Eric Gansworth, S˚ha-weñ na-saeɂ (Onondaga), writer and visual artist, was raised at the Tuscarora Nation. He is a professor and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College. In 2016, he was NEH Distinguished Visiting Professor at Colgate University and was one of fifteen writers chosen for LIT CITY, a public arts project celebrating Buffalo’s literary legacy. His books include If I Ever Get Out of Here (YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults), Extra Indians (American Book Award), Mending Skins (PEN Oakland Award), and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function (NBCC Good Reads List). His most recent book is Give Me Some Truth. An excerpt from his story “Secret Identity” can be found here. It appears in the Mar/Apr 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Secret Identity”?
I firmly believe in Flannery O’Connor’s assertion that “anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” I include myself in the people who misremember this quote as being about writers, in part because it’s a key to my writing life, and to the lives of other writers I know. When I’m looking for a new idea, my youth easily offers conflict to explore. My upbringing on the financial fringes provided me a lifetime of story seeds. People from my social class attempting to get out of a jam, routinely enter a new one. At the end of elementary school, I knew I’d no longer only have contact with other Indians and I’d finally gotten my family to believe that I needed glasses. At the eye exam, seeing the frames available to someone of my financial class, I understood my new set of problems made me more noticeable in a world where it was more dangerous to be noticeable.
Much of “Secret Identity” places a gaze on glasses and transforms them from objects that allow sight into objects that are themselves seen and judged. For your adolescent narrator, being seen in unstylish frames that he’s economically confined to is more than an inconvenience; it appears to threaten and endanger his identity, autonomy, and ability to present himself. Could you talk a bit about the glasses in your story and their coexistence as objects that both enable sight but also enable bias and assumption about the character of their wearer as well?
Among the autobiographical details in this story, was a moment of clarity when the optician tried to force me to accept pale blue girl’s cat’s eye glasses from the Welfare/Medicaid case. In that moment and the larger life situation it illustrated, I found a story. I knew it might be too arch to have this character gain insight through a pair of glasses, but my imagination often gives me unexpected associations. At eleven, I hadn’t realized I’d only ever seen glasses that the wearer had chosen. The frames I was forced to wear were woefully out of date, like the rest of my clothes. Equally like my clothes, I couldn’t just choose not to wear my glasses. I had signed on.
The narrator of this story seems to juggle a desire to mimic and embrace the imagery of comic superheroes and to avoid looking like the bespectacled Clark Kent, whom he’s mocked for resembling in the glasses he can initially afford to get. While some connection to superheroes appears to be lauded, this link with the pedestrian Clark Kent inspires disdain in the narrator. In what ways does the narrator desire connection with superhuman figures and abilities and in what ways are these associations more debilitating to his sense of self rather than empowering?
I’ve been obsessive about superheroes (Batman specifically) since I was two, and their narratives informed my world view, even when I was very young. American culture’s critique of glasses was established by the time twentieth-century popular culture emerged. The trope is inherent in the “you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses” routine vaudeville comedians used. It extended into the Superman details. Superman, as a character, was initially so invincible, writers had a hard time creating suspense. Kryptonite was an invention of early Superman radio dramas because the writers needed the possibility of peril. The secret identity was also a common pulp hero trope. If you’re the world’s strongest man and you need a secret identity, you go for the opposite appearance. In the case of Superman, Siegel and Shuster gave Clark glasses as part of his disguise. Clark’s glasses didn’t merely obscure the world’s strongest man’s facial features; they also connoted weakness. This is all fine for the needs of this character, but it complicated life for boys with glasses from that point on.
When invited into his mother’s purse, your narrator reflects on how stealing from this guarded place would be “an action you could never undo” akin to “being bitten by a radioactive spider.” There are other moments like these throughout the story that seem to hover at the edge of becoming adjacent to a superhero’s origins. In what ways might this piece be like an origin story for your narrator and or in what ways do you feel or hope it acts differently than a comic-book protagonist’s transition from human to something more?
I wanted an ambiguous exploration for that crossroads moment. I didn’t want to slip into super-villainy, and Spider-Man’s origin seemed perfect. Peter Parker accidentally received his powers attending a science lecture, out of his own academic interest. Once he discovered his new potential, desperation and greed influenced his desires. Peter and his aunt and uncle struggled financially, and he initially used his powers for financial gain. In entering celebrity culture, he ignores a robbery in progress as not his problem. In typical Marvel pathos, the robber Peter didn’t stop murders his uncle. The protagonist of “Secret Identity” recognizes the seduction of power, trying to improve his life. The powers are only part of the deal. At first, he thinks he has a weapon to use against his mother, should he ever need it, and when he eventually does, he discovers the world is a more complex place than he’d understood.
Unlike a superpower that grants hyper-visibility, the final glasses the narrator receives near the story’s end cloak his economic status and make him normal and unable to be mocked for resembling a hero or a celebrity. How is this normalization a sort of power for him and his identity? How is it different from the seemingly-damaging association with the pedestrian Clark Kent he experiences early in the story?
Superhero stories predictable in their arc, and most have to do with showing off great physical prowess. A popular game in online platforms (I’m not involved in social media, so I only know these things secondhand) involves the fantasy of exploring what your super power would be. Even at gyms across America, which requires a greater commitment than an online game, the bicep curl is extremely popular if somewhat impractical. You have to assume this is partly for the strongman silhouette this workout gives you. I wanted to invert that idea. Probably the super power most dismissed as useless is Susan Storm Richards’s ability to turn herself invisible, and I have no idea why. I am not a particularly intimidating figure, but my life, since puberty, has had a near-constant irritation of others needing to prove their power, by attempting to assert it over me. It happens often enough, even now, that friends notice it in public. I absolutely see the value of invisibility, and I thought that would be an interesting reversal for the story.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
It has probably gotten more like me. My first published story included complex popular culture figures, toys, gallows humor and unpredictable figures asserting power. Those elements were minor key features in my early work because I pared them away. Now I allow them the free reign they have in my own life.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Not believing in the hierarchy of “the guilty pleasure.” Pleasure in art is just that. As an early adult, striving to appear more sophisticated, I artificially separated my taste between high and low art. Now I’m just a passionate consumer of art. That said, I recently tried reading a paperback horror novel I’d loved as a fifteen year old, and it was so badly written at the sentence level, I couldn’t finish. Plenty of books, films, TV shows I liked as a young person are a mystery to me now. I had also discovered Stephen King (before he was the brand “Stephen King”) around the same time, and recognized his talent as a storyteller was significantly greater than other writers I’d been reading. I still pick up his new books on the day of their release. I don’t read the work uncritically, of course, but I also never stopped reading, when I realized I wasn’t going to be a horror writer. It’s true of any entertainment I embrace. The Beatles are a touchstone for me (and so many others, obviously) but the Monkees are equally a pleasure. That refusal to create a false ranking of my pleasure allows me to pull in whatever aspect of a story I want, without concerns of others questioning my taste. If others have that critique, that’s their issue, not mine.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
Find the truth and beauty in the small moment (a paraphrase). As a young writer and painter, I wanted to make big, high-concept pieces. I was weaned on the concept album, and the brief heyday of performance art, forms that are pretty rare now. My work then was often overdetermined by “BIG THEMES!” I took only one Creative Writing class, from E.R. Baxter III, at the community college where I was enrolled in a medical technology program. We did workshop, of course, but it was also the first exposure I had to contemporary literary fiction and poetry (including the Kenyon Review). Though initially foreign, the quiet moments in the work of, say, Raymond Carver, were illuminating in shaping the kind of writer I’d become.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
My next book, Apple: Skin to the Core, is a memoir in poems, and will be published in 2020 by Arthur A. Levine. “Secret Identity” is part of a novel I’m hoping to find a home for soon. One of its other chapters, “True Crime,” was my first Kenyon Review publication—a huge moment for me.