An Interview with Author Jim Ruland
Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection, Big Lonesome, in addition to being the host of the long-standing LA-based reading series, Vermin on the Mount. Learn more about Ruland here.
Matty Byloos conducted this interview over email with writer, critic and reading series host Jim Ruland, who lives, writes and works in San Diego, CA.
Author Jim Ruland
I can’t remember exactly how I met San Diego-based writer, critic and host of the popular and long-running reading series Vermin on the Mount Jim Ruland, but I did. And I remember appreciating his talents very quickly. Early on, we exchanged books, and having received the modestly sized Big Lonesome in the mail, I dove in fast and found some pure and astonishing fiction gems, steeped in history and lent gravity via copious amounts of research. So I did my own research, and found one helluva writer, community builder, organizer, critic and host. And that, my friends, is Jim Ruland.
Below is the full transcript of a rather long-standing conversation over email. I didn’t have the chance to make it to the Vermin on the Mount this past February in D.C., but by all accounts it was another shining success, featuring notable indie-lit writers Mary Miller, Scott McLanahan, Amber Sparks and several others. Man oh man it’s an indie lit paradise and one needs to figure out quickly how to be in six places at once when it comes to the annual extravaganza that is AWP. But we do the best we can. And when I want to continue talking with someone, I guess I conduct an interview. Enjoy.
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Byloos: How long have you been running the LA-based reading series, Vermin on the Mount?
Ruland: JR: It started in August of 2004. So we’re coming up on our seven-year anniversary. Todd Taylor, my editor at Razorcake, a punk rock zine that I write for, asked me if I’d set up a reading for our friend Joe Meno. I said sure, but I didn’t want it to be just for our circle of friends. On Easter Sunday of that year I went to a conversation with Lawrence Weschler at The Mountain Bar in Chinatown and I just fell in love with the place. It’s a quirky little bar that was designed by one of the owners, Jorge Pardo, who received a MacArthur Fellowship last year. The very first bill was Joe Meno, Mike Faloon, Todd Taylor, Andrea Seigel and Joshua Bearman. Before we even had the first Vermin, the manager at the Mountain was very enthusiastic and wanted to do another one. So there was a lot of momentum behind it from the very beginning. I just had to keep it going.
Byloos: How has it changed?
Ruland: It hasn’t changed all that much to tell you the truth, but a lot more people know about it. The series is still at The Mountain Bar, I commission a new poster for each event, and it’s always free. I’ve changed more than the series: I published a book, grew a beard, quit my job, left LA, got married, started a new career, got sober, shaved my beard. But Vermin keeps chugging along…
Byloos: High points? Low Points?
Ruland: I’m really excited about some of the recent events I’ve had away from L.A. I brought Vermin on the Mount out to Denver for AWP 2010 and did it again last February with a reading in Washington, D.C. that was co-sponsored by Annalemma. I’ve done it in San Diego a few times. The first one coincided with the High Emissions tour with Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter and Aaron Burch, and we had over 100 people turn out. That’s really got me excited about future events in San Diego.
There haven’t been too many low points. It’s an irreverent reading series, which attracts independent/emerging writers, so I haven’t had many flakes or weird egos to deal with. I can only think of two writers who big-timed Vermin. I won’t mention their names because their reputations for boorishness are already pretty well documented. I think being on the West Coast also helps keep things mellow. West Coast writers are more laid back than East Coast writers, and even uptight New Yorkers lose their edge after a few days in El A.
Byloos: Where you see it going in the near future?
Ruland: It’s something I think about all the time. I think people assumed I’d stop doing it after I moved to San Diego, but one thing about me is I don’t give up easily. I remember after the McSweeney’s print journal first came on the scene there was a burst of DIY enthusiasm in the literary world. Reading McSweeney’s was like seeing The Ramones for the first time. People were like “I can do that” and then they did. I had stories in a lot of those magazines that came out and then one, two, five years down the line, they disappeared. I was determined not to let that happen to VOTM. Now I’ve been running Vermin in L.A. from San Diego longer than I did while living in L.A. I’m very proud of that. I don’t know where Vermin is headed, but it isn’t going away.
At the very least, I want to do more events in more locations and I’d like to do something that falls under the category of an anthology. I like to joke that the best thing about Vermin is it isn’t a literary magazine because of the enormous amount of work that goes into making magazines. But I want enlarge the scope of Vermin so that it has some kind of utility for writers after they read. Something like a community, a network, I place to make their peers aware of new work, something akin to promotion but more subdued. Also, a clothing line. Seriously. That doesn’t mean I want to attract a different kind of writer. I don’t want to deal with publicists and their flunkies and 25 year olds with seven figure book deals. I want to stick with writers at the fringes, whether they are emergent or underground or cult heroes. I don’t have indie-only rule. Anyone who wants to come to L.A. is welcome. I’m always looking for new talent. That said, I’m hashing out a plan. One thing that’s become clear is that I’m not going to be able to do it by myself. I’m going to need a lot of help from the Legion of Vermin, past, present and future.
Byloos: The thought that consistently kept coming up for me when I read your stories in the book Big Lonesome, was how effective the use of (at-times minor or tangential) history is in many pieces. It’s as if you found these curious little footnotes in marginal history texts, and then dug your detective heels in and polished up a gem (“A Terrible Thing in a Place Like This” is a prime example, in my mind).
Ruland: Thank you. It’s funny you should mention that story because I just got an interesting email about it. It started something like this: “Dear Jim Ruland. Did you send a story called “A Terrible Thing in a Place Like This” to The New Yorker twelve years ago?” Apparently, he stumbled on the story in his files and wrote to tell me how much he liked it when he discovered it in the slush pile as a reader at The New Yorker, but wasn’t able to get it published. Just goes to show you never know what goes on behind the scenes at a magazine or literary journal, the futility of reading too much into rejection letters, etc. They never tell the whole story. Nothing ever does. Half-truths are so much more tantalizing.
But “Terrible Thing” started with a happy accident. I became interested in the Haymarket Riots in Chicago and decided to read the Chicago Tribune in the days leading up to the incident to get a better sense of the mood of the city, and I found this wonderful expose of a hog slaughtering facility that makes Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle look like a Sunday school lesson. The expose hijacked my story, made me feel this world in a fresh and startling way. I had to use it. So it was a case of looking for one thing and finding something vastly different. Since that letter I’ve been thinking about that setting a lot. I just might return to it. Or highjack it again. We’ll see.
Byloos: There is almost a kind of journalistic element at play — like your readers are going to learn something about a time or a place or a population, as they spend time in your book. Are you a big researcher when you work?
Ruland: Yes, but in a casual, reckless way. I’m always poring over old books, advertisements, and photographs, looking for points of access. The danger is that history lies. Photographs are staged or posed. Advertising is cultural folklore. Histories are hook-driven arguments molded to fit agendas, settle scores, whitewash wrong-doing. I always try to remember that when we speak of history, we’re usually talking about a crime, and both sides of the law will have their own version of events.
That said, if that stuff is part of the culture my characters swim in, it’s my duty to make use of it. My wife likes to tell the story of a visit to the downtown Los Angeles Public Library. I was researching the boxer John L. Sullivan and came back to our table with a giant stack of books and a crazy smile on my face. I was just so happy! I guess you could say I like research too much. It’s been a problem for me in the past because it can be a huge a distraction. There was a time when I could have taught a class on German Naval Operations in the Atlantic Theater during World War II. Now, of course, I’ve forgotten most of it.
Byloos: Where does story writing start for you, and do you use history to find characters, events, situations within which you can operate as a writer?
Ruland: That’s a great question, and one I’m often unable to answer. The novel I’ve been working on the last two years, which is somewhat autobiographical and set in an Indian casino, has no origin story. There’s no flash of inspiration or insight I can point to and say “That’s when I knew…” When I latch onto something that catches my interest, I want to know everything about it, which leads to tangents, footnotes, etc. From there I seek out primary materials: letters, speeches, diaries, statements from the gallows. The actual words that people used–which is not the same thing as the truth–but is closer than anything I’m going to see on the History Channel. That takes a while, a long courtship before the commitment of actual writing. So to answer your question, I would say I “use” history to find events and situations to apply to my fiction, though that sounds kind of bloodless. My fiction, which often nudges up against one genre or another, is typically event driven. This is why I’m drawn to counterfactual tales, stories that pose the question “What if?” because it gives me the opportunity to create my own version of events over which I have complete authority.
Byloos: To what degree does “truth” become a factor in the story, if at all?
Ruland: If there’s truth, it’s my own. Right now I’m playing around with a story about debtor’s hospitals: you check out when you’re all paid up. I read a story in the Los Angeles Times about this situation in Nigeria. It wasn’t that big of a leap to wonder “What if that happened here?”
Byloos: As a writer who also hosts a reading series, organizes panels at conferences and writes criticism about other authors’ works, what kinds of questions do you most like to ask other writers, and would you mind directing one final question at yourself?
Ruland: : I like to ask writers who are appearing at Vermin on the Mount about their most unusual experience at a reading. So I guess mine goes all the way back to the Los Angeles coffee shop scene in the ‘90s. I was working at a place called Eagles Coffee Pub and my roommate and I started an open mic on Wednesday nights that my roommate named Skinny Leonard’s Free Verse. Eagles was located right next door to a high-end recording studio and famous musicians were always popping in. It was always startling to look up and see Lita Ford or Steve Perry or half of Stone Temple Pilots asking about the iced coffee special. Angelo from Fishbone got wind of Skinny Leonard’s and used to drop by and lay down some spoken word. He’d time his entrances so that he could start from outside the store burst into the coffee shop mid-rant. I learned a lot about performance from Angelo.
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Thank you kindly for your time, Jim!
Jim Ruland’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a number of newspapers, magazines and journals, including The Barcelona Review, The Believer, Black Warrior Review, Esquire, Hobart, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, Opium, Oxford American, Village Voice, and Razorcake — America’s only non-profit punk rock zine.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the host of Vermin on the Mount, an irreverent reading series in the heart of L.A.’s Chinatown.
Jim lives in San Diego.
Learn more about Jim Ruland at his official website, or on the Vermin on the Mount website.
(Author Photo courtesy Goodreads Author Page.)