Interview: Tony O’Neill

by Sean McGahey

A phrase I use far too often…

yes.

The most surprising thing that ever happened to me was…

Actually, nothing surprises me anymore. Nothing. I suppose that I wasn’t shot and killed the time I foolishly decided to rob a crack dealer in LA. That one is still a source of wonderment to me.

I am not a politician but…

I can lie and steal with the best of them.

You know me as a writer but in truer life I’d have been …

A pharmacist. Or a doctor.

What kind of music are you listening to?

Right now I am listening to ‘little girl with blue eyes’ by pulp. It’s a good song, their early stuff. I like all of pulps stuff though. Jarvis cocker is a poet plain and simple. I mean just listen to any of their albums if you don’t believe that rock lyrics can be poetry just as much as something by fucking Wordsworth can.

What do you think of the more alternative, cultural phenomenon of the Internet based lit-Zine scene? Is it a good thing? Or is it killing off the traditional paper based publishing industry??

Everything’s always killing something. Taping music from the radio is killing music. The internet is killing music. The internet is killing the printed word. Its evolution I still listen to vinyl. It’s all irrelevant. All I can see is that the internet has been very healthy for writers. It’s causing scenes to evolve. It’s giving me new stuff to read every day. I mean who cares about the businessmen and how it’s affecting them. I’ll worry about that when I’m in their position.

What role has the Internet played in your writing?

I mean I think I can honestly say I am a writer who has made himself on the internet. When I finished digging the vein, I mean nobody would piss on it. Nobody, what the fuck did I know about anything? I was like working for shit wages, and even the postage to send the book out was a stretch for me. I had one person in my corner, my wife, and she didn’t own a publishing company. We had a baby on the way. Do I buy stamps and submit 3 chapters of my book to like 5 publishing houses knowing full well that it probably won’t even get read? Or do I buy babyhood? Getting published for the first time on 3am was a huge validation. Because not only was somebody saying ‘we like you, we like your writing’ the people saying it were obviously people who liked the same authors I did. Having someone like that dig your stuff was worth more to me than having Joe schmoe from whatever-house saying it, because they probably hated all the guys that I dug.

http://www.3ammagazine.com

Do you write a novel/short story for a reaction or do you write novels/short stories for personal reasons?

Oh never for a reaction. Never. I never wrote digging the vein to even get it published. It just came out of me. Like a baby. The contractions started and I couldn’t keep it in anymore. I was scared I was going to die having never written it down, and forget everything. And then having a manuscript in front of me, as rough and far from finished as it was … well it seemed like a stupid idea not to send it out then. But when I was writing it, the only reader I had in mind was me. Writing seizure wet dreams was easy because it consisted purely of stuff I was putting out on the internet. Experiments. Again I was writing to amuse myself. When Heidi at social disease said “do you have another book” I realized that I had. The difficult one has been ‘down and out on murder mile’ I’m still rewriting it. But for months I was paralyzed. ’Will people like it?’ Then I got over myself and just write the fucking thing. And you know what; I think it’s better than digging the vein by a country mile. It’s my favourite thing that I have written so far. Until the next one, right?

Is what you write about purely literary, or is it a depiction of a certain world you’ve been a part of?

Well it is born out of that world, but it is literary. I’m not a memoirist. I don’t put my name in there. I don’t say ‘Tony did this or that’ and I conscientiously turned my story into a novel form. just like Hemingway did with his stuff, and Bukowski, and Burroughs with ‘junky’ and Trocchi with ‘Cains book’. What’s the formula? I can’t say. Everything happened. The literary merit comes in how I wrote it. I’m not a journalist and I’m under no obligation to tell it EXACTLY how it happened. i just put it down in a way that is meant to be realistic and unsentimental. I mean really, I gotta be honest I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. it just comes out like that.

Top 5 books you’d rescue from a burning building?

Fuck that. I’d be running in the opposite direction. I’m not one for heroics. shit, I’d just buy another copy. My kid, my wife I’d rescue them from a burning building. The books and the pets can fend for themselves.

If you could have a beer with any writer dead or alive who’d it be, and why?

Well Burroughs. Only I wouldn’t have a beer if you know what I mean. Burroughs and Trocchi. In, like, Burma. We could talk shop. It would be fun.

What are you currently working on?

I just finished a book for St Martins press in the US about NFL player Jason Peter whose career was sidelined by injuries and drug addiction. This means that by some quirk of fate my next book comes out in hardback on the same publisher as JG Ballard crazy, right?. While working on that I finished up ‘down and out on murder mile’ the sequel to digging the vein. I mean digging just came out in the UK so I feel like I have a little bit of time to breathe before trying to get it out onto the market. ’Songs from the shooting gallery’ the poetry collection just came out on burning shore press and I’m really proud of it. There’s not a lot of really vital new poetry collections coming out on paper these days, but I’ll stake my claim that ’songs’ is one of the few.

Anyone else on the scene you’d recommend?

All of the usual suspects. If you’re reading this you probably know who they are. Talking in terms of specific new books that are coming out, I got a chance to read Lee Rourkes ‘everyday’ and its fantastic. Noah Cicero’s new stuff is outrageous. He read a little from his new book recently at the KGB bar in NYC and I was mesmerised. I have it on video, I mean to upload it to youtube as soon as my computer gets fixed. tao lin’s ‘bed’ is incredible, I just read that. I just read Joe Ridgwells interview and was cracking up.. I like Joe. He’s like the least ‘literary’ literary guy I know. And I mean that as a highest compliment.

What is the one thing you truly want people to get out of your work?

Fuck, I don’t know. Well, a page turning experience. And maybe some social anthropology for those who’ve never gotten too deep into the drug world…. ….maybe a bit of hope that all the good ones aren’t dead yet…
http://tonyoneill.net/

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