In 2003 Comeau co-created A Softer World with Emily Horne. Truth and Beauty Bombs, a book collecting the comic, was published in 2006. The A Softer World site also features Overqualified, his series of humorous prank cover letters sent to real companies. His first novel, a "genderqueer adventure story" called Lockpick Pornography, was serialized prior to publication in book form, and the first seven chapters remain available online. Comeau is also a writer of short fiction for various magazines, and several of his short stories appear in It's Too Late To Say I'm Sorry, his third publication.

- Wikipedia entry

"Joey is a firm believer in the idea that if you can't be a good example, you have an obligation to be a horrible warning." 

- from the author’s website

"I don't like the idea of writing to make a statement," Comeau says. "Writing should be about exploring ideas. There aren't really any answers in this book. But questions are more interesting anyway." 

- interview with Xtra (2006)

by Nathaniel G. Moore

[February 2008]

I don’t know how to interview or profile Joey Comeau because his first person is likely stronger than mine, his moves quicker, his agility and charisma likely slaloming in ways I could only imagine on my Commodore 64 or during mononucleosis nightmares.

I sent Joey some questions with the subject line Girlfriend in a Comeau. He fired them back with Comeau in a Girlfriend, both of which, are riffs on a Douglas Coupland novel (but first a song by The Smiths) called Girlfriend in a Coma. It’s all part of the round of What If CanLit? Joey and I play later on in the interview. The best thing to do might be to check out the links to his writing, buy his books or just wait around for him to appear in your city.

I first met Joey Comeau at a Coach House fall picnic in the fall of 2007. We said nothing to one another, one of us may have nodded, but there was a lot going on, or the wine was fermented. I had already heard of him through a variety of sources and was familiar with his writing.

Years later, in my literary memoir, Deleted: My Life As A Jpeg, I recall this era with a bit of envy, jealousy, and as always, subjective Cancerian paranoia:

"Rummaging through Annex alleyways for the freshest pizza slice remains, in between tailpipe hits, I wondered if Joey ever felt about writers born in 1986 the same way I felt about him. That somehow all my life I had looked away to the future, to the horizon, never my mind on what I was doing, always seeking adventure, excitement, and a grand spectacle of reactions that I could control like a hooker or baker. Why couldn’t it have turned out differently for me? Why was being born in 1974 (at least for me) such a dramatic and exhaustively endless curse, and how did Joey make it all look so easy? Suddenly I’m nudged by my wino intern who says that one of the things I was ‘paying’ him to do was remind me whenever I was committing one of the deadly sins. "You’re envious Nathaniel, better watch out. You don’t want to lose focus sir." I thank Mickey, and remind myself that it was never a popularity contest. That it wasn’t about not getting a break or making bad career moves. That writing should be about exploiting myself."

Joey Comeau seems like he could be a telethon host, a running shoe or hand cream model, a customer experience representative for a variety of customer experiences, a really angry person, a critical thinker and lover, a theme park janitor or member of the Royal family. Joey would be a good career councillor, marketing executive, bi-polar gymnastic coach or UN representative.

However, he is a Canadian writer. His latest project is Overqualified.

from Stalking is so commercial now:

What ever happened to secret admirers? Are they just stalkers now? If you notice someone, if you pay too much attention, that's weird. All of a sudden you're that guy who sits on the bench in the mall, right in front of the store where she works and stares inside all day. Or, worse, you're the guy who keeps going in. The guy with the Orange Julius who keeps saying, "I'm just browsing."

At some point, after burning his hand on an easy bake oven, he may have started writing with that maimed hand, a hand full of talent, timing, testosterone, beauty pageant conceit and Ottawa-Pez. He seems like the genuine article in a locker room where fakers are a dime a thousand.

Comeau is prolific, on the offensive and born in an Olympic year, (1980) it’s no wonder. I would classify his fiction as a confluence of self-help, prearranged sexual hostility and 1990’s American gothic. One senses a touch of Tupac, Mark Leyner, Ted Bundy and TC Boyle in his ridicules and humiliations.

In a very dangerous market, one where, if you’re not careful, you can start big East Writers versus West Writers type fights, Comeau is seemingly breaking all the rules, oozing in and out of literary cliques with the skills of a ninja, Saskatoon mime or fourth level magic user. He appears to have no enemies.

His writing is as eclectic as his attitude and state of mind. Said Chris Dupuis of his first novel, Lockpick Pornography "...The ensuing 10 chapters follow a group of disaffected youth through a myriad of break-and-enters, kidnappings and enough hot queer sex to give me a boner the whole time I was reading it."

This low cal fanaticism seems to work to Joey’s advantage, because he appears to be very busy and sought after. As you will find out through TDR’s extensive cross-examination, exhuming facts and statistics about this young man, he is a bit of a contradiction, very opinionated yet dismissive, very crude individual, yet refined and ubiquitous. Pathologically guarded, yet hoping to get caught somewhere down the road in Isotoner Smooth Leather Gloves strangling a Canadian goose in a RCMP uniform.

When TDR finally asked Joey Comeau about his writing (in particular a story where one of his characters tries to return a coke to a food court vendor, accusing the proprietor the drink has made him gay), Comeau replied in amusing, albeit guarded fashion.

*

JC: I wanted that book to be a huge spiralling ever-increasingly cartoony descent into ridiculous awesomeness, and when I get into that headspace these things just come to me. I am channelling terrible powers, is how it feels, though probably there are more reasonable explanations having to do with manic depression. There are probably reasonable explanations for the Loch Ness Monster too, but I am not interested in having magic explained away, thanks.

TDR: According to one of your biographers, (I would suspect either Comeau or the agents at Loose Teeth Press in Vancouver,) your mother kidnapped you early on in your life. Is your mother is still practising the art of the 'nap, so to speak? 

JC: No, that was just a onetime thing. You hear about those women who can lift up whole cars when their kids are trapped underneath, and they're heroes. My mom is exactly like that, except instead of having super strength she committed what was probably a felony.

[TDR Shuffling cue cards] Comeau says his main influences tend to influence his life more than his writing. The list includes Jane Bowles, Helen DeWitt, Kathy Acker and Patricia Highsmith.

TDR: Why these people Joey?

JC: These people reassure me that crazy people can still be good writers. I love their books, but I'm not interested in writing books like that. I love biographies of self destructive sexually demented geniuses. The stuff that influences my writing is more likely TV, or old comic books. Calvin and Hobbes. Peanuts. Stand up comedians like Mitch Hedberg, Sarah Silverman. Steve Martin. Old John Candy movies. I think comedy is better with tragedy.

JC: I have no idea! I don't know what that dude is like. I've read some of his books, but never seen a picture or heard him on the radio. Does that make me a bad person? Is he going to Google his own name and read this and hate me? OK, if I did an infomercial with Douglas Coupland, I would sell chunks of Douglas Coupland's hair. Can you imagine the demand for that shit? Screaming bookish teens would go absolutely bananas. Talk about Canadiana.

JC: My grandmother doesn't listen to music, really, and I've never walked in and thought she was dead, but she gets lonely sometimes. She must, out in that house. I miss her and I don't call her enough, and it's those feelings that show up in the writing. I mean, isn't that how everyone does it? You love someone and think about her out in the country, and you feel like you're letting her down, and so you turn her into a monster of grinding stretching teeth that eats her whole family.

JC: I saw Eileen Myles read here in Toronto, at This Ain't the Rosedale Library. She was great! She was funny, and smart and just lovely. My own best reading is a bit harder to pin down. I showed up for a reading once, only to discover that it was a "night of Jewish authors" that I had somehow been invited to read at. Jonathan Goldstein from CBC was there, and the audience was filled with fifty and sixty year old CBC ladies. Reader after reader got up and read their Jewish-themed fiction, and then I was supposed to read just before Mr. Goldstein. I didn't have any Jewish fiction. So I got up there and I read some of my dirty math stories. Absolute filth.

JC: It was fun! There were a lot of people there. Hundreds! I read sections from my new novel, Overqualified, for the first time. And afterwards a few fans gave me a giant Pez dispenser with a Bert head. It dispensed whole packages of Pez! I got to cuss into a microphone a bit, and tell jokes where the punch-line is that everyone is sad sometimes. Also, I hung out with an old friend from Junior High and gave him some Pez and ate mediocre pasta and wandered around Ottawa. I guess if I had to sum it up, I'd say it was good Pez.

JC: I'm not sure, but that Mike Lecky maniac is still going strong, I think. I think he is a-ok.

JC: It is very good. It is about their lives, oh my god. It is not as good as it used to be. It is funny. It is sad. It is amateurish. It is immature. It is lovely. It makes Fridays better. "Meh."

JC: It is a collection of funny/sad/crazy job application letters that tell a big story built out of a bunch of little ones.

TDR: Who is going to publish it?

JC: ECW is publishing it in spring of 2009.

JC: I play chess every day. I read comic books and I play video games. I don't have a TV, so I don't play many console games, but I have a Nintendo DS and a Sony PSP. I skateboard and I like to watch horror movies. I enjoy Elmore Leonard's Western fictions! I have a tablet for my computer and I’m learning to draw again.

Further studies:

Joey’s journal
http://untoward.livejournal.com

Joey’s website
http://www.asofterworld.com

Joey’s books
http://www.lockpickbook.net

A review of Lockpick Pornography
http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/l/lockpick-pornography.shtml

A Joey story
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20060227/historians-f.shtml

Another Joey story http://www.terminus1525.ca/exhibits/niedzviecki/en/index.php?content=comeau

Overqualified
http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php