IN THE MAGAZINE

POPPY Z. BRITE IS THE KING/QUEEN OF NEW ORLEANS - PART 1

The Vice Interview

INTERVIEWED BY AMY KELLNER, PHOTOGRAPHED BY TONY CAMPBELL

Poppy Z. Brite’s early novels are full of vampires, angsty teenagers, and other beautiful, tortured creatures, often sexually ambiguous and with varying shades of flaxen, crimson, or raven hair, tangled and blowing in the hot wind. Her first two novels, Lost Souls and Drawing Blood, became instant classics with goth kids and horror nerds alike. Her third novel, Exquisite Corpse, a love story about two serial killers and their passion for squishing around in the blood and guts of adolescent boys, was so gruesome and excruciatingly detailed that after I finished reading it I threw it out my window because I couldn’t sleep with it in my room.


After that came a Courtney Love biography, several great short-story collections, some vampire-erotica anthologies (always awesome), and—one thing that is etched in my mind forever—a eulogy for William Burroughs in which she fantasizes about sodomizing his corpse. Then, suddenly in 2004 there was a new novel, Liquor, and it was about… chefs. Yup, chefs. More specifically, Rickey and G-Man, a New Orleans couple with a passion for cooking and hot gay sex who open up a restaurant where all the dishes are made in some way with alcohol.

Brite has since written three novels about this lovable duo and plans to keep going. And even though the worlds of horror and “foodie lit” are like night and day, Brite’s killer storytelling is still there, as are a couple of her main themes: loving descriptions of New Orleans and romance between fellas. And where the early books were swimming in gunky bodily fluids (it always seemed like something was dripping, be it blood, cum, spit, or tears), the new ones are full of equally detailed descriptions of gooey stuff—just this time, it’s things you could eat without getting an STD.

Brite also keeps an online journal that is fully addictive, whether she’s writing about her 20-odd rescued cats, her devastating experience with Hurricane Katrina, or just ranting about the kinds of things that life makes you want to rant about. According to the entry she wrote right after we contacted her, she usually doesn’t do interviews these days, but it seems we caught her in the right mood. Lucky us! And lucky you!

Vice: Do you have a special place you sit when you write?

Poppy Z. Brite: Unfortunately, I’m not doing much writing lately. My “guys in the basement,” as Stephen King so aptly describes them, have been on strike for nearly a year, and no matter how many well-meaning people exhort me to “just write,” it’s no more effective than telling me “just don’t have back pain” (I have chronic back problems) or, as another writer friend pointed out, telling an alcoholic “just don’t drink.”

People who don’t write can’t grasp just how hard it is. At least you’re still doing your LiveJournal blog.

I’ve also written a couple of newspaper and magazine articles over the past year. I do most of it at my desk, the same desk I’ve had since I was 12, albeit in an office I’m not used to yet and probably won’t be until I’ve written a novel in it, in the new house we bought in New Orleans’s Central City neighborhood after the failure of the federal levees destroyed our old one.

Well, I hope you start writing again soon.

It’ll come back when it comes back. I probably have a bunch of stuff concerning Katrina to deal with first. “To process,” as they say. I’d scarcely believe I had lived through that time if I didn’t have the emotional scars to prove it, but here they are. I was a fairly happy person before August 29, 2005.

Can you talk about your personal experience with the hurricane—like your evacuation and the difficulty you had in retrieving your many cats?

This isn’t something I’m equipped to talk about right now, I’m afraid. I’ve bought a new home in New Orleans and I’m committed to spending the rest of my life here, but I’ve reached a point where I have a very hard time reading or watching anything about the city, particularly if it concerns the storm or its aftermath, and I find that I’m subject to panic attacks if I talk much about that time or look back at the journal entries I wrote then. You should check out my entries for the months of September and October 2005 at docbrite.livejournal.com.

I read those entries and they were heartbreaking. I got teary-eyed over the part when you were finally allowed back into your flooded house and you found some, but not all, of your feral cats.

It is sad, yes, but right now I find it healthier to be angry, and there’s plenty to be angry about. I no longer feel like a citizen of the United States. South Louisiana has been treated like a third-world country—worse than many third-world countries. Why am I still paying taxes to a government whose incompetence devastated my city and which refuses to fix what it broke?

One thing I do want to note is that we would have found it much harder to get through the immediate aftermath without the generosity of readers and friends. They kept us afloat financially through donations, they joined in the effort to rescue the cats we hadn’t been able to evacuate, and their kindness helped keep us at least semi-sane.

Let’s talk about something a little less traumatic. What are some of your favorite books?

I have hundreds, but once I get past John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, it’s hard to know what else to mention. It is surely the truest piece of fiction ever written about New Orleans, and the one that has most influenced my own writing about my home city. I think Stephen King’s Misery contains more useful insights about writers and writing than most so-called writing manuals. King in general tends to be my comfort reading. I love V.S. Naipaul, Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Theroux (especially his maybe-autobiographical metafiction), and Carson McCullers. Moby-Dick was a good friend to me on a trip to Australia—I read half en route and the other half on the return flight. A Tale of Two Cities is my favorite of Dickens. And, of course, my Smithsonian Guide to North American Birds—couldn’t live without that one. I try to pick up at least one birding guide to every country or region I visit, and I love paging through them afterward, reliving my trip, remembering what I saw and what I wish I’d seen.

Is bird-watching a big hobby of yours?

My husband and I both love birding. Neither of us is any kind of expert, but we enjoy the bounty of wildlife in Louisiana. One of my best trips—in fact, one of the memories that helped me get through the storm’s aftermath—was to the rainforests of North Queensland in July 2005, after I’d been a guest at a convention in Melbourne, Australia. I stayed at a place called Cassowary House and saw over 100 new species of birds, including cassowaries, which are huge flightless birds with shimmering black hairy-looking plumage, iridescent blue necks, and tall hornlike casques on their heads.


TO BE CONTINUED
POPPY Z. BRITE IS THE KING/QUEEN OF NEW ORLEANS | 1 | 2 |

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Comments

Anonymous, on Aug 24, 2009 wrote: i miss those fag-fuck days too! but alas, she’s grown up, taking care of cats and writing stuff about chefs.

Anonymous, on Nov 7, 2008 wrote: I quite like Poppy’s books, having read everything thus far, but I long for the ol’ gore n’ fag-fuck days, even though she doesn’t care about that "genre" anymore.

Anonymous, on Oct 20, 2008 wrote: stuuuuuuuuupid