Intended Friday feature: Billy Lombardo on the thing within

May 31, 11:28 AMChicago Literary Scene ExaminerRobert Duffer

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Billy Lombardo steals stories. Five chapters in his new novel-in-stories, How to Hold a Woman (OV Books), were borrowed in part from stories told to him by friends. “A friend of mine calls it benign plagirism,” Lombardo says with a wry smile that is either mischief or humility. However he gets them, the stories would never be realized without Lombardo’s gift for empathy. For both people and language. 

“Whatever it is I’m writing I try to be that precise where I write exactly what it is that I feel so that someone can receive it in the same way,” Lombardo says in a cramped room at the pricey Latin School of Chicago, where Lombardo has taught for nearly two decades and where he oversees Polyphony H.S., an international student-run literary magazine edited and written by high-school-age writers.

The book (click for a full review)is about Alan and Audrey Taylor, whose marriage is strained by the everlasting silence that is their eldest child’s absence. The tragedy is less about what happened to Isabel, a Daisy-Buchanan quoting pubescent, than it is about what is happening to her younger brothers and her parents, whose love is undeniable even as they split, both individually and as a family. Lombardo challenges the reader by playing with point of view and by never giving in to the easily dramatic—what happened to Isabel is suggested in a sentence here or there, but never in full. At first you feel deprived; then you realize that what is happening between Audrey, Alan, Dex and Sammy is much more dramatic—and universal. The stories start in the midst of a typical domestic kerfuffle, like Audrey not making potato pancakes for Father’s Day or the boys getting their sleepover backpack stolen, but intensify so quickly and so profoundly that the conclusions are breathtaking in their abruptness and depth.  The bits that Lombardo chooses to tell, extracting the essence of the “thing within” from the seemingly mundane, are, as a whole, beautiful.

“I really don’t know if I got it right,” Lombardo says with that smile. It takes a second to get that he’s being sincere. This humility, this craving for feedback on how his words hit his audience, is most evident in the backward trajectory of his writing career. In 2005, his The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories, a debut collection centered on Lombardo’s homehood of Bridgeport, earned various award nominations and best book of the year citations, as well as effulgent praise from Chicago and national literati. After that kind of success Lombardo, who’d taken one writing class, enrolled in a low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson, where it dawned on him that the stories he’d been writing monthly for the Forest Park Post might in fact be a novel.

“I was afraid I was done writing because these other stories were taking so long,” Lombardo says. That worry evidently led to productivity. How To Hold a Woman is due out this month (June 2009), followed by a poetry collection Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, and his next novel, The Man with Two Arms--about a switch pitcher--is due out from Overlook Press in early 2010, and his agent is shopping around his novella.The MFA program gave him the language of the craft, putting a name to things he was already doing. More than anything, it taught him how to read. “You can give me a paragraph of a writer’s work and I can sense something about his mindset.”

Lombardo’s main schooling, however, came on the stage of the Uptown Poetry Slam under the on-the-stage tutelage of slampapi Marc Smith. “You have one chance to shut people up,” Lombardo says about the Green Mill experience. He applies a poet’s concentration to the language of his prose. “When I’m successful it’s because you read it exactly the way I intended it to be read, and exactly how I felt when I wrote it.  I was able to do that before anyone told me anything about writing.”

In 160 pages Lombardo succeeds by touching on so many kinds of love that the Taylor’s depth of feeling and humanity—their tragedy notwithstanding—almost makes them enviable. To have that kind of love. “When you’re talking about love it’s so hard to do you just take it in little pieces. Maybe that’s all we have, these little stories about love.”

Yup.