Thanks for liking Big Al. She’s a conflagration of several girls I knew as a child growing up in Jersey City, most notably my sisters. I wanted to have a character who worked against type in most stories. Alabama does that because she’s a female in a traditionally male role—the urban tough. Yet this was the way it was growing up in the ghetto. Girls could be as mean and hard and dirty as the boys, sometimes worse, and they were more likely to carry brass

knuckles in their pockets than lipstick.

 

 

 

The narrator in other tales is known to be her little brother, Pete. He works against type also, being the more thoughtful and gentle of the two kids, although he is perpetually a step behind the more crafty and quick-witted and stronger Alabama.  If Big Alabama is sometimes in her element in the dark world of the ghetto, Pete never is.

 

The structure is drawn from a lot of stories with larger-than-life characters. Sherlock Holmes does not (usually) tell his own tales. Jesus does not write his own gospels. Big Alabama is too large to be the teller of her own tale. It would come off as bragging, hubris. Also, clever as she is, she cannot see her own failings, how the cruelty of the ghetto has rubbed off on her. It takes a Nick Carraway to tell the tale of the tragic Jay

Gatsby. It takes an Ishmael to tell the tale of tragic Captain Ahab. And it takes a Pete to tell Big Al's misadventures.

 

 

 

I write them as they come to me. I may be writing them the rest of my life, since Alabama and Pete just show up from time to time with a new story for me. Someday, I suppose, I will collect them in a book. Or it’s possible they will coalesce into a novel.

 

 

 

I’m always reading a lot of things at once. At the moment, I’m reading a pair of novellas by Donna Hilbert and Gerald Locklin. I’m also reading poems: Dog Angel by Jesse Lee Kercheval, Fever by Ron Koertge, and rereading Timothy Green’s American Fractal. Also, short stories: Madness in the Family by William Saroyan. Since I write them, I read young adult novels regularly. Right now I’m reading The Stalker by Nicole Davidson. On my walks, I’m

listening to some Teaching Company lectures on the history of the Catholic Church by William Cook. I’m also about to read a novel by Dan Simmons called Flashback. Of course, I read literary journals all the time, in print and online. I just got contributor copies this week from Creosote and Third Wednesday, so I’m looking forward to reading those.

 

 

The question is too large to answer briefly. The names alone would take up half the internet. I will say the Big Alabama stories owe a debt to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. There might even be some connection to a much earlier collection called Mama’s Bank Account, which became the movie: I Remember Mama, starring the brilliant Irene Dunne. I love both those books and the movie is one of my favorites. There is also,

almost certainly, a William Saroyan influence, who is perhaps my favorite short fiction writer, so much so that I am constantly rereading his collections. Big Al is very, very different than Esperanza of Mango, and she and Pete have a different life than the Norwegian immigrant family of Mama’s Bank Account, and I’m not anywhere near the writer Saroyan was, but the connections are there and I hope I am honoring them.