Introducing: The New England Literary News Questionnaire
With Christopher Castellani
Good morning from the fast-slow creep into spring, and introducing a new now-and-then feature to the newsletter, the New England Literary News Questionnaire. A handful of questions posed to the region’s writers for glimpses into how they work, who they are, and their relationship to place.
The New England Literary News Questionnaire with Christopher Castellani
“A boy like him goes missing every day, and then a week, a month, a year later, he floats to the surface of some frozen river.” In Christopher Castellani’s new novel, Last Seen (Viking), a quartet of murdered boys watch from an in-between-beyond as the people they love most continue living. A true-crime flavor (Castellani followed a 2017 Boston murder case which led him to the “Smiley Face” murder theory) mixes with the haunt and lament of Spoon River Anthology and the ghosty non-linearity of some of Chris Adrian’s work. The multi-voiced book explores the ways love binds us, holds us in its mercy, defies time and place and life and death. And it asks the unanswerable questions: how do we understand ourselves, how do we understand anyone else, and what exists in the space between what we think we know and what we don’t. (And a disclosure: two centuries ago, give or take, I took a fiction writing class with Castellani through Grub Street. It was in the early 2000s and the class met in a dingy drop-ceilinged classroom in a building in Porter Square. I’d never taken a writing class before, and I still return to what Chris taught me. He was a wise and generous teacher, and that wisdom and generosity live deeply in his writing, too.)
Castellani grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. Now, he divides his time between the South End in Boston and Provincetown. He moved to Boston in 1995 with the intention of leaving after his one-year masters program at Tufts. “Thirty years later, I’m still here.”
Salt water or fresh? Ocean or mountains?
The saltier the better, especially when I’m splashing around in big waves that keep knocking me down. That said, I’ll take the mountains over the ocean any day. My parents and recent ancestors all hail from tiny villages at the tops of the Apennines, and the riot of emotions I feel whenever I’m near mountains convinces me that their genes are still very much active in me.
Do you have a habit or ritual, related to writing or not, that you wouldn’t be able to replicate if you left where you live?
Perhaps out of necessity, I’ve internalized the maxim that writers should train themselves to write anywhere, that we can’t be too precious about our rituals and requirements. I do work better in loud spaces, though, because I need human energy around me. I work best in a busy coffee shop that’ll serve me an expensive cappuccino in a ceramic cup with a little spoon and an almond biscottino. Each of those components is key and, yes, precious: the ceramic cup that maintains the purity of the coffee’s taste; the little spoon that clinks pleasingly when I stir the foam into the espresso; the biscottino that’s an instant Proustian taste of home; and, maybe most importantly, the exorbitant price that guilts me into making the most of my time.
You have an afternoon with any New England writer, living or dead. Who would it be and where would you take them for a walk/to eat a sandwich/to drink a beer?
My friend and one of my longtime mentors, Ellen Bryant Voigt, former poet laureate of Vermont, passed away last year. I’ve never met anyone with a more brilliant mind, a keener eye, a better command of her craft, or a more blazing talent for telling me everything from a literary joke to a gossipy anecdote to how to distill a line to its essentials. Nature, among many things, inspired her, but I don’t know if she’d ever been to Provincetown, so I’d love to take her on a walk through the Beech Forest trails and then to Ladyslipper because she loved a fancy and gorgeous cocktail as much as — inexplicably — a tall glass of ice-cold cheap Popov vodka served straight.
What artist outside of writing (filmmaker, musician, visual artist, performer, craftsperson) is your work in conversation with?
While most of my novels are told linearly and in conventional points of view, Last Seen has a more complex mosaic structure that includes documents, text messages, futuristic modes of communication, and interview transcripts in addition to “straight” third-person and first-person sections. Once I decided on this organized chaos and series of collisions as a narrative strategy, I spent a lot of time looking at mosaic as an art form — from ancient works to modern takes. I see a kinship between the structure of Last Seen and the capaciousness of the mosaic, which makes meaning from odd and often ordinary and “broken” fragments. Alone, mosaic pieces are limited in effect; together, rubbing against each other, held together by grout, they explode with meaning. That’s what I was hoping the reader’s experience of this novel to be: like assembling a mosaic (or a jigsaw puzzle) without the reference of the guiding image, using common and often damaged objects. Unlike my other novels, many of which are set in sun-splashed Italian locales, the “pieces” of this book aren’t pretty; hopefully, though, when taken all together, readers will read it as an optimistic and hopeful take on the human experience in this world and the next.
Do you consider your body of work to be associated with a place?
Italy, for sure, which appears in every one of my novels in one way or another.
What word do you hate?
Less a single word than that pointless and always-cringey shortening/cutesifying of a word in conversation, e.g. “peeps,” “totes,” “preggers,” “deets,” “vacay” (ugh), it’s hard for me to even type these.
What word do you love?
According to the copyedited manuscripts of my last few books, I just really love the word “just.” Somehow, it just appears in every sentence even when it’s just not necessary at all.
Is there a writer you’d particularly want to see featured here? Send word. And another gentle, humble plea: I want to keep bringing the literary news to you. By supporting this work, you support the health of the literary scene across the region. Is a paid subscription possible? I thank those of you who have renewed your subscriptions and those who’ve recently shown support. Please help keep the work going if you can. With my gratitude always.
Interview Morgan Talty
Thanks for this introduction, Nina.
Proposed addition to Mr. Castellani’s words-to-hate list: “veggies”.