An Interview with Clifford Chase by Jim Gladstone

Brooklyn writer Clifford Chase—author of the The Hurry-Up Song, a memoir of losing his older gay brother to AIDS—recently made his fiction debut with Winkie, a genre-and-gender-bending novel that’s earning accolades everywhere from Out to Oprah magazine. Winkie is a hermaphrodite, an alleged terrorist, a weatherbeaten stuffed bear. The author himself appears at Winkie’s fictional trial, testifying on behalf of his onetime companion. Breezily readable, super-weird, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly moving, Winkie (Grove Press) is a one-of-a-kind creation, as queer a book as you’ve read in ages. Author Jim Gladstone, whose first writing to appear between hard covers was in the Chase-edited Queer 13: Gay and Lesbian Writers Recall Seventh Grade (1997) chatted with Cliff Chase about the bear necessities.

Jim Gladstone: I remember your mentioning the early notion for this project ages ago. That Winkie has been published after all this time—to great acclaim, no less—is a real testament to perserverance. It should provide inspiration to all of us non-prolific writers who turn ideas over in our head for a long time.

Clifford Chase: I started working on this ten years ago. Probably I was working on it even before then, but there are definitely passages I wrote in 1996 that actually stayed in the book. I started out planning on writing about my childhood and my mother’s childhood through the character of Winkie, who was her teddy bear and was handed down to me when I was a small kid.

Gladstone: So there was no intention for this to be a political book when you started?

Chase: Not at all. During a residency at the Blue Mountain colony in the1997, I started working on some of the scenes of Winkie leaving my childhood home and wandering into the forest. I was inspired by the beauty of the Adirondacks. Coincidentally, the legal proceedings around the Unabomber case were going on around then, and I ended up connecting that to the more autobiographical threads of what I was writing, which started taking Winkie into whole new places, writing-wise. In the forest, Winkie met this troll-like creature in a dilapidated cabin who was based on the Unabomber.

Gladstone: It’s interesting that because the book was so long in the works, the Unabomber elements ended up dovetailing with your whole post-9/11 critique.

Chase: Yes. Terrorism worked its way into the book via the Unabomber four years before 9/11. I was too upset to work at that point, and I set the project aside for a while. I didn’t make all the connections in my head right away—I didn’t really think about Ted Kaczynski as a “terrorist” right away. It seemed like a whole different story.

Gladstone: So, after putting Winkie on hold, what brought you back to it?

Chase: What really started pulling things together in my mind was the whole John Walker Lynd affair, when this man faced all these unjust accusations by the government and it became clear that the administration was comfortable with torture to coerce confessions. That’s when Winkie started to become this sort of Unabomber manqué who the government was turning into a sort of symbol of evil.

Gladstone: As strange as it is to have created a living-breathing ambisexual stuffed animal in the early portions of the book, Winkie gets really outlandish when this persecution begins.

Chase: I was feeling angry and I funneled it into humor. I sort of regressed into a kind of humor I hadn’t worked with since high school, when I drew these little cartoons to express my feelings. But bringing politics into my writing was a really new experience for me. Especially having started this book thinking I was using it to explore some of my more painful childhood feelings and memories. When I read through the book now, it’s very interesting to me that the political content is the most purely comic writing.

Gladstone: The book is a pretty ballsy mélange. Did you worry about whether it would be publishable?

Chase: I really didn’t know that this was ever going to work. But I was having these unified feelings in my head, this sense that the different material was somehow coming together in a way that made sense to me. I just hoped that it would make sense to anyone else. I was just following my intuition. It’s not as if I felt extremely confident. I remember opening my eyes in the mornings and thinking, “Well, its time to get up and work on my ridiculous book.” In some ways, the fact that it took so long to write may have been a saving grace. I don’t think it would have been accepted even three years ago. But another couple of years of Jon Stewart hammering away every night has helped change the cultural environment.

Gladstone: What was the biggest challenge in the actual writing process?

Chase: I knew that the transitions between the autobiographically-based memory sections and the political satire would be really tricky. Keeping those threads interwoven was the most difficult part of the writing. I’m used to writing memoir and I would keep slipping out of Winkie’s voice into my own point-of-view. I had to be really disciplined about that. And I needed to have friends reading the work in progress and pointing out the slips. It was like when a musician has to transpose music from one key into another, I had to shift my own half-memories into fiction.

Gladstone: What helped you make those transpositions as smooth as possible?

Chase: The first time my agent submitted the manuscript to my editor at Grove Press, she didn’t make an offer, but I think she understood what I was doing even better than I did at that point. She sent me this long, incredibly thoughtful list of questions about my intentions and I had a lot of trouble answering them. I felt like I was flunking an oral exam on my own novel. It was really helpful. It led me to spend a year and a half restructuring the novel to get it to a place that made better sense to me, and to her. I did a lot of reading during that period, too, starting with Freud’s The Uncanny. I also was glad to discover some of Kafka’s animal stories. Some critics have mentioned The Metamorphosis and The Trial in reviews, but the Kafka story that gave me more confidence is “Josephine the Mouse Singer.”

Gladstone: The other name that tends to come up is David Sedaris, which doesn’t strike me as apt. Do you think it’s a superficial link, just because he’s gay and uses humor?

Chase: I don’t mind. I like what I’ve read of his work and he does have some pieces that are sort of fables. The comparison that would be most meaningful to me is Donald Barthelme, whose work I’ve really been inspired by. But nobody seems to know Barthelme anymore, so that comparison isn’t going to help the book find an audience.

Gladstone: Who do you think your core audience for this book will be?

Chase: I never really thought about who the book would be read by until Entertainment Weekly—in a very nice review—said “Winkie is not for everyone.” I guess I think the first audience for it is Literary Fags, and then women are probably the next circle in the expanding wave of Winkie enthusiasts. I don’t have any idea what straight men will make of the book.

Gladstone: You’ll probably find a big readership among Plushies and Furries!

Chase: Yeah, maybe there will be a whole profusion of alt-Winkie slash fiction. But you know, Grove has sold it into nine foreign languages, including Norwegian. Apparently teddy bears are very popular there. So who knows where Winkie will catch on. Wherever teddy bears are loved and Bush is hated!

Read more about Winkie at: www.freewinkie.com

Jim Gladstone, author of The Big Book of Misunderstanding and Gladstone's Games to Go has also written comic strips, dialogue for the Claymation M&M's characters, award-winning erotic fiction, television commercials about heavy menstrual bleeding, and fine dining reviews. He lives, eats, fucks, and bleeds in Philadelphia.