Author, writer, poet
Michael Swindle
Photo by Brian Kenner

Get Swindled:
A Short Bibliography

If you enjoy reading travel stories and Southern adventures, Michael Swindle is not to be missed. The author, freelance writer, poet, actor, art curator, and
aficionado of the chile picante has written articles and reviews for national magazines and newspapers, including Details, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. He was born in Alabama and lives and works in New Orleans.

His books include:
Mulletheads: (Crane Hill Publishers, 1998)
When a one-pound fish flew across the Florida/Alabama state line, local tradition was spawned along with a group of folks known as Mulletheads. Based on a 1997 article for The Village Voice, Swindle tells readers, with Southern-fried panache, of the folklore and legends surrounding the mullet.

Slouching Towards Birmingham: Shotgun Golf, Hog Hunting, Ass-Hauling Alligators, Rara in Haiti, Zapatistas, and Anahuac New Year's in Mexico
City: (Frog Press/North Atlantic, Berkeley 2005)
"Slouching Towards Birmingham reads like collaboration between Hunter S. Thompson and Roy Blount Jr. edited by Willie Morris. Read it through, then read it aloud for full effect."
—Allen Barra, The Wall Street Journal

Poof! Just like that the lights went out. He got up from his chair to light candles--he had to ask his wife if there were still some in the kitchen drawer—and disappeared for more than five minutes. He flicked his Bic down the hall and made like an acolyte, lighting wicks here and there. On a side table, on top of the television. As he lit them, it looked like he was releasing lightning bugs into the dark, and for the next few hours, they were the source of illumination inside the darkened house.

Hurricane season in the South had produced thunderstorms—as usual—rife with lightning in New Orleans. He sat back down at the table to watch the flicker of three skinny yellow tapers blowing underneath the force of a thunderstorm-sourced breeze. It was June and liquid hot.

The long interior walls of Michael Swindle's house are filled with gifts from famous writers and artists--people he knows as friends. William S. Burroughs, Joan Duran, Tina Girouard, Herbert Singleton, and Lew Thomas are some of those who have contributed to the eclectic display of shotgun-blasted steel, paradoxical paintings, sequined voodoo flags, photographs, and radical folk art.

The more you study the wall, the more you feel like the sole guest at an all-star artists' installment at some stylish gallery. There's an ethereal feel to it that would remain even if you weren't in New Orleans, but in Burbank. Or Toledo. Or some other very non-ethereal place.

Swindle is tallish and thin, and he wears those glasses with the lenses that get dark when he's outside. He's a published author, a freelance essayist, and book reviewer. A poet. He has acted. He's an art curator. His smile is receptive, and when he flashes it while telling you a story, you know this is a man who believes in things like serendipity, ghosts, art, and life in general. Less immediately obvious is his affection for mullet-tossing, cockfighting, and Zapatistas.You don't so much participate in a conversation with him as you hold on and listen to him go.

"I have more art than I can put on my walls," he says."I collect the artists that are my friends, that I curated, or became friends with. I've been given most of the nice art I have. I have some voodoo flags from Haiti. I have folk art from Herbert Singleton, who is from New Orleans. I have a Joan Duran--he's an abstract
painter and fantastic guy. I wrote a catalog for him and curated a show of his. We traded. Lew Thomas; he's a photographer from San Francisco."

"I have some of Roy Ferdinand's work, who died about six months ago at a very young age. Very elaborate portraits of street life. He had liver cancer. I have all kinds of stuff crated up. I have some stuff from John Dillon. He taught at UAB [the University of Alabama at Birmingham]. Lenielle Wilson from Birmingham."

Swindle loves writing about these things even more than talking about them. Over the years, his essays for The Village Voice reveal his unconventional Southern adventures in vivid detail. His 2005 book, a collection of those columns called Slouching Towards Birmingham: Shotgun Golf, Hog Hunting, Ass-Hauling Alligators, Rara in Haiti, Zapatistas, and Anahuac New Year's in Mexico takes the reader along as he tackles "sports of sorts," explains his unique travels in Mexico, and paints word portraits of relatives, famous friends, and Southern characters.

Swindle follows the avant-garde journalistic style revolutionized by Hunter S. Thompson. He's not a writer who stands by thesidelines, carefully documenting facts. Uh-uh. He's in the thick of things, reporting instead how elements of a story taste and smell and feel barreling toward you. In Swindle's case, this means
attending events like Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials or throwing fish from Florida into Alabama or hanging out with a bookie during the Super Bowl.

Voyeuristic participation gives way when it needs to for Swindle's memorable and succinct writing for outlets such as Details, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. He's the editor of Sequin Artists of Haiti (Contemporary Arts Center, 1994) and author of Mulletheads
(Crane Hill Publishers, 1998), a book about the fishing enthusiasts he encountered along the Gulf Coast.

The Alabama native speaks in an ear-catching accent with a storyteller's knack for timing and drawling and enunciation. Twitches and grimaces and gesticulation emphasize different points. That smile invites you to share the joke, to find a way to squeeze into the bodacious conversation. Time spent with him
simply flies by.

Southern Arts Journal: How did you become a journalist?
Swindle: I have a friend who hustles. When he got a job at The
Village Voice he called me up and said,"Hey, you can do this." And
it was like that everywhere he went. If he was in Chicago, editing
or wherever, he would call me up. That's how I got my start. After
that, I had built up enough clips and credibility on my own to
establish myself.
SAJ: Who are your writing influences?
Swindle: The Beatniks: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs.
SAJ: What was the first thing you ever published?
Swindle: A poem called "Sorry WB." It was about William Butler
Yeats. I stole something from him.
SAJ: Where was it published?
Swindle: Oh, I don't remember. It was writing for money. I have it
around here somewhere. [drawer bangs] Almost thirty years, and
I thought it was in here.
SAJ: So you're just back from a book tour in San Francisco?
Swindle: I walked into a bookstore in Oakland. There was a
large-sized Oriental woman there. I said,"Hey! I'd like for you to
carry my book. I like your bookstore." She said,"Keep talking. I
love your accent."

Give us a reading" she said."A short one. We're going to
order three copies and see what happens."

I've done that for several bookstores. I think I can sell more
books like that, walking in cold. I talked to a young guy in
Mobile and did that. He looked like Johnny Mathis. He ordered
five copies."
SAJ: What did you enjoy most about San Francisco?
Swindle: I did this reading at Moe's on Telegraph Avenue, and
[poet and mystery writer] Owen Hill works there. So I walk in and
ask for Owen Hill, and the young man behind the counter says,
"I'm Owen Hill.""Michael Swindle," I say."Oh, hi," he says."I've
just been reading your book.You're funny!" I said,"Well, good! I'd
rather be funny than boring."

You know the Southerners. We're exotic animals [to them].
They love the accent. It was a real nice trip for me.
SAJ: Do you enjoy reading your work to an audience?
Swindle: When I was bored one morning at my friend's apart-
ment near Haight, I called this bookstore where I was doing a
reading that night and asked for directions and took a cab and
walked straight in. And the store's in the Marina area, fairly ritzy.
I introduce myself to Dave, the manager. He shows me where I'm
going to read. And then he shows me the front of the window.

They have this big window with this huge display of my book
with a big poster. I mean it was huge--five feet wide. That was
certainly a first for me. I said: "It looks like they're expecting a real
writer to come here." I went "Wow!"

And then the reading went well. When I read at Moe's, they
had a big audience, a third of which were friends and friends of
friends. That went over real big, and then I read at City Lights. It
was packed, I think because I shared the stage with a local poet
who was well known. So that has been the apex of my career so
far. All those beatniks and hangers-arounders! It was a lot of ego
strokes for me.

I'm not much for touting, but it was, um: You can't beat this.
"You can't live here," I told myself,"and pretty soon you're going
be back in that room by yourself in New Orleans." But it is nice to
be well received."
SAJ: You've spent time with Hunter S. Thompson.
Swindle: "It was back in '78. Huntsville, Alabama. Hunter flew
into Huntsville to give one of his infamous lectures at the college
there--UAH [University of Alabama], I guess. So we loaded up
with this crazy friend of mine who is gonzo to his bone marrow,
and somehow or other we either followed Hunter or talked to him
about going to this party. We certainly weren't invited.

There was a party somewhere up on a mountain. The road
ended at this house, and the drive through the trees and up this
little mountain was surreal. One of the UAH professors hosted a
get-together for Hunter after his lecture. He didn't know anyone.
And we just fell in. There were a lot of people there. Hunter was
being Hunter, but not as bad as he was towards the end of the
party. He could still understand what we were saying. Let's just
say they tolerated our presence.

It was March. The Final Four was going on in Birmingham,
and John, my friend, told Hunter to come back to Birmingham
with us. He said,"Come on, Hunter, we can catch the last half of
the game if we leave right now." Hunter said,"I'm not going
anywhere with you two *&6%*&^." So we hopped in our car and
trudged on back to Birmingham.
SAJ: How was your new book compiled? Did you do a lot of rewriting?
Swindle: These pieces were written over twelve years, and they
began life as deadline pieces for The Village Voice. It's different
than writing a book, although I did rewrite many of the pieces for
continuity and writer's revenge.You know I put back all the things
the editors took out. I tend to overwrite so a lot of things got taken
out [over the years]. I knew some things would have to go. Some
stuff you fight for more than other stuff.

For Mulletheads, the process was driving up the west Gulf
Coast several times, and you know, it's the same process as a
deadline piece. I'd interview people, hang out, make my notes.
After several months of doing that, you sit down to that blank
screen. It's like building a house.You nail a plank everyday.
SAJ: So how long did it take?
Swindle: Maybe a little less than a year. I spent about four or five
months hanging out. It's kind of a miracle. Even with deadline
pieces, if you're writer, no one ever thinks you're working. [talks
foppishly and waves hand] "It's like he's wandering around and
then one afternoon, he sits down and there will be a story."
People think you just do the magic. Oftentimes, I have to write it
in my head before I sit down. I make notes and stuff. I do just
wander around.

Even your family doesn't think you're working. I tell them a
writer is always working. If I take a walk in the French Quarter or
walk to the grocery store, it's running through my head all the
time. The first draft is written in my head so when I sit down, it's
really the second draft. I move things around [in my head]. It
seems to work for me.

When you're writing a deadline piece, there's more structure
because you know: Okay, they want 2,000 words on X in X many
days so it focuses you. But if I'm writing for myself or a book, you
don't have deadlines like you do when you're getting paid. Or
length restrictions. So I do an awful lot of editing. I usually only
get edited for space. I'm a good editor. Friends have told me I'm
my own worst enemy.

When I started on this road to ruin, I didn't care about prolifi-
cacy. I just wanted what I put out there to be good. My friend
William Price Fox has a theory: It has to sound right. His deal is
he's a big music freak. He hears it rather than sees--well, you
have to see it, obviously, but you know what I mean, you're a
working writer. It's the rhythm. Sometimes you want a staccato
sentence. Sometimes you want something light.
SAJ: Have you ever been late with a deadline?
Swindle: I'm always running late. I've lived in New Orleans for
too long. No one is concerned about being on time--or showing
up, actually. [In the foppish voice] "It's raining." Or "I'm too drunk
to come." I'll tell people this about living in New Orleans: Do
not ever get out of bed and want something to happen right
now--or today. Because therein lies heartbreak. It's not going to
happen today.

But it suits me. I'm a great procrastinator. In general, I really
have fun at work. I always mix my business with pleasures.
You better be able to, or you're not going to have any business [as
a writer].

We're getting into a very dark place here.
SAJ: No, we're not. I promise.
Swindle: Yes, we are. I've just finished this bottle of tequila, and I
don't have anymore.
SAJ: What's the difference between the South and the Deep South?
Swindle: The difference between the South and the Deep South....
Hmmm. The difference between the South and the Deep South is
the difference between lightning bugs and lightning, respectively.

"Are you a liar?"

"Yes." He took a drag off his cigarette, which was already down to the filter.

"A thief?"

"Yes."

"A gambler?"

"Yes."

"Thank God."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm a writer, too."

"Then I've just validated your life for you. Where are you from?"

"Huntsville," I said. "Well, I grew up here in Birmingham, but now I live in Huntsville."

"You knoooow...I hung out with Hunter S. Thompson once in Huntsville."

For a freelance journalist, this information is like finding a newborn bundled in swaddled clothing in a basket with a note reading: "This is all yours."

"He was giving a lecture at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. At the time, his book, Hell's Angels, made a convert out of me."

Michael Swindle is just the kind of writer I aim to be. There are people who go to bed early so they can get up early for work: department-store clerks and piano teachers and journalists with deadlines. This is not Michael Swindle. He is "gonzo"—someone who believes his work is more truthful if he's actively involved instead of an objective observer—to the core, or as he would say, "to my marrow." He's a writer who follows the avant-garde journalistic style revolutionized by Hunter S. Thompson, who died last February of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

"If there is any central characteristic of gonzo journalism," Thompson said, "It is participation in the story. And when you're backing off and talking about it, you're not participating in any way. You're touching it."

I've always regarded this statement to be true. So has Swindle.

The first time I met Swindle it was hot, and all I wanted was a slice of pizza and a good look at my little brother before he went off to fight in Iraq. It was May in Birmingham, and I had been driving around taking pictures of brick walls for a marketing company in New York City. It was my job to find a blank space suitable for a sports drink logo to be spray-painted.

I didn't know what I was getting into when I sat down for a late lunch in an empty pizzeria where my brother was evidently in the process of standing me up. When opportunities present themselves, you take them—or you lose them and get that sinking feeling of knowing somewhere somebody's having a better time than you are.

"This guy's a famous writer," the bartender said to me when she walked over to the table where I sat reading the Birmingham newspaper and going over my photos of blank brick walls.

"Is that right?" I asked because that's what I always say to egg people into telling me more. Curiosity got the best of me so I immediately followed that question with another. "What does he write?"

We were talking about the man--who was totally within earshot—like he was a statue, like Birmingham's Vulcan, frozen at the bar with no voice of his own. He didn't turn around. She put a press release on my table when she brought me utensils and a menu and said in a loud whisper, "He's Michael Swindle," and she cocked her head and pointed her thumb over her shoulder, toward the bar. "He used to write for The Village Voice, and now he has a new book coming out. He's like, gonzo. Does crazy stuff and writes about it. Has a book-signing later. You should stay."

I never turned in the photos to the marketing company. We scheduled an interview for the next month.

When my phone rang at two in the morning, I thought it was one of my college-aged siblings, who are both young adults with red-blooded penchants for trouble-making, a pattern I established for them as a rowdy, rebellious older sister. I thought I was in for a long-winded adventure story that would somehow end with me offering wisdom, car assistance, and/or bail money. Like almost all twentysomethings, rarely do they seek insight.

"Did you get the article I sent you?" he asked without saying hello, in that voice that makes you not only want to listen to what he is saying, but also how he says it. "When is your article due?"

Through the receiver, I heard him take a draw from his cigarette—likely a Pall Mall Red—and pictured him sitting in his little art-and-book-filled shotgun
house in the dark of a New Orleans morning.

"I'm not at liberty to, um—no comment," I stammered before I realized I was lying to my latest interview in the middle of the night.

"Well, the last thing you were asking me about was art, and I wanted to tell you about William," he said, "S. Burroughs." The "S. Burroughs" came out in a dry cough. I blinked hard. My contacts were sticky.

"Okay. It's due. Like, right now," I said. "Burroughs. Shut up. You did not know William S. Burroughs." And in one breath I continued with: "I got the piece you wrote about Thompson. It was—seriously—crazy."

My Valley Girl vernacular is important only because it characterizes a major defect of my generation: a lack of shamans, bards, troubadours, and poets. Generation X has a certain disregard for oral history, the lost art of the illiterate, long winded, and expressive. Swindle is an orator, a showman. I am Cyndi Lauper to his William Jennings Bryan. So I listened because this was a first-person connection to Thompson and now, Naked Lunch author Burroughs. And Swindle—well, he's the sole train conductor of the midnight Gonzo Journalism Express.

"You know I told you about Tina Girouard and the voodoo flag art?"

"Right." "And you have a lot of it and used to curate her shows."

"Listen. I didn't tell you that I have these four-by-eight sheets of steel, blasted by explosives. It was an installment by Tina's boyfriend--an artist, too, and a champion pistol shooter. So he took this metal and blew it up with explosives, and when Burroughs caught wind of it, he wanted in."

"You blew up metal? With William S. Burroughs?"

"Every piece was a surprise. They look like steely flowers. You'll see them when you come down again."

I scratched my head and asked, "Why didn't you tell me this the other day? Do you know what time it is? My story is written. It's done. Do you still have it? The art, I mean?"

"You knooow, Jennifer. My good friend, the Southern writer Roy Blount Jr. had something to say about deadlines," Swindle said immediately after tickling me with this last-minute Burroughs extravaganza. "He says, `You need a deadline, yes indeed. A good, firm deadline so that you know precisely when to be appropriately late.'"

Two months later, he springs Burroughs on me.

"Of course I have it."

Jennifer H. Daniel lives and writes in Huntsville, Alabama and Clemson, South Carolina. She has two dogs and one husband: Mars, Paolo, and Jason. In addition to Southern Arts Journal, Daniel writes and edits for a weekly newspaper in South Carolina and writes for numerous alternative weeklies across the South as well as Arriviste Press, a Boston book publisher. She occasionally contributes comical fake news stories to CampusProgress.org, which is read by students at northeastern universities. Daniel was reared as a Southern belle before she became a writer.