By Kristin Pazulski
The term “noir” can bring images of dark alleys, curbside nights, the action beyond the street’s yellow coned spotlight. But to really understand noir, you have to go deeper, inside the spinning mind of those that haunt those dark places.
[caption id="attachment_5517" align="alignright" width="245"]
Noir can be a darker path: To read and write noir demands a lot of uneasy compassion. ... to do it right you have to be willing to go places where nobody'd want to go, and often with people nobody'd want to go with.[/caption]
Benjamin Whitmer, our new faculty member teaching an 8-Week workshop on Writing Noir Fiction, will take writers into a deeper understanding of noir writing. Though it tends to follow certain conventions, Whitmer will argue that the genre plays by its own rules—similar to noir protagonists.
Whitmer, a renaissance man and writer, wrote the critically acclaimed Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, and the noir classic Pike, which inspired author Steve Graham Jones to extol, "This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice—blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page." He took some time to talk to me about writing in general and his own writing in particular.
1. Why did you decide to write about the Louvin Brothers? Did you like their music?
Well, I didn’t so much decide to do that one so much as it landed in my lap. Neil Strauss had done a piece on Charlie Louvin for the New York Times awhile back and he wanted to put out a book on him for his pop culture imprint at Igniter. I didn’t even know exactly what the project was when I heard about it. I just knew it was a country music legend.
That said, once I found out the subject was Charlie Louvin, I was in. I knew enough about the Louvin Brothers to know they were foundational to most of the music I listened to, and I loved the murder ballads they’d done like “Knoxville Girl.” I also knew how violent and tragic their story was. And, of course, once I realized I was gonna be sitting around with Charlie, smoking cigarettes and listening to stories about Johnny Cash, I knew there was no way in hell I could pass it up.
2. You’ve had quite a few 'careers' (according to your own bio)—what, besides writing, did you enjoy the most and learn the most from? Does the experience of those careers help you now, as a writer? And are you ever tempted to write about those experiences, either as a memoir or through fictionalized characters?
I can’t say I’ve ever really enjoyed a day job except teaching (and that was part time, at best). Most of the rest of the work I’ve done has been pretty brainless. I’ve met a lot of interesting people, sure, but I could have met them other places that’re a lot more fun.
About the only thing I’ve ever really learned was that there’s maybe four people in the world who enjoy their day job. Which is its own kind of lesson, I guess. That most everybody’s trapped doing something that they hate for roughly a third of every day. Or, to put it a slightly different way, that almost everybody would rather be living some other life than the one they’re saddled with. In Willie Nelson’s words, 'Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.' That’s pretty good fodder for noir fiction in itself.
And, no, I can’t ever see myself writing a memoir. A book takes me two or three years to write, so I have to be real careful to pick subjects I’m gonna stay interested in for that long.
3. In your bio, you mention ‘ungentrified Denver and its bookstores’ … tell me more! Where are best places? What do you think of growing, gentrifying Denver? What genre would you place Denver, the city, in right now, if you had to?
I think when I wrote that I was talking about Northeast Denver. Along the lines of Globevile, Elyria-Swanson, unincorporated Adams County, Commerce City, etc. I’ve got a novel coming out next year that’s set largely in that area, and I was spending a lot of time over there. I had a gang of young Greeley toughs who’d come with me to keep me from getting killed while I took cell phone pictures in all the most interesting joints I could find. (Not that they were ever needed; we never walked into a place where everybody wasn’t very gracious.)
As to growing, gentrified Denver—it just bores me. I like places I can walk, think, see things that are interesting to me and my writing. I don’t find much of any interest in the gentrified areas. I’ve lived in one of them for the last year so I can be near my kids, and it’s like living in an Applebee’s. But, y’know, the schools are good and the library’s great and there are lots of parks, so I live with my hypocrisy, and drive to take walks. At least it’s easy to stay out of the bars, since you might as well drink in a drug store (to steal a line from Harry Crews).
And Denver’s a noir city. Hands down. Heavy class stratification, corruption, industrial wasteland, an often brutal police force, plenty of drug trafficking, some of the worst environmental conditions in any major metropolitan area, all the good stuff. I love it.
4. Explain to those who might not be familiar with the term 'noir fiction' what characteristics define a written piece for this genre, and what can students in your class anticipate to learn/refine? What’s going to the hardest concept/task to learn? What will likely be the easiest?
There’ve been a lot of definitions of noir fiction. Often noir’s about crime from the point of view of the criminal. Usually it’s folks who’re trapped, reduced to desperate circumstance to get out of a bad situation. In that way it’s about choices and consequences. Some of it’s just about vantage point. In other kinds of crime (and even literary) fiction, the protagonist works to remedy some calamity in society; in noir, society itself is the calamity. Of course, every one of those things is contradicted in even the books we’ll be reading.
As to what’ll be hardest, I think that’s probably going to be compassion. To read and write noir demands a lot of uneasy compassion. That’s what I think Eddie Muller meant when he wrote, 'Noir does not call for ironic detachment. It calls for the ultimate commitment: a willingness to go to the darkest places and remain compassionate in the face of hopelessness.' No matter what your definition of noir, to do it right you have to be willing to go places where nobody'd want to go, and often with people nobody'd want to go with. And you can’t do it with winks or asides or tricks.
That said, it may be easier for folks to do these days. If nothing else, there’s been some great noir-ish television in the last 10 years. But to me, noir is still gut-check literature. The temptation to make cheap or surface-level judgments is still there, and that’s the hardest thing to avoid. I’ve got a post-it note above my writing desk with two words on it: 'Dig Deeper.' I think there’s a lot to be learned in all of literature from just that.
And I think the easiest’ll be a fondness for firearms and tobacco. Those are key. Luckily they’re both so much fun.
