On Writing Hotel Impala

A Conversation with David James Poissant for The Florida Review September 16, 2024

David James Poissant: Hotel Impala is a novel that tackles, unflinchingly, questions of homelessness and substandard housing in America. By following six years in the lives of the members of an unhoused family, you ask certain questions of the reader. When readers close this book, what do you hope their takeaways will be?

Pat Spears: Those of us who live in cities, large and small, see people with no fixed residence every day. All too often, we look away, so that we can maintain a physical and emotional distance between ourselves and them. But I wonder how often we pause to consider who they are—what their lives are like, how they got where they are, how they live, what hopes they have for themselves. It’s a question I’ve been considering from time to time since I was in graduate school and saw a family with a small child on the street one cold February night. I remember that it was February because my birthday was approaching, and I was thinking about getting out of the cold and finishing off the food from the care package my mom had sent. As I was leaving the campus, I saw them—a man and woman, my age or slightly older, and a child, maybe three or four, huddled together beneath a streetlight. The boy sat slumped on what appeared to be a cardboard suitcase, and I imagined him tired, cold, and hungry. He leaned against the woman I took to be his mother, and I tried to imagine what she might have said to comfort him. The light changed, and I drove away. I felt I should have stopped, although I had no idea what I might have said or done. Until that moment, I had understood homelessness only as a construct. Now it was real.

The image of the boy and his family has stayed with me all these years since. I want to believe that a random encounter, decades earlier, had planted a story seed, an emotional memory that has remained. Perhaps it is true that our hearts hold memories, waiting for our conscious minds to catch up.

You can read the full interview HERE.

On Tackling Evil and Writing with Compassion:

A Conversation with Sally Bellerose for Lambda Literary Review

I fell in love with Jodie Taylor the protagonist of Pat Spears second novel It’s Not Like I Knew Her. Beginning in the late 1940s, the narrative maps the journey of a fiercely resilient queer woman during a time “when young gays and lesbians understood that admitting who they were could lead to prison, institutionalization and unspeakable violence.” Spears brings her working class roots and lesbian sensibilities to this story. Her characters are flawed, complicated, struggling–mean one moment, kind-hearted the next. They make messes. They are sexy.

It’s Not Like I Knew Her is being published by Twisted Road Publications this month and is available at www.twistedroadpublications.com.

Jodie’s story seems to me to be an under-told part of our collective coming out story. Why is this story important? Why these particular characters?

While our coming out stories are a crucial part of our individual and collective histories, I elected to focus on the layers of lies and secrecy required of Jodie as she took on the enormous complexities of living queer in a world that despised her and would seek to destroy her.

I am roughly the same age as Jodie Taylor, and while I experienced none of the childhood brutalities she suffered, I knew the emotional and psychological burden of maintaining constant vigilance. As a teenager, I sat many an evening on pilings, watching the sun withdraw beyond St. Joseph Bay, and tried desperately to imagine a future from nothing at all. Everywhere I dared to search there were no stories that promised me a place in the world. My deepest longings were condemned as insane. I shared Jodie Taylor’s anger and despair, and her fear of being discovered.

Read the full interview HERE