Kevin Maloney: On Writing with a Day Job, Parenthood, How Twitter Made Him a Better Editor, and His Novel ‘The Red-Headed Pilgrim’
As a highschooler growing up in Southern New Mexico I dreamt of moving to California long before I actually did. The truth is, I dreamt of moving anywhere that wasn’t New Mexico, but California seemed the easiest place to imagine. It was constructed mostly through the books I was reading — Beatnik novels of self-actualization and artistic living. Shortly after I turned eighteen, I road-tripped to California with the intention of becoming a poet. I imagined myself a young Kerouac, only different.
As I got older, Kerouac appealed to me less. There were a lot of reasons for this, but a core one was simply that I hadn’t discovered the same nomadic living and freedom he so often harped on about. Life was hard. California was expensive and unforgiving. Responsibilities seemed impossible to avoid and I didn’t understand how he’d done it.
In Kevin Maloney’s newest novel, The Red-Headed Pilgrim, he asks this same question — how does a person exist in the fringe of society while still tending to one’s own responsibilities? It follows the protagonist (also named Kevin Maloney) as he takes a pilgrimage to lose his virginity and gain enlightenment. Along the way there is farm work and camping; there are wild women and almost loves; there is actual love and its fallout; there is parenting and the chaos that it entails; maybe most importantly there is the constant struggle to build a life that feels meaningful. The Red-Headed Pilgrim embodies much of the same questions and themes found in Kerouac, Thoreau, and Whitman, yet it also feels wholly unique and of this time. It is full of suffering and beauty, and it lurches towards truth in its haphazard way that feels a lot like life. It is a book about yearning —for love, for art, for a different kind of life, for spirituality, and, ultimately, for a sense of one’s identity.
I spoke via Zoom with Kevin about wanderlust, parenthood, day jobs, how Twitter made him a better editor, and how he’s carved out a life that allows time for art.
Shelby Hinte: Could you start by talking a little bit about how The Red-Headed Pilgrim came to be?
Kevin Maloney: I think I started writing some scenes back in 2015. My first book, Cult of Loretta, had just come out and I had no idea what I was going to do next. I found myself writing scenes that were in the world of the divorce I'd gone through in real life, but sort of fictionalizing it and making other things happen that hadn’t happened in real life. I started at what became the middle of the novel and realized that I wanted to create a very naïve protagonist because I felt I was really naïve in my early twenties. I didn't think I could get the reader there unless I took them all the way back to the beginning. I got the idea to kind of follow the model of some books I read when I was younger. Like Siddhartha by Hermann Hess — books where a boy becomes a young man and tries to find the meaning of life. I wanted to follow that model but make it a comedy where everything just goes terribly wrong, and the protagonist fucks up everything. I read the Beats when I was a teenager and I sort of put them on a pedestal, but when I got a little older I saw them from a different perspective. I wanted to reexamine that old idea of someone very innocent going on a quest to both to lose their virginity and to find the meaning of life and to see how it could lead into something loosely based on an actual dark period of my life.
SH: The protagonist of The Red-Headed Pilgrim has that wanderlust and the freedom we usually ascribe to male writers from the Beat era, yet he also has a daughter and his relationship to his daughter is on his mind constantly. Their eventual estrangement becomes a huge source of his mental and emotional anguish. I'm curious, with the parenthood element in particular, how you felt your book was in conversation to some of those early influences?
KM: I felt there was very little thought given to the families of some of the Beats who went wandering around America. It was always like, oh, somebody showed up and the next day we hopped in a car and went to Denver and I was like, ‘wait, what's the other side of that story?’ I think that the protagonist of my book is not very aware, but I think he is trying to be a good person. He is very preoccupied with philosophy. When he becomes a parent he tries to jump into that world, but he does everything wrong. He is still trying to hold onto his identity. I think that's the struggle both in the book and in my real life. There is this tension between trying to be an artist and also someone who's a seeker, but also someone who wants to be a good parent and a good feminist and a thoughtful human being and asking ‘can you be all those things?’ Maybe the answer is no, but it's worth trying even if everything might fall apart. I wrote the book in part to revisit some times in my life, but also to fictionalize them and see how much I could explore that tension without necessarily having an answer. I don't think there is an answer.
SH: It’s probably worth noting for people who haven't read the book yet, that your protagonist shares your name. He is also Kevin Maloney. I gather that it's somewhat autofictional and I was curious, how did deciding to fictionalize your life instead of turning it into memoir impact the writing?
KM: I can't write memoir at all. When I try, I end up like going through emails and trying to remember timelines and what happened, and I still get it wrong. For me, just throwing truth out the window and trying to tell the spirit of what happened, but with the same spirit of invention that a short story writer who doesn't know what's going to happen in the next scene they’re writing does. In a lot of ways my life provided the arc, but I felt at each scene anything could happen. It made it more fun. It gave it a sense of playfulness. I felt I could tell my truth through these characters in a more profound way than if I was trying to get the facts right. It allowed me to push each character further than they might have gone in real life. Werner Herzog said something about the ‘ecstatic truth,’ which is basically that lies told with in the spirit of truth are closer to reality than trying to get everything correct. I guess I just tried to write the book with that in mind.
SH: I've been thinking a lot about this in relationship to fiction, especially with, that popular term ‘autofiction’ and I’ve noticed that readers tend to get so concerned with sifting out the real from the fake. It’s as if they want everything to be something that actually happened so they can attach it to the real person. I love this idea of the ecstatic truth — that you're getting closer to the heart of something by making it up, but were you ever scared or concerned that people would just totally conflate him with yourself since you guys share a name and similar histories?
KM: I don't know that I'm scared of that. The book is starting to make its way into the world, so with the people I love most, I want to make sure they know it is fiction, but if they have a question about something —whether it was real or not— they can check-in with me. Beyond that, in a bigger sense, I think smart fiction, to whatever degree it's autobiographical, is self-critical. It’s aware of its own flaws and it wears them on its sleeve. For me to tell this story, I felt the protagonist had to be the biggest fool. I think it's where some of the comedy comes from. My hope is that the reader is more aware than the protagonist of how ridiculous he is being. That's where some of the tension comes from.
I do think it's weird that the word autofiction even exists. I've heard from writer friends who wrote something totally out of left field and people still ask them questions as though their work is memoir. I don't know if that's just because we're in a social media world and a reality TV world where entertainment exists at this weird nexus. I guess I just kind of throw all that out the window and I'm like, who cares? Was it interesting? Is it good? Did it make you feel something? We don’t need to know what’s real. I think I also named the character Kevin Maloney just to kind of fuck with that concept on purpose. Because why not? There are a lot of writers who change the protagonist's name or make it just slightly different and I'm like, just cut the artifice.
SH: There also seems to be this strange phenomenon of fictional work adapted from stories that go viral on social media. It’s as though if a story goes viral it has an embedded audience for when it gets adapted into a book or movie. What do you see for the future of fiction, specifically novels, with this obsession of connecting work back to the real?
KM: I think we like to think things have changed a lot, but to some extent this tension's been here since fiction was first a thing. I was reading recently that Walt Whitman was a shameless self-promoter and I was just that imagining Walt Whitman's Twitter account would be the most obnoxious thing. I think the ways that social media is shaping fiction has to do with attention span. Every writer's competing against Netflix right now and not necessarily other books in terms of commanding attention. I try to make my writing really sharp and fast paced. I have to keep my own attention if I want anybody else to read it. There’s also something to be said for going the total other direction. Regardless, good art always tries to just cut to someone's own truth.
SH: What other ways do you see social media impacting your writing?
KM: When it's good, a joke will spread on Twitter. There's an aliveness to that kind of writing that I think when some people approach the page they feel like, “okay, I am now in a literary space and I have to talk to literature,” but if someone randomly tweets something, they're just trying to be funny. Sometimes more profound things will come from that sort of lightheartedness. I think Twitter is bad in so many ways, but the ways it's good is it forces people to edit right there. I would say that I personally have become a better editor of my own work because of Twitter and trying to shave characters.
SH: What are some contemporary writers that you are feeling inspired by or reading or engaging with right now?
KM: Anytime Bud Smith writes something I'm excited about it. I think Chelsea Martin is amazing. I just read [Tell Me I’m an Artist] and that blew me away. Mike Nagel wrote a book called Duplex that's incredible. There are some deceased or older writers like Denis Johnson and Charles Portis who I just adore and have really shaped what I do. Allie Rowbottom and Jon Lindsey are both incredible writers. It's really exciting to me to read people that I have met or know to some extent in the real world and then can go read their writing and feel it's alive on the page. To me that is a huge thrill. There’s probably like 20 people I could list. I'm forgetting some, but I think some of the best writing ever is happening right now. It just looks different and feels different maybe than literature used to. People haven't quite wrapped their head around the fact of how good it is. Maybe small circles know how good it is, but I don't think the ripples have gone out about how exciting it is.
SH: What do you see as the connective tissue between some of these writers? What do you think sets them apart from literature of the past?
KM: I think we live in such a different world in a lot of ways. We live in this hyper-connected world that sort of forces us to be quick and smart and funny. I think of Dostoevsky. He was writing to an audience that had nothing competing for their attention. He's just like, okay, I got you for the next 2000 pages. But I do think the pressure to be relevant and to not be writing for TV —to be writing specifically for the page, to write a book and not be thinking about what it could be turned into in—means you're writing in a different way than people have written before. I think you're trying to do what TV can't do. TV can do something for you, but when you're reading alone in the bathtub it's someone's taking over your brain in a way that movies don't. I think the best writers are aware of that and aren't writing a book that read like a movie script. They're doing things on the page that TV can't do. It’s the same as when photography became prominent. Painters realized that painting realistic paintings wasn't interesting anymore. They had to do what a photograph couldn't do. Similarly, writers who are aware that you can't out Netflix Netflix, realize that you can do this wholly other thing where you descend into someone's brain and their reality.
SH: The protagonist in The Red-Headed Pilgrim is really concerned with subverting convention and capitalist ways of living. He wants to prioritize spiritual and creative living, yet he also has to make certain compromises. I'm curious for your own life, how have you found a balance between being creative and also having to comply with whatever adult obligations are in front of you?
KM: I'm 46 years old and I don't think I found that balance, and maybe I don't want to find that balance. I had an office job for thirteen years where I drove to the same office every day. I never wanted it to feel particularly comfortable. I am responsible for more than just myself. I have to do certain things to be a good parent and that's important to me, but I don't ever want to mistake [work] for my life. Even though I tried to bring some kind of mindfulness to it, I was always aware that my real life was what happened after five o'clock. I want to be an artist, but it's really hard to make a living that way in this world. I've learned how to make a living, but it doesn’t talk very well to the part that is an artist.
SH: Do you ever feel like having a career that offers financial support that’s separate from your writing is useful to your creative practice?
KM: Oh yeah, definitely. I think if I quit my job and writing had to pay the bills, I would probably start writing very differently. If someone right now told me ‘I will give you 10 million dollars to move to LA and have your own TV show,’ I think I'd say no. This isn't a bridge to somewhere else for me. I’d rather build websites during the day and clock out of that job and start writing fiction. The job is just to be able to have a house and maintain my life. My kid is 20 now, so there's less pressure in that sense. But I've set up a life. I'm married. I can't necessarily go back to being like monastic necessarily, but I think about how we can pair our consumption down to be able to work less, to be able to live more like artists. I've also kind of just accepted that that may never be an option for me, and I have to be an artist when I have time to be an artist. I could never make a work of art that I just thought was going to make money.
SH: There were a lot of things I really loved about your book, but the thing that I think touched me the most was the way you write about parenthood. I found the protagonist to be totally compelling, and his pain was so real, but also, he was kind of a mess. It felt like a gift to get to read a parent in that way because usually we only see the mess if they come out on top in the end, or their behavior is explained away. I think we get told a lot of things about the dangers of writing about parenthood, mostly that we’re not supposed to write about our kids, or we’re not supposed to write too closely to something that could be perceived as writing about our family. How did you navigate that, that area?
KM: I think part of what helped is that my kid is basically an adult now. So, there's a little bit of distance. Becoming a dad at 25 felt, to me, like when a soldier came back from Vietnam and they wanted to be a writer. They're like, “at some point I have to write that war novel.” It’s the thing that kind of broke them and put them back together a different person. For me, the thing that broke me and put me back together a different person was becoming a father. It just changed me completely. It was so much harder than I thought it would be. On one level, art tends to make parenthood seem really sweet and saccharin and implies that babies will save your life. Then the flip side of that is the screaming baby trope. Nobody ever gets any sleep. Everybody's going crazy. But I think what people don't often talk about are the layers —that both those things exist at the same time and that there can be resentment and wishing this isn’t your life. Then there is feeling guilty for the thinking that thought, because you love this kid and your whole world is that kid. But then you’re like, it's also not. I used to be a person. How do I hold onto that? That's important or I'm going to go crazy. For me, it was such a difficult experience. I don't think I necessarily look back and think I was a stellar, amazing parent. I think I did my best and I think I tried. But it's so hard, and especially when you do it when you're young. You just don't know what you're doing.
It was the most beautiful time in my life too. There’s a scene in the book that's kind of close to real life where the baby won't stop screaming and the protagonist picks her up and carries her around and he is just noticing the sky. I remember those moments of thinking life's so bad. But then having these quiet moments where I was seeing my life in a way I never had before. I felt alive. I just wanted to get both those things on the page.
SH: You mentioned earlier that you started this book in 2015. How do you keep momentum going for a project that takes this long. Or maybe this sounds corny, but how do you keep believing in yourself when you're working on a project over a sustained period of time?
KM: I mean, it could just be I’m a Capricorn. My wife always jokes that I need a rock to push up a hill. And it's totally true. So there's something about my nature where if I'm not tinkering away at a big thing every day, I start to go stir crazy. Part of it's how I still my brain.
It was kind of a gift of the pandemic for me. So much of the pandemic was so hard, but we have this beautiful, forested park within walking distance from our house. When there was nothing else to do, I would write new scenes and do edits and then I would either read what I had written onto my phone or use an AI voice, then I would put on my headphones and go for like seven walks every day in the forest to hear it. I’d listen to for what was working and what wasn’t. I made notes that way. It was a really interesting editorial process to be like, okay, the world's ending, but I have this beautiful forest and I'm walking around the forest and I'm just trying to make this work of art I've been working on for so long. I'm trying to finish it and make it good. It was really special to finalize the book looking at 200-foot Douglas Fir Trees.
Kevin Maloney is the author of The Red-Headed Pilgrim (Two Dollar Radio), Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist), and the forthcoming story collection Horse Girl Fever (CLASH Books). His fiction has appeared in FENCE, Barrelhouse, Green Mountains Review, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Aubrey.
About the interviewer
Shelby Hinte is the Associate Editor of Write or Die Magazine.
