The Brooklyn Rail

Joe Pan and I were not students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the same time, but we met at a Workshop poker game and I won a whole bunch of his money. There were softball games too; we hit it off anyway. I started reading his work at that time, twenty-five years ago. His novel—preceded by five collections of poetry—began to take shape in those days, and I was a fan of the work because it aspired to do what Francis Ford Coppola did in Apocalypse Now: create a blockbuster that was also a work of art. Actually, Florida Palms is more like a redneck Godfather, and I recall, after reading an early draft, the vivid dreams I had about the book’s minor characters.

This exchange was conducted by email.

J.C. Hallman (Rail): This book has been a long time in coming—at this point, years down the road, do you remember what the first spark was that set you on the path to the book?

Joe Pan: I do remember the first spark, yes. I was sixteen or seventeen, at a biker party in Palm Bay, Florida. Two of my friends’ parents were bikers, and the gathering was a tremendous feast, wild boar roasted on a split oil drum—you will recognize this scene from the first chapter of the book. The party was presided over by my friend’s father, a gruff old patriarch who had spent time in San Quentin. Many people there had served time. Well that day I met an honest-to-god former hitman, I met a photographer for biker mags, a young woman I took a charm to, and a whole slew of n’er-do-wells still living the fast life—and here I was a kid, dirt poor and lacking for options, writing horror stories in my spare time while working a part-time job alongside my mom at the Krystal Burger. At one point the head biker, my buddy’s dad, was sitting across from me eating the boar they had poached from the wild thickets of Malabar, out near the river. He leaned over and gripped my kneecap and said, “One of these days, you’re gonna write about me.” I chuckled, as people are always cornering writers, hoping to have their stories memorialized. But maybe he saw something else in my eyes, some eagerness. Here were folks living like there was no tomorrow. Adolescence as a kind of freedom that need never end, was the promise. It could be one prolonged, wild ride.

Rail: Can you talk about where the other influences for the characters come from—for Bird, the biker patriarch, or Seizer, the mafioso, or Gumby, the vampire hitman, without actually putting yourself in danger?

Pan: Ha, I don’t imagine I’m in any danger, and most of the people who sparked certain ideas for the novel are no longer with us, for various reasons. Yes, I did meet a hitman with false teeth who had carved one tooth into a vampiric fang, and who supposedly hunted people with a blowgun. I did go to school with a kid who disappeared from class only to reappear in an influential role with a Miami gang. I had a friend who ran guns, and one who was a crack dealer. My father was a jail guard and I have a brother in prison. Those are influencing factors for certain elements of the book, but characters dislike typecasting and will quickly eradicate any real-world counterparts to become unique voices with unique interiors. The novel and the place have gone through so many permutations that they little resemble any sources from my upbringing. That said, our country’s current economic outlook may again give rise to problems of the past.

Rail: The language of the book is notably lyrical—not generally the kind of language one associates with bikers. You address this a bit in your acknowledgments at the end of the book, but what’s going on here?

Pan: I associate lyricism with poetry, and poetry is charged with investigating language: Language reframes consciousness, it enlightens and subverts, but there is always a motivated speaker behind its usage, and that’s where fiction gets a foothold. In telling stories, language is used to articulate ideas, that is, the subject is usually already known. Whereas poetry, for me, encounters language on its own terms; the poem teaches you what it wants to be. But I find it hard to divorce the two, and find inspiration in more lyrical language. For instance, if I get stuck at the beginning of a new scene, I give in to the poetry impulse and swim around in details for a bit, then cut it back later, once the subject arrives. It’s a meditative rehearsal.

In the acknowledgments, I paraphrase the great short story writer James Alan McPherson, who offered that one should write in the “magisterial voice,” which allows characters to speak closer to their intentions. When I first heard that, it shook me. Was I allowed to write in a way where my characters expressed the things they felt in a voice that was closer to their feelings than what “real people” would say? So I returned to some favorite writers of mine and found, yes, writers do this all the time. Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Dostoyevsky. Playwrights and screenwriters also do this, but beyond voiceovers or soliloquies, we aren’t privy to characters’ inner dialogues, their confessions in full articulation. That’s what’s so special about fiction—we get to hear it all. And if a writer wants to, they can employ the magisterial voice, bridging the gap between inner thoughts and conversation. You can have an eighteen-year-old speak more fully into the muddy rush of their emotions in ways they might not otherwise articulate. Which is a lyrical pursuit, a bit more dynamic than tried-and-true realism. It broadens what we might consider ‘authentic,’ maybe not “true to life” but “true to the experience of life.” You can allow the internal to bleed out more. Physics has taught us that observation changes outcomes, and we might add that language alters thinking which changes observation. William Gass has a lot to say on this subject, noting that when consciousness changes, language must change as well. Plus I just love lines that vibrate, that resonate. Give me some purple passages to set the atmosphere.

As for bikers not being philosophical, I think any such belief is probably held by folks who simply have no poor friends, or friends who work in the trades. You bring a six-pack out to a bonfire in the woods, you’re going to hear lots of jokes and personal stories, failures and triumphs, and you’re going to hear people arguing issues of morality, how to fix things, religion, politics, and philosophy. It’s human nature to converse about our place in the universe.

Rail: We’re old friends, so I’m able to recognize the various nuggets in the book—fragments of characters’ back stories that come from your life. It’s not just Eddy, the protagonist, it’s all of them. Are you consciously sprinkling yourself through the book, even though there’s no reason a reader would necessarily ever be able to perceive that? Is this something writers do, like video game designers putting “Easter eggs” into video games, private signatures?

Pan: There’s no single character who represents me, but Eddy, the main character, comes closest. His aperture is wide. One thing I’ve come to realize is that all of my characters are me, in some sense. That is, who I could be, given a specific situation or different life. Building out a character—each character—takes a bit of method acting. I imagine the conditions that motivate them: economic disparities, cultural realities, sexual identities. I walk through the city listening to their takes on things. I try to get out of the way as much as possible, but at the end of the day, this is all being filtered through me. Cueball’s hidden bisexuality. Seizer’s lust for power. Kid Kaos feeling stilted by his gang boss cousin. I do my research and try to be fair. Zadie Smith said she reads to experience a connection to a consciousness other than her own, and I carry that feeling, cautiously, into my writing as well.

I appreciate when writers really go for it. I want to read characters who reflect the moral hazards and meanness and self-sabotaging we all do. I think about Camus, whose resistance work in WWII shifted his own existentialist belief that we’re all essentially alone, trapped in our sad meat bodies and lonely imaginations, to a more empathetic humanity, a unifying force of solidarity. When I see human struggle dealt with honestly in a book—warts and all—I bond with the writer. I trust them. Thank you for going there.

As for Easter eggs, I do sprinkle some around, if only for my own amusement. For instance, a lot of the characters in the book are described as different animals, which falls in line with Del Ray’s characterization of humankind as “beasts set loose in the garden.” Eddy’s last name is Wildeboar. His boss’ name is Bird. Florida in this context represents a fallen Eden, a “proving ground historically for toothy creatures stalking each other into extinction.”

Rail: The book has sold to HBO, and a pilot episode is being hammered out now. Can you talk about how that came about, and what it was like after having lived with the book in your mind as long as you did?

Pan: The HBO show was a complete surprise. It’s been optioned and we’re working on the pilot episode, yes, and I can’t say much more than that. It’s becoming more common that when agents send out manuscripts to publishers, they also send it around to producers and studios, who themselves have readers looking to identify marketable IP. I’ve been very lucky to have an incredible agent with foresight, ambition, and nerve. We had several big producers bid on it but HBO swooped in and we went with them. For me, the book and the show are two completely separate works of art. The series writer will do with the characters what he wants, just as the readers of my book will. I’m around for answering questions, but at some point, you just have to get comfortable with loss of control. The same happens when the book is published, and the world you created becomes the reader’s to interpret, however they might.

Rail: Florida itself plays a huge role in the book. Is this incidental, intentional? Is it setting, character, or subject?

Pan: Florida is a character unto itself, for sure. It acts like a character, in that it informs how people relate to it. Florida is hot, buggy, frustrating. It holds within itself religious fanatics and lunatics and serial killers. It has tax loopholes and cops on cocaine and forces incarcerated people like my brother to work on penal farms, for which he’s paid pennies. That kind of shit affects its inhabitants, so yes, all of the above.

Rail: Not many biker novels take time to mention Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge. Explain.

Pan: The Incognito Lounge, along with Johnson’s story collection Jesus’ Son, are guidebooks for anyone hoping to document the struggles of working-class people. Johnson’s humanity shines through every paragraph. Pain and loss, addiction, woven through with sporadic bursts of creativity and service and love. The wild-eyed prophet illuminated by something beyond himself. I find fellowship in his work. Maybe that’s the former Baptist in me, but I sense him trying to draw us together, to register our hopes, even as we slide into impossibly dark situations. Movies like The Florida Project, Gummo, and a little known Australian film called Snowtown, also seek to register the dreams of people trudging through the gray emotional places like those in Florida Palms. Johnson is a touchstone for me, a master of dimensionality and brevity. He knows our secrets.

Rail: This is maybe similar to the first question I asked, but the narrator feels more present in this book than in many other modern narratives—what is your thinking on that point?

Pan: If that’s true, well I don’t know. Maybe because I see myself in the characters. At some point you realize the reader is looking for an accurate portrayal of whatever world you’re building, and you’re the person in charge of mitigating that reality. This is a very personal story for me, guided by events in my life, and ultimately my take on how racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. is playing out in overlooked communities like this one. Othering and otherness interests me. People pushed to the outskirts. I try not to hover, but I did feel the need to fill in the nooks and crannies, to look at all the various viewpoints from each character’s perspective. I’m constantly fighting off my own maximalist impulses. Like, when figuring out how to start a drug cartel using a bunch of backwoods folks, I wanted to include all the little details I discovered in my research. And some of those details make it into the book, but at some point I had to abandon becoming a poor historian in favor of being a decent storyteller.

Rail: This is a debut novel—but you’ve published previous books, mostly poetry. And you run Brooklyn Arts Press, mostly a poetry press. Yet this is a very commercial story, and you already have a TV deal. What do you think you bring to the work, as a poet, that makes it distinct from the genre into which this story falls?

Pan: An attention to detail at the language level, I would say. Poetry is where I go to experience language in all its luxury. Because it’s not tied to money or any real economy, it’s free to explore the world free of most capitalistic impulses. I’ve tried to bring some of those elements into the service of my fiction.

I don’t believe any genre demands adherence to a specific way of putting sentences together, even if it places certain demands on formulas and tropes. What works, works. Readers are sophisticated in that they’re primed to identify the artificial. We’re skeptical and bored. We want to be rocked back on our heels. And that starts with voice. With risk-taking, but most of all with language. If you want to build a world with any heft or insight, you’ll have to get your hands filthy with language.

We always hear how publishers are buying lyrical books or plot-driven books or character-driven books, chasing this or that fad, and I find chasing that destroys the original desire to write good stories with three-dimensional characters. If you do the good work and get lucky, you’ll find buyers often praise style over everything.