American Freaks: The Writing Process

By Michael Mohr

American Freaks—my first short story collection—is highly autobiographical. The collection is a gathering of 21 gritty, “real life” stories from my wild drinking days. (There’s a reason I am nearly 15 years sober!) And yet it would be a mistake to read these stories as thinly veiled memoir. I am, after all, a fiction writer, a penner of literary prose, an “artist,” to use a loaded word.

Michael Mohr

Memory is a slippery thing. It can’t ever truly be relied on. Ask six eyewitnesses to a crime what happened and police often get six very divergent accounts. This is because all human beings have internal bias; memory is complex and hard to accurately nail down; we (especially writers) tend to embellish; we tend to revise history a bit (sometimes a lot); we tell our own conscious and unconscious self-hero myths; we mythologize our lives.

And so, this all being the case, I can’t honestly call these short stories “memoir.” I often did write as truthfully as I could given my human limitations…but I also often added little flourishes, or I deleted a key moment, took out a crucial character or piece of context, made the narrator of any given story feel differently than I actually recall feeling in real-time.

Why? That’s easy to answer: For the sake of Story; for the sake of drama, action, intensity of interiority, revelatory insight, and to make the wild, erratic, non-linear, non-clear-cut anecdotes of my life experience from ages 17 to 27—the years I was an active, out-of-control alcoholic—into actual stories ripe (I hope) with depth, emotion, meaning and transmogrification. Spiritual awakening was what I was aiming for, at least in the overall arc of the pieces.

Still, there is a lot of general (and some very specific) “reality” in these stories. I did pass out in an alley in Mexico (I was 23) in a blackout and wake up in a moving car with people I didn’t know. I did steal a car with a vagabond I met on the road (strangely unintentionally). I did get high on acid in Maine and shoot off a .22 rifle, a bullet ricocheting and nearly killing me. I did sleep with all those wounded, lonely women. I did hitchhike across America, and hop a freight train. I felt all that broad, deep loneliness, fear, self-hate and emotional confusion. I was a lost soldier fighting a war (adulthood; convention) I did not fully understand.

These stories were written in a fever-pitch between 2012—when I had, at 29, my first short story ever published in a magazine—and 2019, when the last one was published, and then many since then published on my Substack. I was trying, while writing these tales—sober and from my late twenties to my mid-thirties—to put down what it was like to be ME during a roiling, chaotic time in my life that I was frankly lucky to survive.

Buy a copy of Michael Mohr’s short story collection, American Freaks, HERE. Read the whole book on his Substack, HERE

My influences are clear (or should be): Jack Kerouac, Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Hemingway, O’Connor, Updike, Didion, Baldwin, etc. My aim was always to push the envelope, to slash at convention, orthodoxy, “normalcy,” and the eternal bourgeoise: Just like I did in my life during those years. I was a rebel, absolutely, but also a scared-shitless, immature, angry kid who didn’t know how to live.

Thus writing it all down—and then, over time, revising and creating art out of something more like prose vomit—allowed me a catharsis, in the ancient classical Greek sense. I felt like, if I could somehow turn these absurd tales into something aiming higher than just dirt, grit, chaos and loneliness, I’d feel as if my life during that time was not a waste, that it was something meant to become translatable to other human beings. I needed some way in which to communicate that I had been very much lost but alive, searching desperately for love and redemption, though always in the wrong places.

Why stories? Why not a novel or a straight memoir? Well, I wrote those, too. (Visit my Substack for that.) But when it came to these specific tales it seemed to me that the best, the most ideal, the most iconic and productive way to proceed was to will them into artistic expression in the form of individual pieces, slices of anecdote turned into unique scrolls of thought. That’s how my life often felt at the time: Not one long whole narrative but little tales chopped into fine segregated bins of dust. From chaos: Order. The arc of these stories represents the arc of my sober life, too. When I first got sober, in 2010 at the age of 27, I was angry, confused, lost. I hated myself. I thought everyone had been given the memo except me. How did one “do” relationships? How did one have friends? How did one tell the truth? How did one listen to authority? How did one be part of a family? Most importantly: How did one love, self or other?

I learned the answer to these questions over the years as I wrote and then revised these stories, and as I stayed sober day by day, year by year, and as I got older and settled, at last, into something like adulthood and general contentment.

The stories are in no particular order. That felt right given the slapdash nature of my life back then. The events aren’t all exactly accurate but the general feelings are all “true.” I aimed for emotional truth versus exact corporeal reality. Most of the stories mimic my early twenties. A few show me as a child. A couple show me in my thirties. They’re mostly all edgy, gritty, and intense, foreshadowing the suffering to come, the eventual spiritual bottom hit, and the subsequent transmogrification.

I hope you enjoy these stories. They’re certainly not politically correct. They’re absolutely real, raw and honest, even if, as I said before, they don’t always exactly capture the cold hard evident “reality” of that time. (They surely get generally fairly close.) But there does seem to be, after many years working on them, the sense of universality with the tales as a whole. They create the complex fabric of a young man searching for meaning and purpose in what feels to him like a meaningless world. Having been forced into life without my consent, the narrator seems to often be saying in the stories, I now must create my own meaning, my own understanding of the human experience.

Have fun. Be careful. These stories will take you on a wild ride.

I should know. I lived them. 

About the writer

Michael Mohr is the author of six books: The Crew (literary punk YA); Two Years in New York: Before, During and After COVID (fictional memoir); Disgust and Desire (A tragic COVID love story); Controversial: The Substack Essays, Polemics 2022-2024 (an essay collection); and American Freaks (a short story collection) and The Grim Room (psychological prison suspense). He writes on Substack at Sincere American Writing (michaelmohr.substack.com).