Shoutout Q&A with Gordon Brown
Author of “Death of a Hotel Manager” in The Baltimore Review
Welcome back to our Friday feature: Shoutout Q&A.
Check out our archives for access to great short stories published through this year, including this posting from May: an appreciation of Gordon Brown’s rabble-rousing “Death of a Hotel Manager” (650 words) in The Baltimore Review. I strongly recommend reading this great, very short, short story, if you haven’t already, before dipping into this interview.
Gordon grew up in the deserts of Syria and now lives in the deserts of Nevada. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, f(r)iction, Hunger Mountain Review, and Broad Ripple Review. among others. Gordon spends his free time writing feverishly and looking after his cats, of which he has none.
Thanks for your time today, Gordon! Can we start with setting? What can you tell us about growing up in the deserts of Syria? And further, being raised in a desert, one would think you would make a bee line for the tropics. What in holy hell got you to Nevada?
One spring morning, for some reason that’s never been explained to us, the mukhabarat, the [Syrian] regime’s secret police, showed up to my family’s apartment in Aleppo. In quiet, firm tones they let us know that we’d been blacklisted, and we’d need to leave the country and never come back.
I say “us,” but the truth is, I was in college at the time, just finishing up my freshman year. If it wasn’t for my decision to stick around for a May term, I might’ve been somewhere over the Atlantic when we were being exiled—or whatever term you’d use when you’re getting removed from a place that’s not-quite-home-but-not-quite-anything-else.
I’ll spare readers the details. A lot of those details are sad but a lot more of them are boring, and none of them compare to what happened to the people I’d grown up with. The short of it is that we spent the next few years tumbling across the North American continent. We finally lost momentum somewhere in the Mojave, where I got a job writing resumes for folks getting out of prisons.
(The tropics will have to wait.)
“Death of a Hotel Manager” is about as condensed a short story as they come. In a few hundred words, you capture the cultural, political and economic undercurrents of the kind of tourist town that could be in any number of places in the world. What was your vantage point in observing this dynamic play out, and what can you tell us about the fact that drove the fiction?
I’m sure there’s a different term for it now, but I grew up as a “TCK” or “Third Culture Kid”—a term for children who spend a significant part of their formative years outside the culture that their parents come from. Think military brats, children of diplomats, aid workers, language teachers, etc.
It can be tough, being part of two worlds and belonging to neither, but with that perpetual outsider status comes the ability to notice things that other people treat as normal.
One of those “normal” things I encountered, both in Syria and other formerly-colonized countries, was a recurring pattern of self-hatred. A lot of people with constant interactions with foreigners seemed to develop a seething contempt for their countrymen. For kids who had one foreign and one local parent, that contempt often bordered on hatred. That feeling or fear of inferiority, along with the shame at anything and everything linked to one’s home country, was the inspiration behind “Death of a Hotel Manager.”
Even if you’re from one of the few places that hasn’t been on the receiving end of the imperial boot heel, I still think everyone struggles with that same anxiety in some shape or form.
Both your prose and your poetry have been published widely, across quite a range of venues. Many congratulations on that! What can you tell Shoutout readers—most of whom are short story writers—about your experiences as a submitter, as a receiver of acceptances (and, I’m assuming, a receiver of the occasional rejection) that might make their time in the submission trenches feel a little less…random? A little less dispiriting?
It’s incredibly kind of you to suggest that the rejections are just occasional. I can promise that they’re anything but.
My acceptance rate for fiction submissions is currently standing at 17.9%. Which is bad. Really bad. If I had any decency (which I don’t), I’d be working on getting that acceptance rate down to beneath 10%—ideally, even lower than 5%.
My advice to readers [who are writers] is to be better, braver, and more ambitious. Treat rejection as something to aspire to, rather than worry about. If you step into the ring and aren’t getting knocked on your ass on a regular basis, it means you’re in the wrong weight class.
If you submit a dozen stories in a year and each one of them gets picked up on your first try, maybe it’s a sign that you’re phenomenally lucky, but more likely it’s an indication that you’re not aiming as high as you could.
Rejections hurt. They’ll hurt every time you get one, but the sooner you stop being afraid of them and treat them as part of the battle, the more liberated you’ll become to be bolder with your work and where you send it. Don’t try to avoid rejections—set a goal for how many you’ll want to have before each year is out.
I feel exactly the same way about rejections, and you’ve framed it more eloquently than I ever could. Thanks for that :)
You are big into Haiku. A lot of your short story work would be categorized as flash for its condensed length. Haiku are the “flash” of poetry. What is it about the seventeen-syllable form (5-7-5 for those of you keeping score at home) that captures your imagination?
Surprisingly, modern haiku are often even shorter than that!
While you’ll still sometimes find people using the 5-7-5 structure, the general consensus is that this principle doesn’t work well outside of the Japanese language. Instead, modern English haiku length is often condensed down to what you can express in a single breath, which is a big part of the appeal for me—the challenge.
I love the puzzle of trying to pack as big of a punch into as few words as possible. In haiku, there’s no room for ornamentation or bloat. Every single word has to be thoughtfully selected and purposefully included. Each has to fit perfectly with the words around it.
Each haiku has to create something greater than the sum of its parts, often surprising the reader with wordplay or double-meanings that invite you to look at even the smallest things in life from a different perspective. A lot of those same principles are at play when it comes to microfiction and flash fiction—think of Hemingway’s “Baby shoes. For sale. Never worn.” or Augusto Monterroso’s “When she awoke, the dinosaur was still there.”
Can you shoutout a fellow writer / story / book that you think the world needs to have its eyes on now?
By far and away, the question I’ve been dreading the most, just because there’s so many amazing writers and works out there that don’t get a fraction of the praise and attention they deserve.
In no particular order, read the microfictions of Ana María Shua, any short story by Jeffrey Ford, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain, “Going for a Beer” by Robert Coover, “Our Black Comedy” by Elisabeth Ingram Wallace, and Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler (just to name an obscenely small number of achingly brilliant works).
Based on “Death of a Hotel Manager” (and “All Fairytales Are About Longing” in f(r)iction, and “King of infinite Space” in Broad Ripple Review…check them all out, they’re excellent) it’s clear that you have a gift for pulling apart complex systems in order to understand the motivations that drive, and possibly up-end, them. Things like resentment, jealousy, aspiration, justice, injustice, raw need—all the big-ticket human drivers. I guess what I’m asking is…what’s next for you? :) Is there a Gordon Brown “White Lotus-y” roman a clef in the works?
No clefs for me, Roman or otherwise—though I will admit that my critique group has bullied me into setting short stories aside for a while and working on a novel instead. Hoping to have a first draft knocked out by the end of the year and a second draft sometime between that and the heat death of the universe.
For anyone who doesn’t want to wait that long, though, you can grab a copy of my chapbook Skin Crawls from Cuttlefish Books, and I’ll be posting my forthcoming short stories as they become available over on Instagram at @gordonbrownwrites!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences with us, Gordon. We look forward to reading more and / or the heat death of said universe.
Thanks for reading Short Story Shoutout.
Check out our archives for more bracing, new short stories, more about the journals that publish them, and interviews with the writers who brought them to life.
And if you’re feeling it, please recommend us to your friends so we can bring more eyes to writers on the come up, weekly.
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