It was ten a.m. and already the temperature was ninety-seven degrees. Waiting at a stop light in Scottsdale at a very affluent intersection, I could see the heat rising off the asphalt like a moiré. Arizona heat, even in its infant stages before the temperature hits one hundred degrees, is unforgivable. It makes you feel like a piece of meat about to be thrown on a grill. Even I was sweating, sitting in my air-conditioned car that hadn’t yet been able to recover from the hours it had been baking in the driveway since sunrise.  I had nothing to complain about, however, because directly across the street on the corner was a short man holding a giant sign for a shoe and luggage repair shop in the strip mall behind him. His head was tucked under the crook of one arm, trying desperately to shield himself from the relentless, white heat.

Well, Library Boy,  I’m surprised you had the stomach to show up for this, given the—well, maybe you should explain.  Anything you’d like to tell the readers about the person who wrote this book called The World’s Strongest Librarian?  Like, oh, I don’t know, about the librarian in Tennessee who can deadlift more than you can?

Your new book is titled not Do Animals Grieve? or A Few Big-Brained Mammals Grieve Once in a While but How Animals Grieve.  How come?

I wanted to telegraph what we now understand: a wide variety of animals mourn when a loved one dies. Scientists have known for years about elephants who stroke the bones of the dead, and chimpanzees who become greatly distressed at the body of a loved one.  And very recently, we’ve learned from up-close observations new details about how these big-brained mammals and others, like dolphins, grieve in the wild.

Today the library was hot, humid, and smelly. It was like working inside a giant pair of glass underpants without any leg holes to escape through. The building moved. It breathed. It seethed with bodies and thoughts moving in and out of people’s heads. Mostly out.

Storm Warning was a beautiful thoroughbred with a challenging personality. So many things spooked the horse: umbrellas, bicycles, small dogs, ponies, even people who removed an item of clothing while riding him. Storm, as he was called, was just a bit neurotic. But he lucked out in one way: he enjoyed a fifteen-year close relationship with Mary Stapleton, who happens to be a psychologist. Acutely attuned to people’s fears and anxieties, Mary transferred her insights and calming abilities to the horse. Even as Mary and Storm competed in the dressage ring, they worked together on Storm’s fears. In Mary’s words, Storm “learned to jump and face all of his terrors with great courage.”

Is it really true that you wrote this book while living in a storage unit?

I wrote the monologue in the storage unit – Life in a Marital Institution (20 Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Hour). The book I wrote in a couple of different houses and apartments, after the lease on my storage unit ran out.

How does one end up writing in a storage unit?

I was living in a very expensive coop apartment in New York City, when I finally accepted the material limitation that to pursue my dream of writing autobiographical stories, I needed more time, and to have more time I needed to lower my expenses.

I’m standing on the sidewalk in Blue Hill, a tiny town in upstate New York, hands cupped around my eyes, peering through the plate-glass window of a Victorian house that’s been converted into a café, like a thief, or a real estate agent, or—given the crazed reflection looking back at me from the plate glass— an ex-husband spying on his ex-wife. All of which I may become. But first, I need to eat. I’m insane with hunger, having driven around for three hours now, since shortly after breakfast, trying to find food my wife, Jane, will allow our two young boys to eat. So that I can eat.

One year you were an American exchange student living in Paris and the next you return (with a Fulbright) to study at the French National Circus School. The circus! What happened?

Yeah, I’m still as surprised as everyone. Basically, I discovered it by coincidence. My exchange program was a “critical studies” program with an emphasis on cinema and philosophy, and the goal was to expose us to as much Parisian culture as possible. On one of the outings we went to a “nouveau cirque,” a kind of contemporary circus, and I was blown away. It was absolutely nothing like the clichéd image of the circus that I had in my head. It was athletic and dynamic and dark, more like a piece of physical theater, with very able performers. I started seeing more shows and got hooked.

I arrived in Paris with vague hopes of being thought of as a student rather than a scholar, a circus hopeful like the others in my program. If asked, I would of course tell the truth, but I honestly thought it wouldn’t come up. Although I wasn’t an acrobat, I was reasonably athletic—-I had excelled at sports as a kid and done some rock–climbing in college. And it was, after all, a “preparatory” program. It would take me less than a class to figure out how hopelessly naïve I was.

How would you describe Wedlocked?

Wedlocked is an intimate, uncensored self-portrait of a man (once a boy) leaning towards infidelity. Perhaps that Leaning towards The Other began as I watched my older brothers and father leave my mom, our dog (a black lab named Bump), and me in the house in the woods, and perhaps that Leaning gained space-shuttle lift when I failed to cope with something as ordinary as marital loneliness. Wedlocked describes (among other things) my desire for The Other inflating my sense of self, filling my sense of self with POTENT PONTERI SELFDOM. This book is the car ride to the collision, the dark hallway to the Void, the burnt bulb dangling by wire from the ceiling.

I hate to say this, but I think of you as a younger man.

I normally admire your forthright nature. At any rate, I’m aware of certain changes.

It’s not that you’re not appealing. You’re still the most interesting person in the entire universe as far as I’m concerned. I mean, I’m obsessed with you.

Look, I know exactly how you feel. I can’t get you out of my mind. And yet, you do seem different somehow.

According to the memoir of Athanasius Kircher, even the circumstances of his birth were auspicious. And in a sense they were, if you choose, as he did, to leave out the witch hunt.

Kircher’s mother was “the daughter of an upright citizen,” his father a learned man with “expertise in expounding complicated matters.” They lived in a hilltop town called Geisa, part of the old principality of Fulda, in a valley of the gentle and green Rhön Mountains. (Fulda was also the name of the small city at the center of the principality; the trip there from Geisa took about three hours on foot.) For a long time before Kircher was born in 1602, his parents were caught up in the conflict that had disrupted northern Europe since 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Catholics and the new Lutherans felt the special kind of hatred for each other that comes from a split within the same religion, as did the Catholics and the Calvinists, the followers of John Calvin.

Erika Rae:  So, James Michael Blaine, AKA 11:59…how does it feel now that you’re about to be outed?  I mean…now that you are publishing your first book, you are going to let us see your face, aren’t you?

James Michael Blaine:  Thank God, yeah, you know?  Sometimes you get saddled with a gimmick and you’re glad to get rid of it.  In 2006 I decided I really wanted to try this writing thing.  I’d been turned down for Vandy’s MFA program (we’re looking for talent more along the lines of Shelley or Yeats, ha ha ha ha ha)  – but I was trying to find a place to get better.  If I have any talent, it’s tenacity, to just hammer away until something breaks loose.  I figured TNB would be a good place to start hammering.  It takes awhile to find your voice so I thought it might be good to stay nameless, faceless.  By the time I was sick of it I had the book coming, so I thought I would wait until now.  You ready?

First off, let me say I think it’s fabulous that you’re publishing a memoir about your son.  Even though it’s a sad topic and, given a choice, you probably would have given up your writing life altogether for Silvan to be healthy,  I’m glad this book is in the world. Holding Silvan is a great title, by the way.

Thanks.  I needed to hear that. In fact, this is something I literally repeat inside my head: “It‘s good that I’m publishing this book.” Otherwise, I feel nothing but anxiety.

Anxiety? I didn’t know you suffered from that.

I didn’t either. But it must be pretty common before the publication of any book, let alone a first book like this.