Paul Luikart, a contributor to this publication, is an author of short fiction who devotes much of his time to aiding homeless services in Phoenix, Chicago, and Chattanooga. His latest chapbook of flash fiction, poetry, and artwork, Metropolia (Ghostbird Press), focuses on themes of religiosity, including the struggles faced by the homeless and feelings of abandonment by God. In one of the collection’s stories, “Old Songs for Quarters,” the narrator encounters a homeless man attempting to sing over the noise of a nearby train and thinks to himself, “It’s vulgar to think of my father this way, that his spirit lives on in the reedy voice of a beggar singing old songs for quarters, instead of in a mansion in Glory. Still, I drop all the change I have into the old man’s cup. Laundry can wait till payday.”
This past fall, Luikart visited an undergraduate writing class at Lee University, where Luikart answered students’ questions about the book. After that in-class discussion, two of the students, Eric Van Gorden and Braden Dyk, contacted Luikart to ask further questions about his work. What follows is a transcript, edited for clarity and concision, of that conversation.
Eric Van Gorden & Braden Dyk: When you visited our class, you mentioned that when you encounter people experiencing homelessness, you absorb them into your creative mind and bring them back out into your stories. Could you say more about this? Do you see your writings on the struggles and graces of homelessness as part of your advocacy for homeless people?
Paul Luikart: Love this question. I hope that’s true, that my writing on the struggles and graces of homelessness is a kind of advocacy. If my writing does shine any kind of a true light on the men and women who experience homelessness, I’ll consider myself lucky. Now, go with me on this next part…A long time ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. Eventually, they died off and their carcasses went down into the earth and the deep processes of the earth and time changed them into oil. Oil gets sucked up from the ground, transformed further into gasoline, and powers our cars. Is gasoline the same as dinosaurs? Nope. But there is an essence the two share. When I encounter people who live in homelessness or near-homelessness and they’re good enough to let me walk alongside them for parts of their lives, those encounters always go very deeply into the recesses of my brain. Later, often much later, they come back out as I write. The real encounters, though, are entirely unrecognizable except for the essences of them that my brain, over time and by way of deep processes, has retained. They’ve been worked over by unconscious rumination and imagination and don’t look, per se, like the actual events and actual people anymore. But the essences remain. It’s hard to lose essences, once you really grab ahold of them.
In the story “Beads” we see two men bypass a homeless boy and give beads to his dog. The boy responds by saying, “It’s a blessing, Zeke. God is love.” What aspects of God’s love and our care for poor people did you hope to convey with this story? How does the boy’s response reflect that?
Huh. I don’t know. I wanted the story to present a quick imagining of a circumstance where there isn’t any evident presence of God. In real life, we’re often left asking, “Where was God in all of that?” The men in the story toss the beads—a strange symbol of acceptance in New Orleans on Bourbon Street, a symbol that, if you’re wearing beads, suggests you belong there—not to the kid but to the dog, an intentionally cruel act. It’s a reminder to the kid, at least, that he doesn’t belong there or, perhaps, anywhere. But God doesn’t save the kid from his circumstances and God doesn’t punish the bead-throwers who’ve acted so cruelly. When we don’t see any evidence of God, particularly in difficult realities or injustices, is He really there? Do we have to make Him up? I think the kid’s statement that God is love is a bit of a desperate grab at self-reassurance that God even exists.
The art pieces Path to Heaven and The Devil’s Bones bear stark similarities, with the only real difference that the black strokes in Path to Heaven are much denser. Could you say more about this? Why are the black strokes, a color often associated with darkness and evil denser in Path to Heaven?
Two reasons, I think. One boring, the other perhaps at least quasi-thoughtful. The boring: I bought these great art pens that are essentially ink brushes. I love ‘em. The ink is so expressive. You can go really thick and heavy or you can go really light and barely-there, like the shadows of leaves or something. I was initially just having fun with my new toys, and those drawings are the results. The quasi-thoughtful: The denser, black strokes are more definite, more distinct. There are a million ways to go to hell. You don’t even need to do anything. You can just sit there and do nothing and find yourself, one day, burning in hell. With Heaven, as we tend to think of it, it’s not so willy-nilly. The ‘how we get there,’ is much more clearly defined.
In “Holy,” you quote Matthew 11:30, where Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” The narrator argues that “sure, he probably said it, but I bet you he winked when he did.” Why do you think that holiness is heavy, as the narrator suggests?
On the one hand, if we take Jesus at His word, that His yoke is easy and His burden is light, then holiness (for that is the yoke, I think, that He’s talking about) is a simple, feather-light thing. You could put it in your pocket with your car key and carry it around and forget it’s even with you. And that’s the inviting part of holiness. Anybody can have it. Anybody can pick it up. On the other hand, holiness is the most rare and precious thing in the entire universe. Rare and precious things tend to be heavy (e.g., a royal crown, a multi-carat diamond), and not just in physical weight. They tend to be fraught with the heaviness of meaning or implied meaning: A heavy crown, for example, might imply the king feels the weight of the responsibility of leading his kingdom. I take Jesus’ statement as both a simple invitation to the holiness that He imparts to those who follow Him, but also as a deeply ironic, maybe even sarcastic, statement, in that to wear the yoke of Christ means to care for His people…the poor, the lonely, the imprisoned, the desolate, the downtrodden…and there is plenty of societal, emotional, spiritual, even physical weight to that.
When you visited our class, you said that the stories without explicit spiritual or religious references—such as “Cigarettes at Kanku’s”—have more implicit themes, such as the grace and mercy of people looking out for each other. Could you say more about implicit themes one of the stories in the book, “Fight,” since it seems to lack grace or any benevolent intervention?
Good question. It’s really important to wonder artistically what a world without mercy might look like.
In [my story] “Fight,” there are a couple of jaded cops and a couple of drunk businessmen in a fist fight. The cops understand that these two drunk guys couldn’t actually hurt each other if they tried, just because they’re a.) drunk and b.) really bad at fist-fighting. The cops’ perspective, then, might be that they’d reserve their energies for what they’d consider more serious criminal activities. A drunken fistfight on Bourbon Street is pretty ho-hum, compared to what else happens there. The cops might say, then, that they staying out of it is a benevolence, in that they are freed up to intervene in an inevitable “something worse.” As an author, then, in “Fight” I wanted to ask the questions: What is mercy? What is benevolent intervention and how might it not be what we’d perhaps automatically assume? How can I presume to know what the best avenue for benevolence is in any given circumstance?
In “Chicago Blues,” the city addresses a woman, telling her that “I have forgotten you for so long, my love. / I am a city and I must devour my lovelies so my heart will beat.” How do you understand the significance of this contradiction, being both forgotten and loved, and how does it reflect the realities of life?
Not too long ago, I was strolling through an abandoned cemetery in Chattanooga. I noticed a headstone that said, “Gone, but not forgotten.” The irony, of course, is that whoever it is that was buried under that stone had been completely forgotten. That doesn’t so much answer your question as it does “prove” that we’re all forgettable, but we don’t like to be thought of as forgettable. We want to be unforgettable. That’s pretty real, I think, that most of us will be forgotten a couple generations or so after our deaths, if we’re lucky. Cities, like Chicago, are tremendously vibrant, hugely full of life. My knee-jerk response upon seeing that headstone was one of sadness, like, ‘Aw, how tragic, that guy is dead and buried in this now abandoned cemetery and nobody remembers him or even cares.’ But that’s only a sadness the living feel. Maybe the significance, as it is parsed in “Chicago Blues,” is that love is eternal, but not the kind of love we tend to think of. It’s necessary for older versions of cities to pass away so that newer versions can come along. Everything falls apart, everything dies. So, then, actual love must be immune to death. I hope, with this piece, to ask what other forms of love there might be? In the story/poem, the woman loves her city, but it moves on without her, and necessarily so. Could this woman, and could we, be loved by a love that would never move on without us? Does such a thing exist? Is the pity that is perhaps aroused in us when we consider a forgotten headstone or a woman who has lived past her prime in her own hometown a signal from another kind of love? A beacon of it?
The final piece of your chapbook is the artwork titled Wait. How do its colors of gray, red, orange, and black suggest waiting? Was this meant to resonate with the final words of the previous story: “Over the Gulf of Mexico / Beyond it, someplace, / must lie Heaven”?
I think so, yeah. That the final lines of that poem should resonate with the painting. Waiting suggests that something comes next and that waiting there, wherever ‘there’ is, is purposeful and worth it because the next thing that comes is of greater value than the time it takes to wait for whatever it is that’s next, or else we wouldn’t wait.
Is that why it’s the last thing in the book?
I liked the idea of ending the entire chapbook on a note of waiting, that whatever your, the reader’s, takeaways from the work as a whole are, there is something greater out there. And the line, “beyond it, someplace, must lie Heaven,” implies that the persona of the poem has discovered something worth waiting for. S/he might not know anything about it beyond that, but it does exist.