“It’s said by people who know things that can’t be documented that when Roosevelt Boulevard, Interstate-17, was paved, a number of the graves of former slaves were paved over.” —Tim Gilmore, Ghost ZIP Code, Yukon
Tim Gilmore is the author of the upcoming “This Kind of City: Ghost Stories and Psychological Landscapes,” as well as two collections of poems, Horoscopes for Goblins: Poems, 2006-2009 and Flights of Crows: Poems, 2002-2006. He teaches literature and English, including a course called “Ghost Stories,” at Florida State College at Jacksonville. In addition to editing deadpaper.org, his writing has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Fiction Fix, 580 Split, Jack Magazine, and other publications. He has visited Panama and Mexico and England. He has driven forklifts and sold vacuum cleaners. He has grown beans and tomatoes and winter greens and herbs. He has held hatchling bluebirds in his hands. He has robbed bees. He knows the difference between the Sublime and the Beautiful. He’s bad at math. He needs to wash his car. He has horrible hay fever.
In your work, the past is very much a part of the present. Are these ghosts in the geography or hauntings, erasures, exorcisms?
Of course Faulkner said the past wasn’t dead, the past is not even past. Human landscapes are full of markers from the past—not just old buildings or neighborhoods, but the way neighborhoods are laid out, the way they’re named. Part of the feeling a lot of people have in suburban neighborhoods of the place being soulless may not only be cookie-cutter house design and poor building materials. It may also be the lack of an accretion of lives lived.
If you’ve been in an older place, a really old place, maybe a European city for example, you can feel that depth of history, layer upon layer. It’s as though the city you inhabit contains a city beneath and within it and that city contains a city beneath and within, like Matryoshka dolls.
I teach a “Ghost Stories” literature course every fall term, and I don’t tell most of my students that I don’t actually believe in paranormal ghosts. The kind of “ghost” I’m describing gives me a deeper sense of haunting than paranormal ghosts. This kind of ghost is a cultural ghost, a geographical ghost, a psychogeographical ghost. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Sethe talks about “rememories” and describes them as memories that live on, physically, outside of us, out in the landscape, and she says every place is haunted, that you can walk along and accidentally bump into someone else’s “rememories.”
What is “psychogeography”?
Psychogeography is a very loosely defined focus. Personally, I think it should stay that way. On an obvious level, it’s a portmanteau word of psychology and geography. So it has to do with the psychological effects place has on us, and it has to do with the possibility of geography having, in some sense, its own psychology.
A French Situationist philosopher named Guy Debord apparently originated the term, and he said it was “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” But there’s not, and there never has been, anything precise or scientific about it.
In the last couple of decades, the term has been applied to a wide range of writers who often have very little to do with one another. It’s been applied to San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit, who’s written a history of walking, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It’s been applied to British writer Peter Ackroyd, who’s written what he calls the autobiography of London.
In 1984, Ackroyd said in a newspaper interview, “There are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks… Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behavior of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city [London] and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond?” That seems to me as good a way into the concept of psychogeography as any.
Ghost ZIP Code, Yukon is filled with names, zip codes, years, and other data that attempt to “hold onto” a geographic place/historical moment. The work seems to be saying in no small way: “This is real.” What is the nature of reality that you are trying to express in your work?
That piece comes from a manuscript called “This Kind of City: Ghost Stories and Psychological Landscapes,” a collection that gives voice to the spirit of the streets and the houses and neighborhoods, even the back alleys and the polluted ditches of Jacksonville, Florida. And Jacksonville’s a very bland city, a mediocre city, but that only makes it perfectly demonstrate that every place, as a human artifact, is haunted, is fascinating even, if you know how to look at it. Yukon is a truly strange no-place within Jacksonville. The story, “Ghost ZIP Code, Yukon,” speaks for itself. It also speaks for the place. It also allows the place to speak through it. Your question is perfect. All of my own psychogeographical writing does scream out, “This is real.” Place has personality. We live in its personality, its persona, and often don’t realize it. When the details of its personality are pointed out to us, it can be the realization that you’ve been living with ghosts. All of us live in haunted houses, psychogeographically speaking. It’s not some spiritualist, Theosophist kind of concept. It has to do with architecture and psychology and history. In Yukon, it has to do with slave graveyards, plundered graves, a post office with its own ZIP code, the post office now decommissioned, rumors of buried treasure, and conspiracy theories about military secrets in the woods. It has to do with one side of the street being downtown and the other side uptown and with a woman who said she used to stand between ZIP codes to hide from the world.
How do you conduct research?
I’m a romantic. I have to go to the place I’m interested in. I have to wander around it, look at it from every angle, maybe talk to people in the area. I’m always looking for the hidden. I’m drawn to the decadent and to ruins.
But of course you have to have background. Sometimes that means reading through property records, and it usually means Google Maps. It means old newspaper articles. I’ve also gathered a small but, I think, not unimpressive library of local history, architecture, etc. So much stuff is still not on the Web. So this library [Pictured above] contains histories written recently or in the 1960s or the 1920s. It contains pamphlets for urban master plans. It even contains a wonderful dissertation on the vanished black culture of a downtown neighborhood called LaVilla, a neighborhood of which maybe a half a percent remains.
Your psychogeographic works are history, geography, creative nonfiction, journalism and fiction (and possibly more). Are you influenced by—or do you admire—any authors (past or present) who similarly defy categorization?
Wonderful description of what I’m trying to write. I really like a lot of the above-mentioned Peter Ackroyd’s work, both fiction and nonfiction. Unfortunately, “historical fiction” is a categorization that sounds cheesy, sentimental. Ackroyd’s novels and biographies and urban histories are almost all historical, but he captures the soul of the past, or of place. Rebecca Solnit’s writing is indispensable to me now. I also love the postmodern writing of Don DeLillo and Paul Auster, who both, especially Auster, often capture the psychology of urban place. The quiet verisimilitude of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio makes it one of my favorite novels. Urban cultural studies like Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities have made me think about place like I never had before. But I also want my writing to have a poetic dimension, and for that, I’m indebted to poets like Rilke and Whitman.
What is the first story you ever wrote?
Hmmm. I used to write “scary” stories in third grade that I read aloud to the class. I remember one called “Scarface” and one called “The Grotesque Dragon.” I didn’t know my mother was paying them any attention at all, until I overhead her telling someone that she was keeping them all in a drawer. I tried to write a novel in ninth grade, “The House Still Stands.” I hope it’s true that doing something for 10,000 hours makes us a master of it, because I wrote an embarrassingly large glut of garbage before I wrote anything I now think of as readable.
Deadpaper is approaching its 10th Anniversary this September; what are you going to do to celebrate?
Holy shit! It is, isn’t it? How could I not have realized? I’ll get to work on that.
Do you think Jacksonville, FL, is a good place for writers to live? Where do literary types gather there? How do they stay connected?
The thing that amazes me is how much talent can be found in one place at one time, even a place that most people think is a cultural backwater. Most people would not describe Jacksonville as a good place for writers to live. The city has a “brain drain” problem. Little pockets pop up here and there from time to time. Douglas Anderson School of the Arts plays a big role in the city’s culture, with the biennial Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival held at the University of North Florida. Deadpaper hosted a public reading for two years at the downtown location of Chamblin Bookmine. Then there are certain people—Mark Ari and Clark Lunberry at UNF, and Bill Slaughter, now retired from UNF. People like that are important nodes in any kind of network of writers. If there’s a young writer hungry to get going, living in Scranton or Indianapolis, I’d love for that young writer to come to Jacksonville, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
—Interviewed by April Gray Wilder