The Prodigal Son
Photos by Sean Lynch
For everyone I’ve ever been drunk with, and those with whom I’ve not yet had the pleasure - part of the dedication to ‘A Deep and Gorgeous Thirst’, Hosho McCreesh, Artistically Declined Press 2013.
I am to meet Hosho McCreesh, an Irish-American writer from Albuquerque, New Mexico in Portadown - is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write, but as I do, all those other 'never thought I would’s' come to mind and this occasion will, in the future, join them.
I have been reading, admiring and influenced by Hosho's writing for over 15 years and corresponding with him for nearly as long. Meeting in person was a pipe dream mentioned now and again, so it was a surprising and happy occurrence opening Hosho's email of the 29 April 2022 saying he and his wife, Tina, would be coming to Ireland. I asked if he’d be up for an interview, it was great to be meeting but I wanted to preserve something from an evening that we knew would include a clatter of drink, embellished stories, rants and laughs.
Fast forward to 12 June and it is as bright and warm a day as it gets here. I joke with Sean, Hosho's collaborator and fellow correspondent, that Hosho has brought some of the Albuquerque sun with him, given it was raining and blowing a gale here the week before. It is a quick run down the motorway to Portadown, then through the Dr Seuss traffic system of the town and out onto tight country roads.
Sean's designs for Hosho have been numerous over the years.
Pictured here - 'The Beautiful Fire' LINK
Guerilla Poetics Project mini broadsides LINK
'The Art of Chinese Gucci' LINK
'Cicada' LINK
The house Hosho and Tina have rented is a square, grey, parochial type, I half expect to see Ted and Dougal* curtain twitching as we approach but instead find Hosho and Tina exploring the plant life in the gardens. It's hellos and hugs and an immediate ease with one another.
Hosho McCreesh presents a large and imposing figure, which belies his gentle demeanour, these are some of the traits he carries across into the independent (small) press world as a prolifically, talented writer and producer of beautifully made books he publishes under the imprint DrunkSkull. Tina, small, tattooed and tanned is instantly recognisable as the other half of a warm and considerate relationship.
We unpack quickly, as drink was the only thing we brought - Powers (Three Swallows) whiskey, Kinnegar and Boundary IPA’s and red wine - and have a quick tour of the house. We end up in the large, open-fired, living room relaxing on the three sofas and filling the space between us with stories from our pasts.
Having consumed enough liquid courage Sean and I try the wonderful (now infamous) green chile and flakey tortillas that Hosho and Tina have brought and combined into quesadillas, which produced a profound heat, working in tandem with flavour to create a unique eating experience from such simple ingredients. I was, though, still glad of the extinguishing abilities of beer.
Afterward it’s time to get around the kitchen table - a place that for me continually proves to be an intense focal point for family and friends; bearing witness to the jovial cuppa and chat and the blows we take from time to time that emotionally take us off our feet. Hosho moves easily, drink in hand, a beatific Hemingway, and seats himself at the table. I set my phone up on a sideboard out of the way and press record:
If we were building Hosho the writer out of little Legos what would the Lego blocks be labelled?
It might be embarrassing to admit, but I think at the bottom of it all is probably hope. I think the writing is supposed to reach people, who need it when they need it, and save them in a way that they otherwise couldn't have been saved. For me, that's what writing has always been. You pick up the right book at the right time and you read it and you're like - I'm going to keep going, I'm going to keep trying.
So, you're talking more about other people's experience there. But what were the blocks that made you the writer you are?
I think my natural setting as a person is to be removed. But there's a part of me that wants to connect. So being able to connect, I don’t think a lot of people write without having that in mind. The end result of whatever effort they're making should be a connection with other humans. When it comes to world-renowned writers, Shakespeare or whoever, not only are you connecting with people in your generation, you’re connecting with people beyond your generation. You're connecting with people who weren't born when you were alive. So, the point of writing is to leave a human record for everyone that says, look, you're not alone as a person. Somebody else has felt this before. You read this and you're going to recognise that someone has felt this and you're not alone in the world. But that, to me, is the point of writing.
Is that how you feel when you read?
Every great book that I ever read from any author, that is the feeling that I get, which is, this person understands me without knowing me. Anyone who ever thinks that they're alone, hopefully they can find a thing, they can read a thing, they can hear a thing, they can see a thing that reminds them, that tells them, that shows them, that it proves to them that they are not alone.
You’ve said ‘alone’ a few times, was it a sense of isolation that made you want to reach out? What other little blocks are there?
Yeah. Other little Legos. I can't say that I was especially isolated as a person, except for the isolation I created myself. My family has always been amazing, my Mom, my brother, everyone in my family, they care so deeply about me that I know that I'm not by myself.
In the same vein though, I do experience some things in a lonely kind of way. I have seen other folks, like John Lee Hooker, talk about how, when it comes to being a creative person, at the root of it, it's being alone, I understand that. This loneliness motivates you to find a way to connect, to reach out to people and generations you can't possibly know.
To me, it's kind of the strength of the human story, to be able to reach out across the limitations created by time, to reach people who otherwise never could have known you and it could give them a moment of comfort, a moment of solace in whatever desperate time they find themselves in. To say, just keep going. Just keep trying.
Time and legacy – what would be your reason for wanting to leave something behind?
I think the reason is because of the reality of human ignorance. We’re not doing the kinds of things we should do to take care of each other, to ensure that we continue to exist. I'm motivated by the idea that you need do this because it's a very small amount of time we all have, so do what you can, while you can because if you don't, you've missed your opportunity.
It's shocking to me, to try to imagine how many people have existed that didn’t leave anything for anyone else to know them, to know what they did. It's kind of unnerving. It feels like such a waste because I'm sure there were so many amazing people that existed before us. It doesn't matter that they didn’t do anything world-renowned – it’s about how they made the lives of those around them better. It’s a thing that’s lost to history, so by writing I want folks to know who I was, but that doesn’t matter as much as letting them know that what they are feeling, others feel the same way - don't do anything drastic, keep going. There are amazing things that can happen.
'A Deep and Gorgeous Thirst' is a big book. What was the spark that started the conflagration of 321 pages of poetry?
Tina. So, Tina and I got together. And Justin Barrett is a writer whose written things tremendously funny to me. One of my favourite things he's ever written is ‘Booger’. He's talking about shooting a booger from his nose unintentionally and it landing on the coat of a woman ahead of them in line somewhere and he ends up blaming it on his wife.
I love this thing. When I read it, I just laugh and laugh. And I said to myself, in life, you tell more jokes than you don't, your earlier work has been very kind of, down, death, the point of life. And so, I told myself, I wanna write something like Justin Barrett, this motherfucker makes me laugh. Why can't I make people laugh? There's no reason I can’t do that.
When I got with Tina, the idea that everything I was feeling, everything that was fantastic about reconnecting with somebody after 16 years and realising that your life has suddenly been saved, like it’s not what you thought it was going to be. This woman comes along and says “You’re ok, we're going to be okay together. We're going to do this together.” And so, I decide, goddammit, I'm writing something that's funny.
I'm going to write about every time I can remember being drunk, and being hungover, this is going to make people feel good as opposed to - if they're struggling, I want them to know that they’re not alone. Let's just laugh. And so, the entire book was written, after we'd gotten together, in the span of about three weeks. I wrote every single rough draft of everything in that book in about three weeks.
And I told myself, think of every time you've been drunk. Think of
what you were feeling, what you were drinking, what was going on.
It's fun to be drunk, it's fun to be in the world experiencing things while you're kind of at an angle. And for people who were wondering if they should keep going, wouldn't they love a book that told them not only should you keep going, but this is why.
It's no accident that the last poem in the book is about the first time I met Tina’s parents, went to their house, swam in the pool, hung out and drank, and I realised, without a doubt, that my life had been saved from whatever else it could have been.
Your early work (predominantly) thematically dealt with humankind’s inabilities - how we conduct ourselves, how we treat one another. Was this youthful anger, or more personal, intimate issues blown up and put on the world stage?
I think when it comes to earlier work it was an anger at the world and a search for understanding, wanting to understand why the world was okay with what it’s okay with. A lot of my earlier work is influenced by losing friends, recognising the world was not artful in the way I would like it to be. Recognising that people make their lives harder than they should be because they care about things, that in the end, don’t matter.
In America in particular, it's important to make something of yourself in some sort of financial and culturally acceptable way. To me that meant you should look like this. You should dress like this. You should make this amount of money. You should live here. You should drive this. I had no aspirations that way. I was never going to be like that. I was never going to look like that. I felt the world cared about more, more than the tiny little list America has imagined, and so I felt that you can't really live in America as an artist and expect yourself to be anything except an outsider. To exist in America, you have to play by the rules.
It never seemed reasonable to me to try to be artistic as a person, to expect poems by McCreesh to be in Time Magazine that some dude selling cars in Ohio somewhere will pick up and read, that’s not ever going to happen.
Connecting on a deeper human level that transcends borders, transcends ideologies. It transcends all of that. You want to reach other people, the place you happen to be born, the place you happen to live, where you grew up or where you move to has nothing to do with what you have in common with the rest of humanity.
In your earlier work there are moments of joy, but they seem to have to be fought for, wrestled away from a world always in the wrong. Is that a fair assessment?
Absolutely. Growing up and even still now, the world makes its continued existence harder than it should be. To be a human. To marvel at the sun coming up. To grab a drink. To walk around a garden and look at the flowers are not difficult things to do. If you are paying attention some of the things around you are amazing, but we get bogged down in lots of different ideas, ideologies, concepts – for me, you want to tell me something complex, go ahead, but tell me in a way that would convince a caveman, because I don't feel especially different than a caveman.
What I want to know is what's comfortable, what makes me feel happy, what is joyful? So, if you can't convince me that your thing, whatever you're dreaming about, makes sense to a caveman, it's not going to make sense for me. I'm nothing more than, a modern caveman. You get out and you eat. You have the people that love you. You do the things that make you happy. You go to sleep, and at some point, you die, like everyone else in the world. If you’re convinced there’s more than that, that’s insanity to me. Nothing will ever be more than that. Our job is to do our part, move things a little further along the path.
Chinese Gucci is you first novel. What differences, if any, did you find in writing a novel compared to writing poetry?
They do connect. If you're writing a novel that you care about, it's going to be like a poem, it's just going to have more facets. When you are writing a poem it should be really contained. It should be tight and sharp, and at precisely the right time it should end. That's the secret of a poem to me. It should end when it's supposed to end, period.
What a novel is, in my mind, is a collection of so many poems that are put together in a way that makes sense. But in the end, it's actually still a poem.
I don't care about the narrative so much as the feeling – it should feel like a poem. So, a poem can convey how you feel about one thing, maybe two in a moment. But a novel should convey how you feel in many, many, moments. So Chinese Gucci, to me, is a poem.
Was this your first attempt at a novel?
I tried a lot of different things, like Jack Kerouac and the travel, move around and see things. My work approach was to gather up as many ideas as I could, then try to write the one that had the ‘most’ for me and was the closest to what I wanted to try at the time. And then go with it, and that was ‘Chinese Gucci’
So, it won’t be your last?
No, no, no. I'll write more.
What, if any, drawbacks are there in self-publishing?
To my mind there aren’t any. I think that putting out what you want, how you want, the way you want, and how you want it to look – we’re on the cusp of what's coming after today, what’s coming later.
You might think that someone external, ‘outside’ will make the things that you're doing more legitimate, but they don’t get a vote in who you are as a person. For me, I love every time I land with a great publisher, I love for them to say, ‘you matter to me.’ but more important is the person I don’t know and reads what I have written and connects with it. That's why you do what you do. That's why you write. That's why I put it out myself.
And while there's an obvious drawback of promotion - the truth is almost no press can afford promotion and very few know how to really drum up interest/interviews/blurbs - so it is not the drawback it once was. And, besides, the person who opens an unknown book by an unknown writer and connects in the way we know can happen...that person won't give one squirt for how or who made the book...they'll just be glad they have it in their hands. And that's why I think self-publishing will become more popular.
How have you found Ireland? How important, a place, is it to you?
Half of who I am as a person originates here. I love it. If we ever have to flee the States, which we talk about, this is a good place to set up base.
I love the fact that I have deep roots. Folks in Crossmaglen, folks in Armagh. Folks who have fought and lost for the things they believe in. For me as an American who was born in Albuquerque, I thought it was disrespectful to pretend that I had more of a claim to it than I really had. My cousin Raymond was the third to die on hunger strike with Bobby Sands, but I never wanted to pretend, I never wanted to grab anything more than what anyone here would think I am entitled to. I don’t want to be more than I am.
We thought then we’d been quite serious for long enough and I shut off the phone. We continued to talk and get loud and laugh into the early AM. When we’d all drifted off to bed, I came back down to get my own book that Hosho had brought with him for me to sign, which I did, and then proceeded to doodle through it and write other poems in the end pages. And then I stood looking at the table, dotted with empty bottles and drying, crusting beer glasses, monuments to our evening, and tried to commit it to memory. Even though it had been captured on film, I wanted a malleable memory that I could return to, change and embellish, of the time I sat with 3 friends and had the longest conversation about writing and books and design that I have ever had.
The next morning, expelling sighs and rubbing foreheads, we went into town collectively seeking to repair the individual damage done the night before and found it in Joe Mac’s. A bar with some outside, fake roofing and guttering, on the inside, a family of four doing shots, an elderly, translucent regular, flickering lights and a skipping cd had us wondering if it was all a manifestation of our beleaguered states.
Revived by fair pub grub we retreated to the house for our last goodbyes. There was the awkwardness of leaving and the sadness of wanting to stay, but we got in the car, waved through the windows at the smiling couple, and knew our friendships were no longer, long distance.
*Father Ted, Channel 4
Some Highlights
A Deep and Gorgeous Thrist, Poetry, Link to Information and Purchase.
Chinese Gucci, Novel, Link to Information and Purchase.
For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things, Poetry, Link to Information and Purchase.