Click Here To Purchase From Amazon Down To a Sunless Sea

Author: Mathias B. Freese

ISBN: 978-1-58736-733-5

Today, Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com is honored to have as our guest, award winning author Mathias Freese, author of Down to a Sunless Sea, The i Tetralogy and countless other writings.

Good day Mathias and thanks for participating in our interview.

Norm:

Could you tell our readers something about your childhood where you were born and grew up?

Mathias:

Born 23 July 1940, a few months before December 7. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, in Brighton Beach, a stone’s throw from Coney Island  -- Harvey Keitel territory; indeed, my story “Billy’s Mirrored Wall,” uses that environment, for I knew well the flora and fauna. Until the age of 10 I thrived on Brighton Second Street which still saturates my sensibilities as I reflect back in my autumnal years. If blindfolded, I could find my way through the streets and lanes.

It was here that I was Made. About 1950 I moved to Manhattan Beach, another enclave on the southern peninsula of Brooklyn. I spent time at nearby Sheepshead Bay, swaddled in a childhood that had seasons and constancy, for I was a child bathed in rhythms – punchball, flipping baseball cards, marbles, kites, stoopball, stickball and the like: -- it was a grand substitute for ineffectual parents. Memories of that time – neither edenic nor halcyon – enriched my writing. I was a child that needed to be “felt,” but that loving exchange was never mine to have.  

Consequently I absorbed my world, internalized it without reason or knowingness. About the age of nine I saw “Citizen Kane” in the Lakeland movie house, then commonly known as the “dumps.” I knew I was seeing something grand and altogether terrific but I could not express that, much less feel it. Analogously, my childhood was one of taking in, and my adulthood is one of metabolizing these events. In “Echo” I use a speech given by Bernstein to the reporter in Kane which pretty much expresses my feelings about growing up.

Norm: 

In our last conversation you mentioned that your wife says that you write well about pain. Is this a valid assessment of your writing and if so, why? 

Mathias:

I was reared, the wrong word, by lower middle class parents, if that, with the purest motives of benign neglect. I have had to grab myself by the scruff of my neck and parent myself.  

Not too many complaints about that, for it has led to writing, but the costs were significant, and pain, psychological and emotional, marinated me as I learned through trial and error.

 I was a bright child who could have touched the heavens with my palms if I had been heard and read well, for I always wanted to know, to learn. I became a master observer, but as we know, to observe is not necessarily to experience.  

As I look back now in a Wordsworthian sense, I see that passion has been a major ore in my personality, a seam that I continually mine, and this combined with my sense of agony and angst, of mortal pain, leads, I imagine, to a kind of passionate intensity in my writing.  More about this later on.

Norm: 

What kind of characters are you attracted to when writing your short stories?

Mathias: 

I am not attracted to characters in a sense. I am attracted to what is in me, for it is within the thesaurus of my self that I seek synonymous characters that may best express what feelings I need to express, be it depression, sadness, high anxiety, or ribaldry. Apparently I see – and others have told me – that I have an affinity for the deviant and damaged, for the outsider, the alien.

In The i Tetralogy I took significant risks, writing Nazi “poetry,” composing a psalm, trying to exquisitely, to the best of my skills, lay bare the internal devastation, the wasteland, of a Holocaust victim. I am often asked how can I write about a Nazi beast. I often respond: I look in the mirror. My take on humanity is an unpleasant one. I don’t “Disney” myself. 

Norm:

What motivates you to write? What are your aspirations as a writer? 

Mathias:

I write  passionately – and expressively – to sing my song. I write to defend against despair and depression. As I reflect upon the losses and lack of opportunities in my life, the feelings and needs denied me, I realize that I write to assuage the inner pain; I do not get over things, but I do work them through.  

As I struggle, some respite is provided by the stories I create. Aspirations? I am un-American. I have no materialistic ambitions in this most gilded of ages. If you want to be a writer, dear readers, buy a bottle of Mazola oil, go into a parking lot, genuflect, and pour it over your head, truly a balm of Gilead. Say you are a writer to yourself and then rise. That’s all it takes. The rest is effort – and guts – and perseverance. I write not to aspire; writing for me is simply respiration. Period.

Norm: 

Are you conscious of any particular influences on your writing?

Mathias: 

Yes. I have always been an admirer of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Report to Greco, a great if not the greatest confessional of the 20^th century, The Last temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek, and Saint Francis.

He had the chutzpah to continue the Odyssey in two volumes after the return of Ulysses – in verse – and by all accounts equaled Homer. He was a friend of Krishnamurti; a mystic – broke out in stigmata; a diplomat, the list is endless. When he describes a plum in that is the taste of the plum, and I try to do that. His passionate intensity about life, his passion always moves me to stretch myself in that  corner of the soul.  

Conrad is another, for his Nigger of the Narcissus goes beyond brilliant. It is his layered focus I admire. I try to reach for the nether geode in each of my characters, hold it in my palm and give it words. Finally, Norman Mailer who taught me to shove my balls against the wall, come heaven or hell – to be brave at the risk of being a fool.

Norm: 

Do you undertake much research before writing a particular story?

Mathias: 

In The i Tetralogy I needed to look up words in German and other details like that; however, I research myself. I actually go into mind. Research for a short story is just to make it sound reliable. The rest, for me, is passion, intensity, for plot and structure flow from all that, at least for me.

Norm: 

Why did you choose Down to a Sunless Sea as a title for your collection of short stories?

Mathias: 

Coleridge’s opium induced poem, Kublai Khan, contains this line which I memorized in college and still can quote half accurately. That nether world ably describes the dark oceanic tides, the fetal swamp that many of us have within us, if we were to slosh through it. Notice how it all comes together, the synchronicity of it all – I see “Citizen Kane” and he lives in Xanadu, a pleasure-domed palace; I quote Bernstein in “Echo”; Welles as culture hero for me; and my own life metaphorically being lived in a sunless sea, the associations permute. So the title came easily for a collection of short stories of characters who live perilously at the edge, often stunned and dazed, and unknown to themselves, my metaphor for the human race.

Norm: 

Is there much of you in these stories?

Mathias: 

All that I can be imaginatively, all that I can be passionately, creatively are indelibly woven within my stories.

Norm: 

Do you feel that writers, regardless of genre owe something to readers, if not, why not, if so, why and what would that be?

Mathias: 

I owe the reader nothing. I owe me a great deal. I challenge myself to compose ideas, actions and all the rest in a satisfactory manner. If I do that reasonably so, I am pleased. If you choose to take pleasure in that, I am pleased for both of us. I don’t separate out the artist from what he writes or composes; that is a conditioned canard in most societies. I don’t excuse T.S. Eliot’s rampant anti-Semitism simply because he wrote “The Wasteland.” I feel, based on my internal experience, that the writer and what he writes are one. Everything in any one of my short stories down to a semi-colon is me. If you are going to “judge” my stories, feel free to “judge” me as well – I can take it.

Norm: 

Do you have a local writing community or fellow writers that you look to for support and advice? As a follow up, did you have a writing mentor? Do you mentor others here?

Mathias: 

I am too independent, too ornery, perhaps, too self-sufficient for groups. I get my Wheaties elsewhere. I never had a mentor, which is why I made almost every possible error a novice could make. I also, as an aside, do not believe in being a disciple – that truly sucks. I do teach workshops now and then because I have that teacher stuff in me, but the beauty now is that I am the writer and I can call upon that immense refrigerator I have, larded with foodstuffs and all kinds of frozen sweets.

Norm: 

How do you want to be remembered when you leave this world?

Mathias: 

A non-issue for me. In my self is the sconce I hold for all those I have lost. I cherish those who have died in the now. My children know well my feelings about this – love me, engage me now, so when I am gone I am in you, never far away. Seek me out in that brain drive of yours, download me. I need not be remembered. I need to be felt now!

Norm:

Is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered and what is next for Mathias B. Freese?

Mathias:

I give you Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it stops.” A commentary on a whole lot of things including the question before this…

The next book is a science fiction fantasy, the very first chapter published in the eighties, to my delight. It is called Gruffworld, a Bilsdungroman  examining a creature who experiences himself on a decrepit planet . 

I have worked on this, on and off, for two decades, for it expresses an analytical approach to the major theme which is the awakening of intelligence, a term I took from Krishnamurti, the spiritual teacher..

Metaphorically, it is me again, and as I work with this creature and he comes into awareness, into cognizance, I try to explore the consequences of all this in terms of relationships. Within a year or two, I hope.  

My son, Jordan, who has designed my last two bookcovers, will work on this book, creating drawings for several chapters. A father’s blessing – as a child he remembers me working on the book and now at 31 he will do the graphics. What’s this about remembering?

 Click Here to read Norm's Review of Down to a Sunless Sea