Interview: Matthew Pallamary

Matthew Pallamary is a San Diego writer of short fiction and novels. His novel, Land Without Evil, won a San Diego Book Award in 2000. He recently won The Independent e-book award in the horror/thriller category for Dreamland, a novel about computer generated dreaming that he co-authored with Ken Reeth. Pallamary teaches at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and the San Diego Writers Conference. From Surviving Boston’s Mean Streets—to Shamanism in the Rain Forests: The Journey of Matthew Pallamary by David Boyne ©2002 writersmonthly.com All Rights Reserved All Art/Images Copyright Protected All Rights Reserved

Matthew Pallamary is the author of The Small Dark Room of the Soul, a collection of tightly wound, dangerous, short fiction, and Land Without Evil, a genre-defying mystic novel dramatizing the confrontation between Jesuits and native people of the South American rain forests— two and a half centuries ago.

I catch up with Pallamary a week after his return from an extended stay in the Peruvian rain forests.

He is a man just under medium height with a wide-open stance that speaks of an energetic curiosity—and under that, a quality that might be intense self-reliance, or in-your-face defiance. There is unmistakable strength in his compact body. His large, dramatic facial features would send sculptors scrambling for their modeling clay, hammers, chisels, stone. But then there is the hair— thick, unruly black and grey hair—a classic case of "genius hair", right up there with Einstein. And then there is the engaging, articulate, desultory conversation. Pallamary could pass for a lively professor of theatre, or botany.



I wonder if the man telling stories of exploring Incan ruins—while at the same time openly sizing me up—is a glib professor of botany, or a 47 year old welter-weight boxer ready to step back into the ring at any time.

When Pallamary offers to make chai tea, he succeeds in keeping me off balance, as he will all evening. Something in the direct, masculine—even macho—47-year-old had made me unconsciously anticipate a can of beer being thrust into my hand.

Pallamary goes to the kitchen to start the tea, but a continual rush of words comes from him: like many just-returned travelers, he is gushing with the echoes of his journey. He is continually abandoning the kitchen to lead me to one of the dozens of framed photographs covering every wall of the dining and living rooms. He tells of flying into Peru, taking decrepit buses and then wrecks of cars, deeper and deeper into the jungles, until the point where the road ends and he travels by small boat, upriver to his destination.

Then he returns to the kitchen, works on the tea.

I browse over the scattered books and papers on the dining room table. The books equally divided between anthropology and botany texts, and novels. Among the latter is Herman Hesse’s, The Glass Bead Game, a book I had not read or thought of in nearly 30 years—but as I read the back cover, Hesse’s strange, mystically dense metaphorical story and imagery comes flooding back over me.

It takes a long time for Pallamary to make the tea. He continually interrupts himself to show me more photos, densely woven, intricately patterned blankets brought back from his recent journey, and his office crammed with books and a full set of Ludwig drums with Paiste cymbals. ("There’s something about drumming..." Pallamary says, not elaborating on the cryptic remark.)

When finally we are sitting across from each other in the living room, sipping the hot tea, it is clear that Pallamary has an encyclopedic knowledge of and passion for the study of shamanism, and the plants that form the foundation of the ancient spiritual-medical arts of the shamans.

I ask, "Where did you grow up?"

"Boston. In a part of Boston, called Dorchester," Pallamary says. "Until I was fourteen I wanted to be an astronaut. But, you know, Dorchester is a tough place. My dad was in jail three years for embezzlement, all my friends were car thieves, shoplifted, sold illegal fireworks. So I decided I would be a career criminal."

I can’t help but laugh, but as I ask Pallamary what it was that gave him the ambition of career criminal, he shakes his large head and roughly runs his hands back and forth over his thick black and grey hair. It becomes clear that, as he answers, he is not struggling to put a certain spin on how he is perceived, but working to find the truth in his own mind, and bring it out in words, out into the open.

"I don’t know. Sure, there were all those bad role models, but I just hated the system. I definitely thought I was smarter than the cops, smarter than the system."



The more Pallamary looks inward, back to his youth, the stronger his urban New England accent becomes, displacing the surface layer of casual California.

"I was angry as hell. I mean, I was a street fighter. Maybe because I was the youngest, and I was small, I had to fight even harder than others. I mean, I remember..."

Pallamary roughs up his hair, but doesn’t let the memory go unsaid: "I remember when I broke a guy’s nose, his jaw and his cheekbone. I was scared and amazed that I was that powerful."

Pallamary tells how, when he was still in high school, his mother, a single mother of three, managed to move the family out of Dorchester, to a small rural Massachusetts town. "My mom is my best friend. She taught me about unconditional love."

But the desperate move to a smaller, safer town, wasn’t the happy beginning some might wish for. "I raised hell there," Pallamary laughs. "I mean, I was a tough kid from Dorchester. But it got to the point where anything wrong, I got blamed for it, whether I did it or not. You know how small town cops are. I finally joined the Air Force. Figured it would make me or break me. I did my four years. When I got out, I moved to San Diego."

So when did the angry kid from Dorchester begin the journey that would make him an accomplished writer, a sought-after teacher of writing, and an expert on the botanical and mystical practices and insights of the Shamanism practiced in the world’s remaining rain forests?

"A friend died in a motorcycle accident. It messed me up. I just sat down and started writing. I eventually took my novel to a writers group and got my ass kicked. I put the book aside and said it wasn’t worth that kind of shit. But that lasted maybe only three weeks. And I read it again, and I started thinking, well maybe they have a point about this, and maybe about that part could be better, and—"

By now Pallamary is laughing and has rubbed his hair into tufts and knots that stand straight up.

"I just kept writing, kept getting my ass kicked. I came up through read and critique groups. I managed to catch on quickly, but I also had some truly phenomenal mentors. Jerry Hannah, Nancy Holder, Joan Oppenheimer, Side Stebel, Ray Bradbury, Charles Schulz, and many others at the old Writer's Bookstore and Haven, and its outgrowth, The Southern California Writer's Conference, and The Santa Barbara Writer's Conference.

I kept working, hard. I won a fiction award in my second year as a student at The Santa Barbara Writer's Conference for one of my weird short stories and the next year when I was flat out broke, Joan Oppenheimer, my writing teacher, insisted I attend. And my dear friend Lynn Ford sponsored me.

That year I was asked by some people to run an unofficial Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror workshop during meal times, because there was no place for weirdoes like us to really read and be heard. I lost two pounds that year, and the unofficial workshop was a hit. I was asked by the conference to teach one the next year, which I did. It was a hit, too, so they put me on staff.

Now after more than a dozen years, I am still the youngest workshop leader.

As far as what I get out of it, get out of teaching? For starters I am putting back in what I got from it, but more than that, my students are my teachers. When I started teaching my writing skills soared to new heights. It is very gratifying and now I have discovered that I had a hand in the careers of some very successful writers."

Okay. It is easy to see how writing students—who as a group, tend to be mazes of booby-trapped insecurities, would respond well to the searching, honest and energetic style of this accomplished writer.

Okay. We’ve gone from the tough kid on the streets of Dorchester, to the young writer in San Diego. But what about the mature writer, the author of dozens of published short stories and the novel Land Without Evil? How does Pallamary work? What gets him going?

"Initially something grabs my attention. I call this the germ. It has to hit home strongly and emotionally in order for me to be willing to invest the time in it. I play it through in my head a number of ways exploring its possibilities.

If it plays out in the right way and I know it will develop along the right lines, then I think it through for quite awhile until I have a sense that it is ready, then I do an outline that usually runs about ten pages. It has no real structure. It is basically stream of consciousness. Paragraphs, snippets of dialogue, setting details, etc. The keyword in all of this is develop, just like a picture develops in photographic chemicals.

I know how to work with my subconscious very well and feel I have a very deep understanding of its mysterious workings that I trust in. I have written over fifty short stories and I am presently at work on my eighth novel in about twenty years time, so I know this process very well. I even have house and office cleaning rituals that I always follow before embarking on a big project. One of the reasons I can't stand to watch television is that I am having so much fun being a creator myself -- way more fun than the crap they are putting out."



Okay. Now what about the rain forests? The shamanism? The hallucinogenic plants?

Matt Pallamary tells how he goes to the rain forests as often and as long as he can, to work with various shamans in different cultures, from Mexico to Guatemala to Peru. For years he has studied botany, becoming a self-taught expert from books. His mentoring shamans have taught him the uses—both medicinal and spiritual—of hundreds of plants, many of them found only in the rain forests of Central and South America.

With a focus and concentration as if reliving the experience, Pallamary tells about staying three weeks in a hut, alone, his diet little more than a selection of plants provided by the Shaman he has come to study with. He talks of "lightening" his soul, preparing his spirit, in an effort to reach visions, internal visions rich with metaphor and meaning.

"I was after visions. It was a vision quest. My mission is to tell the truth, but for those who would argue, I will qualify that statement to say my truth, then I'll qualify that and say that the roots of truth are Universal. If they want to argue more, then I would like to talk to them at their moment of death to see what they have to say about THAT truth.

I only write what comes out. I've tried "writing to genre", but found it not only frustrating, but unfulfilling. Ultimately I write for myself, but I think my message is important if nothing else, simply for the fact that I go where most others don't. I haven't watched television for fifteen years. If I turn it on and see about thirty seconds of a commercial, then I turn it off, because I am quickly reminded of why I don't watch it. I do march to the beat of a different drummer—my beat. Wherever everybody goes, ninety nine percent of the time I go running in the opposite direction."

And when he’s running in the opposite direction, where is Matthew Pallamary’s favorite place to go on this planet?

"Inside my head."

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