The Expeditions of Paul Carlucci (New & Selected) // Nathaniel G. Moore

Of his previous collection, A Plea for Constant Motion, novelist Amanda Leduc wrote “these are tales of unlikely triumph, wistfully poignant and played out with a master hand.” Paul Carlucci discusses his new book The High-Rise in FortFierce (Goose Lane Editions) which Quill & Quire calls, “Darkly majestic but notably grim.” In this new collection of linked stories, Carlucci creates a rich interplay between the characters and their surroundings, an environment that swarms the characters, sometimes inflicting harm. It’s a gritty, Canadian Cormac McCarthy, full of drugs, violence, and ugly despair. The tiny, northern town of Fort Fierce has issues in spades, and most of them fester in the high-rise by the lake.

Nathaniel G. Moore: The High-Rise in Fort Fierce is your third collection of short stories. How have you changed as a writer since your debut collection?

Paul Carlucci: That kind of change is hard to sum up, but I think I’ve developed more story sense than I used to have, more patience with development, and clearer visions of what I want to do. At the same time, I feel less anxiety when my plans change shape and more awareness of how to fix things, or just tweak them a little bit in a different direction. In general, I guess I’ve become a lot more comfortable working on the page. I don’t find words as feral as I used to, but I’m still pretty thrilled by some of their arrangements.

NGM: Do your stories in any way reflect the sometimes-abject tropes of modern life?

PC: I think they do, but maybe in a limited sense. That’s sort of what inspires them, anyway. Like, I probably won’t write about economic migrants or political intrigue or similar sorts of human experiences that shape the news narrative, just because I’ve never had any direct contact with that stuff, not even as an observer. The modern-life themes I write about are usually what I’ve rubbed up against, again not necessarily as an actor or agent, but at least as an observer, like I’ve gotten close enough to have a sense of the details. Power dynamics, class, work, certain kinds of displacement, addiction, conflict, insecurity, isolation. That’s not to say I don’t try writing about things that are totally abstract or foreign. I do, but stories come together better when I have some sense of how they play out in real life, facial expressions and lighting and smells and so on.

NGM: You lived briefly in the NWT during the creation of The High-Rise… how did this environment inform your writing?

PC: I lived in Hay River for about a year and a half. That’s a little town on the south shore of Great Slave Lake, connected by an all-seasons road to Alberta. There was a high-rise in town, kind of a crazy place, and that’s what inspired the building in the book. The other elements were also cribbed from my time there, or at least, they were distilled from my dour take on the place: tension and alienation between Indigenous and settler groups, isolation, poverty, addiction, violence, and the cyclic patterns behind all these things.

NGM: “Jaundice walls” is one of many disturbing descriptions of inanimate objects in your new collection. These types of descriptions are always apt yet foreboding at times. Who are some of your favourite writers to read?

The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

PC: Thanks. I don’t really have favourite writers per se, but I do have favourite books, and some of them are by the same author. Recently, I really enjoyed Tree of Smokeby Denis Johnson. It’s a huge, sprawling book. It took me a bit to get immersed, but after a couple hundred pages I was happily lost. The characters, settings, dialogue, and descriptions were all so perfect, and I loved the way he slowly revealed the multiple meanings of that phrase: tree of smoke. I feel like there aren’t enough books like that anymore, like maybe editors and publishers underestimate reader patience and instead push authors away from that kind of sustained ambiguity. His posthumous short story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is also a masterpiece of ambiguity and abstraction. Really compelling stories that work so well despite—or maybe because of—their refusal to traffic in orthodoxy, stuff like plot or last-act character transformation. He’s not concerned with that stuff and, as a result, we get wild, psyche-steeped interiors.

NGM:  Where did you get the idea for a family of landlords (the Franklins)?

PC: They kind of emerged in tandem with the building. I knew I wanted a tower with at least a few decades of life, so I figured I’d need more than one landlord if I wanted to profile the thing from construction to demolition. I liked the idea of referencing the Franklin Expedition, too, like the high-rise is a modern-day Erebus or Terror, some failed, locked-in-the-ice imperial endeavour that’s harmful not just to the people who lead it, but also the people who visit it, be they locals or foreigners. And once those ships were iced in, they pretty much were buildings, full of frightened people desperate to flee. So that’s where the family name comes from. The idea of multiple generations came naturally. Like with the mould that develops over the course of the book, paranoia, social isolation, and geographical incarceration are persistent and infectious. If they’re housed in the high-rise, then it only stands to reason that the building’s caretaker would be hobbled by them, too. Circular patterns are a big theme in the book, so it seemed tight to keep the building’s ownership, with attendant psychological trauma, in the same bloodline. We do see the Franklins launching escapes, but those efforts don’t pan out. Billy, of the second generation, comes pretty close, though. Come to think of it, his could probably be considered a successful escape, even if his situation living in and managing a hotel down south isn’t all that different from his life up north. At least he had a friend.

NGM: How important are literary journals to you? Is it a soundboard of sorts?

PC: I’ve got mixed feelings about them, but for the most part I think they’re a good thing. If someone publishes your writing, you get to work with an editor, and while that’s not always a revelatory experience, it certainly can be. In theory, journals find you readers, but I doubt many people actually pick them up, and of the people who do, most are probably just writers trying to find a home for their own work. Maybe it depends where you are in your career. I remember being ecstatic the first time I got published in a journal, and almost ten years later, I still get a surge of gratification when it happens (which, sadly for my gratification receptors, is very rarely indeed). You get to see your story designed and maybe some artwork bulking it up, and that’s pretty satisfying. You may be invited to a launch, and, if you can make it, you’ll get to meet (or be ignored by) other writers, plus the editors. I’ve also heard of a writer getting a book deal when a journal-published story of hers fell into the right hands. Plus, journal hits make you grant-eligible, and book publishers are more likely to get excited about your manuscript if you’ve landed a few. So that’s all good. On the flipside, a lot of them seem a little too married to orthodoxy. They can be painfully boring and more than a couple I’ve worked with have been horribly managed, like so bad the “we’re volunteers” rationale falls flat, and the only real explanation is people are flakes. So good with the bad, I guess. On the whole, I think submitting to journals should be a normal part of a writer’s life, especially a writer just getting started.

Paul Carlucci's first collection of short fiction, The Secret Life of Fission, won the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His second collection, A Plea for Constant Motion, was published to critical acclaim in 2017. His stories have also been published in numerous magazines and journals, including the Malahat Review, subTerrain, the Fiddlehead, and the New Quarterly. He lives in Ottawa.