Evocative short stories from the Rust Belt: a Q&A with Nick Rees Gardner
Reviewer Joseph Pete Interviews Nick Rees Gardner, Author of Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts
The short story is to fiction what espresso is to coffee—intense, precise, and yes, short. Maybe that intensity and precision is why certain readers are so loyal to the genre.
A short story author at the top of his game, Nick Rees Gardner joins us today to talk about the reasons he’s fixed upon short fiction—the rhythms, rhymes, and bursts of insight he draws upon to tell his evocative stories set in America’s Rust Belt. His new collection, Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts, was reviewed by Joseph Pete in a recent issue of Foreword Reviews.
Enjoy the conversation.
What inspired the setting of Westinghouse, Ohio? To what extent is it unique to Northeast Ohio and to what extent is it more broadly Midwestern or universal in some regards? How real is Westinghouse to you?
Westinghouse, Ohio, has become just as real to me as any other place I’ve come to know. It’s loosely based on my hometown of Mansfield, Ohio, at least geographically. Landmarks like the Worlinger Department Store and The G&T Bar, though they are mostly amalgams of several locations I’ve frequented, definitely mirror Mansfield bars and buildings. There are lots of people and places from my hometown that I love, so I wanted to keep some references to actual places and events in my book. I don’t want to write directly about my hometown, but I want these sort of Easter eggs that only a Mansfielder could pick out. It’s a wink and a nod.
Early drafts of these stories spanned a wider swath of the Midwestern United States. But as I dug into the stories more, I began to see how each and every one of my characters experienced place in similar ways. They were all looking for escape. And often they ran into each other, or at least ran in similar circles. It made sense, then, to set the stories in the same place, to explore a specific local, a specific way of life, through many different characters. While I originally thought of Westinghouse as my Winesburg (a mirror image of a real place), as I traveled and shared my stories with others, I came to find that the world is full of Westinghouses, filled with small towns that people want to escape. I definitely think that Westinghouse, Ohio is universal.
Why does addiction feature so prominently in the work and take so many different forms?
My own experience with addiction was definitely a big influence when I was writing these stories. I spent much of my teens and early twenties binging on drugs and booze. Like any passion or obsession, drugs took up most of my headspace. Whether I was researching psychedelics, making drug runs to the south, or taking a walk through my neighborhood, I saw the world through the lens of drugs and alcohol. I believe the reported percentage of people who have used drugs at least once is around 50 percent, but that seems incredibly low to me. Even after ten years of clean time, the large majority of my friends, of the people I see each day, have used drugs, many of those have abused them. I don’t mean to say that drug use and abuse is a universal experience, but it seems pretty prominent, at least in my milieu.
By the time I started writing “Drug Magic” (the first story I wrote for the collection), I was a bit tired of addiction narratives. Rather than feeding into what Leslie Jameson calls “the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis,” I wanted to talk about recovery, because recovery is just as fraught, just as interesting and exciting and individual. I think drugs slipped into my stories because they were (and are still) a big part of my life. It’s sort of like how place evolves from point of view. Though I’ve never used drugs in my current neighborhood, I know where to get drugs. I see where drugs are, recognize drug users. To someone without a past of addiction, my neighborhood may look completely different. Drugs might not even be on their radar. I guess it’s similar to how a mechanic hears a rattle in an engine and sees the car as on its last leg while someone who knows nothing about cars might shrug off the sound and keep driving
The funny thing is, that until one of my beta readers brought it up to me, I wasn’t even thinking of Delinquents as a book about drugs. I wanted to write about individuals with these certain troublesome pasts. I wanted to write about delinquents trying and failing and trying again to put some distance between who they were and who they are.
As a writer, what interests you about exploring the opioid epidemic?
To be honest, I didn’t really know much about the opioid epidemic until after I was already an addict. Then, I think it was in 2008 or 2009, the Oprah Winfrey Network came to my small town in Ohio to do an expose on opioid addiction, on this thing they were calling the opioid epidemic. So many locals were offended. I believe someone with the police department even tried to charge the family being interviewed. But for me and my friends, it was kind of cool: we were at the heart of something. Oprah was interested in us.
Since I’ve been clean, I’ve done a lot more research into the opioid epidemic, into the underlying problems and the doctors and the money behind it all. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist anymore, but it’s hard not to feel like the opioid epidemic wasn’t orchestrated, if not by some person or group, at least by some collective of unscrupulous capitalists, a general sense that destroying lives to make money was worth it.
But then we’re not talking about innocents being taken advantage of. To a large degree, addiction is a choice, or at least it begins with a choice. I think those complexities are what interest me the most about the opioid epidemic: To what degree is the addict responsible and to what degree is the environment they live in the real problem? Why the Midwest? Why Ohio? There are lots of ideas thrown around, but no definitive answers. It’s like any mystery, but the opioid epidemic is a mystery I was a part of, so my hope is that that fact puts me that much closer to finding a solution.
The cornfield-stubbled Midwest. Speedway gas cards. Skintight Cracker Barrel slacks under an apron. Piping from Menards. Leaves scraping across gravel. How do you evoke the Rust Belt so evocatively in your prose?
Thanks for saying that. The Rust Belt really does mean a lot to me. I’m proud of where I came from, the struggles I went through there, not to mention the people who struggled by my side. I didn’t think about these places (Cracker Barrel, WalMart, Menards) much when I lived in Ohio, but now, when I come back to visit, a store like Kroger becomes more than just a grocery store. It’s a landmark. In a way, it separates the insiders and outsiders. I think a lot of the details were things that I noticed more once I left the Rust Belt. At some point, I missed the corn. The leaves scraping across gravel? I honestly haven’t seen much if any gravel where I am now. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about minutiae, and I think that shows in my prose, but the specifically Midwest or Rust Belt details in Delinquents were, to a degree, a combination of that attention to detail and a bit of nostalgia, as well.
Your book has moments of laugh-out-loud humor like the declaration “there ain’t no laws on the moon.” Why do you make a point of incorporating humor into your work when it often deals with dark subjects and bleak human suffering?
I’ve always used humor to cut through the darkness, but it took me a while to incorporate it into my prose. I think, as a younger writer, I took my stories too seriously. I wanted to breach these big heavy subjects, and humor kind of lessened the gravity. But life is full of humor. People make fun of each other. They make fun of themselves. A cocky dude stumbles off a curb when he’s cussing you out. A drink gets spilled on new slacks. I’m not a huge sports guy, but rooting for the Cleveland Browns is sort of its own joke; Ohioans love the team that constantly fails them and the only way to deal with that failure is to joke about it, make it lighter.
One of my favorite books about story science is Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks, and in it Fletcher talks about how it’s healthier to crack jokes about yourself, your own situation, then about others. It actually makes us feel better about ourselves. So, in a way, my humor in Delinquents is just that: I’m poking fun at my own struggles, my own shortcomings as they are fictionalized. It’s hard to imagine my book changing anyone’s mind, but if I can get someone to see themselves in a new light, feel seen and to maybe crack a joke about themselves, I think I’ve accomplished my goal as a writer.
A lot of the work feels grounded in authenticity. How do you select such telling details like drinking Mountain Dew, listening to Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter II,” and sleeping in Walmart parking lots to save money? How do you have such an ear for slang and so artfully juxtapose it with polished prose like “lines of cocaine which they drew from a tiny Kilimanjaro in the center of the coffee table?”
I’ve joked before about how I’m a writer because I’m just a failed musician. I’m also a writer because with writing I only have myself to depend on, not a group, a band. From a young age, though, I’ve enjoyed music. When I first got into rap, sometime in high school, I think, I was sort of blown away by the sounds words could make as well as the rhythms of different languages, accents, regionalisms. Though I don’t always read my prose aloud, I always craft it with sound in mind. And I don’t just mean rhyme and rhythm (which are, of course, important) but the starts and stops. The subject matter and the mispronunciations. I’m not a linguist. I haven’t spent a ton of time studying language. But I love music and I want my prose to be musical too.
Slang plays into this too. There’s a lot of talk about high and low culture/art, but for me, it’s all just words. Hip hop does this all the time. I could totally see a rapper talking about Kilimanjaro and blow in the same breath. But in the end, it’s about saying things in a new way, helping the reader see something in a way they’ve never experienced before. I think this applies to the rhythms, rhymes, and content.
What drives you to be so anthropological in your observations of Midwestern behavior?
As far back as I can think, I’ve been interested in human behavior. I used to sit at bars and watch people, see how they interact. Before that, I’d sit at coffee shops and pretend to read. I struggle to read or work in public places because there’s just too much going on, too much to try to understand. In undergrad I studied psychology before I morphed into an English major. And I worked for a while in a rehab once I was clean in part because I wanted to understand how other former addicts worked. Really, I just have an interest in people. Many of my characters’ mannerisms and even a few of their sentences were swiped directly from overheard conversations or observed actions.
Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts
Nick Rees Gardner’s scathing short story collection captures lives of not-so-quiet desperation in the Rust Belt.
These linked stories vivify Westinghouse, Ohio, an imaginary depressed Midwestern town wherein some people’s only options seem to be “rehab, death or prison.” Most people try to escape, often through drink and drugs. Youth who feel that they are just passing through fail to realize that their Midwest home will be fine without them.
There are haunting but humorous tales of substance abuse, recovery, efforts to leave, and fantasies about starting new lives throughout. In “Sever the Head,” an alcoholic winery employee tries to get clean; in a memorable scene, an octopus is decapitated. “Orange Pill, Yellow Wrangler” chronicles a descent into heroin addiction in harrowing detail. And in the poignant entry “Delinquents,” a scrap metal rocket ship is crafted out of a person’s “drive to vanish in the firmament.”
The stories are suffused with a palpable sense of place that’s complemented by a hand-drawn map with a legend of Westinghouse’s landmarks. And the prose is alliterative and earthy, making use of streetwise analogies that ground it in realism. Westinghouse residents have to watch out for “American Gangstering” and try not to be buzzkilled” or “smithereened.” Keen insights on drug use, addiction, and recovery are included, too: someone who used to swill drink from a hip flask and take edibles “now call[s] movies films”; another person gulps “down airplane bottles of Sutter Home over ice to stop the shakes”; and someone marvels over how soft the bed feels in rehabilitation.
In the scintillating short story collection Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts, small-town residents flirt with escapism from feelings of brokenness, searching for more beyond their hardscrabble existence.
Reviewed by Joseph S. Pete July / August 2024
Joseph S. Pete
