“It’s not really an interesting story,” says Gomez good-naturedly--not about any of the six short stories in the prize-winning collection, all of which, judging from the excerpts I have been shown, have fascinating and original premises--but about how he came to live in Luxembourg. Originally from Colorado, USA, he moved to the grand duchy 15 years ago because his wife got a job here.
“It’s a nice place to live,” he adds. “I’ve got no major gripes except for, I guess, the colour of the sky in the winter.”
Under that grey sky, however, Gomez has been busy. Before setting up the Wurst in 2017, he ran another satirical website focused on American politics; he has written three screenplays, a (for now) abandoned novel, and many more short stories; and he’s also currently collaborating with Fireflies, a local production company, on an animated video project. (On top of all that, he has even threatened to launch a Europe-wide satire website…)
On the fiction-writing front, Gomez’s work has recently made the transition from private project to award-winning collection: the culture ministry--specifically jurors Pascal Seil, Mylène Branco, Marion Rockenbrod, Jeff Schinker and Jeff Thoss--chose “The Idiot of St. Benedict”, a collection of six short stories, for the main prize (€5,000) in the adult authors category of the 2022 National Literary Competition. Gomez’s stories beat 39 other submissions.
The Idiot of St. Benedict
The first evening, you drink as much as you can of the weak ale, served without reservation by the moon-faced daughter who smells of manure. Three bowls in, the pain in your head lessens, your confusion itself becomes confused, and you no longer care where you are or how you got here. Even as homely as the daughter is, she steadfastly refuses your advances late that night when she leads you outside to sleep among the pigs.
This is an excerpt from “The Idiot of St. Benedict”, a story from the winning collection of the same name. In it, a man turns up in a pigpen in medieval Belgium believing himself to be a scholar from the future, sent there to solve an architectural conundrum.
The second evening, she, whose name is never offered to you, is as gracious a hostess as the first night, bringing you ale, serving you meat and boiled roots before the others reach for a morsel. The daughter, mother, and father are transfixed by your delicate table manners and your modesty, by the way you hid behind a bush when you peed. After a second bowl, no more ale is brought, and the father escorts you to the pile of hay that is your bed.
Gomez’s prose has a particular balance to it, whereby things happen quickly but not at the expense of detail or a feeling of fullness. Enjoyable for readers, tricky to pull off for writers. “I would say sparse,” the author comments when pressed for a description of his style. “I don’t give a lot of description--I don’t like reading a lot of description, so therefore I don’t give a whole lot.” He adds that his style tends to shapeshift story by story, which is less his intention than something that just happens.
Elsewhere in the collection, readers--eventual readers, as the collection is not yet published--will find dystopia, horror, revenge and more.
For instance, “Twice Daily, at 8. a.m and Noon” plunges into a dystopia where alien occupiers have forced humans to re-enact major scenes from human history. In this environment, an actress looks back at, as Gomez describes it, “her wasted life… [playing] with the idea of taking violent, poetic revenge”.
Inspiration
If there is satire in these stories, it will be decidedly more opaque and sinister than what you might find in the Wurst. Satire, however, isn’t the aim. “I’ve got nothing to say really about life in general, or about where we’re headed,” Gomez says of his fiction, explaining that his ideas tend to just turn up unannounced, or perhaps via a dream.
From there, the writing process is--perhaps surprisingly--“quite easy”. “If I were to struggle a lot with a short story,” he says, “I would just not write it.”
The prose doesn’t come across, at all, as casually written (if that’s what “quite easy” suggests). It’s thoughtful, smooth and tightly edited. But it does have a simplicity or directness that might stem from the likes of Ernest Hemingway, whom Gomez cites as an inspiration (“this will infuriate some people,” he hedges) along with Kurt Vonnegut, Denis Johnson and Raymond Carver. These names, however, are of secondary importance to him: “I don’t really have strong inspirations in my life in terms of literary figures that have influenced me.”
It sounds as if the author is focused mainly on craft: a simple idea comes, the spark is lit, the words burn outwards into a story and all of it is guided by Gomez’s literary sensitivities as a whole.
What’s next
“I’m hoping to get this first collection published locally,” comments Gomez. “After that, I’m going to continue working on a second collection of short stories” He adds that he already has about ten others of the same calibre as those in “The Idiot of St. Benedict”.
As for the three screenplays, these go more into the horror genre (“thoughtful horror” he calls it) and are works-in-progress. The animation project with Fireflies is underway, and the old novel draft--clocking in at 140,000 words--needs revision but there may yet be hope. “I would like to resurrect it,” says Gomez. “But, when I look at it now, it seems a bit naïve… my short stories tend to be the dark and speculative in nature. And my novel, it just seems like it was written by a young person.”