About John Schoneboom

Q: What does 'fungible' mean?

JS: It's like a dirigible, only more fun. No. It basically means exchangeable, with a connotation of flexible, negotiable, not set in stone or immutable or sacrosanct. So if you have a fungible reality, for example, it implies that it's contingent rather than absolute, that it's a gooey, flobbery mental construction subject to interpretation and re-interpretation and perception and it's vulnerable to things like propaganda and confirmation bias and prejudice and so on. It can also collapse and disappear and have to be rebuilt. One reality can be exchanged for another. That can either be traumatic or liberating, or just an endless infinite loop of rabbit holes.

Q: And why are we talking about this?

JS: You brought it up. I assume it's because fungible realities constructed from distorted perceptions is probably the central theme of most of my writing.

Q: Is it true you were an ice cream man?

JS: I was an excellent ice cream man. White trousers, white shirt, red bow tie. Good Humor truck. The old kind, cab in the front, freezer in the back. You had to get out of the truck, walk around, and open the little door on the side or the back to get into the freezer. Not the big van where you just stay in there. An actual bell I had to jingle as I cruised along my route. Actually a set of a few bells, with one central jingler. A beautiful sound. Everyone very excited to see you. Somehow all the money you made just got ploughed back into more ice cream. The theory was at the end of the summer you'd end up with a pile. I don't remember ending up with a pile, but I loved that job. I was the ice cream man.

Q: Did you really foil a purse snatching?

JS: Also true, sadly. There we were, walking down the street. This was in Boston, I was visiting a friend. Suddenly a woman is screaming and a young man clutching a woman's pocketbook is running straight at us. All I did was step out in front of him and hold my hands out as if to say, hey, uh uh, no, not cool. He tossed the pocketbook one way and darted the other. So we let him go -- not that we could have caught up to him even if we wanted to, and we didn't want to, it's not like we were out for vengeance or trying to clean up the streets or anything. We just picked up the bag and walked it over to the woman, who was very shaken. Then we followed her into her apartment and robbed her. No. She did offer a reward but that would have ruined the vibe. The reason I say it's 'sadly' true is I ended up feeling bad for the purse snatcher in a way. He was young and poor and the lady was very posh. I ended up feeling more sympathetic to the kid and sorry that I messed up his caper. Maybe he didn't eat that day. But purse-snatching isn't really a noble profession, regardless of any class issues involved. We were just glad he didn't have a nearby accomplice who decided to murder us for interfering.

Q: Is it true you have a PhD and a masters degree in Creative Writing from Northumbria University as well as another entire masters degree in Science, Technology, and International Affairs from The George Washington University on top of a BA in Political Science focusing on US meddling in Latin America from Hampshire College?

JS: Yes.

Q: Doesn't all that education imply that you were desperately trying to avoid real life?

JS: Yes.

Q: What else should I ask?

JS: Why don't you ask me whether I've won any awards?

Q: Have you?

JS: Well, I wasn't going to bring it up but now you've asked, yes, I have. I won the Artists' Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council back in 2001 for writing a Dada-esque word-collage play called Dreams of Jimmy Bannon, and let me tell you, that was a real shock and it came with $12,500, which was definitely more money than I'd ever seen before, by about $12,000. I only learned about the competition a week before the deadline and I'd never written a play before so I went into a 7-day playwriting frenzy without the slightest idea what I was doing. The play made no real sense but one of the judges was José Rivera, who wrote the screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries, and he wrote me a message saying the play was 'Hilarious... so damn poetic and beautiful.' He said the judges would read parts of it out loud to each other and laugh their heads off. Which meant even more to me than the cash. Then I also won a Northern Writers' Award in the UK for an extract of a novel I was writing for my PhD. It turned out nobody wanted to publish that novel in the end but the analytical accompaniment turned into Surrealpolitik and got published by Zer0 Books.

Q: Is it true, as the English claim, that 'bonk' is a dirty word?

JS: A thousand times no. It's a sound effect. The English are a fine people but you can't just blindly trust them.

Q: What rock stars have you met?

JS: I met Buck Dharma after a Blue Oyster Cult concert at the Long Island Arena when I was about 15 years old. I asked him to sign a bootleg cassette tape I'd made of the show. He said is this tonight's show? I said yeah, slowly realizing that recording concerts was often frowned upon. He just shook his head and signed it. It was a cheap Radio Shack tape. Then my friend, who used a better quality tape, asked him the same thing, and Buck took it and said 'oooh, Memorex.' Signed it smirking. I met Ritchie Blackmore a couple years later after a Rainbow concert in Hempstead. I was with the same friend, who waxed eloquent about his admiration for Blackmore's virtuosity and feeling, to which the comfortably seated former Deep Purple maestro responded by lifting his foot up to my friend's face and saying 'yes, kiss me there.' It was awkward. I have shaken Albert Bouchard's hand; I love Albert Bouchard. I tried to shake Kirk Hammett's hand on the streets of Prague but Kirk Hammett does not shake hands. At least not with strangers on the streets of Prague. He does have valuable fingers. No hard feelings. I've met all of the Tubes and they were all cool, especially Bill Spooner, who helped me figure out how to play one of his songs on guitar. When I was 15, 16, 17 I was an absolute Alice Cooper freak and many years after that I finally met him after a show, and Alice is the nicest person on earth. I told him he looked great and sounded great and I gave him a DVD of The Seventh Curse, which is a very strange Hong Kong film. He was relaxed and friendly and in no hurry. We chatted for a good long time. I must also mention the late great Pat Fish, better known as the Jazz Butcher, one of the great under-appreciated musical and intellectual talents of the 1980s, 90s, and beyond, who was kind enough to contribute a hilarious original short story to one of my Uncommonalities collections -- one of the most exciting things ever to happen to me. Oh and does Jonathan Lethem count? He was very generous with his time, helping me with my PhD and providing a very exciting endorsement of Surrealpolitik. He gets rock star status in my estimation. Oh that reminds me, I also briefly met Hunter S. Thompson, who did not want to go grab some pizza.

Q: Could you share any personal information, like, hobbies, what else you like to do besides writing?

JS: You mean like how I was the bass player in Fast Clean & Safe or how I'm learning to play the guitar, or how I was lucky enough to get my black belt in karate under Tsutomu Ohshima, an absolutely impeccable honest-to-goodness karate master (him not me), or how I also learned a bit of aikido as a supplement, a beautiful art in its own right, or how I like to write code for the interwebs, or how I half-assed dabble in learning Cantonese and Mandarin, the former because I like how it sounds in films and the latter because I want to be able to greet the new overlords most obsequiously and curry their favor?

Q: Yes, that's the sort of thing.

JS: No.

Q: All right. Change of subject. I've heard you help chickens?

JS: I helped one chicken. It was in slight distress. We were in unfamiliar territory, out in Easington Lane, visiting friends in their new home. It was a skinny little chicken with white feathers and it had crawled under the fence around its enclosure but it couldn't find its way back in. I picked it up and was going to drop it over the somewhat high fence. I hesitated because I wasn't sure what the story was about chickens and flying. If I let go, would it drop like a stone? Would it break its little legs? Would it land on its head? I conferred with my family. We democratically reckoned it would flutter its way down all right. I released the chicken. It did flutter down all right. We later learned that particular chicken is a real wanderer. It's always getting out and needing to be chucked back over the fence. I like that chicken very much. It's engaged with the world.

Q: Would you help other chickens or was that it?

JS: Any time I see a chicken in distress and I'm not starving, I will help it.

Q: OK. Should you say something about where you live?

JS: Is that important?

Q: I don't know. It's pretty common for authors to say where they live for some reason.

JS: I grew up on Long Island -- not eastern Great Gatsby Long Island. Mid-island endless suburbia Long Island. I lived in western Massachusetts for many years, lived in Washington DC for many years, lived in New York City for many years -- Sunnyside/Woodside, Queens -- travelled all around Africa as part of a job I had for many years, been to a bunch of countries in Europe and Asia but weirdly have never been to Latin America where so many of my favorite writers are from and which I studied intensively as an undergrad. I feel at home there anyway, without ever having been, but I have now lived for many years in Newcastle upon Tyne, a very fine city in the United Kingdom. I live there with Abby, Oscar, Maisie, and Bongo.