Mike Dell'Aquila received a BA from Penn State University and an MA Brooklyn College. His writing has appeared in a variety of print and
online publications including KGB Bar Literary Magazine, Writing Our Way Home, Paterson Literary Review, Florida English Literary Journal, Italian Americana, and Kalliope: A Penn State Literary Journal. His short story “Growth” was also the first-place winner in the 2010 AICW short story contest. Mike is currently at work on his first novel and also maintains a blog that can be found here.
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Mike Dell’Aquila interview with Meg Tuite
These three flash pieces are all exceptional, Mike! The first story, “Promises,” is heartbreaking and powerful. We, as readers, find out from the first paragraph that the narrator’s wife, Ruth, has some disease. Her husband, Tim, and her are celebrating their anniversary and the dialogue is intimate and their respect for each other is well established. The ending is, in my mind, the ultimate act of love. What was your inspiration for this incredible story?
First of all, thanks for your kind words. I’m really happy to have found an audience for these pieces.
“Promises” is one of those “ripped from the headlines” stories. My wife and I usually have the local news on while we’re getting ready for work and I was half-paying attention to it when the anchor recapped a story in which a husband and wife were found dead in their home—I think it was in Queens. Apparently, the wife had suffered from MS for several decades and the couple decided that they had both reached the end of their roads. There was something about the mercy killing and suicide that really stuck with me for days to follow, and I felt inspired to try to capture that ultimate act of love (I agree with you on that point). Once I decided to write about this story, I made it a point not to research anymore about the murder/suicide as I didn’t want anymore of the real-life details to dictate the decisions I made on the backstory, etc.
The last two stories, “The Neighbors” and “Two-Point Turn,” have a young boy as the narrator who is privy to the secrets of those outside and inside his house. The beauty is that they are told without emotion and yet, reveal so much of the narrator’s feelings. How did you work the structure of these two stories to heighten the intensity in both?
It’s funny, I didn’t realize how closely these two pieces were related until reading them side by side. They were written a few months apart, so some of the ideas I was working through were obviously recycled, but I think structurally they’re opposite sides to the same coin. In either case, I thought it was important to limit the amount of access that the voyeuristic subjects had into the lives and worlds of the adults. Both stories feature protagonists that are old enough to think they understand what being a “grown up” is all about, but what they discover is that adults don’t always do the right thing and they really don’t act according to some idealistic model of rational behavior. To me, there is an indelible kind of disappointment when you realize that you have to readjust your own expectations of what your life will be like after childhood, and very often those discoveries are made by witnessing the mistakes of the adults who are closest to you. By having these two characters witness these scenes from a physical and emotional remove, they have to process what they’re seeing through whatever filters they have at their disposal rather than having some kind of authoritative figure explaining it for them. To me, that’s what makes it emotional without being melodramatic.
Do you have a specific genre that comes more easily to you, as a writer, than others?
Most of the fiction I’ve written over the years has been pretty cookie-cutter literary fiction. I’m actually trying to branch out and, to that end, I’ve been working on piece of historical fiction (more on that below). I’ve really enjoyed writing historical fiction and I think it’s something I’d like to do more of in the future. I’d also like to write a piece of science fiction at some point in my life, but I haven’t ever come up with a halfway decent idea on that front.
What books are you reading now?
During the last couple of months, I’ve been making more of an effort to cast a wider net with the books that I’ve been reading. Right now, I’m re-reading The Divine Comedy by Dante, and I’ve also recently finished Home by Toni Morrison, Marvel 1602 by Neil Gaiman, Baudolino by Umberto Eco and Mao II by Don DeLillo.
What an amazing mix of writers. Love it. Who are the writers that have inspired you most?
When I first decided that I wanted to become a writer, the two most important authors in my life were Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway—in that order. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gravitated toward more cerebral writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. I really don’t know if that’s a natural progression or not. I guess in some way, I like to be challenged by the things I read and all of those writers have pretty specific styles and approaches to telling stories.
Do you have any writing practices that help you get past those hellish moments where you feel blocked?
I don’t know if you can categorize this as a healthy writing practice or if it’s actually a personality flaw, but I think the best way I can manage through those moments is by being relentlessly stubborn. I almost approach it like a battering ram or a wrecking ball and figure that repetition is the only way to weaken—and eventually plow through—some of those blockades. That may not be the best or most efficient way of going about it, but I think it does produce a certain amount of confidence when you finally break through. Either way, I definitely think that this approach is directly related to my first two literary idols.
Do you have specific writing habits on when and where you write?
Absolutely. I’m pretty ritualistic when it comes to writing. Everyday, I take my lunch break at the same time, I walk a few blocks down the New York Public Library (their Reading Room is a great place to work) and I make sure that I write for an hour. I prefer writing with a pen and paper, and I make sure that the pen keeps moving from start to finish. On the weekends, I like to get up before my wife, make some coffee and put in an hour of writing on our deck (weather permitting). I also have an unhealthy attachment to using Pilot G-2 pens, which doesn’t really affect the when or where, but is still very much a part of the ritual.
I used to go the library every day and write. It’s an excellent place to focus in without the computer, phone and other crap that can keep us from the work. What music inspires you?
I have pretty eclectic tastes as far as music goes. It’s hard to say that one genre has more of an effect on me than another, though the amount of hip hop that I listen to sometimes surprises people. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of 90s-era rock, which I can’t really explain or defend except to say that it’s sort of like musical comfort food.
I am going to give you five words as a prompt. Write a story using these words.
Swine, morose, sphere, abyss, fragment
Alan was in his den. He called it a man cave because the room featured a big screen TV, a leather recliner and a vintage-inspired globe that doubled as a bar stand, but the room was still just a den. The sphere was open and the world was cut in half like some erroneous map illustrated during the Age of Exploration. Alan hovered over the space and poured single-malt scotch into two different glasses.“I’m giving you the good stuff,” Alan said to his brother. “I always say I’m saving it for some special occasion, but that opportunity never actually comes.”Andrew looked at his twin brother. He’d never seen him looking this morose. Maybe when they lost the divisional playoff game in their senior year, but that was just childish disappointment; that was not pain distilled with age and regret.“Didn’t someone teach us not to cast pearls before swine,” Andrew asked, punctuating his question with a brusque laugh.“No,” Alan answered. “I think it’s Jesus who said that. It’s in the Bible, anyway. I’m sure of that much.”“Oh.”“Listen,” Alan said as he handed his brother the glass. “It’s over with me and Rachel.”“Because of what happened with the company? Shit. Did you tell her that we can always go back to working for general contractors? I mean, the well is pretty dry right now, but things will hit bottom soon. Maybe they already have. Anyway, it’s not like this recession is some kind of endless abyss. We’ll bounce back and you guys will bounce back, too.”Alan shook his head. He was always the calm one and his brother the excitable one. They both lacked the sort of telepathy that non-twins assume all shared-egg siblings have. For the first time in a long time, Alan wished that they did share an unspoken connection. It would have made this conversation easier, rendered it unnecessary; it would have kept the seal of his bottle of Balvenie in tact.“It’s not the money, not completely,” Alan answered. “And it wasn’t her call, either. It’s mine.”“Buddy,” Andrew said, forcing down a sip and putting his glass down on the end table next to a stack of cork coasters. Andrew waited a few beats before continuing. He ran his hands over the sides of his hair, the thickest patches left on his head. “You have to give me a shot to talk you out of this. Please tell me that it’s not final yet.”“It’s not final but it is too late. She already knows how I feel.”“She might know, but I don’t. What the hell is going on with you?”“You can’t understand, Andrew. You’ve got the dream family. And anyway, all your kids are both of yours. You’ll never know what it’s like to be a distant fragment or some kind of moon orbiting around this planet that doesn’t really need you and forgets that you exist half of the time.”“That’s not how it is and you know it.” Andrew’s eyes darted from one wall decoration to the next. There were pictures of the twins as boys, a poster signed by Eric Dickerson and a dartboard that looked like it was also from some SkyMall catalog, just like the globe bar stand. “You love that kid. You’re like a father to him, even better than dad was with us.”“It’s an act,” Alan snorted. “He’s not a bad kid and I do care about him, but I’m not his real father and he’ll never forget that. I think he’s just old enough to respect that I look out for him and his mom when I don’t have to, when she and I haven’t loved each other for years.”“And you can’t try to make it work for his sake? You know, so it’s not another man walking out of his life?”“That’s what I’ve been trying to do all this time. You can’t just make a family, though, not this way. Not when you all know how artificial the whole damn thing is.”Alan swiveled in his chair and pushed back the Northern Hemisphere. The thin metal clanged and echoed from inside the chrome core. Andrew watched his brother grope for the bottle that was lying just out of reach, somewhere inside the world that was now cut in two.
That was exceptional, Mike. Wow! Thank you for indulging me on that one. One final question. What are you working on at this time?
I’m putting the finishing touches on my first novel. Like I said earlier, it’s a work of historical fiction, which was a genre that I hadn’t attempted before. Similar to what happened with “Promises,” I came across a somewhat obscure figure from the turn of the twentieth century. It sounds kind of cliché in the abstract, but his story is all about an ordinary person doing an extraordinary thing. In spite of all the ramifications of the act that made him (in)famous, though, it was still not enough to keep parts of his biography from being lost to history. As such, there was a natural gap between what was known and what would have to be invented in order to tell the story, and so I decided that it would make for an exciting literary project. Hopefully it makes for an exciting novel, too.
Looking forward to that. Sounds incredibly interesting. Thank you so much, Mike, for this amazing interview and for sending Connotation Press some of your brilliance!
It is really my pleasure. Thanks again for publishing my work.
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