Trevor Lanuzza is an MFA candidate in fiction at Temple University. He obtained a B.A. from Lake Superior State University in 2011. His work has been published in Hobart literary journal and Drunk Monkeys magazine. His influences include Fran Ross, James Baldwin, and Paul Beatty. Trevor is from Lansing, Michigan. He won the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers in fiction for a story titled “nobody’s a real mystic anymore.”
Q&A
Why do you write?
I just sort of do. I guess it’s a way to pull various thoughts that come in different aspects of my life in a way that I can consider them and make some kind of sense out of them. … I can’t think of when I wasn’t writing. I didn’t take it seriously until probably mid-way through my undergrad. I wasn’t in any creative writing classes up to that point. I just thought I would try writing things. I think I started with trying to write a novel, but that quickly didn’t go anywhere. But always [I] was writing and when relatives would read things, it was a lot of like “that’s the way you seem to make the most sense.”
How did you learn about the Hurston/Wright College Award?
I think I just found it online somewhere when I was trying to find something to do with the story. I think at that point it might’ve been a little longer, but something about the formatting fit directly with the [competition] page limit. That sort of spoke to me.
Who are your major literary influences?
Fran Ross, for sure, her book that’s called Oreo. I discovered it maybe a few years ago, randomly. It sort of shifted the way I thought about race and deals with a bi-racial character who’s sort of dealing with a [suicide] and it didn’t feel very self-serious. There’s definitely something about humor that makes a book stick with me. … I guess a more current thing is Dorthe Nors, who’s Danish, and her short story collection called Karate Chop that I’ve been going back to a lot since I found it. I hadn’t really been taking stories that seriously for a while and there’s sort of a bluntness in her stories that appeals to me. I have a couple of nonfiction books by John Walters, most of his work involves, really all of it, involves outsiders somehow getting a version of being on the inside of whatever the establishment they’re dealing with. He writes about that in his nonfiction, which appeals to me, and just about outsiders in general. …There’s something about that that’s sort of attractive, like I don’t really want to [fit in].
What experiences have shaped you most as a writer?
I guess being more of sort of an outsider … would have propelled me into that, just as a way of trying to understand the whole situation through writing. I try to figure out what are the sort of structural things, why are those people there? Why do I feel like I’m so outside? Does everybody feel that?
How did these influences shape or figure into “nobody’s a real mystic anymore?”
Well that story, it definitely is fully voice driven. It doesn’t attempt to fit into a normal kind of narrative form. It starts in the middle of a phrase, really the middle of sort of the character’s life. It doesn’t have a sort of firm beginning or end point. At some point in writing it, I felt you should be able to start at any point and go through the whole thing and it would still make sense. Having no sort of punctation just sort of asserts that point even more.
I put that story up for a workshop. It was slightly longer and people felt really overwhelmed with the number of words on the page and there being no sort of indicators of space guiding the thing. There were some suggestions for some way to break it up a little bit on the page. So, there’s a few little gaps in there that almost look like typos in spacing. But they’re put in as sort of road bumps just to sort of slow the pages down a little. … Everybody in my workshop was in agreement that it just felt very intimidating. A whole block of words with no sort of breaks. It’s really a question of what are you trying to impose on the reader I suppose. But I thought, it’s not really meant to be difficult to get through, so it didn’t really need to look intimidating.
What is your writing process?
Ugh. Writing is hard. A lot of times it’s tricky because I feel like when making a sort of conscious effort at it, it sort of takes away from what I’m trying to get at. But sometimes I have to do that, especially in a school setting; I have to turn things in. A lot of times, even under time crunches, I’ll try to write sort of while I’m half asleep, so it can take a while of like I’m going to take this weekend day, I’m going to try to be half asleep and if something strikes, I’m going to start writing while [I’m] there. Yeah, it’s tricky.
What advice would you give to other student writers?
I don’t like giving advice either. I think “just find what you need.” You sort of have to, at least it’s helped me in school. I found a few people who seem to understand what I’m trying to get at. And it’s not everybody. But, it’s definitely useful to find the people whose voice makes sense for you to make your work what you want it to be. … For me that’s probably been the most useful tool of coming to school. Through workshopping you get feedback and you can sort of sort through and figure out what kind of feedback. Honestly, I like feedback that challenges me a lot. It’s sort of easy to figure out who’s going to be tough on you and who isn’t. Not unduly tough either, it’s with a purpose and I always appreciate that more than the soft, nice version of things.
Interview conducted by Jovonne J. Bickerstaff
“nobody’s a real mystic anymore”
By Trevor Lanuzza
an excerpt
so I grab her palm and lightly trace the lines and lick my lips to look deep in
thought and I close my eyes all of a sudden and drop the girls’ palm and scribble on my note pad
that the spirits don’t see her at stanford but they see her finding success out in the real world
despite this academic disappointment and that she is in fact a genuine activist whose brilliance
cannot be fed by mere academia and she smiles for a second like this thought has occurred to her
before as she reads it and she takes the note with her as a souvenir as she scoots out of the booth
and is replaced by a red haired twink in a skintight purple tee and he’s all sweaty and the tone of
his voice is so high I can’t make out what he’s saying so I take a guess and pass him the paper
I’ve written his fortune on and he reads that he will meet a tall blonde stranger at the library and
he will be everything he has dreamed of so he leaves with a smile and he’s replaced by the
leatherdaddy we’ve been trying to avoid although I don’t think he knows me so I smile when he
comes in and he’s wearing the same too small leather cap now as he was in the picture on lex’s
phone and he starts asking me about his boy who has gone missing and how some russian
comrade has taken him against his will and I spit into a handful of seeds from the table and write
a note for him to do the same so he really hocks it up and blows a gob in my hand with mine and
I shake the seeds and toss them down and look then grab them up again and throw them down
again and he’s asking what it means and I scribble away about how he’ll get his boy back only
when he stops looking and he looks at me like I’m crazy and I nod to confirm my reading and he
laughs and says what a scam this is and plops out into the main room and I watch him go out to
the patio as scrumptious sends in the next client who immediately holds her palms out to me to
read and while she goes on about whether to get bangs or not I write in big bold letters yes to
bangs and I try to go out with her but scrumptious stops me and says no way honey you got a
line so get your silent ass back in there I ain’t letting you go nowhere till you get all the coin and
she means it and the bitch is huge so I hope lex is on the lookout and the next lady in line comes
through and she’s a forty year old hippie who tells me that she’s a massage therapist and how I
look tense and that she loves my lip color which feels like it may be smeared and I don’t know
why she won’t get to the point so I make my hands move around her head slowly as if I’m
reading her aura and she finally asks if her crippled husband will ever walk again and I keep on
reading the aura and closing my eyes and she starts to hum as if she’s helping and I pass her a
note explaining that her aura indicates that she’s in the relationship that she’s supposed to be in
and no her husband won’t walk again but it’s the way things have to be for universal order