SELF-INTERVIEW FOR ABBEY 100

Actuation?  Thomas Wolfe remarked that we all have 640,000 hours to live.  That’s dead at 73, but life expectancy has improved to about 680,000 since Wolfe died after he used up only about 340,000.  With 160,000 or so already gone, it began to feel futile to burn more of them in moneycraft.  And I didn’t want to spend my 600,000 odd without having done much more than use up my quota of three hots and a flop.

But why continue to be a writer, most of whose work has readership only in the hundreds?  One Abbey reader is worth… well, anybody who’s reading this knows what I’m talking about.  Writing because there are three ways, beyond teaching — something I’ve managed to escape — to mouth off: preaching and I’m pagan, politics and I don’t have the inclination, and the arts and writing.  When I was writing my first novels (all unpublished, as are 12 of the 13) there were still independent trade book publishers not yet divisions of media conglomerates, and there was still honor and intellectual purpose among some trade editors.  As far as “continue to be a writer,” in order to be able to stay with whatever you start out to be, if you stay with it until you’re 35, nobody can get you to sign on the dotted line, and then of course there at the edge of middle age it’s harder to sell out. 

Why not something with more impact, like film, music, work in genres more of the times?  Language manifests culture like nothing else and in print can endure like nothing else except maybe bronze sculpture, so ultimately working unequivocally with the written word is valuable.  Again, why not go for broke?  Banality is dull.  Kids in my generation used to ask, “Why are we here?”  And we meant it.  And writing is never superfluous to the times, if it ever is we’ll have only fearful mediocrity and leering savagery. 

There are other ways aren’t there?  Maybe I could have set out to become curator of the British Museum, the editor of the New York Times, or sign as first baseman-outfielder, but after getting through my first grammar school book reports, I wanted to write.

But why not maneuver yourself a greater readership?  Maxim and the other skin and skid magazines outsell Abbey or The Denver Quarterly and their ilk, but so what.  Independence and out-performing the norm are sound principles.  A friend writing news and feature articles for the LA Times since the 1960s has byline stories numbering in the thousands, each read by hundreds of thousands of people.  Both of us pleased to be writers, laugh about the disparity.  He generally ignores the hundreds of emails and letters he gets, I don’t get any.

Isn’t there some middle ground?  There’s a fat spectrum of places to publish, but somewhere between violet and blue, maybe at about indigo, there’s a line.  Massachusetts Review is on one side and, say, The New Yorker just on the other.  There’s a lot worth reading in The New Yorker but it’s a magazine designed to make money and Massachusetts Review is designed to make waves.  The cogent thing is editorial stance.  The most conclusive people in publishing are obviously editors, and on the violet side of the line people like Richard Peabody, John “Vagabond” Bennett and Carol Bergé in the old days, Bin Ramke, Robert W. Lewis, are the ones who keep out the schlock.  The expertise among them is easily up to the best on the commercial level.  An editor like Richard Peabody has a breadth of competence that would have put him in charge of any publishing house if he’d wanted to go that way.

What contemporary writing counts?  Nobody knows.  Anointing writers in the act is either commercial hype or intellectual folly.  All serious writing should be taken seriously and left to the future for sorting out.  It could even be that small press people are cranks, and that the horrible curse a failed novelist in his seventies spoke in sunny Santa Monica when I was working on my second novel is the objective and self-fulfilling truth.  He commented, bitterly, “Nobody ever wrote anything worth publishing except for money.”      
         
What’s your audience?  Fair question, but I have no real idea.  Only in Abbey, with its robust feedback mechanisms, do I have much sense of who’s reading me.  I am sure that whoever does read me has picked up a literary magazine, a filtering process in itself.  And there’s a nice regional impact in being a lit magazine writer.  I often publish in North Dakota Quarterly, one of the best university magazines but with a spotty readership outside North Dakota.  They did a China special recently and used three of the months I write month-to-month (I have over 200 now).  My months took over 30 pages in the issue cheek-by-jowl with poems of the sublime Tang Dynasty poet, Li Po (Li Bai).  How do you beat publishing 30 pages next to Li Po?  And then have it read mostly by discerning Dakotans?  Or to publish months about the Northwest in Northwest Review in Eugene, or about New York in Chelsea?  And to have what editors take printed exactly as written?  A footnote:  One of the first pieces I ever had accepted, passionate and poetic, called “Burn Us in the Night,” came out in letterpress in The Phoenix (not the Boston one) rewritten line by line into the voice of the egomaniac cranky editor.       

What makes a writer?  Heavy reading, curiosity, self-confidence.  Severe childhood trauma, left-handedness and attitude are astonishingly common in writers’ lives.  Solid choices help get you there.  I’ve had bountiful and timely luck.  Farm work as a kid, the infantry in Korea, the U.S. Forest Service, good jobs in Europe, a tolerant family in years when you could walk out to any road and hitch to any place in the lower forty-eight and Canada, having appetite for travel on any terms, having wide open interests and friends.  The ease of our times with our multitude of ways to live, and live well, when so many writers have had to do it in Gulag conditions or with blinders on, should humble us all, at least get anybody who hopes to write off dead center.

Are you defining an identity paradigm?  No, then to paraphrase Italo Calvino, a person at a desk resembles every other person at a desk.  Reading and curiosity hold even in these days of TV as stupor soma. 

But every profession has characteristic qualities.  What are most writers like?  A quote, Paul Theroux describing Paul Bowles:  “He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise.  He was like almost every other writer I had known….”  That’ll do.     

What about politics and writing?  Whoa, this is coming out in Abbey whose editor outlaws politics and porn.  But general awareness of history manifests politics, at least sardonically. 

What about teaching writing and writing?  The workshop story about workshop writing, the poem about the workshop, the novel (Letting Go put the cap on that one way back when).  Under the dismal nomenclature of creative writing, writing about writing feeds on itself.  There’s an essential hypocrisy involved in writers teaching writing since for those tens of thousands every year who take writing courses questing for a freedom window, the odds are similar to a high school player making it to the NBA.  But writing programs and workshops keep a huge cadre of generally well-meaning writing teachers in oil changes and baby food.  Chronic American cooption at work.

You don’t mean to say that the teaching writing business is a business?  At its worst one of the most venial and exploitive hustles out there, the conferences at the resort with the networking cocktail parties, the conference-retreat’s “manuscript marketing” fees on top of exorbitant conference charges, its junketing “superagents,” “faculty” writers that nobody has ever heard of.     
  
Is writing easier than it looks?  Yes and no, mostly no.  But then much of a writer’s work is absorbing, often intellectually exciting.  Awe and amazement are quite common.  Writing can lift you into euphoria.  And it’s not that easy to find euphoria these days.

The worst of times, the best of times?  We live in fat city, with so many physical and intellectual opportunities now, awareness of everything on the planet in our ken, and with a cascade of small press outlets, writers are probably more advantaged than at anytime in the past.  Yet reality for people who want to write is daunting.  Advertising?  Trade journal journalism?  Scripting?  Promotion?  Some brain-tap office job and try to write after getting home?  Teaching.  I could go perch on a fire tower but now there are almost no fire towers left.        

What poetry have you been reading?  I try to go from poet to poet reading their complete or collected collections.  Since Nine Eleven, two poets stand out and neither of them were born American, Les Murray, and Paul Muldoon, who “gave up the Shannon for the Shenandoah” years ago.  Muldoon’s “Madoc: A Mystery” 120 pages from the late 1980s and “Yarrow” 50 pages from 1994 are seminal and instant classics.  Murray in New South Wales is simply the most brilliant poet working in English.  Elizabeth Bishop’s complete poems and W. S. Merwin’s varied and prodigious output stun me.  C. K. Williams, Pattiann Rogers, Norman Dubie, Robert Lowell, Paz and Borges are others.  I could go on about how dreary some poetry is, but enough said.  The trivialization of “poetry” in psychotherapy and encounter groups hasn’t helped.

You mention two poets who write in Spanish…  Every language, Zuni to Kazakh, has extraordinary poetry, that of course can best be read in the original.  That’s a profound irony, all that we miss because we don’t know French or whatever well enough.  Parallel texts are often good, but they don’t do much in languages like Hungarian, which apparently has the most profound poetry of any culture.  Take Russian, obviously another great poetic language, when we try to read Tsvetayeva, Akhmatova or Mandelstam, whatever the translation, we’re getting only maybe forty percent.  Then consider Chinese….  

Have you ever tried to do anything in another language?  Fresh out of college and writing fiction, I aspired to learning Russian well enough (I’ve never learned it at all) to translate Leonid Leonov, a favorite novelist of mine.  He has wonderful books with titles like Russian Forest and a whole novel about somebody trying to quit smoking.  He was translated into English in the 1930s and I wanted to do it better.  And then when I lived in Europe off and on in the 1960s and beyond, despairing of New York trade publishers doing anything for me, unrealistically I toyed with spending a couple of years intensely improving my French so that I could write in it (real pie in the sky).           

Anything to say about a writer’s locale?  Gary Snyder said he thanked San Francisco for having saved him from having to go to Europe.  A lot’s implied in a statement like that.  Sometimes, as during our bombing of foreign cities, I feel more European than American and I value travel immensely and always have.  Like electronics, dependable cars and modern dentistry, ease of travel is one of the great benefits of these times and it’s peculiar that more writers don’t take advantage of it.  Look what the far Pacific did for Melville and Paris for Miller.  Maybe if Snyder had gone to the Alps and gotten off the ships he worked on more often along with his time in Japan we’d have an enhanced nature poet.  Imagine if Frost had strayed from New England, or if Kerouac had struck south toward Cape Town when he was in Tangier, or if Eudora Welty and Faulkner had not been quite so tied to Mississippi, if Virginia Woolf had actually made it to South America after The Voyage Out.  There’s a constant writers’ theme of sense of place that usually has to do with the charms of localism.  But we live in one world, we’re citizens of it whether we like it or not.  And we’re by no means just the same old us.  In this country Hispanics approach 40 million and Asians dominate advanced technology fields and graduate schools in the sciences.  It’s not just air bread and freedom fries anymore.   

Advice?  Again, the litany of heavy reading, curiosity, confidence.  Before sending this off I checked my self-interview in Abbey 75, Spring 1995.  It’s terser, more concise, with the same wry but preachy arrogance, and it’s consistent with this one.  But then Schriftleiter Greisman laid on a glaringly solipsistic form.  Thanks for the opportunity, David.  And for everything else you’ve done so well in your hundred issues of Abbey.  With Number 101, Abbey, the Legend.