Michael Heslin

Michael Heslin was born in New York City where he attended parochial schools and CCNY.

As a teenager in New York City Michael Heslin began writing on the back of album covers and the paper placemats in diners. It was compensation for not being able to draw. He has been writing fiction since the 1970's about the American scene and likes stories about jazz babies and guys who still can't hit a curve. On the side he plays the guitar and reads everything he can. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

A brief interview with Michael:

As we were in the neighborhood we stopped in to talk to Michael Heslin about his new book, Saint James Infirmary, and related matters.

Q. Your book is not an ordinary car trip. Where did the idea of a 1,500 mile funeral procession come from?

A. Well, some time ago I took driving trips around Louisiana and Mississippi and other places in the South. I’d see a tobacco barn or cows in a field, maybe a church steeple, and think about how I could connect them. I think I mentioned I always wished I could draw. As I can’t I tried to string them together verbally with stories. And you know, you pass quite a few cemeteries too.

Q. Do you think of it as cinematic then?

A. I think that’s fair. I’ve always been very taken with murals, with wall frescoes say. You walk from one end of the room to the other and the story is there beside you. This book has a pretty tight time span, about 72 hours, and that’s closer to a film than it is to most novels.

Q. But a Ford station wagon as a hearse?

A. Well, you know, it’s Faulkner too. I probably read ‘As I Lay Dying’ when I was twelve and maybe never got over it. Somebody once said death is the mother of beauty. The longer we live the less we look at things. I think Jim in this story is looking extra hard because he’s looking for his friend who can’t experience these things any longer.

Q. How about the music? There’s blues and country and Elvis. Does writing about that come naturally to you?

A. I think so. Being a teenager in New York in the 60’s was maybe the best time to hear a lot of different music without even trying. My mother loved country and western but even Top 40 radio then had more styles of music than you might hear now. The songs you heard may not have been the best examples of what was out there but it got you interested.

Q. The main character here, Jim Logan, we can expect to see him again?

A. Yes, quite a bit probably. He’s part of an Irish-American family from Pittsburgh I write about. He was born in 1940 and that puts him in my literary wheelhouse so to speak. My writing is pretty much confined to the period between the Depression and 1980 or so.

Q. How do the newspaper books fit in?

A. They are smack in the 1970’s. I was living and working in Manhattan then, just finished with college… Q. Where was that? A. Uh, that’s City College of New York. I took the A train there which is probably why I like Big Band music so much. City came after twelve years of Catholic school and after college the day jobs started.

Q. But not on a newspaper?

A. No, sorry. I wish I could show you my hard boiled newspaper side but I don’t have one. I’m not good at asking questions and I’m a terrible note taker. And I can’t read my own handwriting, which is a drawback I think in journalism.

Q. So the newspaper books are wish fulfillment to an extent?

A. Most likely they are. But newspapers and newspaper people are one of the world’s great subjects.

Q. So you made up your own newspaper?

A. Right, the New York Local. It’s a weekly. It’s a pastiche, a little bit like the Village Voice and some other alternative papers from that period. I find it a good vehicle for writing about New York, about politics and the zeitgeist, really about day to day life in the 70’s.

Q. There’s a collective title?

A. There is: New York Spleen. Pardon my Baudelaire on that. There are three books, covering about 10 years. I like continuing characters and these books have them. It’s something that has always appealed to me when other writers do it.

Q. The Collapse of the Broadway Central, that sounds like… I mean is there any mystery involved there?

A. There’s a small one but it’s mostly about a reporter doing what they do, being nosy. I like to emphasize what people read, what their apartments were like, how much a taxi cost, that kind of thing. Writers have always understood that it is small details that make things interesting. I’m not good at describing how people look physically and what they’re wearing but if someone buys a pair of jeans I’d like to say where they bought it and how much they paid. It’s not very necessary but I find it satisfying.

Q. Do you work every day?

A. Most weekdays. When I was younger I was more compelled to write a certain amount every day and often kept working until I couldn’t see straight. Thirty years of unsuccessfully trying to sell stories showed me there’s no point to that. Now I like to have a project and nibble at it until it’s done.

Q. Do you still get ideas for books?

A. I do, not many, but enough to keep me busy. The pleasure of having had a good couple of hours of work means a lot to me. I’d hate to give it up.