The two-story, well-stocked Lucky Dog Books in Oak Cliff still feels like a cozy secret I selfishly don’t want to tell. But there’s a good reason to slip the mention: Author Aaron Teel, who attended the University of North Texas and played music in Denton for a time in the mid-aughts before moving to Austin, will be reading from his chapbook at the store on Saturday at 7 p.m., thanks to Wordspace.
Shampoo Horns is a chapbook of short fiction published by Austin’s Rose Metal Press, a stamp with interest in hybrid genres — namely flash fiction and nonfiction. Teel’s book won the publisher’s chapbook contest before being adopted for courses by Indiana University.
Teel told Jessi Cape ofThe Austin Chronicle that his stories about the trailer park of 12-year-old Cherry’s childhood are largely autobiographical. They grew from Teel’s desire to write a Nabokovian memoir like Speak, Memory, and went off those rails when Teel realized memoir was too restricting. Fitting, because a host of illusions define his memories:
Austin Chronicle: I found the difference in Cherry, Tater, and Clay’s relationships with their fathers interesting. Were you consciously trying to create contrasting portraits of the father/son bond, or did that sort of emerge as you were writing the individual stories?
Aaron Teel: The idea was to focus on the kids, and to allow all of the adults in their lives to be sort of mysterious and unknowable, which is the way I felt as a kid. Fathers are the most unknowable of all. They’re masculinity personified. Huge, mythic beings to be loathed and worshipped in equal measure.