Those pieces might go into another essay collection I have been putting together called Poseurs. I've been working a memoir about my father, who was a funny guy, but also had his issues with being angry at the world, and handed a lot of that down to me. Hopefully one of those will turn out to be the next book. But who knows? Maybe I'll just write How to Be Inappropriate II: The Quickening.
You heard it here first! For more about Daniel, swing by his website: http://www.danielnester.com. And for more tips on craft please come by http://bangthekeys.com or pick up my new book for writers:
Until next time ...JD
