Prolific novelist Corey Mesler (he’s written 14 of them) and I sat down toward the back of Burke’s Book Store (he owns it) to discuss his latest publication.
“Let’s talk about your book,” I said. “It’s just filthy.”
“I knew you’d lead with that,” he said, dryly.
How could I not? Mesler gleefully says that he was moved to write the book because of perversity: “I got tired of people saying, well, ‘There’s too much sex in your books.’ So I doubled down on it and decided to write a book that tells a man’s life through his psychosexual experiences. I wanted to make him come alive, mostly through his sexual encounters. And I used my own life to give it structure.”
It’s not a tell-all, however. He qualifies it by saying it’s based on his own experiences, but “many, many things were made up. I wasn’t as much of a stud as the guy in the book.”
So maybe we can blame Neill Rhymer, the guy in the book who gets so much action, for some of the reaction. There’s a site called Chapter 16 (chapter16.org) that is funded by Humanities Tennessee and reports on literary news and events in the state. It also reviews books, including several of Mesler’s earlier works.
But not this one. It does get a mention in an item named Briefly Noted, but all that sex business gave the outfit pause since it gets public funding. Better to be safe than explicit.
Mesler is unbowed.
“I love women. I love sex. I have a standard thing that I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: I write about sex because sex is good and it’s the life force. When you tap into writing, you’re looking for the life force — the chi as they call it. Sex points toward nothing but good. I think it’s positive. I can’t think of anything bad about it.”
It has taken him some seven years to write and publish Cock-A-Hoop: the Adventures, Mostly, of Neill Rhymer, partly because it was too long for his usual publisher to handle. So Mesler found Whiskey Tit Press and was reassured that they weren’t going to be bothered by the sexy stuff. The publisher’s mission statement begins this way: “Whiskey Tit attempts to restore degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts.”
Mesler is a writing machine, with all the novels, all the poetry, and a film script to his credit. Not bad for someone who says he “backed into” writing novels. Still, he admits to some anxiety. “I still feel like I’m sitting at the kids’ table.”
He says that for decades he wrote poetry and “it was pretty bad. I was looking up to Fredric Koeppel and Bill Page and Gordon Osing and thinking, I’ll never be as good as those guys. Then I read Raymond Carver and decided maybe I can write a short story.”
But Mesler wasn’t sure about writing prose. “The sustaining of the voice and all that was really hard for me,” he said. “I backed into it by creating my first novel totally in dialogue talk. I thought it was just this funny thing that I was having fun doing. It was a gas to write, and I found my strength, which, I think, is dialogue.”
He looked up online to see how long a novel was and found out a novel is 40,000 words; anything under that is a novella. “I had 45,000 words, so, okay, it’s a novel.”
But then what? “I thought, well, this is a queer bird. Who’s gonna go with me on this?” As it happened, Joe Taylor at Livingston Press loved Talk: A Novel in Dialogue and published it.
So he’s been at it ever since, with his 2015 book Memphis Movie being the bestselling of his works. And if Cock-A-Hoop is the latest to hit shelves, it’s not his most recent work. “I think I’ve published at least two novels that I wrote after this.”
Meanwhile, he’s still at it with another novel that veers into biography. “It’s coming hard,” he acknowledges. “I’m older and I’m tired. And it’s about some parts of my life that are very difficult. I didn’t think I was scared to write about it, but apparently I am.”
Yet he’ll do it no matter what, even if he has to back into it.