KMWR: I always love to know the origin of a story. Can you tell us what it was like writing “The Wolf in the Oxalis”?

MT: The ingredients of it fermented in me for years. I do keep a garden. In San Francisco, with wet, mild winters, that's a year-round task, and winter is when the oxalis in the story, Oxalis pes-caprae, thrives. I fight it in the garden. I find it outside my gate, and throughout the City, and through much of the Bay Area.

I was raised Catholic in this place named for St. Francis and -- just as Tony -- heard the stories of his life in my childhood. I admired the Franciscans; a Franciscan priest, Father Matthew Poetzl, was a frequent visitor to my family of nine siblings then, always with two bags of groceries, for which I was grateful, being endlessly hungry. Beniamino Bufano's beatific statues of the saint are here and there around the City. Then in 2002 I stood in the tight hot confines of the standing-room audience behind the uppermost seats of the San Francisco Opera House to be moved by St. François d'Assise, from Olivier Messiaen, so much of whose music I love.

As an Ironworker I was sent into the Marina District to pin buildings back together after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and it did seem to me, as to Tony, that everything was out of kilter, and that the surface of the earth, and indeed everything, is as fragile as we are.

I recalled that Kerouac -- another writer of Canuck descent and raised Catholic -- had attributed sainthood to devotions not at all religious. I've gone back to look at On the Road. He says of Dean Moriarty, "These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days," and, "I suddenly realized that Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot ... That's what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF."

And I walked through the Stonestown Macy's in its closing days.

Somehow all this seemed to want to come together in something.

KMWR: In your piece, “Building the Ironworkers” over on Popula, I was struck by the joy you found in iron work, and I’m curious to know your thoughts about the links between iron work and writing work. How has working with one influenced the other, and vice versa? I can’t help but think of how ironwork can be used as a metaphor for writing—do you find the metaphor to be fitting?

MT: I reject what may be the most obvious metaphor -- writing is walking high steel -- because the stakes of the latter are so enormously different.

(Although if things degenerate further some American writing may approach those stakes.)

But parallels are available and may have been useful to me.

Production is a requirement in Ironwork, but the work is subject to constant variations, both minor and major -- it's not factory work -- and most of it also to the challenges of working out-of-doors. Nonetheless daily metrics apply: Pounds of welding wire used, high-tensile bolts stuffed (NOT a straightforward process), pieces of structural steel hung, tons (yes, tons daily per worker) of rebar hand-placed and -tied, and so on. Jobs are bid and obtained on these bases. And there is no paid time off. I know what it is to ask myself to produce, despite what goes on in and around me.

As a general foreman, I had to acquire a quick sense of the particular skills and weaknesses of the workers and foremen under me and to assign and advise work accordingly, and also according to the availability of tools and equipment and supplies. I had to coordinate crews with each other and the entire effort with other trades and the work of other contractors and the general contractor. I've sought a comparable understanding of the work of writing, of my resources for it.

Also as a general foreman, I had on occasion a task I truly enjoyed: To imagine how to rig something of considerable weight -- an architectural stair of a couple of tons, say -- through narrow openings, through different positions and elevations to its ultimate destination, often entirely or primarily by hand tools and human-powered hoists. This act of imagination seems to me very akin to a joy I find in writing. Again, though, the stakes are of radically different scale. I screw up a story, it's no actual catastrophe.

KMWR: In “The Wolf in the Oxalis,” Tony is a complex man: he is tender yet bitter, wrecked with loss and yet familiar with how quickly lives can fall: “Days of ducking or at times crawling through the tilting and twisting houses and apartment buildings of the Marina, of seeing where lives had been contorted and some lost, had left him feeling that the earthquake had torn open before him a crevice with no discernable bottom, in which all was possible, for good or ill.” How much of this Tony was present in the first draft? Or did he take more time, and more drafts, to craft?

MT: Tony was always going to be that combination of things. The challenge was in finding representations of it. The line you quote arrived in the fifth of seven drafts. Let's say it took all seven drafts.

KMWR: You’ve mentioned that you were a prolific writer in your twenties and took time away to build a family. How does it feel to be back? What was it like building your writing practice back up and how has it changed?

MT: I decided when I set the writing aside to give myself entirely to another life. I always thought I would return to writing someday, if I survived, but this did not devalue the life I had. I'm proud of what I did as an Ironworker, a union organizer, and a union representative. The work of my hands is around me. The work of my heart has improved thousands of lives.

That said, I'm so very happy to be writing again. The first stories I wrote after retirement stumbled, most of them, although almost by accident I had a couple accepted in early 2022, very soon after starting to submit them. I think -- I hope -- I have a better sense now of what they need. This doesn't preclude risk. I've written and continue to write some that are not ordinary in form or approach, and each of these thus becomes a new chance to stumble. But I have no patience with formulae. Every idea for a story issues its own demands.

KMWR: What have you been reading recently, and what would you recommend?

MT: I'm reading Solenoid, by Mircea Cărtărescu. Selected Poems, from John Ashbery, Alcools, by Guillaume Apollinaire, St. Matthew Passion, by Gertrude Schnakenburg. I have a long-term project-in-progress of reading Proust's A la recherche du Temps perdu in the original. I'm finally approaching the end of Du côté de chez Swann.

I don't dare recommend anything to anyone. Having set major reading aside for decades -- except for poetry before bed -- I feel woefully underread and in need of busting my tail to catch up.

KMWR: Finally, what are you working on and what can readers expect from you in the future?

MT: When I came back to the short story, I decided I should not write draft after draft of one story at a time, but write a series of story first drafts (these are in pencil in notebooks, subsequent drafts on the computer), and then a series of second drafts, and so on. In this way I could come back to do new drafts with a colder eye for the old ones. I chose ten as a number of stories for this treatment, just because it's a round number. Later I saw a quote in English translation from Roberto Bolaño to the effect that one should never work on just one story at a time, but always several, and I felt confirmed in this approach. I've done stories in runs of ten, then.

From what I'll call the 2022 run, nine stories so far have been accepted, from the 2023 run, seven, from the 2024 run, two. I continue to submit the unaccepted stories. One might yet appear from the 2022 run, then, three from 2023. eight from 2024. I've done all ten first and second drafts for a 2025 run, and five third drafts, and three fourth drafts, and these three are out looking for homes. All these stories, too, will have their turn out there.

I also have the first and second drafts of a novel, Salamander, with a couple of small gaps left to fill. First draft went onto index cards (Nabokov trick, with pluses and minuses), second into the computer. It will need at least two more drafts, I think. It's a wild impossible thing. It's insanely long for a first novel, past 700 pages. I went to AWP for the first time this year and heard lectures about needing "comps" (recent comparable works) to sell novels to publishers. I'll fail miserably at that. The novel draws on a millennium of French literature. It is pastiche but a unified whole. It has some chapters in verse and some containing verse, and one that's a prose poem. It speaks back and forth to itself across its chapters much as some long works of classical music do across movements. It is philosophical and simple and exotic and mundane and ecstatic. It is comic at times -- or at least I intend it to be -- and much the opposite at others. It follows one life but this life has three (and maybe four) alter-egos. It is a love story. Or maybe two.

Nobody will want the damned thing.

But I'm of an age and a condition where I figure I have one shot, and I'm going to do what I want.

♤♡
♧♢

Michael Thériault has been an Ironworker, union organizer, and union representative at various levels. He published fiction in his twenties, half a dozen stories in literary magazines, but abandoned it for decades to support first a family, then a movement. In his recent return, since 2022 his stories have been accepted by numerous publications, among them Pacifica Literary Review, Overheard, and Sky Island Journal. His story “An Invitation to the Gulls” was shortlisted lately for the Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration. Popula.com has published his brief memoir of Ironworker organizing. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe and San Francisco native and resident.