CR: role does music take in your writing? Many stories reference songs, and in contributors' notes occasionally you've mentioned stories have .,.,., ................ stemmed from songs. are thoughts on the ways in music might enhance the writing or, perhaps, how this quality to may be a by-product ofyour love for music? MP: Music is such a part ofmy life, always has been, that it's really hard for me to think about my work as separate from music. I listen to music all the time-as I write this, I'm listening to an old Dinosaur Jr. album, and the first thing I did when I got out the duct tape this morning to try to extract those bothersome cactus barbs was put on a record. (I Love You But I Have Chosen Darkness, which gets my vote for best band name of recent years.) How anyone could duct tape the cactus barbs out of their ankle without musical accompani– ment is beyond me, but then there are thousands of things I cannot do without music, including but not limited to: cook, shower, fold clothes, rake leaves, grocery shop, pay bills, wrap presents ... the list is endless. It is true that my work has been increasingly inspired by music, but I think it was there from the start. I was a little hesitant to admit that mine was not a particularly literary adolescence. I grew up in the '70s , standing around the parking lots of laundromats, listening to eight-track tapes ofMott the Hoople and Led Zeppelin and the Stones through someone's busted back-seat speakers. But then I realized that you didn't have to grow up reading your way through the Western Canon in order to be a writer. I cannot overestimate the importance of reading ifyou want to write, and I did eventually learn to read. Books are made of other books, but they are also cobbled together from other elements, other influences. I seem to be, for better or worse, a bit of an obsessive type. Whatever I'm obsessed with often finds its way, usu– ally in a diluted form, into the work. In the past ten years I've become increasingly devoted to endurance sports, and I can see how that sort of painful pleasure or pleasurable pain has seeped into the stories. 62
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