Interview with Gary Floyd - 2021
Interview #1 (fiction, political fiction, hybrid text, flash fiction)
Gary Floyd is a Massachusetts writer who has worked as a journalist and with at-risk youth. He has attended the Wildacres Writers Conference in North Carolina annually for over 25 years. From 2011-2014, he edited a Boston labor blog called Labors Pains. During that time he was on the periphery of covering the US Uncut movement as well as Boston’s Occupy Wall Street movement. He was a member of SEIU who took part in the union’s lobbying efforts. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in several magazines. Last year he published Liberté: The Days of Rage 1990-2020. His collection Eyes Open With Your Mask On is the follow-up story, even though it also functions as a stand-alone piece of literature.
The conversation was conducted by email over three weeks in December. The author and interviewer first met at Literary Fiction Writers, a Facebook group the interviewer runs as a volunteer administrator.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Gary Floyd.
It seems like you’ve had quite the prolific year, publishing two books. Why did you feel the need to get them both out within six months of one another?
Gary Floyd: I think that my pace has been driven by the times.
My first book, Liberté, took much longer than my second. I think I was writing it for a couple of years before I put out a finished product. I had gone to the same writer's conference for over twenty years and have met plenty of wonderful writers there. When I put out Liberté, it was after I had become immersed in flash fiction (under 1000 words). It was a new form that I was still trying to learn, but I was drawn to it because it helped me boil everything down to its most concise form.
After returning from the conference probably in 2017, I think, I ran my own flash group with a number of other writers. The genesis of Liberté came from a prompt. It was nothing I planned to write and instead it was just, ‘Wow where did that come from?’ It was being part of a union and petitioning our representatives in Washington for the Card Check bill in 2008. It was then that I realized that nobody in Washington (friend or foe) cared about us. It was like we weren't represented by anyone and they really just wished we'd go back to wherever it was we came from. I got two stories out of that trip, and I realized there was something there. I just didn't think there was enough for a full book. Several other stories were added to this and each seemed to have a similar theme: the outsider seeking changes and trying to overcome the politically connected. I began to wonder if a book could hold up on a theme rather than on a traditional storyline. This was at the time of the yellow vest movement in France, and there were protests coming out across the globe against the political insiders. This was an effort to connect what I saw in this country with movements I saw going on around the world. Once the Coronavirus came, I figured I had to get this book out, sooner rather than later, because everything I had been writing about would soon be on full display.
I had decided to write the second book, Eyes Open With Your Mask On, almost before Liberté ever came out. Where everything I talked about in Liberté was in the abstract, I felt pretty certain that they'd all be on full display in the government's response to the current crisis. And I'm sad to say I feel I was right. For the second book – also written in flash – I almost felt like someone who was chronicling the events we were living through, and I let the events carry me along. I'd make a note of different subjects that I was interested in and wanted to touch on in pandemic America. I used areas from our past (Hurricane Katrina, Standing Rock, Flint, and Diego Garcia) to demonstrate the roots of many of the problems we are experiencing today. I tried to connect this period to pandemics of our past, often amazed by the similarity of our actions to those of our predecessors. I hope it makes for a satisfying blend of fiction, non-fiction, and essay.
Randal Eldon Greene: You also included prose poems in these two books, right? Or is it maybe poetic fiction? I had one story published as a prose poem, although I submitted it as a story. So I know that the demarcation between the two can be quite fluid. Do you think an average reader of your books is likely to know which pieces are story and which poetry? And how much does it even matter?
Gary Floyd: Yes, there are poetic interludes within both pieces. There are parts that are almost done in a stream of consciousness. They aren't written in the form of: here's the lead character, here's the problem, and here's the resolution. In these particular pieces, you can basically place the reader inside a swirl of images. They become a kind of stand-in for every man/woman. I almost look at it as a way to paint with images; these sections hopefully both feed into and support the collective whole. It's really a mosaic.
I think most readers will sense which are prose poetry and which are more traditional story, though they might not necessarily know how to properly categorize them. I've had readers who read Liberté and thought it was an important book but still felt unsure of their ability to evaluate the rules of flash. I told them that that was okay because I do believe what I'm doing is a potentially new art form. It's almost more external, with regards to its interactions with the world, than internal as some writing is.
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