The characters in Dave Reidy’s debut collection Captive Audience dwell on the periphery of scenes and cultures with which we think we’re familiar. The lives of a journeyman basketball player, an isolated student of stand-up comedy, and a character actor planning his own funeral allow Reidy to illuminate how art affects those who participate in it, whether in the spotlight or on the fringes. How Reidy’s own perspective relative to music and film illuminates his writing was one of the topics in this interview, conducted via email.
[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]
While many of the stories in Captive Audience focus on music, they’re generally about peripheral, or at the very least less glamorous, people within a music scene. What attracts you to figures outside of the spotlight?
Little known artists are interesting because their motives are less obvious. Why are they working so hard for so little notice and so little money? The answers to that question are of great interest to me as a writer.
In the Acknowledgments section of Captive Audience, you cite the work of Jay Ryan and Daniel MacAdam — when creating a fictional artist (as in “Look and Feel”) or a fictional band (such as Sod Off Shotgun), how influenced are you by existing artists or bands?
Sometimes, to get some clay on the table for a fictional character, I take my half-informed or misinformed notions of a real band or a real person as starting points. I usually don’t end up doing much research about the real person—what I misunderstand or mistakenly suppose about his life is much more valuable in creating a character than what I know about him. When the fiction is finished, my characters tend to bear only passing resemblances to any real people I had in mind when I first started making them.
When I was first inventing Tim Vilinski, the narrator of the story “Postgame,� I had some vague notion in my head that he was like NBA journeyman Eric Piatkowski. But I don’t know much more about Piatkowski than that he is (or was) an NBA journeyman, and I suspect that all that he and Tim Vilinski have in common are Polish surnames and a love of basketball.
Likewise, the story “In Memoriam� is told from the perspective of a reimagined Abe Vigoda. The Abe Vigoda of “In Memoriam� shares the name and some of the circumstances of his real-world counterpart, but I’m guessing that the character and the man are not very much alike—somehow, the act of creating a piece of fiction ensures that.
When including real people in your stories, whether they’re the focus (as in “In Memoriam”) or play a more supporting role (as in “Dancing Man”), how concerned are you with making sure that they’re portrayed authentically? And, to play devil’s advocate: why use a real person as opposed to a fictional analogue?
I did my best not to substantially misrepresent any of the real people who share names and some circumstances with fictional characters in Captive Audience—I have no interest in causing problems for anyone. But I was conscious that my characters were fictional, no matter their names, so I let them be what they needed to be. My guiding lights were Jim Shepard’s stories “Won’t Get Fooled Again,� which is told from the perspective of Who bassist John Entwistle, and “John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me.� It seemed to me that new names weren’t invented for these characters because real names better served the story and the reader, and did no harm to any real people. After some deliberation, my editor and I decided that the same things were true of the real names I used in “Dancing Man� and “In Memoriam.�
Some of the characters appearing in Captive Audience tell us a good portion of their life stories until that point, while others, such as James in the title story, are less forthcoming. How much of these characters’ histories had been worked out before you began writing about them, and how much emerged as their stories unfolded?
Almost all of my characters’ lives—their backstories and the events that unfold in the story’s real time—are made known to me as I write them. I usually don’t learn that a character lost a parent to an early death or was cut from the high-school dance team until I realize that, for the sake of the story, I must know. The question then becomes: does the reader also need to know this detail? And, if so, how best would it be revealed?
In both “Captive Audience” and “The Regular,” the protagonists live vicariously through the actions and performances of others. Do you see any parallel between this and the act of writing to evoke the daily routines of an athlete or musician?
Yes, I do. A writer can experience the emotional resonance and even the physicality of an event he or she has not lived, and help a reader to do the same.
But I think that an audience member’s connection with a performer is a singular thing. Those fleeting moments in which we can imagine ourselves on stage, playing some part in the creation of something beautiful and meaningful, are a big part of what makes live performance so compelling. Sometimes the imagining goes only so far as identifying with the performer—she’s like me somehow, or I am like her. Sometimes we see ourselves stepping out front for a solo. Whatever form it takes, that imagining gets me to my desk the next morning in the hope that some of its transformative power can find its way into my fiction.