Mike Magnuson, author, professor, and Wisconsin native, spends nights out drinking Molson in the Cellar in Carbondale, Illinois, his new home. He says it’s the only tavern in town he can stand. One Saturday around ten, students from his classes at Southern Illinois University straggled in and camped around his table. The guys did tequila shots with him; the girls pretended to hate him, then had a few beers and named him the greatest creative writing teacher on earth. The lit crowd was indistinguishable from anyone else in the dark, plywood-paneled basement bar. The other drinkers could’ve been students too, or welders, or maybe trailer hippies–everyone was dressed about alike. An older guy wandered in with his wife, started slurping, and turned out to be a Guggenheim fellow, poet Rodney Jones. He teaches at SIU too, and Magnuson says he’s no stranger to impromptu creative-writing bacchanalia.
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His envy’s thick but not unsympathetic. Most of Magnuson’s media notice pegs his work as quaint, barely articulate backwoods rambling, though he’s gone through the BS of getting the MFA, becoming a professor, and writing two works of fiction, The Right Man for the Job and The Fire Gospels. He does use a lot of dialect, but it sounds smart (not “wise”) and natural; his style at its best flutters between the cramped, defensive language of social interaction and the poetic, open locutions of internal monologue. Now his publisher, HarperCollins, has prodded him to jump on the memoir train with Lummox: The Evolution of a Man.
If you read the Lummox press packet and dust jacket flaps that somebody who wasn’t Magnuson was paid to write, this is what you learn about the guy: He looks like an idiot. He talks like an idiot–he has a ghastly Wisconsin hick accent. “You see,” the blurb writer tells you, “Mike is trapped in a lummox body, but has a mind for the world beyond the lummox world.” He likes lots of beer! He is often confused by the behavior of females! Yet he can think and feel! They make him sound like a typing monkey.
“Nobody really makes it unless they spend at least a year in New York City drinking at the right parties with the right people. You have to go get an internship and meet them.” As most publishing internships are uncompensated, these aren’t dues your average college graduate can hope to pay. “You spend $300,000 on that internship and you hope to just make it back–no interest. You can’t be a poor person and get very far in that world. I’d love to go and live there for a year, but…” He shrugs. He and his wife, Beth, have two daughters and a neat but cramped house in Carbondale; his sabbatical pay, he claims, would never cover his expenses in Manhattan. “I don’t think [Moody’s] a worse writer than me. I just don’t think he’s any better. And the reason he’s doing so well is because of the contacts, where he’s from.”
Magnuson tried to avoid the self-pity and rationalization that prey on memoirs by couching Lummox in the third person, for humor and distance, and in a disclaimer following the text he admits he did a certain amount of fact mangling to avoid embarrassing old acquaintances who have cleaned up their acts. But Magnuson, by vocation a fiction writer, not a diarist, said he couldn’t help fudging even more to make “Mike’s” life story more coherent. “It’s a weird kind of third person,” he says. “The way I write, it should be obvious it’s a character I’ve created–it’s language, it’s crafted. But I’m not crafted.”
Magnuson hasn’t gone out of his way to be weird, but he’s developed his own aesthetic and common sense. His narrators sound true, and it isn’t because he’s gleaned mystery folk power from scarfing Colby cheese. When he transcribes Gunnar’s thoughts–“Work, as it’s always been for me, from every day of eight years at Peterson Products to my first job stocking the frozen-food aisle at Piggly Wiggly, long ago, when I was sixteen, is about friends and doing your best not to disappoint them. Nobody at work wants to be a piece of crap”–the odd syntax and swearing work because Magnuson has an enviable ear and he reads and writes a lot (or at least “Mike” does in Lummox).
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Branda Keehn, Ann Sterzinger.
