Postcards from Heartthrob Town: A Gay Man’s Travel Tales is a passionate ride through physical and emotional landscapes straight to the heart of homoerotic desire. Award-winning author Gerard Wozek colours snapshots of memoir and short fiction with a poet’s eye for detail, travelling outward to the edges of the planet while making a sojourn to the depths of his erotic core as he spins a collection of nineteen queer tales that evoke a sense of displacement and a hunger for journey.
Whether meandering around the desolate plains of his hometown in the American Midwest or trekking through the lurid trappings of underground Paris, Wozek describes not locale, but the spirit and feel of each place he visits as a gay man searching for new territory and the untamed terrain of the erotic body.
We asked Wozek to reveal more about his tales of inner pilgrimage and gay sensuality.
Tell us about Postcards from Heartthrob Town.
It’s a collection of nineteen short stories defining travel as an opportunity to completely delve into unabashed wanderlust. The stories form a portrait that depicts the visceral thrill of being on a journey and encountering the unexpected: dramatic landscapes, spurious passions, urban history, oneself. Taking a trip becomes a metaphor or a frame for what ultimately turns out to be a pilgrimage within one’s own psyche or being.
Certainly, travel writing makes particular claims to be an objective genre. I wanted to challenge that notion in this collection by saying, how many of us 'create' - or reshape, at the very least - our version of a foreign place? Destinations are often inventions of our imaginations and preferences, and what makes travelling most rewarding, it seems to me, is how open we are to the experience of uncertainty and disorder. That’s definitely the terrain covered in this book: the romantic heart that stumbles abroad.
Where did you find the original impulse to write the book?
My first book of poetry contained a good number of travel poems that I wanted to somehow extend out with fuller character sketches and details of events that were deeply influenced by location. Before the book, I wrote and published several travel stories as well as a memoir piece for The Out Traveller magazine. The more I travelled, the more I wanted to continue to sculpt longer narratives on my experiences in foreign locations.
I think there are so many rewards with being a traveller and a writer: capturing memories, divining the unique 'spirit' of each place, meeting new people, refining and reassessing various cultural assumptions. It’s such a gratifying endeavour!
How much of the book is autobiographical and how much of it is fictional?
To a large degree, the experiences in the book are mostly autobiographical, some semi-autobiographical. I wanted to enrich some of the travel tales by using other characters to propel the action and to underscore the theme that travelling sometimes affords one the opportunity to shift into different personas. However, I personally lived through and identify with all of the emotional 'throb' inherent in the stories.
"The stories form a portrait that depicts the visceral thrill of being on a journey and encountering the unexpected: dramatic landscapes, spurious passions, urban history, oneself."
How long did it take to get the entire collection of stories together?
Several of the stories in Postcards were published in other lit journals or anthologies and were gathered together with travel stories I wrote specifically for the collection. Over a period of eight months or so, I rewrote and reshaped the narratives and my editor helped in lining up the progression of the shorts so that there was a discernable harmony and order to the book.
Is there a particular story in Postcards from Heartthrob Town that resonates with you in a special way?
'Vienna Waits for You' is somewhat of a cautionary tale that details a bit of a fatal attraction I encountered while I was living and teaching in that city a few years back. The theme rests on the idea that the city we anticipate or dream of is not always the place we actually encounter. In this story, the protagonist makes lists of things he is determined to learn about: Vienna’s royal history, the Baroque architecture, where to buy the best strudel and sacretortes and so forth. But somehow along the way he gets charmed and sidetracked by a handsome resident and receives a very different take on life in this grand European city.
Travelling teaches us to be flexible along with the idea that we create our own guidebooks to foreign places. Sometimes our fondest and most memorable souvenir might turn out to be sharing an unlocked confessional with a sexy stranger at the Church of the Augustinian Friars.
Your book certainly assigns a lot of meaning to location; what locations in the world mean the most to you?
I have spent most of my adult life in Chicago, Illinois and some of my most enduring memories are of friendships I formed there, biking around Lake Michigan, dancing and cavorting at all hours in downtown bars and in the north side gaybourhoods!
But essentially, I am most at home in Paris, France. In my early thirties, I taught English to French business professionals there and developed an insatiable desire to explore all things connected to this Mecca: the boulevards, the fountains, the parks, the food, the music, the literature, the faded glory, the self-possession of the Parisians, the quirky gay scene in the Marais. I felt gloriously fulfilled when I lived there, a complete sense of perfect solitude and belonging that I’ve never experienced in any other location. It’s a magnificent city that I continue to go back to.
Are there any specific gay writers that you would say have influenced your writing?
Several come to mind almost instantly. I am a huge fan of Truman Capote’s short stories, particularly 'A Christmas Memory', which I read at least once every year. His short prose reflects my own intentions with writing, especially the travel portraits from his collection, The Dog’s Bark, which couple personal sketches with his very romantic, subjective views of various locales.
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando still grips me as well, along with the poetic quality of her language. I’m fully enamoured with the way she handles the fluidity of gender and the theme of immortality within her novel - her work is still so relevant today. I’m also a big fan of the travel stories of Bruce Chatwin and Edmund White and I feel that their narrative structures are very much an influence on my own prose.
Your book certainly contains some erotically-charged scenes, and you have also published work in various erotic anthologies; is erotica fun to write?
I certainly enjoy reading good erotic literature, particularly the short stories of Anais Nin and the work of Vladimir Nabokov, to name just two. I think I began writing erotic literature to liberate that part of myself that had been so shamed and repressed during my childhood. My mother and father were very conservative Catholics and we never spoke of sexual impulses. Growing up, everything seemed to suggest my solid attraction to other males was somehow unnatural, forbidden.
Now, when I incorporate the erotic into my own stories, I find that it’s one way of reclaiming that silent, exiled self - rescuing that part of my gay being that went unnourished during those critical early formative years. Writing erotic lit has been more therapeutic for me than anything else.
What's the secret to writing a good sex scene?
Oscar Wilde said, “Those who see any difference between the soul and the body have neither". I see that the soul is expressing itself through our skin, our tongues, our organs and cells - through every act of ardent desire. A strongly written sexual episode in a story should reveal that divine soul bleeding through and underscore a connection between two characters that somehow transcends the physical and taps into that great mystery. The erotic is about engaging with all of your senses, your psyche, your feelings, your entire sense of who you are sensually, as well as metaphysically.
Carl Jung defined Eros as the life force of the universe - as something responsible for a range of human impulses and behaviours, inclusive of, but not limited to, sexuality. So when I’m writing a scene that evokes Eros, I am aware that my characters may be opening up to a whole range of transformative possibilities. It’s my opportunity as a writer to make that link between sexuality and what I consider to be sacred. Erotica, when it works on the page, taps into that primal, vital, procreative force in the universe - if the reader recognizes that libidinal experience as somehow resonant with their own, I’ve done my job.
"Erotica, when it works on the page, taps into that primal, vital, procreative force in the universe - if the reader recognizes that libidinal experience as somehow resonant with their own, I’ve done my job."
What is your favourite poem that you've written?
I like to think that my favourite poem is the one I’ve yet to write. One that holds great meaning for me is the last poem in my book, Dervish, titled 'Shaman'. It’s dedicated to a dear friend of mine who passed away nearly a decade ago. It starts out, “I won’t let them bury me”, and goes on to uncover the attributes of a mighty archetypal figure who stands between two realms. It asserts that we are all connected to this huge eternal mythic force and each of us has an opportunity to tap into it—to channel it, if you will. When I read the poem over, I think of my friend and how he’s still present. He’s never really completely gone from me and I’m certain he is still informing me on how to live my life right now.
Are there any particular poets who have inspired you?
Without a doubt, the two classic poets that I consider to be my constant spirit guides are C.P. Cavafy and Walt Whitman. Both writers have exquisitely presented their craving for male companionship and bonding through their poetry - underscoring how homoerotic desire really does inform our identity and our relationship to the larger world.
I adore Adrienne Rich’s poetry too, particularly her collection, A Dream of a Common Language, which I carried around in a knapsack my entire freshman year of college. I’m constantly going back to the angelic elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke as well as the work of more contemporary authors like Mark Doty, Li-Young-Lee, and Chrystos.
What's next for you?
I’m always crafting poetry, working steadily on drafts of poems and trying to put together another collection at some point. Right now, I’m writing a memoir of growing up in the seventies that deals with my relationship to two mothers: my adopted mother who raised me and my biological mother whom I never met. As a kid, I invented a very rich mythology surrounding the secretive circumstances as to why my actual birth mother gave me up for adoption and I’m exploring that subject in this book.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
I’m grateful for this opportunity to talk about my passion for writing and travel here with GaydarNation! Travelling has inspired me and woken me up in so many powerful ways. It's taught me how provincial some of my assumptions have been and it’s also expanded my sense of the kindness that is possible among human beings.
Being a writer compels me to list details, invent characters and play with language. I think perpetual travel is the perfect antidote for someone like myself. The lesson I’ve learned through all my journeys is that we are more alike than we are dissimilar and that it is essential that humanity learns how to respect and embrace what is at first unfamiliar. That’s when serendipity takes over and guides us to that unforgettable destination.
Find out more at www.gerardwozek.com and look out for our upcoming review of Postcards from Heartthrob Town.
Postcards from Heartthrob Town: A Gay Man's Travel Tales, by Gerard Wozek
Published by: Harrington Park Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press
Released: 30 March 2007
ISBN: 156023623X
Buy Postcards from Heartthrob Town online and save some money to put towards Dervish, also by Gerard Wozek.