Patrick Coleman

Patrick Coleman makes things from words, sounds, and occasional pictures. His debut collection of poems, Fire Season, was written after the birth of his first child by speaking aloud into a digital audio recorder on the long commute between the art museum where he worked and his home in a rural neighborhood that burned in the Witch Creek Fire of 2007. It won the 2015 Berkshire Prize and was released by Tupelo Press on December 1, 2018. His short-form prose has appeared in Hobart, ZYZZYVA, Zócalo Public Square, the Writer's Chronicle, the Black Warrior Review, Juked, and the Utne Reader, among others. The Art of Music, an exhibition catalogue on the relationship between visual arts and music that he edited and contributed to, was co-published by Yale University Press and the San Diego Museum of Art. Coleman earned an MFA from Indiana University and a BA from the University of California Irvine. He lives in Ramona, California, with his wife and two daughters, and is the Assistant Director of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego.

Coleman's first novel is The Churchgoer.

From his Q&A with Rachel Lyon at The Rumpus:

The Rumpus: There is something noir-like about this novel. Like other readers and reviewers, I was reminded while reading it of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Of course you are writing about San Diego, and Chandler’s setting was Los Angeles, but it seems to me that, what with the eerie SoCal mystery, and the ugliness that lurks behind the blue skies and great weather, you are kind of his spiritual heir. And yet The Churchgoer does not fall neatly into any genre or category. To what extent were you toying with the tropes of the noir and/or mystery genres? Do you find it useful to consider genre—structurally, process-wise, or otherwise?

Patrick Coleman: Thank you! I was very much thinking about Chandler, particularly The Long Goodbye. He wrote that book in La Jolla, while his wife, Cissy, was slowly dying. It’s his most elegiac book, the one in which he bends the rules of pulp detective fiction the most. A reviewer at the time said, “Marlowe is less a detective than a disturbed man of forty-two on a quest for some evidence of truth and humanity.” And that’s one of the things I loved: that this thoroughly compelling detective story painted a surprising, sharp, almost George Grosz-ian portrait of so many aspects of Los Angeles at the time. I was angry about the California I’d grown up in, about the America I was living in. I wanted to tease some of that out and push and pull against that form.

I was especially frustrated with the usual way you don’t get to know much about the detective/protagonist, and thinking about the almost mythical place that figure occupies. Typically male, right about everything, quick to violence but with a handle on good-vs-bad in a way that most of us can’t manage in daily life. Everything else came out of that—the choices with...[read on]

Visit Patrick Coleman's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Churchgoer.

The Page 69 Test: The Churchgoer.

--Marshal Zeringue