Sean Lovelace’s fiction “Denver Health Medical Center: Nursing Notes” appears in the September 2009 issue of The Collagist. He blogs at seanlovelace.com. He teaches writing and editing at Ball State University. His new flash fiction chapbook How Some People like Their Eggs was recently released by Rose Metal Press. He likes to run, far.

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for “Denver Health Medical Center: Nursing Notes “? What was on your mind while you were writing this fiction?

Well, the inspiration is clear. I am an English professor but also a registered nurse. In 1997-98, I worked at the Denver Health Medical Center emergency room. I worked in the psych ER, but the medical ER was literally five feet away and I had several duties that took me over there. This place was the real deal. Its nickname is/was the “Gun and Knife Club.” Denver is a wild city, more outlaw than you might think, and we had a medvac helicopter so we also serviced the mountain highway passes and the ski slopes (that year Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono suffered fatal head injuries while skiing into trees). The city of Denver was the main source of our work. Meth was just coming in then. Criminals quit running from cops, period. A paradigm shift, fueled by meth and big guns. The criminals started firing back or just driving off canyons, into bridges, whatever, into spectacular deaths. It was the meth. We used to have a saying in the ER, “Without alcohol, there would be no ER.” When meth hit we had to adjust the saying. The bride to that drug is violence. So I witnessed incident after incident. I don’t write about it much. This time I did, in a compressed way.

2. One of the things that drew me to this story is the way that it hides its narrative. There is one here, but its perhaps not immediately apparent, given the structure of the piece. Rather than being a series of events, I read the narrative more as a series of resonances, created by association and language rather than the more traditional tools of character and plot (although those things are here too). Is this an accurate reading of how you see this piece working? Is there anything you can say about the structure here? How did it free or constrain you as you were writing?

Well, nursing notes exist. In nursing, “If it isn’t written down, it wasn’t done.” We record everything. It’s called covering your ass. The nursing note is evidence. Now a nursing note would never have the tone and voice of this piece, but it does somewhat relate—we are recording here. Fiction records just like a medical document, maybe more. The narrative is how a person deals with a job, day to day to day, that has violence and death and confusion and bewilderment and bitterness and beauty and truth and pain and agony and screams and absolute in your face unfairness, as in the universe-does-not-give-a-shit unfairness. Daily. How do you face that? Everyone has a different answer. That’s a big subject. You know, people die in an ER, that’s just reality; and often there is a group of people out there, in the waiting area, whispering into phones, hugging anyone near, praying. Someone is going to go see that group of people. To give them words. I guess I think maybe this piece needs to be larger. Maybe sometime it will be.

3. There’s a line of dialogue in the story—”There’s a gas station right across the street. Go get a beer, drink it, and get your ass back to work”—that reminded me of my own days working not in the medical field but in restaurants, where this sort of thing occasionally happened. I can remember a cook fresh from an AA meeting who now couldn’t work, who had in fact never worked sober. The boss said basically this exact same thing to him and got him back to work within fifteen minutes. I remember thinking how good it was for the business—we really did need the guy—but how bad it was for the man himself. What about here? What’s the story behind that line?

I don’t think there is one story behind that line. I was just trying to catch a mentality. Suck it up. Do your job. In an ER, everyone is allowed to act crazy, but never the nurse or doctor or whomever employee at the hospital, no matter how crazy the situation you just experienced. So it’s like, Wow, that WAS crazy 3 minutes ago, but move on. Move on. Do your job. I respect and repel this attitude simultaneously. I think it scars health care workers, this mentality, but also makes them strong and beautiful and real.

4. Your chapbook How Some People Like Their Eggs was recently published by Rose Metal Press as the winner of their chapbook contest judged by Sherrie Flick. It arrived at my house during an afternoon I spent accidentally locked outside, and kept me great company while I waited for my wife to come and let me back inside. Are there any other places and circumstances in which your book might be particularly helpful or enjoyable?

Maybe a deer stand? I mean you could peek at a flash fiction during those down periods with no deer movement, you know, before the rut. You sit for hours and listen to the birds gnaw. The world smells like world. Also, if you are meeting a family of someone you know, or just an acquaintance of, or in some living room where no one is living, clearly not living at all, and those type people don’t serve alcohol, or not enough alcohol (besides vanilla extract),  and you suddenly appear in a sky blue bathroom, sky blue mirror, and just really need to smoke weed, just to deal you know, with life, right now, with life in an immediate here-I-am sense, then I give you full permission to wrap marijuana leaves/buds/horseshoes/dinner bells/stems within the pages of this very chapbook. And I say this being a person who does not smoke weed, so that feels generous to me. So smoke and burn this book. Go ahead, I implore you. Smolder.

5. I’ve noticed that several people blogging about How Some People Like Their Eggs have felt the need to point out that they don’t like eggs, as if you’d written a cookbook instead of a chapbook. Any advice on how an egg-hating reader might get past the title and the yolky hue of the cover to read the fine words inside?

Well, I don’t eat eggs, period. Why would a person eat an egg? BTW, I would love to write a cookbook, and am working on a cookbook. It involves nachos, sans eggs. My advice is never judge a book by its cover, which I believe someone said sometime. If I was a wide receiver right now I would say, “It is what it is.”

6. What other writing projects are you currently working on?

A nacho cookbook. A book about every drug known to man, legal or otherwise (here is one at Barrelhouse: http://www.barrelhousemag.com/word/?p=1308) A book about getting drunk and buying stupid shit on EBay (for example, http://everyday-genius.blogspot.com/2009/09/sean-lovelace.html ). I am writing several checks. And a book about art classes in rural high schools. I guess that’s it.

7. What great books have you read recently? Also, are there any upcoming releases you’re excited about?

Not really, besides Blake Butler’s new book. And Amelia Gray’s book is coming in the mail soon. Not to be a pragmatic drag, but I have two kids I enjoy and it’s football season and I need to shoot my bow and I have teaching and a shit-load of good beer I must wade through and many marathons to train for and also a stack of great books, a fucking Taj Mahal of great books, on my desk/bedside table/treadmill rack/deer stand reading pack/floorboards of car. So. I don’t really need new books right this moment.

Read recently? A lot of Stud Terkel interviews. And any Arlene Ang poetry I can find, and I can find a lot. I love Arlene Ang.