I Wanted This to Feel Personal: An Interview with Tucker Leighty-Phillips

Avee Chaudhuri: Children at play seems to be of recurring interest in the collection. There are all these powerful and evocative instances and sentiments of children at play, and the chapbook’s longest piece is “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies, (play)” which is about children ad-libbing their way through a stage adaptation of the fairy tale. So I guess the actual question part is, has childhood always been a muse for you as a writer? Or are these recent developments?

Tucker Leighty-Phillips: I think so, but it may not be in the way you would imagine. I didn’t start writing until I was in my mid to late twenties. I’m 32 now. I’m about to be 33. So before I was writing, [childhood] was something that was really present in my thought and modes of connection with people. I was definitely one of those people at a party who would sit around and be like, “Yo, remember Legends of the Hidden Temple?” I was like, “Remember this thing from being a kid? Remember this?”

There’s this thing I’ve read about online, a very common occurrence that when two young guys don’t know what to talk about, they just name athletes from their childhood. Like, “Remember Jerry Rice? Remember Latrell Sprewell?” and I feel like that sort of reliance on childhood memories, or telling stories from middle school and high school—like asking about your school’s thing—a lot of that stuff has been a means of connecting with other people, especially acquaintances or strangers. So I feel like it’s something I’ve relied on a lot, and I think that translated seamlessly to writing; all these stories or experiences that have connected me to other people seemed like sensible places to analyze my childhood through writing.

AV: That’s really cool to hear, that the book is a natural mode of communication taken further. So you said these stories allowed you to analyze your childhood. This is not the right way to phrase the question but, what have you learned?

TLP: Oh, man, that’s a good question. Well, one of the big takeaways is I feel like there’s a certain—I moved. I moved north when I was like 19 or 20, right after high school, and I felt like growing up in the [small town] South was a different experience from growing up in a city or in the North. And that public school, especially in a super underfunded state like Kentucky, was a different experience. I tell some people stories, and they think Kentucky public schools are like the Wild West, you know—there are no rules. And everything was happening all the time.

It’s been a space for me to see the similarities between lived experiences, especially in Appalachia, and a larger cultural network, that living in Appalachia is its own thing, but also, it is not a completely removed thing. There are ways that I found myself connected to people in big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and people in other countries. I was just in Europe a month or two ago, and did the same thing, I was hanging out with new people, telling stories from childhood, and we found that there were a lot of similarities, even though we were on other sides of the world. And I feel like that’s cool; it’s been nice to see it as a way to feel like an Appalachian narrative is not strictly for Appalachians; it can be something that other people will read and be able to imprint their own experiences onto.

AV: No, I don’t think so. I’m really glad that you addressed region. I think the imprinting you’re describing is a really tangible part of the reading experience since a lot of the collection is flash… When I came across the story “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies, (play)” I was hit by a sense of envy. It’s so rich! It’s presented as a retrospective about a disastrous stage performance directed by a fictional version of yourself based on a story you’d written that seems no longer extant, based in turn on the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin. There’s an architecture to it that is formidable and like something out of Borges, but humor serves as this great leavening agent. What was the process of writing that story?

TLP: Well, there were two processes. There was a process in content and a process in form, and I think that the formal process was that I was reading a lot of Michael Martone at the time. I don’t know how much of his work you’ve read, but he has The Blue Guide to Indiana, which is like a fake guidebook to Indiana tourist sites and history that was so similar to other guidebooks that it was being sold in bookstores under the travel section, and then he had to add a disclaimer that it wasn’t real. He also has his book, Michael Martone, by Michael Martone, which is a book completely of contributor bios. You know, “Michael Martone is a writer from, you know,” over and over and over.

AV: Isn’t there one biography in there where he just takes Shaquille O’Neal’s biography?

TLP: I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t remember. But because there are like 200 of them. Yeah. And they shapeshift. I was really interested in looking into quote-unquote “objective forms of writing” and interrogating that. And I’m not the first person to do a Wikipedia article creatively, but that was a form I was interested in.

For the story itself, I knew I was trying to move back to Kentucky, I had moved away a decade before, and while I was gone, I went back to college and graduated and went to grad school, And I was afraid of coming back to my hometown and seeming like a pompous asshole. You know, I didn’t want people to think I’d left and gained all this big city culture and thought I was too big for my britches. And so I was trying to channel that energy, telling the story about an evil version of myself, who was coming back and being super manipulative, exploiting children for my own artistic gains. I think it was me trying to channel a bunch of anxiety into a weird creative story. I was playing with those concepts and also wanted to play with that form. So that’s what it was born out of.

AV: I’m curious about putting together this collection. How much did you have to leave on the cutting room floor? Can you talk about those decisions?

TLP: There was definitely a version of this chapbook at first that was like, “I want to have a chapbook,” and I was just throwing a bunch of shit together, giving it an umbrella theme that didn’t really exist, and was just like, “here are my 15 or 20 most recent stories. Please publish them.” And that didn’t work, so I kept tinkering with it, and an actual theme evolved, so I tried to chase that by writing more stories that felt like they were contributing to that project. I did end up cutting a bunch too, and if I went back and looked at the ones that didn’t make the cut, they’re mostly more straightforward surrealist stories. They don’t feel as grounded in the autobiographical experience, they feel more removed from me personally, and I think I wanted this collection to feel personal. I wanted it to feel like it was coming from a place of experience. And those other stories that didn’t make the cut might still have a home somewhere, but it didn’t feel right to include them in here. It felt like it stunted an emotional ride or emotional register.

AV: So, as you said, the first attempt was, “Here are 15 to 20 of my most recent things,” and you said that did not work, but then a theme emerged in later attempts. Do you think that theme would have emerged in a 150-page collection, or do you think it had to be kind of the brevity of the chapbook form that allowed you to think in that sort of thematic way?

TLP: You know if a book publisher reached out to me and said, “We would love to explore this concept in a 150-page format,” I’d say, “Yeah, I can definitely do that.” But if it’s not motivated by accolades, I don’t know because I think one of my fears was the bit growing tired, you know. I’ve said this in previous interviews; the concept in this chapbook mirrors what Tim Robinson is doing in I Think You Should Leave. He’s done interviews where he says every sketch is built around someone who is too invested and reaches a point where they’re way too involved and should step away. I took that as a motive for this collection; stories about characters who are trapped in vicious cycles and believe that whatever circumstances they exist in are by their own doing, without regard to systemic injustice. It’s all individual failure, or it’s like, “I have brought this on myself in some way.” And I think my big fear—and this is something that stifled me for a while—was that I was writing the same story over and over, with a different title and character. I felt like I’d gotten formulaic, and the formula was going to be figured out. I need to keep exploring creative ways to explore the ideas I’m interested in, so it doesn’t feel like it’s a CD with the same song 11 times, you know. I want it to feel comprehensive, like there’s dimension to it. I don’t know if I could do it over a more lengthy work. I think it would need to evolve, or I would need to put it away and come back to it with a different lens or scope.

AV: Well, since you mentioned I Think You Should Leave, I wanted to ask about influences of yours, across genres, across media, that you think would genuinely surprise us.

TLP: I feel like any sort of intercom speaker at a department store. Imagine the person who has to say these sorts of predetermined things like, “Dive into summer. We’ve got swimming trunks on sale.” And then also the person who has to be like, “We need a manager to customer service.”

I’ve always appreciated the performance of that. And also the people who are completely unwilling to perform. I think the service industry plays a big role in my work and having worked in the service industry plays a big role in my work, and the performance of having to be a body representing a company while also being a human being, and toeing that line of if I can be professional for five more minutes than I can be human, but also wanting to insist to all the people who are coming into these stores and places that you’re a human, whether or not they see it.

Maybe that doesn’t surprise people. But I feel like doing those announcements and having to get on the intercom and sometimes wanting to say, “This is the worst day I’ve ever had at this job,” instead of the thing I have to say, like, “It’s the season of Lima beans.’ I think about that line of performance and non-performance, upholding something for the sake of keeping a job, but also wanting to be like, “please God, recognize that I’m a human being.”

AV: So who should we be reading right now that isn’t being read or is criminally under-read?

TLP: Let me look at my bookshelf. I think I want to recommend people with books. But I also want to recommend people who don’t have books. It’s legitimizing to have a book in the world, and that’s exciting that someone can have something physical they take with them. But there are also a ton of really incredible writers that have not published a book yet that I think deserve, in some ways, even more attention. I really love jj peña. I think his work is awesome—maybe I’m gassing myself up by complimenting him. But he does short-form, emotion-packed, really charming autobiographical or semi-autobiographical work that feels very similar to what I want to do. And I think he does it so incredibly well. I love Rhea Ramakrishnan, who also has published a few things that are very sharp, and she gives off the vibe that she will eventually—and I don’t want to put pressure on her!—but her work reminds me of a lot of the stuff published by The Dorothy Project. I feel like if you love stuff Dorothy is publishing, you’ll love Rhea’s work.

I just read Lindy Biller’s chapbook Love at the End of the World, which is really great and heartfelt. It’s about the sort of mundane nature of climate apocalypse, when the world is ending, but you still have to send your kids to school. Her work is very in the realm of Aimee Bender. It’s fabulist but also rooted in reality, all the terrible things the climate is going to do to us in retaliation for what we’ve done to it.

Who else do I love? I’ve been reading this newsletter! I’ve got to shout this guy out, Jack Vening. He runs this newsletter called Small Town Grievances. It’s like fictional gossip of this fictional small town. It’s hilarious. I’ve really, really been enjoying it. I want to see them compiled into some sort of collection. Any publisher would be stoked to get their hands on it if they read it. I think it’s a pretty popular newsletter, but it’s fairly new to me, and I’ve been really, really digging reading it. Our local newspaper has this thing called “Speak Your Piece,” it’s like an anonymous editorial section, and it’s mostly about local politics and transphobia. But there are also really good snippets of everyday life, like, “I saw a person’s dog pee on the cabbage at the grocery store the other day.” among other weird little anecdotes from this town. And I’ve been sending them to Jack because I thought he’d appreciate them. I just sent him one today. The front page headline of our newspaper was about the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile being spotted in our county. He always responds really kindly. I don’t know if he actually enjoys me sending them every day. I might just be a reply guy, you know. But yeah, I think those are, off the top of my head, people whose work I’m really digging lately.

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Bio: Tucker Leighty-Phillips (he/him) is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. He is a graduate of the MFA in Fiction program at Arizona State University and currently lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Maybe This Is What I Deserve is his first chapbook. Learn more at TuckerLP.net.

 Bio: Avee Chaudhuri is from Wichita, Kansas.