Andrea Cumbo Dowdy

Three-Way: An Interview with Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian

Anton LeVay’s House. Cyber-sex. A beautiful women with her broken leg propped on a folding chair. A puckish man in his 50s who holds a portrait of he and the woman that is set against a background of hot pink. Somehow married writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian pulled these disparate pieces of their stories and themselves together into a lovely evening of language. I had the opportunity to be present on this odd but lovely night when they read at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and I’ve been their fan ever since.

In circles beyond the literary, or even beyond the San Francisco literary, Kevin and Dodie are considered to be a bit odd, or to be more politically-correct – avant garde. Their works range far beyond the realm of the conventional. Dodie has channeled a vampire in her recently reprinted epistolary The Letters of Mina Harker; Kevin has captured the voices of some of San Francisco’s literary giants, Sam D’Alessandro and Jack Spicer. For the past twenty-five years, their lives have become entwined in the sometimes raucous, often resplendent San Francisco literary world, and they have, in their marriage and in their writing, tilted the world a little more askew, giving us a prismatic perspective on love, sexuality, and aesthetics.

After a short stroll from their tidy but book-crammed flat in San Francisco’s South of Market District, the three of us settled down for a chat and some latte at a local organic market on a Sunday afternoon in early June of this year.

Andrea Cumbo Dowdy: How did you meet?
Kevin Killian: At poetry workshops, prose workshops for free so anybody could just drop in off the street here in San Francisco, in Noe Valley. At the bookstore, Small Press Traffic. You could go in the bookstore, and at night they would have these different writing groups. And I went in and there was Dodie, and I was impressed by her writing. A few years later we got married after a lot of ups and downs.
Dodie Bellamy: The workshops had a real scene. There were three workshops. There was the sort of mixed workshop on Monday night. Then there was a gay male workshop. Then there was an elderly workshop on Saturday, but anybody could go to the Saturday one. I didn’t go to that one so much. The workshops became a whole social scene. So we were all constantly hanging out together. Even before we got involved we were together a lot.
KK: Then we had the same teacher, Bob Gluck, whose writing was very important to me.
DB: Tell Andi your good news.
KK: I don’t want to say it, might jinx it.
DB: Kevin’s kind of pathetically out of print these days.
KK: But if you went to Amazon you could get some books.
ACD: I couldn’t find the Jack Spicer and Sam D’Alessandro work anywhere. Given that they’re Bay Area authors, I was surprised.
DB: A new edition of Sam’s work is being reprinted. Kevin’s the editor.
KK: So that will be out in August.
DB: By Suspect Thoughts, who did Pink Steam.
ACD: Tell me about your childhoods, where you grew up and whether you think that has an influence on your work, your life and such?
KK: I’m from Long Island, which is a suburb of New York. I grew up there in the 50s and 60s. It was basically such a boring place that I wanted the glamour of writing to take me away from it. As soon as I could I went into New York, which I thought would be the answer to my problem of boredom and banality. Dodie and I are both the oldest in our family, so maybe that had something to do with it.
DB: We’re both suburban. I was raised right outside of Chicago.
KK: Same issues probably. Everything’s happening somewhere else.
DB: Except that I had Chicago to think about and he had New York.
KK: Did you ever read Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters? How they’re always trying to get to . . . two of them always want to go to Moscow. They’re just dreaming of Moscow they’re whole lives long. Well that’s what I was like, and I expect Dodie was like that, too. Isn’t it funny that neither of us wound up in those cities? Just here.
DB: Well, I lived in Chicago for two years, and you lived in New York for a while. He went to undergrad school there. He went to undergrad at Fordham and grad school at [SUNY] Stony Brook.
KK: So maybe San Francisco combines the best of city life and the sleepy provincial life of the suburbs.
DB: It is kind of provincial here.
ACD: That was my next question. Everything you write has San Francisco in it. Is that just because you live here or is it because it has a sensibility that you think expresses something that’s important to what you’re writing?
KK: That’s so interesting. I never thought of it. But it was probably something to do with Bob’s [Gluck] New Narrative ideas about thinking locally and writing globally...
DB: But also, San Francisco, at least when I moved here, I so much fell in love with it that it almost becomes a character in your writing. And then because of Kevin’s work on [Jack] Spicer, I at least was exposed to a lot of San Francisco literary history and met a lot of the people from the 50s and stuff. It’s nice to feel like you’re writing in some sort of lineage. So I just feel my work really is San Francisco based. Though I’m writing a lot more about the Midwest now.
KK: Probably couldn’t have been written any other place.
ACD: I’m probably the oddest interviewer to interview the two of you because I grew up Southern Baptist, I’m still pretty devoutly Christian, never read anything that had any sex in it –period - until I was in grad school, so when Eric [Delehoy] asked me to interview you I was like “Me, you want me to interview them.” So what I find interesting is that both of you have at least a sense or knowlege of Christianity that comes through. I read your piece, Kevin, in Brian Bouldrey’s book Wrestling with the Angel, which is one of my favorite books, so I was wondering . . .
KK: So you know I was a Catholic, that I went to Catholic school. So you were wondering about how it fits in?
DB: Whenever I’ve been in a Catholic church with Kevin, he will take me around and show me all the different parts of it and explain the candles. Are you alienated from it? You always seem very comfortable in churches.
KK: I was an altar boy and everything.
ACD: That’s the sense that comes through in the piece; that there’s pain but there’s also an affinity for this tradition.
KK: I guess you can take the boy out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the boy. Did you see the movie Bad Education? I thought about that a lot because it was like my life story. But I feel like a spiritually based writer. I find it hard to imagine . . . I don’t know how religion got started. Who could fall for that? This cultish idea that our way is the true way. Maybe humans needed religion to just begin to form society, but at a certain point I think it becomes overgrown and damaging to the individual psyche. I don’t know how much good it has done for Planet Earth either. Still I think there is some higher power, something bigger than we are who thought of all of it. I just don’t know how you get in touch with that person; that’s what we’re longing to do, isn’t it?
ACD: Dodie, your work contains Scriptural passages. I just read “Spew Forth” where you quote Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and also the scene where Jesus casts demons out of the possessed man. It was very non-traditional.
DB: The new piece I wrote has a passage from Revelations in it. I am the Alpha and the Omega.
ACD: Do you read the Christian scripture as just another text? Does it have a different power for you?
DB: I don’t really read it that much now. But I went to a fundamentalist church when I was a kid. Actually I’m supposed to be writing this piece for an anthology by Suspect Thoughts on fundamentalism. But I think it’s kind of interesting . . . my parents didn’t go, but I just sort of was sent to one as a child. Then I was in a cult for ten years. I think that kind of shaped me more. I still am really . . . kind of threw the baby out with the bath water. I’m always reading Buddhist books. I take Buddhist meditation classes. Then I meditate for a while, and then it falls off. Then I get all anxiety ridden. I seem to be drawn to Buddhism right now. I’ve been trying to find some kind of spirituality that won’t diminish me as a person.
The fundamentalist . . . if I’d gone to an enlightened church it would probably have been okay. Indiana, right outside of Chicago, has the biggest Southern Baptist membership in the country, so they’re real like kind of hardcore Southern Baptist. I didn’t go to a Baptist church, but everything but the bodily submersion. I went to a number of them. I made friends with this girl whose father was a preacher, a really, really radical one. People would go into convulsions and stuff. That was kind of interesting. Talking in tongues and things like that. But most of the time it was more sedate than that. They didn’t want you to stand in front of movie theaters because of the evil. Hollywood was evil. I mean it was very conservative.
My mother’s recently joined a church. They’ve never gone to church, and I was really in favor of it because she’s old and alone. She joined a “Luthern” church. I was just so glad. Lutherans are like liberal compared to the rest of it around there. The only personality change I’ve noticed is that she’s gotten sweeter. She hasn’t gotten like radical. I went to church with her, and I could not deal with the service. It was like, “People say that there’s more than one way to God. Well, they’re wrong.” It was very militaristic and depressing. Kevin would say Lutheranism was Bergman’s religion. Very bleak. But the people were really sweet, they’re a really supportive community. She really was a very negative person, always criticizing. She’ll see the good side in people now. It’s disconcerting. So I think it’s been really good for her. She’s got cancer, and my father’s dead. She’s got a lot of anger now.
KK: Is there a connection between sex and spirituality?
DB: Yeah.
KK: There is because you want to break on through to the other side.
DB: Often you see people who describe sex as going to this other side of consciousness where you’re kind of outside of time.
KK: You think you could get past the religion, get past the capitalism, the blank, the wall that separates us from reality. I don’t know. It doesn’t happen all that often when I’m in church.
ACD: Each of you writes about sex without innuendo, without coding, without any kind of romance novel slip away where you end up with the lame sleeping in the bed, and I find that beautiful. Dodie, you have written a lot about the female body and body image. Kevin, is that something you were interested in. Because I know that men are often slighted in that regard, body image doesn’t come in for them, or people think it doesn’t. Is that why you write so openly and clearly about sex? Both of you, really.
DB: I think I always was interested in writing about sex; I think it’s probably because I had so many issues around it. In the late 70s, early 80s there really was no support system for me as a woman doing that. So I got involved with the New Narrative, all these kind of gay men, and there was a lot of interest in gay identity politics. It’s really important to write about sex because you’re coming out of the closet and expressing this gayness. But the New Narrative people are really interested in writing about sex. I had a community where you would just get all this praise for doing it and also a lot of real training. It’s not an easy thing to write about. It’s very much wanting to write out of the female perspective. I’ve got this book I’ve got to finish that’s all about sex, but I’ve kind of lost interest in writing about it. But I have not lost interest in writing about body issues, so I think when I finish this next book I want to do a book that’s broader about women body issues. I see it all as a part.
I think my writing was very interested in creating this kind of alternate reality. To write about sex was a way to also tap into this alternate reality.
KK: Why or how?
DB: A lot of sex writing is very conventional narrative based. I was trying to write about sex in a way that was about a state of consciousness. The new book is all about . . . it’s not about where you have the narrative where people come together, and then the orgasm is literally the climax of the narrative. So it’s all action oriented. I wanted to write about...
KK: More of the traditional way of writing about sex. That’s the traditional way of having sex.
DB: It’s not about having sex. It’s more about a state of being. I also was reading a lot of feminist, post-Freudian stuff where your sexuality is a filter of how you see the world. I was very much influenced by that. The French feminists were always saying how women have a different sexuality; therefore they have a different writing. So that the way women write and see the world stems out of their sexual being. So I was trying to explore those issues.
What about you Kevin? Why were you writing about sex?
KK: It didn’t seem like . . . that was just the vehicle, but the tenor was very different. I didn’t think it was about sex but about issues of shame, embarrassment, foolishness, guilt, issues about the cash nexus and commodity and how sex is often a form of money. It was just all these things, and it seemed like you could do a lot of writing . . . I mean if you wrote about sex you were writing about all these other themes. As I look back now, I say I did write a lot about sex.
DB: Writing about sex was a real political act.
KK: Yeah, that’s true. You were supposed to have as much sex as you could, with as many different people as you possible could. That leads to a lot of intimate encounters, memories.
ACD: And did that change radically with the AIDS pandemic?
DB: It did for a while. It seems like it’s swinging back . . . don’t you think?
KK: Yeah, I suppose so. If I was twenty now I’d probably be having just as much sex as I ever did. It did change quite a lot. It was the great tragedy of our lives, the great trauma that happened when Dodie and I were alive as far as I can see. You couldn’t help but be affected by it just because everything in the world changed, even if you didn’t have friends who died or got sick.
DB: We were in Vancouver recently, and this guy where we were staying came from Toronto. He’s this gay artist, and he was saying that we need to have some vision of gay sexuality that isn’t about fear. That’s kind of a major problem. Some people get off on the fear. That’s intense.
KK: You think organized religion would get a lot people who were just going to not have any extra-marital sex anymore because we don’t know . . . anybody could be diseased. I think that’s true in numbers.
ACD: So what do you think the most important thing that’s going on in the world is?
KK: For me, I think it’s the AIDS crisis.
DB: I think it’s fascism, the growing fascism of the United States.
ACD: Would you like to give an example of that?
DB: Everything. Bordowitz was calling it this “proto-fascist moment.”
KK: He’s an artist, Gregg Bordowitz. We went to see a speech by him. He started out with this striking image that we’re living in a proto-fascist moment.
DB: He said it took him a while . . . all these people are comparing the United States to the beginning of Nazi Germany. He was resistant to it, but he can’t resist anymore. It’s the environment; it’s everything. It’s hard not to get into a total despair, I think.
It always starts making me question a lot . . . I want everybody to write in a political way. In teaching, I just feel like, “Yeah, but you need to be saying something.” I keep wanting to have some kind of political content in the classroom, which I don’t really have any way of bringing it. I usually just feel frustrated; I don’t actually bring it in. I do try to talk about if you’re really very rigid-minded in what writing should be, how that’s like a political statement; you’re telling people how to see the world; you’re reinscribing these set narratives. It’s hard for me because I really believe in working with what people want to do and not imposing anything, but then at the same time I really want everybody to be using their writing as a tool to express something important and to examine it.
I think if I had a tenure-track job; adjuncting it’s hard . . . you just kind of go with the system. At [San Francisco] State and at Antioch, nobody really tells me what to do. And I really do, especially at Antioch, I try not to impose things on the people that work with me. I just try to figure out, “if you want to do this, we’ll figure out how to make it work.” I just feel that’s really important. I feel like people should be supported rather than pushed into directions. I think it’s kind of a violence to tell people there’s one way to write and that’s the way to do it.
KK: But there must be a frustration in this MFA world about dealing with these . . . I think we’re living in a time where technique is not enough in writing. There’s gotta be something else.
DB: That’s what I’ve been thinking more and more. But all I do, I feel like a plumber helping people with technique. We’re not getting to the heart of the material. A lot of the people that are the most popular, they do everything that I would tell people not to do. I’ve been listening to this Sue Grafton book on tape to go to sleep at night. It’s just amazing . . . It’s hard to go to sleep sometimes because of the choices Sue Grafton makes. If she was my student I would tell her not to do any of this, and she’s a famous, loved writer. I start having this crisis . . .
KK: Of confidence?
DB: Not of confidence. Of what am I doing? Maybe I need to reexamine what I’m doing.
ACD: Like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. I listened to that on CD, and I was so frustrated because he uses the same plot twist in every chapter. It’s being made into a blockbuster movie; it’s huge.
DB: With Sue Grafton, if she was to write about our conversation here. First of all, she’d give the whole history of the neighborhood; she’d tell about the construction of the building, those teas and what she thinks of those teas. It’s like, “where’s the plot?” These two characters go to McDonald’s, and they’re talking about the pickles in the Big Macs. On and on. The first thing you’d tell somebody to do is get rid of those pickles.
ACD: So Kevin are you writing about the AIDS crisis?
KK: I’m on a different editorial project now.
ACD: Is it something you’ll write about in the future?
KK: Oh yeah, sure. One other thing I was thinking about as a crisis is a crisis in reading. People don’t read anymore. It’s just on the list of things that we should be doing. I think that’s bad for writers, don’t you think? Nobody to be reading these books you write.
DB: If you’re writing a cult book, you’re always going to have a small readership. But more and more, anybody’s that doing something non-mainstream has to go to a small press. People say that Faulkner couldn’t get published now.
ACD: So what should people be reading?
KK: They should be reading books or magazines, or something besides the computer screen or video games.
DB: People are so visually oriented. One thing nice about reading is that you use other parts of your brain.
DB: People are so visually oriented. One thing nice about reading is that you use other parts of your brain.
ACD: One last question – what do you make of television these days? I know you’re a big pop culture guy, Kevin.
KK: There are so many good shows on TV that it’s hard to keep up. I’m just glad it’s now summer so I can stop watching the shows.
ACD: What do you like to walk?
KK: The Shield, The Wire – that’s a good one on HBO.
DB: Desperate Housewives
KK: Lost, Arrested Development. There are just so many good shows. There’s something you could tape every night. Dodie and I aren’t ready to watch TV when it comes on, so we tape these shows and watch them – often too late at night. So it’s part of dreaming, I suppose. We should be asleep at midnight or one o’clock, but instead we’re watching these shows from earlier in the evening.
DB: Kevin will present something. He kind of controls it. I will put my foot down. I put my foot down on the one about the plastic surgery . . . Nip and Tuck. It had too negative a worldview. I felt like I didn’t want to take it in. I really like The Wire and The Shield, even though they’re cop shows. I love Desperate Housewives. We watched Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD. Then we watched all of Buffy and all of Angel. They took a while to get into, but once I did I really liked them.
KK: If you didn’t like a show you can watch it on DVD like force-feeding, front-loading a whole twenty hours. It’s great. I should quote Dennis Cooper, her friend in LA. “Everybody should have at least one show.” It builds continuity.
DB: I also sort of like the on-goingness of TV. It just keeps going and going. We used to watch soap operas. There’ve been books written about time in soap operas. It’s real time, but then it’s not real time. They play around with time a lot.
KK: If you had your son this year, in four years or five years he’s going to be grown up or a teen, but you’ll be the same age.
ACD: So what are you guys working on now? Kevin, you’re working on this play for Portland, and Dodie, are you still working on The Fourth Form?
DB: Yeah. I decided I was going to write this semester. I was querying people who taught – do you write during the semester? And it was kind of pathetic. So I decided that I could not. But I actually put a manuscript together for a new book. It’s about half the size of the Fourth Form. It’s the first in a series that is alternative forms of scholarship and essay writing and/or critiques of academia. It’s a combination of sort of fictional writing and essays. Lots of essays on writing and teaching and academic job searches. It’s called Academonia.
ACD: And Kevin, you’re editing a volume, you said.
KK: Of Jack Spicer’s work. His collected poems have gone out of print because Black Sparrow, the press that put them out, is dissolved. So now there will be a new four-volume edition of all of his work.
DB: All of his papers were donated to the Bancroft [Special Collections Library at Berkeley]. Kevin’s been working as an employee of the Bancroft cataloging his papers.
ACD: Thank you both.