SmokeLong Quarterly

You are great at character names! I think this fact is known throughout the world. Your character names are a story unto themselves. What is your naming process like and/or how did the character names in “Jigger” come to be?

Many of my characters’ names come from the neighborhood I grew up in. Everyone on Grafton Hill had a nickname. Jigger McGrail, for example, was the name of a guy who owned a tavern called Jigger and McGrail’s in Worcester. Jigger’s actual first name was, I believe, James. Mary Muray was a friend’s sister who lived a couple of blocks from our house and was a year or two ahead of me in St. Stephen’s School, and who did claim to have seen the statue of the Virgin move. A childhood friend, Jimmy (Mac) McDermott, sent me an email this week after he finished reading my novel My Darling Boy. He wrote that he had an advantage over other readers in that “I get to laugh out loud more often than they because I get Tiger Tivnan and Paul Skopetski and Bill Abdelnour—other quirky folks from my own memory.” I have files of names that I’ve compiled over the years. Surnames, first names, male and female. First and surnames for women, another for men. I’ve got another page of my father’s friends and their nicknames, some of whom I have already used: Jumbo Nelson, Bay Lettiq, Chingie Tripodi, and so forth. Need a name? Check the files.

You do some amazing time compression in “Jigger.” We’re in the bar but we’re almost in Alaska; we’re in Jigger’s home and also in O’Malley, Nevada. Could you talk a little about how you use time in connection with plot here?

Jigger lets his mind wander the way I do when I’m writing a story. It’s a world of the imagination rather than a physical world. And you never know what’s around the next bend. Home is not so much a place as a state of mind, maybe. A place in which you would love to live. One that you’ve helped create.

You write fantastic, big novels that spill over with movement and scene. I recall you mentioning that you know when you’re about to write a piece of flash. What’s satisfying about flash that maybe is an itch the novel can’t scratch?

Most of my flash fictions are based on found forms. Hermit crab stories, my friend Julie Marie Wade might call them. I think of them in Virginia Woolf’s terms, and maybe that will serve for now as a definition of the very short story; flash fictions: little miraculous illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

If you could choose only one piece of punctuation, what would it be? Could you use exclusively that punctuation mark in your answer?

Without question: the period. You have to stop somewhere. All the other marks of punctuation are arbitrary.

You use a lot of brand names in “Jigger:” A Bruin’s cap, Ajax soap, and Dugan’s beer, for example. In this case they help with setting. What are some other ways you build setting in flash?

I don’t want to say that I grew up in a barroom, but I spent an inordinate amount of time in barrooms as a kid. Both my parents tended bar as second jobs. They had to take us along. These images are those I remember from the bars of my youth. And they give me a sense of place and time. When I see that Dugan’s and the ‘Gansett clock, I am in the bar with Jigger.