Lee Thompson: Busy Man

Lee Thompson is a busy man: Executive Director for the Writers Federation of New Brunswick, active writer, recording musician, one-man force behind the literary magazine Galleon and then some. But what is striking about Lee Thompson isn’t so much all the hats he wears, it is how he wears them. It is the genuine, not-forced originality he brings to both his writing and his music. There are quite a few writers who record music, or musicians who write, but there are very few writers as unique as Lee Thompson, and very few musicians as distinctive. With much of his writing, Lee is channeling something most writers plain can’t, or perhaps more importantly, would not tap in to. I shared a venue with him at the Halifax Club’s Literary Luncheon Series in January, and he read “Hairball Man” (published in Riddle Fence vol.2) and blew me away: I’d just loved a story about a hairball, a piece Lee described to me as “a story about a doomed relationship between a lonely woman and a sentient clot of hair she pulled from her kitchen drainpipe one evening.  I played it straight, so I think something like emotion comes across, and makes it creepier.  But like most of my stories you can always question the protagonist’s sanity.”

Salty Ink: What have you been up to lately, writing and/or music wise?

Lee: I have another novel (if S. can be considered a novel), The Lazy Fisherman’s Guide to Hell, coming out in the fall with an Ontario publisher, Crossing Chaos.  It’s about a man writing his memoirs on a beach in hell and his guide, a strange and very chatty fish (eel, really).  I’m also shopping a story collection around, about ten years of published short fiction.  Lot’s of “‘we’d bite if we had teeth” responses so far.  I’m slowly writing a novel called, maybe, “Lamb”, about human-to-animal brain transplants.  Musically I’ve been recording a new batch of songs, slightly more accessible than in the past (if I have a musical past, which I don’t), daring myself to sound good, to speak up and not sing into my navel, even if the sound is kinda cool in there.

The Writer:

Lee Thompson has been contributing his short fiction to journals and anthologies for over a decade now, including journals like The New Quarterly, Qwerty, Riddle Fence, the Dalhousie Review and Gapereau Review, and in well-received anthologies, including Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada (Random House, ed. Lynn Coady), The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction (Nimbus, ed. Sandra McIntyre and M. Anderson), and Hard ol’ Spot (Killick Press, ed. Mike Heffernan). In December 2007, he published S., a Novel in Dreams, which Atlantic Books Today called “reminiscent of Borges, of Garcia Marquez, and of Hitchcock . . . beautifully disconcerting.” It is a completely innovative book of connected dreams, unprecedented as far as I know, in which the narrator, journal-style, shares his dreams of “S.” Or, as Lee alluringly describes it: ” The memory of the slam after the door shuts.”

Salty Ink:  How did you come up with the idea for S., A Novel in [xxx] Dreams. What conceived that?

Lee: I’d been trying to write a conventional novel about the events that led up to the eventual novel.  False starts for over a year (which is a reminder to never write about a traumatic event right after it happens).  Meanwhile, I kept dreaming.  And dreaming.  Same subject with variations for over a year.  I’d wake and jot a few notes about the dream, then fall back to sleep, often dream again and wake and write those notes and after a while I started reading the dreams and at some point thought I should gather the dreams, use them in the novel, and then hell, why not use only the dreams.  How would that read?  I’d always wanted to strip stories of plot and all the little connect-the-dots and just leave the impression of the work, the emotion.  The memory of the slam after the door shuts.  So the book conceived itself, really.  Dreamed itself into existence.  And the dreams ended when the book was completed.

The Musician:

Thompson records distinctive music under the name of Pipher, and has put out two albums and two EPs since 2008. Click here or here to listen, buy, or download Pipher. You can get my favourite album of his (for free!) by clicking here. It’s haunting, mellow, original, nice to write to. According to the description on his CBC Radio 3 page: “Pipher is what happens when fiction writer Lee D. Thompson dreams, guitar in hand.” Sounds about right. The video below is of Lee performing “The Lion’s Teeth” at the Words on Water reading and music series in Miramichi.

Salty Ink: Tell us a little about this Words on Water Series in Miramichi.

Lee: It’s a terrific little reading and music evening hosted by Judy Bowman and Cindy Rule at Saltwater Sounds, and previously at the Edgewater Gallery in Miramichi.  Of course there’s great literary and musical heritage from that region, which is probably why the series has lasted so long.  It’s great to have series like WOW and the Attic Owl Reading Series in Moncton, otherwise, opportunities for writers and writerly musicians can be tough to come by.  And you have to love an attentive, literary crowd (because I hate playing bars).