Café Monday: Moxie Mezcal

This week in Café Monday, we begin a series bringing you interviews with some truly wonderful authors. All over the internet there are individuals and groups just bursting with talent, and they are budding and blooming at such a pace it is hard to keep up with them all.

First off the rank is one of my favourites. I’d like to introduce you readers to Moxie Mezcal.

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EF: How do you feel about your audience? Do you get a feeling of who it is reading your work?

MM: Oh I absolutely adore my readers. Most of those that I’ve been fortunate enough to hear from are the ones who seek me out — whether through my web page or Twitter or Facebook — so they tend to have enthusiastic reactions, and that does wonders for my over-inflated ego.

As for who they are… well, I am a bit of an outsider, so I always expected that it’d be other outsiders who’d naturally gravitate towards my work, and that seems to be holding true. I seem to be big with a broad cross-section of goths, punks, occultists, anarchists, libertarians, people who think too much for their own good, people who spend a lot of time dissecting Lynch films, and people who walk around with a paperback of Fight Club tucked in their back pocket like it was Mao’s Red Book for the 21st Century. And I love them all dearly and love hearing from them. And if any of them ever find their way into San Jose I’d love to buy them a whiskey or absinthe or Molotov.

EF: When you write, are you thinking about the audience’s reaction or are you getting what you want to say onto the page?

MM: As much as I love my readers, I honestly don’t think about them at all when I’m writing. I don’t really worry about what people will like, what’s marketable or what’s offensive. The only reader I write for is myself; my goal is to write the kind of stories that I’d enjoy reading, and I cling to that mantra with religious zeal — it’s my only barometer of success.

Which isn’t to say that I am completely blind to the reader experience. I do put some thought into pacing, story structure, how and when mysteries are revealed. But it’s more about craft for craft’s sake rather than trying to please an audience, real or imagined.

EF: Every form of creative art has lovers and haters; what might a devoted fan say to convince a reluctant reader to look at your work?

MM: Well… my work seems to attract outsiders and I’m content with that. If someone is hesitant about reading my work, then they probably shouldn’t. If we have different values by which we judge art, it doesn’t mean we can’t all still be friends.

In terms of actual pitches I’ve heard people use… one guy had some success interesting his friends in Concrete Underground by talking about the layers of occult symbolism. Another is trying to talk some friends into reading it so they can have a whiskey-fueled discussion group about it. So I guess the best pitch you could give is that I write the kind of stories that you can get drunk and pick apart and debate for hours. That makes me smile.

EF: Why did you choose independent punk-as-fuck guerrilla fiction? Malcolm McClaren is dead and the angry, and the pure anarchy punk that he began seems pretty much dead, too. Is there still enough anger to smash the system?

MM: This is a tricky one. Like almost everything I do, there are two warring elements at play in the whole “punk-as-fuck” slogan I chose. On the one hand, I do love the way that punk rock, zines, DIY, and the various associated movements, from X-marked straight edge kids to Anarchist Black Cross to the ghosts of Riot Grrl, are so achingly sincere. The idea I like is that by declaring yourself so unapologetically anti-establishment, it precludes you from ever going back and selling out. You’re burning bridges.

Because I am not in this to make money, to “get signed” by some publisher, to be taken seriously by whatever nebulous “establishment” might exist out in publishing-land. I do not submit to agents, I do not write query letters, I do not pretend to understand McSweeney’s, and I will not pay fucking Publishers Weekly to review my book.

At the same time, I’m by nature a compulsive contrarian, and so I do like to build an antithesis or self-critique into everything I do. “Punk-as-fuck” is deliberately infantile, and also naive… punk rock is dead, if indeed it was ever even alive to begin with and not some strawman propped up by the huckster McLaren, and now the corporate monolith has defiled every orifice of its corpse, turning it into a commodity, into a fashion accessory. I understand that, and I understand how slapping “punk-as-fuck” on my work makes it very easy for certain types of people to dismiss it. Good, they should dismiss it, it IS infantile and naive and not at all as sophisticated as Scandinavian forensic thrillers. Just move along, there’s nothing for you to see here.

EF: How structured is your writing process?

MM: Completely unstructured and undisciplined. I write when I feel like I have to, when I have something to say that’s burning inside of me so bright that it eclipses all other thoughts. It’s an escape, a sort of play, or maybe even a crude form of self-therapy. I know a lot of other writers are much more structured, will sit down and force themselves to write, keep diligent track of their word counts and generally treat writing as a kind of job or chore. God bless them and I’d never tell another writer to abandon a process that works, but I don’t understand that at all. I write because I have a compulsive urge to, otherwise I’d be out enjoying all the beautiful things you miss out on while hunched over a laptop.

EF: Your characters — do you know them?

MM: I never write characters that are straight analogs of people I know in real life, because frankly real life is boring to me. But I do often base certain traits on things I’ve observed in real people, so one character may be an amalgamation of several people, a friend, an ex, a random encounter, or pieces of myself. Even then, I’ll usually exaggerate those traits and tendencies to make the character more archetypal. I think that fiction should be larger than life, sexier, more dangerous, more entertaining… or else what’s the point?

EF: Each of your books follows very different characters — different mental states, socio-economic status, and gender. That is not easy for many writers; are you comfortable voicing male and female characters?

MM: I think the real answer is I am equally uncomfortable with both masculine and feminine perspectives. Gender has always been a slippery, mercurial thing for me. I suppose that If I’d been born a decade or two later, now that kids seems to be more open about this sort of thing, I might have slipped more comfortably into some kind of “intersex” designation. But as it stands, having grown up in the Reagan ’80s in a Catholic Mexican-American family, I’ve wound up merely a confused and largely ambivalent transvestite.

As far as my writing goes, I find that female readers assume I’m a man, and male readers assume I’m a woman, so the only conclusion I’m left with is that no one feels entirely comfortable with me in their gender sandbox, and that suits me just fine.

EF: Are mental health and corporate wealth important subjects for discussion?

MM: Mental health, absolutely. To me it is one of the most fascinating phenomena of the modern industrialized world, that having conquered scarcity and nature to the point where the vast majority of us, in what we with predictable arrogance dub the First World, don’t actually have to worry about starving to death or day-to-day survival — in other words, having mitigated the external threats to our well-being — our very minds are turning on us.

Several years ago I was at a gathering of politically minded people that was mostly comprised of people who had a solidly middle class background, with a smaller but still substantial minority who’d grown up well below the poverty line (qualification: relative poverty, California not Calcutta). At least three-quarters of the middle-classers had, at one time or another had some kind of mental health issue. A couple were diagnosed bi-polar, others suffered depression, a few had had total nervous breakdowns, and one was in ongoing therapy as a result of a sexual assault.

So all these people with these middle class upbringings start talking about all this, and the folks from the lower class families’ jaws just drop. You see to them, mental illness is an anomaly. It’s rare, and usually when it occurs, it happens to people who have been fucked over by life in the extreme, shell-shocked Vietnam vets and people who’d hit rock bottom, people who live on the streets or in institutions but can’t function in society. To them, hearing a bunch of people with steady jobs and much more stable and carefree childhoods than themselves talking about their mental illnesses was just baffling. Their reaction wasn’t “get over it” or anything mean or dismissive, it was a legitimate gap in understanding… “how?”

That incident and that question of “how?” was something that stuck with me for a long time. I’ve lived around mental illness enough that I know it is a valid medical/physiological condition, and not something you can just say “get over it” to. And it does seem, at least in my experience, to be most prevalent in the middle and upper classes.

So I’ve developed two theories about this.

Theory #1: Human beings have an innate need to struggle, which acts as a built-in fail safe for population control. When things get too easy, and thus we can no longer reliably count on external forces to thin out the herd, this need for struggle kicks in and literally drives us nuts, killing us from the inside.

Theory #2: The fact that we no longer need to worry as much about survival in the primal day-to-day sense has freed us up to evolve. What we mistake for mental illness is actually growing pains of this evolution as we adapt to new ways of thinking about identity and ego.

This answer does tie back into my writing, which is my primary means of trying to understand these kinds of things. Theory #1 is explored in Concrete Underground and, to a lesser extent, in Sweet Dream, Silver Screen. There are shades of it in 1999 and Home Movie, but it really comes into play in a few upcoming pieces, including a short story called No. 1. Theory #2 is the driving force behind Fake and possibly the last bit of Concrete Underground, depending on how you interpret it. It is also going to be a major part of a new single that I think will be titled Shhh!

And corporate wealth is also something I try to deal with, but a slightly more nuanced way. I think everyone is familiar with the arguments of the anti-corporate movement. Whether you agree or disagree, you know what the critiques are, so I take that as a given. I’m more interested in using writing to explore and understand it rather than just whine about how bad it is.

So case-in-point, the character of Max is the representation of corporatism in my novel. He’s clearly the villain of the story, but my portrayal of him was intentionally romanticized; I think he’s a very compelling and arresting character. I’ve even seen an objectivist/libertarian message board post where he was extolled as a portrayal of the free-market ideal a la John Galt (yes I Google myself, no I am not ashamed to admit it). The point I was trying to explore with him is that he IS romantic, he IS a lover of personal freedom. It’s just that he puts an inordinate weight on his OWN personal freedom. Even if he’s not entirely sympathetic, he is relatable… on some level, we all wish we could jet set and have whatever we want and have beautiful kinky sex and not worry about the consequences or cleaning up after ourselves.

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Moxie haunts San Jose, but is easier for most of us to find Moxie at MoxieMezcal.com or on the blog, Facebook, twitter, or occasionally at Year Zero Writers. Wherever you find Moxie’s stories, you can be sure you have found a treasure. Go see for yourself.