Barry Pearce is a Chicago-based author who received his MFA in creative writing at New Mexico State University. His new book, “The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories,” is a series of short stories set in different neighborhoods around the city. He will be reading from the book as part of the Nelson-Boswell reading series Friday night at 7:30 in NMSU’s CMI Theatre. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Pearce about his book.
Scott Brocato:
Barry, talk about your book and the many themes that run throughout.
Barry Pearce:
Well, it's a collection of nine stories, Scott, all set in Chicago, and has maybe a slightly unusual structure. Each story is set in a different neighborhood in the city, and they are all linked. So each story at the front has a neighborhood label and then the title of the story.
The idea was to try to capture the breadth and depth of Chicago and as many groups, as many ethnicities, and just diverse stories as I could to capture the soul of the city. And the idea is really that Chicago is pretty much dead center in the country, and that it's kind of a stand-in for America. About half the characters are women, about half the characters are men, many immigrants from all over the place, from Somalia and Mexico and Poland and Ireland. And so, yeah, I was trying to reflect the diversity of the city and of the country.
And that title, “The Plan of Chicago,” a lot of people have asked me about that. There's a famous 1909 Daniel Burnham Plan of Chicago, which was really like a foundational document in urban planning. So it's like anyone in urban planning knows the Plan of Chicago from 1909. It was a very kind of idealistic, almost Edenic, you know, sort of utopian Garden of Eden look at what Chicago could be. Very unrealistic, and not much of it got implemented. Some brilliant bits did, but it's probably good that it wasn't forced on the city. So my title is a little bit of an ironic take on that. All the characters have plans involving the city, and those plans are often foiled, often by the city in a way.
Scott Brocato:
And the stories were spread out over the years (when they were written). I think you started the first one, “Chief O'Neill's,” about 20 years ago.
Barry Pearce:
Yeah, in terms of my writing it, yeah. I mean, weirdly, it's
funny you picked that story. A bar called Chief O'Neill's opened after I wrote that story, probably more than 25 years ago. So I had to put a little note in here saying this is not the Chief O'Neill's.
Scott Brocato:
But at the time you wrote that (story), there wasn't a plan to make it a full collection of short stories, correct?
Barry Pearce:
No. I mean, you know, I always wanted to write a collection of stories or a novel, but I was just writing stories for years. They didn't really hang together. It was only later that I saw how they might all sort of fit together. And it was really just coincidence, I suppose, that it arose from my interest in the city that it turned out I had all these stories set in different neighborhoods and I started to think, oh, this could sort of be a strength if it became a book, that this would be a kind of thematic link for all the pieces.
Scott Brocato:
Well, one of the stories, “Chez Whatever,” that was the grand prize winner of the 2019 Nelson Algren Award. That award was from the Chicago Tribune.
Barry Pearce:
Yeah, exactly.
Scott Brocato:
How did you feel about that?
Barry Pearce:
Well, it was exciting. I actually got paid. It boosted my rate, my hourly rate up to like 10 cents an hour. (laughs)
Scott Brocato:
Awesome!
Barry Pearce:
And you know, it's a big award, I guess. People say it's one of the top short story awards in the country, probably. So it gave me a little boost of confidence. I had friends who were like, now you're going to get a big agent and a big publisher. And none of that ever really happened. But it gave me a big boost in terms of sort of confidence.
Scott Brocato:
What do you want readers to take away from “The Plan of Chicago"?
Barry Pearce:
I guess one big thing would just be that there is more uniting us than dividing us, that as disparate as all these lives are, that they do have these connections and that often it's systemic stuff keeping us apart. It's not just individual animus or whatever. There really are systems, I think, designed to keep us apart, whether that's redlining or ethnic cronyism or bias policing. There are systems in place: panic peddling by realtors, all this stuff, keeps the neighborhoods divided. And if we could unite, boy, that would be a hell of a thing.
Scott Brocato:
Well, especially in this day and age, where immigrants in general are in the news. And as someone who came over, as one of seven children of immigrants, how do you feel about that?
Barry Pearce:
Yeah, it's a really upsetting, tough time, I think. I mean, immigrants built this country.
You know, in Chicago, I give architecture tours. My dad was a carpenter, came over. My brother was born in Ireland. I was born here. But when he came over, all the tradesmen he worked with were from other countries, whether it was Ireland, Poland, Mexico, you name it. I give architecture tours, and half the buildings on my tours were designed by people from elsewhere: Berlin or Canada or other spots. So really, like, it's just evident in a place like Chicago, that really it wouldn't exist without immigrants. Immigrants built it. And I think that's true of the country. It's unfortunate we seem to have short memories about all the contributions immigrants have made.
Scott Brocato:
Well, let's back up a bit and talk about your path as a writer. You eventually earned your MFA from (NMSU). What was the path that led you here? When did you begin to be interested in writing?
Barry Pearce:
Yeah, I mean, the Land of Enchantment feels very true to me. I had a teacher as an undergraduate, Robert Boswell, amazing writer. And I loved him as a teacher, as an undergrad. And so when it came time to go to grad school, I just looked to see where he was teaching. He was teaching at New Mexico State, and I applied and I got in and I got in the car and drove.
I'd never been to New Mexico. I'd never been to the West at all. Never been west of the Mississippi. And I just drove out here and I stopped with friends in Colorado. And driving south through New Mexico, I was just astonished. I was like, where am I? This is amazing, you know? And just fell in love and stayed through getting a master's, stayed an extra year, went back to Chicago for a while, came back to get an MFA years later and stayed an extra couple of years. So yeah, I've lived here seven or eight years, on and off, in two different spells. And I tell you, Scott, visiting now, I'm thinking about it again because I did a reading outside in El Paso last night. It was five degrees in Chicago.
Scott Brocato:
You mentioned Boswell. You will be appearing Friday night here at 7:30 as part of the Nelson-Boswell reading series. What can we expect? I assume you'll be reading partly from "The Plan of Chicago?"
Barry Pearce:
Yeah, I will. In a way, it's a tough book to read from, because the stories are on the long side, you may have noticed. So I have specially customed, for New Mexico State only, I have trimmed down a story so that it'll fit into a nice sort of reading length, about half an hour. And yeah, I'm going to read a story called “Out of Egypt” that I hope people like.
Scott Brocato:
Do you have a passage that you can read for us?
Barry Pearce:
I will read you a passage, sure. I'll read you just a little...
Scott Brocato:
...I see a bookmark...
Barry Pearce:
...a snippet here, yeah. This is actually from the first story called “Enumerator,” and it's about somebody who counts people who didn't get counted for the census. And so in this passage, it's a woman named Margaret who's the enumerator. The colonel is her boss. That's what they call him. And they're out trying to count the people who didn't get counted.
“The colonel sent my team to the center of the city. We followed the thickest of the scars on our map along the expressway. Beneath overpasses we stumbled onto shadowy figures guarding carts stuffed with rags, cans, bedding, and appliances. Some scaled sloping berms to sleep between massive concrete columns or the highway's steel ribs. Like Athena from the head of Zeus, they emerged from the structure as if part of it, born when I shined my light on their huddled forms. Our maps highlighted el routes, drainage canals, and railroad tracks, which like the expressways, fell between neighborhoods or formed their borders. Why did transients sprout at the city's seams like grass and cracked sidewalks? They liked the shelter of viaducts and trestles and the lack of police in those barren areas, but I realized that whatever particulars they lacked--parents, employment, sobriety, sanity--they lived this life because they did not fit in one box or another. They had straddled borders before becoming homeless and used to the geography of gaps, continued to live in them after.”
Scott Brocato:
All right, that's from "Enumerator,” the first story in your collection of nine short stories as part of “The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories,” which you'll read from this Friday night at the CMI Theater at NMSU at 7:30. What are you currently working on?
Barry Pearce:
I have another collection I'm working on. I'm working on a novel as well, but the very next thing is a collection of stories sort of focused on architecture. So also very city-oriented. I had a long novella that involves architecture and it got cut from this book. So I have a few other stories that also involve architecture.
Scott Brocato:
Will they also be set in Chicago?
Barry Pearce:
Some of them, not all of them. Yeah, it's more architecture just uniting them.
Scott Brocato:
Do you have a working title yet or is that TBA?
Barry Pearce:
I don't, yeah, TBA on the title, yeah. I thought about this third Chicago school. There's a sort of famous first Chicago school of architecture and a second school. It was just a grouping of people, not an actual school. So I thought about the third school, but then some of them aren't in Chicago. So we can come back to the drawing board.
Scott Brocato:
All right. Barry Pearce, author of "The Plan of Chicago, A City and Stories." Thank you for joining us on KRWG Public Media.
Barry Pearce:
Thank you, Scott.
