Washington Square on air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Lucken, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with Timothy Dodd, whose piece the Darlene Conspiracy is in our Summer 25 issue. Hey there, Timothy.

Hello, Melissa. Nice to be. Nice to see you.

Nice to be here, yeah. Cool. So give us a little overview of your piece and let us know how you came to write it.

Okay. Well, first of all, before we get to that, may I say hello to Washington Square Review? Anyone involved? Anyone at the Lansing Community College and Lansing. I'm a person who's very interested in geography and place. So maybe we'll come back to talk a bit about Michigan.

I'd love to, yes.

So, yeah, the Darlene Conspiracy, I think is. It's the story that's in the upcoming issue. And how did I come to write that? I'm gonna have to tell you that I really honestly cannot remember. And that's what kind of happens when you're writing 12 different things at once. I'm a bit of a.

Well, give us a little a nutshell overview. What's it about?

Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of an obsessive, so there's a lot of things going on at once with the writing. But it's a story that's about a quirky guy. I guess I'm probably used the word quirky maybe too much in this interview, but he's a quirky guy. He has essentially, he has these hallucinations of seeing his ex or his former girlfriend in various locations around town. So the story starts out with another of these spottings in the Walmart checkout line. And of course, even though he knows that he's got this problem and this issue, he's always dead sure that this time it's her. So the guy proceeds to follow her and he's. He's doing a bit of stalking, to be honest. He follows her out of the parking lot, out of the. Actually out of the Walmart into the parking lot, out of the parking lot. Where is she going? What's going on? And all these questions. Finds out that she turns into a motel, which is not really a five star hotel. Let's say it's. It's one of your. More a hookup joint, you might say, I guess, kind of, among other things. But so he follows her in there and then basically the story goes on with his mind Trying to figure out what she's doing there, what's going on, and all of his obsessive compulsive issues that are involved in this problem. But that's kind of the basic narrative. But really, essentially what I was trying to get at with this piece is bigger issues of longing, bigger issues of nostalgia. This is a hotel where he stayed at himself, where him and his ex used to actually go in their youth. So really, what the story is trying to get at is this sort of longing and this feeling of nostalgia and place, things past. As the narrative unfolds towards the end of the story, we get into that. That issue of who he is, what he's doing and such. And I will say that if anyone who might happen to be familiar with some of the pieces that I write, this issue of nostalgia and longing is sort of probably a central theme that I go back to a lot. I think a lot of the Romantics among us have this feeling of nostalgia for various things. And that's basically the story.

Okay, well, you kind of. That was a little preview answer to my next question. When. Which was, how does this piece fit in with your other work? And so we already know the.

Yeah. Well, and there's also. Yeah, I've actually. I'm sorry, I may be jumping ahead of you, Melissa, but I've had a couple of three poems in different issues of Washington Square Review. And I find that the ones that are accepted often sort of relate to this. Again, this sense of nostalgia, this sense of bygone eras, past times. And sort of. It's not simply a romanticization of it, but it's a longing for times past. So this. Yeah, this story is. Is not just about longing for his ex, but it's more about longing for life as it used to be and. And not being able to find your place in the current setup or whatever you have going on in life in the current times and modernity. And you just have this loss, longing for a past. And actually, this story is a part of. I have a manuscript that's called Love Bumps. This is a story that's in that collection. It's not published. I'm just finishing it. But these are all stories where love is kind of quirky and. Or kind of goes wrong, goes haywire, doesn't work out the way you had planned it, so to speak. And so the Darling Conspiracy is also tied to these. These stories and this issue. And again, even though the stories are all about love, they're really not. They're really trying to get at things that Are under the surface of what are we doing when we are looking for this other person? What are we wanting in love? What are we trying to find for issues under the narratives, I hope.

Yeah. Kind of the individual's experience of love and being in a relationship and what that means to the person. Kind of separate from the experience of having the relationship with the other person.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, I mean, again, there's a lot of. There's a lot of angles to these stories that I've composed, but essentially they are. They all have sort of a narrative tie of people who are having issues with their relationships in different settings, different scenarios. Some of them tragic, some of them just ridiculous, some of them silly. But as a collective, it's really. Again, I like to write things where there's a narrative and you can follow the narrative and it's clear, more or less. But there's also issues underneath the surface, which I'm trying to get to. So even though the collection is now called Love Bumps and all of the stories on the surface are all about love, it's really trying to get beyond that and see what's behind this issue that we seek.

How does this theme of nostalgia fit in with your own life beyond writing? Just wanting to have, like, any collections of nostalgic items.

That's a great question. You're gonna get right to the heart of me here, so let's go for it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm really not a person who is in love with modernity or. I don't know. I mean, I'm adequately competent or comfortable in it, but it's really not who I am. So I'm always trying to find other outlets to get to eclipse or to counter the time and the space that I'm in. I won't say that I'm stuck here. You know, we are all in a certain time and place, but I like time travel. I like going to new continents and countries and towns and places that are forgotten and no one cares about really much anymore. So, yeah, this is all. This nostalgia thing is kind of my way to get outside of just being told that I am here and I am now and need to behave and do and think and love all of the things that we are sort of expected to participate in in our current time setting. So, yeah, it's very much connected to both my fiction and my poetry. But I think you've opened it up because nostalgia is sort of usually a look at sort of a romanticization of times past or a longing for times past. But this is also sort of one part of me, and I'm sure many other people, too, who just like to get beyond the time and space that we're sort of set in for those of us who feel like we are kind of conditioned or framed into being certain people in certain times and places and all of the things that kind of go along with here and now. And I just. I'm a person who just likes to have experiences which sort of, I don't know, set my mind off or blow my mind or make me feel that I've transported to somewhere else. That's just interesting and intriguing for me. So writing is a big outlet for me in doing that. But even before I was a writer, I really just love to travel. That's a big part of me trying to get beyond my own time and space.

You said you also do oil painting. Is that part of this?

Yeah, I would say so. Oil painting. I have never been a natural at oil painting, but it's one of those things that I've always. Since high school, I really learned to love visual arts, particularly painting. I didn't have a background in any of this, in painting and writing or my family didn't say, oh, you need to do these things. They're sort of things that just came out of me innately as I tried to find myself moving along in the world. But the painting sort of came about just from loving going into museums and seeing paintings. And again, having that moment where I'm not here and now I am suddenly moved to a different time, to a different place. And I can say that, and it maybe sounds weird, but if it happens to you, actually it happens to all of us. At some point when you have a moment where you are not really right in this time, in this place, you are transported creatively or imaginatively or even physically, some other interesting place, and your mind sort of shifts. You know, this. What happened to me when I would see paintings. And then I guess the next logical step is try and paint. And when I first try and paint it, I think that was one of the scariest moments of my life. Because, honestly, I got a. I had a blank canvas and I had the paints beside me. I cannot draw. I couldn't draw myself if I had to with any sense of realism. And now there's this canvas, and I had no training, no idea how to mix colors, no idea of any sort of technical capabilities. And I like, what the heck do I do now on this blank canvas? And I painted something. And it was obvious. It was. As anyone who paints would probably expect very one dimensional, very flat. And then I just thinking this just gave me an appreciation for what painters do. How do they create this depth and this feeling and this visual reality that's just a total fabrication on this piece of paper?

Yes, for sure.

Yeah. And then from there, I, some years later, tried it again and I got a little bit better. And then years later, I got a little bit better. And then I showed a canvas to an artist in the Philippines, matter of fact, and he claims. It's hard for me to believe him at the moment. He claimed that he really liked it. And I said, yeah, well, I know that's. You're. You're crazy too. That's why, you know, we get along so well. But I didn't buy it. But as time went on, I could see that he did have a genuine interest in what I was trying to create. So, long story short, I kept practicing. I could say technically, I'm still probably, I would say average at best. Honestly, probably below average or maybe even terrible. It's funny how I have actually created paintings that I. I like myself, which.

Let me ask you this, okay. So you say that you're not great or maybe not good. And people tell me that oil painting is really intimidating because you got the oil, the textures of the oil, the size of the canvas, just the complexity of putting the actually getting the paint to do what you want, which is all that stuff. So what I'm wondering is, given that what you're not producing isn't like this super amazing, stellar work, what is it about the process of doing it that you find satisfying?

Okay, yes. And that's the thing. Because I have created paintings and I'm doing it. I'm doing it, I'm doing it. I'm thinking, I don't know what's going on. And then I will step back and look at it. And it's something that I did not anticipate with writing. I feel like I am always pretty much in control with writing. Even when I have, you know, a hurdle or I'm trying to think about how to accomplish something, I feel like I have the capabilities to figure it out and get from point A to point B eventually. With painting, I don't have. I don't have any confidence in knowing those steps. So when I just, I start and it's very spontaneous, but I do have sort of a visual. Half the time, it doesn't turn out to look like what the visual was, but it could sometimes be. It sometimes ends up being better. And when you have One of those canvases that turn out actually better than what you anticipated. And then you look at it and you just feel. Feel like, did I really do that? It's. It's hard to. It's again, one of those moments where we. Where I was talking about getting past time and space. It's one of those moments when I just feel like, well, what just happened? Because this is not what I planned. This is not technical skill. But yet what I see is evocative and communicating something to me. And then I have had other people, not just the one person who kind of encouraged me originally, but have looked at these and they have probably no idea that I'm started from hardly able to draw. You know, I couldn't draw a hand. They don't know this. And then they look at the paintings and they tell me whatever feedback they give me. And, you know, I'm thinking, well, hey, some other people maybe see something in it. So it's very intriguing to me. It's. It's a sort of. It's almost a sort of magic to me because you just. I just don't know how. It's. It's not scientific. It's not, oh, I know how to get from A to B. It's not. If I do this, I know I'm going to get this like you do when you're fixing a car or anything else. It's just very spontaneous and then it happens. And of course, some of them, I just paint over them, but there's quite a few that I have turned out to like. And it's just. It's one of those things. So that sort of keeps me intrigued, it keeps me engaged with the painting. And, and, and I will say also because they're not realistic PA paintings, of which most realistic paintings, honestly, it's not really what intrigues me anyway, when I look at other artists, I've always sort of liked the Expressionists and the Post Impressionists, and that's also kind of what I do, which, lucky for me, doesn't seem to require quite as much technical skill because you don't have to draw a hand that looks like a hand. You can draw a blurry, weird, disfigured, distorted hand. And it might be, hey, it's perfect. So if you look at my paintings, you will see a lot of Expressionism. And actually, even if you read some of my writing, you will see a lot of Expressionism, which is sort of, I guess Expressionism is not realism per se, but it's more about inner emotions, atmospheres, bright colors, yeah. So I think that all kind of. It is connected as far as who I am and what attracts me and motivates me.

We've had a couple of your poems, and we'll be having one more in our Summer 25 issue. How has your work in poetry fit in with your creativity?

So it's probably going to be a.

Long answer, which I hope that's fine.

Okay. So. So fiction, my fiction, it's more narrative. A lot of my fiction is set in my home state of West Virginia, although I have certainly have a lot of fiction which I've finished and looking for publishers that's not about West Virginia and Appalachia, but it's a more. I don't want to say logical, but there's more narrative in my fiction, I think. I think it's fair to say. Whereas with poetry, I really feel a lot freer. With poetry, I can write a narrat poem, but my poems are more. They're more expressive. There's more expressionism in them. They're all over the board. For example, just this past weekend, I was on the road going to this abandoned town, and the person who was driving ran a red light. And just last night, this was, I guess, last weekend. Then just last night, I wrote a poem, running a red Light in Minersville. Just anything that can happen really sets off, I guess if you think about it at any point in life, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, even as we're talking right here now, you know, we can say, well, Melissa and Timothy are having this conversation about writing, but there's always other things going on. You have a big banner behind you that's got a typewriter. There's blues, there's a cup of coffee, There's a green kind of Art deco chair. I mean, if I really want to stop and take it all in, there's a lot going on that can affect dynamics, emotions. That doesn't sound too New Agey or silly, but.

No, it sounds great.

You know, in life when you're, you know, I'm just driving down the road, but there's a lot going on. What's happening outside the. The car, where you're going, the conversation, the music. And for me, in a poem, unlike in a narrative story, in a poem, I can encapsulate all of that. That moment in time, sort of that energy or that electricity. It can all be sort of crystallized in a poem. And I find that very attractive and fascinating. So my poetry is a lot more. It's less narrative. It's a Lot more in the moment of experiences and what happens to me or what happens to any of us.

So you said the poems are. Well, to back up, you said a lot of your fiction is set in your home state and that the poems aren't necessarily reflective of us.

Yes. Yes, you're reading that correctly. Yes.

Why? Why is that?

Well, I don't know. Because. Yeah, it's a really good question. Although I will say this also, I just published a book of poetry that's called orbits 52. It is set in West Virginia, and it is one long poem, so I don't remember how long the book is, maybe eight pages, but it's one long poem. And it's actually not that I only write about poems in cars, but it is actually a road trip poem, father and son, and it's set in West Virginia. But why it can go on for 80 pages is because it's not just a narrative of the father and son dynamics and they're actually taking a trip, going to see the wife, mother, who is in a mental institution. So that's sort of the narrative that goes from the beginning to the end. But in all of this narrative, there's all kinds of stuff that I throw in. There's. There's cryptids, there's apocalyptic stuff, there's history, there's. There's natural history, there's the ghost towns that were passing. And in this. What? Again, I think I'm repeating myself. But what I like about poetry is there's. There's just a sort of freedom for me in writing poetry where I can dig into all sorts of things that someone might say, well, this doesn't fit the story, or how are you throwing this in? This isn't connected. This is all disparate stuff. Now I'm confused, But this book, Orbits 52, is sort of like a collage. It really is trying to encapsulate everything that's going on in this short drive between two towns in West Virginia. There's a lot going on there. It's a forgotten space of the country by most people, but there's a lot going on. And again, back to me finding intrigue in jumping time and jumping space. This is my home state, is a good place to do that.

You've mentioned ghost towns a couple times. So now we just have to know, how did you find this ghost town? What did it look like?

Yeah, right. So again, back to nostalgia, back to going to places outside of our regular time and regular space. Ghost towns are very intriguing for me because they're real. Places that have existed and people have lived their lives, raised children, worked, grown food, all that, and now they're gone. They're back to nature maybe. Or there could be some leftovers, some remnants. And I really find these places interesting because it just again it sets your mind in motion. Like not just you. For me, I can't help but think, you know, when I go to ghost town, well, these people aren't here anymore. For me, the next logical thing is, well, neither am I. I'm not going to be here much longer either. None of us are, you know, so it. It again starts to make you think about who you are, where you are, what life is, all the processes that have happened. I'm not just stuck in Gmail and iPhones right now, but I'm thinking about the greater world and life and speaking of ghost towns, I said I wanted to say something about Michigan because I'm assuming probably maybe a lot of. If there are people, the people who are listening, maybe a lot of them are from Michigan. So I have. It's funny, I know, you know, maybe people don't think about this but Michigan and West Virginia, they're only two states apart. It's just that. That. That bloom in Ohio between us, but we're really that close. But growing up, I don't really remember people traveling to Michigan from West Virginia. It wasn't really something. It really wasn't a place that was talked about a lot. But it's an interesting place for me. It's an intriguing place for me. I know you've got lots of good ghost towns actually among things. Of course I've only made it to Michigan once but I did want to say I did make it to Lansing. So give me some sort of.

All right. Yes.

I've been to Ypsilanti, Flint, Detroit. Trying to think the small towns. Adrian, that rings to come.

Yep. So you have not been to the up the Upper peninsula?

That's on my short list. I promise I will make it there. It is a must see. I have not. But the reason I'm also bringing this up is all this talk about nostalgia and ghost sounds, etc. You may not be surprised to hear that I had to go to the Irish Hills and that all was capped off by me getting. I was not arrested, but I did have to speak to the police about trespassing on this abandoned amusement park. It is, I believe it is called a prehistoric forest near. What's the town? I want to say Oneida.

I. I don't know but it sounds familiar.

Hopefully Someone out there knows what I'm talking about.

I'm sure someone does.

It was this beautiful amusement park with these old huge dinosaurs. And they're all roaming and kind of. Some of them are on the ground, some of them are in perfect condition. But for those people who like. What is it called? Urban X or abandoned sites and stuff like that, I'm sure they. They know this place is probably a.

Bit famous, but however, it's not open to the public. Apparently not open to the public.

It may be now. I don't know, probably not, but it was not open to the public. I guess it didn't stop me.

Apparently not.

Yeah. And you know, sometimes I guess you just have to break a couple rules for the things you love there. That's. That's what. What we say in love bumps, anyway.

So what did you get out of the experience?

Well, again, it's like when I walked, you know, and I'm not into. I don't care about the trespassing. That's not my thing. Just to break all the rules. But this was. The trees are growing. It's sort of forested now. And you have these huge, I'm gonna say 10 foot, 15 foot, 20 foot dinosaurs. I remember Tyrannosaurus rex. I remember woolly mammoth. And they're just kind of hanging out there, you know, they look sort of realistic, but they're huge. And now the trees are all growing around them. The grass is growing up at their feet. And when I'm walking there, it's just like, okay, I'm not here in. Wherever I was back on the street just two minutes ago. I'm now like in a whole other world. For those of us who like to be creative, that's sort of where imaginative thinking starts to come in.

Right.

You know, and your mindset changes, the atmosphere changes. So. And I guess that's sort of what I mean. I write, but that's sort of the motivation behind my writing again, that I've tried to express that just getting beyond these. The usual everyday feelings and trying to experience a shift in your mind, atmospheres and experience something. Something different. So. But up. I'm sure I will make it someday because I hear that's a beautiful place. And there's lots of other. Tons of other places in Michigan. No one has enough time to go to all these great places.

But that's the truth.

Yeah, you know, I try.

All right, so if people would like to keep in touch with your adventures and misadventures, where can they find you? Online?

I sort of do social media by I guess by requirement. I do have a website that own WordPress. It's just TimothyBDodd WordPress. I have an Instagram page where you could see paintings. I do have an Amazon page for my writing. I have a Goodreads page. So I guess that's after it's all said and done. That's a fairly significant social media. I don't know if anyone ever visits any of those things, but they're there in case if you want.

All right, well we will put the links in the show notes and then if people want to visit, they can do it.

Thank you, thank you. That would be great.

Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for visiting today.

Okay, Melissa, these 30 minutes passed fast for me, so I hope not slow for anyone else who's there listening as well. I appreciate all the time and support for sure.

Thanks for stopping by the audio town square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been the Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about our writers, community and literary journal, visit lcc. Edu wsl Writing is messy, but do it anyway. Sam.