Q & A
Blue
1. William, what inspired you to write Blue? Each story was a response to a specific incident or episode. Three things were required to begin: an environment for the story, a character, and some sense of a story to be played out (to my mind, the place or environment or habitat is the key element–maybe that’s why they wind up being short stories and not something longer). I think many ofthe early stories were inspired by sexual longing and confusion. Some ofthe later stories, such as “The Strongest Man Stands Most Alone” and “The Visit,” tend to work in, to a greater extent, political elements. I don’t believe the short story is particularly well suited to investigating politics–I turned to writing plays for just that reason–but I’m proud of my ability to work politics into the short story. Affirmative action, however much it helped others, all but ruined my life. Hence the title.
2. What is it about? Having said that (above), I suppose the book is really about nostalgia for the loss of youth and, at sixteen, the loss of my Midwest childhood home. I think writers are behind the times, and hanker after some lost horizon.
3. You share stories that spotlight stressful, awkward, or unusual situations. Do you see life as messy or confused? This is a hard one. I think life is more often than not messy and confused. But I don’t think I see it as such, at least not at my best moments. I think life is relentless–there’s no way to take a break from it, no way to stop one’s mind in its tracks–and that on some tragic or sublime level it’s just. I don’t feel good about myself. I am not enough. And I credit life for this insight.
4. You also write of love, marriage, and life. What do you want people to feel after reading your book? My mother once said to me: “Some people just shouldn’t be married.” When I was seventeen, I first got married, my parents having to sign a waiver. I love the idea of marriage, although my first marriage wasn’t out of choice. The best thing about marriage is children. In an early story, “Evolution,” there’s an exchange between a middle-aged woman and a young man in a bar about marriage and children. The female character, whom the young man rather cruelly describes as “monkey woman,” has this to say: “There no guidebooks handed out. I mean, there are some but only by the work of a prodigious mind, like Darwin’s. But homoerectus, right? They could blow it all away and I don’t care. I’m still proud of being a human being. Why must we always blame ourselves? But then you’re so innocent and so young.”
5. Some of your stories in this book and in earlier books focus on sex and compromised relationships. What message do you want to share with your readers in this regard? We are not so much driven by erotic encounters as by the desire for a release from extreme circumstances, but those circumstances drive the erotic, denature it. This can go too far of course; but individualism, at least our highly personal, highly commercialized version of it, more certainly foreshadows the death of Eros.
6. Were you shocked to see Kirkus Reviews identify it as one of the best indie books of the year? I was thrilled. Especially to see the book featured by Karen Schechner, vice president of Kirkus Indie. Blue had received a starred review and my previous book, Two Romances, a very positive review, so I knew there was some appreciation for my work in those quarters. It’s a terrible thing waiting for a review to drop. I’d waited thirty years for a professional review. When it came, I started to cry, in my room. I realized I was crying also, double-crying if you will, because I was not mistaken in my choice of subject, small-town life and the invention of the teenager.
7. The literary magazine said your book is “A richly textured, engrossing collection of tales about people discovering who why they love.” How did you develop a writing style that engages, questions, challenges, and entertains? I was surprised to see the word “entertains” at the end of that question. I recall someone saying when I was in graduate school–I did an M.F.A. at University of British Columbia–that my stories begin optimistically and then take a dark turn at the end. I had no idea. I suppose part of the pleasure or delight a story offers is an unexpected, if prepared for, switch of perspective. Especially if its logical but outrageous at the same time. I believe some writers might have been hesitant to include certain stories in Blue were the stories theirs. A lot of writers today, aiming for academic appointments and the blessings of woke contemporaries, are too cautious. I appreciated Kirkus embracing the book despite its controversial nature.
8. You have been lecturing or teaching at the university level for the past four decades. Is it harder to teach writing and literature or to write books? Teach. Every year at the college I’m supposed to turn in a “Self-Evaluation” of my teaching performance and I have no idea what to write (I haven’t submitted one for several years and am not sure if the requirement is still in place or not). I’m not much of a performer as a teacher, relying instead on dry humor! I teach out of my love for literature more than out of a love for teaching. Those who like language and literature, a dwindling coterie I suspect, appreciate my approach, or so I believe. I’m currently reading Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, which a student of mine turned me on to. It’s more engaging, deft that I had expected it to be. In the novel, he says of writing: “Writing was never work for me. It had been the same for as long as I could remember: turn on the radio to a classical music station, light a cigarette or a cigar, open the bottle. The typer did the rest. All I had to do was be there.” I gave up smoking in fifth grade. But on the whole, I agree with the sentiment as expressed by Bukowski.
9. You have written short stories, poetry, plays, essays, novellas, and a children’s book. Which format/genre do you enjoy writing in the most? Why? I’d hoped to be a novelist, along the lines of Jack Kerouac, my first favorite writer. The best I’ve managed in that regard is three short novels. I always thought of my older brother David as the short story writer (and my younger brother, Brian, as the poet), so I am surprised in retrospect to see that I’ve spent most of my writing life doing short stories. I prefer to read novels, or plays. Although recently I have found a renewed pleasure in reading short stories (currently Fitzgerald’s third collection, Taps at Reveille). I do have some theories about the nature of different genres and those writers best suited to work in a certain genre. I’m not sure I have the descriptive powers to write novels, but more importantly I believe a novelist must like to riff on a topic for five or six pages; I, on the other hand, head toward some sort of poetic ellipsis and leave things unstated, subtextual. I also believe the short story is primarily a rural art form. I grew up in rural Indiana. Writing plays has given me an alternate outlet for more expansive storytelling, if again in compressed format (description is the hardest thing to get into a play unless your characters speak, as in say Shakespeare, in a highly poetic manner). I do enjoy the relief of switching genres and of ending one story so as to be able to start another (short) one. In the end, I most enjoy prose, playing around with sentences.
10. When did you know you were a writer and that books would be your identity? I wasn’t a reader as a kid, including comic books (except for Archie–not able to choose between Betty and Veronica, even then). I was also an indifferent student. I was good at sports, and was popular, and had little idea back then that there was something wrong with me and I would become a writer. Perhaps my bad temper should have tipped me off that something was afoot. The competition I felt with my more talented older brother is perhaps also key to understanding my desire for self-expression. To my surprise, in my freshman year in high school I wrote an essay–the subject I can’t recall–that caused me to be moved into advanced English. I was however ambivalent about the move, as I would have to leave Mrs. Freeman’s class, she the hottest teacher at the school. We moved from West Lafayette, Indiana to Scottsdale, Arizona between my sophomore and junior year. According to my parents, I strongly did not want to leave behind Christy Cooksey, my girlfriend. I think I suffered PTSD as a result of the abrupt move from the place I’d spent all but the first year of my first sixteen years. I can remember walking around the (hot) high school campus in Scottsdale suddenly unknown, in no way of course “popular,” in need of an identity. When basketball practice started in October I was saved from obscurity. But I was only an average player at that point and saw I would need something else in order to standout. I found my way to the school newspaper and my senior year became editor. “Co-editor,” my friend Steve Silver reminds me. But I think of myself to this day as the editor of the paper. I wrote a weekly column for the paper called “The Young Outlook.”
11. What does your sub-title refer to when you say your stories are “in the manner of ethnographic burlesque”? I thought I’d come up with phrase. But I googled the term and saw that it or similar terms have been used in reference to Yiddish culture, theater performance, and satire, as well as in relation to the ethnographic study of burlesque. I use the term to point to changing American social mores and political realities. When I google it now, I find Blue and another book of mine, Three Major Plays: Tattoos, School Play, Tyrannos. 12. How did a Midwesterner end up in El Segundo, California? I spent a couple of years living in Boston, where, at 30, I met my second wife, a native New Englander, but otherwise I’ve lived my adult years in the West, having moved there, as mentioned earlier, from Indiana when I was sixteen. I migrated to California when I was in my forties in search of a job, having lost my position teaching creative writing at Arizona State University–ironically, years earlier I had as a graduate student at ASU set in motion the founding of their M.F.A. program. ASU also being where my dad taught engineering for many years. I settled in El Segundo, a small suburban town, because it was as close as I could come, in California, to replicating my hometown in Indiana, El Segundo the product of the Ohio-based Standard Oil Company