Full disclosure. I’ve been a friend of author DJ Palladino for many years. We co-produce the annual Bloomsday celebration in town, and I’m the junior intern at the Mesa Bookstore, which DJ and his wife, Diane Arnold, own. That said, I tried to come up with some challenging questions about DJ’s latest publication, Spake as a Child, a book of two short stories and one novella, each linked by their settings in the memories of childhood.
DJ has previously published a meta-mystery novel set in 1950s Santa Barbara and a werewolf novel set in Austin, Texas, along with a book of poetry. His work is well known in town from more years than we’ll enumerate contributing to this fine and award-winning weekly, as well as other Santa Barbara print properties. He’ll be signing Spake as a Child at Chaucer’s Books on Monday, November 9, at 6 p.m.
What led you to this trio of stories? Were they thought of together originally, or did they become joined by theme as you wrote them over time?
Actually, I wrote these stories about 25 years ago. At the time, I was reviewing a lot of kids’ movies and became interested in young adult writing as well. [The third story in the collection,] “For Love of Monster Island” was written first, but for young adults. I later went back and rewrote it as a story for adults. A couple of years ago, as I was wrapping up my poetry collection for my publisher [Genius Books], I said, “Geez, it’s too bad you guys don’t do short stories.” And they said, “We love short stories!” So, I sent them [“Monster Island”] and the other two stories, which also had childhood themes, and forgot about it completely because it had been so long. Then one night I came home from eating at the Indian restaurant on the Mesa, and I was in a giddy mood because I had had so much curry. And there was an email saying, “We love these; these are great; we’ll publish them.”
Classic author question: How much do you think the main characters in the three stories — Donny, Joseph, and Mike — are versions of you?
My blowhard answer was, “It’s all about me.” They all are about me. But of all of those characters that you mentioned, the middle one is me because it’s a story [“The New God”] that actually happened to me, and it’s the first time I’ve ever written something like that.
That story has some pretty obvious Santa Barbara location markers, though the city is never mentioned. What’s it like to write about your childhood neighborhood while still living in the same house you did back then?
It was really cool. The final scene, where Joseph has a kind of self-reckoning with a Christmas tree, I can still remember sitting there and looking at the tree in that room over there. [Points from the kitchen to his current living room.] And another incident happened as it was depicted with friends of mine — a walk from Las Ondas Street to the Harbor and back. And then we had all these adventures after drinking a giant Colt 45 malt liquor.
All three stories tell stories of a young person’s experience. Is that something you were eager to write about?
As I get older, I seem to think more and more about my childhood. I had a conversation with somebody today about childhood, the revelations that you have a child, and how you can see those things from the point of view of a child — hence the title of the book. In the stories, I tried to preserve that, not innocence exactly, maybe ignorance. I think the stories are kind of transforming your mind into what it was like to be a child.
Can you point to some sort of arc to the three stories?
Well, each has a specific theme. The first [“The Way and Its Meaning”] is faith, where the main character wrestles with what he believes versus what he sees. The second is hope. Joseph wants something more. He’s unhappy with his kind of bougie family life, middle-class family life. He hopes he can get out in the world and see something else. And the theme in “Monster Island” is love — of Donny for his monsters, but also for his family, especially as they deal with a real monster, his mother’s illness.
See DJ Palladino speak about Spake as a Child at Chaucer’s Books (3321 State St.) on Monday, November 9, at 6 p.m. See chaucersbooks.com.
