I first became aware of Graham Irvin’s writing a few years ago when his debut collection Liver Mush came out with Back Patio Press. I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I was struck by the cover and title. Liver mush is so specific to North Carolina and such a perfect way of invoking images of the region in readers’ minds.
Every piece involves liver mush in some way, but it mainly serves as a springboard to talk about everything else–family, love, memory, and “all that romantic shit.” I remember reading and loving it and thinking specifically This is not a lame dude at all. When he announced his second book I Have a Gun is out now with Rejection Letters, I knew I had to talk to him. I reached out through Instagram, and he said he dug my recently released short story collection So Much Heart. He suggested that it might be less boring to do a conversation instead of a standard interview. Enjoy below the meeting of two of America’s foremost public intellectuals.
Drew Buxton: We’ll get to the new book in a second, but you’re from Kannapolis, North Carolina, which is also the hometown of the legendary Dale Earnhardt. I know someone from Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, the hometown of Dennis Anderson, the original Grave Digger monster truck driver. I’m from San Antonio, so I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in a place that is defined to outsiders by one famous figure. The closest I can relate is living in Corpus Christi and Selena being such a point of pride. What does Dale mean to Kannapolis and what do you remember about the immediate aftermath of his death? Has he influenced you as a writer in any way?
Graham Irvin: Dale Earnhardt’s image and legacy were everywhere when I was growing up. There’s a small highway, NC 3, that connects Kannapolis to another nearby town that was named after Dale Earnhardt 10 years before he died. There’s a minor league, single-A, baseball team, currently called the Cannon Ballers, that were originally called the Piedmont Boll Weevils, but who were renamed (from 2001-2019) The Intimidators in honor of Dale. Like the piece in Liver Mush mentions, there has been a Dale Earnhardt Tribute in the middle of downtown Kannapolis since 2002.
I didn’t care much about NASCAR as a kid. A lot of my adolescent personality was built around rejecting Southerness, Southern-culture, the image of a redneck and all that came with it, so Dale wasn’t really my thing. Whenever he died I remember being shocked, specifically that someone as monolithic to not only racing culture but our hometown’s culture, could not only die but die in what seemed like such a quiet way.
People made jokes about it. I remember friends and people from my peer group ironically saying, “Three for Dale” in an exaggerated Southern accent, during really anything that needed a nonspecific interjection. Instead of, like, “woooo” or, “hell yeah.”
Moving away from Kannapolis, and eventually leaving North Carolina (and maturing hopefully) made me realize those cultural figures help guide others in understanding broad stories. NASCAR and Dale Earnhardt and North Carolina and Kannapolis are all different broad stories that can help direct context for an individual. Like Selena and Corpus Christi for you. I don’t know much about Selena, but it guides me toward a context for your experience. Like, I think about the scene in the movie when Yolanda Saldivar is crying, holding the gun she just used to kill Selena (who was played by Jennifer Lopez).
And that makes me think of your stories “So Much Heart”(D.B. Cooper) and “Ride With Me”(Hae Min Lee/ Adnan Syad), also, somewhat, “You’re Gonna Know My Name”(JonBenet Ramsey) and “Tilikum Gets Loose”(Blackfish). These all feature true crime as a backdrop or framing device, maybe just mention true crime in some sense. What about true crime media interests you? What’s your favorite true crime podcast? Are true crime podcasts copaganda and does it matter?
DB: I know what you mean. I looked down at every regional thing that was popular when I was in high school–the Spurs, high school football, Texas country. It was this kinda blind snobbery. Now I see the value in all that stuff. I think we have to be invested in things to give our lives meaning. Following the Cowboys, Rangers, and Spurs gives my life some structure and purpose. NASCAR matters because people care about it.
I’ve been really into true crime for as long as I can remember. Unsolved Mysteries scared the shit out of me as a kid, but I loved it. I have such good memories of when Serial was going on. The night when a new episode would come out, I’d walk around my neighborhood listening to it in the dark and get scared by every little sound. A lot of the shows we watch are manufactured mysteries. They’re straightforward cases that producers arrange to make mysterious by withholding information. Even with Serial. When the case is laid out plainly, it seems obvious he’s guilty. I just get annoyed when true crime podcasters have this grandstanding air to them, like they’re really doing the lord’s work when they’re just profiting off of others’ misfortunes. That’s fine, just don’t pretend it’s something else.
True crime scandals like JonBenet can become iconic when there’s no clear resolution. There’s an enduring appeal to stories that remain mysterious. I’ll revisit the D.B. Cooper over and over and never get sick of it. I can be 95% sure of what happened, but that doubt keeps me coming back. I wanted to show the phenomenon over time, from the 70s to present day. The obsession and voyeurism feels very American to me though I know it’s obviously not unique to the US.
I think some true crime is copaganda like when I saw Cops or America’s Most Wanted, it made me feel like the Cops were always right and always won in the end. Increasingly though, true crime explores cases that the cops botched and try to figure what actually happened. Sometimes, I listen to the podcast True Crime Garage. I really recommend the Boys on the Tracks series they did. It talks about this big police coverup where people who know too much keep getting killed.
I feel ambivalent about the morality of the true crime industry. One thing that makes I Have a Gun so compelling to me is how it resists simplicity, how uncertain and unreliable the narrator is regarding grave topics. The idea of killing pedophiles with guns is brought up before the pedophile is humanized. We’re told the story of a war profiteer before learning that the narrator lied about some of the details. This makes it difficult for the reader to be comfortable in making any firm judgments. Is this an effect you intentionally tried to create? If so, how did you approach it?
GI: Unsolved Mysteries was so good. I watched Rescue 911 and America’s Most Wanted a lot as a kid. Never traced my own interest in true crime, or connected the history of true crime as a form of entertainment, to those kinds of shows until now. One compelling recent story for me was the Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy case. Specifically their text conversations. You can read them all here, about 184 pages over the span of their three month relationship. Because we know how that story ends, but is only alluded to in the conversation, that document reads like an experimental epistolary novel. There’s even a type of epilogue where Carter talks to Roy after she “learns” he died. It’s fucked up but one of the most intriguing things I’ve ever read. It made me feel, after reading it, that I was 100% certain Carter convinced Roy to kill himself but, mostly, I didn’t care about it as a right vs. wrong situation anymore. It’s like a modern Lolita or something. Except the characters are the same age. And one of them dies. And it really happened.
It felt important to lean into ambiguity while writing I Have a Gun because the project was about challenging expectations, images, ideas. Statements like “guns are bad” or “guns are good” are equally uninteresting to me because, once you make them, there’s nowhere to go, creatively, argumentatively. I liked the idea of suspending an opinion as long as possible or giving myself the ability to have as many opinions about the topic as possible, without saying anything definitive, at least about that specific topic.
The characters in the book were necessary to argue longer, to bring up examples of absolute evil, so I could push an imagined audience toward one opinion then, by giving backstory, humanizing, lying or say I’m lying, maybe challenge that opinion as well. A lot of the character stuff, the pedophile and war profiteer, were seeing what I could put into a section while still employing some poetic device besides shock. Then, once I felt comfortable they made sense and were working, I wanted to see how far I could push the same trick.
Mostly I think it’s funny to give the reader whiplash. I like writing that does that in big and small ways, like the last paragraph of “The Dolt” by Donald Barthelme, or this poem by Richard Brautigan:
“Good Work,” He Said, And
“Good work,” he said, and
went out the door. What
work? We never saw him
before. There was no door.
We DMed a bit about making choices because the piece “is funnier that way.” In your stories, I was impressed with the action, the cinematic movement sentence by sentence. These are image-heavy stories and, to me, funny because of that. You have the ability to show characters, scenarios that are funny without sacrificing reality. There are real emotional stakes. In the first story, “Lexapro,” the narrator writes “I may or may not kill my dog,” in his Tinder profile. In “So Much Heart,” a final mention of hunting for Bigfoot is heartbreaking. Competent children, like the ones in “Monticello” and “Inside Recess,” are inherently funny, but, as shown in those stories, “acting adult” can be in response to pretty dire trauma. What and who are your comedic influences? In literature or otherwise. Why do you care if something is funny and what else makes you laugh? When writing a story, how necessary is humor to you?
DB: The Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy case is really wild and fucked up. I can’t think of anything like it that I’ve seen. You get to see it play out almost entirely in text message form. You mentioning whiplash honestly makes me think of these shows. They withhold some huge piece of information that excludes one suspect then introduce it once you’re all but convinced he’s the one. I want to write something smart about shows like Dateline at some point, lol.
The comically precocious kid and child-like adult are two archetypes I go back to. I watch a lot of horror movies, and the precocious kids show up a lot in that genre. The Ring scared the absolute shit out of me when I first saw it, and I thought the kid in that was hilarious with his three piece suit and umbrella. I think kids can “grow up too fast” due to trauma or only having themselves to rely on, but no matter how brilliant or wise they are, they’re still kids. I enjoyed playing with how those extremes can exist in one person with the Dessie character in “Monticello.”
I’ve always really admired people who are able to weave humor into other genres. The Coen brothers do it so well with noir. They said The Big Lebowski was loosely based on The Big Sleep. We understand who Walter is immediately from the first scene, and it makes everything he says after that so hilarious.
It seems like we’ve moved on from comedy that tries really hard to be funny. I can’t name the last good pure comedy I’ve seen. I’m obviously trying to be funny in my fiction, but it needs to arise naturally from the story and characters. Sad, funny shit happens constantly in life and can be found everywhere, I think. Life is kinda humiliating, and that’s funny to me. I think the funniest moments in fiction will only click for maybe ten percent of readers, but it’ll absolutely kill those people.
The understanding that humor and sadness are so closely linked has really helped me in life. It really helps with failure and embarrassment. You know those big tube TVs that classrooms had mounted in the corner? One time in high school I bent down to grab a pen or something then came and smacked my head right on the corner of one of those metal mounts. It hurt like hell, and I was really dazed, and my vision went blurry. But there was still this pride inside me that made me try to play it off like it didn’t just happen. I kinda smiled and played it cool and walked back to my desk. The girl next to me looked at me in horror then I looked down at my shirt. It was covered in blood. My head was squirting everywhere, but even then, I tried to act like I was fine. Stupid pride is really funny to me. Spite, petty ego, and pride are the driving forces for a lot of the characters in my book. We all want everyone to think we’re fine, but we’re all just bleeding from the head.
The title phrase comes up over and over in I Have a Gun. The narrator relishes in the power contained in the phrase and the fear it instills in others. He likes messing with people, including the reader. We wonder if he really has a gun or if it’s just a metaphor. What drew you to writing a book centered around guns? Your first book Liver Mush revolved around one object also. What appeals to you about building a book around a single physical thing? What does it allow you to do? Did you ever feel limited by it?
GI: Pure comedy is difficult to pin down. I don’t remember any recent films I’ve seen that are just funny without some other thing going on, or me laughing at them outside of their intended purpose. Husbands by John Cassavetes has a really good scene where the main characters, the husbands, are drunk on a subway, heading home after a night of drinking. Peter Falk, one of the husbands, says, “I could go for a light breakfast,” meaning, let’s keep getting fucked up. Then the other two get riled up and excited and all stand like it’s decided, we’ll have a light lunch, we aren’t going home. And there’s a beat. And John Cassavetes says, “what are we doing? There’s still 40 more stops to go.” They all sit down and stop talking.
It’s a movie about middle age and losing a friend and infidelity, but it also had so much humor.
Outside of that, grape lady falls still brings me to tears.
Both I Have a Gun and Liver Mush are dialogues. I don’t think they are didactic dialogues, maybe other people would disagree. But. Liver Mush is a type of dialogue where an imagined other doesn’t know the main topic and, hopefully as they progress through the book, are pulled toward some better understanding of the topic. Each time the reader turns a page, they’re asking for more details about this unknown thing.
I Have a Gun is a dialogue in which the reader might not want to engage. Or, there is some hesitation about where the dialogue is going, how it’s being led. According to Aristotle, comedy starts low and ends high. A reprehensible character becomes a sympathetic, relatable character through events of the play. So, maybe in that way, I wanted to write myself out of a deeper hole. Though, I don’t know if I Have a Gun has a “happy” ending.
The topic of guns felt like the deepest hole, the hardest to get out of successfully. If a gun shows up in art, there is inherently more violence in the air. The stakes are raised. In poetry, a gun can be representative of war, extremism, unhingedness. We are all surrounded by that, whether it’s from guns or not, and most people try to maintain some semblance of status quo in their day to day life. People move past these things or address them with blanket statements. War is bad. Unhingedness is scary. Extremism is, frankly, too extreme. I, maybe, somewhere deep inside, wanted to change that up. Play with the objective correlative of guns to see if it mattered, not for the world at large, but for this specific art project.
Meaning, I know everything is political and guns are political, but I don’t think of I Have a Gun as a book about guns. Even though it is. I think I exist in the world in relation to ideas and physical objects. What I bring to those objects is what differentiates me from others. So, when I talk about anything I’m always talking about myself. And I can talk a little longer if it doesn’t seem so self-centered.