Q&A with Tim Cummings

 

 

 

 

Tim Cummings is the author of the new young adult novel The Lightning People Play. He also has written the novel Alice the Cat. He teaches writing for the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, and he lives in Los Angeles. 

 

Q: You’ve said that The Lightning People Play was based in part on your experiences with your late brother Matthew. Can you say more about that?

 

A: Matthew had grand mal seizures his entire life. Sadly, we lost him in the summer of 1997 when he was 26 years old. He died of complications from a bad seizure.

 

We shared a room when I was a kid, and he used to have tremendous seizures in the middle of the night. I always felt that there was some unseen magic happening in that room, whether that was some kind of preventative trauma response, or my subconscious at play, or something else.

 

This book allowed me to transpose those memories into something mystical and beautiful by utilizing my involvement in theatre for over 40 years as a framework to tell a story about two young brothers, about creative collaboration among friends, and an important story about a struggling family that figures out how to deal with the affliction. 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: It’s a double entendre. “Play” is both a noun and a verb. The title of the play they put up is “The Lighting People Play” (they vote on it!) but also, the lightning people are playing with them.

Q: The writer Gayle Brandeis called the book “a breathtaking celebration of creativity and neurodivergence and connection.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Choked me up when I first read her blurb. Did you see it in its entirety? It’s astonishing. Gayle is a genius, a seer, a writer’s writer, and her perception of this book is astoundingly meaningful to me. Also, she’s 100 percent correct—the book is really all of those things.

 

I will be doing an event at her bookstore, Secret World Books, in Chicago in early September.

Q: The novel takes place in the fictional town of Weirville, the setting for your novel Alice the Cat. Why did you decide to return to the same setting this time?

 

A: I loved creating a fictional town for my first book. At the time, I had been thinking about why there are no new American cities, like, ever. Where are they? And I thought it would be cool to explore a “subtropolis” (small city interlaced with the suburbs, sort of like a miniature Los Angeles) initially erected following 9/11 where families would settle, and children would be born in the mid to late aughts.

 

I scoured the internet for large swathes of land in the USA and found one on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border that is primarily used as a massive hunting grounds. I decided to do something better with that land, so I placed Weirville there.

 

It’s a bit like Hawkins from Stranger Things or Cittàgazze in the His Dark Materials story-verse. A little like Castle Rock, too. It's described as an “era blender” because it seems to exist in several different decades, and is a prismatic and mercurial place, rife with magic and the supernatural (though in subtle ways).

 

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Ruth Chew's multitude of books about witches. They lived among the commoners in normal suburban neighborhoods and had covens hidden in plain sight. I loved that idea so much. The kids in the stories would always meet these witches and be whisked away to wonderful alternate realities.

 

Anyhow, it was so fun to revisit Weirville. There are crossover characters from Alice the Cat in this one, and readers will recognize them.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A work of adult literary fiction about some weird stuff that happened to me in New York City after I graduated from NYU. I found myself lost in the darkly glistering underworld of the club scene that was immensely popular at the time, the Club Kids, the designer drugs, the outrageous fashion, the alternative identities, wonky monikers.

 

All of it pre-internet, all of it wild and fun and often nefarious, all of it forever lost to the history of a city that can never go back to that time. It’s a love story, really, but also a cautionary tale about how artists can sometimes go too deeply into their work and not find their way back out again. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I want this book to be well received, understood, and supported. It is extremely challenging to be putting a book into the world right now. The protagonists in this book have two dads and there is so much homophobia in the world. Loud and proud hate.

 

 It explores epilepsy and other forms of neurodivergence too, and there is so much neurophobia as well. I am hoping it finds its rightful audience and is celebrated for being hopeful, because it's a healing, humorous, and heartfelt exploration of love-in-action. And, I mean, it’s about them getting a dog. You know? I mean, c’mon.

 

That's not to say there aren't difficult aspects of this book. It gets visceral in places. But there is an insurmountable amount of joy in my heart for it, because I feel like I accomplished something profound, and I didn't know whether I could or not: To amalgamate these two monumental energies in my life--theatre and epilepsy--has been life-altering in a really positive way.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Tim Cummings.