3 Questions with Joel Worford

Joel Worford is a writer and musician from Richmond, Virginia. His work appears in TriQuarterly, trampset, Chestnut Review, The Lumiere Review, Laurel Review, and more. Joel has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories, and Best Small Fiction. His short story "The Word" was named a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2023. Joel is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Fiction Editor  Haylee Massengill talks with Joel Worford. about their work from Issue 73, out now!

Joel, thank you very much for sharing “No Clubs” with us. We’re so excited–and incredibly lucky–to publish this piece. When I read “No Clubs” for the first time, I was deeply drawn to the careful and deft consideration you give to the rhythm and acoustics of the language. I noticed your music–particularly in your project, Whitney & the Saying Goes–similarly has a distinct reverence for language. Across your work, I find that the thoughtful attention you give to the sonic and recursive quality to language allows for a meditative frankness and intimacy in your work. This made me curious about the roles music and language play in your art. Do music and prose influence each other in your work, or are they fairly distinct from one another? What do sound and music mean to you in your own writing and revision practice?

Thank you for these kind words, and for providing this wonderful literary space, I’m honored to be a part of it. I do believe that rhythm plays a limiting function in both music and prose writing. In a band, you might have a guitarist who specializes in reggae, a bassist who plays gospel, a metal drummer, and a jazz keys player, but once you set the tempo of the song, you’ve all got something in common—that tempo. The rhythm is the rule, and everyone has to follow it. Then the groove starts, and everyone gets closer together, the groove is another rule we all abide by, and everyone has to find a way to express themselves within common constraint. We’re all struggling against the same time, so we’re all struggling together. In writing, I look at the rhythm of the prose the same way. I’m gonna set these characters, who are all different people, with different backgrounds and intentions, against the same prose metronome, and see who they become. The metronome is for me as well, because there are a lot of different writers I could become, but as soon as the first sentence is set on the page, I know who I am, for that day, or for however long the story takes—I know who I am while I’m working on it. Musicians spend years developing their pocket, and as a writer, I’m always developing my relationship to the rhythm of language, to its musical qualities. My prose pocket is always tightening. “No Clubs” was an exercise in creating a strong rhythm, and, every now and then, letting the voice disturb it. My ear wants “if you moved to the side of them a little” to be “if you moved to the side of them,” but that’s not what the narrator wants, that’s what I want, and the reader wants the narrator’s desires, not mine. That’s the beauty of rhythm though: once the groove of the song, of the prose, is set strong enough, you can play ahead or behind without losing the listener’s faith. Sometimes being a little off even enhances it.

I’m so taken by the role setting plays in “No Clubs.” The narrator and Billy try to carve a space for themselves within a fraught and imperfect setting, and these children are unaware of the historical context and systemic forces that influence their own lives within the elementary school playground. This is something I see throughout your work–the messiness of building community and cultivating belonging within spaces of normalized and institutionalized hostility. I’m floored by how skillfully you portray this dynamic in your work. Can you tell us a little more about how you think about setting, characters, and their relationship in your writing?

I love that phrase “the messiness of building community,” I think that gets to the heart of “No Clubs.” For me, the narrator and Billy’s story is one on the impossibility of good intentions when those intentions come up against pesky people habits— selfishness, jealousy, insecurity, privilege. It’s a bit of a “this is why we can’t have nice things” story. I’ll admit that during the compositional phase, I was much more focused on the aesthetics of the thing—the rhythm of the prose, the humor, the character tensions—than the larger implications of the dynamics at play. But it’s fun to step back and approach the story as a reader, rather than as the person responsible for keeping the ship afloat.

My first involvement in a political world may have been on the playground. Kids got married, got divorced, rose to power, were usurped, formed alliances, betrayed them, went to prison, it was wild out there, it was bloody. It was racist, sexist, classist and homophobic. Everything was a mess, nothing was pure, we couldn’t handle ourselves or each other, and there was one teacher in charge of holding it all together. “No Clubs” takes an almost adult perspective to children’s conflict—there’s an innocent maturity about the narrator, he doesn’t really tell the reader how he feels about all that’s happening, he presents events objectively with little meditation on their meaning, and that’s where the light-heartedness and humor comes from. But there could definitely be a version of this story that invests itself in the gravity of playground conflict: how a ten-year-old so insulated within those conflicts might perceive them as all encompassing, like playground Succession or something. I’m glad that some of the gravity comes through in this version, even as the style takes a playful approach. It’s always a bit tough. There are a million ways to tell a story, and on some level, a writer just chooses one.

Is there anything else about “No Clubs” that you'd like to share, about content or process, that we wouldn't know at first glance?

Maybe I’ll take this space to shout-out some of the writers who influenced “No Clubs.” Shouts to Amy Hempel, Brandon Haffner, Helen DeWitt, Toni Morrison, and Charles Simic, who all wrote children so beautifully, at one time or another. I want to thank them for being their bad selves on the page.