Interview with Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps

MF: What medium do you find you enjoy working in more?

JM: I like all of it. I like switching it up. Work on a novel, then go to a play, or work on a bunch of short stories for a couple months. That’s how I feel I keep learning, and I don’t get caught in a rut or a pattern.

The other thing is that it’s lonely working on that one book for a couple of years, while working on a play is this really great collaborative effort. You get to get out of the house, get to talk to people. So, that’s also been gratifying.

MF: You started as a musician, right?

JM: I did. I grew up playing music. That was actually how I first got into writing. I was into these horrible hair metal bands, you know, like Metallica and Slayer and things like that. I went to Catholic school so those bands were really attractive because they were the antithesis to Catholic school.

That was the first stuff I started writing were these horrible lyrics to songs based on stuff like Metallica. And then that went into poetry, because that seemed a little more possible than writing a story. I thought, “I could write 16 lines.”

And then I started writing some stories in high school. So by the time I went to college, I knew I wanted to write, though I thought it was going to be film. I was taking a screenwriting class at Columbia here in Chicago, when I realized that if I write something as a story instead of a film, I don’t need to actually film anything. It was a revelation. You don’t need to get actors or anything - you can just write this stuff!

And so I actually started experimenting more and more with prose, with fiction. And it’s interesting, because I feel as though everything I’ve written could be adapted easily into film – it’s all very physical, character driven, a lot of dialogue. In my mind, these are all movies that have yet to have been made.