Despite being so young, Pete is a character of great emotional intelligence and resilience in your story, “sixth man”. Can you speak to the construction of his character?

Pete is very loosely based on a nephew of mine who in fact was the sixth man on a high school basketball team that advanced pretty far into the playoffs in the early 1990s. His good friend on the team (and to this day) went on to become a well-known NBA basketball star. So, that’s the germ of the story. That friendship. Nothing tragic and horrible happened to that real team thank God, but a lot of writing starts by asking “what if?”

My daughter, Emily, and some nephews and nieces of mine displayed the sort of emotional intelligence in their late teens and early 20s that Pete displays. Some people just have old souls.

I believe almost everybody has some resilience in them, but some have it much more than most. Pete’s resilience springs from a sense of duty to make his life meaningful to offset the apparent meaninglessness of the tragedy that took his teammates’ lives. He feels that he owes them that.

Regarding construction of character: John Gardner’s book On Moral Fiction had been a great influence on university writing programs in the 1970s and 1980s. Gardner’s use of the word “moral” has nothing to do with religion, or virtue as defined by the ancient Greeks, but rather how a writer works.

Gardner writes: “Moral fiction communicates meanings discovered by the process of the fiction’s creation… Thus we see Tolstoy beginning with one set of ideas and attitudes in Two Marriages, an early draft of Anna Karenina — in which Anna, incredible as it seems, marries Vronsky — and gradually discovering, draft by draft, deeper and deeper implications in his story, revising his judgements, stumbling upon connections, reaching new insights, until finally he nails down the attitudes and ideas we find dramatized, with such finality and conviction that it seems to us unthinkable that they should not have burst full-grown from Tolstoy’s head in the published novel...”

I keep that in mind in developing a character. I ask myself, “Would Pete actually say (or do) that in this situation?” I’m not so much creating Pete as trying to remember him. I’m not so much writing a short story as trying to remember a story that already exists out there somewhere.

I know that sounds irrational, but I’ll bet some of the other writers that you work with (or even you yourself) can identify with this approach. The intuitive and/or irrational choices that a writer or any artist makes is why I believe that AI will never be able to actually create art, just mimic it.    

In “Sixth Man” there is a very strong feeling of loss, but also of brotherly camaraderie. Growing up, what are some experiences you’ve had that inform those themes?

The first of Buddha’s four noble truths is that life is suffering. You don’t have to live too long to realize that this is a broken world full of broken people. And that we die. I remember being 5 or 6 and fully realizing that some day, I am going to end. It freaked me out. (Still does, though I’ve come to believe that there are things worse than death.)

My daughter felt this at age 4 or so and my late wife, Kate, and I comforted her by talking about an unimaginably beautiful hereafter. A heaven. “And besides it won’t happen until you’re 90 or so.” For a kid, that’s almost like saying it won’t ever happen.

Art springs from a wound. That’s not to say that artists need an inordinate amount of suffering to practice their craft. Also, an artist need not drink or take drugs in excess or do any of the other ruinous stuff too many creative people do. There’s no truth in self-destruction and many great artists lived fairly normal and uneventful lives. Wallace Stevens was a banker. Harper Lee was an airline ticket inspector.

The wound, in my case, was my brother, Charles “Chick” Diamond, being killed in the Vietnam War, which I’ve written about.

Friendship is truly one of the great joys in life and a friendship that can be described as brotherly or sisterly camaraderie is golden. I’ve kept in touch and still meet with old friends that I’ve had for decades. We’ve all changed, and not just physically. Despite those changes, for the most part the essence of what made us friends in the first place remains.

Friendship can also be a great foundation for love. My significant other, Sonja, brought me so much joy when I thought that I’d never find joy again. We’d been colleagues and friends for years before we became romantically involved some years after my wife died. I am thankful every day for her. We have a lot of fun.     

There is a lot of detail given to the way in which the town pays respects to their fallen Lenape players, painting a vivid picture of a close-knit community. What is your memory of your community at Pete’s age, and how did it influence this narrative?

The community that I describe in “Sixth Man” is more like the town where we raised our daughter than the Olney section of Philadelphia where I grew up. I loved Olney. Made many wonderful memories there. It’s where I played sports (mostly baseball), learned to drive, drank beer for the first time, met my late wife, graduated college, started my writing career at a large weekly newspaper — all the typical rites of passage. The majority of my short stories are set in Philadelphia.

But cities and suburbs are different, and that’s not to say one is better than the other. The energy is different. A child that takes comfort in the relative safety, coziness, and activities offered in a suburb will often come to see that way of life as a bit stifling at just about the time they head off to college. My daughter lives in Philadelphia today and loves the energy of the city.

On your website, you have covered songs by The Beatles, Sting, and Michael Nesmith. In “Sixth Man,” you reference the legendary Woodstock concert from 1969. How has music influenced your occupation as a writer? How do you see songwriting as different from story writing — or are they the same? 

I am a decent karaoke singer. The first time I posted one of my covers on Facebook I apologized to my dozen or so FB friends who are true musicians/singers/songwriters. People who’ve taken years to hone their craft. I am just sort of goofing around with it.

There is some connection, certainly, between songwriting and story writing. Some songs can stand alone as poetry and/or story. For instance, “Eleanor Rigby” can be a short-short story or a poem without any musical accompaniment. But some lyrics don’t work as poems.

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.

Now it looks as if they’re here to stay.

Oh, I believe in yesterday.

One of the most beautiful songs ever written, but it can’t stand alone as a poem, I believe.

A musical quality infuses writing that truly touches me — such as the gorgeous ending to James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” or all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

Also, music becomes part of the process for many writers. They’ll latch onto a certain song while they’re creating something and just play it continuously. I do that.

A lyric in the John Denver song “Poems, Prayers & Promises” has the narrator say that someday he’d like to “dance across the mountains on the moon.” That one line led directly to me writing this short story.

I’ve also written some songs. Here’s one called “Raise Your Glasses” that I sing. The singer/songwriter Camille Peruto sings backup, and Noleen Urmson supplies the Latin solo at the end. Camille sings and plays instruments on my song “Pennypack Park.” Singer/songwriter Genevieve Kaplan sings and plays the instruments for my song “I Want To Live!”

So, the short answer is songwriting and writing short stories are different, but they influence each other a lot.

On your website, you mention author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton as a hero. When did you first read him, and how has he influenced your writing today?

I first read Chesterton in my teens because my mother greatly admired him. My mother was a brilliant woman —writer, activist, painter — who introduced me to a lot of great writers and thinkers. We’d have wonderful conversations about them. Even into her later years (she died at 92) I’d visit and over cups of tea we’d still discuss writers and philosophers. We didn’t always agree, but we enjoyed the conversation.

Chesterton did every sort of writing you can think of: novels, plays, books, poems and, yes, even songs. He’s perhaps most widely known as the author of the Father Brown mysteries. But I relished his philosophical works.

He started out as an atheist and became one of the most revered Christian apologists. I’m always interested in thinkers who make that journey; but also those who journey the other way, from belief to unbelief. I think the late Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great is an excellent argument for atheism that believers should read. Untested faith isn’t really faith.

Chesterton’s influence on me involves his unique way of looking at the world. He’s one of the most quoted writers ever. Example: “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” 

I’m a writer who happens to be Christian in the vein of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Flannery O’Connor. In other words, I avoid any sort of didacticism like the plague. Most of the ethical standards seen in Christianity and other religions had been worked out centuries before those religions arrived on the scene by the ancient Greeks and Eastern philosophers. Some of the most “Christian” people I know are atheist.

That’s why I have Pete and Deshawn in the “Sixth Man” consider themselves stoics and quote Marcus Aurelius. Like the great writers I mention above, I hope that my worldview doesn’t really show through in the work. I want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Stephen King was raised Methodist and reads the Bible. Mark Wahlberg is a daily communicant. But those aren’t the first things you think of when you hear their names.

I believe in the separation of church and art.  

Other than G.K. Chesterton, who are some other authors who’ve influenced your writing?

Too many influences to count, really. Margaret Atwood, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Jonathan Franzen, John Irving, Iris Murdoch. I gravitate to writers who are considered masters of the short story form. I’d written seven unpublished novels (deservedly so) before finally realizing that my craftmanship really lies in writing short stories.

Who might you recommend to people looking for writers or musicians that resemble your writing style? 

My influences include Salinger, Fitzgerald, Cheever, Shirley Jackson, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Annie Proulx: Again, too many really to list. Like most writers, I read anything that I can get my hands on.

There’s such an incredible number of songs out there that I wouldn’t know where to begin in terms of naming any current artists. I’ll be watching a TV show or movie and suddenly this wonderful song with wonderful lyrics would play and I couldn’t tell you who the artist is. Going back decades: Beatles, Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, U2, Sting, early Bee Gees, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez, Sinatra, Nat King Cole.

As I said, I’m a karaoke singer. But what I found interesting in recording songs is how the ones I always felt were simple ones to sing turn out to be much more complicated than I’d imagine. And singers who I thought had pleasant but not fantastic voices turn out to in fact have fantastic voices. John Denver, for instance, can hold an incredibly pure note for an incredibly long time.

The great ones make it look easy.

Read Frank’s short story, “Sixth man” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 1.