“What I do is I write,” said Percesepe, a youthful 56. “Even a sermon — you’re at least knocking out 1500 words a week.”
Less known locally is Percesepe’s writing for literary journals, including the well regarded Mississippi Review and Antioch Review.
While at work on a novel now being considered by Little, Brown, Percesepe quickly co-wrote a book that will be officially released Sept. 15 by Cervena Barva Press titled “What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G.”
The book, which will be available from him and online, imagines an illicit love affair between Pollock, the famed artist, and a young girl becoming a woman he meets in a grocery store in the Hamptons.
For those who find it surprising that an ordained minister would write on such a topic, Percesepe’s book offers another surprise: He wrote not Pollock’s letters but the letters of the young woman, Dori G.
Love letters are a correspondence between two minds trying to make sense of what’s happening in their bodies and souls.
Graft that notion onto a bit of art history and you have the premise for Percesepe’s and co-author Susan Tepper’s brief novel “What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G.” (15, Cervena Barva Press)
Readable in a single night’s sitting, the book is an imagined exchange of letters between the hard-drinking, paint-slinging avant garde artist of the title and a girl he meets in a grocery in Montauk in the Hamptons.
Their fictional affair is doubly illicit, given that Pollock is older and married and Dori turns 18 partway through a relationship that short-circuits the beginning of her education at Vassar.
The idea for the book was born in messages the co-authors exchanged on fictionaut.com, which Percesepe describe as “like a Facebook for writers.”
Tepper “admired my writing, I admired hers,” he said. Discovering both their East Coast roots (he is a native New Yorker, she from New Jersey), they learned one of his early girlfriends, Dori, was from a town not far from where Tepper lives.
They also discovered that both had been in the bar in the Hamptons where Pollock had his last drink before the car wreck in August 1956, which killed him but which his real life girlfriend of the moment survived.
The authors, who did not meet in person until after the book was written, decided it might be fun to imagine their way into Pollock’s world.
Having exchanged e-mails, they decided letters would be the natural format for the book. But when Tepper suggested Percesepe write Pollock’s, the project took a novel turn.
“I’m not really interested in Jackson that much,” he recalls telling her. “I’m interested in seeing what (Dori) is all about.”
With that settled, the fictional letters began between a young woman swept off her feet by artist whose most enduring relationships involved two substances: alcohol and paint.
In what Percesepe describes as “an organic process,” the two authors wrote letters to one another, each responding to the last one’s answer.
Percesepe said he wrote about half of Dori’s letters “on the fly on my BlackBerry,” something that explains why the text is more conversational than is typical from an ink-on-paper letter of the 1950s.
Often receiving a message while traveling, “I’d (suddenly) be Dori trying to respond,” he said. “I sort of compare it to method acting, where you kind of inhabit a part.”
Dori herself inhabits a few places: her family home, Vassar for a brief time, then a lonely cabin in which she becomes Pollock’s kept woman, although one who eventually finds her way out.
The letters show the recesses in which the two need one another.
“You know about these fall nights here,” Pollock writes, “the cold gets in deep and I stretched canvas until long past midnight. My hands were so stiff and I needed you to touch to get my blood flowing back through my fingers.”
“It’s not my blood you’re after,” she responds later, “it’s my soul. You’re a soul vampire. How many girls have you seduced with that look?”
“You’re like the sun and the moon,” she later writes. “You’re in orbit around yourself.”
“It’s paint and drink or I die,” he confesses to her. “But you could help me there. Just being around, seeing you so young and perfect each day.”
Once when they’re planning to meet, she writes: “Leave your paint home, I’m the picture.”
In the course of her isolation in the cabin, Dori begins to drift into mental illness, and her sudden emergence from it before their final parting in the book seems sudden and unexplained.
On the other hand, Dori’s unexplained delays in writing return letters add to the drama and amplify the depths of Pollock’s insecurity and need.
Along the way, there are enough expressions of vulnerability and confusion (“You make spider webs in my head,” Pollock writes), to remind us of the difficulties involved in trying to make sense in letters of the confusing, enveloping, exhilarating experience of love, illicit or not.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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