Meno, Joe 1975–

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Meno, Joe 1975–

PERSONAL: Born 1975; married, c. 2000; wife's name Koren. Education: Attended Columbia College Chicago.

ADDRESSES: Home—Chicago, IL. Office—Fiction Writing Department, Columbia College Chicago, 600 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605-1996. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: During early career, worked as flower delivery truck driver and art therapy teacher at a juvenile detention center; Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, currently professor of creative writing. Sleepwalk (literary magazine), publisher.

AWARDS, HONORS: Nelson Algren Literary Award, 2003; Society of Midland Authors Fiction Prize, 2006.

WRITINGS:

Tender as Hellfire (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

How the Hula Girl Sings (novel), ReganBooks (New York, NY), 2001.

Hairstyles of the Damned (novel), Punk Planet Books (Chicago, IL), 2004.

Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (short stories), TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 2005.

The Boy Detective Fails (novel), Akashic Books (Brooklyn, NY), 2006.

Also author of plays, including adaptation of his novel The Boy Detective Fails. Contributor to books, including The Best Underground Fiction: Volume One, edited by Jeff Mikos and Scott Miles, Stolen Time Publishing, 2006. Contributor to literary magazines, including Other Voices, McSweeney's, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, and Gulf Coast, and to the Playboy Web site. Contributing editor, Punk Planet magazine.

ADAPTATIONS: Hairstyles of the Damned has been optioned for film by Focus Features.

SIDELIGHTS: By the time he reached his twenties, Joe Meno had already published two books and was labeled by some critics as a promising young author. A gradu-ate of Columbia College Chicago, Meno wrote his debut novel, Tender as Hellfire, when he was just twenty-four. Two years later he published How the Hula Girl Sings. In both novels, Meno experiments with language, trying to keep the dialogue of his characters as close to everyday language as possible. The result, as some critics have observed, is a narrative style that includes numerous expletives and vulgarities. Meno explained this facet of his work in an interview with Melanie Masserant for the Columbia Chronicle: "What I've learned in my short career as a writer is that taking big risks can have payoffs. I'm a firm believer in thinking big. It's important not to limit yourself as a writer." Meno also told Masserant that the writers he admires, such as Toni Morrison, Hubert Selby, Jr., and William Faulkner, have also used natural language in their writings.

Meno caught a professional break when an Atlantic Monthly editor discovered his manuscript for Tender as Hellfire while Meno was still a college undergraduate. The book, which a contributor for Kirkus Reviews described as a "rambling and oddly good-natured debut," is narrated by an eleven-year-old boy named Dough Lunt. Dough, along with his brother Pill Bug, who is two years older, must move from their home in Duluth, Minnesota, after their truck-driving father is killed in an accident while smuggling a truckload of illegal cigarettes. The boys move to a trailer park home in the fictional plains town of Tenderloin. The story becomes the boys' coming-of-age tale, as they deal with the many trials and tribulations of living in a trailer park. For instance, their funny names immediately put them at odds with the local kids, and they have to prove themselves physically on numerous occasions. They also have to deal with their mother's eccentric behavior, especially her communal sex life, while coming to grips with their own developing sexual desires. Despite these difficulties, the boys have each other to lean on, and they learn valuable lessons about themselves and life in general. "We had learned we didn't have a damn thing to lose, and no matter what we were caught doing, nothing could bring you down lower than the sad state you were already in," Dough declares at one point in the story.

Meno also created a number of secondary characters whom he paints with an extremely fine brush. Joy Malinowski, writing for the Philadelphia City Paper, called Tender as Hellfire "a satisfying story, with its small anti-heroes navigating proudly through any number of confusing, humiliating and horrifying situations." Similarly, a contributor for Publishers Weekly wrote that the book features "some of the liveliest characters just this side of believable that one is apt to meet in a contemporary novel." Booklist contributor James Klise called Meno "a writer with promise."

Several critics thought Meno improved upon his first effort with How the Hula Girl Sings, a tale about an excon named Luce Lemay who tries to pick up the fractured pieces of his life after being released from prison. Lemay has served three years in a state penitentiary for running over and killing a three-year-old child while fleeing from a liquor store he had just robbed. When he returns to his hometown of La Harpie, Illinois, Lemay finds that not only does his old girlfriend want nothing to do with a former convict, but the entire town continues to hold a grudge against him because of his past.

Meno sympathizes with Lemay's character, and he wants the reader to do the same. As the author explained to Masserant, the idea for How the Hula Girl Sings came from two separate experiences in his life. In 1999 Meno drove a flower delivery truck, and he was always haunted with the fear of running over a child and having to carry the burden of guilt associated with such a tragedy. The second experience was when Meno taught art therapy at a detention center for juvenile sex offenders. Despite approaching the youths with initial prejudices, he said he ultimately felt some compassion for them. "Doing creative writing with them, I realized that it's a lot easier to be angry at these people and to think of them as nonhuman than to be aware of their humanity," he told Masserant. "In a sense, they are completely haunted by what they have done. They are haunted by the sense of their future and are stuck in time by this event in their lives. They are having an impossible time forgiving themselves."

In the book Lemay fits this description—a man continuously at odds with himself and society for what he did in his past: "They gave me back my full Christian name and my own clothes and three miserable old Viceroy Golds," Lemay says when leaving prison. "They gave me back my full name and the life I had lost, but still that baby carriage rolled on cold through my head. It rocked and wavered right past me as I wandered out of those penitent iron gates and back to being a sovereign man." Lemay finds some hope when he begins to romance a waitress named Charlene, but the townspeople, including her father and former fiancé, do not approve of their relationship. When their narrow-mindedness pushes the townspeople to take violent action against Lemay, he is forced to confront the very past he is trying to run from. To make matters worse, a man named Toreador is set on seeing Lemay dead because Lemay beat him up while the two were in prison together. In the violent climax, Lemay finds out just how far people can take a grudge.

How the Hula Girl Sings received positive reviews. Masserant commented that Meno maintains "his position as a poignant voice in fiction." A contributor to Publishers Weekly wrote that the novel "should bolster Meno's reputation" as a writer, noting that "Meno has a poet's feel for small-town details … and he's a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization." Dowling Brendan, reviewing the book for Booklist, commented: "Fans of hard-boiled pulp fiction will particularly enjoy this novel."

In his next novel, Hairstyles of the Damned, Menlo tells the coming-of-age story of Brian Oswald, who deals with the vagaries of high school and his parent's marriage problems as he pines for Gretchen, a tough, pink-haired girl who is interested in an older man. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "Brian's occasional bouts of anger and destruction seem very real," adding: "He's a sympathetic narrator and a prime example of awkward adolescence." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, commented that the author writes "with verve and will entertain readers who find tales of teen misadventure and rock and roll irresistible."

Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir is a collection of Meno's short stories. A Publishers Weekly contributor particularly noted how he "narrates his tales of awkward interpersonal relationships … in a cool, half-adolescent deadpan." Among the volume's short stories are "A Trip to Greek Mythology Camp," which is about social outcasts who seek strength in numbers, and "Happiness Will Be Yours," the story of two people who were abducted as children and meet annually. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, noted that the author "orchestrates predicaments tragic, absurd, and grimly funny to reveal the mythic in the mundane."

Menlo returns to the novel with The Boy Detective Fails, which explores what might have happened to child detectives like the Hardy Boys had they been real people growing to adulthood. Billy Argo, his sister, Caroline, and their friend Fenton become acclaimed solvers of crimes in New Jersey as children. However, as adulthood comes, Caroline becomes depressed and commits suicide, and Billy ends up in an asylum. He returns to the outside world when he is thirty and begins to fight crime while trying to discover what caused his sister to take her own life. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the novel "a full-tilt collision of wish-fulfillment and unrequited desires that's thrilling, yet almost unbearably sad."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Menlo, Joe, How the Hula Girl Sings, ReganBooks (New York, NY), 2001.

Menlo, Joe, Tender as Hellfire, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1999, James Klise, review of Tender as Hellfire, p. 1156; August, 2001, Dowling Brendan, review of How the Hula Girl Sings, p. 2089; September 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Hairstyles of the Damned, p. 209; November 15, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, p. 27.

Chicago Sun-Times, December 18, 2005, Mary Houlihan, "Joe Meno's on a Roll."

Entertainment Weekly, November 18, 2005, Gilbert Cruz, review of Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, p. 140.

Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 1999, review of Tender as Hellfire, p. 91; October 1, 2005, review of Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, p. 1049; June 15, 2006, review of The Boy Detective Fails, p. 596.

Library Journal, March 1, 1999, Jim Dwyer, review of Tender as Hellfire, p. 110; October 15, 1999, Dan Bogey, review of Tender as Hellfire, p. 132; December 1, 2005, Jim Dwyer, review of Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, p. 120.

Publishers Weekly, January 18, 1999, review of Tender as Hellfire, p. 326; July 23, 2001, review of How the Hula Girl Sings, p. 47; September 13, 2004, review of Hairstyles of the Damned, p. 59; January 3, 2005, Raya Kuzyk, "Akashic's Punk Novel Strikes a Chord," p. 10; September 19, 2005, review of Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, p. 44.

School Library Journal, February, 2005, Matthew L. Moffett, review of Hairstyles of the Damned, p. 156.