The Edward Falco Interview

Interview by Scott Esposito

Edward Falco is most recently the author of the novel Wolf Point and the collection Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha: New and Selected Stories. He is also author of the collections Acid and Plato at Scratch Daniel’s & Other Stories as well as volumes of poetry, plays, and experimental hypertext novels. Published in The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, TriQuarterly, and The Best American Short Stories, among others, Falco is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize.

Scott Esposito: Even though the stories in Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha are very well crafted, none of them feels tidy. The feeling upon finishing one of them isn’t “well, that ties everything up,” but rather that they’re still opening up into the unknown. Or that the plots themselves transcend the individual situation of the story, that they’re allegorical in a sense. Is it important to you to attain this feeling of something larger?

Edward Falco: I think you’re describing the way good, serious writing works, so, yes, I’m always striving for that. I want to tell a good, engaging story, but a story is neither good nor engaging, to me at least, unless it is also meaningful, which is to say it both tells a story and through the action of the story, through the choices made by the characters and the results of those choices, explores meaning. This, I suppose, is a kind of round about way of talking about theme, which may be that “feeling of something larger” you’re talking about.

SE: Do you have any work that’s set to be published in the near future, and what are you working on now?

EF: I have a short story called “Places, Please,” coming out soon in Daren Wang’s new audiojournal, Verb; and another short story, called “Wild Girls” scheduled for the summer issue of The Missouri Review. I’m also working hard to find productions in New York for a couple of plays I’ve already written and had performed locally. At the moment I have a couple of writing projects going: I’m writing a series of monologues for Susanna Rinehart, Patty Raun, and other actors from Virginia Tech, to be performed as part of the Theatre Department’s first New Play Festival, which is being organized by a good friend, David Johnson. I’m also working on a new hypertext project with photographer Mary Pinto. And I’m making the first tentative gestures toward beginning a new, longer narrative that may or may not turn into a novel.

The complete version of this interview is available in the Spring 2006 issue of The Chattahoochee Review.

Articles by Scott Esposito

• Latin America’s Kafka: What a Sly Argentine Has in Common with a Tubercular Czech
• Monsieur by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
• The Natasha Wimmer Interview
• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
• Educating Bolaño’s Orphans
• Thrice Told Tales: How Stories Become Reality in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow
• The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
• Triangle by Katharine Weber
• New Cliches: How Mulligan Stew Uses Old Lines to Slam Pretentious Authors
• Haruki Murakami’s Meaningful Metaphors
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
• Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo
• The Edward Falco Interview
• Reading Alberto Moravia’s Boredom
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
• What are Prisons For?
• The Fruits of Parasitism: Unraveling Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady
• Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef al-Mohaimeed
• Dirt for Art’s Sake by Elisabeth Ladenson

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