Mary Magazine

Peter Orner

PMH: You’ve talked about concision too, in your work, and you kind of take from poetry that you really admire. What poets do you read?

PO: I love Emily Dickinson. I don’t always understand her, but I love Emily Dickinson. I think she’s a great, when you talk about the giants of American writing, you’re talking about Melville and Dickinson, you know what I mean. And how different are they? One never stops talking and one just talks a little bit. But, I mean she can take your head off. She’s an absolute genius. And again, I’m not a great reader of her, in that I always understand it, but I’m seeing what she’s doing with voice and language, which is so stunning, it’s stunning. I just think she has to be up there with the greatest writers with her use of language and other things. I can name a lot more.

To be a little more obscure but not too obscure, I hope, Zbigniew Herbert. He’s a Polish poet, and he’s really wonderful. I love his work. I was just teaching him. I have one of his poems right here, called “Apollo and Marsyas.” It’s a myth where Marsyas challenged Apollo to a flute contest. Marsyas is a mortal, and the judges were all gods, so it’s obviously rigged against him. And the deal was that whomever won got to do whatever they wanted to the loser. So Apollo flayed him, skinned him alive, and nailed him to a tree, and that’s what the poem is about. But Herbert’s–

PMH: Wow (me laughing).

PO: But, Herbert said the real duel happened after, and he’s talking about the sounds of pain that Marsyas is making that Apollo is not paying attention to. It’s totally amazing. Herbert’s a total genius.

PMH: Sounds like it. I know this is a bit of an odd transition, but I wanted to make sure I mentioned my appreciation for the inclusion of the Cincinnati Red’s Davey Concepciòn and Pete Rose into The Second Coming.

PO: Right. Kaplansky, in Mavala Shikongo, is from Cincinnati, so he’s well acquainted with the Reds, and goes on to the other characters about baseball, which is something they can’t relate to at all of course, his obsession with Rose. The fact that Pete Rose is not in the Hall of Fame is offensive to him. The whole time of course, they have no clue what he’s talking about. And he goes on, how his crimes, such as they were, were a lot less than a lot of other people who are in the Hall of Fame. He got what, three thousand hits? Four thousand hits?

PMH: I think it’s four thousand. And Baseball’s always been pretty filthy.

PO: I mean, we celebrate fucking Barry Bonds but, four thousand hits. No one, I mean we might see someone break it, but if Cal Ripken can’t get four thousand hits that says it right there. The fact that a point of morality is holding Pete Rose out of the hall of fame…moral issues? I mean what a fucking…Anyway, Kaplansky goes off about this as I’m doing now, without much explanation. But I admit I’ve always been obsessed with Pete Rose. I mean he deserves respect, because he’s a hitter. He’s like a storywriter; you know what I mean? He hits singles. What’s more important than singles?

PMH: When you do have free time away from baseball, reading, and writing, what is your kind of relaxing?

PO: I brood. I do a lot of that. No, I like to camp, go up to the mountains, the Sierras. I took a couple of trips this year. Which actually helps clear my head. Unfortunately, I lugged a lot of books up there. So I can never quite escape it, but that’s ok. It’s all to get away from it. Andre would say something to the effect that working was a break from life, which was harder. That writing was actually not as hard as life.

PMH: I think Chekhov says something about crisis being simple, that it’s the day: to: day life that’s difficult.

PO: Wow, where’s he say that? Is it in a story?

PMH: When I read that Francine Prose was quoting him.

PO: So everyday life is harder than a crisis.

PMH: Yeah, it’s the day–to–day life that will kill you. With Chekhov, I mean you were talking about being amoral and taking your characters into consideration–

PO: He loved them all, even the worst ones. He’s pretty great. In that last section of Mavala there’s a quote from Chekhov, which sort of relates to this in a sense. Russians don’t love living, they love telling. I love that.

PMH: “The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living.” (Mavala Shikongo)

PO: I think that says it all for me here. I mean of course I love living, but that’s not what we do. We’re not living when we’re writing.

PATRICK HOLIAN was born and raised in San Francisco. He currently works out of and resides in South San Francisco, The Industrial City, coming to St. Mary’s after graduating from UC Riverside in 2005. The 2007 recipient of the Chester Aaron Scholarship, Patrick has made awnings, broken the largest bone in the human body (his own), and cut school to meet Joe Montana.

PETER ORNER is the author of a collection of short stories, Esther Stories, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize for his next book, the novel The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, his work can be found in The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review, and he recently edited Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, a non-fiction book documenting the lives of illegal immigrants living and working in the United States.