Kylie Michelle-Westerlind Rybak: What was it like writing the first draft of "Life and Death in Half-light"? How much change did you see from first to final draft?
Salvatore Difalco: This story started as an unsatisfying flash or sketch. I let it rest for a few months before digging it up and reworking it by adding little dabs of colour and light. I thought it needed more depth, more life, more death. I must be honest, I love writing stories like this. I worked as a counselor for years and it needed to smack of reality. I hadn’t re-read it since publication and I think it still hangs together.
KMWR: This story dances with humor and despair and interrogates the glory and damage of artistry on passionate souls. Jerome points out, "I can’t help but think that someone with your intensity is probably an artist of passion. I mean, you really feel the world. I think what you need and what you’ve needed along is a subject worthy of your talent and heart.” Can you talk more about the themes that haunt and delight within this piece?
SD: I’ve lived and worked on the margins for most of my adult life, despite having a deep vocation to writing. I never wanted to teach writing or English, so I worked many dick jobs and worked with and for broken people in many contexts. My life experience has always yielded dark humour commingled with utter despair. Maybe my Sicilian background explains it. Where there’s hope, there’s death, is one my favourite Sicilian expressions. But that said, a true artist digs deep into the murk to come up with something true if not beautiful. I find redemption and grace in pursuing my art—but not everyone has that remedy or escape hatch, if you will. I’ve eaten a lot of shit with the notion, mistaken or not, that I could always turn that negative experience into art. Nevertheless, the pain and humiliation are not quickly forgotten. But life is a struggle, my friends. We all know that. And some people struggle more than others. I’m more interested in these stories than stories of smug success and well-being.
KMWR: You write, "I felt as though we were having a deep conversation. I can’t explain it. Everything he wanted to say, about himself, his faith, our current situation, and everything I wanted to say, about my work, my life, about the fucked up state of the world, it was all there, without a word uttered between us." I wonder how many moments like this are missed between all of us as we plug into the unreal world. Writing, also, has to say a lot to emote a little. What are your thoughts on the literary state of the world and how do we fend off the numbness?
SD: I met an old friend for coffee not long ago. I mean, twenty years had passed. As with some friends, we picked up the conversation as though it had never been interrupted. Laughter, politics, our sad domestic affairs, all that. But interspersed were comfortable moments of grinning reflective silence as we replayed our little scenarios in our minds. It felt so real and warming. And then his cellphone buzzed and my cellphone lit up and we each reached for them without a second thought.
I must be honest. I find it difficult to read most books published after 2001. Maybe it’s my age, or my excessive previous immersion in the modernists. or the crushing and flattening effect of MFA programs, I don’t know. But as the digital age swells and absorbs everything, and more and more bullshit is coursing through all the communication channels, writing, and literature in general seems threatened. I heard that there exist AI programs that can produce complete novels in mere minutes with the slightest prompts. Mind you these works suck ass, but so do many novels written by humans. I despair that someone thought this was a cool idea. It aims to take away the soul of the animal entirely. I guess that’s what these talentless techno-oligarchs want: the human taken out of the equation. What can I say? We live in fucked up times. I could have never imagined the particular stench and inanity of the current times, never.
KMWR: This is your second time publishing with Feign. Your first piece, "Difficult Men," is a delightfully strange piece I often return to. I'm curious about how you think the two stories may be speaking to each other about difficult men, difficult people, difficult lives.
SD: Running and working in various circles or spheres of addiction, mental illness, vice, and sheer failure, I’ve run across too many men to count in states of despair, confusion, or complete disintegration. Maybe being a man was simpler in the past. Maybe the chickens of our systemic misogyny, sexual aggression, cruelty, recklessness, and mistaken macho-sense of entitlement have come home to roost. Maybe a man without a woman is a liability, both to himself and to society. Has society failed men, or have men failed society? But we’re also talking about hierarchies and how impossible it is to rise in them. It’s also about men, and humans in general I would hazard, how they are imperfect and perhaps incomplete and prone to fuck ups and all manner of mayhem.
KMWR: Can you talk more about what you're working on now? What have you been up to since your last publication with Feign?
SD: I’ve been writing steadily, exploring similar and different themes. I’m completing a book of short stories based on Sicilian folklore and Marc Chagall and have had great fun doing that. Next step is finding a publisher. Aye, that’s the hard part, getting by the Guardians of the Gates. Despite that, I go on. I started as a poet and also spent a lot of time this past summer working on a new batch. Some of the poems have found homes in decent journals, which is encouraging. So that’s it. I write every day and never really know what will come of it. I’m working on a new story for Feign. You’re publishing such wickedly good stuff I feel I need bring my A+-game.
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Sicilian Canadian poet and storyteller Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto, Canada. Recent work appears in Cafe Irreal, Bull Fiction and Literary Heist.