Interview -- Steven Davison

by Sabra Embury

SE: Grand Rapids, Michigan is your home. Can you give me a quick tour? Where’s a good place to eat when you’re craving authentic local food?

SD: Grand Rapids is Michigan's second largest city after Detroit. It's located about 20 minutes from the coast of Lake Michigan which is basically one big fresh water ocean. The shorelines here in Michigan are spectacular what with big dunes and pine and maple and beech forests. Grand Rapids gets its name from the Grand River which bisects the city from east to west. The 'grand' rapids have since been removed from the river. I do know that the Native American word for rapids is "Baw Wa Ting."  

If I had take the Troikas out to dinner I would take them to Bartertown Diner. It's a IWW worker owned restaurant and all of the food comes from local farms. It's the whole farms to table thing and it's always fresh and delicious.

Grand Rapids is also home to a few minor celebrities - former President Gerald Ford, Gillian Anderson... its been getting mentioned in all of these polls. For example, it just tied with Asheville, NC for the title of "Beer City USA," which is total bullshit because I lived in Kalamazoo for over 10 years and that is by far a much heavier drinking town than GR. It also got best place to raise a family and 10 best places for gays.  GR is pretty conservative overall, so it seems like a contradiction in terms. Like Sean Penn said in 'The Thin Red Line' -- it's all about the real estate.

SE: From photos I’ve seen you used to be in a band. Tell me about it.

SD: Yeah, I still play with the same people I have been playing with for years. We all knew each other from growing up in GR but I didn't start playing with them until they had been established for a couple of years in Kalamazoo where we were all going to college. So, they did all the heavy lifting of making a name for themselves and then I got to join up! We were into bands like Camper Van Beethoven and the Flaming Lips...I really enjoyed being in that band because we didn't have any genre that we were...  But, that lifestyle is really hard and you have to be like a pirate and leave everything behind.  I don't think we ever had that level of commitment. That being said, it was a good time, regardless.

Now we do Loop d Loop which is primarily an on-going recording project. We get together and make weird music in the basement, essentially. We just finished our Magnum Opus: the Grand Rapids Songbook, and put it out at www.loopdloop.org. It's an inventory of where have you been/where are you going sort of mid-life/not quite crisis, still taking stock. It's for anyone who has nostalgia and longing for people, places and things that are gone.

Anyway, to relate this somewhat to writing, Darrin Doyle who is in both bands with me, has published two very good novels. Revenge of the Teacher's Pet and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo.  Actually, Darrin put it pretty well in another interview: "The indie band lifestyle is difficult to sustain for a long period. I’m not even speaking about commercial success, which is ridiculously hard to attain. I’m referring to keeping five guys working together in close quarters, happily functioning as a group while doing constant rehearsing and traveling and eating crappy gas station food and living in bars…it’s fun, but it’s not easy."

SE:  Do you consider yourself a musician, writer, musician/writer, artist, or art hobbyist?

SD: I would consider myself an amateur All of the above. I have managed to devote a lot of time to these things, but I have no illusions that I am a 'serious' musician or writer. Perhaps that's a shortcoming or a lack of effort on my part.  I also have a degree in Environmental Studies, that I have never really done anything with. There is a part of me that is interested in those issues and other social justice type issues. I guess the challenge or the goal is finding a way to synthesize all of these things.  

That's one of the reasons I love writing for Troika. It gives me a place where I can write without any inhibitions really and have it peer reviewed. I think its a great little online writers group.

SE: What was the last book you read? Do you think you read more books ten years ago, or now?

SD: I finished Upside-down World by Eduardo Galeano and A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit at about the same time. I have always been a steady 2-3 book at a time reader. Ever since I was in elementary school.  I probably read a bit more now. I live about a three to five minute walk from the library and I go there pretty much daily. The pace of my life has slowed down a lot in the last few years too, so quiet time reading is actually something I totally savor nowadays.

SE: Which books in particular have had the most effect on your writing? Do you think your writing changes with every book you read, or only with books that bend your mind?

SD: The books that are among my favorites, I don't know how much they have influenced my writing.  I love Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; I think it is a perfect book, but I don't think I even approximate the style. I have to go back to Rebecca Solnit. She is primarily a journalist, and editor for Harper's and writes regularly for news sites like Commondreams.org.  Her style is the amalgamation of political writing, memoir, art criticism, pop culture theory, history and mysticism and poetry, all sometimes in the midst of one paragraph.  She'll throw in an absolutely beautiful phrase like "the blue of distance" while writing about a revolutionary movement.  I love how she blurs so many lines together to create this creative non-fiction journalism poetry.  She wrote this piece for Harpers in 2007 called Detroit, Arcadia which blew my mind. Granted, I am biased because of my proximity to Detroit, but I read that and just felt a real connection to her sensibility.

I also recently read the David Lynch book on meditation, Catching the Big Fish.  His writing style is so different from his films, which I think have been a huge influence on me as far as my world view, if nothing else. I liked his no-nonsense ways of describing things like Unified Field Theory and the benefits of just. sitting. still.  I can't do it at all, my attention span has been ravaged by the internet, but I do believe its an essential part of life I need to reclaim.  

SE: Some common themes in your Troika pieces are music/band references, bleak isolation and nostalgic glimpses into another time--which work well together. Is this by chance?

SD: I hope it's not by destiny! Yeah, bleak isolation...thanks for noticing! I am definitely leading off most pieces trying to sort through some emotional stuff and I think a lot of it has been moving back to GR after being gone for so long and having this feeling of being a "stranger in your hometown." I have incurred some losses over the last several years, deaths of loved ones and failed relationships, basic adult stuff that everyone has to go through at some point or another. Some of the Troika pieces have been little balms to soothe some of the existential pain on particular days.  

SE:  When you sit down to write do you have an outline in your head of what you’re going to put together, or do you stitch the words together as they come into your head?

SD: I haven't really ever thought about that. I would say outline. It's probably more of a feeling or an image that I want to convey. I have a difficult time writing dialogue. It always seems very stilted to me.  I marvel at someone like Faulkner where you feel like you're just eavesdropping on this great conversation and he can transport you right into the middle of rural Mississippi even though you have never been there, you know? Just hanging out at the rickety wood fence, spitting tobacco into a bucket, squinting into the distance and listening to these people talk.  

I think you and a few of the others on Troika have a real gift for riffing on words.  Some people just getting going and it’s like BAM BAM BAM and it's just a joy to read.  You certainly have the talent and the gift of observing people or "knowing life" as is necessary to relate and transcend experiences through words.

SE: You’re good at reading between the lines in writing. What’s fascinates you more: style or story?

SD: Story definitely. If it's not a good story, then the style is like cotton candy. It may taste good going down, but it leaves you with a bit of a stomach ache and sticky fingers  But, wait...I am a bit of a sucker for some style; feather boas and disco lights whirling on the wall. NO, wait...I love the writings of Marcus Aurelius and that guy has no style...I'm the wrong person to ask.

SE: In your most recent piece (shield, hazard, movie-goer) you wrote about being 8 and loving comics. How do you feel about the boom in the entertainment industry with regards to your lifelong comic book heroes being portrayed by mega movie stars like Hugh Jackman and Robert Downey Jr.? Are you for or against it?

SD: I'm for it and I don't feel any sort of vindication either. The two forms are so different it's really kind of like apples and oranges. You mention Wolverine. In the comics he's this short, stocky, hairy and for the most part humorless and Jackman turned him into this kind of tall, dark and handsome scene stealer. I haven't seen The Avengers yet...I think its being out of that 18-34 demographic now. There was a time when I would have been there opening weekend for sure. I do respect some of the Indie comic people who have avoided the lure of hollywood. Dave Sim held his ground with Cerebus when hollywood came knocking. Although, I think my favorite comic book movie is Ghost World where it is faithful to the source material, but Clowes and Zweigoff rework it enough so that the movie is a different entity altogether.

SE: Finally, tell me about your perfect day.

SD: My standards for the perfect day are pretty low so I can usually hit them quite a bit. Usually some kind of corn bread or french toast, black coffee, honey dew melon, some kissing and hugging and if lady luck is really smiling, a low hanging crescent moon with some star tucked in the cradle of it. I love that astronomical shit!


Read Steve's stories here
Read Sabra's stories here

beak, mandala, slurp

I admit, I have a tendency to eavesdrop on conversations at fast food places. I'm good at it because I have selective hearing. You never know what a nice sampling of characters might say in a lunch hour dipping salty fries into their milkshakes between bites of a delicious burger.

Saying: why, why, why, why, why...are good shoes so hard to find?

A statuesque blond says: he knows, he knows I puked all over the bathroom sink. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but you can still smell it!

A table of sweat-soaked landscapers say: thank God we're not in El Salvador. A machete killed my brother. They look at the man, 6'5" in a fishnet dress and flip flops and say: man oh man a woman who is a man--and dip their fries in squirt piles of fancy red catsup.

And ten people order a large #1 and someone drives a Cadillac SUV.

A bookish woman, slurping her soda, says to her friend whose nose looks like the beak of a Peregrine Falcon: you're gonna end up giving guy a heart attack with all that hatred. I killed a stepdad that way.

One man says: I saw my mandala in a box of newborn Peekapoo puppies; the afterbirth was a map. Now I know what to do.

A guy in the corner eating a spicy chicken sandwich says: spry references to masturbation aside, the reading was decent; one girl read a story about her stepfather dying from a botched gastric bypass. And she thought it was her fault. Can you imagine?

Then the woman comes over to refill her coke and says: didn't I see you at the reading last night? I'm Lydia. And the guy says: that's my mother's name! And offers her a seat.

It's a small world I tell ya. With a great big stage.

tiny, shiny, transient

Hell, anything tiny and shiny, I'm in, whatever heist you have planned. Everything is transient.

shield, hazard, movie-goer

"The Terrible Toll of the Task Master" June 1980, Walker Street Pharmacy, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Mom's doing mom things and I am looking at the rickety comics rack. A spindly wire frame apparatus, with about five baskets on each side that contain about 7-10 comics each. There is a metal plate on the top that says "Comics are for all ages". Why do they even put this Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost in here? I want the superhero stuff, by then I had already established as a regular monthly reader of the Amazing Spiderman and Star Wars (That Archie Goodwin/Carmine Infantino run fired my imagination probably more than the movies...but at 8 years old I couldn't get enough of that Galaxy Far Far Away. Especially what with the requisite distant father and drugged out older brothers and seemingly manically-depressed mother. I liked oddness of the 'non-team' Defenders and the X-Men still kind of scared me...I think this was due to the fact that Mego toy company didn't manufacture any X-men figures. I had a ton of those Mego guys, Spiderman, Green Goblin, Human Torch, The Thing, Thor...However, by mid '82 I was fully enrolled at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Stan the Man knew adolescent isolation better than most and what a way to connect to all those 'misfits' out there than to make a band of teenage outcasts, of the window to all of this was Kitty Pryde. Comics may have been a balm for those awkward years, but they may have also been the hazard that perpetuated my anti-social tendencies. Was it 'normal' for a 14 year old to be a solitary movie-goer, taking in movies alone on saturday afternoons? It wasn't that I didn't have friends, I did, more than enough in fact, it was that I just wanted to be alone. So, anyhow, back to this random memory of this comic I bought. I have no idea why this particular memory sticks with me more than others. There's a skeleton man with a shield and a bow and arrow and a sword. He looks pretty cool.

bruise, suitcase, fire escape

The angel of death rides into town on the rails. She steps out of the shadows of the boxcar and into the pre-dawn light. The sky above the color of a bruise as she slowly makes her way to town; the black hooded figure wading through the knee high grass and rusted remnants and discarded post-Americana. As she passed, crickets would hold their breath,wildflowers would shiver and the weeds would cringe. All stillness and blinking animals suppressing shudders, The angel stops by the black mirror of the creek as the fish scatter for the hollows. She dips a skinless toe in the icy waters as the currents slow to a barely audible swirl. Birds in the trees cease their cheery morning chirps, the crows perched on the power lines cut their cruel laughs and turn their black within black eyes upon the shrouded figure below. On the creek bed is a suitcase. It has a sticker that says “I’m a Beachbum for the Bahamas.” It is full of letters; feverish, languid, passionate letters, written in an expansive cursive. The content is a thatchet full of wild-haired nature,aching lust and the tangled, searching vines of longing and the bottomless hole of love. The angel of Death reads each one, letting them fall from her bare-boned hands into the cool waters, where the inks run and swirl and dissolve. The morning doves coo as the angle makes her way downtown. Business men and bums feel the morning chill as she moves past. A black cat sits on a fire escape and stares the angel down.

scandal, butter, Botox

The sound was too terrestrial to be a threat, but too industrious to be benign. She'd been through this. When a pause became a standstill from a thunk by the window, a fresh offering would likely follow at the altar of her slippers. A sacrifice for the promise of Fancy Feast aplenty. The birds almost always died from shock.

Hummingbirds especially, so iridescent, so small.

She heard the chitter again, from under her bed. Ducking her head from the Posturpedic her eyes sifted the dark for familiars. Scanning uncapped pens, Botoxed come-hither smiles on a torn scandal rag, dust bunnies, smut monkeys, dander lions, and crusty mouth guard. Her eyes adjusted and she saw them. It. The dating, proposal, falling out and the other she. Fives years all again at once. A flash. So wasted.

A broom was already beside her, along with a Tupperwear perforated for circulation. A lesson from last summer's sticky trap ordeal that required an entire stick of butter to remedy; and the slicked-up critter still lost a foot, and no less than half its fur. And with a few sniffs and a wash, it was gone.

She steadied herself with a flashlight.

Squirming between a pair of crumpled socks, a soft set of gleaming eyes -- four pink mounds, hairless and blind, tangled in sheaths of bloody placenta. The mother's legs no more than three. In front of its maw a sparkling object sat, colorless crystalline and gold. Worth a decade of groceries, and a lifetime of closure. Taking the cat outside, she shut the window. She sifted a drawer for a sleeve of crackers.
.

frequent, flyer, points

.
At certain points - elbow, knee, shoulder - 

contact is nothing. At others - drunken, say,

on empty stomachs - contact may force 

still other points - mostly those of contention.

Although not frequent enough to warrant a posting

or flyer of the facts as they stand, occasionally 

we require points of clarification, points of order.

Knees, at the end of thighs, in contact on a couch,

may be nothing. Our elbows knocking together,

also nothing. But my stray hand, on your side,

felt unforced, and it stirred my stomach 

like driving over hills, unravelling gravity -

I didn't know I knew your scent 

before you left it on my pillow.
.

nostrils, motel, gin rummy

The motel stunk like stale white cheese; the long walk home after his wife called to say their son was sick with fever--stunk even worse. This is why she always got the money up front. Now she just wanted something sweet to mask the lingering stench of raw shallots, surreptitiously stashed in the salad she'd ordered for dinner.

It was called the All You Can Eat Special.

$300--including an hour of whatever. Usually that just meant lying there, but sometimes all she had to do was take a long, soapy shower while her date watched, and urinated on her freshly pedicured feet.

Her nostrils burned with a thick bulbar waft as she sucked parsley from her teeth in the mirror. As she killed a second glass of water by the sink, her organs absorbed the liquid and expanded like prunes in a meaty stew. She scoured the cabinets for something sugar. Dried cherries. No. Raw honey on toast? No. She decided on a bowl of cereal.

Peanut butter puffs!

But to get the texture of the cereal just right she'd have to stand by for at least three minutes to let the milk simmer the rock hard exterior which might otherwise slice her gums to shards.

Stress, she had heard somewhere, was neutralized by crunchy food. Corn Nuts, pretzels, ice cubes in gin tonics, red rummy punch, celery stalks in Bloody Marys, those were all fine by her book. She unfurled the plastic from the box as a text bleeped from the counter. The message read: 2 nite fondue- freaky yes PLZ!

Lesbians. You could always count on them to procrastinate.
.

vivisection, crewel work, vodka

.
"I'm all complicated, girl... Like a Rubik's cube or some shit."

Take a bite of something so you don't have to respond.

So, this is what my dating life has become: nodding politely while I envision different animal heads in place of the face of this man. I'm squinting until he looks like a tattooed Egyptian mockgod and drinking cheap vodka to make the conversation palatable. He doesn't seem to notice - or mind, at any rate.

It's a slow, entrenched process of losing desire.

I remember being young and ardent, running down a romantic experience like it was a luxurious, leggy bit of prey. Every interaction was an emotional vivisection of sorts, unpacking it all to feel more mature, to soak myself in another human all the way to my sinews. There is a kind of learning that goes with youthful indiscretion and exuberance, dismembering the kill in the field.

These days, I'm just thankful if going through the motions is more interesting than an evening of crewel work - especially since I don't know how to embroider.
.

joint, bone, oink

.
There’s still some out there. Bedraggled and pinprick-eyed. One collective live their days pacing beneath high intensity discharge lighting - the kind of lighting you might find in a 1960’s psychiatric hospital, if such places had been preserved.

How come no one bothered to do that? Even now you can still visit the Old Melbourne Gaol, not that you’d want to. After the case of Elizabeth Scott’s ghost haunting the museum was verified, and she was given that Crunchie Bar she so desperately wanted, everything went back to normal. Like most places here, it's just a joint. Still, you can get a mean meat pie at the ol' gaol on a Sunday.

So, these lightweights believe that living beneath high intensity discharge lighting protects them from being sucked into black holes. It’s ridiculous, but, for history sake, I have to let you know: The future is stupid. And there ain't no bone to pick, either. No amount of therapy can coax lightweights out of their stupor. Instead of interfering we watch, and occasionally, feed them grits. We use Quaker brand grits because after the Big Oink fell to pieces it became really cheap to ship all their readymade stuff over here.

There’s a YouTube video entitled The ultimate discharge lamp startup video. At this time in history it probably doesn’t have many hits, but it sure as hell does here in the future! ...too many.

Deficiencies recorded are: low counts in vitamin D, extreme anxiety, sleeplessness. The rest of us are doing okay. There's been a few great bands come and go, one of which actually did get sucked into a black hole. People cried for months. It was bigger than Kurt Cobain's suicide.
.