This interview was submitted by TNG reader, Harry Thomas.

After publishing Briefly Told Lives (2000), a collection of short stories which focused largely on punks and queers and queerpunks in NYC’s East Village, author and zine-maker C. Bard Cole did the unthinkable:  He moved from the East Village to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in order to pursue an M.F.A. in creative writing.  His new book, This Is Where My Life Went Wrong (Blatt Books) is the strange and hilarious outgrowth of the work he did while at the University of Alabama.  Pressing hard on the boundaries between short fiction and prose poems, TIWMLWW is a collection of 106 short vignettes that range, stylistically, from the perversely obscene to the archly literary while gaping at the grotesquely alluring spectacle that is early 21st century life in the American South.  Writer and academic-type Harry Thomas interviewed Cole, who also runs the online art and literary magazine Six Little Things, via email in June 2009.

The New Gay:  TIWMLWW was composed after you moved to Alabama. Before that move, you’d lived in New York for a long, long time. What were some of things you found most shocking or difficult about life in the South and how, if at all, did those things influence TIWMLWW?

C. Bard Cole: Nothing was shocking to me, per se.  To me, you have New York City and you have America, and the difference between Alabama and the North Jersey suburbs is just a matter of degree.  It’s not that anything is really unfamiliar, but the proportions are different, and that feeling of imbalance wears on you.  There was the Alabama stare, for instance.  That so many people really do feel completely at ease absolutely gawking at strangers who are just a tiny bit different looking—dyed hair, a funny t-shirt—stuff no one in most places would even think of noticing.  Maybe it really does shock them so much they can’t help it, who knows?  Besides that, I was shocked by how Republican government works out in practice—it really seemed like a magic land of rich white people down there, because the poor people, especially poor black people, were rendered completely invisible and completely outside.  For me, it stirred up childish feelings of rebellion and spite that hadn’t been activated inside me since I was a teenager, and I duly put them in the book.  It did help me get to a certain state of mind where memories of past feelings came flooding back.

TNG:  You published Briefly Told Lives when you were living in the East Village, and that book was very much about the East Village and punk kids living in it.  And TIWMLWW, which you wrote in Alabama, is filled with southern scenes and images (The Waffle House, small town beauty pageants, etc.).  Are you conscious of place exerting a big influence on your writing?

CBC:  It’s the opposite.  I write about places in a story and then I end up moving there accidentally.  I was on a path to live in the East Village and have a dysfunctional relationship with a junkie boyfriend since I was in seventh grade.  I don’t know why.  I started writing a New Orleans story when I still lived in New York, and I asked [novelist] Poppy Z. Brite to make up the name of the bar where Squire got a job.  She gave me the “Imperial Bar & Grill on Decatur.”  I didn’t even know where Decatur Street was when I started writing about it.

TNG:  For some time, you referred to the book that eventually became TIWMLWW as “The Crazy Book.”  Why?

CBC:  Because I didn’t know what it was, or what good there’d be in doing it, but I kept putting this stupid amount of work into it nonetheless.

TNG:  What’s your answer when people ask you, “What’s TIWMLWW about, Bard?”  How do you describe the book?

CBC:  I say it’s more or less poetry.  Or I say it’s a silly book.  I’m sure my poet friends hate that I conflate the two things.  Sometimes I say it’s about Alabama.

TNG:  Within TIWMLWW’s short sections, there are a tremendous number of different genres on display.  There are what we might call literary short-shorts, murder mysteries, treatises on Christian hypocrisy in Alabama, a reworking of the song “America, The Beautiful,” a celebrity profile of Willa Cather written in the voice of Truman Capote, and even an opera.  How conscious of genre were you as you wrote and revised the book?  Were you aiming to work in a bunch of different genres, and if so, why?  And what genre was the most difficult for you to work in?

CBC:  I just recently saw a short film from the mid-80s, Made for TV, by the late Tom Rubnitz, the East Village videographer, with Anne Magnuson.  The concept was it was a TV and someone kept changing the channel.  And in every scene, there was Anne Magnuson doing something in a different character, a different voice, a different wig – in a talk show, a soap opera, an old noir movie – every kind of random program you could see on TV, filmed perfectly in its genre, but fragmented, shown for only seconds.  Made for TV wasn’t about creating TV shows, it was about remembering watching TV.  And that’s what I did, I think.  It didn’t feel hard.  It wasn’t about writing, it was about remembering reading.