| The
Wag Chats with Curtis White
Author of
America's Magic Mountain
"What's
awful to think in any historical period in the West
is what it means to grow up into destructive situations.
Paul Goodman called it 'growing up absurd.' Theodor
Adorno called it 'damage.' For me, being socialized
into our culture is like being poisoned. Hence my
interest in toxins, alcoholic and otherwise."
The
Wag Chats with Caroline Kettlewell
Author of
Electric Dreams
"Because
it's designed for fast, mass appeal, pop culture
can be a powerful force for change and connection.
That's why I write about it. I know millions of
strangers because we saw the same movies as kids,
had the same heroes, can quote the same funny bits
of dialogue. That makes us less likely, I believe,
however naively, to kill each other one day in battle."
The
Wag Chats with Glenn Gaslin
Author of
Beemer
"Because
it's designed for fast, mass appeal, pop culture
can be a powerful force for change and connection.
That's why I write about it. I know millions of
strangers because we saw the same movies as kids,
had the same heroes, can quote the same funny bits
of dialogue. That makes us less likely, I believe,
however naively, to kill each other one day in battle."
The
Wag Chats with Wyatt Mason
Translator
& Editor of Rimbaud Complete
"I
think the 'ecstatic visionary' angle is horseshit,
along with most of the rest of the mythic baggage
attached to Rimbaud. If you want celebrity, watch
Entertainment Tonight. It you want poetry,
read Rimbaud with an open mind."
The
Wag Chats with T.R. Pearson
Author
of Polar
"If I'm
employing a first-person narrator, as is the
case in Polar, I feel I have an obligation
to make that narrator as human as possible—equipped
with both virtues and frailties. Like people,
my narrators have a difficult time getting to
the point, which can be exasperating. When I
edit a manuscript, I try to keep the exasperation
to a minimum, but I never attempt to do away
with it entirely. If the narrator's voice is
untrue, the plot is essentially pointless, as
far as I'm concerned. "
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The
Wag Chats with David L. Robbins
Author
of Scorched Earth
"Southern writers long wish
for greatness in their work, it's another curse.
We are humorous and self-bashing, more than any
other American region. We can be cool to outsiders
and when we write we sometimes let this unfortunate
sidelight leech in, we often write just for each
other. No matter if I am describing Russia or Virginia,
my intentions are the exploration of man and nature.
This is the Southern writer in me, sweating and
marveling at Creation whether on my porch or at
my computer."
Writers
on Writing
Six writers—Michael
Dibdin, Bobbie Ann Mason, Peter Nichols, David L.
Robbins, George Saunders and Susan Richards Shreve—answer
the central question: Why write?
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The
Wag Chats with Bobbie Ann Mason
Author
of Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail
"The stories
take longer for me to write now. The early ones
were bursts of inspiration, reckless plunges, followed
by intense reworking and shaping. But as I learn
more about stories, they get more difficult, harder
to manage, less conducive to the reckless. I think
as the sensibility deepens, the deeper are the possibilities
that occur in the writing of the story. But that
makes them harder to pull off. I don't mean precisely
that the critical faculties get in the way; it's
more like the imagination is biting off more than
it can chew."
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Writers
on Their Favorite Writers
Ten writers—including Madison
Smartt Bell, George Saunders and Charles Baxter—tell
us who their favorite neglected writers are and
who they think is the best, most under-appreciated
writer working today.
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The
Wag Chats with Kendall Taylor
Author
of Sometimes Madness is Wisdom
"Fitzgerald was always on
the lookout for a female persona about whom to write
and would have found another model with another
result. She would have be fictionalized, but whether
she would have resulted in a character as potent
as Daisy or Nicole is questionable. As for Zelda,
she was determined to get out of the South and to
lead an expansive, exciting life. She also would
have found a way to do that, and if she had married
more wisely (read here: a man with more stability),
she may have been spared the madness into which
she descended."
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The
Wag Chats with Mark Bowden
Author
of Killing Pablo
"I think both Killing
Pablo and Black Hawk Down are about the
difficulty of being American in the modern world.
Given the United States' great wealth and military
power, what is our appropriate role in the world?
What sort of strategic, tactical and moral questions
do we face? In both books, the well-intentioned
efforts of the U.S. lead to unexpected, problematic
results. Each, in its own way, ought to be humbling.
They serve as reminders that there are more things
in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy."
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The
Wag Chats with Peter Nichols
Author
of A Voyage for Madmen
"I find the sea to be a perfect
crucible. It's a place where people are stripped
of all the pretence they normally use or rely on
in life ashore, and without it, in that spare and
elemental place, they find themselves face to face
with who and what they really are. This happened
to me, and it seems to happen to the people I write
about, real or imaginary. There are so many books
I admire and love to read...but I seem to be able
to write only my own thing my own way. Although
I'm writing some quite different fiction and nonfiction
now, it still feels unalterably mine, as in what
I'm burdened with and must write."
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The
Wag Chats with Michael Dibdin
Author
of Thanksgiving
"For me, at least, writing
is never satisfying, because whatever you do is
never as good as you feel it ought to be. Knowing
when to stop is a matter of knowing when to give
up. Someone said that a poem is never finished,
only abandoned. The same goes for novels, whether
they're packaged for sales purposes as 'literary'
or mystery.' But Thanksgiving stretched me
in a way I've never been stretched before, and it
wasn't altogether pleasant. Reaching your limits
as a writer is like reaching the top of a mountain
where the air is thin: the sense of accomplishment
is rewarding, and the view is great, but it's hard
to breathe and you start to panic."
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The
Wag Chats with Andrew Loog Oldham
Author
of Stoned: A Memoir of London in the 1960s
"Stoned is a celebration
and a history. It's a time that is often overlooked
by those on the left side of fifty by the accordianing
in of those years, as if we kicked off with peace
and love. That only came about when the fame and
money weren't working. Stoned tells of the
ride up, when every waking day had us beaming at
not having had to settle down and work for the Man.
Most of the people in Stoned were war-babies
who'd been told to tow the line for the sacrifices
of our elders. Thank God, we didn't; thank God,
we rocked the boat."
The
Wag Chats with Lee Hill
Author
of A Grand Guy: The Art and Life of Terry Southern
"While Terry Southern's
specific tone and sensibility are impossible to
replicate, I think his pioneering brand of satire
is just too irresistible to each new generation
of iconoclasts to avoid. In some way, the present
is just like the Fifties were in the way the establishment
via multinationals sets the agenda for cultural
discourse. We are beginning to see a new wave of
protest via books like Naomi Klein's No Logo
to counter the tyranny of the mass media and prepackaged
Hip. Terry's targets—the bureaucratic, military,
business, scientific establishments—haven't
disappeared. They have just gotten more sophisticated
at manipulating power. So if anything, I think we
need Terry Southern and other voices like him more
than ever."
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The
Wag Chats with Bill McKibben
Author
of Long Distance: A Year of Living Dangerously
"At some level, I'd come
to realize that I wanted to change enough that I
too could die a good death. And at some level that
seemed to mean learning to make an all-out commitment
and, paradoxically, learning to forget myself a
good deal. I managed, in one race in Canada, to
make fifty kilometers' worth of supreme effort;
the larger challenges elude me still, but maybe
I have a bit more sense of what they are."
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The
Wag Chats with Edward Albee about Naturalism and
the Theater of the Absurd
"There was a misunderstanding
about the nature of the Theater of the Absurd. Martin
Esslin, a very, very bright German critic, wrote
a book called The Theater of the Absurd in
which he pointed out that the Theater of the Absurd
as it originated in France in the 1940s was basically
a post-existentialist movement—you know, Sartre
and Camus. Having to do with the absurdity of man's
position in a universe that made no sense. And that
was the philosophical basis of the Theater of the
Absurd. Then people started to think it had something
to do with the style that the plays were written
in: any play that wasn't naturalistic was absurd."
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The
Wag Chats with Hal Crowther
Author
of Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape
of the South
"Is the kind of thing we
have with political correctness—this terrible
controlling of speech—is it worse than what
came before? Of course, it's not. It's not worse
than racism and misogyny and homophobia. But
it's worse for writers. In my profession, it's
the worst thing there is because if you write something
and you know you're offending a large group of people
(including your peers), it's a kind of constant,
subtle censorship that operates on you all the time."
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The
Wag Chats with Madison Smartt Bell
Author of
Master of the Crossroads
"Toussaint
Louverture stands at the crossroads between Europe,
Africa and the pre-Columbian Indian world, controlling
the passageway from slavery to freedom, controlling
even the pathway from feudal and monarchical systems
to the new sort of society which the French and
American Revolutions had just begun to invent.
He is known to have been a devout Catholic, but
in Haiti Catholicism is not inconsistent with
the practice of Vodou. In writing this book, I
have come to believe that Toussaint, as well as
being the avatar of French Revolutionary ideology
carried to its logical conclusion (equal rights
for all human beings, not just whites), also embodied,
even literally incarnated, both Attibon
Legba and Mait' Kalfou."
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The
Wag Chats with John S. Littell
Author
of French Impressions
"Having known many 'international
kids,' I can say without hesitation that I would
never want to be one of them. They are people without
a country, without a culture, and without any idea
how to get along with Americans. The word 'clueless'
was invented especially for them. They can speak
eight languages, but they know no slang in any one
of them. They have seen the great art of Europe,
but not Yankee Stadium. And they dress funny. If
you act like an adult when you're twelve, what do
you do when you reach sixty?"
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The
Wag Chats with Angela Bourke
Author
of The Burning of Bridget Cleary
"When questions were first
asked about Bridget's disappearance, the story that
she was in the fairy fort and would ride out on
a white horse at midnight on Sunday provided a wonderful
smokescreen. It was the sort of story many people
would have heard as local legend, but it also reflected
a kind of glamor about Bridget Cleary. Anybody who
didn't conform would have risked being isolated
by rumours about the fairies, but on the other hand,
someone who didn't want to conform might
encourage her neighbors to think she had fairy connections."
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The
Wag Chats with Stephen Budiansky
Author
of The Truth About Dogs
"I think the
animal rights movement sometimes shows a profound
ignorance of the very animals they profess to
champion. And I don't think it makes any sense
to try to apply the human legal, social concept
of rights to the natural world, which is fundamentally
amoral. We have vast responsibilities, as thinking
human beings, to other species and to the natural
world. We also rightly should take joy and wonder
in the natural world. But I am struck by how sterile
and bitter and crabbed a view of animals the animal
rightists often take."
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The
Wag Chats with Robert Drewe
Author of
The Shark Net
"I was always determined
not to let the Eric Cooke material dominate the
story in The Shark Net. Despite my knowing
the killer and one of the victims, that would have
seemed to be exploiting it rather than letting it
sit naturally, as it actually happened, within the
context of my family's lives and the lives and times
of the community. It was the most terrible time
the community had experienced, but life—and
death—went on. Even today, thirty years later,
the Cooke killings are the source of constant discussion
in Perth."
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The
Wag Chats with Witold Rybczysnki
Author
of One Good Turn
"New Urbanism is a huge improvement
over the simplistic theories of the architectural
modernists who made such a hash of things. Still,
I wish that New Urbanists could be a little more
pragmatic in their approach, and find places for
Home Depot, strip malls, and drive-by convenience
stores in their plans. Not just because these things
are part of the way that we live today, but because
messiness and ideological impurity are an integral
part of American urbanism."
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The
Wag Chats with Rhian Ellis
Author
of After Life
"With After Life,
I tried to write the kind of book I'd like to read—enough
plot to give the book forward momentum, but not
at the expense of character or solid sentences...Writing
about spiritualism appealed to me because it deals
with the big questions (life vs. death, faith vs.
science, etc.) while providing lots of lushly detailed
subject matter. I knew I could fill my book with
objects: Ouija boards, seance rooms, and so on.
Also, it's fairly untrammeled territory—it
was just screaming to be written about."
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The
Wag Chats with Penelope Evans
Author
of First Fruits
"It seems entirely
natural to me that if one writes in the first person,
everything is going to be unreliable. We all see
and describe the world to ourselves in ways we can't
control. To tell the truth, I would quite like to
get away from writing in the first person, because
it is definitely harder, burdening both me and the
reader with a single voice that might not even be
a very attractive one. The trouble is, I've always
thought the all-seeing third person is a bit of
a seductive cheat, because that's not how we see
life."
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The
Wag Chats with Susan Richards Shreve
Author
of Plum & Jaggers
"The worst thing plaguing
writing is the conglomerates, the fact that books
have never made money. It's a small audience for
serious books. Most other books serve a purpose,
to teach an audience how to cook, eat, have sex.
It's all about the bottom line now, so that the
serious editors are not able to look around for
the best books. It's hard to persuade the company
that a book that sells only 10,000 copies is worth
publishing. It's a serious problem."
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The
Wag Chats with Jan Dalley
Author
of Diana Mosley
"Obviously, there
is no such thing as a completely dispassionate account
of anything, and of course my text is in fact steeped
in my point of view—but as a reader I hate
it when biographers tell me what they think all
the time. It seems to me that if they aren't sufficiently
skillful as writers to put across their ideas without
waving a banner on which it is written in letters
five feet high, then they just aren't very good."
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The
Wag Chats with Iain Pears
Author
of An Instance of the Fingerpost
"I
like writing both fiction and nonfiction—even
the eurobond market has its interest, once you
get into it and begin to understand how it works,
although I doubt I will ever return to that sort
of writing now. In some ways the subject isn't
so important; it's the task of taking complex
material and trying to make in comprehensible
without simplifying which is the satisfying part,
and that applies to eurobonds, the doings of the
Vatican, art history and 17th century medicine
equally."
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The
Wag Chats with David L. Robbins
Author
of The End of War
"There's really just
one challenge to portraying all characters in any
novel. They must be authentic. Readers of novels
delegate that chore to the writer, and it is the
core trust. The responsibility of creating a fictional
character is no greater than re-creating an actual
person out of history. The difference is the reader
comes to an historic character with preconceived
ideas, often deep knowledge. You do not disappoint
that reader, or he will have no patience or love
for whatever else you do."
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The
Wag Chats with Charles Baxter
Author
of The Feast of Love
"I like to have several
points of view and several narrators because I am
an impatient person and because I think the world
is not uniform: i.e., it has multiple textures that
are best reflected in multiple points of view. I
like the idea of counterpointed characterizations,
and even better, counterpointed dramatic scenes.
Again, it's a kind of mixture of worlds: the mixture
of the world of the novel with the world of the
dramatic play on a stage, of sorts."
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The
Wag Chats with J.D. Dolan
Author
of Phoenix
"I'm
of two minds about the memoirs genre. I think
there are a number of witers out there who've
written popular (and, yes, revealing) memoirs:
Toby Wolff, Mary Karr, Frank Conroy, Kathryn Harrison,
Frank McCort, and others. But those books were
all written by extraordinarily gifted writers
who've spent years developing their craft. They're
artists. Unfortunately, many people think the
subject matter of their lives is good material
for book—and it might be, if they'd bother
to become writers somewhere along the way. I don't
imagine too many people would say, 'Hmmm, I've
had an interesting life...I think I'll turn it
into an opera!' There's more to writing a memoir
than slitting a vein and bleeding onto a page."
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The
Wag Chats with Chris Larsgaard
Author
of The Heir Hunter
"I knew immediately I wanted
my first book to be about heir-finding. I had never
heard of a heir-finder being portrayed in a fiction
book before, and I recognized a unique opportunity
to present the subject from an insider's perspective.
I had a good feeling that the concept would be well-received
because it presented a niche of private investigation
which few people know about. I knew fiction readers
would be interested in the subject if they just
had the chance to learn more about it."
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The
Wag Chats with George Saunders
Author
of Pastoralia
"Most people I know who write
either teach or live very frugal, often single lives.
So I think it's important to simply disconnect the
two things. The story form is incredibly challenging
and beautiful and rewarding, in and of itself. A
worthy thing to spend one's life on, no matter what
the financial rewards. And I think you sort of have
to end the discussion there. You can make some money
with good stories of a certain type, while other
good stories of another type won't make a cent,
but a good story is a good story, and is worth the
time, simply in terms of spiritual benefit to the
person writing it. And then, secondarily, to the
person reading it."
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The
Wag Chats with Caroline Kettlewell
Author
of Skin Game
"The hardest thing about
writing a memoir is walking that fine line between
honesty and the fact that you are not, after all,
obligated to reveal every single detail of your
private life. I believe that when you write from
life you do owe it to your reader not to fabricate;
the challenge of literary non-fiction is to create
something powerful from lived experience itself.
But how much detail do I owe my reader?"
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The
Wag Chats with Leonard Guttridge
Author
of Ghosts of Cape Sabine
"Ever since schooldays, I
liked to tell yarns. Even during wartime, I'd love
to have been a war correspondent. During my first
years over here, I did some fiction—short
stories, mystery yarns and fantasy. But the short
story market evaporated, and after writing now and
then on jazz (a lifelong passion), I grew to perceive
that true history, once you plunged into it with
an open mind, can supply an abundance of ready-made
plots. Intrigue and adventure, innumerable opportunities
for creating narrative suspense."
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The
Wag Chats with Elizabeth Ayres
Author
of Writing the Wave
"We live
in a materialistic culture that doesn't value the
gifts of soul, of spirit, that the writer possesses.
And writers, being very sensitive people, fight
rejection with rejection: if you don't want my gift,
the hell with you, you're a stupid ignoramus anyhow.
So writers tend to write for other writers, and
the people who desperately need the true writers'
gifts are forced to content themselves with the
schlock that the publishers think the people want
because the publishers are American and materialistic
and want to make a lot of money."
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The
Wag Chats with Mark Bowden
Author
of Black Hawk Down
"I think
the extreme hesitance of the Clinton administration
to intervene militarily anywhere for the last seven
years stems directly from Mogadishu. The reluctance
to commit ground troops during the campaign against
Slobodan Milosevich was just the most recent example.
The pendulum has swung about as far as it can go
in the other direction. I'm glad we didn't have
to fight on the ground in Kosovo, but I don't think
the U.S. will long wield a credible military force
if we remain so determined to keep every last one
of them out of harm's way."
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The
Wag Chats with Thomas Mallon
Author
of Two Moons
"A
number of my books have involved important public
events—a spaceflight, an assassination, a
presidential election—and those events are
what I hope will attract readers initially. I find
it easier to tell these stories from the point of
view of ordinary people, bystanders and accidental
participants, than through the eyes of the great
protagonists. After all, how can a reader be expected
to see himself in Lincoln, or an astronaut? But
the 'other' people at the theatre, or the people
watching the launch on the giant TV monitor in Grand
Central—they're another, more fruitful matter,
a psychic avenue of entry for the reader."
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The
Wag Chats with Douglas Coupland
Author
of Miss Wyoming
"People
have always been saying to me, 'How Can you put
Pop culture into your work? How can you do
that?' My response has always been, 'Well, how can
I not put Pop culture into my work? It's
what we live in. It circumscribes pretty well all
aspects of North American middle class life.' In
the visual art world, high culture and Pop culture
got married in about 1955. The marriage is only
now happening in the literary world."
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The
Wag Chats with Andrew Vachss
Author
of Choice of Evil
"If you look objectively at it, you'll realize
this country's not obsessed with most serial killers—only
the ones that have the good tastes to kill young
women. Look at books written about serial killers.
Look at John Wayne Gacy versus Ted Bundy. Bundy
outsells John Wayne Gacy a hundred to one. Why?
Because he was more of a monster? Of course not.
He was more interesting? No. He killed young women.
And if you go into any of these foul places that
call themselves bookstores, you can find all kinds
of books about the joys of torturing women. But
you won't find many about the joys of torturing
men. And that's why the fascination with serial
killers is aimed more at a Richard Ramirez or a
Ken Bianchi than a John Wayne Gacy."
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The
Wag Chats with Tim Sandlin
Author of
the GroVont Trilogy
"If I go in
a restaurant, I'll look at the menu and figure out
what all my characters would order before I figure
what I will order. I can do it real quick. And we
exchange presents at Christmas sometimes. I'm married
now, but back when I was single, it was a lot spookier
because it was just me and six or seven fictional
characters in this apartment."
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The
Wag Chats with David L. Robbins
Author of
War of the Rats
"The Russian
toll alone at the battle of Stalingrad was in excess
of six hundred thousand. Throw in the German forces—1.2
million men on the Russian steppe outside Stalingrad.
When the war was over and in 1954 the last German
soldier was repatriated from imprisonment in Russia,
there were fewer than thirty thousand left alive.
So we can say that the largest armed force ever
assembled in the history of armed warfare disappeared.
When you add in the civilian casualties from the
residents of Stalingrad, you have two million people.
And that's the Hank Aaron of butcher bills for warfare."
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The
Wag Chats with Stephen Jaramillo
Author of
Going Postal
"Now people know I'm a novelist,
and they're always saying, 'Oh, I just did something—that's
going to be in a book.' I don't say it to them,
but a lot of times, I'm thinking, nine times out
of ten, you're just not weird enough."
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