Interview with Peter Damian Bellis

By Christopher Stokum & Elizabeth Milo

Peter Damian Bellis refuses to be pigeonholed. He is a unique blend of scholar and writer, combining an English professor’s encyclopedic knowledge of literature with an artist’s organic view on creating art. Not surprisingly, Bellis’s style reflects his dichotomous up-bringing where he benefited from both the academic influences of his father, and the story-telling traditions of his grandmother. Bellis graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in English Literature. Over the course of his career he’s worn many hats, including but not limited to high school English teacher, college English professor, policy analyst for the Pennsylvania Workforce Investment Board, Workforce Development Specialist for a non-profit agency, inn keeper, and chief bottle washer. His most recent work, The Conjure Man is described as “part myth, part fable, part satire, and part coming-of-age story.” You can find out more about Bellis and the book at http://www.conjureman.net/.

WNW: Your father was an English professor. Where did he teach?

Bellis: My father taught English at the College of Notre Dame in Baltimore, MD, St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, and St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, MN. His area of expertise was 19th century and early 20th century American and English literature; his dissertation was on Moby Dick, which means that from a very early age I was surrounded by great literature.

WNW: Where did you grow up? How has this affected your writing?

Bellis: Most of my childhood was spent in a small town in Minnesota. In Minnesota my life alternated between diving into Huck Finn style adventures (it seemed we were always getting into trouble of one kind or another), and reading great books. My father would pay me a quarter for every book report I turned in to him, and I remember earning upwards of $3 a week some weeks.

But my education was not limited to reading alone. Every summer we lived with my grandmother in Pensacola, Florida, and it was during those summers that I entered the world of oral storytelling. Every afternoon I would sit on a bench outside my Uncle Walter's Funeral Parlor, and I would watch the old men squatting on the sidewalk, chewing on grass stalks. I would listen to them tell stories about the war or nights spent hard-drinking or some "sumbitch" who stole someone's car and drove off to Mobile. These were the stories during the day. Every evening we sat out in the side yard and listened to my grandmother tell stories, and the pitch of her voice would rise and fall with the sounds of the evening. I learned to write from my father, but I learned to tell stories from my summers in Pensacola.

WNW: You have a fairly extensive list of canonized authors as your influences. Who do you think has influenced your work the most?

Bellis: You can find echoes of everyone I have ever read in my work, or at least I can find those echoes, but in terms of my approach to storytelling, particularly my belief that all story is rooted in a strong, almost mythic sense of place, I feel the closest connection to Twain, Faulkner, and Gabriel García Márquez.

WNW: When did you first encounter magical realism? What did you find so engaging about it?

Bellis: You could say that my first formal encounter with what is called magical realism was Gabriel García Márquez. But that is not quite precise. American literature was grounded in the very beginning in a cultural ethos that embraced the supernatural, the mythic, the legendary. We did not separate that aspect of our lives from the everyday routine. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, the Brer Rabbit stories, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill (and other tall tales) -- all of this was part of our oral storytelling tradition. Our great writers pulled from this tradition. Hawthorne was simply the first to weave the magic of this folk culture into a complex social, political, and moral tale, The Scarlet Letter.

For me, magical realists do a better job of capturing the essence of what it means to be human than do psychological realists more concerned with what it means to be contemporary. Too many of our "literary" American writers seem to have forgotten that the role of the writer is to reinterpret the myths of our culture and breath into them new life, and hence new meaning. The writer is the shaman, the bard, the mystic who uncovers for us the truth about our relationship to God and the world and each other. If this role is neglected or forgotten, then we are robbed of an understanding of our very soul, and that is what I think has happened in America.

WNW: Parts of your book have a very colloquial tone. Would you say that is a definitive part of your style, or was it simply a tool for this novel?

Bellis: For me the voices of the novel are the voices of the novel, which is to say the voices chose. Tone, narrative perspective, viewpoint, all come from listening carefully to these voices. Indeed, my job as a writer was to listen to what those voices had to say and to capture what I heard as best as I could. So where do the voices come from? That is more difficult to say. For me, each story is a gift from God (or from Jung's Over Soul, our collective unconscious, if you prefer). I believe as writers we need to be aware that every story is a gift, every story has come into our hands and no one else's, and the only thing we are supposed to do is to sit with each story long enough to bring it to the world. If we sit long enough, we will capture most of it, never all of it, but most of it, enough of it - and then we birth it and move on to the next gift.

WNW: You have a very spiritual view, for lack of a better term, of writing books. What has shaped your beliefs about writing books?

Bellis: When I was six years old I told my father that I was going to be a writer, and then, of course, I wrote nothing for the next twenty years. But I read everything, science fiction, fantasy, the classics, mythology, boy’s books, westerns, detective novels – and each book spoke to some part of me. Then I went to Northwestern University to study English Literature; I felt that if I were going to write great fiction, I better first become a student of great fiction. So for twenty years I was preparing myself to write by listening to the voices of story tellers. When I finally sat down to write (and this was in the days of typewriters) at the age of 26, the words began to flow quite easily. They still do. They always do. But when I think about where the words come from I cannot always say. I sit and listen to myself, to the voices that seem to swirl around me. While writing The Conjure Man, which was the first thing I ever attempted, I felt at times as if I were detached from myself, that something was writing through me. So to answer this question, all I can say is that the progression of my life, lived in a sort of communion with books, has shaped my understanding of the writing process. All I do is sit down and open myself up to the words, and if I have enough time, I can hear the voices, and the words flow.

WNW: Where did you get the idea for your novel?

Bellis: I was teaching high school in Florida and the summer was almost over and we were visiting friends at the beach and we went down to the water where the St. John's river rolled into the sea, and there it was, the beginning of The Conjure Man, right there in front of me. Three little boys were scrambling after crabs, and their mother, a big woman with elephantine legs, was hammering away at them with words, telling them to stop wasting the chicken heads and get those crabs in the bucket, that was going to be dinner. It was an extraordinary scene, and I couldn't get it out of my head. That evening, as we ate our own freshly caught crab dinner, the novel began to unfold. I spent the next two years following the threads of the story and writing what I hoped was going to be one of the greatest books ever written

WNW: You seem to be borrowing from various religious and mythic traditions. Which myths have had the most influence on your work?

Bellis: I did not begin with any particular notion in mind about the nature of religion or myth. However, I did feel that the story was on some level about the prophet Elijah passing on the spiritual torch to the next prophet. I was also reading about the Manichean heresy when I started the book (the Manicheans believed that the God of the Old Testament was in reality the devil and that Christ came to deliver us from this false god) and so throughout the book there is some degree of uncertainty about whether or not Thaddeus is of God or of the devil. But these ideas are merely undercurrents, whispers, echoes, for the story is about transformation, the transformation of Thaddeus, and the transformation of Kilby. And because all such stories of transformation have their roots in the archetypal myths identified by Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and others, The Conjure Man is mythic in both texture and impact. So I was not borrowing from any one particular mythic tradition; I was embracing them all. Thus, in spite of the setting and the dialect, the story goes beyond black and white and so moves the reader beyond black and white and so what you experience is the humanity of these people, of their pain and their sorrow, of their joys, however limited. You have the essence of what it means to be human, and that once again brings it back into the mythic realm.

WNW: You said you’ve been “sitting with” The Conjure Man for 23 years. Have you been sitting with other projects at the same time?

Bellis: I am currently working on nine novels, all in various stages of completion, as well as half a dozen outlines of other books, and one screenplay. So yes, I have been sitting with these other works for a number of years as well. But The Conjure Man was the first. I also have three completed one act plays (one premiered in Chicago, the other two are seeking premiers), two completed novellas and one half completed, maybe 3 dozen poems (mostly sonnets), and a few essays scattered about.