An Interview with the Author, Byron Case
Crossroads Correctional Center, Cameron Missouri—September 2013
The Pariah’s Syntax: Notes from an Innocent Man is your first published book, a collection of personal essays and poems written during your incarceration, which began in 2001 and is ongoing. In the introduction, you write about how you’ve always been a writer, even back when you didn’t consider yourself one. Do you believe you would have turned to writing as a full-time pursuit if you hadn’t been put in the position of spending hours and hours locked in a cell?
You were convicted of first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory sentence in Missouri of either the death penalty or of life without the possibility of parole. You were sentenced to the latter. Is this what you mean when you refer to your “circumstances,” and could you talk a little about that change in perspective—what it entailed, how it occurred?
You mention that in your poem “Whose Knees,” which begins a little like a lament for lost youth but ups the ante by implicitly likening prison to a degenerative condition. There’s that line, midway through: “I bind myself together now with words.” Do you truly feel that writing, and writing alone, is what holds you together?
In the essay “Oz,” you write about playing the violin for passersby on the streets of Sydney, Australia. Music comes up in other places in the book, as well. How large of a role does music now play in your life?
You seem comfortable being an outsider, or at least with being an exception. It could be said you even embrace it, by titling your book and blog The Pariah’s Syntax, and by the offbeat lifestyle you led before your incarceration. In the essay titled “Literacy,” you also tell about what could be called your anti-assimilation into the social structure of prison. Other essays deal with some of the ways Asperger’s syndrome has impacted your life. How important do you believe it is for a writer to be at a remove from his subject, or from society in general?
Between your refusal to conform and what you refer to in the book as your “spartan material needs,” is it fair to say that you’ve made “Don’t get too comfortable!” a personal philosophy?
Besides a brief nod to them in your introduction, then a few glancing references in later essays and poems, you don’t address the subjects of your trial and the events that brought it about. The avoidance is obviously deliberate, but why?
Your writing strikes a balance between tenderness and hardness that at first seems contradictory, as in the essays “Hidden Pictures of an Elusive Past” and “Doing Without,” which concern themselves with varieties of longing, but that apparent contradiction resolves itself as the reader realizes that the intersection of tender/hard is inevitable. It’s as if there could be no other way to address these subjects. But what about the pieces in which you meld humor with the hardness? Is that equally inevitable, when you’re handling a subject that’s too emotionally loaded?
So you don’t think humor is cathartic for you?
Your arrest.
Yet distance seems exactly the point in “The Ways Justice Fails,” your essay about what it’s like to be wrongly accused of a crime. The second-person subject in that essay is “you.” Why did you choose that voice there, and why don’t we find it anywhere else in The Pariah’s Syntax?
In addition to personal essays, you also write fiction. Which is your favorite form, and why?
Who are the writers you look to for inspiration?
Some readers of the book may be curious to know: do you still have those ‘’Frankenfeet” shower shoes?
[September 2013]
- There aren’t as many quiet hours for contemplation as you might expect. Prison makes some harsh demands of one’s time and can be unforgiving of those who don’t heed those demands. I fantasize about getting out of this place and attending a writers retreat, preferably somewhere cold and mountainous, where I can focus on my work for longer than an hour or three at a stretch. I hardly remember what that’s like. As you mentioned, I’ve written a lot throughout my life, but that writing was mostly short, often breezy or humorous stuff. Before prison I wrote a few stories, a few serious essays, a single piece of journalistic fluff, and, for the web, a kind of proto-memoir that incorporated imagery and hypertext. I was unfocused. I wrote on whims. So, yes, I think my dilettantish approach to writing, prior to my imprisonment, was definitely changed by my circumstances, which engendered about as drastic a shift in perspective as you can imagine.
You were convicted of first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory sentence in Missouri of either the death penalty or of life without the possibility of parole. You were sentenced to the latter. Is this what you mean when you refer to your “circumstances,” and could you talk a little about that change in perspective—what it entailed, how it occurred?
- Some people, when they learn that I have what is known in prison’s glib vernacular as “life without,” don’t understand. They ask, “So that means you’ve got to do, what, like twenty-five, thirty years before they let you out?” And I have to rumple up my forehead and take a deep, exasperated breath and explain that, no, life without parole means life without parole. What I have is an exceedingly slow death sentence. I’m expected to shrivel up and rot in here, basically, and there’s a certain fatalism that I think comes about as a result of that. It seems easy for one to let himself be swallowed up by the mouth of indifference, a kind of nihilism, an existential disaffection that a lot of prisoners have. Some of them get tattoos that read LIFE WITHOUT, or LIFER, to show off their don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Maybe I’m too much of a believer in randomness and happenstance, but I tend to maintain what Romain Rolland referred to as pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will. I recognize that, if I lie down and accept the injustice of my conviction as an immutable fate, there is effectively zero chance that I will ever leave this place, not while my heart’s still beating. Conversely, if I fight to get my freedom back, though it may take years or another decade, it’s within the realm of possibility that I will someday be able to reclaim however much time remains for me. In the meantime, though, I’m here, in this terrible predicament, so I might as well make something of it. Often it feels as though I’m writing in between pieces of myself, trying to fill in the cracks.
You mention that in your poem “Whose Knees,” which begins a little like a lament for lost youth but ups the ante by implicitly likening prison to a degenerative condition. There’s that line, midway through: “I bind myself together now with words.” Do you truly feel that writing, and writing alone, is what holds you together?
- My answer to that is a qualified yes. Writing is one of my primary fixatives. My friendships, the connections I maintain with the world outside, are another. Music, too, helps me to keep a hold on who I am.
In the essay “Oz,” you write about playing the violin for passersby on the streets of Sydney, Australia. Music comes up in other places in the book, as well. How large of a role does music now play in your life?
- My music experiences today are passive. I get to listen, but that’s it. There isn’t a violin here for me to play. No keyboards, either. I started playing classical violin when I was six, and, like everyone, I was also in a band for a very short period of my teens, doing keyboards and vocals. Later on, I got into accordion. I’m a sucker for unconventional instrumentation and sonic experimentation. I guess it’s odd that my writing can be a bit old-fashioned, from a technical, stylistic standpoint, while the music I enjoy tends to be forward-thinking or just plain bizarre. There’s a lot of music swapping that goes on here—guys starved for stimulation, looking for a quick fix of new tunes. When they find out what my little CD collection consists of, no one ever tries to negotiate a trade. I’m fine with that, incidentally.
You seem comfortable being an outsider, or at least with being an exception. It could be said you even embrace it, by titling your book and blog The Pariah’s Syntax, and by the offbeat lifestyle you led before your incarceration. In the essay titled “Literacy,” you also tell about what could be called your anti-assimilation into the social structure of prison. Other essays deal with some of the ways Asperger’s syndrome has impacted your life. How important do you believe it is for a writer to be at a remove from his subject, or from society in general?
- Extremely. The existence of art and innovation depends entirely on iconoclasts, naysayers, malcontents, schizos, daredevils, obsessives, control freaks, and a whole spectrum of generally unpleasant people. To be a writer who’s worth reading, whether the work be fiction or nonfiction, means to set down on the page observations that are in some essential way true. This could be a hard-edged empirical truth, or it could be some nebulous philosophical truth. Either way, the only way to arrive at a truth is to see objectively, which requires some measure of detachment. An artist who feels a part of a thing, to the extent that he or she is numb to its nuance and uniqueness, is better off looking elsewhere for a subject. The familiar neuters perception. Only in the new do we come alive with sensation. Sorry if that sounds like a mouthwash ad slogan.
Between your refusal to conform and what you refer to in the book as your “spartan material needs,” is it fair to say that you’ve made “Don’t get too comfortable!” a personal philosophy?
- [Laughs] No, but that’s a good one. If I lived by a single codified philosophy, it would have to be suitably high-flown, maybe even in Latin. Magna est veritas et praevalet would suit me all right: “Great is the truth and it prevails.”
Besides a brief nod to them in your introduction, then a few glancing references in later essays and poems, you don’t address the subjects of your trial and the events that brought it about. The avoidance is obviously deliberate, but why?
- There are a few reasons I didn’t want to use The Pariah’s Syntax as a platform to shout about my legal troubles. Readers of my blog know that it is rare that I’m compelled to discuss my case in that particular forum, and I like to think that they’re grateful for that restraint. The same goes for readers of the book. At least, that’s the logic under which I operated while curating it. Those who are interested in the details of my friend Anastasia’s murder have a veritable library of information at their disposal, both online and in print. I personally have recounted, then re-recounted, those events more times than I can actually count. And this goes to what I said a moment ago about familiarity and perspective. Someone else, corning to it fresh, with a different view, could write a compelling account that was so much more than mere rehash. In fact, my friend Davy Rothbart did just that—quite effectively—in his recent collection, My Heart Is an Idiot. But there came a point at which I felt it was necessary for me to shut up. Innocent people are convicted of crimes frighteningly often, and those convictions ruin more lives than just those of the convicted. There is a tremendous amount of progress to be made when it comes to generating public outcry for things like prosecutorial accountability and improved police interrogation ethics, but I don’t believe that the voices of the wrongfully imprisoned lend much weight to the issue. We’re personae non gratae. To many people, our cries for justice just sound like an awful lot of whining. So if, as I write in the book, “[v]ictimhood is a choice,” then I have resolutely chosen no.
Your writing strikes a balance between tenderness and hardness that at first seems contradictory, as in the essays “Hidden Pictures of an Elusive Past” and “Doing Without,” which concern themselves with varieties of longing, but that apparent contradiction resolves itself as the reader realizes that the intersection of tender/hard is inevitable. It’s as if there could be no other way to address these subjects. But what about the pieces in which you meld humor with the hardness? Is that equally inevitable, when you’re handling a subject that’s too emotionally loaded?
- Am I using humor as a tool to attain psychological distance? Not really, I’m just an inveterate smartass. My willingness to find humor anywhere, especially where others think it’s least appropriate, is never-ending. Speaking of the later pieces in the book, the ones that concern themselves with my prison existence, “Smoke ’Em if You Got ’Em” is the only one that’s outright satirical, start to finish. It was the only one I sat down to write, thinking, I’m going to make this funny, because I know myself well enough to recognize that I can’t talk seriously about people using their rectums as handy-dandy carrying cases.
So you don’t think humor is cathartic for you?
- I didn’t say that, just that none of the essays in the book make use of humor for cathartic effect. I certainly use humor that way enough in my day-to-day life. A few weeks before my abduction by the state--
Your arrest.
- Right. Weeks before then, before there could have been the tiniest inkling of the nightmare awaiting me, I was talking with an old friend, catching up, over coffee, after nearly a year. As I was sharing the details of my recently failed engagement, a breakup that was still very fresh and very painful to discuss, he burst out laughing at every point I found most difficult to relate. It really made me angry, as though he was mocking my grief. But before I could say anything he leaned across the table and, by way of apology, told me something that I will probably remember even on my death bed: “Sometimes things get so awful that the only thing we can do is laugh at how ridiculous that much badness looks, piled up.” Later in my life, too, I learned that there was actually a rich tradition of humor among prisoners of the Soviet gulags and of Nazi concentration camps, and that there develops a similar appreciation for the absurd in most oppressed cultures, particularly under totalitarian governments, all over the world. What surprises me is that there aren’t more prisoners here, in the prison where I’m confined, who have well-developed senses of humor. When I ridicule some aspect of our surroundings, pointing out how silly it actually is, hardly anyone laughs with me. They’re too preoccupied with feeling downtrodden. They’ve relinquished any sense of personal empowerment, I suppose because they accept their imprisonment.
Yet distance seems exactly the point in “The Ways Justice Fails,” your essay about what it’s like to be wrongly accused of a crime. The second-person subject in that essay is “you.” Why did you choose that voice there, and why don’t we find it anywhere else in The Pariah’s Syntax?
- I don’t actually think of “The Ways Justice Fails” as an essay. It’s more of a prose poem, or at least that was what I intended as I was writing it. But that’s an academic point. As for the second person, I chose that perspective because writing about wrongful conviction in a somewhat anecdotal way seemed right. I think it emphasizes the equal-opportunity nature of our criminal justice system: anyone can get caught up in it.
In addition to personal essays, you also write fiction. Which is your favorite form, and why?
- I wouldn’t want to limit myself to one form, even just to claim a favorite. Essays are more conversational, more informal, and deal more in abstract ideas. Poetry, for me, is more of an exploration of language, a thought exercise that borders on being a form of meditation, and the resulting work is something that is neither fictive nor real but interstitial. That kind of ambiguity appeals to me, since it can’t be attained through any other form of writing I’m aware of. As for fiction, I think that there are truths—and here we are again at that—only reachable by literary back roads and hidden trails, which is fiction’s milieu. Fiction challenges me more than essays or poems do, and I write less of it, but that’s not to say that I enjoy working with fiction less. The book project I’m working on next is a novel-in-stories, so I obviously maintain equilibrium in my work. I place a heavy premium on balance.
Who are the writers you look to for inspiration?
- I was just having this conversation the other day, and it’s interesting that, as omnivorously as I read, the books that resonate with me are almost all works of fiction. One of the best books I’ve read in recent years is Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination, a beautiful novel about pain and how it shapes us. I also loved Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Classics such as 1984 and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich are high on my list, not necessarily for inspiration. I read the poets Dean Young and Charles Simic for much the same reasons, yet the essayists I enjoy the most are almost always humorists. I’m particularly fond of curmudgeons like David Sedaris and G.K. Chesterton, who do an outstanding job of skewering not only cultural absurdities but their own personal ones, too.
Some readers of the book may be curious to know: do you still have those ‘’Frankenfeet” shower shoes?
- I sometimes wonder if, after all these years, I’d have a hard time showering like a normal human being, in bare feet. Meanwhile, my gruesome stitch-up job continues to hold.
[September 2013]