At the Risk Management Playground: A Conversation with Tucker Leighty-Phillips

Tucker Leighty-Phillips | Maybe This Is What I Deserve | Split/Lip Press | 2023 | 48 Pages

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A brief note on the form: 

If the cento is a form endeavoring to place texts in conversation with one another to produce surprising effects, then the cento-review is a form endeavoring to position projects in relation to the reader to highlight the unique affective potential of any book placed in a line of the individual’s readership. Mary Ruefle writes of “the lifelong sentence we each speak” and the “long piece of language delivered to us by others.” A book read twice is contextualized at least as many times, and so read differently. Even a book read, and then read again immediately thereafter, is a book contextualized by its first reading. The cento-review isolates a given reading, captures a singular collision between book and experience. Importantly though, it does not rescue a book from the “lifelong sentence,” but rather gestures at the momentary silence offered by every author one is not currently reading. And, once it is over, we embrace the book completely into our “long piece of language.” 

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Maybe This is What I Deserve is a play based on a short story of the same name by author Tucker Leighty-Phillips. 

This is how it begins: We find ways to turn our consequences into comforts. I took a holistic approach. 

I got up to perform the action of a hug. We probably aren’t helping one another, but we’ve got no other treatment. I wanted to together him. We were togethering. We togethered for a good long period. 

A whirlpool did not come into the house from the outside, but was inside the house and is slowly escaping. 

The crowd kept mistaking me for a lighthouse. I became jingle-belled and melancholy. The lobsters were actually much smaller than they looked. 

Our spirits felt as reduced as our school lunches. How did anyone choose anything at all? The lurch of what we can’t yet swallow. 

Can we together again? Like catching a bug under a cup? 

We’re a community, his statement reads, and I see you. I’m listening. Don’t worry, I’m mostly healed now. 

Leighty-Phillips agreed to an interview, but one never transpired, as he sent a child in his place.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips’ Maybe This is What I Deserve was selected as the winner of the 2022 Split/Lip Fiction Chapbook Contest by Isle McElroy. Its publication date is June 20, 2023. 

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This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Evan Williams: Okay, so a Ship of Theseus style book you say. What did you cut? What didn't make the final version of this one? 

Tucker Leighty-Phillips: Well the original version had a 2800-word story about professional wrestling that sort of… I don't know, you know how sometimes someone will do a 100-page novella and then another 100 pages of short stories? I did that, but with a chapbook. I had a 3000-word story and then ten 300-word stories, and I don't know, I felt like I was just trying to cram something together rather than actually putting together something cohesive, so I kept whittling away and got to a point where I was writing towards the thing that did exist rather than trying to make something exist out of all the separate parts. So I added a lot of stories specifically to add to the manuscript. 

EW: That's a cool miniatures kind of way to go about a book project. I like the changing of scale for the novella and stories to be the same essential, structural thing, but half as long. 

TLP: Yeah, probably like a fifth as long is right I guess. Yeah, yeah. 

EW: When I was reading it, I was like, wow, these are all really short. I'm really into this. I really love little one page quick shots. Those are really fun. But the question always has to be—at least for me—are these prose poems or flash fictions? Are these short, short stories? Does it matter? I don't really know. Do you have an answer for that? Do you have a firm “this is this and that is that?” 

TLP: For me, some of the little one paragraph things were whatever submission period was open at a journal. If they were open for prose poems, then it was a prose poem. If they were open for fiction, then it was a micro fiction because I try not to get super caught up in it. It's interesting because it's like, when you're anticipating a poem or a story you kind of put different layers of expectations onto it, you know, like it's going to do this to you or it's going to move in this way. 

And, I guess it is labeled as a story collection. So they're all—for the sake of categorization—they're short stories, but I don't know. Some of them were published as prose poems, and I think that letting them both be categorized and also evasive of categorization is kind of cool. 

EW: I think it's very cool. I tend to agree. Was there… I can imagine that if you're sequencing a book that has pieces in it that have gone by the heading of a prose poem, or a micro fiction or a flash fiction… does that in any way affect how you sequenced it? Like, this has a prose poem cadence and a prose poem cadence should be followed by a flash cadence? 

TLP: When I was originally sequencing this, It was during my thesis year at ASU, and I asked my thesis advisor, “How do you do this? When you sit down to do this, what do you do?” And he made digital index cards that had the first and last line of each story, and was like, how does the end tone of this story respond to the next? How do these ideas feel in relation to one another? If this ends on something funny, where do you want to go with the beginning of the next story—something heartfelt, sentimental, also humorous? And we basically made a puzzle of emotional movement. 

But when Split/Lip accepted it, Pedro Ramirez—who’s their fiction editor—kind of resequenced the collection, and then after all that work that I did, I looked at Pedro’s sequencing and was like, this is way better. He built upon the work I’d done in a really cool way. 

EW: I feel like I've had people be like, you should just put all the titles into like a random list generator and see what happens. See what comes out and I'm like, sure, yeah, it works. 

Which one did you write first? 

TLP: I think the very first thing I wrote is the one that the title comes from. Yeah. “Toddy’s Got Lice Again” I wrote at Art Farm in Nebraska. Summer of 2019. Everything else came after. 

I was working on a different short story collection and then I spat that one out in one sitting and was like, we'll follow this thread and see where it goes. 

EW: Art Farm is very cool. I think you actually were the one who first told me about it.

TLP: God, yeah, what a place. 

EW: How long were you there? 

TLP: Two weeks. And a part of it is that you have to give back. You know, you have to do like 10 hours of some sort of labor per week. I shingled roofs, and I told the guy, “Yo, I'm so afraid of heights.” And he was like, “that's the perfect reason for shingling.” 

EW: Is there some subconscious or unconscious or whatever thing where you're like shingling the roof and you're like, “Fuck, maybe this is what I deserve for being afraid of heights.” You know? Like, that's it, that's the title? 

TLP: If you're looking for meaning in it, I think my thought process was more like, “Ah, fair enough. Fair enough.” 

EW: I keep thinking about the piece, my favorite piece, which was “Rumplestiltskin Understudies (play).” It's also the longest one of the collection. But it's the rare one in which you use Tucker Leighty-Phillips as a character. 

I've seen you do this at least one other time in the poem you sent us for Obliterat. (1) It doesn't seem autobiographical. But it's also, you know, not not some intervention that you're doing. What's going on with that? How are you thinking about that?

TLP: Why do I do it? Was that the question? 

EW: Why do you do it? What are you doing when you do it? What's the thought process there? 

TLP: During the pandemic, I got super into Michel Martone. (2) And he knows it at this point. He's well aware that I'm into his work. He has such a way with play in literature and reimagining what can be literature, not just like, writing a hermit crab essay or story, but envisioning the role of literary writing in writing in general. And I think some of the things that I was reading were these possibly fictionalized interviews with him, that maybe he had actually written himself, and I was thinking about places of objectivity where you can be really subjective. 

I got into writing stories through like, quote-unquote “objective forms” for a bit. One of them was the Wikipedia article, which is supposed to be super peer-reviewed and moderated and fact-checked. And I wrote another one that hasn't seen the light of day yet, but it was done through press releases, which was brutal because you're trying to exert emotion through something that's trying not to be emotional at all right? 

But I wrote this story—the Rumpelstiltskin story—while also actively applying for jobs to come back to Kentucky. And I think I'd been out of the state for so long, I left and went to college and then went to graduate school, and found a career and I had this fear of coming back and coming across as snobby or snooty or something, you know, feeling like I left to go be better than other people. 

I thought the best way to sort of channel those feelings was through this weird, objective retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin” where I am the evil Rumpelstiltskin character, who has kind of been manipulating and taking advantage of the goodwill of others. 

And it was brutal. It was really brutal to write, but it was also like the perfect channel to take those fears and nerves and push them onto a surrogate. 

EW: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm from just north of Paducah, in Illinois, and the collection as a whole felt somehow very true to that stretch of communities. I can't put a finger on why, but I've been trying for a month at this point. Do you have… Is there an obvious connection to you? 

TLP: Do you mean in terms of the scenery, or? 

EW: Yeah, I think I mean… I'll try to take a stab at this. My experience, at least, growing up in that part of the country, is that there's always this confusion between what is playful and what is dangerous. An easy example, that's kind of a cheap shot, is that a lot of my friends and I went hunting with our families. That's a form of play and a form of bonding, but it's also a lethal thing. I think that the boundary between those two always feels so paper thin when I'm back home.

Or for example, opportunity, right? The balance between having an opportunity and losing it feels seconds away at all times. And a lot of the pieces in the book felt to me like they were performing a kind of play, or observing a kind of play that frequently tipped into danger. Specifically in “The Whirlpool” where they're just in a pool and then a kid dies and that’s kind of it. 

Is that something that you're thinking about? Is it something that you have felt or feel still? 

TLP: I think so. Let me navigate what I'm thinking here. I think a lot of the stories that I wrote—especially the childhood stories—were kind of about moving through a couple of feelings. One, the world is completely unfamiliar when you're a kid, so everything is kind of large and magical and wonderous. And you're also not aware of the danger of some of those things. You are, I think, more inherently trusting of other people. You're not skeptical yet. I think a lot of the stories are also trying not to undermine the mental capacity of these children. Maybe there's something aspirational within, going back to that sort of unfamiliar approach towards looking at the world. Even if it's not possible, even if there's a point where you can't go back to that, but maybe there is something to be learned from the ways that children view the world… I don't know, I don't know if that’s toeing the line between play and danger. 

Actually, when I used to teach English I would show this documentary. (3) I wish I could remember what it was called. Maybe I'll pull it up and send it to you later. But it was about these things… I don't remember what they were called. They're big in the UK, and they're basically these risk management playgrounds. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. 

There are these after school playgrounds that teach children risk management and it basically gives them the chance to explore and experiment and try new things in a sort of semi-safe space. They talk about the difference between risk and danger in the documentary. Risk is understanding that if you light a fire, it can burn you, and danger is stepping on a nail. Their idea is to mitigate danger and promote risk and help these kids understand through risk-managed play their relationship to their bodies and their relationship to an ability to harm one another. I always found that really interesting. And they talked about—at the end of the documentary—they talked about how popular these types of places are in the UK and Europe and how few of them there are in the United States. 

I think I may have implicitly taken something from the risk management playground. There's something in that that I think is really interesting. 

I think maybe it's sort of an influence on this collection. 

EW: Yeah, it feels exactly like The Toddlers Are Playing Airport Again.

Do you think of yourself as a surrealist? The way you describe childlike wonder feels very surreal to me. 

TLP: I guess in the copy for the book I said I like to align between sentiment and surrealism, which is goofy because I don't think there's a line between those things. They're entirely separate concepts. 

But I think if it's not surreal, it's fantastical or fabulist. I use those terms interchangeably sometimes… I don't know if that's a tremendous offense… but when I can mess with reality and what's possible it gives me freedom to tell a story that feels emotionally resonant. Sometimes I will explore the fantastical even in something that’s 100% autobiographical. 

EW: Do you have a favorite piece? Actually change that question. Not a favorite, that's boring. If you had to physically live inside one of the pieces for a day and make it out the other side, which would you choose? 

TLP: Okay, let me look at the table of contents. Which one do I want to live in for a day? Sad. “Sad.” In that one I'm sad. 

Emotionally, the second refrigerator story feels like the kindest one in the collection, and there's a redistribution of wealth happening there. That story I feel good about. There's also some gentle class antagonism but that feels like the one I would want to chill in—because all my favorite drinks from childhood exist in that story. That's a really good one, I think that's the right choice. That feels perfectly right to me. There are possibilities, but I just want the one that has 3-D Doritos and the snacks from childhood. 

EW: If you could convince everyone in whatever audience it is that you're looking for to do one mutual aid action, and do it routinely, what would it be? 

TLP: Oh, that's a hard question. Yeah, this is brutal, because there are so many good answers, but I think the best one I can give is to introduce yourself to a neighbor. I think knowing your community is the first step to helping your community. 

EW: Yeah. 

Talk to me about the class antagonism. 

TLP: Just in general? 

EW: Or specifically. 

TLP: One of the terms I kept using when I was pitching books and workshops and myself as a human being, I said that I write through the “3-D glasses of poverty” and I think what I mean by that—I think, it's just like a funky catchphrase that maybe people will be attracted to—but I think when I actually tried to get to a definition of it, it means, “Here's a lived experience that you maybe can't necessarily explain to others, but when you find other people who have lived that experience, you kind of inherently understand one another.” 

I think it's the same thing with any sort of lived experience or identity, there's some level of understanding that goes on even when there are nuances and differences and contrasts of your own separate lived experiences, there's some level of overlap, and I think that what I tried to get at in this collection is the little things of poverty. You know, there's the big things, but I feel like so many people have touched on the big things already that I felt like maybe I didn't have anything new to say, but I was very interested in the parts of it that were familiar to me, like food insecurity and its relationship to the public school cafeteria. Or like… I mean, I think it's all mostly food… like going to a friend's house for a meal, or the joy of having a friend who has an above ground swimming pool. 

The story that started this was this story about a girl befriending her lice because her parents couldn’t afford to exterminate them. I mean, if you see my hair, you know that's autofiction… my seventh grade year, I had lice for, like, the entire year, and there was just nothing that my family could do about it. And we tried to get rid of it, and we just couldn't afford to eradicate them, and I think I wrote that story as a means of being like, “Is there anyone else out there who has this feeling,” you know? 

I've actually only seen lice referenced in a story one other time, and it brought me so much joy. It was in a collection by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina. There's a character who has lice in one of her stories and I was stoked, because I was just like, hey, like, I've been waiting for a lice story. I've been waiting my whole life. 

So I think a lot of the stories in this collection, even the ones that don't explicitly touch on class, are kind of influenced by class and trying to examine myself as a person within a class structure, especially all the stories that I wrote while I was living in poverty, but was also in graduate school. There’s a dynamic to that. 

I'd been in poverty my whole life leading up to now, but I have a job and I'm not in poverty anymore, and like, how's that? How does that relate to my relationship to this collection? And how will this influence the work I do next, and that has me messed up, asking all sorts of questions about authenticity and navigating what it means to have found stability, but not wanting to turn my back on the experiences that I've had and what I know to be true about them. Yeah, it seems really important to me. 

EW: It sounds like you are really wrestling with it. But at the same time that you've been really wrestling with it, you’ve moved back home, and that feels meaningful. I mean, it really does seem like you're…you're…I don't know, you're doing a really important thing, especially with your job. (4) That seems like a really robust way to give back to Appalachia. 

TLP: It feels good to be here and to be doing the work that I'm doing and to be building community here. I think it means a lot to me. Yeah. You've got me. 

(1) See: “Tucker Leighty-Phillips (2)”
(2) See: “Another Story”
(3) The documentary Tucker mentions, The Land, is a short exploration of an “Adventure playground” in Wales, and the children—“playworkers”—who frequent it.
(4) Tucker works with a group in Kentucky collecting, preserving, and promoting artistic works from Appalachia.