Author: Steve Himmer
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An Interview With Okey Ndibe
Very early in Foreign Gods, Inc., the second novel from Nigerian-American writer Okey Ndibe, we find Ikechukwu “Ike” Uzondu strolling through the eponymous Manhattan business where ancient relics and statues of deities are sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s his first trip to the store, though he already knows this is where he…
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The Many Hats of Jeffrey Condran
I sat down with Jeffrey Condran this fall — me at a computer in Ogden, Utah, and Jeff at a computer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — to chat about this breakthrough moment in his career. Our conversation ranged from there to his travels through Eastern Europe and the inspiration he found there to the art of…
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Exhibit A: Dark Shadows
[Over the course of my month as writer-in-residence, I’ll be sharing artifacts that I’ve connected to fiction writing. I almost always start in one place and quickly veer off course. This is the first exhibit in the series.] Even as far as soap operas go, Dark Shadows is pretty awful. There are scenes where the…
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Dispatches from a Literary Dropout
Before going any further, I want to extend my thanks to Steve Himmer for inviting me to serve as the Necessary Fiction writer-in-residence for February. I’ve been looking forward to this! By way of introduction, my name is Richard Melo. It’s all right if you haven’t heard of me. I’m sure I would never have…
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Monster Flicks
Poltergeist Most of us are dying for more tears, but not me. I live for the screams and shrieks. “Get away from my baby,” one cries, squeezing with the lights off. A few rounds pass through me and get lodged in the dresser. When I was alive, I took a slug in the lung that…
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The World Without Me
He dives out of the water on to a lilo: finds himself mounting Mrs Robinson. Her eyes are closed. Her lips ajar. In this shot, Mrs Robinson reminds me of a pietà. Benjamin reminds me of an airborne penguin, exiting the ocean, and landing on its breast. Her breasts, in this instance, as well as…
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On Robert Bresson
1. It took me a long time to appreciate Robert Bresson’s films. Not long, as in I had to see his films repeatedly before I was able to appreciate them. Rather, I watched a lot of other films and directors before I ever even came to Bresson. But this is just as well, for I…
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Chroma Key
Did you ever feel you were smaller than your life? Quite ridiculously small. And yet at the same time too big? Did you ever feel that the fit, at any rate, was wrong? I am too small for how big I’ve become. Talk about diet: that’s a laugh when I’m fifty feet top to toe.…
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Antonioni
No need to go obscure here. The films of Antonioni are what get me going and have inspired my own work for years. When I think about his films, namely L’Eclisse and La Notte, I have memories of sitting alone in the darkness, reduced to tears in the soft glow grey of a TV screen.…
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Run
It’s the short man who holds the camera, the tall man who gives the orders. The tall one tells me to stand by the chickens, to scatter cracked corn so the birds will scratch and peck around my feet. Red, those birds. Brick-red feathers and candy-red combs on their heads like blistered knuckles. They make…
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Last Screening Of A Hoax Cantana
When we watched it, on basement televisions after parents had gone to sleep or on a high school monitor after classes had ended, we were never less than convinced that it had been made locally. The hotel where most of it was set, we believed, looked like a place that had burned down on Route…
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The Cut
And so it was and so it is. A folding in of folds. An origami of the mind. Anna finds herself, once more, at the black door of the warehouse. Again, the palm of her hand pushing against the cold steel until it gives. But gives into what? And for whom? Who is she? A…