Tom Lynch

Already sipping a fresh coffee, Joe Meno slinks into Wicker Park's Alliance Bakery & Café on an early Saturday afternoon, shuffles by scenesters taking advantage of the free wireless Internet, and inconspicuously sits at a table. The author, playwright and Punk Planet contributor doesn't really look "punk rock," but his work thoroughly evokes it. He's grown up since his own personal punk-rock evolution--he's been married five years to his sweetheart of twelve, and the couple's recently bought a house just blocks from the café. At 31, Meno's an adult.

"It's really weird because it's the first time either of us has had stairs," he jokes.

Northwestern's Triquarterly Books has just released "Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir," Meno's first collection of short stories, seventeen in all, his follow-up to last year's breakthrough of punk nostalgia "Hairstyles of the Damned." His use of magical realism is at an all-time high, mixing both the surreal--a horse predicts the future by crying into a bucket--and his now-patented high-schooler memory bank, joining both the sentimental and the morose. Sometimes it's kids being kids. Sometimes it's the kids being aged drastically by experience. And sometimes there's suicide. Meno effectively deadpans even the most serious--some could say inventive--of awkward situations, like when two childhood friends systematically meet at the theme park where they, many years prior, were both kidnapped. "Bluebirds" is impressive work from an author who, while consistently shifting genre and tone, maintains a sense of memory and longing. We've all had these moments in youth. Meno's telling his.

"I've been putting this together over the last five years," he says. "I wrote a lot of it while working on `Hairstyles.' I was writing short stories. That's the way I work--I write these short stories, sometimes I see a recurring pattern and realize it's a novel. Parts of [this collection] ended up in `Hairstyles.'"

One story in the collection, "Midway," earned Meno the Nelson Algren Award in 2003, an acknowledgment that spring-boarded him into the "who-to-watch" of the Chicago literary scene. "Nobody wants to put out a short-story collection," he says. "The corporate presses don't because they can't distill it into a one-line sentence. That's sort of ridiculous--some of my favorite fiction is short fiction. It's a lot more difficult to write a really good short story than a novel. It's not just what I like to do as a writer--it's also one of my favorite forms of fiction to read. I like that you could read it in one sitting, that sense of immediacy. They usually deal with one idea and when you're finished they give you a moment to pause or reflect. It's like listening to a great song versus hearing an entire record album."

Meno, who counts Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave" as his favorite short story, considers a variety of elements while crafting his work. "Any time I sit down to write I have the intention of reading it aloud. If I can read it in front of an audience, how it will go over. It's like...writing something that you have to share. Parts of `Hairstyles' I wrote knowing I would have to read it on tour. It's really hard to write a chronological novel that has that feeling." He also enjoys both the possibilities and limitations of constructing stunted fiction. "In terms of tone, there are things you can do because [a short story] is so brief," he says. "Sometimes certain things are difficult to maintain over two hundred or three hundred pages. Sometimes short stories are better because there's only one idea, and it would be a terrible mistake to expand that idea."

The somewhat unexpected success of "Hairstyles of the Damned"--the first release on the Punk Planet imprint of New York's Akashic Books; it became the publisher's all-time best seller, translated into several different languages, including a recent pressing in Turkey, to which Meno responds, "I think that's the greatest idea in the world, that there's some teenage girl in Turkey reading about Gretchen," his multicolor-haired, mixtape-making protagonist--could've easily brought undue pressure onto Meno while considering his options for a follow-up. "Now that I've had success with an indie press--and they've been really supportive, no negative pressure at all--the thing that's most important to me is to try different things out, never repeat myself. A lot of writers make sequels and repeat formula, and that's the last thing that I want. The tone of `Bluebirds' is very different than `Hairstyles.' It's a little more literary, a little tragic and dark. I wanted to make it clear that there's a lot more that I'm interested in. Don't get me wrong, I love `Hairstyles,' I love that book. It's really close to me. But, I'm 31, I want to keep moving in other directions and keep readers interested and surprised."

Much of Meno's "Hairstyles of the Damned" came from his own adolescence. He grew up a South Side Chicago punk rocker, life-changed by influential outfits The Clash, Misfits and Minor Threat. He attended Brother Rice High School, the same school as "Hairstyles"'s narrator, and like the disenchanted angsters of that book, hung out at theme park/arcade Haunted Trails, just a bit edgier than your typical shopping mall. While a 24-year-old graduate student at Columbia College, Meno wrote his first book, "Tender as Hellfire." Singer and guitarist of local rock band The Phantom Three at the time, he was thrust into the world of corporate publishing with St. Martin's Press, an industry he would later criticize. His second novel came a year later, titled "How the Hula Girl Sings," this time on Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. His experience was doomed from the start as the publishing house shamelessly watered down Meno's noirish tale. This led him to Akashic, where he published "Hairstyles of the Damned," and in the acknowledgements wrote the not-so-subtle fuck you to the corporate presses with "You suck it: Judith Regan. And all you other bad publishing corporations. Be ready, the end is nigh." "How the Hula Girl Sings" finally got its due, however, as Akashic re-released it in September, this time with Meno's choice of a cover image--two hands cupping an intricately dressed bird, instead of Regan Books' original choice, which dove headfirst into the hula girl theme, despite the glaring reality that a hula girl never appears in the book whatsoever.

As unabashed as Meno is, he finds his harshest critic at home. "A lot of my stories I write with my wife in mind," he says of his partner, who serves as the cover model of "Bluebirds." "We've been married for five years and have been together since I was 19, so she's read all my books, my short stories. She's seen all my plays. She likes the short stories the best. There's this thing where I feel I still have to surprise her, so I always have her in mind, and a lot of stories deal with love or the conflicts of love."

Meno balances his tragedies with light-handed humor, never drowning the reader in anguish, nor injecting him with an unwarranted sugar rush. "It's huge to balance it," he says of the opposite tones. "My second book ["How the Hula Girl Sings"] is really noir and pulpy. I wrote it when I was 25, and it's very dark. It's like a ballad--not like a metal-rock ballad--but more like a country ballad, like a Johnny Cash song. I was really proud of it and I sent it to my dad, and he was like, `It's really good. But it's really fucking sad.' Until that moment I hadn't thought about it, I just wasn't really aware of how heavy it was. While writing `Hairstyles' I knew there were serious issues like sex, race and class. I knew if people were gonna read it, it had to be balanced. In the short stories, there's experimentation in meaningfulness and depth. You have to make it interesting, palpable. Enjoyable for the reader. A lot of that comes from having a live audience to read to. You can't go up there and read a eulogy. I think `Hula' was a good lesson for me to learn as a writer. I'm still pretty young, though. There's a lot more for me to figure out."

Meno's most endearing quality as a writer proves to be his use of widespread nostalgia, his ability to tweak the interest of those who don't necessarily crave the past, their youth, but instead hold a gentle, bittersweet memory of aging, changing, flowing through rites of passage, always simultaneously looking towards the future and reaching for the past. "A lot of my experience is based on what happened in my youth," he says. "In literature there's a phenomenon of child heroes, a sense of sympathy for kids. It's dramatic to see a kid who goes through life changes, changes that are way more obvious then the changes you go through when you're 35. There's a sense of discovery that's just not the same as you get older. It's hard to get surprised any more in a good way. The older you get, it's usually really negative. There's just not the same sense of wonderment. A lot of these stories hopefully connect to that sense of wonder. I go to music and literature to be surprised. People need that, that sense of possibility. Those are the stories I really love, that give me the sense that the world is complex but not negatively complicated. That's really close to me, so far that it's even the reason I sit down to write."

Meno's made a living as a literary multi-instrumentalist. Several plays of his have graced Chicago stages over the last few years, he contributed to the short-story collection "Chicago Noir" a few months back, he still serves as a columnist for the seminal punk-rock magazine Punk Planet and he teaches fiction at Columbia College. "It's great," he says of teaching. "You get to talk about the thing you love. Every time I walk down the hall to my little office, I expect to see one of those pink memo notes, and it reads `This was kind of a mistake, we have to let you go.' And I'd just be like, `okay, it was fun while it lasted.' I just can't believe I'm getting paid for this."

While a modest tour is planned for "Bluebirds," Meno has many projects on his plate. In the fall of next year, Akashic Books releases "The Boy Detective Fails," Meno's next novel, and House Theatre produces the stage version--which Meno wrote first--in May. "It's as far away from `Hairstyles' as I could possibly get," he says of the story, about an obsessive-compulsive young man--who spent some time in an institution--and searches for the reasons why his sister has committed suicide.

Furthermore, Focus Features, the film company behind "Lost in Translation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," has optioned the rights to "Hairstyles of the Damned," beating out several other studios for Meno's approval. "I think a lot of production companies saw the book as an opportunity to make a film about teenagers with fucked-up hair," he says. "I would talk to these people on the phone and after about a minute of their pitch I would be like, `No way.' I mean, it would've starred like Hilary Duff or something. But when I talked to Focus, they clearly understood what the book was about."

While the script is still in its early stages--Meno's not crafting the screenplay--the production seems to be moving smoothly. "The writers they have are excellent," he says. "I was a little worried at first, but I'm happy. But I told them, `If you make Gretchen skinny, I'll come out there and kick your ass.'"

(2005-11-15)

Also by Tom Lynch

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