“Smoothing Things Over” by Jon Pearson appeared in in Issue 43 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about “Smoothing Things Over.”
“Smoothing Things Over” flew out of me like some mythic pterodactyl I’d been harboring all my life. It emerged flapping and squawking in its wise and funny way almost as fast as I could write it. I try to combine flights of imagination with depths of emotion and to bring it home through the senses—to say unsayable things in unforgettable ways. I was lucky this time. Each sentence suggested the next, as if the whole thing could hardly wait to leap out. One of my favorite sentences was how women had always secretly known that men, deep down, were just boys. And she knows this, knows it like a river knows, a deaf and dumb knowing, widening and narrowing in a wandering blind faith that is nature, that is woman.
What was the most difficult part of this story?
The most difficult part was getting it published. I sent it to over fifty places. Then, my wife, the poet Elya Braden, told me that Sequestrum was looking for a piece about desire. I thought I have just the piece!
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Barbara Kingsolver’s book Demon Copperhead comes to mind. It’s a modern-day David Copperfield. The voice and syntax are stunningly authentic. You climb into the head of a poor, uneducated, orphaned boy and five hundred and sixty-two rivetingly poetic pages later you realize a person, without being what is commonly thought of as “smart,” can be a genius.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’d like to have a drink with the stand-up comedian, Steve Wright, author of the novel Harold. The book is a day in the life of a third grader in the 1960’s. The kid reminds me of myself (if in third grade I were also Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates, and Einstein). Every grade school teacher in America should read the book and realize the infinity of a child’s mind.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on being a better husband and a better man. Every day I make my wife a card: a small drawing with a bit of poetry. I’m up to card # 3687. I teach a weekly writing class in the fine art of unhinging the mind. I also write a weekly one-page spiritual essay. Both keep me young and wise. I’ve written about three hundred short stories and three novels: In the Nostrils of an Icon, Memoirs of a Gorilla, and The Reluctant Gunslinger. The novels are unpublished, but they remind me of who I am—ME.
Our thanks to Jon for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Smoothing Things Over” here.
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Writer, speaker, artist, and educational guru, Jon Pearson has been a cartoonist for the Oakland Tribune, an extra for the New York Metropolitan Opera, a college professor, and a classroom teacher. His work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in Baltimore Review, Barely South Review, Barnstorm, Carve, The Citron Review, Crack the Spine, Faultline, Forge, Lake Effect, Pretty Owl Poetry, Reed Magazine, Sou’wester, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. He believes now, as he did as a kid, that courage, caring, and creativity can save the world. He lives with his beautiful and poetic wife near Santa Barbara and you can find him online at www.jonpearsoncreative.com