“I’m Trying to Cut Into Your Soul”: An Interview with Pete Tarslaw

Like a delicately made Tunisian tangine, Pete Tarslaw’s novel The Tornado Ashes Club blends flavors and styles into a seamless, deceptively simple novel that challenges, nourishes, and restores, evoking place and time in ways few writers still dare. We sat down with Pete to talk about art, life, and falling in love with your characters.

Thanks for meeting me.
My pleasure.

I see you’re drinking tea.
This is as strong as it gets for me, as long as I’m working. I can’t have anything stronger than lemon-lime Gatorade within two days of writing, or the sentences won't have the quality I need them to have.

Let me start by asking a question everyone always wonders about writers – when did you know you were a writer?
I knew it as soon as I knew anything. Even as a baby I used to pull my mom’s books down off the shelf, and just run my fingers across the words. There was magic in them. I wanted to work and play with that magic.

It must be comforting.
What do you mean?

That sense of certainty, from such a young age.
Actually, it was quite scary. I saw it more as a responsibility, a duty. If I could’ve chosen, I would’ve chosen something else – a teacher, or an immunologist.

An investment banker?
(laughs) Not these days!

But this is your first book. Were there lots of failed efforts that proceeded it?
I wouldn’t say “failed.” I hate that word, failed. I wish we could banish it from the human lexicon. No human being, who’s earnestly tried, has ever “failed” at anything.

But, well, I’d compare it more to a butterfly in a cocoon. If you could cut open that cocoon, then what you’d see inside would just be a repulsive, mucousy mess. You need to wait for the butterfly to form. And then you go back and you think, “oh, right, all that mess, that was necessary. That was the creation.”

The writing in this book is very lyrical – some passages read almost like poems.
At the time I was writing I was reading lots of Whitman. I mean, Whitman could get you through almost any spiritual crisis, and writing a novel is up there, as source of spiritual crisis. So I think some of that came through there.

But more than anything, it was just this unfailing, insatiable need to be accurate. So when you’re picturing, say, a dew-spotted Kansas wheatfield, and you want to set that down accurately, I mean truly accurately, the only way to do that, to convey that beauty, the way that vision makes the chords in your soul hum, is through that sort of language.

In the end, I mean, some of that poetic language is really sparse, when you think about what’s actually being described.

How do you form your characters? Do you start with them, and then set the story in motion, or - ?
The old chicken/egg! Let me answer like this. I don’t create characters. I couldn’t if I tried. I don’t create a character any more than, say, a pond “creates” a frog, or a patch of damp topsoil “creates” an oak tree.

I try to maintain the conditions for characters – an open heart, a still mind, a state of constant, open listening. And I find they arrive. At first maybe they’ll just show me their face – peek in, have a look around, and duck away. But once I’ve had that glimpse, I know they’ll be back.

That’s interesting, that sense of gestation.
With Silas, I didn’t feel like I knew him, really knew him, until I heard him laugh. One day I just heard that laugh of his – gentle, warm, very raw and very vulnerable – and suddenly everything else flowed out, until I could picture everything. His half-made bed, his shoes, the coffeemaker in his kitchen, a constant losing battle against dust. In a lot of ways, I know Silas better than I know myself. I mean, for instance, when I wake up, sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to have for lunch. But if I stop and think about what Silas is going to have, I’ll think, “grilled cheese.” And that’ll be right, that’s what he’d have.

You’re obviously a male writer –
Mmm.

- but there’s a very strong sense of the feminine in your work.
Well, I’ve been blessed to just have that in my life. You know, when I was finishing this book, I was up at my aunts – that’s aunts, plural – place in Vermont. Such strong women. So that was in the stew.

Let’s talk about the character of Genevieve –
I love Genevieve. I’m in love with her. If I could steal her away from Silas, I would.

You would?
But that wouldn’t be right, of course. Silas is my best friend. But she just has this majesty, there’s a majestic quality to her. Writing her, it felt like I was out having a picnic with the most majestic woman I’d ever met, and everything she said made me fall in love with her a little more. All I could do was try to transcribe it.

That’s interesting, the idea of falling in love with a fictional character.
Most of us are in love with fictional characters, aren’t we? But it’s been a real problem for me, in relationships. I’ve met incredibly beautiful, incredibly charming women who’ve been moved my writing, but I can’t form relationships with them as long as I’m in love with Genevieve.

You write quite richly about her music –
The ranchera tradition, right. Lonely, heartbreaking music. A ranchera singer considers him or herself a failure unless he or she can break your heart beyond repair with a single song.

Music is an important theme in this book. Songs, radios, heard melodies.
Let me answer that this way. Here’s what I’m trying to do with my writing: I’m trying to cut into your soul. I want to cut you, the reader, open, extract your soul, breathe air and life into it, and put it back, leaving only a trace of a scar to remind you what happened.

Now, when you’re doing that, music can be both an anesthesia and a scalpel. You know the old saying “music tames the savage beast”? Well, I have this theory that the cry of the savage beast was also the original music. Imitating the call of a lion, a tiger, was the first music, because it was the first time people realized they could terrify each other. And that they could, in turn, calm one another. And that was an important step to finding humanity’s place in the world.

Let’s talk about the literary world in general –
The whole world is the literary world.

I mean publishing, authors you admire –
You know, a few weeks ago I was taking my daily walk, twelve miles, and I saw a sign pinned up to a telephone pole. It said “Please help. Lost dog. Has a brown stripe across his face. One paw bent in slightly.” Whoever wrote that sign, that’s my favorite author these days. Beyond that: Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, Whitman, Sainte Exupery, John the Evangelist, Woody Guthrie, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Steinbeck, Preston Brooks. That’s who’s in my stack these days. Anyone who you can sit back and just hear them whittling a stick on the back porch and offering lemonade and good talk to anyone who passes by.

There’s been a lot of panicked talk about the decline of books, the end of reading, layoffs in publishing. Does any of that worry or unsettle you?
No. It inspires me. If we’re entering a dark age, when the music of the soul is drummed out, silenced, by the shouts and squawks of the glands, the genitals, the stomach, so be it. I’ll be the guy in the high tower, you know, sitting there by candlelight illuminating manuscripts. I intend to be the last man, scrawling on a rock, I loved. And I trust that someday, someone will read that, and they’ll know what I meant, and they’ll tear up. That’s enough for me.

What’s next for you?
Oh, I hate to talk about projects I’m working on. It de-powers them, you know? Strips away some of the magic.

You’ve got to give us something!
Okay, okay. I’ll tell you the title. The Wisdom of Acorns.

Can’t wait.
Me neither.

Thanks so much for your time.
My pleasure, entirely.

The interviewer was Steve Hely, a freelance journalist who lives in Los Angeles.