TSM: Can you tell us a little bit about your works Big Lonesome and The Made-Up Man?
JS: Big Lonesome, a story collection, attempts to challenge myths of America and the American West. The stories runs the gamut from realist tales about moody loners who live in Chicago to fabulist yarns about rampaging centaur cowboys. I like to think that there are thematic through-lines, though!
The Made-Up Man, a novel, is a take on the film noir/detective genre. It’s about a Chicagoan who accepts an invitation to spend a week in his Polish uncle’s apartment in Prague, knowing that by doing so, he’s placing himself at the center of a highly invasive, personal, and unethical performance art project.
TSM: What was the inspiration behind The Made-Up Man?
JS: In 2005, when I was 22, I backpacked Europe for a month with my buddy Andrew. (His dad’s graduation gift was tickets for him a friend to go abroad—I got to be the lucky friend who went with.) We toured cities we’d already heard of, but also decided, on a recommendation from Andrew’s dad, to go to Prague. It was a place we knew nothing about. When we arrived, we were entranced. Prague was gorgeous and strange and cheap. Andrew and I agreed that Prague would be a spectacular place to shoot a film noir. At some point, we started to co-narrate our Prague experiences in an over-the-top film noir/detective voice. I don’t remember the specific jokes very well—things like: “That building sure is old.”/“Yeah, a little too old.” But I know for sure that we found them funny only because of how we told them: in that faux-gritty, goofily elevated, “hard-boiled” voice.
As soon as I returned to Chicago from this trip, I prepared to move to Las Cruces, New Mexico; I was about to begin an MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. Larry Watson, who I’d studied with in undergrad, had said that it might be wise to start a new writing project before I moved southwest. Something to maybe use for my first workshop. With this advice in mind, I wrote a few pages of a piece based on the voicey film-noir inside joke from Prague. That was the earliest draft of what eventually became The Made-Up Man.
TSM: The Made-Up Man is very much so about finding and learning the truth about yourself. Do you view writing as a medium that people can use to find themselves? Why or why not?
JS: My experience has been that if you’re lucky, you become increasingly honest with yourself as you get older—increasingly honest about who you are, who other people are, what you need, and how you relate to the strangeness and wildness and joy and horror of living. I think that writing, like all art, can enact the complexities of life in complex ways, and by doing so, can give you an opportunity to see, experience, and maybe even understand yourself/others—at a distance, on the sly, and/or by surprise. That wonderful shock of recognizing yourself, your community, your world in a work of fiction. This has value! I don’t think that art is therapy. But I do think that art can have therapeutic effects.
TSM: Performance art also plays an important role in the novel, especially through Uncle Lech’s character. Do you enjoy performance art in your daily life? What kinds of stories can visual art tell that novels can’t?
JS: I’ve always been interested in performance art—I love the bravery, strangeness, transgression, and surprise that’s so prevalent in the best of it.
I’ve never done any real performance art, myself, though I’ve gleefully participated in activities that, in a way, have some proximity to it. In high school, for example, I pulled a number of elaborate public pranks for a radio show; in college, I regularly orchestrated the same sort of thing for the TV shows that I was involved with. One time I created a video of me throwing myself down multiple flights of stairs. I’m not calling any of this pranky stuff performance art—definitely not!—but it employs some of the same techniques, and it certainly goes for some of the same effects.
I think that performance art is inherently transgressive. It tramples the standard “contract” of many other art forms by destabilizing the boundaries between “audience” and “participant.” (For example: how the audience for performance art pieces sometimes don’t know that they’re witnessing or participating in art; even if they do, they might not know the degree to which they’re an audience, and/or participants, and/or both.) The story that this tells is an important one: that all binaries can be false binaries—that the border between categories is porous.
TSM: The main character, Stanley, has an interest in archeology. Did you do a lot of research into archeology prior to writing the novel? Do you have any researching tips for aspiring writers?
JS: I was fortunate to do an interview with Bill Iseminger, an archeologist at the Cahokia Mounds State Park, as well as a series of interviews with my friend and colleague at Bucknell University, Kris Trego, also an archeologist. These conversations were invaluable! And extremely lovely on their own terms. Bill and Kris provided me with a wealth of detail—while writing, I found myself reaching back to those conversations for convincing details, big and small. The prologue to the novel—“Archaeology is destruction”—is something Kris told me.
My advice for research is to find human beings to talk to. The internet is terrific! But I encourage you to reach out in a humble way to an expert, prepare yourself for an open-minded conversation, and pay attention to the moments when the conversation zips off into surprising directions.
Also: for me, at least, there’s a phase of post-research writing in which I am including facts in my work of fiction simply because I know those facts. My draft says: Look at how much I learned about this subject! instead of Be immersed in this fictional world! I always have to forget my research, a little, in order to focus on what’s important: trying to make an interesting, meaningful, and immersive work of fiction.
I continue to make (and correct!) this mistake despite being very aware of it. That’s writing!
TSM: The novel also has very interesting and unique chapter titles. Why did you make this stylistic choice?
JS: Initially, I included the chapter titles simply because I’ve always liked the old-timey convention of them. Chapter titles/summaries remind me of playful novels from previous centuries that I read as a kid. (If you’ve ever read an old adventure novel, you’re probably familiar with the formal convention of including chapter summaries right beneath the chapter titles, summaries that say things like, IN WHICH OUR HERO FALLS INTO A WELL or CHANCE ENCOUNTERS AT THE BAKERY.)
Above all, I appreciate the challenge that this convention sets for a writer—if you tell the reader what’s about to happen, can you still make it interesting and surprising?
The more that I wrote, the more that the chapter titles entered into a conversation with the book’s themes. For example, I was excited by the tension that they created when they contradicted Stanley—the chapter titles are in 3rd person, and the chapters themselves are in 1st person (Stanley’s voice)—I found that the chapter titles occasionally wanted to correct Stanley’s claims. It also became clear to me, at some point, that the chapter titles function as “labels” to the individual “exhibits” in Stanley’s life—that they echo the set-up of Uncle Lech’s art installations.
TSM: Big Lonesome is a collection of short stories that you wrote. How is writing a short story more difficult than writing a novel and vice versa?
JS: The short story form and the novel form, to me, are completely different challenges. I find that both are extremely difficult to do well.
For stories, the question is: How can I make this story interesting and meaningful, right now, in a small space?
For novels, the question is: How can I make this novel interesting and meaningful, over and over again, in a big space?
I do think that writing short stories can help you learn how to write a novel. As the brilliant writer and teacher Robert Boswell once said to me, you might want to take the boat around the harbor a few times before you take it out to sea.
I’ve found that learning how to finish short stories has carried me through the task of finishing the various chapters/sections/parts of novels.
TSM: You are also an editor for the West Branch literary magazine. What is one thing that you have learned from editing that has helped you when writing your own work?
JS: It’s invigorating to know that there is no shortage of talented people out there working very, very hard on writing. It’s inspiring! It makes me want to get back to my desk. Other people are doing the work, I think. You can be doing the work, too.
TSM: Why did you choose to become a professor?
JS: When I went to New Mexico State University for my MFA, I taught as part of my graduate assistantship. It was the only way I could afford to go to grad school. Fortunately, I loved teaching! (My dad was a gym teacher at a K-8. He likes to say that I became a teacher because I shadowed him at his school one time.) I have found teaching to be as challenging and exciting and sustaining as writing. I still love it and I always will. I can’t even begin to tell you how grateful I am for this.
After I graduated, I followed my now-wife to Lewisburg, PA, where she was starting a job at Bucknell University. I had three years of teaching experience and an MFA, so I started doing the adjunct-professor-shuffle at Susquehanna University and Bucknell University. How I got to a tenure-track position is a longer story; the short version is that I’m really, really, really fortunate.
TSM: What is one thing that you knew about writing before you started writing?
JS: That if the writing that you’re doing is not fun, or interesting, or meaningful, you have within you the power, at any point, to make a change in what you’re writing so that it is fun, interesting, or meaningful, and most importantly, you can enact this change for no other reason than that you need to make what you’re writing fun, interesting, and meaningful—you can always figure out a way to have the changes make sense later. Follow the feeling that makes the work alive.
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Joseph Scapellato is the author of a novel, The Made-Up Man (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2019), and a story collection, Big Lonesome (Mariner, 2017). He earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. His fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Post Road, No Tokens, and other literary magazines, and has been anthologized in &NOW’s The Best Innovative Writing. Joseph is an associate professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at Bucknell University, and a Core Faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago.