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Western Writers

An Interview with Daniel Grandbois, Bassist, Author and Reader of Trigonometry for Pleasure

By Jenny Shank, 8-02-10

Daniel Grandbois plays the bass for the innovative and popular Denver bands Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Munly, and Tarantella.  Grandbois is also an accomplished writer whose stories are as inventive as his music, and have appeared in a variety of respected journals, including Conjunctions, Boulevard, and Mississippi Review.  In 2008 Grandbois published his first book, Unlucky Lucky Days (Boa Editions), a collection of short-short stories that take unexpected turns.  Lydia Davis described them as “funny, bizarre, moving stories—a pleasure to read.” Grandbois recently published The Hermaphrodite (An Hallucinated Memoir) (Green Integer, $13.95), which describes the surreal adventures of the title character and several others who journey into weird, subconscious, and mythic realms, and occasionally turn up in Boulder, Colorado.  The book is illustrated with the striking woodcuts of Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya, which will be exhibited beginning September 9 at the RedShift Gallery in Denver.  Grandbois will discuss his book at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on Thursday, August 5 at 7:30 p.m.  I recently interviewed Grandbois via email about how The Hermaphrodite came to be published, his collaboration with Bedoya, his influences, and the inspiration for the book.

New West: You wrote a draft of The Hermaphodite twenty years ago.  What prompted you to revise and publish it?  What changes did you make to it after rediscovering it?

Daniel Grandbois: The draft was finished 20 years ago, but it was begun three years before that. It was my first serious attempt at writing. I stored it in a box in various garages and basements through the years until I met my wife, and she asked to see my old writing. She prompted me to edit and publish it, gave it a new title, including the subtitle, and had the idea to add the artwork as well. The edits were just cuts really. Nearly two thirds of the text was cut away. I didn’t write anything new for the book, though I re-phrased some sentences.

NW: How did your collaboration with Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya come about, and at what point in your writing process did you show the story to him?

DG: I had already done most of the edits, so the manuscript was basically in hand when I contacted Alfredo. I didn’t have a publisher yet, as I wanted to have the artwork done to present along with the text. I proposed the project to another artist first, one whose work was currently being shown at the MOMA in New York, and she referred me to Alfredo, thinking his work would be more suited to mine.

NW: What was the path to publication for The Hermaphodite? I believe it was published in a Spanish translation several years ago, and Marguerite Feitlowitz’s foreword is dated five years ago.

DG: Alfredo doesn’t speak English, so that prompted me to get the Spanish translation done (Spanish rights have yet to be pursued). Soon thereafter, the manuscript was in the pipeline at the University of Wisconsin Press, which led to the foreword being written back then, as well as some of the advanced praise and reviews, but then a statewide budget crisis led to the press’s budget being slashed to such an extent that the director and my editor both left, and the book, along with many others, was dropped. It was picked up again by Green Integer a year or so later. The publication date was set for fall 2007. Summer 2010, and it’s finally here!

NW: Did this work ever appear as a gallery show with the stories accompanying the woodcuts?

DG: The woodcuts were shown in Buenos Aires, where Alfredo lives, a few years back, but they didn’t have the book to go with it. The first U.S. exhibit, and the first to have the books accompanying the woodcuts, will open September 9th at Redshift Gallery in Denver. That is, if you don’t count City Lights Bookstore, which exhibited eight of the pieces for several weeks after my reading there. Alfredo went on to do the cover art for the Tarantella CD.

NW: Do you think it’s more challenging to find a publisher and audience for an experimental, surrealist work than for it would be for a more traditional book?

DG: I would say that it’s every bit as easy (or hard!) to find both publisher and audience for non-traditional work in all fields. The difference, of course, is in the sizes of publisher and audience, which also means the size of the paycheck, but that’s no matter.

NW: The Hermaphodite seems to arise out of a subconscious stew of myth and ancient human symbols.  The first chapter tells a creation story, about the Hopi woman Cassina giving birth to a son, Kree.  There are several other places in the novel where creation stories are referenced or told.  There are a lot of moments in which semen spills forth to fertilize all sorts of things, which echoes many Native American creation myths.  And a lot of the imagery reminded me of concepts I’ve read about in Jung and Joseph Campbell, such as the axis mundi or the navel of the world.  I thought of that in connection with the woodcut of the tree with eyes in Book Two, Chapter 3, and in the passages in which vaginas or the “cerebral sphincter” serve as this sort of portal between worlds.  Were you thinking about any of this stuff as you wrote The Hermaphodite?

DG: I began the book as an undergrad, where a liberal arts major encouraged study across a range of topics, something I’ve always wished was required in business school. I took classes in Native American mythology, comparative religion, sociology, anthropology, biology, astronomy, and more. Three of my electives were calculus, chemistry and physics, if you can imagine. I guess it all got mixed together in there, along with what I was reading on my own, which included Joseph Campbell, as you mention, books on quantum theory.  I even bought and read a Trigonometry textbook for pleasure when I took a semester off and moved to L.A. Cross-pollinate these areas of inquiry, and you get The Subatomic Trickster. You get an idiot Hermaphrodite, creating the world unbeknownst to itself, much as natural selection ‘creates’ by “non-deliberate, unplanned means,” as Richard Dawkins wrote in The Greatest Show on Earth.

NW: Book 2 of the novel is titled “Studies in Controlled Unintelligibility.” I thought that was an apt description of your writing in general.  Everything that happens in this world you’ve created makes sense within this world—in that sense the story is controlled—but everything that happens is also very unexpected, bordering on unintelligible, when you are experiencing it from the expectation from someone who is used to a character or plot-driven novel.  Is this how you think of your own work?

DG: The unintelligibility is to the rational mind. The writing only works, if it works at all, when it is absolutely intelligible to the irrational mind, which is by far the greater part. Music operates similarly, but we’re all used to that. Does it make any sense rationally that particular strings of notes and pauses can produce such astounding emotional effects on the nervous systems of hairless hominids?

NW: I love the way The Hermaphrodite goes off in all sorts of fantastic and bizarre geographical and metaphysical directions, and then keeps alighting in Boulder, Colorado. There’s even a chapter set in the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, which seems like such a happy, prosaic place, but you manage to depict it in a funny, surreal, yet accurate way. Why did you decide to ground The Hermaphodite in Boulder?

DG: Much of the book was written while I was living in Boulder as a student at C.U., and most of the experiences it draws from took place there, not to mention the spectrum of themes in the book, from physics to metaphysics, that Boulder personifies. I’m not sure any other place could have brought such a book out of me.

NW: What came first for you, music or writing?  Are there any similarities in the creative process between when you write a song and when you write a story?

DG: Music came first. Specifically Elvis. From kindergarten on, I wanted to be him. It wasn’t until my junior year of college, when I began this book, that I gave any thought to writing. After that, if I was in a good band, I’d focus more on that. If I wasn’t, I’d focus more on writing. Gradually, I saw that writing came more naturally to me. I can develop good bass lines for songs that are already there, but I can’t write the songs myself at the same level that I can write stories, and so, even though I’ve been very busy the past eleven years with some incredible bands, the vast majority of my personal creative output has gone toward writing.

NW: One of my favorite writers, Lydia Davis, praised your story collection Unlucky Lucky Days, and there are clear affinities between your work and hers, such as their shared brevity, wit, and unexpectedness. Are there other writers that you consider influences, or writers who you feel are working toward a similar goal?

DG: The obvious connection would be to Russell Edson, the godfather of American prose poetry. An Amazon.com reviewer of Unlucky Lucky Days went so far as to call me Edson’s heir apparent. The funny thing is, I’d read only one of his books before writing that collection, and it was about a decade earlier. I’ve since read more. Lydia Davis is also a fan of Edson’s. In an August 2009 interview in Intelligent Life, she credits him with changing the way she wrote. Way back when I was writing The Hermaphrodite, Richard Brautigan was by far the biggest influence. I was reading Vonnegut and Barthelme then too. More recently, I’ve been getting into Daniil Kharms and the Russian absurdists, Robert Pinget, Francis Ponge, Samuel Beckett, Mac Wellman, David Eagleman, Ben Marcus, and folk and fairy tale writers like George MacDonald, Joel Chandler Harris and Hans Christian Andersen, though I always read more non-fiction than fiction—neuroscience, theoretical physics, primate behavior, personal histories and adventures, survival books, and the like.

NW: What are you working on next?

DG: Earlier this year, I finished the follow-up collection to Unlucky Lucky Days, called Unlucky Lucky People. Now I’m halfway through with the third and maybe last title in the series, Unlucky Lucky Books. Besides that, I’m always in the middle of yet another edit of a book length tale for children of all ages I’ve been working on for the past seven years. I’ve said this many times before, but I’ll say it again with more confidence than ever: It’s very close now.

Daniel Grandbois will discuss The Hermaphrodite at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on Thursday, August 5 at 7:30 p.m.

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