Camel’s Bastard Son – Memphis Flyer

“Welcome to the new America. How can I help you?” asks Corey Mesler when I call him to talk about his newest novel, The Adventures of Camel Jeremy Eros. The poet, author, and owner, with his wife, Cheryl, of Burke’s Book Store, is nothing if not prolific — it seems as though we were just speaking about Camel’s Bastard Son. Clearing up the Camel timeline — which ended up being more complex than this book reviewer originally realized — was just one of the things we discussed. As always, Mesler is charming and poetic — but that’s what I’ve come to expect.

Courtesy Corey Mesler

Corey Mesler

Memphis Flyer: Did you write this recently? It feels like Camel’s Bastard Son just came out.

Corey Mesler: In the small press world, what happens is there are different lag times between acceptance and publication. Some presses move really slowly, some presses move fast. This book I’d written long before Camel’s Bastard Son. This was supposed to come out before that in my perfect plan.

Are they related? Is it the same Camel?

Yes, it is, but Camel doesn’t actually appear in Camel’s Bastard Son as a corporeal being. It’s funny, at Christmas, a customer who — for some reason — is enamoured of my books gave as Christmas presents what he called “the Camel quartet.” I couldn’t be more flattered.

It makes me think of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad.

Yeah, or John Updike’s Rabbit books.

What are the other books in the quartet?

Camel first appears in We are Billion Year–Old Carbon, which is my Memphis hippie novel. I liked him so much, I put him in Memphis Movie, which takes place at a much later time. So I made him an old man who is a retired poet living in Midtown Memphis who gardens and doesn’t really write anymore.

When we talked about Camel’s Bastard Son, we spoke about contemporary politics and discourse. Are there similar influences here, or is this book focused on Camel?

It takes place more in the ’60s and ’70s. I was 14 years old in 1969, and I wanted so bad to be a hippie. I wanted to be at Woodstock, but I was 14. As a writer, I thought, I can go back and revisit that through Camel. That’s what this book is. It has some of the youthful joy, I hope, of being a young poet, going to San Francisco, that sort of thing.

You didn’t get to go, but did it feel good to send Camel?

Well, the chapter about Woodstock, you have to read it. Camel’s too stoned to get there.

Do you have plans to do a booksigning at Burke’s at some point — kind of a “make up” signing?

This book, I feel, was sort of lost in the pandemic. I hate to even say this — I have a novel coming out in March, and then I have an 800-page novel coming out in the summer, from two different presses.

Wait, what? When do you write these?

I know. It’s absurd. I don’t even think of myself as any more prolific or energetic. I’m not; I’m kind of a lazy writer.

Will these books feature science-fiction elements, like Camel’s Bastard Son?
Yeah, it’s in most of my books. A flattering way to describe it is magical realism, but I think of it more like I watched too much Twilight Zone as a kid.

Corey Mesler is something of a Renaissance man in the world of literature. He’s a poet, a fiction author, a book reviewer, and the owner (with his wife, Cheryl) of Burke’s Book Store in Cooper-Young.

This Saturday (Leap Day), February 29th, at 3 p.m., Mesler will celebrate the release of his 10th novel, Camel’s Bastard Son (Cabal Books), with a reading and signing at Burke’s. In advance of the event, I caught up with Mesler to talk about separating the parts of his practice, living with the absurd, and his new novel, which he calls “your typical boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, something-goes-horribly-wrong-with-the-time-machine story.”

Corey Mesler

Memphis Flyer: I’ve primarily thought of you as a poet. Is that wrong?

Corey Mesler: Some people think I’m a poet, some people think I’m a fiction-writer, and some people think I’m neither. [laughs] I’ll take any of ’em.

MF: Do you feel that practicing in other forms make you look at writing differently?

CM: You know, when I’m doing it I’m not conscious really of the fact that I do both. In a finished novel, I hope it sometimes shows that I have some sense of the poetry of the music of the line. But while I’m doing it I’m not conscious of anything except — well, sometimes I’m not conscious of anything. In a novel, I’m working on the big canvas. A novel takes a couple years to write. That’s all I’m focusing on — what are the characters going to do, where are they going?

MF: It seems to me that absurdity is an important element in the book.

CM: [laughs] Yeah, in my writing and in my life. When I was a young man, I read a lot of Kafka and Camus. And you know, Camus’ statement is “The absurd is the first truth.” So I like to think that when I’m being absurd, I’m being truthful. This novel is deceptively silly. One of my early readers compared it to Vonnegut, and I sort of took that and ran with it.

MF: I couldn’t help thinking about — and I don’t want to ruin anything — but the joke at the end, the recurring motif of not understanding. And I feel like you have to be able to live with a certain degree of absurdity just to exist right now.

CM: I think we’re skirting around mentioning the squatter in the White House.

MF: Well, I didn’t want to make you go there if you didn’t want to go there.

CM: I wrote this book when I thought he was a joke. I thought what would be really funny is if I wrote a novel from the perspective that he won. And then I’d already finished it and sent it to a publisher, and then he won.

MF: Oh, my god.

CM: Yeah, which still to me is more science-fiction than my novel is.

MF: It definitely feels like we slipped through the wormhole. But getting back to the book, before we make ourselves upset, I noticed the husband and wife relationship is pretty important.

CM: The first part of the book is basically a love story. … Basically it’s a guy who falls in love with the wrong woman, and she plays all sorts of havoc with his life. And the second half is my idea of a metaphor for that.

Camel’s Bastard Son

MF: As someone who owns and runs a bookstore, do you have a literary North Star you use to help guide you?

CM: I didn’t set out to write a Vonnegutian novel, but he is very important to me. Years ago, I wrote a book called Following Richard Brautigan, and everyone assumed, “Oh, well, he’s telling us who his gods are. Richard Brautigan is one of his favorite writers and that’s what the book’s about.” And it really wasn’t.

It was more the fact that I thought Richard Brautigan as a ghost would be a really funny character. But having said that, I loved Brautigan’s books when I was younger. I have my touchstones. Kafka and Camus and Vonnegut were the first authors I read when I decided that I didn’t really learn about books in high school. And I went to the library and was going to teach myself what good books were. Those were the first three [authors] I checked out.

MF: Has being on the retailer side of the book business ever soured you on the creative aspect of it?

CM: No, they’re pretty much compartmentalized in my brain. I don’t connect the two.

MF: One last question — with time travel and absurdity being components of Camel’s Bastard Son, was it intentional to have your booksigning on February 29th?

CM: It’s Leap Day, so it’s actually sort of a fake day. So we can pretend that none of this exists. It’s a metaphor for my life.

MF: That’s perfect. Sort of like, “None of this should have happened, but here we are on this fake day.”

CM: Exactly.

Corey Mesler discusses and signs Camel’s Bastard Son Saturday, February 29th, 3 p.m., at Burke’s Book Store.