Jack Pendarvis, "The Wild Man of Mississippi"

It’s December 11. Jack Pendarvis, author of Movie Stars, has a question but it’s more of a comment.

How would you describe your story?

JACK PENDARVIS: A slice-of-life fable? I ended with a question mark because I'm not sure.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

JP: I wrote it just before the election of Donald Trump, a fact which, wrongly or rightly, felt so significant that I had to go back and insert it into the story.

What kind of research went into this story?

JP: No specific research, just living a lifetime in a cultural stew of simmering celebrity toxicity. I thought it might be fun to ladle some once-prevalent (still-prevalent?) towering masculine writerly self-aggrandizement over the gentler, more mundane details that generally make up a writer's life in the real world.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

JP: I like short stories because you can try anything and people will generally forgive you because it's over relatively quickly.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

JP: Hmm. Right now I have a column on the website Popula in which I recap Moby-Dick in my own words. Another option would be just to read Moby-Dick.

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

JP: If we are talking about physical gifts, The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz changed my life when I was a teenager. My parents gave it to me for Christmas and I don't know why. It was a box set of LPs that started with a piano roll that Scott Joplin made and ended with Cecil Taylor or John Coltrane. Listening to it straight through, as my first experience of jazz, blew my mind and gave me a big education.

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