Conversations with S. Teri O’Type by Christopher Allen

This post has been transferred in from a previous blog. 
My thanks to  all who contributed or commented. 

The book

Curt Child is your everyday man. He watches football with his friends, eats pizza, loves his mum and dad and, at forty-five (and a teensy bit plump and bald), he’s looking for someone to settle down with – for foot rubs, family dinners and love. Since he’s gay, this will be a man — but because no one knows he’s gay, it’s not happening.

All I want is a guy to come home to, one who’ll have a silly nickname for me and rub my back without me having to beg. A one-plus-one-is-one situation like Dear Old Dad and Dear Old Mom have back in North Carolina. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. It’s just so hard to find a guy when all the guys I know are straight, and I think they think I’m straight too. I guess I could just tell them, but I never seem to find the right time. It’s not like I go around saying, “Hi, I’m Curt Child. Nice to meet you. I’m gay.” Right? Who does that?

Teri is Curt’s oldest, gayest friend. He lives in Curt’s head and berates him every day for not being gay enough. To fix this, he assumes the role of Curt’s  Gayru.

And so, with Teri pecking his head, Curt sets off on The Road to ultimate gaydom.

I’m beginning to think I’ve missed the gay cruise entirely, if you know what I mean. And I guess you know what I mean better than I do myself. I guess I just lack—
“Style?” Teri barks. “Gaytuition, gaygiene, the truth of homocabulary? The mien of haughty intelligence? Did I mention style?” Teri taps his right temple with an imaginary pencil.
“That was the first thing you barked.”
“And where’s your dog?” Teri asks.
“I don’t have one? Where’s yours?”
“Cary Grant’s getting his nails done.”

It’s going to be a rocky road.

Interview with the author

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Chris, thank you for joining us and massive congrats on your new book! And what an incredible book it is.

What inspired you to write about a gay man’s need to prove his gayness?

Hey, Tracey! First, thank you for reading the Conversations. I really appreciate your taking the time to do so. The response to this first question is so complex that we could take the entire interview for it. Since living in Germany for over 17 years I’ve become intensely aware of being “American” to Europeans. I was astounded that being American actually meant something concrete to my students and my acquaintances although it’s impossible to put 300 million people in the same box, and it was the same with being gay. They—and I think most people—have an unshakable notion of what being gay means. Our culture has defined the word in so many ways, and that’s what I try to satirize in Conversations with S. Teri O’Type. Hearing people say “That’s so gay!” when they mean “That’s so stupid or fey or otherwise embarrassingly bad” takes me aback every time. There was a campaign a few years ago with Wanda Sykes that I love.

And Teri… where to start? (Mrs Doubtfire’s brother meets Rupert Everett?) You’ve described him as a monster, but not an unsympathetic one…  He’s a patchwork of stereotypes who slaps Curt in the face with a list of his deficiencies, and yet we all have a Teri, don’t we? The figure that prances around in our imagination, painting the person we feel we should be and then listing our shortcomings. Is this book about being gay, or being everyone?

Good question. I think the book is about being oneself, about becoming aware of how we parrot the stereotypes we see every day on TV. We dress and talk like the characters who’ve been scripted by someone in Hollywood, and we become depressed when we can’t live up to the hilarity, the beauty, the stylishness, the artifice. We are blah, average, unremarkable, lifelike—as we were meant to be—in the shadow of Teri and everyone else in the O’Type family. But blah is beautiful and honest and, most of all, real.

I’ve read a lot of your stories, mostly quite edgy flash fiction. How easy was it to switch to satire / humour – to strike the balance between damn funny and yet still deeply human?

Thank you for “damn funny and yet still deeply human.” Actually, humour is my first love, but I’ll write anything that needs to come out of me. I also write inspirational creative non-fiction for Chicken Soup for the Soul, book reviews for Books at Fictionaut, pedagogical material for ESL courses and travel anecdotes that have been published here and there. Switching among genres is a matter of understanding what voice is right and sticking to it. That said, I feel most comfortable writing Teri vs. Curt-type dialogue. They are a trainwreck between someone who thinks he knows everything and one who thinks he knows nothing. The potential for humor there is marvelously irresistible.

Teri, he’s got his own Twitter ID, yes?

Teri wants that so much, but I don’t think he’s going to get his own Twitter ID. For the time being, I’ve decided he can use mine: @Christopher_All. He’s reluctantly agreed.

What do you think readers will make of it? It’s a brave write, it portrays every gay stereotype (I love the dialogue). Do you think people will love the humanity, the satire — or will they squeal with outrage? Have you had much feedback yet?

Oh, some have already squealed with outrage. I started writing the Conversations in an online writers’ group called Urbis where feedback was basically, but not always, anonymous. Hundreds of readers told me exactly what they thought, and some thought I was the biggest bigot in the world. Although I identified it clearly as satire, these folks didn’t understand what I was trying to do. Other readers thought the book was hilarious and made comments like “I know someone exactly like Teri!” I would reply, “Really? You know someone who is larger than life, communicates telepathically and sees you when you’re sleeping? Um, yikes.” Then there were those readers who saw exactly what I was doing and gave incredibly good feedback. Jennifer Noel Bower, the artist who drew the cover art, and M.J. Nicholls were two of them. There were so many others. Dana Freck, Tia Prouhet, William Denton, Laura Guthrie, Derek Osborne, Teresa Houle, Joe Drass, Curty Berry, Matt Tuckey, Mike Stevens, Heidi Charton, Gina Surles, Josh Fritz, Jebozid, Kimberly Menozzi, Doug McCulloch and many many others whose names I’ve forgotten but whose comments I’ll always remember. One reviewer’s comment on the passage where Teri sings a line from “There’s no Business like Show Business” moved me to tears. He understood immediately that Teri feels forced to play his role: to smile when he is low. This is one of the moments when Teri lets a real person slip through.

Jennifer Bower produced your artwork – and it’s beautiful – are you pleased with it?

I couldn’t be more pleased. In the last few days before I saw the proofs I was so nervous that it wouldn’t turn out right in the end, that Createspace wouldn’t get the colors right, that the bleed wouldn’t bleed right. Jennifer Bower went to great lengths to create the perfect cover, and she has. The Conversations are like an absurdist adult cartoon, like The Simpsons or The Family Guy. The focus on Cary Grant, Teri’s dog, on the cover is exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want Teri’s face to be represented in any way: I want the readers to fill in his details with their own stereotype of the gay man. It’s perfect.

You’re publishing the book via Createspace — are you looking forward to the self-publishing  journey? Is this the way forward for all of us?

Well, up to this point, I’ve been fairly nervous about the journey, but it’s been happening without casualties so far. My decision to self-publish wasn’t easy. I submitted the Conversations to a couple of magazines as a column but never heard back from them. Then I submitted Conversations with S. Teri O’Type to a few agents and publishers. I got polite rejections or silence. Then I started looking at how long it takes from submission to publication in the conventional publishing world: sometimes two years. Self-publishing started to make sense. I’m not sure it makes sense for everyone, but for me it felt right. The book had already been workshopped and workshopped, so all I needed to do was have it professionally edited and commission a killer cover.

Here’s my logic: Twenty years ago I was a singer. A singer doesn’t usually go to a record company and say, “Take a chance on me. I’m good”; he works as a singer, he forms a band, plays clubs, coffee shops, the street. He sings. He spends a lot of his own time and money creating his career because he wants to sing. And why should publishing be any different? Of course I’ll be thrilled when one of my novels is picked up by ANY publisher, but I’m not going to sit and wait for the world to love me. I have to sing. If Conversations with S. Teri O’Type sells well, I’ll be overjoyed; if Conversations with S. Teri O’Type sells at all, I’ll be overjoyed. I guess this makes me a happy person.

Will there be a launch? A blog tour?

The virtual launch is set up as a Facebook event. There will be virtual punch and cookies and virtual pashminas for all the dogs who come. It will be so gay.

This interview is a wonderful part of the blog tour, which includes nine other blogs. Several more interviews are appearing on other blogs.

Details here or, actually, more here. Or here: I Must Be Off. All good.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us — it’s been fabulous having you here and I look forward to reading all the other interviews.

Links:

Buy the book on amazon.com

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UPDATE: If you have hosted an interview with Christopher Allen about S. Teri O’Type, please do drop a link into the comments below. Loads of fab things going on out there right now.

[Images provided by interviewee.
Any queries, please let me know.]