Richard Bowes and the speculative memoir

The idea of the speculative memoir is something of perpetual fascination for me, perhaps because I've always treated speculative fiction as a sort of digging below the surface to unearth things that are maybe more real than the visible things, more intimate and fantastic than the things we interact with in our everyday lives. It's often very easy to believe that there is something magically unreal about everything we experience. The latest story from Richard Bowes in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, "I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said," is not only a pitch-perfect and heartbreaking fantasy about life, death, and the passing of time, but is more integrally a portrait of the parts of our existence that we can't quite put a finger on: moments when memory blends with hallucination, experiences become blurred and intricately layered, and time feels entirely arbitrary. The stuff, that is, of speculative fiction: questions of real vs. unreal, magical or something else.

Greenwich Village is often a character in Bowes's fiction. In a review I wrote of The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, I wrote of his story that it was "about prophecy and the nature of time and history ... firmly rooted in the geography of Greenwich Village so as to become a story about how things—and places—undergo irrevocable transformations." I think that remains an apt description of his body of work, or at least the stories I've been lucky enough to read. My own experience of Greenwich Village, having only lived there for the past few years -- and also, being on the younger side, having not ever seen what it was before -- is one of constantly adjusting my prior expectations, my fantasies, with reality. The building I live in, a hulking modern thing with elevators, now towers over the old brick walk-up next door in which Allen Ginsberg spent decades living (and featuring the fire escape on which a famous picture of Jack Kerouac was taken), and that's a reasonably good metaphor for how I've felt as a participant in Greenwich Village life in the 21st century: like I'm missing the point, or somehow obscuring it.

But maybe it's a point that doesn't exist anymore. As the narrator of "I Needs Must Part, the Policeman Said" stands at his hospital window overlooking Seventh Avenue, watching the world outside move back and forth through history, "the constant flow of traffic downtown was like the passage of time." He is part of a peripheral world, one that exists now in black and white photographs and, more notably, in dreams. The past has become a fantasy world. The setting of a hospital for the majority of the story is remarkably apt, as a hospital is always a liminal space, a sort of self-contained world where life and death walk side by side and where time always seems to matter, moreso perhaps than anywhere else, but while also maintaining an illusive air, a sense of the unreal. Nights flow into days and sometimes you can't tell them apart. The character in the story notes that when he was writing an earlier novel years ago, "what I was writing about was being sick. It's like this other country. You get pulled in there without wanting to and have to haul your ass out." This, to me, also functions as an explanation of the process of fiction and how the act of writing it is also an ongoing project of time travel, a perpetual going back and seeing things from a new perspective.

The character in the story is also named Richard Bowes. And this is the magic of the speculative memoir: it doesn't matter what's real and what isn't, because it's all true.

Comments

[Rick Bowes]

Thanks SO much. You absolutely got it!

[Richard Larson]

Thanks for stopping by, Rick! And thanks, of course, for the story. Can't wait for the next one.

[Rick Bowes]

"Waiting For the Phone to Ring" in the March/April 2010 F&SF is part of the same story cycle as "I Needs Must Part" and continues the story begun in "AKA St Mark's Place" which you saw in the Datlow/Del Rey anthology.

[Richard Larson]

Great! I did read somewhere that these stories were part of a cycle. Is "There's a Hole in the City" part of the same cycle? I read that one before I even moved to NYC, and it's definitely stuck with me.

[Rick Bowes]

Yes. That was the first.