A big welcome to Charles Lambert author of a new collection of short fiction, entitled The Scent of Cinnamon and Other Stories out now from Salt Publishing. The title story of his latest offering was selected as one of the O.Henry Prize Stories 2007. He is also the author of one of my personal favorite reads Little Monsters published by Picador back in March of 2008, which is soon to be released in paperback.

We caught up on the book sharing site Good Reads (I’m forever checking out his reading list) where he asked me to take part in his Something Rich & Strange virtual book tour organized by Salt Publishing. He’s discussing his writing on every stop of the tour and answering a few questions regarding his new highly recommended book “The Scent of Cinnamon”.

I’ve recommended the book to several people and have come to call it a quietly rebellious read, short stories where the gentility of the past, and the civility of the everyday mix with terror and at times disturbance. Like the dichotomy of the pungent cinnamon spice itself, dually referred to as the anti-smell of rot and decay, equated with (especially in America) apple pies, warm cider, baking and the traditional smell of home and holiday alike. The witty short story collection explores the fantastic and the mundane and the terror or anti-terror that may find its way into either. If you like the darker parts of comedy, you’ll find yourself snickering and laughing out loud at some of the more deliciously sinister and salaciously inappropriate passages. That’s not to say that “The Scent of Cinnamon” is all about the abyss or soul mining, there’s just some damn wonderful, vivid, light even magical scenes here coupled with a compact and at times concise writing style that’s nothing short of refreshing. “The Scent of Cinnamon” is a delicate balance, nothing can belong simultaneously to everything, and everything must belong to one part or the other and what not to make this collection. An expertly crafted collection it is indeed, compelling reading by a very skillful writer that will keep you up nights.

On to the Q & A:

Quite a few of the stories in The Scent of Cinnamon have gay themes and gay characters. Do you consider yourself a gay writer and, if so, to what extent has your work been influenced by gay writers?

I’m always in two minds about this issue. I heard Joyce Carol Oates some years ago saying that writing, by which she certainly meant her writing, transcends gender and I was half convinced by this: it’s obviously true, in the narrow sense that women aren’t confined to what might be termed women’s issues (Oates certainly isn’t!). But, at the same time, I’d be distrustful of any writer who wasn’t, or who claimed not to be, rooted in – and writing from – a particular sensibility, a uniqueness, and I don’t see how that transcends gender, any more than it transcends the infinite number of qualities that make us up. Of course I’d write differently if I looked like Brad Pitt, or Golda Meir, or had alopecia, or came from an upper-middle class, or working class, background, or suffered from chronic piles. We work with givens, and one of the main things I’ve been given to work with – and from – is my sexuality. So yes, in that sense, I’m a gay writer. But I’m also a male writer, and a white writer, and a 55-year-old writer, and an expatriate writer, and, touch wood, a hemorrhoid-free writer. So I’m uncomfortable about pigeonholing and I’m not convinced of the usefulness of categorizing, say, two such different writers as Harold Brodkey and Armistead Maupin as gay, other than to make life easier for publishers who want to target units to the appropriate group, necessary though this is. I would say, though, that Maupin is a ‘gay writer’ in a sense that Brodkey isn’t, and I’ll be talking about this in a minute. I’d also say that, much as I’ve loved Maupin, I feel myself closer as a writer to Brodkey, if only in terms of aspiration.

I don’t know about my work, but my life has certainly been influenced by gay writers, and, come to that, gay subtexts in straight writing when there hasn’t been any real gay writing to hand. I managed to sexualize a whole series of children’s classics before getting hold of the real thing. In my case, the real thing, at the age of thirteen, was a second-hand paperback copy of Michel Tournier’s The Erl-King, also known as The Ogre, found, unbelievably, in the local flea market in Leek, Staffordshire. I don’t recall how I got from there to Jean Genet – remember, we’re talking about provincial England in the mid-60s – but the next key book was The Thief’s Journal. It was a Penguin Modern Classic and I had to order it from the local newsagents. That was followed, when I was fourteen, by Last Exit to Brooklyn, which I read, with a hard-on, in the back of my parents’ car. This stuff was anything but queer-friendly material – it was dark and perverse and doomed, and irremediably other – but it was what there was, and I lapped it up. It’s hard to explain now how parched the air was of gay references at that time, when the only male bodies on display were in the boxing or, yes, wrestling ring and the underwear pages of shopping catalogs. And while I’m being nostalgic, I’ll never forget the breathless excitement of waiting to see Ken Russell’s Women in Love, with Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestling in the nude. A few years later I discovered Mary Renault, once again in the back of a car, as a student driving back from an utterly doped-up holiday in Cornwall, and began to understand what love might mean…

Would you say that any of the non-gay stories in the collection, such as The Scent of Cinnamon and The Growing, are informed by gay issues?

Yes and no, Jim. The final story in the book, The Growing, is a parable of difference, of imagining what it would be like to grow up with the conviction that the reference point isn’t what they are, but what you are – which is tantamount to imagining what it would be like to grow up straight in a world that suddenly, horribly, inexplicably, turns out to be foreign, or gay, and to turn this realization on its head. In other stories, the connection is more tenuous. I’ve thought about whether The Scent of Cinnamon or The Number Worm have a gay subtext, but I think it would be unnecessarily partisan to claim loneliness or alienation as gay issues in any exclusive way; we’re often coerced into doing these emotions better or more completely than straight people, but that doesn’t make them less collective. The small boys in Beacons, Girlie and All Gone are pretty sissified (Ryan O’Neal! Dolls!), but I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who thinks they can find a gay subtext in Little Potato, Little Pea.

Some gay writers feel obliged to portray gay characters in an essentially positive way. You obviously don’t. Do you recognize this as a problem?

Yes, but not as my problem. I’m all in favor of affirmative action in the work place and the political arena – even though, in terms of gay presence, honesty and courage would already be enough to right the balance – but the idea that fiction should be consolatory I find, well, dispiriting. I’m aware of those novels designed to make gay people feel better about themselves by depicting them as successful, gorgeous, well-hung, freed in some mysterious way from the daily burden of working for a living, divorced of family, free to fuck and to be fucked, and so on. I’m aware of them in the same way that I’m aware of Jackie Collins the celebrity novelist as a model for what I do when I sit down to write. And they’re that useful. Armistead Maupin, for example, treads an incredibly fine line between making us feel good and telling us home truths, and the latter, for me, exculpates the former, though I think this less true of his last novel, which seems to me to be pressing right-on buttons in a rather mechanical way. It’s fun and it’s nice, but it isn’t true. If I had my way, every copy of Michael Tolliver Lives would have attached to it a copy of Keith Banner’s The Smallest People Alive, to redress the balance between feeling good and simply, in all the complexity this involves, feeling. And if that doesn’t tip the scales I’d add a copy of Everything I Have is Blue a wonderful anthology of stories written by working-class gay writers and edited by Wendell Ricketts

Thanks Charles! You can check out Charles Lambert via his personal weblog. He’s currently a university teacher, academic translator and freelance editor for international agencies, he is lucky enough to live in Fondi, Italy, home to the medieval churches of San Domenico and San Francesco and the venerated statue of the Madonna of the Sky, oh and plenty of good eating and wine too!

The Scent of Cinnamon is published by Salt Publishing UK. Copies can be ordered from Amazon U.S.A., Amazon U.K., the Book Depository, which offers free delivery or Powells. The next step on the Cyclone virtual book tour will be at Vanessa Gebbie’s blog on 9 December.

Other Stops on “The Something Rich and Strange Tour” include:
Dec 12. 2008 Vanessa Gebbies News
Dec. 16. 2008 Asylum
Jan. 06. 2009 Dovegreyreader Scribbles
Jan. 13. 2009 Harkaway’s Occasionalities
Jan. 20. 2009 Topsyturvydom
Jan. 29. 2009 Una Vita Vagabonda

Previously the tour dropped in on:
The amazing Elizabeth Baines, the wonderful Writing Neuroses – Mine Are Rare Yours May Be Legion and the brilliant Me And My Big Mouth