Rumble Interview
with Wayne Sullins
Wayne Sullins is the author of Najimi, a unique collection of micro and flash fiction about a Japanese girl named Najimi. The stories are like brief poignant flashes; bizarre, ethereal, focusing on commonplace objects or events and giving them a twist. Rumble published Najimi 2 and Najimi 3 in 2004.
Having read Najimi, I highly recommend it.
Bio: Wayne Sullins was born and raised in Houston, Texas. In his senior year in high school he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York and had his paintings exhibited in a group show at the Museum Of Fine Arts in Houston. After three near penniless months in The Big Apple he returned home, dejected. Finding work in a machine shop, he saved money for three years before returning to New York in 1980. He worked in a bookstore, painted apartments for the rich and famous, travelled to Europe many times, did the punk thing for a while, started taking photographs and tried to write poems.
In 1989 his son, Miekka, was born. But he was estranged from the boy’s mother and didn’t see him for many years. When Miekka was six he sent Wayne a Christmas card from Boston saying, Hello, someday I would like to meet you. It was ’95 and time to move closer. A year later, Wayne visted India. Then in 2000, his son begged him, Please take me to Tokyo. The travel bug had got him too, plus a fascination with all things Japanese.
Since he saw Cabaret on tv when he was twelve, Wayne has been addicted to films. These days it’s Old Hollywood and anything from China.
His writing improved over the years, and he published his first poems in The Quarterly in 1993. His work has also appeared in Poetry East, Compost, Quick Fiction, Sentence, and online at Rumble, Thieves Jargon, Amsterdam Scriptum, and Edifice Wrecked.
Rumble: Which writers inspire you the most? Which ones influence and inform the style of your writing?
Wayne: I’ve become pretty old-fashioned in my tastes. I like the dead - Camus, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Simenon. Of the living, I read the Asians - Duong Thu Huong, Gail Tsukiyama.
Rumble: How did you get interested in writing flash/micro fiction?
Wayne: Well, this stuff used to be called prose poetry, and the French invented the prose poem - Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Michaux. I was a Rimbaud nut, went to Charleville, visited his grave.
Rumble: What is your take on the difference between writing flash/micro fiction and a traditional story.
Wayne: For me, the difference is that flash fiction, at least mine, deals with a particular moment, a predicament, rather than a series of events that stretch out over time. Although some of Chechovs stories are like flash fictions, they’re so short.
Rumble: Talk about Najimi. Where did you get the idea for the book, and how did the concept develop over time? Talk about the form of the stories in Najimi.
Wayne: I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me this question. You see, I work at a store in Cambridge, Mass. that imports furniture from all over Asia. Sometimes, when we receive a shipment of tansu from Japan, they haven’t been cleaned out, they’re filled with all sorts of stuff, you know, things people put in drawers: pens, nail clippers, clothing, photographs, sake cups, tools, and....books. One day I found an abacus, and imagined a little girl waking each day to that click, click sound. Page one of Najimi. I wrote another. Page two. Then another. I thought, this could be a very interesting book. So I starting reading tons of Japanese fiction and poetry, books on sociology, history, Japanese customs, Zen; I steeped myself in their music, films, fashion, animation. Because I was writing as a woman, a Japanese woman, it took a long time. I wanted her to sound authentic, believable. In the first draft she was much darker, almost evil. Then I put her away for a couple of years. One day I pulled out the manuscript and found that it was better than I remembered, but needed lots of work. I started trying to write stories that revealed her softer side, that showed her sense of humor. The more real she became to me, the more I cared about her. And the more I cared, the easier the stories were to write. I became like a medium, taking dictation.
It was fun listening to Najimi, her voice quiet and devastating.
Essentially, the idea is that I found this book in a drawer beneath some underclothes. A book that was not written for an audience. The name, Najimi, I heard in a movie. Some time passed before I looked up it’s meaning - friend, familiar. A Japanese woman I know said that Najimi is a very good friend that you don’t see very often. On the internet I found a site about Omoide Therapy, a therapy in Japan that helps people regain their memory after an accident, or because of drinking or illness. It’s a fitting name, I think, adds dimension.
Rumble: How do see the state of electronic fiction on the web today?
Wayne: Well, there certainly are plenty of good magazines to visit online. But I hope that The Book stays around. I like holding books, browsing at the library, I like turning pages.
Rumble: When did you start writing? Talk about your early work.
Wayne: I started writing poems in high school. Surrealist trash. I was such a poor student and learned nothing about sentence structure and punctuation, so my writing was pretty convoluted. More than once, out of frustration, I banged my head on the typewriter. Remember typewriters?
Rumble: How much time do you spend reading fiction online? Do you visit a lot of web magazines?
Wayne: I spend very little time online. I use the internet when I need information for a story, or to read about a particular actress or film director.
Rumble: What was involved in geting Najimi published? How much time was involved?
Wayne: After I had received several rejections from publishers, and once I realized that this kind of book would probably not be picked up by any of the big guys like Vintage, or FSG, I decided to publish Najimi myself. It was simple, I looked around at various on-demand publishers, chose Wastelandpress, sent them the manuscript to them on a cd, and a few weeks later I got three cartons of books in the mail. Then I learned how difficult it is to promote a self-published book. Don’t do it! Few people take you seriously, larger bookstores will not carry it, most magazines will not review it, and people in general give you a funny look when they learn that you’ve published a book yourself.
Rumble: A lot of web writers work fulltime in another field. Where do you work and how does that work experience affect/influence what you write?
Wayne: Since I’ve answered this one already, I’ll just say that I’ve always preferred jobs that don’t require me to use my brain. I save my brain for my creative work. Ok, I’m poor, but I’ve gotten a lot done over the years.
Rumble: The Japanese influence on your writing is substantial. Is there a particular style in Japanese writing that you are trying to emulate? What Japanese writers do you read? Murakami is very popular these days. I wonder if you’ve read his novels/short story collections, and which ones. Talk about your favorites.
Wayne: Japan changed my life. I discovered Japanese pop music in 1998. It’s a wacky mix of bossa nova, soul, hip hop, italian film music, 60s hits and french chanson. My son was still a kid and he got into it too. Then came anime - Cowboy Bebop, FLCL...We started watching Japanese movies, he got hooked on Final Fantasy. We were bigtime otaku, obssessive fans. At work I was repairing and refinishing Japanese furniture. On our first day in Tokyo Miekka said, I’m going to live here. Four years later he was back to spend tenth grade in Sano, an hour north of Tokyo.
Anyway, I’m particularly fond of Kawabata. In the 20’s he started publishing what he called Palm Of The Hand stories. If you like flash fiction, he’s the man. But the form of Najimi is actually stolen from Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, written a thousand years ago. Like Najimi, it’s essentially a woman’s self portrait, jottings, musings, lists of things pleasant and unpleasant; she’s arrogant, fastidious, calculating.
At the end of Najimi she talks about a man named Yoshi. “He knew that we (women) don't necessarily want to be understood, we want to be experienced.”
I used to worship Murakami but I’m not so interested right now in pop and fantasy. Give me old novels and slow jazz and girls in dresses.
Rumble: Any ongoing projects? What’s next for Wayne Sullins?
Wayne: On September 3 I’m going to Hanoi to work on a book of stories disguised as a novel. And to stroll... maybe teach English.
This interview was conducted by Craig Snyder via e-mail