Eugenio Volpe

Boston native Eugenio Volpe was awarded the PEN Discovery Award for Fiction and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. Volpe’s essay “Jesus Kicks His Oedipus Complex” was listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021. His stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, New York Tyrant, VICE, Post Road, The Nervous Breakdown, BULL, and other journals. Out now, I, Caravaggio (CLASH Books) his daring debut novel about the temperamental Baroque master, dramatizes an artistic superstar’s psychological unraveling under the sexual and political pressures of the Catholic Reformation. Volpe resides in Los Angeles with his wife and son, where he is a professor of rhetoric at Loyola Marymount University.

Instagram: @eugenio_volpe

Twitter/X: @eugenio_volpe

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

When I was an undergrad in the early 1990’s, my two favorite Hollywood films were Richard Loncraine’s Richard III and Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Both films introduced Gen X viewers to Elizabethan content but with updated wardrobes and soundtracks. Loncraine renovated his Richard III into the 1930’s modernist aesthetics of fascism, replete with hairdos and mustaches of the period’s despots, not to mention vintage cars, biplanes, and DC-3 airliners. In lieu of swords, Loncraine armed the Houses of York and Lancaster with machine guns, waging their Battle of Bosworth not on horseback but in army jeeps and Soviet tanks. I was studying literary modernism at the time, so it appealed to me in an aesthetic sense, but it also related to us Gen Xers historically because although it was decades before our time, 1930’s fascism was the antagonist of our grandparents’ generation, and was still very much haunting the American conscious.

Lurhmann refurbished his Shakespeare with a similar stylization of apparel and weaponry. Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, and the rest of the Verona Beach gang are depicted as pistol-wielding, club-raving Gen Xers dropping ecstasy. The Capulets and Montagues are modernized as warring mafia families. This Shakespeare reboot is all about the aestheticizing of munitions: gold-plated pistols with Holy Mary grips, Glocks, .44 Magnums, Berettas, Walther Compact pistols, submachine guns, and double-barrel shotguns. The angsty romance and sexy violence are coolly choired by a soundtrack of Butthole Surfers, Everclear, and Radiohead. This was the kind of innovation that I wanted for my Caravaggio: a Velvet Underground album with big-haired, sexually fluid dudes dressed in frilly velvets, but instead of switchblades, they’re carving each other up with rapiers in an early modern Rome similar to the gritty streets of 1970s New York.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I wish I could listen to music while writing, amplifying the process with a soundtrack, but the narrative voice in my head can never compete with the beats, rhythms, and harmonies of a given song. I’m too much of a music junkie. But I definitely blast music before sitting down to write, earbuds in, pacing my office like an athlete amping before a game. The music genre depends on what I’m writing: novel, short story, or essay. Because I wanted the early modern Rome of my novel I, Caravaggio to feel and sound like the mean streets of 1970s New York City, I habitually listened to The Velvet Underground while writing it. They started off as Andy Warhol’s house band, so I can totally imagine Lou Reed playing “Heroin” on a lute in Caravaggio’s studio while he paints Jesus Taken. 

Favorite non-reading activity?

My surfing addiction started thirty-seven years ago when I was fourteen. I grew up 500 yards from the Atlantic. The best waves came from October to May when ocean temperatures dipped to thirty-eight degrees. The air temps were often colder. Winter surfing in New England is a survivalist sport. The ocean is seldom calm in the Northeast. The wind is always whipping from some direction or another. The conditions were seldom ideal, and that totally appealed to my working class athleticism and mindset. Coming from a boxing/martial arts background, paddling through some ice-cold, frothy choppy waves felt like punching the ocean into submission. Surfing is all salt. There’s no better feeling than the post-surf, salty skinned, all-body workout. The ocean is my church, therapist couch, secret garden, and boxing ring. I live and surf in L.A. now. The water is warmer. The waves are glassier. The sun is mostly always shining. But I miss the imperfection of Atlantic surfing.

Is there a work of art that you love? Why? Have you ever visited it in person?

My favorite artist is Richard Diebenkorn, his Ocean Park series in particular. When I moved to Santa Monica from Boston, I used to walk past his old studio on Main Street in search of remnants from the paintings. There weren’t any, not in color, composition, or line. But I felt like I was standing inside of them. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I felt like I was visiting the paintings “in person,” standing in the afterglow of Diebenkorn’s genius. I have seen some of the Ocean Park paintings in real life, and prefer that experience to walking around Santa Monica like a goof.

If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

Caravaggio’s bloodiest paintings being displayed on the tennis court where he murdered Ranuccio Tomassoni.