Today Pete Peru and Lord Tupelo, the duo ultimately responsible for The Reeking Hegs, “the world’s first Arctic Gothic Horror,” visit The Storytelling Blog. Presented with a few emailed questions, each shares their unique take on art, writing, and ski ramps.
Disclosure: I have a professional relationship with The Reeking Hegs publisher, Montag Press, which will publish the first Sean Joye Investigations novel in the future.
Kathy: How did you two meet?
Tupelo: In the late 1980s Raz House was established in Cubbington, Warwickshire, as the main site of the Tupelo Brewery, and with Red Spot Studios also in the building it quickly became a hub of cultural endeavors, attracting artists and musicians, writers and provocateurs. All of these was Pete Peru, an itinerant follower of Teoutihuaki, who turned up one day in a gaudy poncho and straight away supervised the building of the Sports & Leisure Centre.
Alongside bastardball, music sessions, and a shared devotion to the Church of Bongo, it wasn’t long before we were conducting experiments in automatic writing, passing the typewriter back and forth across the table. Almost immediately “the reeking hegs” emerged as a title and a subject to explore, although in fact several months passed in a series of false starts before we hit our stride with “Fortune was icicled” and Atiktalik’s letter. These initial vacillations and stutterings are perhaps reflected in the fragmented opening pages of Canto One.
Kathy: What attracted each of you to writing? What are the challenges and rewards?
Peru: Language. Language is something that seems set in concrete, but in fact it’s an extremely plastic thing. It’s malleable. It’s amusing. You can do all sorts of stuff with it: Play with it, get serious with it, be a slave to it, unburden yourself by throwing off the conceptual shackles of spellings and grammatical correctness—or vice-versa. So, what attracts me to writing is all that potential, allied to the chance that you might even manage to write a version of Hamlet that’s better than Hamlet.
Tupelo: The challenges involved [in the collaboration] were huge, but of our own making. The rewards are the joy of so many “five-star sentences” (everyone will have their favorites) and the creation of a world that can exist vividly in the reader’s mind. Scrapper Blackwell will haunt me forever.
Kathy: Tell us about The Reeking Hegs – what inspired the story? How long have you been working on it?
Peru: I’ll answer in reverse order. Total time from first beginnings to the current published version of The Reeking Hegs would be roughly thirty years or so, of which twenty-five passed while we considered the situation.
What inspired The Reeking Hegs? It might be easier to reply to that by restating the question as: What didn’t inspire The Reeking Hegs? That said, I’m tempted to cite a few possible influences/inspirations:
- Dada. Precisely, Marcel Duchamp’s urinal ([aka, Fountain, 1917, an example of “found art”] ed.) and Kurt Schwitter’s Merz ([scrap material collages] ed.).
- The Great Rock and Roll Swindle ([1980 mockumentary film centered on the band Sex Pistols] ed.).
- The ready access to and supply of Lord Tupelo’s Brewery’s finest ales.
- Intellect combined with wit stimulated by “industrial black” ([rock music genre] ed.)
- Whatever happened to be on the tele at the time.
Kathy: It sounds like The Reeking Hegs mixes many genres and even invents new ones. At one time the “old hands” advised emerging writers to never do that. Times may have changed, but how does the storyteller manage the juggling act? Any tips or tricks to share?
Peru: Genre (French: “kind” or “sort”) a distinctive type or category of literary composition, such as the epic, tragedy, comedy, novel, short story, etc.
Let’s see how these apply to The Reeking Hegs. Check them off:
- Epic – yes
- Tragedy – absolutely
- Comedy – it’s the way we tell ’em
- Novel – . . . as in new?
- Short story – maybe not
Add to those:
- Horror – very
- Historical – it goes way back
- Biographical – auto, even
So, yes, there’s a bit of a mix going on there.
Well, the “old hands” advised people to never travel at over 30 MPH. Unless they wanted to risk permanent physical disability and look what that advice led to.
I think my top tip is to write what you feel like writing the way you want to write it and therein lies the trick.
Pete Peru
Kathy: What are each of you working on next?
Peru: I am translating the published version of The Reeking Hegs into Spanish in between workshops in which I’m attempting to produce The History of the Future.
Tupelo: These days I am busy with some innovative new designs for ski ramps, and I’m also assisting my Great-Uncle Rolf with his extraordinary memoir of pre-war hiking and camping in Hitler’s Germany, to be titled “My Camp.” He hopes to publish next year.
Kathy: How do you collaborate with your storytelling?
Tupelo: Typing back and forth there were no rules, though we would occasionally stop for readings and to debate where we were going. Storytelling was all around us; it is ubiquitous. We all want to know what happens next. Humans are full of curiosity. That’s why the suicide rate is constantly fairly low.
If we ever became stuck, a random strike on the keys would produce a letter, any letter, to send your collaborator off again. Great fun, because you never knew what you’d get back, sometimes mid-sentence. There was also the potential to “nobble your neighbor”, for example, by presenting him with the challenge “then a remarkable thing happened:” The colon of doom. Or opportunity!
The story of how Hegs was further composed over the following four years in many different locations and circumstances is itself a tale so unfeasible as to befuddle even Little Knowing What. When we met up, the writing went back and forth once again. I particularly remember a fruitful afternoon in a Barcelona backstreet absinthe bar. Meantime, episodes were composed solo.
Peru: Basically, Tupelo wrote what he wanted and so did I. We shared our writing. We read it out loud to each other. Sometimes one or the other of us had an improbably definite proposal as to where to take the story next – The Trial, for example. Tupelo became determined at some point to bring the narrator to trial, “bring that fiend.” But the way, shape, and form that the trial would take only depended on an unknowable admixture of the inspirations and influences affecting or afflicting us at the time of writing it. Each completed canto was then subjected to a thorough process of editing, revision, expansion, or ruthless cutting all of which was done bilaterally if not horizontally. While this was at times a tough test, we always agreed or agreed to disagree about every single word on every single page every step of the way.
Kathy: What does storytelling mean to you?
Peru: It’s fun. Making stuff up is fun. You might starve to death while you wait for the “royalties,” but you’ll die laughing.
If you enjoyed meeting Pete Peru and Lord Tupelo in this interview, you might like to acquaint yourself with horror-humor author Paul d. Miller or read my review of China de Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris. You can purchase The Reeking Hegs via Amazon.com.
And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
Like the blog? Subscribe (form at the bottom of my website) to never miss an issue. Want more? Subscribe to the monthly newsletter for exclusive content. And, of course, I’m selling books. St. Louis Writers Guild recently published Love Letters to St. Louis. This adorable letter-shaped volume of short stories, poems, essays, and illustrations includes my first science fiction story, “Welcome to Earthport Prime.”