Some People Have Two Refrigerators: A Conversation with Tucker Leighty-Phillips

(Interviewed by Cameron Finch)

Image Credit: Plate Number 169. Jumping over boy's back (leapfrog), Edward Muybridge, 1887

CAMERON: The title of your collection is taken from the last line in your piece "Toddy's Got Lice Again" (one of the stories that I personally think is most affecting). When I first encountered the book's title, I thought of all the times I have justified, accommodated, or surrendered to my vision (or someone else's vision) of my own inadequacies and pain.  But paired with the cover image -- "The Truants" by the American painter, Eastman Johnson -- I felt flung out of the social corset, both exiled and triumphant; holing up in the hollowed heart of a sugar maple with a partner by my side; taking fresh spun air and stuffing it into lungs; tapping into interspecies kinship and carving out a home in the literal roots of a place. What a thing to deserve! Maybe in this title there's room for both despair and contentment... Could you tell me a little about why you selected this title to encompass the collection as a whole? 

TUCKER: I think you've really nailed the emotional register. For me, initially, I wanted to kind of mimic the thematic framework of I Think You Should Leave, where the title is central to every skit, and try to create a world that is populated by a feeling; this feeling of deservedness or worthiness resonating around every character in each story. Maybe This Is What I Deserve felt like that. The stories about poverty are especially vital in this regard, as I've battled my own feelings of inadequacy and felt trapped in endless cycles of missed payments and pending due dates. I remember a point in my early twenties where I was at my absolute lowest, barely living paycheck-to-paycheck at a job I couldn't stand, renting the only place I could afford, leaning too heavily on some unhelpful vices. I started wondering if maybe I was destined for failure, like a higher power had placed me on Earth to be a loser. I think that was my biggest flirt with determinism, those feelings like I was doomed to slog through life. But! I think that's shifted over the years, and this has eventually become a story of hope, that maybe, even at our lowest, there is space for possibility and wonder. I was so thrilled when I received the cover for the collection. I had asked David Wojciechowski, Split/Lip's book designer, to make something that felt like those old Italo Calvino Harvest/HBJ covers. He presented this cover, with the Eastman Johnson painting, and it felt perfect. This collection cycles childhood, labor, nostalgia, and play; this painting captured all of it. I often joke that the thesis statement of my work is "to celebrate the lives of the impoverished without romanticizing their poverty," and I'm hoping this collection honors that. 

C: Could you tell me more about your relationship to the numeral zero? That gaping number and its representation of nothingness appears throughout the collection. One of your characters, who has stopped using numbers in their personal life, experiences an epiphany about nothingness and conspicuously gets a little black oval tattoo so their skin can take joy in the feeling of nothing. I kept thinking about the number of zero tattoos that may emerge on forearms after reading this story! Then, in the quietly powerful last line of “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” nothing is being said between teacher and student, and yet the presence of their silence together creates a tremendous amount of meaning, a booming body language.  And even, in “Togethering,” the hospital is “filled with absence, chock-full of lack.” How does nothing claim so much space? 

I recently read a line in an Olivia Laing essay that delighted me to recall the attention you give to absence and negative space in your work. Laing says: “Nothing doesn’t not require attention.” So, please tell us, what fascinates or puzzles you about zilch, nada, zip? Do you think there’s a connection to absences or lacks you experienced earlier in your life? Can an exploration of zero become anything else beyond zero?

T: This is a great question! I think absence or nothingness plays a huge role in my work. There’s a joke about living in poverty about having “sleep for dinner”—which is a lighthearted take on skipping meals, and the hunger of not knowing where one’s next meal is coming from. I remember how that felt—how resonant hunger was when you couldn’t satiate it. Nothing was heavier than any meal you could eat. But at the same time, in other ways, I’ve craved nothing. When I was a child, I used to cry myself to sleep after church, thinking about the possibilities of heaven, hell, and eternal life. I didn’t like the idea of something ever-lasting. I dreaded it, even if it was paradise. I wanted there to be nothing—to die and cease. Spiritually speaking, nothing was a comforting thought. Sometimes on the weekends, I want to do nothing. Nothing is an act in itself (although, in this case, nothing means lots of somethings, television and reading and going for walks… all their own somethings).  I’ve always been attracted to the vastness of nothingness—it’s kind of endless in that way. It’s badass, really. 

C: Nothingness is badass! I love that. Speaking of vastness and memories of church and the dread of ever-lastingness, there's a sense of the spiritual that ghosts through these stories. Not in a haunted way, but it's there linguistically, knitted into the fabric of your word selections. It seems that through writing, like an alchemist, you can turn any mundane thing -- an intercom system, a fully-stocked fridge, a McDonald's ball pit, even flushed faces in the throes of illness -- into something divine, an altarpiece, a sanctuary for your characters. Has writing itself and its rituals become a kind of church or prayer to you?  

T: There was this recent viral tweet by user @boywaif that stated: "I had a French professor who once said if you just did something like going to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and categories you would go crazy with pure sense and joy." This tweet put into words something I am always thinking about--how do we defamiliarize our world? How do we return a childlike wonder to everything around us? How do we regain an innocence, excitement, and enthusiasm that feels dragged out of us through the cynicism of adulthood? Many of my stories that engage with these feelings were born out of living rurally and in poverty; I still remember my amazement at discovering that some people had two refrigerators. The first time I stepped into a mall. Swimming in a pool at someone's house. You know, so many things that seem so normal in adulthood but felt fantastical when I was a child. For me, storytelling is a chance to access those emotions again, and to try to offer those feelings to others. I think the language of spirituality is probably very close to what I'm trying to discover, so it feels like a sensible metaphor. 

C: With so many child protagonists and narrators in this collection, I was curious: how do you hold onto that perspective and the memory of being in that difficult and exploratory time of life? There's just so much warp and wonder...but maybe that's true of life at all ages. Two stories I've been carrying with me for many years now are the novel Space Invaders by Nona Fernandez, and the Spanish film from the 1970s, The Spirit of the Beehive. Do you know these? I saw a kinship with them in your work. Both of these stories explore violence and inequities and the despair of the world through children's eyes. And yet, there is still time for play, there is still make-believe, there is still something to be laughed about. I recently heard the author Lydia Conklin talk about how humor and sorrow need each other and how they both are inextricably linked emotions by their ability to surprise us. 

T: Trying to recapture the thought process of childhood is really hard. It’s something I often chalk up to logic, but I think it's also something else. Development, maybe? I don't know. I have not read Space Invaders or watched Spirit of The Beehive (although I am familiar with both, and both have been on my list for some time). Some of my major influences in trying to capture the voice of childhood are Abbas Kiarostami, whose film Where is the Friend's House? has been really foundational for me. I also really enjoy Yasujirō Ozu, especially his film Good Morning, about the two young boys who go on a silent protest until their parents purchase them a television. If I were to teach a class on writing childhood, I think those would be locked in to the syllabus forever, they are both so wonderful and evocative and capture so much of what it feels like to be young. I also appreciate, with Kiarostami especially, how they take children seriously. If writing is about scale, then our narrative and the importance of narrative must have its own level of bandwidth--anything can feel as dire as life or death; even the act of returning a boy's homework to him, even the dream of owning a television.

C: One thing that particularly struck me in your collection was the way in which children's games provide an opportunity for story, character dynamics, and setting. With the characters as their avatars, your readers vicariously play Aliens, Airport, Whirlpool. Any scenario can suddenly be gamified. I began to think of games as a secret inherited language that connects children from long ago to children of today. Haven't we all engaged in whirlpool, lava, ninja, tag, or telephone sometime in our young lives? At what point do we lose sight of that portal into the game? In your stories, there's a particular attention given to the fact that these children "do not want their game to end." I found that so astute and self-aware and poignant, especially as the endings of your stories tend to end on notes of despair or longing; we leave each story with the drama of uncertainty. Could you talk a bit about both your relationship to games and your relationship to endings? 

T: I think I've always been invested in simulation--the act of suspending disbelief, believing in something else. When I was a kid, I played a lot of Runescape. A lot of my friends had whatever game system was new at the time, and I was always the kid that went over to their house and watched, you know? But we all got into Runescape, and it was kind of a great equalizer--you could play on any computer, with even the slowest internet. The game moved at whatever pace you wanted--you could go kill dragons and battle other players, or you could go fishing, chop trees, make fires and cook food. I got really attached to Runescape because it was a place where I felt like I was on level ground with every other player. I wasn't thinking about my material conditions. That was important to me--being able to blend in. And we played outside too. We had a big dirt road behind our house, where you could walk around for hours and pretend to be on all sorts of quests. I think imagining those adventures gave life a sense of richness--to feel grandeur, even on a Tuesday in the middle of the school year. I liked that willingness to retreat into imagination, and I think that yearning to go back to those places has really integrated itself into this collection. 

C: The other day, I was having a conversation with another writer friend about listening to non-human elements of our daily lives and how we both ask permission before picking up rocks, leaves, sea glass, coins. Sometimes the objects say “Yes,” sometimes they say, “No, leave me be.” I associated this conversation with the used lollipop your character in “Down the Tunnel, Up the Slide” finds at the fast food play area. The kid picks up “some other child’s loss” and then drops it again “for another to find;” a “small camaraderie.” Where do you think this intuition comes from, that listening to take or leave that which we find? Can you talk about how intuition plays into your writing practice, and how you listen to your stories (and how those stories may be listening to you in return?) 

T: Intuition in storytelling is a strange thing. Sometimes it means making up words that "sound right." Sometimes it means cutting out entire sections of prose and letting white space do the talking. Sometimes it means reading a poem from bottom-to-top to see what the reverse-chronology can tell you; like a strange lyrical time travel, seeing what the end holds and how that impacts the beginning. The story you mention, "Down the Tunnel, Up the Slide" was written as a challenge to myself--I wanted to write a story about a Fast Food Play Place that also felt like one in structure. I wanted the prose to climb and tumble and move through rooms and little compartments. I wanted the reader to feel both expansive and constrained. I didn't know what I wanted from the actual narrative itself, but I wanted to chase a feeling and see what it evoked. 

C: What does it feel like to inhabit your space at the moment of writing? What are you paying attention to when you're writing in private? How does (if it does) your attention shift when you begin to prepare a story to be read by others?

T: I think some of my best writing is done in advance; meaning, I haven't written it yet. I catch a line or phrase and I take it for a walk, literally. I walk around town, or up and down the hill, and I think about the story I want to tell, and I'll try to build a paragraph around the line, and I get the general feeling and beginning and end before I've actually written anything. Sometimes, jumping directly to the page can stifle me, because I don't want to solidify it in writing, I want to play with it as an idea before I sit down to make the blueprint. 

C: In the story, “Tucker Leighty-Phillips 2: The Sequel,” a large hunk of story real estate is given to the particular predicament of a group of actors called The Original Cast; the predicament being there is a hair caught in the space between their tongue and throat. Despite their best efforts, the hair refuses to be swallowed. A few lines later, as they cross state borders while on tour, the hair in the throat remains. What is the hair in the back of your throat? Something that can’t leave you be? That announces its presence in your body, your mind, if not daily, then at incessant intervals? Is there a hair that was produced in this collection that you’ll be wrestling with in later projects? 

T: The hair in the back of my throat is usually not metaphorical--I've got really long hair and I'm constantly having to pull it from my mouth. When I'm eating, running, doing dishes, etc. I think the biggest "hair" from MTIWID is recreating it--going back to the drawing board and writing something else, whether it's a novel, a story collection, or another chapbook. Most of the chapbook was written while I was in grad school, so nearly all of my focus was on writing. Now, I'm working full time, I have a dog and a long-term partner, and a much more comprehensive life than I did in school. I guess my hair is just continuing the motivation to write, or being happy with the writing I've done and not feeling remorse for what could have been. If this is it for me, hell yeah. I did it. 

C: Your story, “The Street Performer,” was first published in Tiny Molecules! Can you give us a behind the scenes tour of this story? Where were you when you wrote it? How did the story arrive to you? What’s something about this story that only Tucker Leighty-Phillips would know?  

T: I had this phase where I was writing all sorts of stories using phrases that could have dual meanings. They were mostly really terrible. I had one called "The Concession Stand" about a monthly convention where people announced what they had given up on. There's another called "The Beared Lady" that was published in Threadcount about a circus performer who wrestles (or is wrestled by) bears. I think this was the first one in the series, and is probably the one I feel the most love towards. A few months before writing it, I'd driven through my childhood hometown and decided to go down my old neighborhood, and I stopped in front of my childhood home. I think the house was empty, because the grass was pretty tall, and the screen door was hanging open, presumably busted. It was in rough shape. I also knew that a few folks on the street had passed away in the years I'd been gone, but some others were still there--and I felt a strange sense of intrusion by being there without them knowing. Like I was coming back without warning, or without invitation. I think I realized how anachronistic my relationship to the neighborhood was, and wrote this story as a response. That's what it always comes back to, ain't it? Yearning. 

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is the author of Maybe This Is What I Deserve (Split/Lip Press 2023). He lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Learn more at TuckerLP.net.