By Christine Maul Rice
Detroiter Steve Hughes’s stories fishtail onto the page in his short story collection, Stiff (Wayne State University Press, 2018), whipping and swerving, offering up dreamlike imagery and absurd twists at lighting speed. There are shout-outs to Kafka around every corner: surreal imagery, a vivid sense of anxiety and alienation. In another writer’s hands, these themes are grim but, in Stiff, it’s just the opposite: if you haven’t had fun reading a short story collection in a while, this might be the book for you.
Webster’s dictionary defines ‘stiff’ as:
not easily bent or changed in shape, rigid”; “severe or strong”; “a dead body”; “cheat (someone) out of something, especially money”; “ignore deliberately; snub.”
All of these definitions reflect the situations Hughes’s characters face but we might add a definition found in the Urban Dictionary.
stiff
a word used as an adjective to describe how a penis gets hard during sexual activity
Yep. That applies too.
In one story, a couple’s engorged genitals separate from their bodies to rendezvous in a carp-infested river. In another, a lovesick cowboy rides his trusty steed, Squint Eye, from one Michigan city to the next, all for his sweetheart.
I’m a bit late to the Steve Hughes party but caught up with him to discuss the lost art of listening, the zine Stupor, and Bonnie Jo Campbell preparing deviled eggs in his kitchen before a Good Tyme Writers Buffet reading.
Christine Rice: You are the writer and publisher of Stupor, billed as “Detroit’s longest-running zine.” In Stupor you publish the stories of people you’ve talked to around town. Have you always been a good listener? Are people drawn to you because of this? Or, why do you think people tell you their stories?
Steve Hughes: When it comes to Stupor, I’m kind of a greedy listener. It’s not like I’m out there gobbling up stories, but I am asking for them. My location is the bar, usually one in my neighborhood. I find that about half the people I meet are happy to talk, and more so late at night as more drinks are poured and everyone really starts to relax.
I used to document the stories by writing notes on napkins or just did my best to remember, but that didn’t work so well and some of the pieces seemed to lack origin. Now I use a video recorder. It’s a little awkward and obvious and some people shy away or don’t want me to point it at their face. That’s all fine. What I like about the camera is that it’s accurate. It’s also cool to hear the voice of the teller when I go to transcribe their story.
On a typical night out, I can easily gather twenty stories, which is about twice as many as I need to fill one issue of Stupor.
CR: Twenty-five years next year? That’s a record publishing history for any publication. Being a publisher of a magazine myself, I’m wondering: did you ever consider chucking it? Taking a break?
And, along the way, what has the discipline of curating, writing, and publishing Stupor taught you about your process, about writing in general?
SH: I have had one significant break in production. I didn’t mean to. It just happened. It was back in 2000, right after I published issue 9. There were some major bad health issues in my family and then a death too. It was more than I could handle. I was down for about three years, not writing or anything. When I did start again, it was almost like I needed to relearn how. I found that writing a little every morning made me feel better. Around that time, a friend asked me to make a Stupor for an art show which sought to recreate the Civil War battle of the Iron Clads. It was a goofy idea but I got into it and remembered how good it felt to be immersed in a project. I appreciated the prompt. By 2004 Stupor had legs again.
Over the years, I’ve learned that I work better with other people than I do alone. Collaboration is a critical component of Stupor and also on a different level for the stories I wrote for STIFF. Always it seems connecting to the community is important in the process of writing, in story gathering, and also in presenting a finished work. The next issue of Stupor, titled “Junkyard Farm,” is scheduled to be released on November 16. On that day, a local theater, Planet Ant, will perform the issue in a series of staged monologues. Sitting in the audience and seeing my work performed on stage is an awesome and humbling experience.
In regards to STIFF, I read early drafts of each of the stories at my literary series The Good Tyme Writers Buffet. I think reading to an audience is a form of publishing. It forces me to think about my work differently because I know I am going to have to present it. I’m going to have to engage an audience. Plus it happens in a finite moment and creates a deadline. This can be helpful too.
CR: You do a good deal to promote the arts in the city of Hamtramck and the greater-Detroit area. You are the creator of The Good Tyme Writers buffet, a literary series and potluck that takes place at Public Pool, a neighborhood art space in Hamtramck.
What’s the most epic potluck dish ever created?
SH: One of my favorite Buffets was when Bonnie Jo Campbell came to read. I was a huge fan of her work, but I had never met her and was super excited to have her out. As I do with all the readers, I asked her to bring a dish to pass. Since she had to drive across the state, I told her she could use my kitchen if she needed. That sounded good to her. So, she came to my house early in the evening and set up to make deviled eggs. My girls were excited to help and there was a lot of talk about her donkeys. After all the eggs were boiled and peeled, Bonnie asked if she should toss the shells in the trash or if the sink is cool. The sink seemed fine. So I smushed them in there and cranked up the garbage disposal. Immediately it plugged. There was no ignoring it. The babysitter was coming. The dishes were already piling up. So while Bonnie and the girls mixed up the eggs, I got out my wrench and a bucket and tore the drain apart. I think we have a picture of it somewhere. Hard to believe, one of my literary heroes was actually in my kitchen, and I had my head under the cabinet, trying to keep my butt from hanging out. Oh brother! I’m not a fan of plumbing. All the same, I got the drain going again. We made it to the Buffet on time and Bonnie’s eggs were wonderful. I liked the spicy ones with red pepper. And what a great reader she is!
CR: How did you start promoting the arts? Did it evolve organically out of publishing Stupor? Who or what has helped along the way—individuals or organizations? Both?
SH: It was back in 2007 when I first realized that working with a different artist on each issue of Stupor might be cool. It was, and it immediately doubled my audience. At this time there was a small but strong arts community in Hamtramck. Really interesting stuff was happening. Houses were selling for 500 bucks. The New York Times was writing about it. People were getting famous in small ways. In 2009, at one of the local galleries, I had a show called Stupor: A Retrospective Of Bad Ideas. It gave me an opportunity to feature work from my collaborating artists and organize a reading too. Not long after, the owners decided to close the gallery. So what I did was I organize a group of friends, and we figured out a way to reopen the space. In the spring of 2010, Public Pool was born. For years, running the gallery has given me the opportunity to create new collaborations with artists and helped me build a writing community through The Good Tyme Writers Buffet. Along the way, I received grants. One big one for my work in Stupor from the Kresge Foundation and two from the Knight Foundation, one for the Writers Buffet and last to expand the scope of Stupor.
CR: Someone once asked me why I incorporate magical elements in my writing. It seemed evident to me: magical elements seem to be just around the corner of every experience…or something like that.
You incorporate magical elements in many of the stories in Stiff. In “Wood for Rhonda,” for example, a man turns to wood after drinking his lover’s (who also happens to be a witch) elixir.
You write:
Keep it going, she says. I would but everything is so ridiculously stiff. I can no longer thrust my hip, bend my spine, nothing, so she takes the matter into her own hands and finishes the job. She has what she wants. She rolls over exhausted and happy. Amen, she says. I lie there, somewhat stunned, trying to understand what she’s done to me. That’s a vertical grain running down my torso, and darkened knots of flesh stub from my chest. On top of that, I can barely bend to sit up. What have you done to me?
Why do magical elements take your attention?
SH: I read “Wood For Rhonda” for the first time at the Writers Buffet on the day of my 50th birthday. The male character in the story was also just 50. So I aligned myself with him and thought about issues connected to aging and the sad sort of physical dénouement we all suffer in one way or another as our bodies decline. Then I thought of the efforts we take to stay young, and virile and, well . . . stiff. I was thinking about that and mortality too when I started working on the piece. So those are sort of heavy subjects that wouldn’t be any fun to approach head on. Why should I when there is the possibility of completely shifting reality? I like the humor and absurdity and lightness in a magic that might turn a man to wood only because his wife wants a more sustained sexual experience. I like obscuring the line between what’s real and what’s not. I also like suggesting that I might be very much like this character and suffering as he does and maybe even awed by the mysterious abundant sexual prowess of my wife. Maybe, just maybe, I’m wood too.
CR: What a great title: Stiff. Sex drives the narrative of many of these stories. The situations characters find themselves in are often ridiculous (but wholly believable), hopeless, and sad—or some combination of all three. Sex—in all its gory detail—serves as the vehicle to deliver much of the collection’s humor.
How did this collection develop? Did you find, suddenly, that you had stories that hung together? Or did you set out to write a collection?
SH: I wrote the stories that appeared in STIFF over the course of four years. I read each one at The Good Tyme Writers Buffet. In the back of my mind, I knew they hung together, mostly because they were set in Detroit or Hamtramck. It seemed like having this local connection would help me more immediately engage my audience. It was not until Wayne State University Press sent a rejection email for my previous book along with a friendly note asking me to send the next thing that I realized I had enough stories to build a new collection, so I spent a morning putting together the manuscript. The next day I sent it off.
CR: What writers do you adore? What writers have helped you see your craft more clearly?
SH: Denis Johnson for The Name Of The World and Jesus’ Son and the poems in Incognito Lounge, Raymond Carver for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Janet Kauffman for Obscene Gestures For Women, Faye Kicknosway for All These Voices, Andy Mozina for Quality Snacks, Barry Hannah for Airships and Captain Maximus, and Donald Ray Pollock for Knockemstiff.
CR: What’s your favorite place to write or collect stories? Do you write in public spaces?
SH: My favorite bars for collecting stories are all here in Hamtramck. You’ll find me at Bumbos, Kelly’s, Outer Limits, or Ghostlight.
No, I don’t write in public. I’m too easily distracted and would just end up talking. Mostly I work at a desk on the second floor of my house with headphones going, maybe listening to Slayer or Aphex Twin or Coltrane.
Steve Hughes is the writer and publisher of Detroit’s longest-running zine Stupor. He is also the author of two collections, Stupor: A Treasury of True Stories (Stupor House, 2011), funded by the Kresge Foundation, and STIFF (Wayne State University Press, 2018). In 2011, he began producing the potluck/literary series called The Good Tyme Writers Buffet. Hughes lives in Hamtramck Michigan and continues to collect stories at local watering holes for forthcoming issues of Stupor.
Pick up your copy of Stiff at your favorite local indie book store.
Christine Maul Rice’s award-winning novel, Swarm Theory, was called “a gripping work of Midwest Gothic” by Michigan Public Radio and earned an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (finalist), and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk*, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of the literary nonprofit Hypertext Magazine & Studio and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University.
