Conducted by Shivana Souchet
Ithaca College Intern to Cayuga Lake Books
- How do your personal experiences influence your storytelling?
Personal experiences are the bedrock of fiction writing. You could say it’s where you get your solid footing. Because with that footing, you’re going to push off and allow your imagination to invent, that is to make up for all you haven’t experienced. But it pushes off of personal experience, both what that experience has been and what it missed being, maybe just missed being.
- What’s the hardest part of the writing process for you? The most fun?
Once you’re started and significantly underway, the hardest part for me is the rewriting or the revisions because then you can no longer ride on that original motive force, and you’re subject to endless second guesswork. Things that felt fresh, even great, on first writing–or the first draft–might not be so great, or might trap you into believing it is when you wonder if you should know better. As I said, endless second guesswork.
- How did you get started writing?
I wanted to be an actor first, but quickly fell in love with literature, which is very private, of course, whereas acting is out in the public view. But it all comes down to the same thing. The need to get out of your skin and into a number of others. The thrill, the almost forbidden thrill, of that.
- What authors have had the most important influences on your writing?
Thoreau for the contact with nature, Thomas Wolfe for the rhapsodic writing, and William Faulkner for the extraordinarily fleshed out, inventive and sustained vision of it all.
- In your research for Pure Products, you worked under a different name in a West Virginia chemical plant. What was that experience like?
I could write another book answering that question, but I suspect the answer would have something to do with my once fondness for acting, since I was necessarily acting (and laboring under) a role, a part. But I was eager to experience as much as I could in the short time (a month) I had, so I took on all sorts of work, making mental notes as I did. Then typewritten notes at night. And I had to cut off my beard since, as my boss pointed out, my gas mask wouldn’t get a good seal over a beard.
- What advice can you give to young writers?
Read as much as you can, then, when you find somebody you wish like hell you could write, like allow yourself to be influenced. Eventually, your own voice will come out of that, powered on by the writers you loved. It’s getting that voice, and that voice, when it registers, is always poetry. You’re back up on that stage.
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