Tag Archives: Joseph Scapellato

An Interview with Joseph Scapellato

18 May

Joseph Scapellato’s debut collection, Big Lonesome, has been called “unlike anything else you’ve ever read” by Robert Boswell.


To read the story “One of the Days I Nearly Died” from Big Lonesome and an exercise on finding the right emotion for a story’s beginning, click here.

Michael Noll

This story is able to fit a tremendous amount of information into a small space. For example, there’s this bit from one sentence: 

“I didn’t think of my brother who didn’t at the time go to our family’s weekly Family Dinner Nights because he was way away in another state (Texas) with a woman we all liked (she liked him) and he for some reason didn’t…”

Another writer in a different story might have slowed down and given Texas its own sentence (Texas’ ego certainly believes it’s worth its own sentence!), but you blast past that piece of info—and then do the same thing again with “she liked him.” Did this sentence actually come out in a rush, or did you condense it from many sentences?

Joseph Scapellato


I happen to have one of the first drafts of this story!  Here’s that same passage, early on:

I didn’t think of my brother who didn’t go to weekly family dinner nights because at the time he was in Texas with a woman we all liked and he for some reason didn’t…

It looks like that part of the sentence definitely began in a rush.  But as you can see, it’s a blurry rush—it’s not doing much to tag its separate parts in a trackable manner.  There’s a greater risk of the reader missing things.  In later drafts, I tried to add more clarity while still preserving the crowdedness.  My goal was to enact the verbal spillage of a narrator telling a brush-with-death story, and at the same time, to suggest the “everything happening at once” experiential density of a car crash/near-car-crash.

Michael Noll

The story contains a lot of specific detail about place and people but leaves out at least one really important detail: what the narrator and his wife were arguing about when they said all those big ugly things. In this story, those left-out details don’t matter, but I’m curious about the process that led to this story. What’s your internal guide for what details to include and which to leave out?

Joseph Scapellato

This is such a great question.  It’s also a tough one to answer accurately, I think.  For me, I’m always trying to include details that firmly root the reader in the world of the work, so that the reader can see, feel, and smell where the character is at, coming from, and headed; however, I also want to include details (or half-details) that move the reader into the openness of the world of the work, an openness that is the same thing as mystery, the sort of mystery that permits the reader to understand the story on their own terms.

It’s almost as if there are two separate but complimentary ways for a reader to be immersed in a work: immersion through knowing, and immersion through mystery.

Practically speaking, this means that I read a draft over and over, imagining what it would be like to be a reader.  Would a reader be intrigued?  Would a reader be lost?

Michael Noll

You have published a lot of pieces, both fiction and nonfiction. When it was time to put this collection together, how did you figure out which stories would go into it and which would not?

Joseph Scapellato

Joseph Scapellato’s debut collection, Big Lonesome, has been called “gobsmackingly original prophecy” by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Kevin McIlvoy, an amazingly gifted writer and teacher, once told me that he thought of story collections as being somewhere on a greatest hits album/concept album continuum.  On the “greatest hits album” side are the collections that are made up of the writer’s very best stories at that moment in the writer’s life.  There’s going to be thematic resonation between these stories—they’re going to speak to one another—but this isn’t necessarily the most important guiding principle when the writer is putting together the collection.

On the “concept album” side are the collections where thematic resonation is the most important guiding principle—the stories very consciously complement and complicate one another.  They seem to have sprung from each other, like songs in a concept album.

I tried to put Big Lonesome on the concept album side of the spectrum, to make it so that the stories, when considered together, go on a journey: they begin in a mythic west (a centaur cowboy, a cowboy who encounters a filthy monster-boy in a laundromat, a cowboy who can sing animals into easy dying), move to a contemporary west (a mother who buries her son’s gun in a desert, a hike that results in a snakebite), and migrate to the contemporary midwest (two troubled brothers in Chicago, an old man forced into a retirement home by his son).  Along the way, the stories shift from the non-realistic to the realistic and from the rural to the urban.  And certain ideas (American mythology, masculinity, lonesomeness) are returned to and riffed on in different ways.

At a certain point, I looked for thematic gaps (aspects of the American West that the stories weren’t investigating) and for possible pairings (ways to connect stories, directly or indirectly).  For example, the story “Cowgirl,” which is about a human girl born out of a cow, is a sister story to “Horseman Cowboy,” which is about a centaur cowboy who goes around smashing things and having sex.  Initially, I wrote “Cowgirl” to be in conversation with “Horseman Cowboy,” to explore the same brand of damaging hypermasculinity from a different point of view.  It very quickly became its own story—with its own set of intentions—but it grew out of the thematic center of “Horseman Cowboy.”

“One of the Days I Nearly Died” is in conversation with “It Meant There Would Be More,” the story that immediately precedes it, in an even more direct way: the narrators are brothers.  They refer to each other in their respective stories.  After finishing “It Meant There Would Be More,” which is one of the longest stories in the book, I thought it might be fun to follow it up with a very short one—to shade one story with the world of another story, and to play with “dynamics.”

May 2017



How to Turn Emotions into an Existential Threat

16 May




How the Story Works





The Writing Exercise




Good luck.

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