I took my kids to buy shoes. On the way home they were playing a game with their stuffies in the back seat. I guess one of the stuffies was immortal, because my youngest said he didn’t know what immortal means, and so his brother told him immortal means you’ll live forever, unless someone does something rude to you like stab you in the heart. I love when I hear stuff like this, when they’re just talking and don’t know I’m listening. It’s really lovely. I think the youngest said he wished he was immortal, and the oldest said he did too, except then he thought about it and said well if I was immortal, my friends would get old. He didn’t say it, but it was there, the realization that his mother and I would get old, and his little brother. He said yeah I don’t want to be immortal, and his little brother said yeah me neither. And they went back to playing.
My life has taken a lot of turns and it means so much that it has led to me overhearing that conversation. I’m also grateful that it’s led to the following conversation I had with my friend Alan ten-Hoeve, via DMs in twitter. We’ve exchanged a lot of DMs but never in a sort of formal way like this, usually stuff about how we liked something the other wrote, or how scared we are for our children, living in this world. Anyway, leaving aside all the terribleness of the world, I’m really happy to kick off The Randall Moon Review of Literature with an interview with Alan ten-Hoeve, author of Notes From a Wood-Paneled Basement.
Alan: OK, I’ll have a little intro and then go into the questions. Will start with this: We’re both writers named Alan, with kids and responsibilities, trying to make art in a hellworld but not really making a living at it, so how do you balance family/work/household duties and writing?
Alan: My knee jerk reaction is to try and be funny but it’s just not working. If my answers are too depressing, just lemme know. I don’t want to bring people down any more than they already are.
Just kidding about labeling dialogue that way. I’m not going to label it all and I think you’ll be able to follow the conversation. If you get lost at least you know it’s Alan talking.
I don’t. No balance whatsoever. As far as writing goes, most of my ideas come at inconvenient times, so I like to have something handy to write shit down on the fly. The Notes app in my phone or a pocket Meade work best. It’s like my mind has to be obligated to something else in order for it to function creatively. I think this comes from a history of performing manual and menial labor. I hate the work enough that my mind, in an act of self-preservation so I don’t kill someone or quit, involuntarily takes me to a different place. A few days a week I’ll neglect more important things to take my barely functional Chromebook down to the basement and try to organize those notes into something readable. Occasionally it works. But even that approach has become more difficult over the last few months. The depression has gotten too heavy. I have no hope and feel guilty as fuck for bringing people into this hellworld, so it’s hard to care about poems and stories. Besides a recent book review, I think this interview is the first piece of writing I’ve attempted to complete in weeks.
This is good. In the interest of full disclosure, because I don’t want there to be a pretense that this project is ethical, professional, or respectable, we should acknowledge the book review you mention is of One More Number by Craig Rodgers, a book I edited and published, as the guy behind Death of Print. As this series goes on I’m going to talk to and publish writers are admire, some of whom will be people I consider my friends. Such as yourself. Even though we’ve never actually met. Anyway I know what you mean about feeling guilty about bringing people into this world. I think we’ve talked about it before but I sort of see it differently. For me, my kids are what keep me going. If I hadn’t brought them into the world I almost think at this point I would be someone the State regarded as a terrorist. Like trying to blow up Elon Musk. But more than that living here is a gift, it kills me that so many people squander it and try to ruin it for other people, but I’m grateful to have my kids here, and I’m grateful to have people like you here. I bet your kids are awesome people. So I don’t think you should feel guilty. I’m not a very good interviewer. Uh, so, your book is called Notes From a Wood-Paneled Basement. It’s really good by the way. I’m not a big poetry guy and if I didn’t like the book we wouldn’t be talking about it here. Where did it come from, or how did it come about? Did you set out to publish a collection of poetry or did it just sort of happen? Also if you don’t like a question just say skip.
OK, sure. I didn’t know if I should mention Craig’s book by name but yeah, makes sense when you put it that way. I also see what you’re saying about our kids keeping us grounded. And I know I should do better, look at things more like that than the way I do. Like you, if it weren’t for my kids, I probably would have taken my anger out in a violent way, either against someone responsible for this enormous mess or myself. Neither action likely to produce meaningful results, only more pain. I don’t regret my kids. That’s not what I meant by expressing guilt. I just wish they had a better future to look forward to. Or that they could at least experience growing up the way kids their age should experience growing up. The pain of the reality is indescribable but you know it well. They are great people, my kids. They deserve better than this place. They’ve given me so much without even knowing. Raising them is the one and only worthwhile thing I’ve ever done and will ever do. The little moments parents tend to not think about when they’re happening—playing trains, looking for Totoro in the woods, or just sitting with them while they’re sick—are the best memories of my life. Everything else is meaningless. Full disclosure: I just went through a procedure to remove some cancerous growths so my emotional gas tank is on E. Which is definitely affecting my mood at the moment. I appreciate you and your perspective. But damn. Now I’m regretting my first answer. Fuck it, though. It’s honest even if it’s an incomplete picture. Parents are dealing with impossible things. To answer the question, NOTES FROM A WOOD-PANELED BASEMENT came about by accident. The book is made up of stuff I’d been pumping into google docs over the last year or so. I didn’t have any intention of publishing it as a book. I didn’t even realize I had enough for a collection. Didn’t keep track of things. When Bram Riddlebarger started Gob Pile Press, I offered to be a reader and look for typos or whatever. Bram’s one of my favorite writers and I knew there was a good chance I’d dig anything he decided to put out, so this was my way of trying to get a sneak peek. I was taken aback when he asked if I had anything to submit. With Bram being one of my favorites I was reluctant, and kind of embarrassed, to send him my stuff, but I also knew I should at least try. We’d become friends and the point of art of any kind is to share it with friends. And if what I made was bad, so be it. Being a musician, I figured I’ve made a public fool of myself in many ways throughout life. What would be one more for a friend? So I dove in and wound up sending him three manuscripts, including two novels. Or a novel and a half, I can’t remember. But as I scrolled through my docs, that’s when I realized I had enough short stuff for a collection and decided to send that too. I was expecting a polite rejection on everything. Surprisingly, that didn’t happen. And the ms I thought had the least chance of acceptance wound up being the one. I should say that the book as it is now is a little different from the original ms but Bram saw potential in it. Besides fixing a lot of my amateur mistakes, Bram wanted to focus on the theme of place, so we cut out a few things that didn’t fit. What that pruning revealed was a picture of one’s youth versus who they’ve become as an adult. The Point Break poem touches on this but I think Nick Olson nailed the spirit of the book best with part of his blurb: “Notes from a Wood-Paneled Basement looks at what we do with our time, our memories, the complicated pictures of our parents that come into clearer focus the older we get. It squares what we inherited against what we refuse to pass on and asks whether we can enjoy the tiny/funny/happy/sad moments that are, slowly, becoming our life.” Many of the pieces are a little heavy, so we left a few lighthearted and ridiculous things in, like my commitment issues with a pair of basketball shorts, to give it a lift here and there. The title also came about by accident. Right before I sent Bram the file I realized I hadn’t titled it and just looked up, saw the wood-paneling around me and used that. Being a Bukowski reader, I think his Notes of a Dirty Old Man subliminally influenced me—the cover even has these brown slats—but there’s nothing “dirty” about my book. Plenty of “old man” though. Btw, I appreciate your kind words about the book. I love your stuff so it means a lot. In general I wasn’t expecting the warm reception the book has largely gotten. Forgive me if I’m being too wordy. When it comes to anesthesia I’m a lightweight and I’m feeling a little loopy from the propofol.
Nothing to regret as far as your other response goes. Everything you say makes sense. What are some of your favorite pieces from the book? The ones you really want people to read and like. And what makes them important to you?
That’s a tough question. Some of my personal favorites are the ones that don’t seem to go anywhere or mean anything. Poems that just exist as a kind of snapshot of a moment. I know that’s unpopular right now, but maybe that’s why I like that stuff so much. “Mailbox” and “Kitchen Floor” and “Less Flat” are good examples of that. “Piñata” is another favorite. That one expresses some of the parental anxieties I feel in these times. Personal preferences aside, I find myself hoping people enjoy the longer pieces, like “Bullet” and “This One” and “UFO” because, while they are definitely about sad situations, there is, I hope, a kind of black comedy to them as well. In “Bullet” a father, who only sees his son on weekends, hopes to gain favor by giving him a live round he claims to have gotten from Superman. This is the father’s idea of being a cool dad and, as fucked up as that situation is, and how fucked up it turned out, I can’t help but laugh at the idiotic rational. Two of my favorites that almost didn’t make it into the book (“A Nice Day at the Park” and “At a Red Light in Nineteen Eighty-Three”) have to do with racism as presented to a very young child by his elders. My grandparents believed anyone who isn’t white is being punished by God and I wanted to show how innocent and nonchalant this kind of indoctrination can seem when coming from a beloved grandparent. Racism doesn’t seem aggressive when it comes at you like that when you’re young. It’s just part of the landscape whether you understand it or not. In those particular poems I tried my best to present the situation as I remember them and keep the innocence in place. I’ve been told those ones are jarring to read, but that’s sort of the point. It might be cliché to say, but all these pieces are important in the way that I needed to write them out. The act of taking something real and turning it into a compact, digestible story or poem and sharing them with others has taken the poison out of the memory for me. Well, maybe not the one about committing to a pair of basketball shorts. That one still stings. J/k.
I like those snapshot poems. I think they’re important. Like that’s what life is about and all that, these smaller moments. “Less Flat” is really beautiful in that regard. I remember liking “Bullet.” My parents divorced when I was very young, I take it yours were divorced as well. Even though I’m happily married I find myself drawn toward writing divorced characters. (Followup question is coming.) Nearly two hours later: Well I forgot where I was going with that. I read an interview you did where you said you wrote some books for your kids. Am I remembering this right?
I did. For my kids. And other kids, I had hoped. Mine are now too old for what it is. I still hope I can turn it into something. It’s a children’s detective series. Like something you might find in a Scholastic book fair. That was my writing goal. To write something like that for early readers. Nothing literary. Just a straight-up mystery. No magic. Nothing paranormal. Definitely full of cheap tropes and suspense. The kind of book I’d have been given to read on a long car ride as an early reader. I’m talking a Goosebumps level thing. Those kinds of books, whatever ones read at that age, seem to make a mark on people. Boxcar Children. Hardy Boys. Nancy Drew. But the series is an evolving thing for me. I haven’t nailed the recipe yet. I got a few ideas to try if the mood strikes again.
I bet my kids are the right age for it if you want a test group. I was flipping through the book, I hate the teen movie one because it makes me feel old. Landed on “Hard Times” and it’s so simple and short, something that might not stick out, but for me really lovely and powerful. Another one I went back to was “Bitchin’ Sideburns,” which is really funny, and was struck by the contrast between that one and the one it’s next to, “Holiday Shopping with Dad,” which is the opposite of funny, more heavy and heartbreaking. The effect is when you get to Sideburns it’s a major relief. How much intention goes into the ordering of these poems?
That would be cool to have your kids read it but I really feel like I have to fix some things first. I haven’t done much with those stories since March and April 2020. That’s when I finished what I thought was the most promising book. One of my biggest mistakes, and this is very stupid and embarrassing in hindsight, was including a character who is a state trooper, based on the state trooper in my town. The reason for this is the series follows two kid “detectives” and I figured there had to be a law enforcement character to handle official stuff like an arrest. I queried that book through April and May 2020 and got some serious interest from a few agents. When George Floyd was murdered most of those agents ghosted me. One told me they were “going in a different direction.” So I shelved it with the intention of altering the trooper and one or two other aspects I think need improvement. Which I haven’t gotten around to. I think the trouble is that the trooper is presented as friendly because our town trooper is. But I should have treated that more broadly. Our trooper rarely, if ever, makes arrests or anything like that. He’s mostly here to safely bring home drunk teenagers. I realize this experience with police is almost unheard of. I think if I make her more of an obstacle in the story, it might work again. I dunno. Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the teen movie one either. But I do like “Hard Times” which I believe was a tweet I made and just broke up to look like a poem. It’s a sound philosophy. “Bitchin’ Sideburns” was originally longer but it didn’t go anywhere interesting so I cut it down to the basics. I could have fictionalized a crazy night with those ladies but felt being Pete Yorn’s brother for a few minutes was weird enough. Bram and I put a good amount of thought into the order of the book and it changed a few times. Every time I looked over the ms and thought it was getting to heavy or sad I tried to maneuver a silly piece in to lighten things up. One reason for that is I didn’t want to depress people. Another reason is that, even though some of the pieces are sad, I didn’t want the book to feel like a pity project. The memories I used to make the poems and stories are unfortunate, but they are far from the worst. My childhood sucked in many ways, but I’m also lucky in many ways. I think my experience of growing up in the American northeast are actually pretty average. So yeah, I didn’t want the book to sound like a list of complaints. There’s humor in it and my life wasn’t so bad that I lost my ability to be ridiculous. There’s a lot of focus on “curation” when it comes to journals and books but I think there is room for outliers that make a reader laugh or think, wtf! “Holiday Shopping with Dad” is a scary one for me even now. I thought I was gonna die that day. A lot of violent shit was going on between my parents at the time. The scariest thing was when my wife read it. She asked me what happened after we left the store and I realized I can’t remember. Trauma short circuits the brain.
I feel you on the trooper thing. It’s hard. My kids fucking hate cops man. My six-year-old will roll down his window and yell “Shame! Shame!” when he sees one. At this point I try to just avoid the topic just because I don’t want to fuel it. But I got no sympathy for law enforcement, kids know right from wrong, we took the kids to a few protests and BLM events. They know the score. Anyway this interview could go on for eternity but I wanted to ask about music, since you play. What do you play, what’s your style, and how, if at all, does it play into your writing?
Yes. I have to avoid certain topics too. Our house is kinda small and my wife is always reminding me that the kids can hear everything I say. My eldest, being 14 now, is very aware and not happy with the state of things. He’s always trying to find logic in the world. As far as music goes, I’ve primarily been a bass player. I can play guitar too but I have an aptitude for the bass. It’s been my favorite instrument for as long as I can remember. With live music it’s the bass and drums you feel the most. The rhythm comes up through your feet and fills your whole body. I like that. When I was in grade school I was obsessed with Cliff Burton. Still think he’s pretty amazing, especially when you consider the time and his age. My style depends on the people I’m playing with. I like all kinds of music but prefer things with a good rhythm and will try to work that kind of stuff into anything I do. Or did. I don’t play much bass or guitar anymore. These days I mostly play violin with my youngest. We’ve been doing that for three years. She recently surpassed me in ability so I don’t know how much longer I’ll be needed. When I was first trying to write I didn’t know how to get started. I’d read plenty of books obviously but never considered how I could go about making one myself. So I read a few how-to books, which were as helpful as they were confusing, but once I dove in and just tried, I realized music and writing were very similar. A piece of writing can be simple and unambiguous, like a country or punk song, or as complex and textured as a thrash metal or a Wieniawski composition. Sometimes writing is like improvised jazz. You just start and don’t know where things are gonna end up. But whatever you do, however you approach it, you’re trying to find certain notes, set a mood. There’s a lot of riffing and following your gut. Making that connection between the two mediums was very helpful.
Awesome. I played the violin for about four months in sixth grade. I sucked. I’m okay at guitar, like a little above mediocre but not great, so I guess we’re a band now. Officially. Just want to say thanks for taking the time, and we both can get kind of bleak and down about shit so I want you to know what you’re doing is good and your writing makes the world a little bit better. Send my love to your family as well. Any chance we could close this out with a short poem from the book?
Violin is tough and very specific. Also kind of sadistic in the way one has to clamp the instrument to their shoulder with their chin. Then the bow is like an obstacle. Whoever invented the violin must’ve been like, how can I make this as difficult and as painful as possible. I’m cool with being in a band. I’m in several make believe bands. I appreciate all your kind words. I always say it means a lot and it does. I never thought I’d be able to do much with writing. I’ve already exceeded my expectations. Same to your family. You can definitely close this out with a poem from the book. I still want to put the first one up on The Gallimaufry. The reason I haven’t is I’m an idiot who can’t perform basic functions on a computer. My wife is a wiz and she usually helps me with that stuff but she’s been so busy with work I can’t bring myself to ask her to do more computer stuff when she’s done. I will though. I won’t feel a part of it til I get something on there. But yeah, for this I’m cool with whatever one. Probably something that was mentioned. Thanks for giving me this opportunity. There’s so many good writers on Twitter and I’m grateful just to be lurking among them. When something like this interview happens it’s pretty special.
Less Flat
Alan ten-Hoeve
Standing on the corner under the maple tree,
where the grass is still damp from a morning
rain. Moisture seeps into my worn-out
sneakers.
I watch the cars go by, then hear the familiar
sound of the school bus cresting the hill. It
emerges into view with lights flashing, first
yellow, then red.
When my five-year-old daughter steps down
through the folding doors, she holds the whole
world in her hand.
Two round pieces of paper, an eastern and
western hemisphere, taped together with
crumpled paper stuffed inside to make it “less
flat.”
She has used crayons to make the paper earth’s
water dark blue, and each continent, labeled in
her awkward handwriting, is shaded with a
different color.
At school, her class is learning about geography.
She smiles as a cool breeze tosses her hair, and
gives me her free hand, to hold as we walk to
the driveway.