Monday, March 12, 2007
McGarrah's first novel, Going Postal, to be released in April
 Don’t make assumptions about Jim McGarrah’s first work of fiction on the basis of its title, Going Postal.The poet and USI assistant professor of English, who shares a lot in common with his protagonist, John Grant, hasn’t written a horror novel. “It’s a humorous book,” he said. “I surprised myself. Usually I’m pretty dark. Of course, a lot of the humor in there is dark, but the title is ironic because it has the opposite ending of what you might imagine.” Like McGarrah, Grant is a Vietnam veteran from a small town in Indiana. And like Grant, McGarrah was once employed by the United States Postal Service. Going Postal follows Grant from the 1960s to the 1990s, as his wife leaves him to struggle with a mid-life crisis. He also deals with a cast of characters including gun-toting postal clerks, rabid dogs, drug-addled friends, and a postmaster who wants him fired. McGarrah worked for the USPS in Mount Carmel, Illinois, and Henderson, Kentucky, for over a decade. “I’m an autobiographical writer; there’s a piece of me in everything I write, but as far as events in my life, there’s not much autobiographical going on here,” he said. “It’s purely a work of imagination and composites of characters I ran into when I worked for the post office.” McGarrah holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing from Vermont College and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies degree from USI. He teaches creative writing, composition, and a course on Vietnam at USI, is poetry editor for Southern Indiana Review, co-director of the RopeWalk Reading Series, co-founder of RopeWalk Press, and a permanent faculty member for RopeWalk Writers Retreat. He co-edited an anthology, Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana, published in 2006 by Indiana Historical Society Press. His first book of poems, Running the Voodoo Down, won the Elixir Press Editor’s Choice Award in 2003. He said, “I write narrative poetry, so it wasn’t that big of a jump to create a long narrative fiction, though the narrative required a lot more stamina.” Going Postal will be released by PublishAmerica on April 16. McGarrah said he is pleased with his first experience with a large commercial press. “All my poetry and nonfiction has been published by small literary presses. This particular press looks at about 30,000 manuscripts a year and publishes about 5,000 of those - all kind of books. “I was initially concerned about getting personal treatment, but I’ve had a very conscientious team of editors who spent a lot of time with me personally. I have been very pleased. Plus this kind of a press opens up markets that are unavailable to small literary presses.” McGarrah plans to write a trilogy revolving around his fictitious Indiana town. In the next novel, he wants to examine the idea of his baby-boom brethren as a generation of “might have beens,” fictionalizing the true story of a death at Bull Island, a disastrous local version of the Woodstock music festival, held on the Wabash River in 1972. “I don’t think it’s possible to divorce one’s culture and external environment from the influence it has on who one is. Everything I write works itself through an individual in some situation in life, but I think it speaks to an ‘everyman’ quality. “It’s not possible to write anything in a vacuum. That’s why literature is so much more valuable at understanding past cultures than history books.” Going Postal will be available April 16 at bricks and mortar booksellers (such as Barnes & Noble), online, and at the USI Bookstore. A book tour is planned for this summer. A Temporary Sort of Peace, McGarrah’s memoir of Vietnam, will be published by Indiana Historical Society Press in January 2008. |
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