SL: Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture, your remarkable debut collection, forthcoming this January from Foxhead Books, features a wild assortment of characters and animals: voles, a fly, a monkey, the Swiss Miss girl straight off the box, a serial killer, a metallurgic woman, conjoined twins, even the Devil himself. This is not the old-hat territory of “write what you know.” Your imagination is unfettered, yet your stories always scratch a truth; the effect is incredibly poignant. Where do your ideas come from?

JI: I probably spend more time amusing myself than is healthy…wait, that doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

SL: You mix realism and absurdity with absolute tonal consistency and unflinching directness. Forget about suspension of disbelief; the world, in your confident hand, simply IS how you present it. It’s all matter-of-fact, devoid of sentimentalism, which only adds to the hilarity of each situation, as exemplified in the first line of the opening story, “My First Serial Killer:” “My serial killer can’t commit.” Why is this interplay important?

JI: With “My First Serial Killer,” once I had the voice of my character in mind, her response to her situation became clear, so really, it was just a matter of staying in character. This is pretty much the way I’ve approached all of my stories regardless of their premise. I don’t actually think of my stories as having absurdist elements, which might also explain my handling of them. Or, more likely, it’s that I’m obtusely literal-minded. I mean, full disclosure, I was the kid in English class calling out, “but maybe he is a cockroach!”

SL: Love it. Humor can be difficult to pull off, and yet, with you it’s effortless. Take “My Tumor, My Lover,” which is about, um, cancer, and more – a dissolution of a marriage, neither of which is a laughing matter. Yet the reader is practically on the floor. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also smart at hell – and works overtime to help reveal some of the real sadness and alienation of your characters. Tell us about your strange, beautiful funny bone.

JI: My bone thanks you for that. I’d like to say that it’s a bone born from a sad and lonely childhood but the more likely culprit was a series of ill-advised Ogilvy home perms during my formative years. Not only was the frizz great fodder for folly, but the damage caused from years of heady hallucinatory fumes and chemical seepage is probably what made me the person I am today …. and which may or may not account for my preoccupation with brain tumors.

SL: An interesting thing happens when you bring in animals. A woman takes a fly as a lover, and this compound-eye boyfriend proves tender and kind, while her husband is a beast. Similar contrasts are felt in “Monkey” and “Little Marvels.” How do animals help to humanize some of your characters?

JI: It is no secret that my dog is my favorite person, and I mean that quite literally. Any Hempel, if you’re reading this, call me and we’ll meet up at the dog run.

But yes, I’ve always been very “Up with Animals, Down with People,” and I think the next phase in my writing might be to get rid of the humans altogether. I mean, talk about a lot of needless drama, and baggage, and always with the “me, me, me.” True story: In fourth-grade, I lobbied hard for, and won, the role of the title character in our English class play adaptation of Flowers for Algernon. So imagine my horror at our first read-through when I learned that the mouse had zero fucking lines! Oh sure, author Daniel Keyes was more than happy to pocket my membership monies for his fan club, but give poor Algernon his due? Not so much. On that fateful day, I vowed to always honor the Animalé in my work.

That I had a huge crush on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom co-host Jim at the time is purely coincidental.

SL: Talk about crushes, I’m crazy for your line precision. When I worked in magazines, we used to give unsolicited pieces “the first sentence test” to see if we wanted to read on; not only, do your openers knock it out of the park with tension and intrigue, but you carry those elements through to the end with each story. For example:

Do you always start with the opening line, or what gets you started? How do you enter your stories?

JI: My failure with numbers from a very early age cemented my resolve to always revel in words, whether I knew what they meant or not, and so my approach to those vocabulary workbooks in elementary school was often based more on letter and sound than on actual definition. In hindsight, this approach is probably what cost me a slot in the Gifted and Talented program, that and my inability to do long division, but such is the price we must pay for our art.

I have since learned what a goodly number of words actually mean, but often when I write, it’s still about the sound. Many of my stories have been triggered by an arrangement of words or some kind of word play / very bad pun that may or may not morph into a full sentence. “Big Angel” grew out of the last lines. “Little Marvels,” because a vole is neither a mole nor a shrew, weasel, mongoose, or ferret. “A Room with A Partial Ocean View” because I am a big fan of E.M. Forster and I also like to steal things.

SL: I’m also always struck by your restraint. So much of the emotional weight in your more realist stories, “Heller”, “Big Angel” and “Room With A Partial Ocean View” arise from what’s left unsaid. It brings to mind that Hemingway quote – “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows.”

JI: Forgive me as I take myself way too seriously with this question, but what you call ‘restraint,’ I call ‘struggle’: show/don’t show, tell/don’t tell, what’s the right combination that will bring a character to life on the page, etc. etc. As a reader, I’ve always been a big fan of writing that elucidates through a careful balance of description and omission as opposed to narratives seeded with so many explanatory details that all nuance and mystery is lost. I think, and I say this as a former English teacher of fourteen years, one of the worst things to happen to “literature” is the demand from readers for analysis at the expense of empathy. When we teach young readers to hunt for clues to character, specific lines or gestures that are meant to reveal some sort of “deeper meaning,” I think we’ve pretty much fucked the whole thing up. Which, for some reason, brings to mind the ending of the original Planet of the Apes movie. I read somewhere recently that all interviews about one’s writing should contain at least one Charlton Heston-esque outburst. So there you have it.

SL: Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture. The title’s a line from “My First Serial Killer,” and functions brilliantly as a metaphor for the collection. It also sounds a lot like my writing process. What was your process like in compiling this collection?

JI: First, I am forever indebted to Stephen Marlowe at Foxhead for approaching me for a collection in the first place and for his patience with me through the process of selecting and arranging the final mix of stories. It took a lot of sifting to find the ones that I felt, when placed together, told the overall story of a life. Once I had this “life” in mind, the title seemed to sum it all up pretty nicely.

SL: Who are the authors on your shelf?

JI: A few weeks ago, I foolishly vowed to read every book on my shelves. This was before I realized I’d somehow managed over my years of stoop sale foraging to compile what can only be called a ‘painfully eclectic’ collection. In addition to the literary standards, there are three books on clock repair, one on operating your ham radio, several Marshall McLuhans, an Ogden Nash compendium, and the entire oeuvre of Dale Carnegie. I have no idea what impact this may have on my writing, but I suspect it will give me a distinct advantage at the Over-Forty Swinging Single mixers. Not that I’m single now, but after a long winter of Ogden Nash recitations, who knows.

SL: Okay, let’s play favorites:

Wild Animal: right now it’s a tie between Newt and the Bieb

Cruelest Form of Torture: Being forced to watch all of the Republican candidate debates on endless loop, Clockwork Orange style or being forced to marry a Kardashian.

Snack: d) all of the above.

Dream Lincoln-Douglas Debate Match-up: Newt and the Bieb

Famous People dead or alive I’d least like to have dinner with: Newt, the Bieb, any Kardashian, Hitler, Daniel Keyes.

Dream Job: Ghost-tweeter for a lesser Kardashian.

Collection’s Theme Song: Eye of the Tiger, of course.

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