Her first poetry collection, Sun, Moon, Salt, won the Washington Prize for Poetry in 1992.

White currently teaches English at Adirondack Community College, after previously teaching at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn and at Bennington College.

A graduate with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, White has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell and The Provincetown Arts Work Center. She serves as Associate Editor of Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and also as Editor at Word Works in Washington, D.C.

Photo © Nancy White

Derek Alger: Let me start by congratulating you on the recent publication of your poetry collection, Detour
.

Nancy White: Well, it was a long wait! That book evolved over almost a decade, collecting more rejections than I can remember. My first book racked up a whopping 50-something before it won the Washington Prize, which got it into print, but I’d say Detour was at least double that. But I’m glad — looking back — that it took so long because I was forced to keep pressing the collection through the sieve of time and my own evolutions, and it really did improve every year it had to wait. It became more experimental, less narrative, and just plain more interesting. Or so I think…

DA: Did you really “write compellingly of love in all its true and skewered forms,” as the blurb from Fred Marchant says?

NW: Skewered is a painful word isn’t it? The poems are about divorce, in one sense, but also the collection is about the mid-life crisis everyone goes through in some form or another — we always find a way — and there’s some painful skewering involved in those deconstructions and re-imaginings. One of the miracles of writing the poems, and of that phase of my life, really was that there was such genuine love that remained, and increased, after all the betrayal and cruelty and starting over. The human heart really is staggering in its goodness.

DA: Looks like you proved you can go home again.

NW: Metaphorically, and literally too! I wrote most of the book after leaving NYC to live near my large extended family upstate, in Cambridge, a small rural town where I run into people I went to high school with or who worked with my grandfather. To many NYC friends, it was shudderingly provincial, but for me it’s an ideal place for writing, teaching, and community that reaches back not just years but many decades. I feel lucky to be reaping the benefits of continuity — living in my grandparents’ old house, making parent complaints to the same school that irked me back in the day.

DA: Were your parents an influence on your desire to become a writer?

NW: Absolutely. My dad was in the Iowa MFA program, and there were always books around and people who loved them. My mom comes from a great storytelling tradition, plus she could get a cat talking, she’s so good in conversation. We lived all over, and while that was traumatic in its way, it also loaded my mind with different places and people: Maine, Colorado, Vermont, Iowa, Wyoming, and we finally settled back in New York when I was a teenager.

DA: What about high school, did you start writing poetry early?

NW: I started out with melodramatic diary-keeping, then wrote bad stories with great seriousness of purpose, and in high school started writing poems. One great teacher is all it takes — and I was lucky to have one. Rumor had it she was an escaped nun, which I thought was gossip but later turned out to be true. She removed the pretense from the teacher-student relationship and cheerfully expected more than anyone ever had; the result was good writing from an astonishing number of students. She began my life-long love of metaphor.

But I got bored, as a lot of high school students do, so I graduated early, worked and traveled, writing most days, then went to Oberlin because it was the only place I hadn’t visited, so it was the only place that hadn’t made me nauseous.

DA: I hope Oberlin was a pleasant experience.

NW: The perfect blend of workaholic seriousness and freedom to explore. I loved it there. Though they really made you sweat to get into the writing classes — I had to wait two years. My advisor kept saying, “You’re not ready to write. Go study history.” The next semester, he’d say, “Go take science classes.” Eventually he snuck me in the back door with the Translation Workshop, which I’m now convinced is the single most brilliant way to begin studying the construction of the poem and the mysteries of poetic voice. I did a shaggy variety of things at Oberlin, including getting up every day to fry eggs in the dining hall, starting a puppetry troupe, and working as an admissions intern.

DA: Your internship actually led to your first teaching job.

NW: I couldn’t help but notice that all my favorite students came from the same school. They’d arrive for these interviews and the top of my head would fly off — so when the head of that school visited,
I asked to be introduced to him, and he ended up saying I should come work for them. Serendipity?

DA: And it was another good experience?

NW: I think it formed me not only as a teacher but as a writer because the entire philosophy rubbed off on me. St. Ann’s students typically studied the art of language more than anything else. Starting in 4th grade, students had two English courses, studio art taught by practicing artists, theater, plus science and history, and language and math taught by people passionate about the subject, with advanced degrees not in “education” but in the area they taught. By the end of high school, everyone had studied a modern and a classical language — sometimes 6 years of each. No grades were given, and you wouldn’t believe how the students flourished. I taught creative writing there for a dozen years, inheriting students who had been reading and writing about and imitating the world’s best writers ever since they could walk. Okay, I’m exaggerating…but only a little bit. The secret to their success was that the school knew, from top to bottom, that one of the teacher’s most important jobs was knowing when to stay out of the way.

DA: You also earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence.

NW: Yes, I sent myself to grad school because I thought I needed structure and deadlines, and after a review of the NYC programs, I picked Sarah Lawrence: great teachers, small classes, also the “don system,” a one-on-one approach to complement the workshop. I have vivid memories of those hours, discussing a poem of mine that was failing, or that was half-hatched, and working it over with three different teachers in conference as well as in workshop. Plus that program demanded a long reading list and intensive study of our forebears every semester, so you came out with a balance of critical and creative skills. You can’t earn a living as a poet in America now — or probably anytime soon — so it is a very pure education. You’re not in it for the money but for its own sake.

DA: Eventually, it was time to move to upstate New York.

NW: I think I realized we had to go when my 9-month-old son crawled to the door and started banging on it with his fist. Since we’d been warned not to let him touch the ground in the park, or crawl on the restaurant floor, or touch the books at the library, we had to find a place that wasn’t poisonous and where we all had more room to move. But also I could see the rest of my career stretching out ahead of me in a predictable manner, and I guess I prefer a little mystery, so I — I can’t quite believe it now that I look back — turned away from Saint Ann’s and after a couple of years at Bennington College moved into public higher education. A new set of frustrations, but a wonderful community of poets!

DA: Tell us a bit about Women of Mass Dispersion.

NW: Over the early years upstate, I kept meeting these very skilled women writers who were struggling to get published, who felt insecure or hampered when it came to getting their work into print. I was coming off a writing and publishing hiatus of my own, and I started tossing around the idea of meeting not so much as a writing group but as a publishing support group. We agreed to meet monthly to discuss writing projects, and to pool research and discuss strategy. One of the most important things we do is help each other meet our own personal deadlines and handle the many stings and arrows of rejection. Since we started, we’ve seen one member earn her MFA, several have received grants, numerous journal publications have resulted, several chapbooks and one book have come out, and with the mutual support, I think we’ve helped each other break some bad habits. And all this before Facebook!

DA: You’re also involved with The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review.

NW: Actually, I’m involved there because of a clerical error. I usually send out multiple submissions, and I accidentally sent poems to Sow’s Ear, which was not accepting simultaneous submissions at that time, and another publication. The other publication accepted a poem, and then Sow’s Ear wanted it too — and I didn’t even have a record of sending it to them! I hadn’t done it on purpose, apologized profusely, asked what I could do to make amends, suggesting I could help sort through any backlog if they had one. They auditioned me to read the slush pile, and I ended up as Associate Editor. Now, that includes writing the book review column, which I love, love, love. It’s an amazing way to keep up (or try to keep up) with new titles, meet new writers, and keep yourself thinking about the work that is coming out today.

DA: You’re also Editor at Word Works.

NW: Yes. I won their Washington Prize years ago, and in 2008 I started working there, managing the prize process, moved on to editing and book production, then this January was elected president. My roles there are changing as fast as I can learn them — faster! Managing the prize process and then seeing the winner all the way through production is another way to see what’s being written “out there,” and then to get to know one excellent poet who has survived the grueling journey from slushpile to finalist to PRIZE. The president role really highlights the challenges that poetry is up against these days: so few readers, so little money, so little understanding of the mission of poetry — and yet so much potential, so many writers working to produce good books. It’s both humbling and inspiring.

DA: Tell us about teaching at Adirondack Community College.

NW: I admire the mission of community college; it’s vital to make quality education available to everyone, equally. We have a superb transfer program — really top-notch instruction — so that yeah, you can use it as a trade school, but you can also use it to explore the power of the intellect, to explore creativity, to move beyond life-as-paycheck. A lot of our students are what we call “underprepared” for college, which is just the state of affairs in the U.S. right now, but I’ve seen amazing change in students in those two years. You can’t help but feel you’ve struck a blow for civilization when a student enters as a future accountant, but ends up enrolled in a PhD program to study literature or psychology.

I do get to teach creative writing, but we all teach a mountain of college composition too. I love my department; they value the individual mind, the unique voice, not just the thesis statement and the ability to arrange yourself into paragraphs. This will sound inflated, but I really do think we restore our students’ love of language, and their faith that it’s a beautiful, powerful tool that belongs to each one of them inalienably.

DA: Whose poetry are you following these days?

NW: I like so many styles, kinds of voices. The irreverence and playfulness of someone like Daniel Nester, the rock-solid beauty of Deborah Digges, the always-forging-ahead Denise Duhamel, young poets like Judy Halebski…

In terms of “schools,” I think “experimental” is the new cliché — every week I read another wandering volume by a writer whose publisher or blurber praises the work as “experimental.” But the unintelligibility seems to me to be an enormous problem we need to address. Poetry already has a small enough audience these days!

I love the questing, austere bleakness of Julie Carr’s 100 Notes on Violence, which is one of the many so effusively dubbed experimental, but … I think we need to be tougher about when it’s important to share these experiments (“Look at me! Look at me!”) and when it really is not. Maybe that’s too esthetically pragmatic, my long-buried Puritanical roots showing, or something. But not everybody’s uniquely textured inner playground is valuable as art.

A generation ago, the whining was about “too many confessional poets.” And I know folks who are frustrated at the dominatrix presence of the lyric in recent years. Here’s what one of last year’s Washington Prize judges, Barbara Ungar, said when we were debating our final selection: “Which book would you return to in a time of need?” It became our definition of “important,” and I think it transcends trends. I’ll put it out there for comparison with other definitions of what makes poetry “good.” Interestingly, while more of last year’s finalists were lyric or narrative in nature (or some mixture therein), I’d say there is more experimental work in this year’s finalist pile — using pretty much the same readers. Stay tuned for which book will be the 2010 volume.

RG: So, what is the current status of the novel?

BE: I started writing this novel at the end of 2006 and I’m currently working on a fourth draft. The feedback on my third draft pointed to some fairly substantial gaps in the flow of the narrative, so this 4^th draft is about filling those gaps and rebalancing the novel as a whole.

RG: How would you characterize your work’s overall setting?

BE: The novel is set in 1980s South Africa, the last decade of apartheid. Resistance to apartheid was particularly fierce at this time and there were many violent uprisings in the townships and demonstrations amongst the student population. Conscription to the army was compulsory for all white men of school-leaving age and the South African Defence Force had a reputation for brutal treatment of conscripts in training (which then transferred into brutal military action). The only way to delay conscription was to keep on studying in higher education, which is what my protagonist does.

RG: What motivated you to tell this story?

BE: This feels like an important story to write.  For one thing, it offers a fresh angle on the apartheid story, through the eyes of a young orthodox Jew. But also, it looks at powerlessness in the face of a system you feel you can’t change and how young people turn to extreme solutions when they experience that impotence. Extreme religious practices are particularly attractive to a certain type of young person, and my protagonist, Eli, is someone who craves a sense of belonging and needs to be insulated from some of the more terrifying aspects of life.

RG: Would you elaborate on the development of your main character, Eli?

BE: At the start of the novel Eli Adler is living in dread of his army call-up. His friend Bernie has died during basic training and to make matters worse, Eli’s twin brother Gabriel (always his closest companion) has turned away from him.

Eli is a law student at Wits University in Johannesburg, and orthodox Jews are active on campus, trying to encourage assimilated students back into the fold.  Eli is initially skeptical but gradually, he’s drawn in.  The sense of belonging and the reassuringly clear parameters of Jewish Law go some way to filling the gap left by Bernie’s death and Gabriel’s departure.

Eli is now eager to prove his commitment to Judaism and rebuild a sense of family, so he rushes into marriage with the young, also newly-orthodox Ilana. But her family is secular and Eli becomes frustrated with what he sees as their complacency.

By now Eli has taken up a job as an articled clerk (which means he is still temporarily exempt from the army), but his growing obsession with intricate religious laws puts him on a collision course with others, both at work and at home.

RG: How does this particular excerpt fit in with the rest of the novel?

This excerpt occurs two-thirds of the way through the novel. Eli has volunteered to spend a week in the remote semi-desert area called the Karoo, as part of a project that renovates neglected Jewish cemeteries. It’s a mitzvah, a good deed, to undertake such projects. While there, he witnesses the local cops meting out rough justice against a group of township kids who are accused of stealing chocolate from the local shop. This episode throws into relief Eli’s helplessness when faced with the big moral challenges of apartheid South Africa.

RG: Your excerpt takes place in the Karoo.  Can you give our readers a sense of that environment?

BE: The Karoo is an extraordinary region of South Africa. It’s a vast semi-desert area in the interior of the country with a beautiful, desolate landscape. The settlements are far apart, and tiny. In the first half of the 20^th century these small towns had a Jewish presence through peddlers and shopkeepers who served the local farmers. So you’ll find vestiges of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in the most far-flung of areas. It’s hard to imagine how tough it would’ve been for immigrants from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to adapt to this landscape. My own grandparents made that journey and my father grew up in a Karoo town called Aberdeen (a Scottish missionary would’ve had something to do with that name). I’ve always found these remnants of Jewish communities very evocative.

The Karoo

RG: What do you remember life to be like in South Africa during the novel’s time period?

BE: The novel is set in the 1980s, when resistance to apartheid was really gathering momentum. In 1985 the government declared a State of Emergency – thousands of people were detained without trial, political meetings were banned and curfews were imposed in the townships. At the time I lived in a student residence at Wits University (a prominent mixed-race university, and highly politicised) and I can remember arriving at breakfast to discover that fellow-students had been taken away by police during the night. Some of them had to face solitary confinement or torture, and they had no legal recourse.

While all of this was happening in the townships, life in the white suburbs was going on pretty much as normal and because the press coverage was so flimsy many people were largely unaware of the ferocity of the resistance – and the ferocity of the state response to it. As a student at Wits University, Eli is well aware of what’s going on, but his response to these circumstances is to take refuge in the rules of orthodoxy. During the course of the novel he clashes with others who deplore what they consider to be his head-in-the-sand approach.

RG: Your excerpt is very interested in relating language divides between people.  There seems to be a sort of binary between those who understand and those who don’t, or the words shared between people, but kept from others.  Would you elaborate?

BE: As you’d imagine, language was highly political in SA during the apartheid years. The two official languages were English and Afrikaans, but Afrikaans was the language of the ruling party. In this piece the cops don’t speak English, partly because their grasp of English is poor, but it’s also a way of saying, we are in charge and we are not going to make the effort to speak your language. Today there are eleven official languages in SA (nine African languages, plus English and Afrikaans)!

RG: You’ve made some conscious decisions about what words to translate from Afrikaans to English in your piece, and which words to not.  Can you talk about the decision making behind your translations?

BE: In making decisions about translations, I was aiming for a balance: I wanted to leave some things untranslated, so that the reader experiences a sense of the characters’ frustration of being on the outside, but not so much so that it would make the piece unsatisfying to read.

There are some words in this piece that have entered English usage in SA, either because they describe something culturally specific (eg sjambok is a type of whip) or because they are evocative (eg boendoe, pronounced ‘boondoo’, is a local version of ‘boondocks’).

RG: I’m eager to get a better sense of what brought you to writing.  Will you detail that process?

BE: I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of six, but by my mid-thirties I was in a demanding full-time job, and I realised that if I was serious about writing I would have to make a change, so I quit my job and began working from home as a freelance business consultant. I used to commute for two hours a day and I told myself that I would spend at least that amount of daily time on writing. Things haven’t turned out quite as neatly as that, but I still try to maintain a regular writing routine, alongside my freelance work.

In 2006 I won an Asham Award for a short story entitled Under the Black Hat, which is published as part of a Bloomsbury anthology (Is This What You Want, Ed Kate Pullinger, Bloomsbury, 2006).  That was a really positive moment: firstly, it gave me much-needed encouragement; secondly, it was the first piece of writing I’d done on a Jewish theme and it triggered the idea for this novel. Before then it had never occurred to me that this could be a compelling subject for a novel.

RG: How would you characterize your own experiences growing up within Jewish South Africa?

BE: I was brought up within the orthodox Jewish community of SA, although my family were what we would call ‘traditional’ rather than strictly orthodox. We had a strong sense of cultural identification, we went to synagogue regularly and observed the Jewish festivals but unlike Eli, we weren’t strictly observant. In my teens, and again at university, I had periods where I immersed myself in Judaism and thought about taking a religious path – in fact, several of my close friends did exactly that. There’s much in Judaism that I find profound but ultimately the world of orthodoxy felt too circumscribed for me.

RG: Can you sketch out the historical context of the Jewish community in South Africa?

BE: The Jewish community in South Africa is made up mainly of Lithuanian Jews who went over during the late 19^th and early 20th centuries to escape persecution by the Tsars.  In many cases they arrived with nothing and the only opportunities open to them were those that the indigenous whites were not keen to take up. This is why they landed up in these godforsaken places. But on the whole, Jews in South Africa enjoyed the privileges associated with being white under apartheid. They enjoyed freedom to practice their religion and ultimately the community became very prosperous.

RG: What is the relationship like between the Afrikaners, the white majority, and Jews?

BE: The Afrikaners are the descendants of the Dutch settlers who arrived in the 17^th Century, and they regard themselves as the true pioneers of SA.  In the early 20^th century the Afrikaners became marginalised under British colonial rule but in 1948 the Afrikaner National Party came to power and the country came under their control.

There’s a really strange anomaly in the relationship between Afrikaners and Jews.

There was plenty of anti-Semitism amongst the Afrikaners and substantial support for the Nazis during World War Two. But the Afrikaner community had also developed this notion of being the Chosen People, as part of their national mythology. (They were deeply religious through the Dutch Reformed Church).  So there were many Afrikaners who identified with the ‘Israelites’ and who put Jews on a pedestal. As a Jew, one could never quite tell whether one would get a positive or negative reaction from an Afrikaner, and there are entertaining scenes in this novel where Eli encounters both types.

RG: Historically, was there a resistance to apartheid from South African Jews?

BE: The Jewish community had a paradoxical role in relation to the struggle against

apartheid. On the one hand, Jewish religious leaders were reluctant to openly criticise

the government because they feared a backlash. This was in contrast to other religious

groups, who were much more vocal. On the other hand a disproportionately high

number of white anti-apartheid activists were Jewish. These included figures such as

Joe Slovo, Albie Sachs, Helen Suzman and so on. Incidentally, these high profile

figures definitely served to fuel feelings of anti-semitism amongst the Afrikaners.

RG: I’m very curious to hear your take on the transformations within South Africa over the last thirty years.  What have become some of the central issues in contemporary South Africa?

BE: South Africa now is in many ways unrecognisable from the country I grew up in. There’s a new generation of young black people who have themselves never experienced apartheid – it’s something they read about in history books. To me and other people of my generation, that’s extraordinary.

There were times when we couldn’t imagine that the transition out of apartheid could be peaceful. I was sitting in a conference in Johannesburg when Prime Minister FW de Klerk unexpectedly announced that the ANC was unbanned and Mandela would be released. There were many political activists in this auditorium, including people who had spent long periods incarcerated on Robben Island, and I will never forget the stunned expressions on their faces at that historic moment.

We were blessed at having leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu, who were able steer the country through a peaceful transition. Which is not to say, of course, that the country isn’t struggling with the legacy of apartheid. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to be done in education, health care, housing, transport and so on.

Perhaps the most pressing problem in SA is the high crime rate and the extreme violence of this crime. It doesn’t happen along racial lines – crime is targeted towards black and white alike. It’s endemic. I think it’s a legacy of the violence that people had to endure under apartheid (of which this excerpt shows a fairly small-scale example). And we’re dealing with a generation of people who missed out on education, and who can’t see a way to improve their lives other than through crime.

Right now SA represents an extraordinary mix of warmth and energy and forgiveness on the one hand, and endemic violence and corruption on the other. One has to hope that the former will win out. As the most economically developed country in Africa, SA’s success could of course drive political and economic improvements further up the continent.

RG: Any thoughts on the ongoing South African hosted World Cup?

BE: I won’t be in South Africa for the World Cup but everyone there says that it’s a wonderfully positive experience. It seems to have reignited a warmth and sense of unity in the country. That’s heartening, because visitor numbers were looking disappointing in the run-up and there were real question marks over organisation and safety.

RG: Finally, you are currently living in London.  What brought you to England and how would you describe living there?

BE: I’ve been living in London since 1992.  I came at the age of twenty-five for a gap year, but I immediately felt at home in London. Maybe it’s to do with my grandparents’ European heritage, or the colonial history of SA, but so much about England felt familiar and warm, and London is a great place to live. It has tremendous diversity and coming from SA the general atmosphere of tolerance is refreshing.

The diversity and quality of cultural activity here is dazzling. I can walk into an art gallery and see a famous masterpiece or I can turn up at the Royal Academy of Music and listen to world class musicians. All for free!  One has to have grown up on the tip of Africa, or at any rate, outside Europe, to appreciate fully what a privilege that is.

Silver’s first story collection, Babe in Paradise, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Her novel, No Direction Home was published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2005, and her novel, The God of War, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. Her fiction has appeared in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES and THE O. HENRY PRIZE STORIES, as well as other anthologies.

Prior to turning to fiction writing, Silver had a successful career in Hollywood, where she directed feature films, including Permanent Record (1988) with Keanu Reeves, Vital Signs (1990), and He Said, She Said (1991), starring Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins, which she co-directed with her husband to be, Kevin Kwapis.

Silver directed her first film, Old Enough (1984), while she studied at Harvard. The film was awarded the Grand jury Prize at Sundance in 1984, when Silver was 23.

Silver currently lives in Los Angeles with Kwapis, and their two sons.

Derek Alger: Starting from the beginning, your family moved to New York City from Ohio when you were relatively young, what influences do you remember?

Photo © Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver: I remember most sitting at my window staring across the street into all the other windows and wondering about the life inside those windows. And I remember sitting at the revival theaters like the Thalia and the 8th Street Playhouse watching films by Renoir and Fellini and then walking out into the low afternoon sunlight feeling an acute and wondrous sense of solitude. I remember roller skating on the rough sidewalks, feeling the vibrations in my legs. Dodging crazy people on the street, getting mugged, how quiet the city once was on a Sunday morning when the shops really did stay closed for the day…so many memories and I have yet to write about them.

DA: Congratulations on your most recent story collection, ALONE WITH YOU. It says a lot that you dedicated it to your mother and sisters.

MS: My mother has made films all her life and when I think back on it, I remember how much she made me part of her creative process. She had me read her screenplays and I was often allowed to sit in on casting sessions and even offer my thoughts. She seemed to really care about what I had to say, she seemed to feel my opinion mattered. Maybe it did, maybe it ultimately didn’t. I doubt anything I said ever changed her mind. She knew what she was doing, after all. But the fact that she made me feel that my voice and that my aesthetic opinion mattered was and is a huge gift.

As for my sisters…well, the story “Three Sisters” says it best. You are never not a part of a sibling group. Without them, I am nothing!

DA: You attended Harvard. What did you originally study?

MS: At Harvard I was all set to major in Visual Studies as I was passionate about making films. But then I got a job to co-direct a PBS documentary and I dropped out of college to do that. This opportunity came about because I had begun to work after school for a filmmaker named Ricky Leacock, helping him and another filmmaker to edit a film they had made about the artist Maud Morgan. Ricky was then offered the PBS job and asked me if I would do it with him. All I wanted to do was to make films, so I accepted. My parents, strangely, were supportive of this and never gave me any grief about dropping out. I went off to Muncie Indiana and made a film with Ricky about a family of charismatic Christians. I met them at an exorcism.

DA: What came next?

MS: After I finished that film I wrote a screenplay and, along with my older sister, raised money to make an independent film called Old Enough. It’s a story about two little girls growing up in New York on the same street but from wildly different backgrounds. It’s about growing up into a consciousness of class divide. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight Series and then went on to win the prize at the Sundance Film Festival which was then called the USA Film Festival. It was a tiny little festival back then, not the crazy Hollywood hullabaloo that it is now. The only people watching the films were locals and a few film buyers. They gave us the prize in a cafeteria.

With that film under my belt, I decided to give Hollywood a try, so I literally packed my bags and got on a plane. I remember at the time the cheap flight was called People’s Express and you could only have two bags. I had about six, including my enormous electric typewriter (I’m dating myself here) and so I went up and down the line asking people if they would carry my bags for me. Obviously this was in an era when they didn’t ask you whether a stranger had handled your bag before you boarded the plane. I worked at a studio for a while, developing projects, and then got the chance to direct for Paramount, a film called Permanent Record – a musical about teenage suicide. No one seemed to think that was strange. One of the highlights of that film was that somehow we decided to ask Joe Strummer to do the score and he accepted. In the studio, he played various instruments including a toy piano and came up with this very random score which I love. He was really excited and kind. I went on to make a couple of other films including one I directed with my then boyfriend, now husband Ken Kwapis called “He Said, She Said” which is a story told from two points of view. Ken directed the man’s POV, I directed the woman’s. It was a very formalistic project and we had a good time. But when I was finished with that, and thinking about what to do next, I had a very strong feeling that the next thing I needed to do was to no longer make movies.

DA: What made you decide fiction writing was the best medium for you?

MS: I felt very strongly that the stories I was telling weren’t the stories I wanted to tell, that what interested me — human behavior, the nuance of character, the life that exists in shadows and moments — was not, for the most part, the stuff of film. I knew I wanted to tell stories but I had a very profound realization that I was working in the wrong medium.

I started to write stories. And then I thought it might be time to finish that education that I’d taken a rather long break from, so I put myself in graduate school. Was it hard to leave the world of filmmaking? For me, it felt absolutely essential. I knew that as a filmmaker, I was on a very fast moving, sometimes exciting train, but that it was the wrong train taking me to the wrong place. It was liberating to put the breaks on (uh oh — extended metaphor alert!) I’m so glad I was conscious enough to understand what felt wrong to me about working in film and what felt right to me about sitting alone in my room writing stories.

DA: Where did you go to graduate school?

MS: The low residency program at Warren Wilson was perfect for me. I went to the school twice a year for ten day sessions — classes and lectures and workshops, and then went back home to work and send my work to my teachers. I had amazing teachers – Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell and Geoffrey Wolff. More than anything, they taught me how to read like a writer, how to understand how craft is used in others work and so begin to see how I might apply it in my own work. I think it’s pretty hard to teach a person how to write, but you can teach them how to read.

DA: Do your stories come from anywhere specific?

MS: My stories emerge from places I’m not really aware of. I don’t sit down and try to think of what to write about. I guess I’m always thinking about it on some level, and then my thoughts combine with things I see or experience or read about and then suddenly a situation, or a character, or a voice appears. I move through stories very intuitively. I rely very much on my associative imagination, the part of my mind that combines seemingly disparate feelings or ideas. I write like a collagist might work. I piece together random things and try to find their underlying joins. I don’t assert meaning or purpose. I let all that emerge. Sometimes I’m hardly aware of meaning. I think it’s probably better for me not to be so that my stories can be surprising and so that they can get into the eddies of human emotion in diverting and unexpected ways.

DA: You certainly succeeded with your story collection Babe in Paradise.

MS: My first collection, Babe In Paradise was comprised of stories set in the Los Angeles NOT of popular imagination. I wrote about people who live on the margins of the life that is exposed in the media. Mostly that’s the way people live here, so my characters are not “marginal” in that sense, they just live on the outskirts of the high life. I’ve been incredibly inspired not only by the city, but by California in general. My third book, The God of War, takes place at the Salton Sea in the desert about three hours east of LA. It’s an amazing, raw, demanding place. I like writing about how place affects the way we behave. We might all live in the same city, but we really don’t. We each feel the air differently, walk on the ground differently, depending on our character and our situation. There’s a real dialogue there. It interests me to try to write it. In the most recent collection, Alone with You, some stories take place in LA, others in the Midwest, a couple overseas. Each story is utterly contingent on place. These tales would not exist in any other locations.

DA: You write exceedingly well about adolescence.

MS: I loved writing about adolescence in The God of War. It seems to me that this is a most poignant time in life. A kid is holding onto childhood at the same time that he is desperate to assert an independent identity. Issues of community versus the self appear for maybe the first time in a child’s life in a profound and personal way. And the feeling of hating those you love appears, and along with that, all the myriad contradictions of life.

DA: You recently had an interesting experience at WordTheatre in Manhattan.

MS: WordTheatre is a great program that presents actors reading stories. I’ve had stories performed three different times by three different actors. Always, the experience has been an odd kind of revelation. I may hear many voices in my head when I write, the voices of my characters. But tonally, I only really hear myself. Even if I say a line of a character as I imagine she might say it, it is still my voice. So it is a revelation to hear an actor read a story, to hear another’s voice, to listen to the choices the actor makes. It is a huge reminder that writing is only half the process. The other half is being read. The reader brings him or herself to the work, filling it in, fleshing it out. That’s the part of the process I’m usually not privy to, unless, as in the case of WordTheater, someone reads my story to me.

SPIDER recently premiered at the NW Projections Film Festival in Bellingham, WA, and is scheduled for a Seattle area premiere at STIFF (Seattle True independent Film Festival). Alexander is currently working on her first feature length film, expanding upon the dark world and seedy characters of SPIDER, while remaining actively involved in the Seattle film community.

Derek Alger: You recently completed your first short film, SPIDER.

Click to view SPIDER trailer

Aria Alexandra: Yes, it was an amazing, life-altering experience. Really, I’m astonished it actually happened. I had some ideas for a noir, crime-drama story that I kept picturing as a movie, bouncing around in my head for the better part of 2008. It was like a vision I couldn’t get rid of. I was dreaming about these characters, images from the film; flashes of a gun, a lamp low over a table, a dark dirty room. I didn’t understand it because I was never a fan of mob movies or anything like that, but I couldn’t let it go — these characters seemed so real.

I vividly remember the very first time on the SPIDER set. Later that night, I sat alone in the shadows, completely surrounded by the world I once only imagined, overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe that something so incredible was created out of absolutely nothing: smoke, mirrors, a handful of volunteers, and an idea. That’s when I knew independent film was my true calling.

Things came together in unexpected ways. I started a new job in October, and for the first time in my life I was making decent money. The relationship I was in ended the first of November, giving me an apartment all to myself (which I would need) and the inspiration for the final piece of the story that I couldn’t finish up until that point. After struggling through a dozen unsuccessful drafts of the screenplay throughout the year, suddenly I had a final draft in a matter of days.

DA: The creative rush was obviously there.

AA: With reckless abandon, I decided that I would make the movie and jumped straight into destroying my apartment in order to create the set. The film required the look of a condemned building, so after blacking out the floor and ceiling I set about dragging in old furniture out of dumpsters for set pieces, throwing mud and trash all over the place and plastering the walls with stained newspapers. By the time I finished, the transformation was so complete that I lost the use of my kitchen, dining and living room. I lived on Chow Mein from the Safeway around the corner and slept on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom, surrounded by all the household items and furniture that had been crammed back there to make room for the set and cameras. It was completely insane.

To make matters worse, between handling all of pre-production on my own and work, I was sleeping four hours a night, running on who knows what. I was high on this vision … SPIDER had to happen, no matter how impossible it seemed.

DA: And you made it possible.

AA: Not only was it my first film, and an incredibly ambitious first film for someone who barely knew what a video camera looked like, but I also had only six weeks before the lease was up on the apartment. which meant that six weeks was all the time I had to build an immersive set, cast, rehearse, storyboard, find a crew, prep, shoot the film, and clean everything up perfectly in time for the move-out inspection.

And then … the Blizzard of 2008 hit.

DA: Sounds ominous.

AA: December became a complete nightmare, and we only had four weeks left. Going for that Chow Mein at Safeway now required nightly trekking through knee-high snow, as it was impossible to access via car. Actors couldn’t make it to auditions, and we still hadn’t found the right person to play Lenny, a principal character. I missed work. The parking lot became an ice rink. We wondered if the weather would ruin everything, as crew had to drive from all over the greater Seattle area to get there, and I could barely leave the block. I made the best use I could of the extra time, coordinating plans over the phone and finishing the final touches on the set.

Our entire schedule came down to one single day of shooting with the actors in late December. We worked like mad, ran two cameras at once, and by the time the smoke cleared (there was a hell of a lot of smoking going on that set…) we had over 15 hours of footage which would become SPIDER — a 16 and a half minute crime-drama noir film.

DA: Tell us about Independent Spirit Films.

AA: One of the things that really amazed me about the experience of making a film, is just how much a group of skilled, dedicated people could do with very, very close to nothing. I saw that great film really wasn’t a matter of budget, but a matter of people. As much work as I put into SPIDER, cast and crew literally fought their way through a blizzard to make this film happen because they believed in it… for which I am eternally grateful. And that made me realize the value of an idea.

The two biggest problems independent film makers have right now are lack of money and lack of distribution. Independent Spirit Films is the production company I recently founded with this in mind. The lack of money and the lack of distribution are really one and the same problem. If filmmakers had a direct link to their fan base, if they had enough fans and their fans were eager, motivated and excited about the film, fund-raising and distribution would be taken care of at the grassroots level. All of the middlemen would not be getting a cut, greatly lowering the cost to the fans, while at the same time increasing the rewards for the filmmakers, allowing them to continue.

Without the interest of your fan base, there would be no movie industry of any kind… so why not start with them? Why not collaborate with them? Why not ask for their feedback? Why not let them go behind the scenes in a way they never have before? Why not reward them with exclusive content and multi-faceted, multi-media experiences? Why not get them involved in your process, looking forward to your film right from the pre-production stage? That seems like a revolutionary idea for most productions.

DA: Sounds good to me.

AA: Hollywood throws countless millions into groan-worthy films and wonders what’s happening to their bottom line. Then they raise the ticket and DVD prices. It’s obvious they’re not giving fans value for their money, but instead they blame file sharing for the inadequacies of their ancient business plan. YouTube, the internet and social networking have changed the playing field. The big studios are going to find it harder and harder to run their monopolies in the marketplace, as clever, independently minded rebels will create pockets of resistance – self-distributing and finding profitable niche markets, creating dedicated, happy fans.

That’s why our fan page for Independent Spirit Films reads: Groundbreaking cinema/grassroots funding/Seattle rebels take on the Hollywood machine!

DA: It’s a noble goal.

AA: I’m sure that one day soon, crazy little independent film companies like I.S.F., who reach out to fans one at a time and rely on generating interest and creating value rather than bullying and cornering the market, will be the new wave of cinematic success.

DA: And along with film production, you’ve found a true home in Seattle.

AA: Seattle is an amazing city. It’s as beautiful as it is inspiring. I’ve traveled to a lot of different places and it’s only made me appreciate the west coast all the more. I like to think of Seattleites as hippies version 2.0 – we believe in free love, value arts and culture, social justice, fair government, saving the planet and green capitalism. On the whole, we are well educated and open minded, creative and diverse…we drive technology forward, whether it’s computers, airplanes or electric cars. Seattle is also the home of SIFF, the largest film festival in the country by attendance, an astonishing feat considering our relatively small population. For these reasons and many more, I’m proud to call Seattle home.

DA: You also run an improvisation workshop for actors.

AA: The Actors Informal, as the name implies, is an informal weekly gathering of actors where they can drop in to play improv games, learn acting exercises and practice honing their craft when they’re not busy with gigs. I’m always impressed with the quality of work that I see from the group, and I assume they’re enjoying it because they keep coming back!

DA: What comes next?

AA: SPIDER will be off to the film festival circuit, and I will be busy spreading the word, fund-raising, and writing the feature length SPIDER screenplay, which will be the next project. There is so much in this dark, gritty noir world that we haven’t been able to show our fans yet, I can’t wait to expand upon the characters, power struggles and intricate plot. Over the past year, I’ve learned so much, met so many incredibly skilled and talented people that I want to work with, and developed so many great ideas for the story that everything we’ve done so far is really going to pale in comparison.

Olsen’s short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have been published in
a variety of journals and anthologies, such as Fiction International, The Iowa Review, Village Voice, BOMB, and Gulf Coast. He is the Fiction Editor of Western Humanities Review.

The hypertext version of his novel 10:01, created in collaboration with multimedia artist Tim Guthrie, was included in the Electronic Literature Organization Collection (http://collection.eliterature.org/).

Olsen teaches innovative fiction, fiction writing and narrative theory at the Univeristy of Utah. Previously, he taught as associate professor and then full professor at the University of Idaho, where he was director of the MFA program for two years; the University of Virginia; the University of Kentucky; on summer and semester programs in Oxford and London; on a Fulbright in Finland; and at various writing conferences, including The Writer’s Edge (http://fc2.org/edge/edge.htm).

He graduated with a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and an MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. He currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at FC2, or Fiction Collective Two, founded in 1974, and considered one of America’s best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

An N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, Olsen and his wife, Andi, an assemblage-artist (http://www.andiolsen.com), divide their time between the mountains of central Idaho and Salt Lake City.

Derek Alger: What do you mean by innovative fiction?

Lance Olsen: For me innovative fiction is the sort that asks us: what is fiction, what can it do, and how, and why? Or perhaps another way of saying this is that innovative fiction is a possibility space where everything can and should be imagined and attempted.

DA: You have a new novel, Head in Flames, which just came out.

LO: It’s a collage novel composed of chips of sensation, observation, memory, and quotation shaped into a series of narraticules told by three alternating voices, each inhabiting a different font and aesthetic/political/existential realm.

The first belongs to Vincent van Gogh on the day he shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise in July, 1890. The second belongs to Vincent’s brother’s great grandson, Theo, on the day he was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004. And the third belongs to Mohammed Bouyeri, Theo’s murderer who was outraged by the filmmaker’s collaboration with the controversial Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a ten-minute experimental film critiquing Muslim subjugation and abuse of women.

I was interested in investigating, not only the circus of those three minds in motion, but also broader questions concerning religion’s increasingly dominant role as engine of politics and passion, the complexities of foreignness and assimilation, and what the limits of tolerance might look like.

DA: You’ve written about historical figures in novels before, specifically Nietzsche’s Kisses, the story of the great philosopher’s last night on earth.

LO: That’s right. Head in Flames is my second novel set in a specific past or pasts. What I discovered in Nietzsche’s Kisses, and continued to cherish in my latest, is the multitude of ways fiction can do what history can’t: smell, taste, touch, hear, see the private details of an historical instant.

I like that famous John Hersey quote: “Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.” Well, not just live it, but think about how history is a specific and complex subset of fiction, how it is constructed, and edited, and by whom, and for what purposes.

DA: I might add you’ve also written about Kafka, or maybe I should say, his characters.

LO: In Anxious Pleasures. Yeah. That novel appropriates and rethinks from the family’s and others’ points of view Kafka’s profoundly haunting, sadly comic novella. I wanted to engage with the lacunae in The Metamorphosis–borrowing and transfiguring lines, scenes, and characters from the original; adding new ones; composing with Kafka’s plot, universe, and suppositions, while simultaneously composing against them. Anxious Pleasures thereby becomes, I hope, not simply a collaboration, but also a celebration, a complication, an exploration, an evaluation, an education, an interrogation, an augmentation, an elaborate and devoted erasure, and, ultimately, a kind of remembering that is also a kind of forgetting that parallels and appraises the Samsa family’s own slow forgetting of their beetle-backed son, our own culture’s almost-forgetting of Kafka himself at the beginning of the twentieth century.

I fell in love with Franz back in 11th grade. I distinctly remember opening The Metamorphosis and reading the first line and realizing fiction would never get much better than that. Anxious Pleasures, I think, is my little love letter to Franz, a means of thanking him, showing him how much the future cares.

DA: I’m not sure we can create a specific beginning for you, but let’s try.

LO: For my life, you mean? I was born in Englewood, New Jersey, but spent my first few years with my sister and parents in a jungle compound in Venezuela. My father was a captain on an oil tanker. He was was helping set up a refinery there.

Recently my sister and I tried to share memories of events that had occurred during those years. But just the opposite happened. I ended up recalling events which I’m sure happened to me that she is just as sure happened to her. I couldn’t recollect some events she said I partook in. She couldn’t recollect others I swear she had partaken in. Who’s to say? We’re left with memories. My sister and I agree that they are deeply flawed, but we don’t know how.

Those sorts are the moments that intrigue me in the world and words–the ones, as it were, that occur off the record.

History always impedes our rewriting of history at the same time the narrative of the past is always being rewritten–by individuals, by the state, by advertisers, by victors, by victims, by historians.

After Venezuela, and for the bulk of my childhood, it was the bland climate-controlled malls of northern New Jersey, and a small leafy suburb called River Edge, and the reedy ratty banks of the Hackensack River.

DA: Where did you go to college?

LO: The University of Wisconsin. When I arrived in 1974, the authorities were still lobbing tear gas and many of the students were still rabidly engaged politically and party crazy and the sixties didn’t feel quite done. I began majoring in journalism because I thought that’s what you should do to be a writer. But I was, I think, deliberately bad with facts, and learned that Dylan Thomas during his days as a journalist was the same, and so I decided to take that as a hopeful sign. I enjoy watching facts misbehave in interesting ways. So it was a foregone conclusion that I would drift into fiction writing eventually.

DA: What prompted you to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

LO: I’d heard it was the place to go to learn how to write fiction. Plus I was in no rush to leave the academy. I loved and love that strange, often vibrant zone. Too, I didn’t know much, but I did know from an early age that I wanted to leave the northeast to see what the rest of the cosmos looked like. Hence, weirdly, Wisconsin. Hence Iowa.

DA: What was the experience like?

LO: The Workshop’s unspoken aesthetics endorsed a conventional mode of mimesis. The sort some call supermarket realism. However, a few student writers doing weird stuff found each other on the far side of the classroom. We challenged and supported each other over pizza and scotch and ice cream. The culture of the Workshop was competitive and commercial–not my idea of an especially good time–and so, save for that small group of writers I hung out with, I tended to keep to myself, write, and stay away from the merely competent stories and poems that one can so easily learn to produce at such places. And, as everyone knows, there’s nothing to do in bitter-wintry Iowa City except write, and write, and write some more.

While there, I finished two novels, both bad, both still blissfully unpublished, and some short fictions that began to find homes here and there. I learned galaxies, usually in opposition to the dominant assumptions held in the red-brick hallways of the English-Philosophy building where the Workshop was housed at the time.

DA: And then it was off to Charlottesville, Virginia.

LO: The University of Virginia for my MA and PhD in literature because…because…well, there was this moment in high school when I thought I had everything figured out? You know the kind I’m talking about. Since then, it’s been a long slow drift into ignorance.

What I mean to say is that it took me until Iowa to learn just how much I didn’t know concerning the history and forms of literature, the theoretical underpinnings, all the texts I had always wanted to read, both literary and philosophical. I cherish the life of books, the idea of sitting in a room with friends and/or students and/or simply by myself and contemplating how language and narrative mean and don’t mean and in what contexts and what those narratives can teach us about the world and ourselves and those not ourselves. What a glorious thing.

DA: Tell us about your ‘ole Kentucky home.

LO: My first job was at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, a fairly conservative department filled with very nice people. While there, my wife and I bought a cabin far out in Appalachia. We spent weekends and vacations there among the stills and moonshine and fundamentalists and rattlesnakes squiggled in the road. My wife, Andi, is an assemblage artist who works with, among other things, bones. We would go on bone-hunting expeditions through the nearby woods and across the nearby farms. Over the years, I’ve really fallen for bones.

DA: That was a big break ending up at the University of Idaho.

LO: I knew nothing about Idaho before beginning to prepare to head out there for the interview. I recall Andi and me taking down an encyclopedia and looking up the state. The map had a lot of green splotches on it, which struck us as a good thing. It turned out to be an astonishingly beautiful place. We still spend our summers and holidays in a cabin we keep among the mountains and glacier lakes.

DA: Your novel 10:01 was a notable accomplishment.

LO: What’s always intrigued me about the communal event of film watching is how, when you’re partaking in it, you’re surrounded by an ocean of others, each with his or her own secret history. I’ve always suspected that those secret histories are much more emotionally and intellectually appealing than what’s usually blowing up on the screen. That suspicion suggested the form and led me to write the print version of 10:01, which is set in an AMC theater on the fourth floor of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota–that is, smack in the heart of the American Dream. The narrative drifts in and out of the minds of forty-some-odd moviegoers, one mouse, and one cat during the ten minutes and one second before the feature begins, nestling into various narraticules behind what appears to be The Narrative (i.e., the about-to-begin movie), but isn’t.

Novels mine psychology in a way that films can’t. Films are all about surface and speed, novels depth and taking one’s time. What other art form allows you to live inside another person’s consciousness–a theater full of other people’s consciousnesses–for days or even weeks on end? Much of the satisfaction I experienced in writing 10:01 was using one genre (the novel) to explore the limits of another (film).

DA: The hypertext version of 10:01 was published by The Iowa Review Web in 2005. Can you elaborate about this?

LO: About halfway through writing the print version 10:01, the idea arrived of creating a complementary and complimentary hypermedia one–a version that isn’t simply a digital adaptation of the print one, mind you, but a rethinking that through its hypertextual form and function opens onto questions about how we read, why we read, what the difference is between reading on page and reading on screen, between reading and watching, about which text (the one made of atoms or the one made of bytes) is the more “authentic,” and so forth. Tim Guthrie, an extraordinarily talented assemblage and web artist, had approached me about a year earlier with the suggestion that we collaborate on a project someday, and 10:01 seemed the perfect occasion to do so.

The more closely one reads and compares the print and digital versions, by the way, the more unlike one will likely see they are. In the gap between them, I hope, exists a third virtual version that’s the most textured.

DA: Tell us about Fiction Collective Two and your involvement with it.

LO: FC2 is an independent press founded in 1974 (it was originally called Fiction Collective, and then restructured and renamed in the early nineties) that is dedicated to bringing out novels and collections too adventurous, challenging, and heterodox for the commercial publishing milieu. The thing that separates FC2 from most presses, besides its aesthetics of experimentation, is that it is built on a collective model–that is, it’s run by and for authors. I’ve known about and respected the press immensely since I first stumbled across its books as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. I remember distinctly coming across Raymond Federman’s and Ronald Sukenick’s work in the University library one Friday evening, completely by chance, and how both authors’ projects claim, with every line, that anything is possible.

In 2000, FC2 brought out my short-fiction collection, Sewing Shut My Eyes. The next year the publisher at the time, R. M. Berry, approached me about replacing Ronald Sukenick, who was suffering from an increasingly debilitating disease, as Chair of the Board of Directors. I was deeply flattered and jumped at the chance to help in some small way to shape the landscape of innovative fiction. I now oversee operations.

In the current publishing climate, where the large houses are ever fewer and more dedicated to publishing novels that want to be films when they grow up, I’m a huge advocate of literary activism: aiding other writers, that is, in any way one can–writing reviews of their work, starting up a literary magazine or blog, launching a press, setting up a reading series, simply getting out the word about writing one adores, you name it.

Fiction’s future is going to be increasingly anonymous, collaborative, and ephemeral, and fiction itself is going to survive only through a grass-roots, networked, activist paradigm.

DA: I can’t help but ask how you ended up in Finland of all places.

LO: Oh, well, I applied for a Fulbright to teach one course on postmodern fiction and one on science fiction at two universities, one Swedish and one Finnish, in a city called Turku, about an hour north of Helsinki. The whole experience was magic, from the students and my colleagues to the opportunity to travel throughout Scandinavia (I’m half Norwegian, half Swedish) and make, as it were, a family circle, while becoming better acquainted with northern-European architecture by the likes of Alvar Aalto. That paired-down, clean, airy style is gorgeous to my eye and went a long way toward influencing the sentence structure of my novel Girl Imagined by Chance, which I was writing while there.

And, of course, the landscape and light were miraculous, too: how, during deep winter, the sun would rise late in the morning and start graying out by not much after two; how, during deep summer, it would never go down, but hover a blurry yellow ball low on the horizon, even at three in the morning.

DA: You published Rebel Yell: A Short Guide to Fiction Writing. What succinct advice would you give for writers in the new millennium?

LO: Back to my comment about mere competence to commence: anyone can turn out a merely competent story or poem or novel, but why settle for the McDonald’s of writing, the literary equivalent of Britney Spears’s marshmallow music? Push yourself. Take chances. Remain curious. Remain crazy. Don’t do the same thing twice. Try to fail in interesting ways and see what happens. Ask yourself: what forms and what fictions are appropriate to our own sociohistorical moment? Don’t rewrite yesterday. Always write what you want to read, not what you think others do. Don’t compromise. Realize, along with Roland Barthes, that literature is the question minus the answer; if you’ve got an answer, chances are you’re not a writer. Realize, along with John Cage, that you shouldn’t be frightened of new ideas; it’s the old ones that should scare you. Realize, along with T. S. Eliot, that only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. Reach out and support other writers. Understand this writing thing isn’t a competition; all of us can win all the time. Think of yourself as part of a conversation about the big stuff of life and narrative that extends across time and space, and ask yourself where your voice fits in, how you can help other voices be heard. And if you plan to write for fame or fortune, do something else…immediately.

DA: We should close with your enthusiasm for teaching.

LO: When you’re in that classroom, man, and all the pistons are firing, and you’re helping your students become who they are, and they’re helping you become who you are, and you and they are engaged in the stunning act of community, of being a tribe of questioners, of intellectual and creative explorers…well, there’s no other space quite like that in our culture, is there? I mean, don’t get me started. I could go on forever.

Kane, a native of Boston and longtime resident of Louisiana, is also a nonfiction writer, an editor, translator, and scholar. Kane served as co-editor, with Grace Bauer, of the anthology Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox (Xavier Review Press), one of three finalists for the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award in Poetry.

She is also an associate editor of the Longman Southern literature anthology, Voices of the American South (2004), a comprehensive survey of pivotal works in the Southern literary tradition, and co-authored, with Kiem Do, the non-fiction Vietnam memoir, Counterpart (US Naval Institute Press, May, 1998), a 1999 History Book Club featured alternative.

Her other accomplishments include a Fulbright Scholarship to Vilnius Pedagogical University (Lithuania), an Academy of Poets Prize, New Orleans Writer-in-Residence terms at Tulane University, and a Pushcart nomination.

She has lived in Natchitoches since 1999 and teaches creative writing and poetry at Northwestern State University.

Derek Alger: Did you want to be a poet from an early age?

Photo © Julie Kane

Julie Kane: Oh, yes. The first day of class every year in grade school, I would always bring my English book home and read every single poem in it that same night. My first poetry publication came when I was seven years old, in the comics section of a Boston Sunday newspaper — they had a little space reserved for poems and artwork by kids.

DA: Your family was Boston Irish Catholic.

JK: All of my great-grandparents came over from Ireland and settled around Boston. My father grew up poor in Somerville and Melrose; his father drove a horse-drawn vegetable cart in Boston’s farmers market. My mother was from Foxboro. Her father had managed to get through a two-year business college after service in World War I, he had a low-level management job with the Foxboro Company. They quite literally had lace curtains up on the windows. But my mother was still embarrassed about being Irish. One of her uncles was the town drunk, serenading her friends from his hangout on the Foxboro town common. Her grandmother kept chickens in her front yard. My mother wanted to get the hell out of Foxboro, and my father wanted to succeed as a newscaster, so they both got rid of their accents and the trappings of ethnicity. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, because of my father’s career ambitions.

DA: Your father escaped poverty in large part due to the GI Bill.

JK: Growing up, he never paid much attention to school. He liked playing sports, stealing cars and going joyriding with his friends, hanging out at the racetrack. His parents separated, and his father tended to drink up his paycheck rather than provide for his children. My father graduated from high school in 1943 and got drafted into World War II. When he got out, he was able to go to college on the GI Bill. He had the most beautiful bass speaking voice you’ve ever heard, and he studied broadcast journalism at Boston University and became a radio and TV newscaster.

DA: Your choice to attend Cornell University paid off on many levels. How’d you end up there?

JK: My father was a TV newsman in Binghamton, New York, for about four years when I was in grade school. We took several day trips to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region, about an hour away — I was stunned by the beauty of the mountains and gorges and glacial lakes. Given that I was applying for colleges at the same time a lot of traditionally male-only universities were finally opening up to women, I was also impressed that Cornell had always admitted women — we weren’t going to be patronized there.

It was a stroke of luck that I landed there, because they had an exceptionally lively poetry scene in the early 1970s. A.R. Ammons — “Archie,” to us students — and Bill Matthews were both on the faculty then, and when Bill left, Robert Morgan was hired to replace him. Billy Joe Harris was teaching American poetry. You would not believe the students who were there at the same time I was, all of whom have gone on to publish multiple volumes of poetry.

DA: Try me.

JK: Okay, here goes. Diane Ackerman; Sharon Dolin; Wendy Battin, a winner of the National Poetry Series; Ken McClane; Cecil Giscombe; Stephen Tapscott, who’s become a well-known translator of Spanish-language poetry; James Bertolino; Gilbert Allen; Mark Anderson; John Latta; David McAleavey; Dan Fogel; Judy Epstein.

DA: Not a bad line-up.

JK: Lynn Shoemaker was in town, teaching shop at a local school, and Rich Jorgensen, the editor of the 70s little magazine The Stone, was running an organic bakery. Gary Esolen was a young assistant dean. It was like The Harmonic Convergence, poetry-wise. There were weekly poetry readings in The Temple of Zeus, a coffee house on campus with life-sized plaster statues of Greek gods, and lots of other readings other places. Ithaca House was in town — publishing letterpress poetry books, and Epoch, edited by the Cornell faculty and grad students, was one of the leading lit mags at the time. Wendy Battin was the editor of the “official” Cornell literary magazine, Rainy Day, and just to be orney, Mark Anderson and Gil Allen and I founded an alternative magazine called Solstice — we’d type the thing up on a rented IBM typewriter that cost us our beer money for the week. But really, we were all friends, and the atmosphere was so heady, so exciting — we were eating and breathing poetry.

DA: You received early recognition for your poetry.

JK: I won first prize in the Mademoiselle Magazine College Poetry Competition while I was at Cornell. Anne Sexton and James Merrill were the judges that year. And then Diane Ackerman took two of my poems for Epoch when she was the poetry editor — I was an undergrad and she was in the PhD program, so I was thrilled beyond belief that she considered me a “real poet.” T. Coraghessen Boyle, Marilyn Hacker, and Sandra Gilbert all had work in that Winter 1974 issue of Epoch. Maybe I’ll be able to sell my copy on eBay to fund my retirement.

DA: You had to make quite a choice when it came to grad school.

JK: I got into the Iowa Writers Workshop, which was considered to be the best MFA program at the time — there were only about a dozen of them. But I also got into Boston University, where my idol Anne Sexton was teaching. BU had the aura of being associated with Confessional poetry — Sexton and Plath had taken a course with Robert Lowell there. It wasn’t all that long after Plath’s death, remember — not much more than a decade. Plath was still pretty much a cult figure then, except to us young women poets, who realized her significance. BU gave me a tuition scholarship; and I had an aunt in Boston who was willing to take care of my cat for a year, because the only apartment I could find in one frantic day of searching did not allow pets. So that all tipped the balance toward BU.

DA: Your experience with Sexton turned out to be rather traumatic.

JK: She committed suicide just four or five weeks into my first semester at BU, in October of 1974. Even today, I can hardly talk about it. We — her students, I mean — just adored her. And she had been upbeat in her last class with us, very excited about a reading in the Midwest that was paying her several thousand dollars. It happened on the weekend, I remember, and my aunt — the one who was keeping my cat — told me at breakfast, because she didn’t want me to hear it on the news the way she had. That was not a good year for BU’s creative writing faculty. John Cheever crashed and burned alcoholically and couldn’t finish out the year — he was admitted to a rehabilitation facility in the spring. But he recovered and got a very fine book out of it, Falconer. For the rest of that fall semester, BU kept sending one accomplished poet after another in to substitute-teach Sexton’s class, much like sending Christians in to the lions, because we’d just sit there and glare at them: “You’re not Anne!” James Tate and others. In the spring, Charles Simic finally took over the graduate poetry seminar. His style was very different from Anne’s — he was distant and cool, whereas she’d been so electric and warm — but he was a fine teacher. I couldn’t help thinking about the road not taken, though — what if I’d gone to Iowa instead? There was no real reason to be there with Anne gone.

DA: You received another honor after earning your MA in creative writing.

JK: I became the first female George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. Exeter had just begun admitting girls as students, and there were only a couple of women on the faculty, so I was the butt of a lot of “fellow” jokes, as you can imagine! It was a lovely little colonial New England town, and the students were very smart and endearing, but I didn’t have much to do — all I had to do was write poems and visit English classes when someone invited me. The snow was up to the windowsills and everybody else but me on the faculty was really busy, so I wound up getting married to the guy I was dating at the time. You couldn’t really have your boyfriend stay overnight when you were living in an apartment in the middle of a prep school campus.

DA: Your marriage led to a major geographical change.

JK: My husband was from Louisiana. He had transferred to Cornell from Louisiana State University. This was during the Civil Rights era, remember, and he swore that he was never going back to the South. But then he started getting the bug to go to law school like his grandfather and uncle and father — he applied to the Iowa Writers Workshop and to LSU Law School, and got into both, and it was “Two roads diverged” all over again. Iowa gave him a teaching assistantship and then snatched it away because he didn’t have previous teaching experience, and LSU started looking better and better. We packed up the cat and our poetry books and moved to Baton Rouge in June, 1976.

DA: How did you end up in New Orleans?

JK: My marriage fell apart while my husband was still in law school, and I was fully expecting to flee back North as soon as possible. But I had been to New Orleans a few times, and I loved what I knew of it — the French Quarter, palm trees, cafe au lait and beignets. I thought, maybe I’ll just check out New Orleans for a year or two before I go back home. I answered an ad for a technical writer with Exxon Nuclear — they were managing the procedure production effort for a nuclear power plant under construction upriver from New Orleans. Exxon hired me, and I moved to New Orleans in 1978. At first, I was living on the West Bank, across the river from the city, and later on I moved uptown, to the Carrollton area.

DA: Were you still writing poetry in those years?

JK: Oh, yes. I never stopped. I lost faith in myself for a long while, but I never stopped writing. While I was still living in Baton Rouge, my husband and I belonged to a writer’s workshop that had some incredible people in it. Wyatt Prunty, W.S. DiPiero, Charlotte Holmes, William “Kit” Hathaway, Sue Owen. And when I moved to New Orleans, I fell in with a couple of old friends who were poets, and we’d go to readings and talk poetry. Ken Fontenot, whom I’d met in Baton Rouge, was living in New Orleans East. Gary Esolen from Cornell turned up, living in a crumbling boarding house and writing for an alternative newspaper — eventually he would found the weekly Gambit. He and I gave readings at The Maple Leaf Bar a couple times in the late 1970s. Gary would bring his dirty laundry with him and a duffelbag and wash and dry it in the machines in the back of the bar — the machines are long gone now. One time Gary took me to a party of New Orleans journalists and I met a British poet named Geoffrey Godbert who edited a little magazine and a small press back in London. We struck up a friendship and began corresponding, and eventually he asked to see my poetry manuscript and I sent it to him, and he took half of it and half of another American woman poet’s, and titled the collection Two Into One. It was published in London in 1982 by Geoffrey’s Only Poetry Press. In 1986, I moved to an apartment just four blocks from the Maple Leaf, and I became a regular at their weekly poetry readings. I became friends with Everette Maddox, Nancy Harris, Grace Bauer, and other poets connected with “The Leaf.”

DA: Then a major turning point in your life occurred.

JK: There were two turning points, really. The first one came in 1987 when two men I knew from the Maple Leaf, Bill Roberts and Hank Staples, decided to start up a small press. Bill and I had dated for a few months in 1985, and he didn’t like me very much any more, but he really liked my poetry. Hank was a bartender then and is one of the bar owners now. They published Body and Soul, my first full-length book in 1987. Even though it never got distributed much beyond South Louisiana, it gave me new hope that my poems would find their way to readers.

The second turning point came when I gave up drinking in May of

1990. Everette had died homeless and alcoholic the year before, after publishing in The New Yorker and The Paris Review when he was in his twenties. I didn’t want to wind up like him. I could look back and see that my work had enjoyed early success, but that my life had somehow derailed since then, like a train. I was never a daily drinker like Rette, but I was drinking too much on the weekends, and I was starting to experience the consequences. I was afraid, at first, that the sober life would mean giving up my creativity, my spontaneity. After I quit, I began to think more clearly, and I realized that I needed to give poetry my best shot, because it meant more to me than anything.

Some lines from Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time” kept haunting me: “But yield who will to their separation,/My object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation/As my two eyes make one in sight.”

So I resigned from my high-paying tech writing job and enrolled

in the Ph.D. program at Louisiana State University, on a $12,000 a year

fellowship. I was 39 years old. I was hoping that a literature Ph.D. with a creative writing minor would help get me a college teaching job, and that having a university as a base would make me appear more professional, less amateurish, to editors and other poetry professionals. Plus, poetry was what I loved to do — I wouldn’t be compartmentalizing my life any more, with one box labeled “work” and one labeled “poetry.” Still, I’m glad that I was able to work outside of the academy for so many years — I hope that it helped to inoculate me against passing critical fads, to give me more of a sense of the general audience for poetry.

DA: Next stop, a surprise in London.

JK: My old friend Geoffrey Godbert and his friends, Harold Pinter and Anthony Astbury, had founded Greville Press in London, which was publishing beautiful letterpress chapbooks — “pamphlets,” as the British call them. Geoffrey and I were still corresponding and sticking new poems in the envelopes, keeping each other up to date on what we were writing. To my surprise, Geoffrey showed some new poems of mine to Harold and Anthony, and he wrote me back that the three of them wanted to publish them as a Greville Press pamphlet. So The Bartender Poems came out in the fall of 1991. I was invited to read at the South Bank Centre in London in October, 1991 together with C.H. Sisson, and Harold Pinter introduced the two of us. I felt like Cinderella at the ball — then it was back to Louisiana and life as a lowly and impoverished grad student.

DA: Back to the Ph.D., what was your dissertation about?

JK: It was about the villanelle’s transition from a musical genre to a fixed poetic form. Dave Smith directed it. I think I chose that subject because I had begun writing villanelles rather obsessively, and I was concerned about the identification of formal poetry with conservative politics in some people’s minds. These days, anyone can choose to write a villanette one day and a free verse poem the next, but back then, when New Formalism was new, writing in form was weirdly controversial — the choice provoked outrage from some poets and critics. Form, particularly the villanelle, was what felt fresh and exciting to me at the time, but I was worried that I might be deluding myself — was I being anachronistic, not contemporary? I started wondering how a poetic form gets fixed in the first place — what are the circumstances, the politics? It wound up winning the dissertation award at LSU. It was a lot of fun to research, kind of like poetic detective work.

DA: Then you began teaching.

JK: I got my Ph.D. in May 1999 and was hired as a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern State University (in Natchitoches, Louisiana) starting that fall. The plan was that I would launch a national job search while picking up a year of full-time college teaching experience. But they liked me and I liked them, and so the position became permanent.

DA: You also taught in Lithuania.

JK: Yes. During my first year of teaching at NSU, my father fell ill with lung cancer, and then while he was dying, my favorite aunt (the keeper of the cat) died in Boston and I was named the executrix of her will, and then I was diagnosed with a bad stage of malignant melanoma, and I had surgery in June of 2000. I had a two-and-one-half year waiting period ahead of me to sweat out, during which most melanomas recur if they are going to recur. As you can imagine, I was sort of overwhelmed with intimations of mortality. I decided that I wanted to travel to Lithuania before I died, if I were going to die, because I had made some friends there, poets and a journalist, while it was still part of the Soviet empire, and I had daydreamed for years about visiting them and seeing their fascinating country. (How I made those friends is a long story involving Tipitina’s nightclub in New Orleans circa 1988, and a non-English-speaking guy sitting all by himself at a table when my friends and I wanted to put our winter coats on the back of a chair.) So I applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to Lithuania, and I got it, and I taught at Vilnius Pedagogical University in 2002. I love Lithuania. I went back there in 2005 for the Poetry Spring Festival, as a guest of the Lithuanian Writers Union.

DA: While you were there, you got another big break.

JK: My bout with cancer had inspired me to polish up my poetry manuscript and send it out to a dozen or so poetry book contests before I left the country — one last Hail Mary shot. Or maybe “grapeshot” is more accurate. One day in Vilnius, I just happened to look in my junk mail folder, which I didn’t always check before deleting stuff, and there was an email message from the National Poetry Series, alerting me that I was a finalist. They wanted me to rush five copies of my manuscript to them; the address was a P.O. box. I was in a panic — they had pretty strict format rules, and I couldn’t even buy 8-1/2 by 11 paper in Vilnius — the paper size there was metric. Plus, I couldn’t use any of the private international mail delivery services, because of the P.O. box. Finally, I thought of emailing the manuscript file to my little sister Cindy in New Jersey. She printed it out, ran off four more copies, and mailed it for me. And it won! Maxine Kumin’s selection for the 2002 competition.

Rhythm & Booze was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2003. Finally, I had a book out with a nationally distributed press — people were actually going to be able to find it in bookstores or order it online! When I was dealing with the melanoma diagnosis and the thought of possibly dying in the next few years, that had been my one regret, that I had never published a “real” book. There had been several times in my life when I had been faced with a choice between poetry or personal happiness, or poetry and financial security, and I had always chosen poetry — twice when men I loved wanted me to marry them and relocate, but moving would have meant giving up the poetry community at Cornell, or later giving up my creative writing job at NSU. I had to face the fact that I had sacrificed marriage, children, and financial security for poetry, but it looked like maybe my poetry wasn’t all that good after all. Ouch.

DA: Fortunately, you didn’t have a bad landing.

JK: It’s funny: as soon as I let go of my dream, the poetry gods relented and let me have it. Ever since then, good things have been happening. Rhythm & Booze was a finalist for the 2005 Poets’ Prize. My third book, Jazz Funeral, just won the 2009 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, judged by David Mason. Best of all, I’ve been able to mentor my students and younger writers –to give back what was given so freely to me by my own teachers. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that there are no second acts in American life, but, yikes, look at me! I’ve been blessed with second chances.

He is the author of over 20 non-fiction books, including From Set Shot to
Slam Dunk, An Oral History of the NBA, and On A Clear Day They Could See
Seventh Place, Baseball’s 10 Worst Teams of the Century (with George
Robinson) and co-author of My Zany Life and Times, by Soupy Sales.

Salzberg has been a Visiting Professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications at Syracuse University and teaches non-fiction at Sarah Lawrence
College. He currently teaches at the New York Writers Workshop, where he is a
Founding Member, the Writer’s Voice and the Open Center.

Derek Alger: Your novel, Swann’s Last Song, was recently
published.

Charles Salzberg

Charles Salzberg: Recently published, yes, but written almost thirty
years ago. It’s a quirky, literary detective novel and when I first wrote it
nobody would publish it because they hated the ending, which I refused to
change. Twenty-five years later, I dug it up and resubmitted it. Everyone still
hated the ending. But this time, I changed it. I’m working on a sequel now,
Bad Reception…but my agent tells me I’ve got to sell several thousand
copies of Swann before a publishing company will buy the sequel, so a lot
of my time is spent doing something I hate — promotion.

DA: Well, fortunately, this isn’t a promotional interview, but we should
mention you’ve written other novels.

CS: I still think the best thing I’ve ever written is a satirical
novel, Black Magic, but it’s a tough sell. It’s about a very liberal,
middle-aged guy who finds he’s turning conservative, so he goes to a shrink who
turns out to be a black man with a Viennese accent who harangues him in a
combination of street talk and psychoanalytic jargon, as well as dressing up in
various “costumes,” to make his points. It’s very funny and very dark and very
controversial, so like most of what I write, it’s a tough sell.

DA: You grew up in Manhattan. Were you aware of books and writing at an
early age?

CS: Because I was a shy kid, books were my refuge. There was a Rextall
drugstore downstairs on the ground floor of the apartment building where we
lived, with racks of paperback books and I used to stand there, transfixed,
staring at them. I just picked up books that seemed interesting to me. Saul
Bellow’s Seize the Day, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, John
Hershey’s The Wall, Percy Walker’s The Moviegoer, even books by
Sigmund Freud. Sometimes, it was the cover that caught my attention, other
times, the title. I had no idea who I was reading, I just read.

When I got old enough to take the bus downtown, I found a discount
bookstore on 23rd Street, and I used to haunt the place, picking up books for a
buck. Later, a discount bookstore opened up on 58th and Third, I think, called
Marlboro Books, and they had all kinds of great remaindered hardcover books,
many of which I still have. I became friendly with the guy who worked the cash
register. His name was Ron Rector. He was a poet and he used to give me
typewritten poems, which I still have, and I’d give him parts of a novel I was
working on. Years later, I found out he’d changed his name to Liam Rector, and
he’d become a fairly well-known poet.

DA: You were also an avid sports fan.

CS: I was a big baseball fan. First, when I was very young, the Dodgers,
and then after they left Brooklyn, the Mets. Like most kids, I collected
baseball cards, flipped them with other kids — we never really traded them,
just “gambled” them. Of course, like every other kid, my mother tossed them in
the trash one day, probably when I was away at camp.

Generally, though, I played anything with a ball — baseball, basketball,
football, tennis. I was pretty good, and I think that, along with books, got me
through a difficult, rather lonely childhood.

DA: Were your parents much of a literary influence?

CS: No, not at all. I don’t think I ever saw my father read a book, and
my mother didn’t read much either. So there weren’t many books around the house
other than the ones I brought in or those given to me, or my parents. It was
probably my grandmother on my mother’s side who was my biggest literary
influence. She loved books and was a great storyteller.

DA: You were pretty young when you started writing.

CS: I wrote my first “novel” when I was 12 — a roman a clef –
but I don’t think I finished it. Something about sleepaway summer camp, which I
knew a lot about, since I’d been going since the age of four. But I was pretty
lazy, so I didn’t write much for school — hated book reports and term papers –
though I did write a story for the high school literary magazine, something very
Freudian about a death wish, I think. Took place on the subway tracks, as I
recall.

The truth is, I always wanted to be a writer, not a rich and famous one,
though, just one that got published regularly…and went to lots of literary
parties.

DA: Where did you go to college?

CS: Syracuse University. I first went as a history major, but I quickly
realized that if you were an English major you could spend most of your time
reading books, which wasn’t really work. At the time, as they do now, Syracuse
had a great English department. Delmore Schwartz taught there, but when I tried
to sign up for his class I was told he’d taken the semester off. Evidently, that
happened very often — word was that he was too busy drinking to actually teach.
I only took one creative writing class, and I did pretty well in that.

DA: Your writing career took a little detour.

CS: I wanted to get a Masters in Literature, but this was the period of
the Vietnam War, and so the choices were to go to Canada, feign mental illness,
get a student deferment by going to a professional school, or teach (to this
day, I’m not sure which alternative was best.) I chose law school in Boston, but
I only lasted one year — hated it, but stuck it out for the deferment. Then
they took those away, so I wound up teaching emotionally disturbed kids in a New
York City public school. It was tough, because the kids were wards of the city
and were quite violent. But I got along with them pretty well, probably because
I didn’t know what I was doing. And neither did the other draft dodger teachers,
who mostly used their instincts to get to the kids. All free time, though, was
spent working on fiction.

DA: What came next?

CS: When I didn’t have to teach anymore, I found a job in the mailroom at
New York Magazine. It was the lowest job, sorting mail, handing it out,
doing other odd jobs, but it turned out to be great because I met people like
John Simon, Ken Auletta, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Breslin, all of whom came through
the mailroonm and chatted with us.

DA: And then you set off to become a writer.

CS: I took a class at the New School, with a fellow named Jim Hoffman.
I’d just finished a novel and I asked him what to do with it. He said he was too
busy to read it but he had a friend who owed him a favor and he’d ask him. I
gave him the manuscript and two weeks later he dropped it on my desk with a
letter from John Bardin, praising the book. Because of that, he gave it to a
friend of his who was an editor at MacMillan. Unfortunately, he was leaving
publishing, and it never went anywhere, but it was a great boost to my
confidence.

DA: How did you make a living in those early days?

CS: I left New York Magazine after three months because I realized
I didn’t want to be an editor — much too lazy for that — but the job of
freelance writer looked pretty damn good, because you could sleep in and didn’t
have to go out in bad weather. I sold my first two pieces — one to the New
York Daily News, the other to New York Magazine, and I was off and
running.

But those early days were tough. I lived hand to mouth. And I

remember waiting for the mail, grabbing a check, and then running to the bank it
was drawn on so the money would clear quicker. When friends with real jobs would
ask me to go to a movie and dinner, I’d say I could do one, but not both.
Fortunately, I had a very cheap rent, which was kind of my writer’s subsidy.

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DA: How did you eventually escape the tough times?

CS: I started writing celebrity profiles, four or five a year. I got a
reputation for being able to get people to talk who didn’t like being
interviewed. People like Meg Ryan, John Travolta, Amanda Plummer, Kevin Kline,
Timothy Hutton. But I was still writing fiction, fiction that wasn’t selling.

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DA: What was your next step forward?

CS: My first three books came accidentally. I’d written an article about
street gambling, 3-card monte, and an agent asked me to write a novel based on
it. I didn’t really want to, but when she said I could make several thousand
dollars, which was a lot of money then, I said yes. I think I wrote it in a
month and I wanted to use a pen name, but they printed the covers before I could
tell them the name I wanted, so I was stuck with my name on it. It was called
Street Gambler, and fortunately, I probably have the only copies left.

/>

A short time after that, I was playing softball for the Dell team in the
publisher’s league and the shortstop, an editor, approached me and said, “I know
you like baseball and you’re a writer, how’d you like to write an unauthorized
biography of Darryl Strawberry?” I jumped at the chance, and at the same time a
friend of mine had to bail out of ghostwriting a book for a famous men’s
designer and she recommended me and I did that book as well.

DA: Your love of sports brought you to the first book you truly wanted to
do.

CS: An editor I knew called and asked me to come up with a sports book
idea and I’d just read The Glory of Their Times, loved it, and thought it
would be a good idea to come up with a similar book about the NBA, which was
only about 40 years old, at the time. That led to From Set Shot to Slam
Dunk, which remains one of my favorite books, because I got the opportunity
to interview about a dozen former star basketball players, guys who played in an
era, where they only made five or ten thousand dollars a year.

A few years later, a softball buddy of mine, George Robinson, came up with
the idea of doing a book about baseball’s worst teams, and he asked me to co-
author it with him. The result was, On a Clear Day They Could See Seventh
Place, Baseball’s Worst Teams, which is going to be reissued by Bison Book
next spring. It was also a great experience, because the truth is, losers are
usually much more interesting than winners.

DA: How did you get into teaching?

CS: Accidentally. A friend’s class was over-subscribed and she asked me
to take the over-run. At first, I balked, but I finally said yes and it was the
best decision I ever made.

DA: That was quite an honor when New York Magazine named you one
of the best teachers in New York City.

CS: It was. And it came as a tremendous surprise, because it’s not
something you lobby for. I didn’t even know they were doing it. I was teaching
at the Writer’s Voice and two other teachers there, Patty Dann and Elaine Equis,
were also named. It was great, because it brought a better caliber writer to my
classes.

DA: You must have a great feeling seeing former students come out with
published novels.

CS: People may not believe me, but it’s an even greater thrill than
getting something of my own published. Lauren Weisberger was the first — the
first essay she wrote for class was called “The Devil Wears Pravda,” but
there are many, many more who’ve published either books or articles. In the last
few months, three of my students have published books: Lisa Cohen’s After
Etan, Sally Koslow’s The Late, Lamented Molly Marx, and Andy Raskin’s
The Ramen King and I. And there are more coming up, I’m sure.

DA: You also have a memorable experience from a well-known literary
journal.

CS: While I was teaching, I volunteered to work at Antaeus, the literary
magazine run by Dan Halpern. I used to go into the office a couple times a week
and do whatever needed to be done. The biggest thrill was when Dan handed over a
story by Jim Harrison and said, “Take a look at this. If you like it, we’ll
publish it.” I did and they did. One afternoon, I was sitting in the office
alone when a guy walked in and asked for Dan. “He’s upstairs in his apartment,”
I said. “Well, tell him Gerard Malanga’s here to see him.” I had no idea who
that was and what I didn’t know was that Malanga recently reviewed one of Dan’s
books of poetry and savaged it. Anyway, I called Dan and said, “Gerard Malanga’s
here to see you.” “You’re kidding,” he said. “Nope. He’s here,” I replied.
“Hold him there,” Dan said. About three minutes later, Dan bursts through the
door wielding a baseball bat. He takes one look at Gerard and bursts out
laughing. It was his friend, Marvin Bell, playing a joke on him. And, obviously,
on me, too.

DA: You have also published books through Greenpoint Press.

CS: I was working on Jonathan Kravetz’s webzine, Ducts, and we
decided to create our own publishing wing. We called it Greenpoint Press — he
lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and our first book was How Not to Greet Famous
People, a compilation of the best writing from the first five years of
Ducts. Since then, we’ve published Gene Kraig’s The Sentence and Richard
Willis’s Long Gone (which is in its second printing and got sensational
reviews — he’s 82 now, and he wrote a memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm in
the 1930s.) And our latest book is Doug Garr’s skydiving memoir, Between
Heaven and Earth.

DA: Tell us about Trumpet Night.

CS: Trumpet Night is Jonathan Kravatz’s baby, although he’s now
part of New York Writers Resources. It’s been going on ten years now and the
second Saturday of every month we have three readers at the KGB Bar in the East
Village, which, by the way is owned by a former student, Denis Woychuk.

DA: I can’t forget to ask about California Pizza on 60th Street and Third
Avenue.

CS: It’s my Elaine’s. I love the food, the atmosphere, the people who
work there, and they’ll let me sit there with many friends as long as I want.
What could be better?

DA: You’re pretty involved now, but what are your upcoming plans?

CS: I should say, to work on my sequel to Swann’s Last Song, as
well as send out another novel I’ve just finished, Skin Deep, which is
based on a true crime, a man who killed his entire family, three kids, wife,
mother, dog, then disappeared into thin air. But it’s summer, so I’m probably
going to spend most of my time playing softball, watching softball, going to the
beach, seeing movies, hanging out with friends, and taking a break from
teaching. But you probably shouldn’t print that, so why don’t you just say,
“writing and teaching.”

DA: Okay, we’ll try again. What are you doing this summer?

CS: Writing and teaching.

DA: That’s what I thought.

CS: And you thought right.

Several chapbooks of Uschuk’s poetry have also been released, including the award-winning Without Birds, Without Flowers, Without Trees (Plume Press Chapbook Award, 1990). Her work has appeared in over two hundred and fifty journals and anthologies, such as Poetry, Parnassus Review, Agni Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.

Uschuk, who graduated with honors with an MFA in Poetry and Fiction from the University of Montana, has been a featured writer at the American Center in New Delhi, India, as well as at the University of Pisa, at International Poetry Festivals in Maimo and University of Lund, Sweden, and Struga, Macedonia, and at the International Scandanavian Book Fair, to name a few.

She was Honored Guest at the 2004 and 2006 Prague Summer Programs, and in the fall of 2008, she read in the Distinguished Writer Series at Arizona State University.

Currently, Uschuk is a Professor of Creative Writing and Eco Texts at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. She has been the Director of the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, where she was an Associate Professor of Creative Writing. She is Editor-in-Chief of CUTTHROAT: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS and is also Director of the Southwest Writers Institute.

Pamela Uschuk

Pamela Uschuk: I was born in Lansing, Michigan on the hottest day of the year, my mother delighted in telling me. She said that mine was an easy birth.

I grew up on an 80 acre working farm 7 miles from the village of DeWitt and 12 miles from Lansing, close enough for my Dad to drive to the Oldsmobile factory to work. The farm was lush, green and beautiful, our yard studded with leafy maples and elms, a hickory tree and flower gardens where roses, Canturbury bells, snap dragons, sweet Williams, lilacs, tiger lilies and more flourished, all tended by my mother. She was an excellent gardener. We raised black angus cattle, chickens, pigs, wheat, corn, oats and we grew a gigantic vegetable garden. Even though we were poor, we always had plenty of good food to eat, what they would call organic now.

DA: Food for thought is always good.

PU:As I grew older, I felt increasingly isolated on the farm. Because I wasn’t allowed to have a car, I was stuck there. Having a mother who was severely bi-polar compounded my agony. She was hospitalized in psychiatric wards every couple of years for paranoia and wild, but not fun for us, hallucinations. She underwent electric shock treatments and psychotherapy. There was no real cure. In those barbaric psychiatric days, the drug of choice was thorazine, which made her a zombie. My mother was very smart, sensitive, an avid reader and she played the piano and organ, but her delusions immobilized her and terrified us.

And, she could also be manipulative, deftly playing the martyr. The older I grew, the less I was able to communicate with her. When my mother was ill, I, being oldest, had to take care of my brother and sisters while my father was at work. Her disorder affected and traumatized our entire lives. Our family spun on the tilt-a-whirl of her frequent psychotic episodes.

Ironically, after my father’s death, I ended up being the prime caretaker for my mother for much of the last five years of her life. My anger and resentment slowly turned to compassion for her, for her terrorizing delusions, her isolation, loneliness, and the box canyon of sadness she couldn’t escape. Almost too late, I learned to love my mother. Sometimes taking care of her constant needs felt like an imposition, but I’ve come to understand that it was also a huge gift I’m still unwrapping. I’ve written about her in poetry and prose, and I continue to untangle the web of my knotty childhood.

DA: You also have a deep love for animals.

PU: As for my relationship with animals, I had and have today a deep respect for and love of animals. I’ve always had pets. They’ve saved my sanity, if not my life. Animals, both domestic and wild, are trustworthy and are mainly without guile. A lot can be learned about the behavior of people by studying the behavior of animals. My childhood companions were rabbits, white tail deer, foxes, raccoons, oppossums, skunks, frogs, snakes, snapping and painted turtles and toads. As a child, I loved roaming our farm with my brother, John. We had free run of our eighty acres and the ponds nearby. As over-protective as my father was at times, it was astonishing how much latitude he allowed us in terms of mobility on the farm and in its local environs. This was liberating and made us self-sufficient. We had to rely on our imaginations to invent games to amuse ourselves. Out of necessity, we became acute observers of the natural world. We lived it.

There is no doubt that being such an intimate part of and enjoying so deeply the natural world fired a life-long passion for wilderness and

its inhabitants.

DA: Your father was quite an influence on you.

PU: My father was a large man, the son of a Russian immigrant who was also a gangster. My grandfather was a member of the Purple Gang and was sent to prison for murder. He was a member of the aristocracy in Byelorussia, but his family forced him, because of his bad behavior, to leave home and to emigrate to America. My father bore the brunt of my grandfather’s wrath and so reacted against him. Early on, my father instilled in us the importance of telling the truth and obeying the law.

When my grandfather committed suicide, my father had to drop out of the 10th grade to go to work to help my grandmother support the family. He was a decorated hero in World War II in the Army Air Corps, a tail gunner who fought in Northern Africa and Italy, then re-enlisted and was sent to the South Pacific. In Australia, he went AWOL and hopped trains all around the country. He was especially fascinated by the Aborigines. Because the Air Corps lost his paperwork, my father spent two years on New Guinea in the jungle, where he started a jewelry business and where he survived typhoid fever, among other things. He had a lifelong interest in Indigenous peoples. As a child, I loved hearing about his adventures, which included him and a pilot friend of his hijacking a shipment of Johnny Walker Scotch meant for MacArthur’s headquarters. They passed the bottles of scotch out to every soldier they saw in Port Moresby. My father was busted for that, but he said it was worth it. My mother disapproved of his telling those stories. My brother, sisters and I begged to hear more.

To say that my father had a profound effect on me is understating it. I was terrified of his temper. He could yell louder than anyone I knew, but he also actively played with us. He was fun. He drew pictures with us. He took us to movies, he hiked with us, picked berries with us, played football and baseball with us, and drove us to Lake Michigan for all-day family outings at the beach. We did everything as a family, complete with cousins, aunts, uncles and my grandma & step-grandpa.

My father taught us to love the woods, taught us not to kill anything simply for sport, and he taught us to fight injustice. At the Oldsmobile factory, my father was a Union Steward so he wasn’t popular with the bosses. One of his crusades was fighting for the right of black women to use the bathroom at Oldsmobile. One thing he absolutely insisted upon was that his children get a good education. After all, his education had been rudely curtailed. He was a reader–he consumed two newspapers a day, and he read history books. My father
was complex so it’s difficult to pigeon-hole him in this small space. He had a great and deep laugh, was as warm and loving as he was spiteful and intolerant of stupidity. It was hard to gauge when he’d explode into inexplicable anger, which made life very tricky for us. Extremely quick-witted, he often used his wit to denigrate his enemies and, unfortunately, us kids and my mother.

When I was three, my father made me memorize the entire poem, “The Night Before Christmas,” which I recited without a glitch in front of relatives at Christmas. Some of my earliest memories are of me sitting on his lap while he read the newspaper to me. He taught me to read very early. As a child, I loved rhythms, loved words. I remember carrying around a small tablet to write words and their meanings on — I was fascinated by them. I read books as if they were food, and the dictionary became one of my favorite volumes. Because I was so isolated in high school, I read 5th Century Greek plays, Shakespeare, all of Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, etc.

My life was further complicated because our household was multi-lingual. My father & his siblings were fluent in Russian. My beloved grandmother, Anna, and my step-grandfather spoke Russian and Czech in their home. Their friends spoke Polish, Armenian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and other Slavic tongues. The music and rich textures of these languages resonate in my poems today.

DA: Where did you go to college?

PU: I earned a B.A. in English from Central Michigan University. My high school grades and my SAT scores were high so I received a four year scholarship that paid all the tuition and fees to attend CMU. I could have gone to any school in Michigan, like the University of Michigan.

Maybe I should have. I was scared that the U of M was too big. After all, I was a farm girl and attended a very small high school. I attended CMU because my cousin went there. In college, I was very poor and ate a lot of macaroni & cheese and Ramen because they were cheap.

As an undergraduate, I was an art major for my first two years, but I was frustrated by the ambiguity of the art professors. They didn’t know how to explain technique. Their vague, “You know, just do it,” left me befuddled. My childhood dream was somewhere between Paul Gaughin and Mahatma Ghandi — I wanted to be a great artist and to change the world. I decided that if I wasn’t going to be a great painter, I’d be a great writer.

I adored literature classes, especially because I loved to read. In literature classes, we discussed books critically. That was a treat. I was propagandized by my family into becoming a public school teacher. It was a safe profession for women. Since I admired some of my teachers, I thought that it could be a career that would fulfill me.

During high school, I was placed in accelerated writing courses because of my writing ability, so I thought an English degree would be a good fit. Those accelerated writing classes and my science classes kept high school from being a total bore. After graduating with honors from CMU, I received a full Graduate teaching fellowship to study Comparative Literature with a concentration in Russian Literature. Although, I loved my classes, I was restless. One year into an unhappy marriage, I felt like my life was belted into a straight jacket. I needed something, but I wasn’t sure what. Then it struck me. I’d been in school most of my life. I moved to the woods outside of Traverse City to learn the names and habits of the birds, the animals, plants and trees. I needed survival skills I couldn’t get in academia.

DA: But you did end up teaching.

PU: Yes, I did. After substitute teaching for a bit, I signed a contract for my first teaching job at Elk Rapids Middle School. Like every public school teacher, I was overworked and underpaid. I taught six classes a day, everything from English to Oceanography (because they had no one else to teach it!). I was a very popular teacher and worked not only with regular students but with juvenile offenders that were sent up from Detroit to get them out of their bad environments. They brought crime to our community. I remember one 6th grader, a cute little blonde who brought me a photo of her teenaged brother dead in a casket. She’d taken the photo. Her brother had been shot to death by police. Anyway, although I loved my students, I was exhausted. I’d plop down in front of the TV every night after school and turn into a turnip. I wanted simply to write, so I quit my teaching job mid-year during my fourth year. My students protested and marched around the school with big signs, trying to get me to come back. It was touching. As much as I was flattered, I was adamant. Following Rilke’s admonishment, I looked to “change my life.” For the next two months, I wrote 16 hours a day and finished a 365 page novel I called FLIP SIDE MEMORIAL. I revised it twice, then put it into a shoe box. It was my breakaway work.

DA: And where’s the novel now?

PU: Still in the witness protection program, living under an assumed name in the shoebox.

DA: I walked into that one.

PU: While I was working on the novel, I continued to write poems. I just didn’t feel they were good enough for public consumption. They weren’t, but my illusions kept me writing poem after poem. The novel compelled me, but I couldn’t give up the poetry. She was the seductress that won my heart.

DA: A change of career really convinced you that you were meant to write poetry.

PU: There was nothing else that made me as happy, as ecstatic, as excited or as miserable as writing poetry. Of all genres, for me, poetry is the most difficult thing to write. As corny as this sounds and is, writing poems gave my life depth and meaning. My poetry came out of my best self, not the self that whined and blundered through life. Writing was power. It was a way for me to smash the walls of my small existence, to find my way out of my own head and to fly along this journey.

DA: You ran into some major influences along the way.

PU: When I moved to Northern Michigan, I met Jim Harrison, who my next husband, Jerry Gates, knew and we ended up hanging out with him and the Lelanau County version of the Merry Pranksters. Through Harrison, I once met Thomas McGuane, who was the most handsome man I’d ever met. I liked his smile and his stories. Harrison was a smart ass, cynical, glitzy with a gritty, rebellious sort of fame. In the Hemingway macho tradition, he flirted outrageously with me as he did every other young attractive woman. We drank and played pool and partied too much in Dick’s Bar. I was young and enscorseled with Harrison’s wit and humor, and mightily admired the multiple intelligences, the pathos in his poetry. I read everything he wrote, and I wanted to write as well as he did. No, I wanted to write better than he did.

DA: Another poet had a profound influence on you.

PU: Yes, there were many actually – Theodore Roethke, Richard Braughtigan, Sylvia Plath were some of my models. It was Galway Kinnell who actually took an interest in my poetry. After quitting my teaching job, I became a bartender and I wrote a lot of poems during that time. I attended all the poetry readings I could — Joseph Brodsky, Diane Wakoski, Gary Snyder, Marvin Bell, Harrison. When Galway Kinnell came to Interlochen Arts Academy to read, my life changed. I was mesmerized by his poems and the way he read them as if he were standing in a cathedral reciting secret texts. Somehow I got invited to a private after-reading party for him. We talked intensely. Galway invited me and my friend, Mike Masley, to sit in on his poetry workshop at Cranbrook Institute. Mike, my sister, Judi and I drove downstate for that. Kinnell’s workshop was great, and he asked me to send him more poems. Among others, I sent “Waiting for Nighthawk in a Snowstorm” and “Elk Camp.” Kinnell wrote back that my poems were intelligent, the imagery fresh and vital and that I should keep writing. Those were words I needed to hear.

DA: And then you were fortunate to find a great husband and poet in one.

PU: When William Pitt Root came to Interlochen as Visiting Poet, I had given up on men and relationships. My second marriage had long been in shambles. None of my lovers worked out. Although I was still bartending, I was teaching occasional writing workshops for Pathfinder, a private school, and I was traveling back and forth across the country alone. I was running a small monthly reading series in Traverse City with a tiny bit of money from the Michigan Council on the Arts. Anyway, Bill came to Interlochen, and I wanted him to read in my series. I was also commissioned to write an article on him for the Traverse City Record Eagle. When I called Bill and asked him to read, he asked me how much I could pay. I told him, “$50.” He said, “That isn’t enough, but would you like to go to a movie.” Needless to say, this caught me totally off-guard. I also laughed, “Okay, I’ll go to a movie with you if I can bring some of my friends.” I asked him how I’d recognize him.

He said he’d be wearing a Panama drifter. I told him I would wear a black rose.

I brought 12 of my friends with me to the theatre. We saw “A Little Romance.” After the movie, my friends abandoned us, so I took Bill to a colorful local Traverse City bar to play pool and have a beer. We had more fun than I imagined and we couldn’t stop talking. We became friends. I read Bill’s work, loved it, and then I did my interview with him. We shared poems. He did read in my reading series without charging a thing. It wasn’t until the next month that we became more than friends. I found my muse in Bill, who shared, with equal intensity, my love of dogs, thrift stores, chocolate, wilderness and a gypsy appetite for adventure. When I moved from Michigan to Oklahoma City to live with Bill, my life broke open like a ripe plum. We’ve been lovers and friends ever since.

When Bill left Northern Michigan for Oklahoma City, it wasn’t long before I decided to leave also. I headed for Colorado. While living there with my brother, Bill invited me to visit him in Oklahoma, which I did. The rest is history, as they say. Fate wouldn’t allow us to stay away from one another. A month later, we moved in together. During those first three years, we lived in Oklahoma City, Port Townsend, Washington, Missoula, Montana, Oracle, Arizona, then back to Missoula, where Bill was hired to replace Richard Hugo after Hugo passed away.

DA: You received your MFA in Fiction and in Poetry from the University of Montana.

PU: I received my MFA in poetry and fiction from the University of Montana in 1986. While I was a graduate student, I was also a Poet In Schools.

I volunteered to work on Indian reservations, and ended up working for three years with students from the Assiniboine, Sioux, Salish, Flathead, Blackfeet, Northern Cheyenne, Nez Perce and Crow tribes. It was a tough job because I had to drive so far for my week-long residencies. I stayed in cheap motels, where I created poetry lessons and I wrote many poems myself. I was also Editor-In-Chief of CUTBANK, the literary magazine out of the University of Montana. One of the wonderful things about attending the U of M was the exposure to and close contact with well-known writers that graduate students had. So many writers, editors and agents came through Missoula — that was great. During graduate school, I had short-term workshops from Donald Hall, Denis Johnson, T.C. Boyle, Leslie Silko, Stephanie Vaughn, Tobias Wolf, among others, and I studied with Patricia Goedicke, William Kitteridge, Bill and Joy Harjo, who held the First Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry.

DA: Your teaching experience can be described as one with extensive variety and many geographical stops.

PU: I’ll try to condense this. My husband took a position teaching creative writing at Hunter College in Manhattan, so in fall 1986, we moved to New Paltz, New York. I applied for several entry level positions and took an adjunct job at Marist College across the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie. I volunteered to teach composition in their prison program, thinking that it would be a worthwhile experience, that prisons like reservations are places where I might effect the most positive change and make a difference, a sort of a giving back to society. I’ve always believed that I need to be socially responsible, to do what good I can in the world.

That adjunct job last six years, and was one of the most intense teaching experiences of my life. I taught in Greenhaven, a maximum security prison for men in upstate New York. Half my students were convicted murderers. A Puerto Rican woman gave me good advice the first night I went to teach there. She told me to never show fear. I remembered that. It served me well, even when I was threatened by an inmate who ended up in the psyche ward.

I got a good reputation, teaching poetry and short fiction. I built the Creative Writing program in that prison. John Cheever had taught Creative Writing there, and he set his novel, FALCONER, in that prison.

I had a legacy to uphold, but teaching in prison erodes the soul in many ways. I lasted six years, and I am proud of what I did there. My students were serious writers, and they wrote amazing pieces, some of which found their way into print. They felt safe in my workshop. Those students ranged from an ex-Black Panther to an Afghani diamond smuggler to an Israeli mercenary soldier who was fluent in five languages to criminals in prison for drug-related crimes. It was interesting, but I could never let down my guard. Speaking of guards, the guards resented us and the program. The inmates were getting educations the majority of these guards had no access to or intelligence for. My supervisor was a chauvinist plus. After six years, I said goodbye.

DA: This interview is more about you than your poetry, so I’ll just recommend readers buy your work, but we should touch on it a bit.

PU: My poems usually begin in the natural world, somehow, or with natural imagery, but then they expand outward and encompass things like politics, wilderness preservation, preservation of the wild within us, compelling stories of people fighting for justice, the interconnectedness of everything in the universe, human relationships, land, spirituality, etc. It’s important to me to write about what moves me so I have often told the stories of those people or creatures who have no voice or whose voice/s have been suppressed in some way.

Exposing injustice for the evil it is is utterly important to me. There is so much corruption, hatred, greed, brutality and mistrust in the world, that it is utterly important for poetry to hold out truth, to hold out compassion, to hold out light and especially love to all of us.

In this way, it is a balance or songs of balance. As Joy Harjo said so brilliantly, “We must turn slaughter into food.” The past eight years, I’ve been consumed with injustices arising from our own government’s corruption and it’s many abuses of power. The Bush administration has been a disaster for families, for health care, for the environment, for the economy, for every day Americans, and I’ve written a lot about that.

The Iraq War was an invasion conducted on misformation, at best, lies, at worst. It has nearly bankrupted us as a nation, created enemies for us all over the globe, not to mention caused the deaths and maimings of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians. All these things happen to real people and are grounded in real stories. They are not just a matter of statistics or political maneuvering. As a poet, I don’t think I have any choice but to address these issues.

DA: That’s quite a compliment that your collection, Finding Peaches in the Desert, was made into a CD of the same name with musical accompaniment by Chameleon and Joy Harjo.

PU: As I mentioned, I met Joy in 1985 at the University of Montana when she held the first Richard Hugo Chair. I took a graduate poetry workshop with her. Joy was a unique and remarkable teacher, the best teacher of poetry, beside Bill, that I’ve ever had. She and I became very close friends and remain so today. We believe in each other’s work and in each other.

DA: Shifting back to your childhood, your grandmother was also a great influence.

PU: No, she was central, an axis that kept me from flying off into the abyss. My Grandma, Anna, was the only adult who did not judge me.

She let me be, laughed with me, walked in the woods with me, picked wild strawberries, raspberries, plums and wildflowers with me, took me to movies, and rocked me in her front porch swing while telling me stories about her life.

I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who I absolutely adored. She was a strong woman, independent, smart and with a razor-edged sense of humor. Although she stood at 4′10″, she never seemed small. Everyone, even my giant father, deferred to her.

My grandmother came to this country in that great turn of the 19th Century wave of Eastern European immigrants. She was only 16, and she spoke no English. When her two brothers, then her brewery owning father died, it sent the remains of her family into chaos. My great-grandmother believed in streets paved with gold, so she took a chunk of money and sent it to a cousin in New York, who was supposed to take that money to set up my grandmother. When my grandmother arrived on a boat from Czechloslovakia, that weasel cousin sold her to a sweat shop in Philadelphia. She rolled cigars 16 hours a day, six days a week, until she ran away with a circus.

Yes, my grandma sang and danced in the circus, and I wish I could have seen her. My grandfather saw her perform in the circus and fell in love with her. When my grandfather committed suicide in the 30s, my grandmother took in laundry and worked as a maid in Lansing to keep the state from taking away her children. She was a fierce defender of her family.

My grandmother remains one of my most powerful role models.

DA: It must have been very special being a featured writer at Prague Summer Workshops.

PU: It was and is a great honor. I have Richard Katrovas, the dynamic and wonderful Director of the program, to thank for that. The program brings in top-notch writers of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and playwriting to work with highly-motivated, accomplished graduate and undergraduate students from the U.S. and Europe. It is a joy to participate in this program.

There is also the draw of my Czech heritage. To walk the same cobblestones as my grandmother reconnects me with her indomitable spirit. I hear her speak in every shop and restaurant I enter. The elegant architecture, the beautiful bridges, the proliferation of culture, the Pinkus Synagogue, the Jewish Cemetery, Kafka’s old haunts, the Terezin Concentration Camp, the Communist Museum, the square where Jan Palka incinerated himself in protest of the Russian occupation of Czechloslovakia, all have a profound effect on me. I’ve been an Honored Guest twice at the Prague Summer Workshops, and I am grateful to be teaching poetry there in July 2009.

DA: Tell the truth, did you ever picture yourself one day standing 12,000 feet in the Himalayas of Tibet with a group students and your husband?

PU: No, I didn’t picture myself standing with students in the Himalayas, but I long dreamed of going there. I can see the way that path evolved.

When I was a senior in high school, I began reading about and studying Buddhism. I read and was affected by the novel, SIDDHARTHA. Tibetan Buddhism still holds a great amount of wisdom and appeal for me. I took students to Northern India, to Ladahk (Little Tibet) to study Buddhist sacred scripture, art and culture. We climbed to monasteries at dizzying heights, met with monks and shaman and common Tibetan people who had the most amazing serenity and happiness. Going to Dharamsala and twice seeing the Dalai Lama was astonishing and changed me in unending ways. I’ve written some long poems from that experience, as well as two articles that appeared last year in PARABOLA and in TERRAIN Magazine. I will be digesting that trip, those experiences for the rest of my life. That I could share them with my husband is an incredible blessing. I am a traveler, by nature, and so is my husband, and I hope that we can continue to see and explore and learn the world together.

So far, we’ve been to nearly every state in the U.S., to many countries in Europe and Eastern Europe, all over Mexico, to Hawaii, in South Africa, India and the Himalayas together. We are very lucky.

DA: You can be found these days, among other things, teaching creative writing at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

PU: Yes, I have a Creative Writing tenure-track teaching position. This semester, I teach a beginning poetry workshop, a senior poetry workshop, and a screenwriting class. My students are intellectually curious, enthusiastic and many are as obsessed with writing as I am.

Fort Lewis College is located at 7000 on top of a mesa that overlooks Durango, the entire La Plata Range of the Rockies and the Animas River valley. Physically, this is one of most breathtaking campuses I’ve ever walked. The college is a 4 year undergraduate liberal arts institution.

The students are independent-minded, resourceful, tough and are here, for the most part, because they love the mountains and the natural world. On the downside, when it snows and there is new powder in the mountains, students skip classes en masse to hit the slopes with snowboards and skiis. Because Fort Lewis is the only four year college in the United States where Native American students attend without paying tuition, we have a high Native American enrollment — 125 tribes are represented. There are also Caucasian, Hispanic, and African American students, plus foreign exchange students from various places on the globe. I love this kind of rich cultural diversity in the classes and at public school functions. A Ute Medicine man often gives a blessing at such affairs as Convocation and Graduation. Walking across campus, I have stopped to buy fry bread, then indulged in a green chili burro. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch a glimpse of our resident mountain lion.

DA: And finally tell us a bit about CUTTHROAT and how it came into being.

PU: That’s another big question with a long answer, but I’ll try not to enter a wind tunnel. When I was a graduate student at the University of Montana, I was Editor-In-Chief of its literary magazine, CUTBANK.

Although this job was time-consuming and entailed big-time responsibility, including fund-raising, I liked reading other writers’ work and publishing good stories and poems. I was fascinated with the process. Being a bit OCD, editing, with its endless details work, called me.

After grad school, I harbored a dream to publish a magazine. My husband, Bill, had plenty of experience editing, too. He and Gurney Norman started the PENNY PAPERS in California, and that was a great success. We both thought it would be as much fun as a mare’s nest to run our own magazine. So, when Bill took early retirement from his teaching job at Hunter College, and I quit my teaching job at Salem College in North Carolina, we moved to Colorado and plunged in the literary river. We had no funding, but we did have a credit card. We came up with the name CUTTHROAT, A Journal of the Arts after Colorado’s beautiful endangered trout. Since we know a fair amount of writers, we solicited work from some friends and enlisted others to be our Contributing Editors. We took out ads in Poets & Writers and AWP Chronicle, and we began receiving submissions for our first issue. To date, we’ve published work by Marvin Bell, Joy Harjo, Michael Blumenthal, Richard Jackson, Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Rebecca Seiferle, Michael Waters, Cynthia Hogue, Rick DeMarinis, Linda Hogan, Wendell Berry and many other fine writers. And, we’ve published many unknown and talented writers.

I instituted national writing competitions at both CUTBANK and the Salem College Center for Women Writers (I directed that Center from 2002-2005), and so we ran our first contests, naming them the Joy Harjo Poetry Contest and the Rick DeMarinis Short Fiction Contest. These continue to be very popular contests, and our magazine’s reputation keeps growing, so far without groaning. In our forthcoming issue, we are publishing a story by writer from Kazakhstan, poems by a Maori poet, by an Australian poet, a story by a Japanese-American as well as new poems from Elise Paschen, Wendell Berry, Linda Hogan, Richard Jackson, Dennis Sampson, and a new story by Karen Brennan. No matter this bad economy, we intend to keep CUTTHROAT alive.

Herriges’ short work has appeared in Chicago Tribune Magazine, The Literary Review, Story Quarterly, and the South Carolina Review, among others. As a young inner-city high school teacher, in 1978, his article, “Inherit the Streets” portrayed the grim story of teen survival against the odds.

Herriges is also the author of JD: A Memoir of a Time and a

Journey (Wordcraft of Orgeon, 2006) about fulfiling the dream of meeting and speaking with the reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, in the mid-1970s.

Derek Alger: It sounds like your childhood and adolescence were perfect for a future writer, if not especially great for a kid.

Greg Herriges: I guess it depends on how bad you want to be a writer. There are times that I would quite happily trade in the psychodrama for a good old-fashioned family life with Pop out in the garage and Mom making pies in the kitchen. But that wasn’t the case. Looking back through that 1950s lens, I guess we were a lot like the “Leave It To Beaver Family,” if Mrs. Cleaver had been psychotically depressed and Mr. Cleaver had been a negligent, alcoholic womanizer.

My dad was the vice president of a bank and my mom was a housewife and we lived in Highland Park, an affluent suburb just north of Chicago on Lake Michigan. It was a largely Jewish community, and my friends were all Jewish, and there were wonderful stories their uncles and grandfathers would tell–I loved Yiddish, and got pretty proficient at using the expressions. But I was sent to a Catholic school, which just seemed so foreign to me–the sacraments, the idea of eating a divinity during communion. The priest turns a piece of bread into Jesus, and then if that piece of bread goes in your system–I mean, you know what’s going to happen to it, right? Some miracle. It’s a hell of a thing to do to a savior.

And Mom and Dad went through a horrendous divorce, and they were the only people ever to be excommunicated in the whole parish–until one of the priests ran off with the organist in her husband’s car. I think he was excommunicated. Maybe they just defrocked him. One less guy turning bread into Jesus. All I know is that I never saw him again, which was okay with me. It was a pretty racy Catholic school. We’re going to have our reunion this June. Pray for me.

DA: You found solace in Dion and The Belmonts and J.D. Salinger as a teen.

GH: It’s a lousy thing for a child to experience, the break up of a family. So yes, I escaped in books and in the rock and roll 45 rpm singles that my teenage sisters brought home. My sisters did all they could to shelter my younger brother and me, but they were young themselves, so I knew that Lee, my brother, and I were on our own. I’d read at the library as often as I could. It was lovely to have such a quiet place, being surrounded by stacks and stacks of books, and Highland Park is known for its ravines, so the nature outside the library windows was serene and beautiful, very comforting. I loved Steinbeck’s stories, and a little later, Fitzgerald’s works. At the end of the day when I’d come home, I’d listen to songs by Roy Orbison, Dion and The Belmonts, Sam Cooke. Dion came across to me especially. I think it was that suave New York image–the guy who could be alternately vulnerable and tough in his songs “Teenager In Love” and “The Wanderer.” Also my mother’s side of the family was Italian, so there was some role model identification. But Dion’s own life was a cover job. He had handlers who could conceal his pain behind an image, but he was strung out. Though I didn’t know it at the time, he was hurting.

I played in rock and roll bands during high school. We were a house band at several clubs that had questionable connections. Guys in dark suits. I didn’t ask questions. I was growing up fast.

DA: And Salinger?

GH: The epiphany came the day I began reading The Catcher In The Rye. Until that time, there had been nothing like it–Holden’s voice, his attitude. He was so funny, and so inordinately sad. I knew what that was like, to deny an aching within, disguise it with a wise-guy facade. When you’re that young, even as a teenager, it might be the only line of defense you have. I couldn’t put that book down. All the pop culture that I was absorbing now in the early to mid-sixties was coming out of New York–the whole backdrop to Catcher, the sounds from the Brill Building, Laurie Records–all very east coast. I used to sit in my doctor’s office waiting room, scanning little maps of the city in The New Yorker, the ones that would be there for tourists to guide them to performances and exhibits. I learned where Central Park South was, the Wollman Rink, the zoo. Holden’s local geography was all conceptual to me at the time, because I’d never been to New York, but it was in my head. I had it memorized.

DA: A change came your last year of high school.

GH: I fell in love with a girl on TV. I was watching this show on television, and there was this petite, pretty girl, and one of the guys in my band said, “She goes to our high school, you know. This is her mother’s show.” So I made it my business to meet her the next day. I stood around the hallway till I saw her walk by, and I introduced myself. Young love–and such an amazing way to fall for someone, on TV.

But that would have to wait. My father had moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and I missed him, the way a boy misses his dad. When I could no longer live with the craziness at home, I took my kid brother with me one night. Just up and left home and flew to Florida.

I spent my senior year there and graduated from Fort Lauderdale High School. Listen, it was not my favorite place, Florida. I didn’t have many friends, because it’s difficult to transplant yourself into a social scene with people who had been together since grammar school. I remember the local kids cracked me up. They were trying to surf on these little anemic Fort Lauderdale waves, as if they thought they were Jan and Dean. And I–I was listening to obscure blues songs and the Beatles, and a terrific, absolutely unexpected thing happened. I had this humanities teacher named Larry Stock who took an interest in me–the new kid, the wise-guy. He taught me Candide, The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Stranger, Lust For Life. He showed me slides of famous paintings, introduced me to Plato, for God’s sake. Seventeen, this rock and roll kid, and I was reading fucking Plato.

Larry was a safety net. He appeared out of nowhere, and that’s when I got the notion that perhaps I could be a teacher, like him. I was gaining confidence, had begun a healing process with my father, a real relationship with him. I caught a few breaks that earlier I never would have thought possible.

DA: And then off to college.

GH: College scared me. I didn’t know if I could get through it. I had no illusions; I didn’t see myself as a scholar. But Vietnam was even scarier, so I did my best. I never dreamed that I would encounter another teacher like Larry Stock, until I met Jerry Stone at Kendall College, a small Methodist school in Evanston, Illinois. Jerry taught philosophy, a class he designed called “Dialogue.” I went to him and said, “What’s your class about?” And he said, “We’ll have to talk about it.” And so the dialogue began. Jerry was so far ahead of his time. He brought in Bucky Fuller, Robert Theobold, the economist. You never knew who was going to walk through the door of his classroom, and these people were cultural icons–pioneers.

DA: You then went to University of Illinois.

GH: I couldn’t afford the tuition at Kendall, and it was a two-year school, so I had to make the change to the University of Illinois. It used to be known as the Circle Campus. It was big and ugly and there was no way to establish one-on-one teaching and learning. All the classes were in big lecture halls. It left a lot to be desired, by my estimate. But then Kent State happened, and I got plugged into the nationwide shutdown of big universities. That it had come to our students dying at the hands of our soldiers was outlandish–an obscenity. I had such contempt for the administration in Washington and the direction they were leading us. I suppose that I became politicized overnight, as many of us did. I took a giant step into the counterculture. It was in the air. It was everywhere–as was psychedelia, and that made an impression as well.

DA: Did you have any idea what you were going to do after high school?

GH: As I say, I had the dream in the back of my head that I wanted to be a teacher, but I didn’t really know how to go about it. Then there were other academic inspirations–and I ended up being placed in an inner city school by the Chicago Board of Education after I finished my B.A. Many of my students were gang members, and in some instances were close to the same age. I began to hang with them after school, got to know life on the streets in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. But the school system seemed blind to the sociological problems that faced these kids every day. I’ll give you an example. While my students were dying in gang fights, I had to enter a numerical symbol next to each dead student’s name–I think it was “99″. A big “L” meant the student had left the system. A little “l” meant the student had been transferred to another class in the school. “99″ meant you’d been capped, hacked, and stacked, Jack. It was enough to make you sick.

So I decided to write an article about my students for a local newspaper, see if I could open up some eyes about street reality, the kind of reality that was shrouded by bureaucracy. The Chicago Tribune Magazine accepted it and ran it as a three page spread. Oh–and this part I love. I needed a photographer who was brave enough to go into the neighborhoods with me and get artistic shots of these kids and their weapons, their homes. I asked the young fellow who was the yearbook photographer. I was running the yearbook at the time, and we contracted this guy to do student photos. I said, “Hey, you want to take some gang photos?” And he said, “Sure. When?”

DA: And then you ended up on TV two days before the article appeared.

GH: A teacher I worked with had some newspaper experience, and he explained to me that promotion was always up to the writer, not the publisher. He said, “Why don’t you call up `A.M. Chicago’ right now and ask to speak to the producer?”

“A.M. Chicago” is what the ABC morning talk show was called before it became the Oprah Winfrey show. I called, the producer said yes, and two days before my article went to press, my gang students and I all appeared on a special hour long show hosted by Charlie Rose. It was a very big deal for all of us, especially the kids. There was this one natural kid named Dino, a member of the GBO (Ghetto Brothers Organization), and I thought he would be a hit. But he froze in the lights, and an older kid named Kong from a gang called The Dragons came through–really told his story of survival on the streets with panache.

And of course it didn’t hurt the sales of the paper. The school administration was upset with me, however; they didn’t like messy little secrets like students with guns getting out to the world at large.

DA: That show also allowed you to eventually fulfill a dream with one of your idols.

GH: This part is in my book, JD: A Memoir of a Time and of a Journey. I had struck up a friendship with my old idol Dion, just by interviewing him a few times. He was in town for an appearance at the Ivanhoe Theater, and I arranged for him to be featured on “A.M. Chicago.” I sat through the taping, took him to breakfast with Warner Brothers staff directing me to take him back to his hotel afterward. I can’t tell you what this meant to me. He gave me two tickets for the show that night, and in what was the culmination of a kid’s dream, he called me out of the audience to sing “Teenager In Love” on stage with him. We did it like it was rehearsed (well, it was–I’d been rehearsing since I was nine) and then he gave me a big high-five afterward. It blew my gaskets. You could have knocked me over with a rock and roll feather.

DA: Now on to your real quest.

GH: Salinger. My high school television sweetheart and I had married and divorced, and now I was living with a teacher from the same high school I taught at. We were young–what–twenty-seven? She found an article in The New York Times that reported that Salinger was still writing every day on his farm in Cornish, New Hampshire. Well–I knew I’d have to go and find him. I’d caught up to Dion, and it was a natural to go meet my other hero.

Sarah (we’ll call her “Sarah”) came with me. We crossed the country at the beginning of summer vacation in her Volkswagen Rabbit, camping all the way. I hated camping. I liked room service, you know? Air conditioning. But Sarah loved nature–lots and lots of nature…mosquitoes, outhouses…nature. I had read a story called “For Rupert With No Promises,” anonymously published in Esquire, and it bore an uncanny resemblance to Salinger’s work, particularly “Zooey.” This had raised the stakes, I thought. I called editor Lee Eisenberg who told me no, it was written by Gordon Lish. It took some of the steam out of the quest, but I still believed I could meet and speak with Salinger.

DA: But you did succeed in meeting Salinger.

GH: Yes I did–at his home, in his driveway. I’m not going to tell the whole story, otherwise who would buy the book? We had been warned by Cornish locals that Salinger had a gun and vicious dogs, the things he needed to protect himself against intrusions. But we had no intention of intruding. It turned out to be a magical, beautiful rainy day. He responded well to a letter I had written; that’s the only explanation I can think of. He didn’t have to come out and talk to us. I told him in the letter that we would drive away in a second if he didn’t want us around.

DA: Tell us a bit about your first published novel, Someplace Safe.

GH: I had this voice in my head. (Christ — that puts me in great company.) But you know what I mean — a character you imagine starts talking, and this was a young character — seventeen or so. I went straight to the keyboard and this young fellow was born, a rather sarcastic, paranoid kid. I imagined what it would have been like growing up in the city rather than the suburbs. I lived right next to the El in Chicago at the time, and the whole place rattled every time it went by. I was still slightly terrorized of urban living. I’d been in Chicago for about three years, and had had a lot of scary experiences. But the overall tone was comic, and I’ve been saddled with that ever since, the expectation that I will always write comedy, that I have to be funny.

DA: A sense of humor is sometimes the only response to some things.

GH: I needed a name for my protagonist so I started looking at the spines of books in my cinderblock bookcase, and there was How To Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce right next to the collected works of William Blake. I put the two names together — Lenny Blake. It worked.

I had no agent. I sent it to 14 publishers cold — the whole manuscript. Of course, it was rejected by everyone — except St. Martin’s.

An editor there sent me a letter saying that she would like to see what I could do about changing the ending, make it less abrupt. I did, and she bought it. The phone call came, and I agreed on the spot and an hour later Avon paperbacks called to buy it. I told them I had just sold it to St. Martin’s, but suggested they could buy the paperback rights. They did. It was very strange, two calls in an hour or so, as if publishing acquisitions went over teletype to everyone in the business.

DA: In your second novel, Secondary Attachments, you utilized your experience teaching at the inner city high school to tell a dramatic story.

GH: Yes, it was dramatic, but again there was a comic element, a laugh-to-keep-from crying tone that was similar to the doctors in M*A*S*H. Secondary Attachments was born of my involvement teaching gang students at a high school level. Talk about teacher burn-out, you should have spent a day in that school. But the amazing thing was how close some of us got to those kids.

I was so young at the time, and the students had such needs on all levels. Many of the new teachers that I hung with, and I include myself here, had to develop this really cynical attitude about the problems that were endemic to the neighborhood — poverty, homelessness, racial prejudice, violence, death.

We got hardened to keep from having our hearts broken on a daily basis.
I think that was misunderstood by some readers who thought that I was insensitive. I don’t know how they could have missed the obvious, that the narrator was trying to keep his sanity by making a terrible situation tolerable in the only way he knew how.

DA: We could probably say you found a home at Harper College?

GH: We could probably say that Harper College saved me from total teaching burn-out. I gave my young years to that high school, which I will not name, and I am very glad I had the experience, but I could not have taken much more and still go on being effective. It was time for something new. Going to Harper was like getting out of the Army, like leaving the battlefield. Suddenly I was in a serene setting. Geese swam in lakes on campus. There were no bomb threats or riots. I taught Goethe, Camus, Ralph Ellison, Updike. I had my own office.

Yes, Harper College is not just a calmer environment — it has a national reputation as a stopping off point for the finest contemporary authors. We have a Cultural Arts enrichment program that is second to none.

DA: How have you balanced teaching and doing your own writing over the years?

GH: It comes naturally. I see to my teaching first. Teaching is my

first love, and so I am very careful to make that my priority, but writing takes up all the time I have left over. They are like two ends of a battery, teaching and writing. I need both. One enhances and inspires the other. Yin-yang — whatever you want to call it. I see it all as one thing. It’s just what I do.

DA: Your students have also been fortunate to benefit from visiting writers teaching your class.

GH: That has been such a delight. I bring in these authors, and some of them aside from doing a reading, actually teach my class. Students get to meet the people who write the very literature they are cutting their intellectual teeth on. They can ask them questions, get advice, share insights. Robert Pinsky has taught my literature class. Jay McInerney. Deborah Joy Corey. Michael McClure. TC Boyle.

Boyle himself is a story. I am not exaggerating when I tell you that he may be the finest combination of artist and teacher I have ever had the pleasure to meet. He first came to Harper and taught my class — what — 18 years ago? We discovered we had both started out writing for Playboy’s OUI magazine, under editor Stuart Weiner. We had similar backgrounds, interests. Both played in rock bands when we were young. He has since participated in literary conference calls with my classes, and he has recently returned to Harper for another day of reading.

Let me tell you — he can captivate a classroom, an audience — no matter what size. He is a performer supreme. And, yes, my new documentary, TC Boyle: The Art of the Story, which I wrote, and which was produced by Tom Knoff, just won Platinum, Best of Show, at the Aurora Film Awards in Salt Lake City. It has been selected to be featured at The American/Popular Culture Association’s National Conference in New Orleans, on April 8th, 2009. I’m very pleased about that.

DA: How did you get started making documentaries?

GH: I teach the most comprehensive rock and roll class in higher education, along with my colleague Kurt Hemmer, a beat movement specialist who studied under Ann Charters. I was aware that he made a documentary on Janine Pommy Vega, one of the first female beat poets, and one of Michael McClure. I just jumped in and made a documentary about author Thomas E. Kennedy — The Cophenhagen Quartet, which I wrote about in an article for The South Carolina Review. I won my first award for my next film, Player: A Rock and Roll Dream, which was a history of Chicago garage bands. Boyle was kind enough to give me an in-depth interview and a dramatic reading, and I asked several fiction specialists to host this newest film.

DA: You also wrote a novel about Buddy Holly.

GH: I wrote The Winter Dance Party Murders, a novel, as an alternative history of Buddy Holly’s life and career. I took every rock and roll conspiracy theory I could find and wove them all together. It wasn’t easy — but in the end it had the greatest cast of rock characters imaginable — Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Ritchie Valens, Brian Jones, John Lennon and the Beatles, Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin, Del Shannon.

DA: And your most recent novel?

GH: The manuscript I just finished, and which I am shopping at the moment (translate: PUBLISHERS PAY ATTENTION) is called Dear Beatles. It’s about a Catholic school teenager in 1964 who strikes up a pen pal relationship with John Lennon. I researched the Beatles’ every move for two years so I could make sure all the things I say happen happened in the right places. And it’s my revenge on years of parochial schooling, which I did not exactly take to, to put it mildly. I had to get the last word.

And yes, I still play rock and roll, and I say so without embarrassment or apology. Most of the young English professors at Harper are also rock guitarists, and after every department meeting, we have a jam session. It’s funny how you don’t think of it until you try to tell someone about it, but I have the best job in the world. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

A member of the original staff of Spy, where he worked for seven years, Malanowski has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Washington Monthly, and many other publications.

His articles have been anthologized in Spy: The Funny Years by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis; Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot To Print, edited by David Wallis; Mirth of a Nation, Volume II: The Best Contemporary Humor, edited by Michael J. Rosen; and The Playboy Book of True Crime.

Originally from Baltimore, Malanowski graduated from LaSalle College in Philadelphia with a B.A. and M.A. in political science. He currently lives in Westchester County with his wife, Ginny, and daughters, Molly and Cara,

Derek Alger: Since we’re approaching a Presidential election, we might as well start with your novel, The Coup. What prompted you to write such a compelling satire of the contemporary world of national politics and journalism?

Jamie Malanowski: Generally, I’ve always been interested in politics, and after spending more than two decades as a journalist of sorts, I’m fascinated by the dysfunctional, co-dependent, antagonistic relationship between politicians and journalists.

More specifically, I began working on the story during the impeachment year of 1998. One commentator said that in attempting to impeach Clinton, Tom DeLay and the Republicans were attempting to stage a coup. And I thought that if that were the case, it wouldn’t be a very good coup. Al Gore would have been well-positioned to run for reelection, and depending on when he actually took office, might have been eligible for another term after that. So I began to wonder what an effective coup would look like — and not a military, Seven Days in May type coup. It seemed to me since the Vice President would be the one to profit from the president’s removal, he would have to be the one behind it. And he couldn’t have too many co-conspirators who could rat him out during an investigation.

DA: Remind me not to get on your bad side.

JM: The other idea that got me going was the observation that whatever else you may have thought about Clinton, his adversaries had him dead to rights. And yet, he was not convicted by the Senate. I began to wonder if I could come up with the opposite – a situation where there was no evidence that the president had committed a crime, but where the mere possibility was so awful that he had to be removed.

DA: That was quite a compliment when after reading The Coup, one reader asked how long you had lived in Washington.

JM: Yes, since I have never lived there. Watching The West Wing was all the research I needed. I’m sure many Washingtonians will say, “Oh no, no, no, it’s really much different,” and I’m sure they’re right, but that program created such a powerful image of what life in the White House is like that all you need to do as a fiction writer is operate mentally in that milieu.

DA: What was the evolution of The Coup?

JM: I first wrote The Coup as a screenplay. Many producers were interested in it, but no studios, and I put it away in a drawer. Some years later, it occurred to me that, well, I knew who the characters were and I knew what was going to happen to them — all the hard thinking had been done — so I may as well try building it into a novel. And that was fun.

Screenplays are a matter of elimination — you shorten scenes, shorten lines, eliminate details — because the actors and the camera will provide all that. A novel allows the writer to fill things in, to create back story, description, interior thoughts, it was fun to explore these characters.

DA: I guess we should try and figure out where you started before you arrived at Playboy.

JM: I was born and raised in Baltimore, the third of four children of a working class family. I had a happy childhood. I was loved. I went to Catholic schools where I did well, and because my mother had aspirations for me, she pushed me to go to more selective, more academically rigorous Christian Brothers High School instead of the local diocesan high school. That’s where I first got encouraged to think that I was a better than average writer.

DA: Did you think like a writer early on?

JM: I was always bright and studious, and always liked to read. I liked stories about history and politics, and my parents always encouraged us to read. But that’s not when I began to think like a writer. I was a writer before I thought like a writer. The “thinking like a writer” — that’s the difference between being a gifted amateur and being a professional, between having some talent and being able to do this for a living. When you think like a writer, you begin to see situations as stories, you begin to think of people as characters, you begin to think about how to express yourself better and better.

DA: And the next step was college.

JM: Yes, every Christian Brothers high school in the Middle Atlantic district got to give a scholarship to the flagship Christian Brothers college in Philadelphia, LaSalle College, now University, and I was a recipient. Clearly, it was a tremendous opportunity, I knew that going in, but it became even clearer after the fact. In other years, lots of guys from my school had gone to LaSalle, but I was the only one who went in my year. So I was kind of free to blossom in peace. There’s an old maxim that advises people to move every seven years, to prevent the person that people think you are from inhibiting the person you’ve become. I was free to do that at college.

DA: You got married at a young age.

JM: Right out of college. Four days after graduation. We met our sophomore year. Ginny leaned out of a second floor window and asked me for a dime as I was walking by.

DA: Are you serious?

JM: Have I lied to you before?

DA: Okay, continue.

JM: But that’s been the secret to our relationship. The moment I give her the dime, we’re over. Anyway, after college I went to grad school at Penn and got an M.A. I thought I would become a professor, but as soon as I got a taste of academic life, I knew it wasn’t for me. People seemed so intense about such inconsequential things. I knew that I could never summon that level of interest.

DA: After grad school, you and your wife moved to New York City.

JM: Yes. Ginny and I graduated together. She had wanted to go to grad school for women’s studies. We decided that she would support us while I got my graduate degree, and then we would switch. Why did I go first? I don’t remember — possibly because I was the one who had the penis. Anyway, during the course of working at a variety of stupid jobs, she changed her mind and decided to become a midwife. And so we came to New York City in the summer of 1977, and she went to Columbia, first for nursing school and then midwifery school. I ended up working for Bella Abzug in the mayoral election, living through the blackout, the riots, Son of Sam, and the Reggie Jackson-Billy Martin tumult, reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, and learning a tremendous amount about New York.

DA: You had an important experience after that.

JM: More than one, I think. But after working in a bunch of campaigns, I ended up working for Tony Olivieri, a young and charismatic member of the New York City Council. Tony had money and looks and high ideals, and he aspired to higher office, and I was hired to help manage his political affairs. But tragically, he developed a brain tumor, and died on election day 1980, at the age of 40. He was a good man.

The best part of that job — what has turned out to be the most useful part of that job — was that I saw firsthand the calculations politicians make as they decide where to go, what to say to the media, how to vote, whose ass to kiss, which punches to pull. Koch was the mayor when I worked down there, and he was like the king. Tony was some nobleman on the periphery, and those of us who worked for Tony were minor courtiers, with a privileged but not particularly close view of the king’s chambers. One never had to bow or curtsy, but we had a bowing and curtsying relationship to the mayor.

DA: What happened next?

JM: After that, I went to work for a public relations agency. Aren’t you people tired of my meandering progress through life?

DA: Not yet.

JM: There were things I liked about that job — I liked the people I worked with and made some lasting friendships. My boss was a man named John Scanlon, who was a jolly rogue. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone as full of life. And although I was good at PR — I knew what angles to take with which journalists — I didn’t like it. There’s a lot of subservience in the job, a lot of hat-in-the-hand moments when you’re dealing with the clients or dealing with the media, and I didn’t like it. And after a while, I realized that I could do a better job writing the stories I was pitching than the people I was pitching could.

So after a couple years, I quit and tried being a freelance writer. The month I left, I published features in The Atlantic and in Harper’s. In the following two years, I published nothing. Eventually, I sold some short pieces to Spin and New York, and then I got my big break: Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter decided to start Spy.

DA: And you fortuitously found yourself a member of the original staff of Spy.

JM: Yes, and it was without a doubt the best experience of my career. For one thing, we laughed every day. I think that’s way above the national average. For another thing, the people I worked with were all bright and funny, and together we had great esprit — as though we were a bunch of kids who had taken over a pirate ship. Kurt and Graydon were excellent people to work for. Graydon had great joie de vivre, and Kurt was whip smart; when one or both thought you had done something well, or what you wrote or said was something that made them laugh, I never felt prouder. No accolade I have ever received has ever meant as much, no doubt because I was unproved and insecure and doubted whether I could amount to anything. This drove me, as I’m sure it drove all of us, to throw everything I had into each issue. I know I’ve never been as productive, and I wonder whether it’s because I’m no longer as creative, or whether it’s because I have never again been surrounded by so many creative people in an environment where my creativity was so encouraged.

My other colleagues — Susan Morrison, Bruce Handy, Joanne Gruber, to name a few — were great to work with.

There was an interesting dynamic — sometimes there were rivalries and sometimes we were jealous of one another (I, at least, was sometimes jealous of them), but this spurred us forward, and in the end, we always took great pride in what we accomplished together and what we built together. I’m proud of the success we all have had in the years since we split up.

DA: How did your collaborative effort Loose Lips come about with Kurt Andersen and Lisa Birnbach come about?

JM: Loose Lips, for those whose knowledge of off-off Broadway in the mid-nineties is less than it should be, was a revue Kurt Anderson and Lisa Birnbach and I constructed out of found utterances — court transcripts, conversations had in front of open microphones, testimony at hearings, wiretaps — many of which involved celebrities, people like Orson Wells, Tommy Lasorda, Clarence Thomas, Ronald Reagan, Heidi Fleiss, Charles Manson, Marion Barry and so on. We had a talented group of young actors perform these bits, which were hilariously funny and deeply revealing.

I guess I'm a little vague on how we all came together. I had a relationship with the stage director Martin Charnin -- he had read a piece of mine in Spy called “When Disney Ruled America,” about what would happen if Michael Eisner became president, and together we turned it into a play that had a staged reading at the public theater. Lisa, who had become an editor at Spy in its waning days, had a lot of show business connections, and Kurt, who had moved back to Time magazine, was enthusiastic about the idea. Anyway, we put together the show and produced it several times — first at a piano bar in the West Village called the 88s, later at a club on the upper west side called The Triad, then in Los Angeles, and finally once again at the 88s. The collaboration was great fun.

I don’t know how people who do theater for a living have time for anything else, because you end up going to all the performances. It’s like six o’clock rolls around, and if you don’t have anything pressing to do — like extinguishing a fire in your attic — you say, “I know, I’ll go to the show!”

DA: And then on to the HBO movie Pentagon Wars. What was that experience like?

JM: Pentagon Wars was about the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle — the infighting that accompanied its development, and the struggle among some officers to prevent other officers from building a vehicle that was an insufficiently armored death trap. It was based on the memoirs of one of those officers and I was hired to adapt the book.

I enjoyed that process — it was a fun exercise, a challenge to my imagination, and I liked it very much. I found the subsequent parts of the process to be weird. There was a revision process, which was fine, and I was told at the end of that time how much everybody liked the screenplay. At that point, another executive read it and didn’t like it, and I was fired.

I think six more writers eventually were hired to work on the screenplay, many of whom were given very different instructions. Finally, I was hired back and told to restore large portions of my original screenplay, at which point I was fired again, and one of the other writers was rehired and told to restore portions of his screenplay. I ended up getting co-credit for the screenplay, although only a few scenes that were actually mine remain; Writers Guild rules make it very, very difficult for the original writer to be denied credit.

The thing I didn’t like is that people weren’t honest with me. As a consequence, it made it impossible for me to improve. I don’t really mind hearing that something I’ve written isn’t working, as long as it’s possible for someone to explain why, and what I need to do to improve. That didn’t happen.

DA: Over the years, you’ve done a lot of freelance journalism for magazines and newspapers.

JM: A great many journalists — most, I would say — construct careers by learning a lot about a field, building a vast network of contacts within it, and doing a lot of great reporting.

Well, reporting has never been a strength of mine; in Henry Luce’s classic dichotomy between reporters and writers, I’m clearly on the writing end. My knowledge about most things is more broad than deep (even when it is narrow and shallow, it is less narrow than it is less shallow), and I’ve got a clear writing style that I can fancy-up or funny-up without much trouble. And I’ve been lucky to understand that if an idea can’t work for Newspaper X, it can, with a little bit of effort, be made to work for Newspaper Y. And finally, much more than a lot of my friends, I’ve been willing to scramble around and write pieces for a little bit of dough. They, on the other hand, eschewed freelancing, went out and got staff jobs at publications, and now have to worry about how adversely the stock market crisis affects their 401K accounts. Not smart like me, eh?

DA: I’ve learned to never underestimate persistence.

JM: Yes, persistence is important, particularly early on, before you’ve developed a reputation and have figured things out. There are a lot of thresholds young writers have to pass through on the way to becoming old writers, and one of the earliest ones is Wanting It — wanting to be a writer enough to put up with all the rejection you have to accept while you’re learning. Wanting It isn’t sufficient, but finding out who wants it is a way that the herd culled the dreamers from the doers.

Here’s a true story: when I went to work at Spy as a staff writer, I brought with me 15 or 20 story ideas. This was my first writing job, and I had no experience working on a staff. The ideas were printed on index cards and posted on a wall along with ideas of other staff members. After a while, those ideas got assigned — and none went to me. My ideas went to other people. And they did a fine job with them — one fellow turned a gem of an idea into an essay that got nominated for a National Magazine Award. After a couple months, I asked how come I wasn’t assigned any of those pieces. I was told that I hadn’t asked. So that was a useful lesson. No editor or publisher ever wakes up in the morning, looks out his window, and scans the landscape for a brilliant writer who’s just too shy to put himself or herself forward. It’s a put yourself forward business, at every level.

DA: How’d you end up at Playboy?

JM: I came to Playboy four years ago. I had just concluded a happy but all-too-short stint at a fine publication called Jungle that ran out of cash. I had written a number of articles for Playboy over the years, and I called my editor there, Chris Napolitano, to let him know I was keen to freelance again. As it turned out, Chris had just been appointed Editorial Director, and he was looking for a Senior Editor, and I was the right man in the right place at the right time. About six months later, the Managing Editor left for another opportunity, and Chris asked me to take over that portfolio, and I was delighted to do so.

DA: Give us an idea of a day in the life of the managing editor of Playboy.

JM: I have several main responsibilities. One, I am nominally charged with making the trains run on time. In truth, much of that work is performed by Dave Pfister, the assistant managing editor, who does all the trafficking, and then, once in a while, drags me out to admonish the dilatory members of the team. Two, I top edit everything in the magazine, acting in a quality control capacity. Three, I oversee several sections of the magazine, which means I mostly nod my head and say “Great idea!” to the very capable fellows who actually manage those sections, though on occasion I throw in an idea or two. Four, I actually work with writers and commission stories.

So among the things I’ve done in this last week, for example, is work with former Senator Gary Hart on a piece that I commissioned him to write for the December issue, edit a piece I solicited from Joe Queenan for our January issue, answered copy editor queries for a piece I wrote about model Carol Alt, oversaw a planning meeting for our annual Year in Sex feature, weighed in on a bunch of layouts, threw my two cents worth in on which photos should appear in our Grapevine section, sat in on some redesign meetings, signed a bunch of pay authorizations, nagged some fellows about late section line-ups that were due, edited the Playboy blog every day, and attended the first annual Sexie Awards ceremony. (This, by the way, is an award given to sex Positive journalism; Playboy finished first, second and third in the magazine category; the first place story, Sex in Iran by Pari Esfandiari and Richard Buskin, was a piece I edited.

DA: So, tell us, are you really a wild and crazy guy in a bathrobe?

JM: I do own a bathrobe, but I think it’s chenille. I have been married to my wife Ginny for 33 years, and we have two daughters, 15 and 20. God sends us no burdens he does not think us capable of carrying, and he has not seen fit to burden me with living a Playboy lifestyle.

DA: I see you have recently discovered the joys of blogging.

JM: Yes, although I’d use the word `joys’ skeptically. I blog on my own site jamiemalanowski.com mostly as a diary of what I’ve done and what I’m thinking about the times I live in and the doings of the day. I had never kept a diary, and I’m enjoying this. It’s like an archive. I spend about a half hour a day on it, and I have a weekly readership of about 5. Deservedly.

I also edit and contribute to the Playboy blog (blog.playboy.com), which is a group blog maintained by Playboy’s editors. This is a great opportunity for us as a magazine, since we get to address events that working with a three month lead would ordinarily prevent us from addressing, like the elections, and it gives us a chance as individuals to write about all sorts of things that for one good reason or another wouldn’t turn into an article in the magazine. And it’s good for Playboy, because in this way we can be a daily visitor in our readers’ lives, not just a monthly guest. Our blog feels like a newsletter or a mini-magazine, and I think it’s pretty lively.

But blogging in general is something I don’t quite understand. From what I see from most blogs, the writing is harried and prosaic, and the insights are fleeting. It seems mostly a medium more for people who want to express themselves than for people who want to be read, and that’s a big problem. Writers need to be read. It’s part of the deal. It’s what makes writing worthwhile. It’s why we put up with all the rejection, so that eventually we’ll be read.

Obviously I’m not talking about everybody. There are some excellent blogs, and some terrific people are doing a good job to create useful content in a new medium. But right now, millions of people are blogging, and most are really talking to themselves.