Chris Semtner didn’t want to remove the spider.
Chris Semtner (Photo courtesy Chris Semtner)
Back in 2000, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum curator was himself on display behind a plexiglass wall while cleaning the model of Poe’s Richmond. He says in his dry and dark-edged way, “There was this big spider by Moldavia,” referring to the long-vanished mansion on the southeast corner of Fifth and Main streets where Poe lived prior to his tempestuous stint at the University of Virginia. “I waited a long time before removing [the spider]. People would say, ‘No wonder Poe wrote about spiders, if they were that big back then.’”
A Blackstone native and a writer and painter, Semtner studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In “The Poe Shrine: Building the World’s Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection,” (Fonthill Media/Arcadia Press), he considers prosaic items such as Poe’s pen knife, a walking stick, and a stained and repaired vest and weaves the plot of the writer’s life — a third of which was spent in Richmond — and the lingering mystery of his death (with 30 theories about how he died). He also introduces the eccentrics who possessed the vision to create what they at first named "The Poe Shrine," in an old stone house, where Poe never lived but which he visited, as a youngster, at least once. Semtner shows that one cannot follow the rays emanating from Poe’s history without encountering the coincidental, macabre, absurd and comitragic.
Clay Blancett (Photo by Summer Anne Aranda)
Similar elements are found in Clay Blancett’s novel “Avenue of Champions,” (Hysterical Books), which takes its title from the street near The Diamond where for many years stood the garage and shops supporting the city’s fleet of vehicles for waste collection. The Great Recession of 2008 knocked Blancett out of the carpentry and construction trades, and he found temporary employment in city sanitation. A Virginia Commonwealth University sculpture major who followed his passion into poetry, whose teachers included the late Larry Levis, Blancett's background was in the underground punk scene of early 1990s Richmond — a vivid flashback crops up in the narrative of this fictional memoir — and later, New York City.
The “Champions” protagonist resembles a Poe character, in that he’s desperate and a little crazy. He’s fighting both to maintain a connection to his children and a hold on his sanity during a messy divorce. Meanwhile, he scours through the detritus of strangers’ lives in the back alleys and forgotten streets of Richmond. The sanitation crew is often sent to shovel up the fetid aftermath of evictions. The character of Clay wonders about the family pictures, the children’s toys and broken furniture that once comprised someone’s home, and he’s engaged in a tug-of-war against the gravitational pull of despair. He works to overcome his anxieties through art-making with his two kids, and while on the job he revels in fecundity of Richmond’s alleys; trees and vines seem intent on reclaiming the city. Nature is as much a focus in “Champions” as Clay's co-workers, surprise encounters with people and the unending piles of refuse.
One chapter involves the collection of Christmas trees and their transportation to a 5-acre lot for mulching. “I drank my coffee and gazed out the windshield at our ocean of conifers and let my imagination set it to rolling.” He’s seized with the notion of jumping into them, like an ocean, and leaps from the dump box of a boom truck, “and slowly standing from a crouch, flung myself into the void. I got lucky and no errant limbs harpooned me as I landed my stage dive in the pungent piney embrace of our labor.”
Blancett began “Champions” in 2011. What started as prosody in paragraphs turned into blog posts that evolved into a novel. When debating about where to take several ideas for longer-form fiction he spoke with a friend (and, full disclosure, a former editor at this publication), Jack Cooksey. Blancett explains, “I told him ‘I gotta write a book; I don’t know what to do’ and gave him four or five of my ideas, but I couldn’t talk about this story without getting choked up. He insisted I do that one and emphasize the imagery and experience.”
Semtner’s first encounter with the Poe Museum came 20 years ago when he set off across town on foot and followed erratic signage to a then-grotty Shockoe Bottom and the somewhat-ragged museum of the time, where he gazed upon a trunk that Poe’s last hotel kept for payment due, and which he didn’t live to recover. Semtner later assisted in its cleaning. He discovered that the trunk wasn’t black, but grey, and the fittings shiny brass. “Once we cleaned it off and peeled away the accumulated grime, we could get a better view of it,” he recalls.
Just as his book does, the various items that belonged to Poe reveal parts of his character that you may have never known. They also demonstrate that nothing is ever accomplished without passion, even obsession, and perhaps a slight dash of temporary madness.
Both books are illustrated by archival images of a kind — the Poe book with objects from the collection and other depictions; Blanchett's chapter breaks feature black-and-white street pictures of Richmond that photographer Summer Aranda found on an undeveloped roll from around 1995. These well complement the text.
Semtner appears from 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 24, at the Short Pump Barnes & Noble for signing and presentation. Blancett reads from his novel as part of the second annual RVA Lit Crawl during the 8 to 9 p.m. slot on Saturday, April 21, at Sugar & Twine in Carytown. These books are available wherever your finer reading matter is sold, and on Amazon.
