Talk Show Host
bombs his monologue. Checks his notes, blinks meaningfully into camera two. Talk Show Host throws his desk out the window. It hits the trampoline, bounces back onto his lap.
Talk Show Host puts on his therapist’s cap, but the guests have removed their mics their mouths faces & eyes they’ve receded behind canned laughter of an audience cut from cardboard. Talk Show Host knows not to probe.
Talk Show Host puts on the albatross costume, drapes his carcass around each guest’s neck. They throw him out the window & he lands on top of a cardboard box covering another Columbus statue. Pigeons listen to his Top 10, but then lacking snacks he breadcrumbs them all a path back to the bench so he can do interviews over Zoom with everybody stuck on mute. He’s streaming for free from a hotel by the airport an abandoned van he’s surprised to find himself broadcasting on a concrete pier by the river, rotisserie chickens fitting him with a diving mask that’s already filling with water. Talk Show Host fashions an airbag into a life raft, is surprised to find it almost floats.
Mini-interview with Chris McCreary
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
CM: It’s difficult to explain, but when I read the short story “Lull” by Kelly Link in Conjunctions (almost twenty years ago, maybe?!?), it shifted what I thought of as the possibilities for my own work. Among other things, it was the bridge I didn’t know I needed between “serious” experimentalism and genres like fantasy/sci-fi. It felt like permission that I’d never been granted, or never felt comfortable enough to grant myself.
HFR: What are you reading?
CM: I’ve been making my way through Olivia Laing’s work for quite some time now. I really appreciate how she blends critical writing, artist biography, and memoir in somewhat different ways from book to book, project to project. I especially loved The Lonely City, which is, in part, about her time living in New York.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Talk Show Host”?
CM: I tend to collect and collage different concepts over time, and this piece began as an homage to the persona of 1980s-era David Letterman—videos on YouTube like “Dave Drops Stuff Off a 5-Story Tower” provide a pretty good summary of his wacky side, but there was also a darkly cutting edge to his almost aloof interview style.
Ultimately, “Talk Show Host” became about the challenges and maybe the impossibility of authentic communication. When I was teaching online during the height of the pandemic, I found it oddly moving to watch hosts like Seth Meyers try to deliver audience-less monologues from a family rec room and bungle the technology of celebrity interviews over Zoom. None of us were very good at any of it, but we were all doing our best.
There are some Philadelphia-specific locations and a few shout outs to the band Radiohead in this piece, but much of the imagery comes from recurring dreams I’ve had over the last couple of years. In these dreams, I often try to talk to people but can’t see their faces—only their backs, no matter how I try to reposition myself—and even when I can see their profiles, they’re usually blank or unresponsive.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
CM: I have been working on a poetry manuscript—currently somewhere between a chapbook and a full-length book at the moment—called awry. It collects much of my work from the last five or so years. “Talk Show Host” seems like part of that manuscript, even if I’m not sure if it’s a prose poem, a piece of flash fiction, or something else.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
CM: I’ll use this space to advocate for regular collaboration. Left to my own devices, I work rather slowly, and really, that’s okay—there’s no rush. But each April (aka National Poetry Month), I collaborate with my good friend Mark Lamoureux via Google docs to write a new batch of 30 poems.
As of this moment, we’re in the midst of our ninth year. I really benefit from the deadlines and accountability that make me write quickly and without second guessing myself, but it’s also always satisfying to see who “Maris McLamoureary” is—his voice contains both of ours but also becomes something else entirely. (If anybody is interested, you can find our last three years’ worth of poems on Instagram @marismclamoureary, and our chapbook Maris McLamoureary’s Dictionnaire Infernal collects some highlights from earlier in our collaboration.)
Chris McCreary is the author of several books and chapbooks, including the chapbook Maris McLamoureary’s Dictionnaire Infernal (Empty Set Press), co-authored with Mark Lamoureux. More recent work appears in Cul-de-sac of Blood, DumDumZine, Resurrection Magazine, Sortes, Vulnerary, and Works & Days. He lives in South Philadelphia. You can find him on Instagram at @chris___mccreary.
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Heavy Feather Review 