Interview with Kevin Brockmeier February 2 2011 :: An Illustrated History of the View from Kevin Brockmeier’s HeadOxford American

Find the OA On:

Kevin Brockmeier’s book of love.

At the heart of Kevin Brockmeier's new book, THE ILLUMINATION, is another book, a diary filled with love notes. I love those three perfect moles on your shoulder—like a line of buttons, reads one entry. I love your giggle fits. I love swipping your triggle gitch. Each chapter of THE ILLUMINATION follows an individual who acquires the diary, reads it, and loses it or gives it away.

Unlike the tender and uplifting diary entries, the lives of the six main characters are bleak. One of them, a divorcée named Carol Ann, has her thumb amputated. Another character, Jason, loses his wife, Patricia, in a car crash. (The diary is Patricia's.) A child is tormented by bullies. A missionary survives an earthquake, a tsunami, and a bomb attack. A writer is plagued by mouth ulcerations. A homeless man is attacked and beaten, twice, almost to death.

The diary exudes warmth, its I love you's "pulsing like a beacon" for the sad and lonely. Its incessant repetitions console all who handle it because the language of love, as this novel suggests, is as generous as the sun, warming everyone equally. One character recognizes that even though the words weren't meant for her "they were wonderful all the same, if not I love you then at least Somebody loves somebody." Another character is "fascinated yet vexed by the book.... He did not understand how something so sweet, so earnest and candid, could also be so wayward and enigmatic." The diary's picaresque journey (it's borrowed, stolen, mistreated, cherished, and remembered) pays homage to literature itself. Thousands of passionate, honest sentences—first private, then public—regenerate a reader's spirit and might even make the world a gentler place.

THE ILLUMINATION is an oceanic novel that deals with love and suffering using inventive and twisting metaphors. Injuries, diseases, and inner turmoils glow and shine with flickering auras of light. In Brockmeier's world, pain is a beautiful and shimmering process. Reading this novel, you feel exposed then cleansed. You are full of pain, like everyone, and because of it, you too are gorgeous.

The other day, I went to Kevin Brockmeier's house in a fit of curiosity. Would his personal space, his belongings, emit mysterious and friendly messages?

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: What inspires & drives you?

KEVIN BROCKMEIER: The Baron in the Trees. The music of Susanna & the Magical Orchestra. The paintings of Arcimboldo. My friends. The effect I conjecture my writing might have on people I've never met because of the effect the writing of people I've never met has had on me. The peculiar sense that my memory and my imagination are zeroing in on each other and will someday explode in a great burst of light. The feeling that time is short and the occasional fleeting instinct that it is magnificent.

THE OA: Why do you write?

KB: My love for other books and my pleasure in devising sentences.

THE OA: Why do you make lists?

KB: It's a shorthand way of saying, "This is what I love, so this is who I am."

THE OA: How do you write?

KB: One tiny piece at a time, termiting away at each and every sentence until I'm satisfied that it presents the right effect.

THE OA: What makes you sad?

KB: Something does—that's for sure. I wish I could tell you what.

THE OA: If you had to describe all of your books in one sentence, what would that sentence be?

KB: Every book has its own sentence—or, for that matter, its own cluster of frequently consulted Roget's International Thesaurus entries that I suppose must constitute its themes. For the latest book, those were 26: Pain, 85: Disease, 104: Love, 1016: Beauty, and 1025: Light.

THE OA: Do you have one sentence or character from all of your writing that stays with you the most?

KB: It's the closing notes that tend to linger with me: "Until the earth and the sky met and locked, and the distance between them closed forever." "Into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories." [Two distances: I've never noticed that before.] "He is not nearly at the end." "Oh make me happy."

THE OA: What is the best comment you have ever heard from a reader?

KB: Every so often, at a public event, I'll mention some particular essential book I've read, and afterward someone will come up to me and say that they love the same book, but love one of my own just as much. That's really the audience I'm hoping to reach: the people who love the same books I do.

THE OA: If you could go anywhere for a reading that you have not yet been, where would it be?

KB: I spent a year in Ireland when I was a college student, but I've never returned. Perhaps, then, Coleraine or Belfast or Dublin.

THE OA: If given the opportunity, would you fly to the moon?

KB: With trepidation, but yes. It's not the moon part that worries me but the flying part, not the being there part but the getting there part. If I could simply appear at some safe spot on the moon and then reappear at home when I was finished, then yes, absolutely, without hesitation.

THE OA: Do you play music while you write?

KB: I try to play music in my writing.

THE OA: If you could have dinner and conversation with any living person, who would it be and what would you like to talk about?

KB: Honestly? There are plenty of writers, musicians, and filmmakers I admire immensely. Given the chance, though, I would be most excited to have dinner with a few close friends from days gone by who have disappeared into their lives somewhere. We would talk about what those lives have been like, and that somewhere.

THE OA: The quality I associate with your work other than sheer poetry is warmth—you manage to make pain and even death feel approachable or acceptable and you seem to channel individuals' suffering into a cosmic scheme. If you had to describe your mission, would it have something to do with helping others?

KB: Well, first, thank you. I think a good book does help others—I know that because of the books that have helped me—but that's not necessarily what I'm thinking about while I'm actually writing. Can I offer you a pair of quotations from other writers? The first has to do with what I think distinguishes good literature from other forms of writing, the second with what distinguishes art from other endeavors:

Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language. In Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that. —Barry Lopez

The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man's memory. That is our duty. If we don't fulfill it, we feel unhappy. —Jorge Luis Borges