Last week I sat down for coffee with Springfield writer Richard Horton and his daughter, Victoria Horton, to talk about Richard’s new book, “Sticks & Bones,” published by Meat for Tea Press of Easthampton. The book is a slim chapbook of twenty pieces of writing, some organized in lines, as poems often are, others that look and read more like prose poems or the short prose form known as flash fiction.
“I’m not really one that cares to slice it too thin,” I tell Horton. “But I wondered how you thought about your work. Maybe it doesn’t even matter. When you start working, maybe that’s the farthest thing from your mind — what form it is.”
Horton considers, then answers in his quiet voice, still inflected after more than 30 years in Massachusetts with the gentle, melodic accent of his Texas roots.
“Well, there’s a way of talking in the piece that causes me to put it in a certain format,” Horton says. “I don’t want to distract the reader from what I’m saying by how it looks on the page.”
He continues, “Another name for (the form) is ‘short-short stories’ but ‘stories’ doesn’t sound to me like what it is.”
“Yeah? Why not?” I ask. “That’s interesting.”
Victoria Horton, 30, a writer herself, tips her head and says, “It’s more like a spoken word piece. It’s a piece of writing that is just the right length to get up at an open mic and read. It’s a piece of writing that’s, in a way, meant to be read out loud.”
“And it’s contained, right?” I ask. “You get to the end it’s fulfilled itself. There’s nothing left over.”
“Yes,” Victoria Horton agrees. “And you get an entire experience in just a few minutes.”
Her father adds, “And I structure what’s being said to manipulate tension, and to make a little hit at the end.”
“And you have these really interesting moments where it gets kind of surreal all of a sudden,” I say, thinking of how, at the end of one piece, “Grandma’s Cigarettes,” bread and baloney “look at each other and grin.”
Horton smiles. “Yeah,” he says.
“Where does that come from?”
“It just seems like a good thing to do.”
“It just pops up while you’re writing somehow?”
“Yeah,” Horton says. “If there’s something non-real that is appealing to me that is being suggested by what I’m writing, I’ll do a little riff on it.”
Victoria Horton offers, “Personally, when things start to get weird in a piece of writing that I’m reading or listening to, I start to pay closer attention.”
“Yes, that’s another thing,” her father agrees.
Richard Horton says he’s been taking his daughter to readings and open mics because, “I want her to understand all that’s happening at the readings and all that’s being said.”
“Right now I’m in kind of a slump so I’m hoping I’ll be inspired by going to open mics,” his daughter responds.
I tell her it seemed to me that hearing your dad read at an open mic might be a different relationship than many children have with a parent. “You’re learning a lot more about his heart and his experience than you might otherwise,” I say.
Both father and daughter are nonplussed.
“I think it works because we have a mutual interest in spoken word,” Victoria Horton says. And, as the conversation progresses, it’s clear that the two share many other mutual interests such as classical music, cartoons, and jazz.
Richard Horton says that his next book, still in progress and currently titled, “Time Runs Backward,” will include more pieces like “Grandma’s Cigarettes.”
“It’s all set in the town of Texarkana,” Horton says. “Toward the end, the family goes to Dallas and so you get the boom times in Dallas in the late ‘50s.”
One thing he’s been pondering is whether to include mention of the political and social issues of the period he’s working with — roughly 1950 to 1957 — in his pieces. He doesn’t want to distract from the stories he’s telling with “information or ideas.”
“I want to avoid that,” Horton says. “However, the stories are set at a time when you know that there was racism, there was racial violence. The anti-communist hysteria was going on.”
He adds, “When we were there, everything was segregated. We never even knew any black people although there were so many of them. So we lived our lives and never experienced the things they were going through. So now when I think about talking about it, what can I say? They’re the ones that have to describe it. And yet if I don’t describe it, am I being insensitive?”
“Well, what about this — just brainstorming — what if you concentrated on where those things met?” I suggest. “Even if you didn’t meet black people, you must have been hearing things on the radio about segregation, so if you pin it back to your own experience — ”
“I’ve tried to do it like that,” Horton says. “Hearsay, talk. I have to be careful. Some things can’t be said that way.”
I tell Horton that it seems to me that when we’re kids, we’re always leading lives that are, “Maybe inside a little bubble compared to the whole rest of society around us. But it’s interesting to see a political or social situation through a child’s eyes.”
“Children don’t know what adult things are happening,” Victoria Horton says. “They only know what they hear and see, which is confusing little bits and pieces.”
Richard Horton says that the pieces in his next book will explore more characters from his family, and more situations.
“It’s kind of like a mosaic,” he says. “They’re different and, yet, taken as a whole, it’s a picture.”
I ask Horton what the job was that brought him to Western Massachusetts in the late 1980’s.
“I’m a book conservator,” he says. “I restore books.”
“Oh well, that’s pretty fabulous,” I say. “Thank you.”
Where to find it
Find “Sticks & Bones” by Richard Horton online at http://meatfortea.com/press.htm.
You can also find Horton’s how-to book, “A Handbookbinder’s Guide to Making Photo Albums,” through Amazon.
Check the schedules for open mic appearances at the North Quabbin Garlic & Arts Festival in Orange, Saturday, September 23 and Sunday, September 24, and during Human Error Publishing’s Great Falls Word Festival in Turners Falls, Thursday, October 12 through Sunday, October 15.
Horton also often reads at Paul Richmond’s Spoken Word Greenfield open mic series, held third Tuesdays at 9 Mill Street, Greenfield. Doors open at 7:00 p.m.
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for poets, writers and artists to interview for her columns. She can be reached at tcrapo@mac.com