An Interview with Thomas Sheehan

Past Megaera contributor Tom Sheehan has just published a 240 page memoir with Pocol Press titled A Collection of Friends. Let's have a chat with the author.

Megaera: When I first looked at the picture of the cemetery on the cover and read the title, "A Collection of Friends," I felt really sad right away. There are many sad stories in this collection, but there are many happy stories as well. What made you choose the cover picture and the title?

Tom Sheehan: First off, I always try to celebrate my comrades, here and gone. That includes most readings where I bring them to the fore, generally with a poem that gets me vibrating, kicks juice, justice and memory into gear. And I wanted a Saugus scene. Nothing is more relevant to me than the Veterans Section of our Riverside Cemetery, with the Town Hall steeple in far background and the graves of some close pals right up front, including Hugh Menzies and Eddie McCarthy, who died a year apart in Korea and lie a grave apart here. The cover picture was taken by friend Jim Harrington who runs Saugus Photos Online. It was accessible.

M: Tobias Wolf once said a memoir isn't necessarily what really happened, but rather what he remembered happening. Do you think this is true?

TS: He’s probably right, with the arguments going on about individual memory and collective memory, and where a writer might find a place for what comes up out of his soul (or his gut if he’s fighting for that recollection) or descends on him as if a hand touches him. That argument may rage forever. I was extremely fond of spastic poet Larry Eigner (RIP) who braved through his frailty to write some beautiful poems, and I closed off one poem about him and my difficulty in understanding his speech by saying (in Poet in the Rolling Chair):

	If I struggle now because I struggled then, think
	lightly of me and without disdain, for I tried
	to lean with you those days and nights you moved
	at everybody else’s hands, grim suitcase of poems

	moving along with you, rare upward alloys
	coming up pure on bond, as if some other god,
	some other Muse of the Fourth or Fifth Century,
	searching your eastern desert, put a hand on you.

M: Throughout many of the stories, you go off on a lot of tangents, but you always come back to the main focus of each story. When you write memoir, do you just let your thoughts take you wherever they end up or do you try to keep them focused?

TS: A face remembered or a remark or an action spills all over me, as if those I know are saying, “Now hear this.” Whatever the approach, whatever the form, they get my utmost respect. Let’s face it … some people, some characters, some memories force the issue from the word go.

You say tangents: right on. Queue up a face from the past. You get a house, a street, a section of town, an incident, see his eyes across the huddle in the middle of a Saturday stadium, see him slipping an ammunition clip into an M-1, hell itself on the horizon, and he slips you a wink, that dirty, grubby, unshaven but memorable Dogface. Glory be for tangents!

M: I noticed smell seems to be emphasized over the other senses, which makes sense since smell is the sense most closely tied to memory. How do smells help you remember?

TS: You’re right on here. Smell is a repeater, a constant, in that mustard is always mustard, horse manure is always horse manure, watermelon is always watermelon. A remembered face plays games, as does a voice, as does a touch from the past. Smell is recurring in itself, keeps its place. A singular smell is an image of a bucket for me, holding all things ladled up, gathered, with that particular smell. The expenditure smells of diesel fuel and acetylene gas capture almost immediately. I really don’t know what in essence came first in Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk, the basic incident or the poem. One day a town worker in a safety helmet and goggles emerged in the street near me. I smelled Parkie in North Africa, in a tank turret, as the poems says:

	The Municipal Subterranean

	He comes up, goggled,
	out of a manhole
	in the middle of a street
	in my peaceful town,
	sun the sole brazier,

	like an old Saharan
	veteran, Rommel-pointing
	his tank across the four
	year stretch of sand,
	shell holes filling up
	quick as death.

	I think of Frank Parkinson,
	Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk,
	now in his grass roots,
	the acetylene smile
	on his oil-dirty face,
	the goggles still high
	on his high forehead,
	his forever knowing
	Egypt’s two dark eyes.

M: What does "I getz catcha" mean?

TS: Simply Halsey the storekeeper sort of vowing he will help catch Shove in a once-and-for-all situation, who deserves to be so caught. It’s his oath in broken English.

M: In stories such as Assault on Mount Carmel, The Great God Shove, and The Bill Collector violence solves problems rather than escalates them. Would you say this is generally true or true only in certain circumstances?

TS: Survival comes to those who can handle it, who can force issues, make demands or amends one way or another, and involve intellect as well as strength or courage. If an eye for an eye takes place, or sweet justice happens on the scene for one unfortunate soul, I’m for it, as I say elsewhere here.

M: You use metaphor to great effect and you cite Yeats as an early influence. Does poetry, and specifically Irish poetry, influence your prose writing?

TS: My grandfather Johnny Igoe read Yeats to me at an early age. I leaped with the myths and how they were voiced, how, in the end, they joined with white space on a page. I was mesmerized. He’d point his finger up and say, “Hear the word. Feel the grasp.” The grasp was often the metaphor, the hook into the mind.

M: In your stories, positive memories such as a girl taking off her bathing suit can be healing, but negative memories of the war can be damaging and cause shell shock. Is it better to remember everything or are there things that are better forgotten?

TS: I would say that is a personal choice if you can make it that, or it may be made for you by the force or tenor of the memory. I try to recall everything about a situation, a person, and am extremely pleased when something comes back to me with surprising clarity that I hadn’t thought about in years, all as if triggered by some outside force or some inward reach. All that said, I am just a farmer who tells tales.

M: The stories Wingsy and Parkie, Tanker, Tiger of Tobruk gave me goose bumps. The writing is superb and it's amazing to think the events in the stories actually happened. I thought they were the best stories in this collection by far. What are your favorites?

TS: The Coalman I saw on many occasions, and the incident with the telegram is one of the most poignant and haunting scenes I’ve ever thought about. Parkie, dead now 25 years, told me his story, and I think I’m the only one who ever heard it. He told it to me on a Friday night while I was attending Boston College after service in Korea. We spent an evening in the Wayside Bar in Saugus, cleaning the week’s cobwebs out of our minds. He said, in one of the great left-handed compliments I have heard, “Tom, you’re fucking literate, and I have something to tell you.” I think, at that moment, I was commissioned.

I did not socialize with Wingsy, but one interviewer asked me the same sort of question: He said, “Is there a reason why some of your stories involve characters who have been irremediably hurt (One Oh for Tillie; A Toast for Skink; Falling-down Jack, A Study)? Is it just the natural flow of your inspiration or do you think that literature ought to give a place to the weak, the silent and the forgotten?”

So I said: "Literature damn well better give them all a shot, for frailty is ours without a doubt and will ever be with us. All our heroes are vulnerable, or they are Supermen. To me they are all remarkable people for one reason or another. Are they here for me, by me? Who knows, but at the end of Jack Winters I say if perhaps I do not remember him, or his like, he will not have been. That is crushing to me. There but for the grace of God, as said. I am warmed thinking of them, of their being real or imaginary regardless of stature, position, influence. I remember my comrades from Korea, here or gone, and the frailest imaginable soldier of all, frightened and glassy-eyed and knowing he is hapless, one foot onto the soil at D-Day, going down, but not to be forgotten, not here." A piece of that reply ended up as part of A Collection’s dedication. And that’s continuity.

M: What's your favorite color?

TS: My first tulips this year were blood red, marvelous splashes against my white Colonial house built in 1742. They clamored for the eye. I favored that color for a few glamorous weeks of their glory, now the yellow ones, a combination of daisy and butter work, are at their last grasp on my eyes, but will soon be gone. I will be a chameleon of choice.

M: Thank you again.

A Collection of Friends can be purchased from Pocol Press.