Peter Stenson on Cults, Addiction, and Acceptance
In Conversation with Brad Listi on Otherppl
Peter Stenson is the guest on this week’s Otherppl. His new novel Thirty Seven is available from Dzanc Books. It is the official February pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
Stenson received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His first novel, Fiend, was an Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2013. His stories and essays have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and family in Denver, Colorado.
“The closest cult-like experience that Iāve had are my issues with addiction and alcoholism and stuff like that.”
Peter Stenson:Ā Something has always drawn me to the concept of abandoning yourself to something larger than yourself. Itās like being taken care of and believing in something. In a lot of ways, itās what my parents found in organized religion.
Brad Listi:Ā What church?
PS:Ā Presbyterian.
BL:Ā Thatās pretty low-key.
PS:Ā Yeah, no speaking in tongues and itās all pretty domesticated and barbless. There was always that draw ever since I was little to a group of people you dedicate your life to.
BL:Ā You couldnāt find that in Presbyterianism?
PS:Ā No, it was not my jam so much. We would always get picked up from school, and mom would need to go to the church and work and stuff.Ā We would just roam around the church and in the bomb shelters from World War II or whenever it was. There was a pool table, and we would play pool and other weird things.
BL:Ā It smelled weird?
PS:Ā Yes, exactly. And we started smoking cigarettes and would do it down there. It was strange but it didnāt scratch the same itch as my fascination with cults.
BL:Ā And that fascination with cults was all the way back to childhood?
PS:Ā I think so. Not as strong as my wifeās, who read Helter Skelter like 10 times, but the draw was definitely there. The closest cult-like experience that Iāve had are my issues with addiction and alcoholism and stuff like that, being plucked from one situation and being put into treatment facilities or rehab or retreat or something like that and being forced to accept, these are your people for the next 30 to 90 days or however long it is.
You got to figure out how to get by with them and develop close bonds. It happens in a really short amount of time in my experience.Ā As far as personal things I was drawing from, it was definitely that, out of that experience going to some place completely broken and finding a family of your own choosing. Those people in there, you get closer to them and share more things with them in a week than people you know your entire life that donāt know certain things about you.
BL:Ā Isnāt it interesting how itās sometimes easier to be intimate with people you barely know than to do it with people who are in your family?
PS:Ā I know, itās so bizarre, but so true. I would open up with strangers as long as they were dealing with the same affliction, with complete strangers in two minutes. However, with my parents, I would never venture with half the stuff.
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“There are certain obsessions that Iām trying to work out.”
BL: I canāt imagine when you were in the depths of your struggles, you were doing too much reading, but maybe Iām wrong.
PS: Youāre definitely not wrong. I wasnāt a huge reader growing up. I liked to write a fair amount. I would always have these grand ideas for novels, get ten pages in and, you know, not touch it again. All the addiction stuff happened in a pretty condensed period of time, from fifteen and sixteen to eighteen. It was Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift.
BL: One of the most harrowing addiction movies of all time.
PS: Once I started getting sober, it was back on. I would read a lot and write a lot. If I relapsed, I would stop, that process. I once wrote a novel on a laptop that I ended up pawning for ten bucks, which is a bummer. I mean, the novel was horrible. It was my first one. I was like seventeen, but Iād be curious to see it.
BL: What was it about?
PS: Me. At points I would accidentally make the narratorās name Peter. It was awful, but it got weird too. I had just seen Kill Bill, so the last third there was all of a sudden these ninjas and stuff like that. It doesnāt really make sense.
BL: Like thousands of crows. I feel like you have a particular gift for taking the stuff of your life and the stuff of real life and synthesizing it into these horror fictions. Iāll give you an example. There is this kind of genius to the idea of writing in your first book Fiend, itās like a zombie story but itās tied to methamphetamine use. When somebody says that, itās like thatās genius because there is some zombie quality to people who are cracked out on meth. How did that come to be?
And cults and addiction and religion, youāre synthesizing all this stuffāis there a through line from book to book in terms of how you might have thematic territory that youāre interested in covering but youāre unsure of what the way in is? Like, you said, your wife says to write about cults, and you think about meth and watch The Walking Dead. Can you talk a little bit about the creative genesis?
PS: I think there is a through line with both of my books. I remember in grad school my adviser Stephen Schwartzā
BL: Where did you go to school?
PS: Colorado State University. I had moved out from Minnesota to Fort Collins and went to school there. I had a pretty darn good experience there for the most part. My first workshop my story was really bad and everyone was so mean, and I just cried for days. Stephen, who was my adviser and was in that class, would later tell me that was the worst story I ever had submitted for any workshop. He said that when introducing me for a reading.
But anyway, he would always say to give in an hour, youāll write your way into your obsessions. I found that to be true with really everything Iāve written, whether itās short stories or essay or novels, both the published ones and the ones that are sitting on my hard drive. There are certain questions or themes or experiences that Iāve had and Iām trying to figure out. Sometimes that works well with the story, and sometimes it doesnāt. There are certain obsessions that Iām trying to work out.
BL: What are those? Can you name them?
PS: I think oneāand itās going to sound stupid and clichĆ©ābut Iām trying to figure out if there is a god or what it means to believe and what it means to put your faith in something. And then stemming from that is why any of this matter. It sounds so freshmen Philosophy 101, and it kind of is, but itās what I think about all the time.
My natural defense mechanism when Iām being awkward and waiting to pick up my daughter and talking to the other parents, and theyāre talking about Lululemon and school choices and teachers, and Iām just thinking about cutting my thighs and if there is a reason weāre alive. Thatās kind of what I gravitate towards, some weird variation of that I find in most of my work. The search for love, and the search for acceptance would be in there too, and I think a lot of my characters are dealing with that and searching for that, and finding different means that supposedly fills that hole for a little bit, whether itās substances or a cult or a belief or a love, and it inevitably comes up short every time.