Interview w/ Matt DeBenedictis

Matt DeBenedictis, author of the chapbooks Congratulations! There's No Last Place if Everyone is Dead, A Perfect Disgrace and I Am a Cloud, and editor/publisher of Safety Third Press, recently interviewed me about my two recently self-published poetry collections, Pseudo-Masochism and How Much the Jaw Weighs. We talk politics, sex, religion, fatherhood, and literature. A while back, Matt wrote a one-line review of my chapbook Snowing Fireflies on Goodreads that's way better than anything in Snowing Fireflies: "A touch when you forget what skin feels like." Thanks again, Matt...

>kill author, Issue #15

Five pieces from my unpublished novel, Trawling Oblivion, appear in >kill author Issue #15, along with poetry by Peter Schwartz, David Tomaloff and many others. Other excerpts from Trawling Oblivion have appeared in Alice Blue Review, elimae, Fix It Broken, matchbook, Necessary Fiction and Storyglossia.

Eraserhead Press to Publish 'Lepers and Mannequins', A Novel by Eric Beeny

My novel, Lepers and Mannequins, has been accepted for the 2011 New Bizarro Author Series to be published by Eraserhead Press this November. Thanks to editor Kevin Donihe for accepting it, and Lazy Fascist editor/publisher Cameron Pierce for recommending it to Kevin, then suggesting I send it to Kevin. It will be released this November during Bizarro Con 2011.

I wrote the entire first draft of the novel in a notebook back in March of 2008 while recovering from an appendectomy, staring out a window. The cover image for the novel, seen here, was designed by my friend Kenny Dumas (who also did the cover for my prose/poetry collection, Pseudo-Masochism).

Lepers and Mannequins is a mock novel, a surreal allegory about a leper colony warring with a tribe of mannequins over spare parts they need to put themselves back together. The novel’s two protagonists, Jaundice (a female mannequin) and Quall (a male leper), are in love in the midst of this war, recalling Romeo and Juliet. Through satire, the novel explores how disconnected people are from each other and themselves because of underlying issues like personal and cultural identity, love, sex, dominance and ownership, and how humans tend to objectify other humans for their own purposes, including women, but mostly just people they don’t know or understand.

In this latter sense, the novel also deals with the very human concern of war, and the possession of finite natural resources (in the novel, those resources being spare parts/limbs), and how humans on any side of any conflict must, by necessity, project the enemy as always plastic, two-dimensional, mannequin-like, because, if those fighting actually thought of the enemy as human, they might feel empathetic. The fact that humans in the novel rebuild themselves using mannequin parts shows how, through striving at any cost to maintain their humanity and their identity, they ultimately lose it. This is the mannequin metaphor, and suggests a surprising parallel: The mannequins were themselves once human...

Early versions of two chapters from the novel appeared in Ben Spivey and David Peak’s journal, Spilt Milk, and another chapter appeared in Pear Noir! #3. (Daniel Casebeer, editor of Pear Noir!, would later publish my novella, Milk Like a Melted Ghost, as an e-book for Thumbscrews Press.) Thank you for your time.