Daniel Grandbois
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As a former or current member of Denver acts Munly, Tarantella, and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, author/musician Daniel Grandbois has long been steeped in a wholly American weirdness. But Grandbois’ love of the odd doesn’t end there. His new book, Unlucky Lucky Days, knows no borders—geographically or imaginatively—when it comes to dreamier side of the psyche. The book’s dozens of short stories, some as compact as a paragraph, use everything from talking animals to sentient pieces of paper to illustrate metaphysically dizzying truths about the world. In a folklore-like fugue that resembles a darkly humorous Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, Grandbois constructs stories like exquisite little puzzles—ones that often conclude with a spring-loaded surprise. The author spoke with Decider about his method, his madness, and his upcoming project, The Hermaphrodite.
Decider: There’s a slippery kind of internal logic that goes on in Unlucky Lucky Days. Where does that come from?
Daniel Grandbois: The nonsense that’s always brewing in my brain. It’s just how my mind works. These stories bubble up from places in my mind—or places my mind attaches to—that don’t know how to use words. The logic there can best be described as absurdist, like the slippery logic of the imagination in dreams, except I have to bridle it somewhat to give it poetic shape and resonance.
Daniel Grandbois: The nonsense that’s always brewing in my brain. It’s just how my mind works. These stories bubble up from places in my mind—or places my mind attaches to—that don’t know how to use words. The logic there can best be described as absurdist, like the slippery logic of the imagination in dreams, except I have to bridle it somewhat to give it poetic shape and resonance.
D: Many of your stories have oblique twists at the end, almost like Zen punch lines. Do your endings ever come to you before the rest of the story?
DG: You hear that from a lot of writers, that the ending came first, and they wrote toward it, even if the ending had to be changed or scrapped once they reached it. I’ve tried writing that way, to great failure. It blocks me up for some reason; I just sit there agitated, unable to find my way. As for the Zen punch lines, I hope these stories have effects similar to those elicited by Zen koans—that is, that they get in there and change the shape of the brain, rewire the nervous system by knocking away all these spider webs woven by logic and reason.
DG: You hear that from a lot of writers, that the ending came first, and they wrote toward it, even if the ending had to be changed or scrapped once they reached it. I’ve tried writing that way, to great failure. It blocks me up for some reason; I just sit there agitated, unable to find my way. As for the Zen punch lines, I hope these stories have effects similar to those elicited by Zen koans—that is, that they get in there and change the shape of the brain, rewire the nervous system by knocking away all these spider webs woven by logic and reason.
D: How conscious are you of the balance between humor and poignancy in your stories?
DG: The humor just comes out, though I’m not always the best judge of it. It was somewhat of a surprise to me that people were finding these stories so funny. The poignancy, if that’s what you want to call it, is more actively attended to. Sometimes it, too, just comes out. Other times, it’s what I work hardest at putting in. A story isn’t done for me until is has that deep resonance with something archetypal, no matter if you can put your finger on it.
DG: The humor just comes out, though I’m not always the best judge of it. It was somewhat of a surprise to me that people were finding these stories so funny. The poignancy, if that’s what you want to call it, is more actively attended to. Sometimes it, too, just comes out. Other times, it’s what I work hardest at putting in. A story isn’t done for me until is has that deep resonance with something archetypal, no matter if you can put your finger on it.
D: Do you think your work fits in the tradition of magic realism at all?
DG: No, not really. Magic realism begins with realism. My stories begin with absurdism. The common ground would be the magic, which, for me, means recalling the lost perceptions of the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and, closer to home, of our own childhoods—those perceptions that make us certain everything is alive, including the dead.
DG: No, not really. Magic realism begins with realism. My stories begin with absurdism. The common ground would be the magic, which, for me, means recalling the lost perceptions of the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived and, closer to home, of our own childhoods—those perceptions that make us certain everything is alive, including the dead.
D: In one of your stories, “Almost Borges,” you nest a Walt Whitman reference in a Jorge Luis Borges one. Is this in any way a kind of meta-commentary on your own style?
DG: Not consciously. Whitman has been walking beside me for a couple of decades at least, whispering in my ear whenever it suits his fancy. Though I’ve admired what I’ve read of Borges, I haven’t read enough. It’s been in the back of my mind to read more. What I have read several times is the transcript from the lectures on poetry he gave at Harvard in the last ’60s, “This Craft Of Verse.” “Almost Borges” began with me sitting in my office, flipping through books to see if any line or phrase would catch my imagination and throw me into the writing of a piece. Borges’ poem “Things” did just that.
DG: Not consciously. Whitman has been walking beside me for a couple of decades at least, whispering in my ear whenever it suits his fancy. Though I’ve admired what I’ve read of Borges, I haven’t read enough. It’s been in the back of my mind to read more. What I have read several times is the transcript from the lectures on poetry he gave at Harvard in the last ’60s, “This Craft Of Verse.” “Almost Borges” began with me sitting in my office, flipping through books to see if any line or phrase would catch my imagination and throw me into the writing of a piece. Borges’ poem “Things” did just that.
D: Borges’ very short stories are widely acclaimed, but do you think there’s a glass ceiling when it comes to writing that length?
DG: There may be one critically, though it doesn’t matter much, and those things are always changing. The books will reach their audience. Sure, if my book was being reviewed in The New York Times, it might reach a bigger audience, but that’s neither here nor there. Popularly, people don’t really care what they’re supposed to think or not think about very short fiction, just as they don’t care about anything related to genre fiction. They read it if they like it and don’t if they don’t. A majority of the most esteemed critics in the country in Whitman’s time raged against his free-verse poetry. That happens everywhere always with things that challenge our notions of what art is. I experienced something similar with some of the bands I’ve played in, but in this case the glass ceilings were being held up popularly as well as critically. Some people are just flat-out closed to anything that smells of country music, even if it’s on a punk label and would never be played on today’s country radio. Same with music that sounds like it might have religious overtones, no matter what the singer’s actually singing about. And some just can’t take seriously any band that doesn’t take themselves absolutely seriously in their songs or their shows. Their loss.
DG: There may be one critically, though it doesn’t matter much, and those things are always changing. The books will reach their audience. Sure, if my book was being reviewed in The New York Times, it might reach a bigger audience, but that’s neither here nor there. Popularly, people don’t really care what they’re supposed to think or not think about very short fiction, just as they don’t care about anything related to genre fiction. They read it if they like it and don’t if they don’t. A majority of the most esteemed critics in the country in Whitman’s time raged against his free-verse poetry. That happens everywhere always with things that challenge our notions of what art is. I experienced something similar with some of the bands I’ve played in, but in this case the glass ceilings were being held up popularly as well as critically. Some people are just flat-out closed to anything that smells of country music, even if it’s on a punk label and would never be played on today’s country radio. Same with music that sounds like it might have religious overtones, no matter what the singer’s actually singing about. And some just can’t take seriously any band that doesn’t take themselves absolutely seriously in their songs or their shows. Their loss.
D: Your next book, The Hermaphrodite, appears to be a novel. What’s been the biggest challenge in making the transition from lots of little bits to a single sustained narrative?
DG: Actually, it was the other way around. The Hermaphrodite is subtitled An Hallucinated Memoir, and it was written before Unlucky Lucky Days—20 years ago, in fact. It stayed in a box in the garage until I dug it out recently, edited it considerably, and sent it to Green Integer Press in L.A. It’s more of a novella than a novel, though it’s also being called an art novel because it includes 40 woodcuts by Argentine artist Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya. Still, it is made up of one- and two-page chapters and subchapters that read a lot like the very short stories in Unlucky Lucky Days. So it wasn’t a big challenge to go from one to the other, and I don’t think it would be hard to go back again. Writing a more traditional character- and plot-driven novel would be another story.
DG: Actually, it was the other way around. The Hermaphrodite is subtitled An Hallucinated Memoir, and it was written before Unlucky Lucky Days—20 years ago, in fact. It stayed in a box in the garage until I dug it out recently, edited it considerably, and sent it to Green Integer Press in L.A. It’s more of a novella than a novel, though it’s also being called an art novel because it includes 40 woodcuts by Argentine artist Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya. Still, it is made up of one- and two-page chapters and subchapters that read a lot like the very short stories in Unlucky Lucky Days. So it wasn’t a big challenge to go from one to the other, and I don’t think it would be hard to go back again. Writing a more traditional character- and plot-driven novel would be another story.
