Twenty Questions about City
of Names:
An Interview with Kevin Brockmeier
by Amy Parker and Her Son Bruno, Age 8

1. Bruno: How did you come up with the names—for example for the mailman, his teacher, his (Howie’s) last name? They’re kind of nonsensey names but I like them and I have always wondered how writers come up with the names. My favorite names—I like Miss Hufnagel. That’s my favorite.

My goal was to give the characters names that were funny for reasons that were hard to explain. They’re not jokes, their names, and the book never uses them to tease anyone, yet something about them is slightly absurd. I think my own name is like that: a little bit funny when you say it, but not in any obvious way. Take Howie Quackenbush: His last name is a real one, there are actual Quackenbushes in the phone book, but it has that duck noise at the beginning, which makes it a little bit comic. Howard, I think, is an uncommon name for a boy these days, and Howie, the shorter form, is the kind of nickname you wouldn’t usually get until you were a middle-aged man. Again, a real name, but when you hear it, you think, “How would this kid end up with that name?” There’s nothing funny about it to Howie himself, though. 

2. Amy: My question is are you more of a Lewis or a Sylvia when it comes to your approach to names—i.e. expansive and serious, or doing anything for a cheap pun?

It depends on the project. For my children’s books, I’m very much a Lewis, devil-may-care and probably a good improv partner to my imagination, saying “Yes and” rather than “No but” to whatever I come up with. I’m more of a Sylvia when it comes to naming the characters in my adult books, though, or at least the central characters: a name is a frequently recurring word, after all, and if it possesses the wrong texture or rhythm or emotional plumage, it can make a cacophony out of your sentences. I’ve gotten more confident about naming my characters over time. In my earliest stories, I was so worried about committing to a name that I ended up with a lot of characters called things like “the window cleaner” or “N.” or “Half of Rumpelstiltskin.”

3. Bruno: Do you know any pickle jokes?

Q: If Chuck Norris were a pickle, what would his motto be? 

A: Dill or be dilled. 

(I just made that up...speaking of cheap puns.) 

Or better: What kind of statuary did Ancient Greek pickles create? 

A: Neo-Vlasical.

4. Bruno: How do you know all those words (the true names) and how did you come up with them? I like “kittlepins”; what’s your favorite?

I’m a man who spends a lot of time paging through the dictionary. I set off to look something up while I’m writing, and I get distracted along the way, by this shining word or that. The most interesting of them I either remember or write down. My favorite of the true names in the book is “floccinaucinihilipilification,” which is, by some measures, the longest nonscientific word in the English language. It means “the act of estimating something as worthless.” So if you told me that you saw no value in City of Names, I might say, “That's enough floccinaucinihilipilification out of you, Bruno.”

5. Amy: My follow-up: Are the secret names expressive of some essence of those places?

Yes, but some of them are bolder about it than others. I tried to suit each place to its true name, the same way I tried to suit each character to his or hers. The’'re supposed to be suggestive, those names, but not defining: hints rather than commands.

6. Amy: Also is this story really about the drama and power of words, alakazam-open-sesame, binding a thing by its true name, discovering the thingness of things, the ur-truth? Or is it about the arbitrariness of names and places? What’s your favorite story that involves a shibboleth?

The story lands on the side of names as truth, I think, but in the world of the book a name isn’t a prison, it's more like a suit of clothes. If you’re wearing the right ones, they’ll feel like a part of you.

The first shibboleth story I love that comes to mind is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m thinking specifically of the plague of insomnia that overtakes Macondo, causing people to forget what common things are called. On pg. 48 and 49, the people in the book decide that the solution is to paste signs around the village, marking everything with its name: table, chair, clock; goat, pig, hen, cassava, banana; and also MACONDO; and also GOD EXISTS.

7. Bruno: Why did you give your first name to a character?

Short answer: I thought it was funny. A lot of the small touches in the book came about for the same reason: they were efforts to be funny. In this case, I wanted the hero to have a peculiar best friend named Kevin who had a mildly amusing surname: Bugg. In my second children’s book, I did the same thing with Kevin Applebab. In my third—unpublished—children’s book, the best friend was Kevin Squigglesby. It’s a strange kind of joke that’s partly supposed to be funny because I’m teasing myself and partly supposed to be funny because I keep doing it, book after book, so that people start to wonder if all these Kevins aren’t just a gigantic display of ego.

8. Amy: My question is mainly an observation: In chapter eight Casey and Howie become ghosts by attempting to be in two places at once, essentially haunting the mutable interiors of furniture and cabinetry. The two of them are the only solid things in the moment, even though they’re incorporeal. This book seems concerned with maps, names, and incarnation—the baby yet to be born haunts the middle of the book, or at least pulls focus from Howie. So it seems your preoccupation with ghosts, embodiment and vocabulary has been forming itself into stories for awhile.

That’s perceptive. Here’s an anecdote in response to your observation: There was a tree across the street from the house I lived in from roughly 1975 to 1983, in Mic Boschetti’s front yard, that I think about often for reasons that are hard to explain. It was unusually good for climbing, with nice thick branches that were sturdy and low to the ground but not too thickety, so that when you took to them, you really felt like you had a view of the street and were in command of it. One of my favorite non-anecdotal memories involves a day when I was about seven, and I had climbed into the tree and was looking out over the neighborhood. I had bit the inside of my cheek, and the taste of blood in my mouth was combining with the taste of a filling I had gotten at the dentist’s earlier that week, and I was trying to think about how I would describe it to somebody. That’s all there is to this memory: the tree, and the weather that day, and my brain working its gears as I tried to put some words together. But I share it with you to show that I have a longstanding acquaintance with both word-work and the feeling of being part of a place and yet somehow separate from it.

9. Bruno: Did you invent the books from the newsletter, or are they real? “What’s That Smell, Charlie Brown,” for example, is definitely not real. Also if they were real, how did you pick them?

To me that might be the funniest joke in the whole book: “What’s That Smell, Charlie Brown.” I was amazed my editor let me get away with it. Anyway, most of the books were invented, with the exception of “101 Pickle Jokes,” which actually exists.

10. Bruno: What gave you the whole idea of the Secret Guide to North Mellwood?

Honestly, it’s hard to remember. I was interested in teleportation and vocabulary and school book clubs, which had been a source of real excitement for me when I was a kid. (Ours was called the Weekly Reader Book Service.) I think those interests came together in my imagination, and out popped the Secret Guide.

11. Amy: Is this a secret memory map of Little Rock? I think you lost soccer balls at your school, for example, on Rodney Parham?

A lot of my work, for both children and adults, contains secret memory maps of Little Rock. I don’t set out to produce such maps except on those rare occasions when I’m writing autobiographically, though. What I set out to do is to tell a story and also maybe to enucleate certain ideas or sensations or instincts I suspect might be hidden inside me. I rely on what I’ve experienced to provide the textures, that’s all, and Little Rock constitutes an awful lot of what I’ve experienced.

12: Bruno: Same as the last one but for the video games in the arcade—which ones did you invent? I know Q*bert is real but...

I had to flip through the book to remind myself which video games I mentioned. All of the games are real, with the exception of Mutant Shadow Boxers II, which I invented. (Ski Slalom, while real, was actually a cheap handheld video game, not a full-size arcade game, though.)

13. Amy: The shadow mutant video game seems almost like a kind of inset short story, a sketch of an idea like the Kilgore Trout briefs that Vonnegut throws around for fun in his novels—but also it illustrates, almost as an incidental, the idea of things having a double in this world—a double that is a shadow but that has its own life, possibly its own aims, and that can also live and die. The game meshes with the whole true name/double world feeling of the book. I know that isn’t a question, I’m just throwing out my observations. Also is that how video game scores work? Do you really have to unplug machines to erase them? And what’s the difference between unplugging and turning off? And did you research arcade games for that chapter? And which video game was your favorite? (I like Q*bert. I had forgotten that he swears violently when thwarted, hence my deep affection for him when I rediscovered this trait.)

I spent a fair amount of time in video arcades when I was ten, eleven, and twelve—specifically in an arcade that was within walking distance of my neighborhood and called, like the one in the book, Star Systems. It’s possible I have some of my facts wrong, but I based all the operational rules in the book on my pre-existing knowledge of video games. I should add that I was a very poor player. I just liked the noise and the colors and the atmosphere of the arcade. I thought Q*bert the character was very lovable, but I found it hard to master the game’s controls. Unlike most games—like, for instance, Pac-Man—Q*bert worked on a slant-grid, not a square-grid, and I could never get the hang of moving, say, southwest or northeast rather than north, south, east, or west. Very quickly, whenever I tried to play it, I would leap three times off the edge of the pyramid and die. I was no good at Pac-Man either, but at least I could play it without dying instantaneously. The only games I played with any skill were the driving games: Turbo, Pole Position, and such. I was better with steering wheels than buttons and joysticks.

14. Amy: Also even though the events in this book are mysterious/magical, the tone isn’t numinous in the same way it is in your adult novels. Do you think the adult sense of fabulism/magic is different from a kid’s sense of magic? If so, how? If not, tell me more! IMO kid magic has to do with the mysterious possibility of a future, a beyond, a world they can explore that belongs to or depends on them—a sense that they are chosen, powerful, special, and liberated. And also that things we suspect are alive really are alive, and waiting for us.

Howie is a matter-of-fact character. It’s not that he's incapable of wonder. Far from it. It’s more that he already possesses an elbow-high fascination with everything, including his family and his friends and the books he reads, the candy he eats, the town he lives in—everything. That’s just his level: elbow high. All the oddities the Secret Map presents him with seem amazing to him at first, but pretty soon they reach the same level. To him, both ordinary things and extraordinary things are weird but not overwhelming.

That’s one of the differences between the way magic works in my adult books and my children’s books: the kinds of characters whose minds I’m trying to perform.

The other difference, I suppose, has more to do with how knowing the narrative itself is or seems to be about the way its magic is speaking. In my adult books, even when the magic doesn’t announce its significance, there’s often a sensation of deeper meaning to it, symbolic but not purely symbolic, also mythic or allegorical or maybe religious, that seems to exist just an inch or two beneath the text, snaking and shifting and insinuating around. You can feel the way it’s moving and the little adjustments the ground makes as it passes through, and it always seems to be on the verge of erupting upward and revealing its import to you. When you talk about the numinous tone of my books, I think that's what you’re perceiving; a kind of mysticism that already belongs naturally to stories, to words, and can be activated by the fantastic—and that, when my writing is working at its best and most intuitive, is.

15. Bruno: What is the glowing mold in the tunnel the kids use to leave Larry Boone’s lair? What gave you the idea to include the living Larry Boone in the story?

The glowing mold is something you can really find in the world: “bioluminescent” is the word for it, which basically means something living that glows. (There are bioluminescent jellyfish, too.) I knew from the beginning of the book that Larry Boone was going to be a sort of slightly ridiculous, slightly sketchy, mad scientist or wizard figure operating from behind the scenes of the story. The truth is that I originally called him Pat Boone. Pat Boone is a very milquetoast pop singer who became popular in the 1950s. (You can ask your mom to show you a YouTube video.) The book never made it clear whether or not North Mellwood’s Pat Boone was the Pat Boone, but I thought it was funny to imply that he was, and to make him so very different from Pat Boone as we usually think of him. My editor didn’t think this was funny, and in fact thought it might be defamatory—illegal—and made me change the name.

16. Amy: Bruno was grossed out by Casey Robinson kissing Howie. The Larry Boone scene had shades of Willy Wonka and of Norton Juster; what is the appeal of this kind of trickster-guide-interferer? I personally find the archetype upsetting and untrustworthy and borderline cruel and curiously smug. I hate Willy Wonka, and The Phantom Tollbooth made me so angry as a child that I refuse to touch it today—they share something I think with Alice in Wonderland’s untrustworthy guru figures, and I’ve never jived with them. The Caterpillar, Cheshire Cat, etc., are all spectacularly unhelpful and Willy Wonka and Larry Boone seem to enjoy toying with their prey—they’re not fully human and curiously detached while also making free with offensive personal remarks. In short, they’re mildly patronising fiends. I don’t get the appeal. So I guess I sort of echo Bruno’s question—what’s Larry Boone doing there, and is the fact that he’s sort of a subterranean devil king of his own private underworld a purposeful thing? I think the book takes a frightening hairpin turn in these last chapters, into horror and metaphysics, as though the deeper you go into seeking names, the more dangerous and absurd things become. And lipgloss-shaming Casey Robinson and fat-shaming Kevin Bugg just are not on.

I’ll confess that I like all the books you’ve mentioned, which I think of as stories that expose children to the great semi-comic logic puzzle of the universe. Anyway, I didn’t think of the last chapters of City of Names as frightening. I definitely thought of them as upping the weirdness quotient of the book, though, and also as underlaying the whole story, the whole city, with a kind of absurdist metaphysics, much of it so random that it’s hard to figure out what it could possibly mean, yet purposeful enough that you sense it must mean something. This is the metaphysics of our own world, too, it seems to me. It’s hard to know whether or not Larry Boone should be trusted. He has an obvious (if mild) cruel streak, but I don’t think he exposes the kids to any real danger. Ultimately, I think the whole story is, at least in some ways, a sort of gigantic Rube Goldberg machine to make sure Howie’s baby sister doesn’t end up with the wrong name. Larry Boone is the figure who triggers that machine.

17. Bruno: I like how the Hall of Babies is underwater. The description of the turtle crawling overhead is my favorite because you put so much detail into it. It’ really cool you put all the time and detail into it. Some authors wouldn’t I really liked it. (The whole book.)

Thank you, Bruno. And I’m sorry for the kissing scene.

18. Amy: Have you ever been in two places at once? I agree with Bruno—the reservoir leading its life uninterrupted, itself interrupting the scene it flowed around, was the loveliest.

Thank you. I like that sequence, too. I’ve often felt that I was in two places at once, and even more often I’ve felt that the one place I was in had two separate identities, but I’ve only really experienced what the kids in the book do in a symbolic way.

19. Amy: Did Larry Boone somehow architect the doubleness of North Mellwood, or merely map it? Are all places like this or just Howie’s town?

The book itself doesn’t say so definitively, but my own idea of Larry Boone is that he is a kind of cartographer of names, and a tinkerer, rather than a true creative force. In other words, the whole world is fantastic, the whole world is full of secrets, with a dictionary-magic operating just below its surface.

20. Amy: Is Kevin Brockmeier your true name? Mine is definitely not Amy.

This is one way I do actually feel at home in the world: my given name is my true name. The semi-comic metaphysical Rube Goldberg machine of the universe did its work.

What, if I may ask, and if you have any idea, might your true name be?

Amy: I’ve never felt that my name was my true name. Too few letters, insufficient. I remember when I was learning to write my name thinking it was a total ripoff. I really wanted a name with more than five letters, more than two syllables, and a kind of rolling off the tongue euphony to it, preferably with an exotic letter in there and as many e’s as possible—but silent ones. And I wanted a name that would pup half a dozen nicknames and endearments—a name you could lengthen or shorten or modify depending on mood. (But not Elizabeth. Though Elizabeth is the perfect example of many permutations and nicknames.) I don’t know what my true name is, but it would move across the page and off the tongue as an octopus moves across a seabed, and it would shapeshift but remain true to itself and it would reflect moods of both bearer and speaker. Eleanor is closer than Amy, but Amy is a little tin cup of a name, and she is the worst March sister, and it is a sort of a plain old buttercup of a name, too cheerful and friendly or something. It never fit. Amy Eleanor is even closer, but no. And most people don’t use my name when they talk to me, a sure sign that it is the wrong name. It always surprises me when someone does call me by my name. Maybe if I had heard my own name spoken more often, it might feel like mine? I don’t know. But as soon as I started learning to write I knew my name was wrong. I tried to make people call me Aurora, and Daisy, and Charlotte, and Emily, and Tallulah, but none of them works. I would desperately love to be a Kate. I have yet to meet a Kate who isn’t just a kick in the pants. But I’m not a Kate. I’m not anyone.

And Bruno?

Bruno: I need to think if mine is true.

Amy: I almost named you Ebeneezer.

Bruno: I don’t think Ebeneezer is my true name or Mama’s, and I think Tiger’s true name is Tiger*. No, I can’t explain why. He just seems like a real tiger.

* Tiger is their dog.