Unpredictable Off-Ramps: Tucker Leighty-Phillips Interviews John Jodzio
John Jodzio’s work has been featured in a variety of places including This American Life, McSweeney’s, and One Story. He’s the author of the short story collections, Knockout, Get In If You Want To Live, and If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home. He lives in Minneapolis.
Tucker Leighty-Phillips: There is a line in John Jodzio’s newest collection, This Was The Decade I Kept Getting Stabbed (Cupboard Pamphlet, 2022), that has stuck with me in the weeks since I finished reading it. “This isn’t holy land anymore!” the protagonist shouts from the window of a church he recently purchased. The line is a declaration to those returning to the church, in search of kindness, salvation, and mercy. It is a statement of intent—this is no longer the place you knew; it holds new purpose. It is also a plea to strangers to please stop leaving babies on the church’s doorsteps. I thought about this line as I read Jodzio’s collection, and considered how relevant it felt in other stories. These stories—witty, charming, and hilarious as they are, are stories of desperate people; people who insist that change is coming, insist they’re happy in spite of everything, insist they can maintain control by claiming to be in control. Of course; whatever haunts them, be it heartbreak, God, or an escaped circus bear who steals mountain bikes, is always going to be there, just out of their periphery, drooling and growling, waiting to corner and devour them.
Many of the stories in This Was The Decade I Kept Getting Stabbed feel structured like sketch comedy–often featuring a hefty elevation of stakes and characters becoming more and more desperate as the story progresses. Can you talk about the role of humor in your work?
John Jodzio: Making people laugh out loud or perhaps chortle or even just get a little grin when they read one of my stories has always been one of my goals. In general I am always looking for humor and absurdity in life and then bringing that to the page as often as I can. I think this is why the sketch comedy structure is something I return to often in my flash pieces. I always find it incredibly fun to try and write these escalating stories that take strange and unpredictable off-ramps and then try to find some elegant or poignant or surprising way out of that escalation.
TLP: That’s great—and I think I want to make it clear that although there is absurdity and humor in these stories, there is also yearning draped across every one of them. These stories are incredibly heartfelt in how they examine human relationships. Can you talk about the relationship between humor and heartbreak in your work?
JJ: Over time I’ve realized that I’m an extremely optimistic pessimist. I’m resigned to all the bad things that we encounter in the world and I am sad as shit and really broken up about them most days but within this utter despair there is always this strange and unbreakable hope that things will get better. I think this combo of humor and heartbreak in my stories is ultimately how I move through the world on a day to day basis. On a practical/writing level I am always looking to weigh down my characters with tons of relatable trouble and heartache and the best way I’ve found to find some ballast with this trouble and heartache is usually sprinkling in some humor.
TLP: Oh, I totally feel that. I am often guilty of using humor as a coping mechanism to comprehend tragedy. And there’s so much tragedy to comprehend. These stories really do feel emotionally resonant, even as absurd as they are in construction. Do any carry a special weight to you, because of emotional importance or a certain feeling they contain?
JJ: Definitely. The story “Sometimes I Hide Gold Doubloons In My Baby’s Thigh Folds” is absolutely borne out of how protectively manic I was with my son when he was born and the “Lisa Won’t Quit Scuba” and “There’s No Chicken Fighting In The Infinity Pool” both hold bits and pieces of bad breakups that I’ve gone through over the years.
TLP: Two of your stories feature the displacement of a holy figure—Pastor James in “Cornholes or Bags,” and Father Breen in “The Church Went Bankrupt.” To paraphrase a popular online quote—if I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right? Can you talk about how these characters—pastors, fathers, ministers—operate in your work?
JJ: I am ultimately not really sure why this really happened. I do think I sort of get fixated on certain topics or kinds of characters and sometimes there ends up being spillover into another story? There was a period of time that I wrote a lot of stories that had a Roomba in it for some reason. For “The Church Went Bankrupt” I think I was looking at houses on Zillow at some point and ran across a church that was getting rid of the rectory and things began to snowball from there. I believe “Cornhole or Bags” was originally set in a middle school but I couldn’t get it to work right and I thought—what about a youth pastor and a church group here? As far as pastors/fathers/ministers, I am incredibly skeptical and uneasy about religion’s role in society and I think I was looking to generally express that in some manner in both these stories.
TLP: In a previous interview, you describe your process by saying “if things start getting too desperate I leaven, if a character gets too happy I weigh them down, if the pacing gets bogged I cut some darlings to speed it up.” Is this still true? Do you ever push back against this intuition?
JJ: I think in general this description still holds true for me and my writing, but over the years I think I’ve grown more concerned with what each story needs to make it feel whole and certainly whenever I get stuck in a story and the bag of tricks I use to get unstuck isn’t working I will definitely break from this way of thinking and look for ways that are out of my default mode to get unstuck.
TLP: I’ve been really fascinated by where you draw inspiration in stories; like the dichotomy of Niagara Falls being a popular place to both honeymoon and commit suicide, or people who lie about being impacted by tragic events for material or social gain, like the gentleman you mention who lied about losing his wife in Hurricane Katrina as a means of getting free drinks. How immediate is it when you come across a factoid or piece of research that a story grows from it? Do you often start tinkering right away, or do you stow information away and let it simmer until you find a place for it?
JJ: When I find something funny or that inspires me or that I think might be useful as some sort of story premise or maybe even something I’ve overheard that might make a good line of dialogue, I normally catalog it before it gets used. This is not 100% true though because sometimes I am looking for a specific solution to a story and I magically stumble across something intriguing or potentially workable and I’ll plug it into a story immediately. I’ve got tons of little kernels and tidbits here and there that I visit often to see if I am suddenly inspired enough by them to get a story started. Or sometimes I’ll combine a couple of these bits together to simply see if I can figure out a way to link disparate things together in a fun manner. Ultimately my process has always been to gather up these little interesting and shiny pieces and slowly see how I can mold them and meld them into something interesting and cohesive.
TLP: I have to ask about the title! When assembling the collection, was This Was The Decade I Kept Getting Stabbed always going to be your title story? Was there something about that title, for you, that encapsulated the collection?
JJ: When I originally submitted the manuscript to Cupboard, it was called “Cornhole or Bags.” Luckily I was swayed by the editors, Todd Seabrook and Kelly Delaney, to switch it up. So glad they were able to see the ways the new title resonated throughout the entire collection. And it’s also obviously a way more memorable and better title. And I am now thinking back on my other short story collections and doubting my ability to title anything because most of the original titles I came up with were mostly switched around and the revised titles were always way way better.
TLP: Speaking of your other collections, how do you feel TWTDIKGS compounds on your prior body of work?
JJ: To be honest, I’ve never been super intentional about any of this and not sure if anything I’ve done compounds anything else. I usually am just writing stories that I’d like to read and then at some point I ask myself do I have enough of these to put together into a flash chapbook or a full length collection. And if I do, then I start cobbling it together. I mean I guess my one hope with this body of work I have created over the years is that if someone stumbles onto one of my books that they’ll love it enough to share it with their friends and pick up another one?
TLP: If your writing had a family tree of non-literary influences, what would be the roots?
JJ: It probably changes from day to day, but right now it feels like the roots would be 30 Rock, The Beastie Boys, episodes of Love Connection where the people don’t find a love connection, David Shrigley, and some Detroit-style pizza.
Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky and a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Arizona State University. His short story collection, Maybe This Is What I Deserve, won the 2022 Split/Lip Fiction Chapbook Contest judged by Isle McElroy. His writing also appears in Booth, Adroit Journal, The Offing, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best Microfiction and received a Notable Mention in Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where he works for Appalshop’s Roadside Theater. Learn more at TuckerLP.net.