Q&A with Barry Pearce

 

Photo by Joeff Davis

 

 

Barry Pearce is the author of the new story collection The Plan of Chicago: A City in Stories. He has ghostwritten 18 books, and he lives in Chicago. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Plan of Chicago?

 

A: I’ve always been inspired by Chicago’s incredible diversity and wildly varied ethnic communities – African American, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Irish, Chinese, Polish…You can never get your teeth around all these neighborhoods, each of which resembles a tiny nation, with its own culture, language, and politics.

 

As a journalist writing about neighborhoods, I would sink into these varied communities: eat in the restaurants, drink in the bars, go hear the music, and hang in the parks, talking to residents at every turn.

 

I loved that experience and came to see diversity as Chicago’s great strength, which makes our unfortunate divisions all the more tragic.

 

There’s a long history of racism and ethnic tension here and a fair amount of division with systemic roots – redlining by banks, panic peddling by realtors, ugly urban planning decisions.

 

The stories in The Plan of Chicago are about the people in these vibrant, multifaceted communities, the differences that make them beautiful, the divisions that keep them apart, the connections that occur in spite of all.

 

Q: Your stories involve a range of characters and neighborhoods in the city--did you always plan to structure the book that way?

 

A: It’s a great question. No, I did not start out thinking of this structure – each story set in a distinct neighborhood, with overlapping characters. I didn’t even plan to write a book. I was just working on stories, but over time, patterns and connections emerged.

 

Once I saw and accepted those connections, the structure appeared organically. For instance, characters in the stories “Enumerator,” “Chief O’Neill’s,” and “Clearing” were based on my brothers and friends.

 

I tried to disguise them from story to story, but once I accepted the overlap between stories, I didn’t have to pretend like these were different characters. The connections became an advantage and the characters deepened, since they were investigated over longer stretches and in different phases of life.

 

Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about Chicago?

 

A: Partly because we are a successful city of immigrants, we’ve become Washington’s favorite punching bag. Politicians have tried to create the perception that crime is out of control here.

 

We have plenty of problems, but we’re the third largest city in the U.S., and our violent crime rate puts us near the bottom in a ranking of cities with more than half a million people, 29th of 37 for violent crime, according to a recent BBC analysis. As I write this, homicides to date are down more than 30 percent compared to the same period last year.

 

Q: The writer Stuart Dybek said of the book, “The power of Pearce’s book rises from the foundational sense of Chicago as a city of neighborhoods.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I take it as the highest compliment, especially coming from Stuart Dybek, one of the great short story writers in the history of the form.

 

Chicagoans know this is a city built on neighborhoods, and Chicago writers like Stuart, Sandra Cisneros, Nelson Algren, and Gwendolyn Brooks have focused on the neighborhood, with all its drama and rich detail, to investigate larger themes. They have understood that the micro is the best way to explore the macro.

 

In The Plan of Chicago, the neighborhoods weren’t just setting for me. They were generative. The stories are about the neighborhoods, the conditions shaping them and the tensions between and within them. The stories wouldn’t work anywhere else.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have several things in the works, but the next thing I’ll complete is a collection of stories connected thematically by architecture. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, and Mies van der Rohe show up – they’ve been great fun to write – and every story has some connection to building or design, if not to an architect.

 

I give architecture tours at the Chicago Architecture Center and my father was a carpenter who took me to work in many of the great skyscrapers in the Loop, so this is another obsession. I’ve learned almost as much about fiction from architecture as I have from literature, and the stories, which play with structure, reflect that.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: The cover photo for The Plan of Chicago was taken by a dear friend and great photographer named Joeff Davis (www.Joeff.com). He worked with me on journalism pieces covering Chicago neighborhoods for years, and this is one of the many brilliant photos he took doing those projects.

 

I could never have conceived of a photo this good or this perfect for the book. To see it still gives me chills. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by the cover, but in this case, I tell people, please, go ahead!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb