Interview With The Author

This is a fantasy ego projection of an interview that might take place in a possible future where I have actually finished this novel that I have sitting around here half-done.   “Forest Park” is the current working title.  Repeat, snark alert!  This hasn't happened yet. 

Q:  Let’s start with the obvious question:  how is it that you are publishing your first novel at the age of seventy?

A:  Well, I could give you any number or reasons, from flippant to profound, but let’s just say that I finally got around to it. 

Q:  The writing or the publishing? 

A:  The publishing, I think.  A half-done first draft of “Forest Park” sat in a lap-top for years before I decided to finish it.  Before now, for decades, I felt like I had books in me, books that I wanted to write, but I had the powerful notion that dealing with publishers, agents and marketers would damn near kill me. 

Q:  It that why you decided to self-publish?

A:  Who says I decided?  I’m not sure that I had any alternative.

 

Q:  Did you try to find a publisher?  Or an agent?

A:  No.  I have no facility for self-promotion and I have a very low tolerance for rejection.  And I figured if John Toole couldn’t sell the business on “Confederacy of Dunces,” what chance did I have?  C’mon, let’s move along, this is a dull subject.

Q:  Okay . . . How about writing?  Had you written anything before? 

A:  Yeah, a lot, actually.  Journals, letters, always.  I hated school as a teenager, but I wrote nice term papers, and I enjoyed writing them.  My overall grades were dismal in my teens, but my term papers scored high.  In my early fifties I wrote some short stories, I think a few of them were okay.  I was a lawyer by then, and of course I wrote thousands of words a week doing that, it seemed like thousands anyway.  After the Peace Corps, I wrote up about a hundred thousand words about my experiences in Thailand based on journal entries.   I think some of that was entertaining.  I wrote hundreds of poems in my fifties.  I've had a blog for ten years that I put a lot of energy into. 

Q:  Did you try to get any of the stories or poems published? 

A:  Not really.  I mean, I sent some stuff out, but I got discouraged almost immediately.  I thought that some of the poetry was good, but I’m famously easy to please.  But it don’t mean nothing, as they used to say.  I read and write mostly because I love to read and write.  I’ve always been a reader.   I love to tell stories too, for that matter.  It all goes together.

Q:  When did you become interested in reading?

A:  Very young, if you count comic books!  Kidding aside, we always had a lot of books around the house, and we got two newspapers delivered every day.  We got the New York Daily News every morning at about six o’clock, so I could look at it before school.  That was a great newspaper then, this is the Fifties, I don’t know what it’s like now.  It was tabloid sized, it had lots of pictures, and it had great writers.  Everything was very punchy, intensely to-the-point.  The sports writing was top notch.  A perfect newspaper for a youngster. 

We also got Life and Newsweek every week, and the National Geographic.  The Life and the NatGeo, I went over them pretty good.  The books at home were my father’s, he had very eclectic tastes.  Many were in German; many were about engineering; there were math books and textbooks about foreign languages; the fiction was mostly very serious.  He went to a lot of used book sales.   I “looked at” those books when I was too young to read them.  I read them like you’d read magazines, you know, just open them and read a little.  I did always love the library though.  Plenty of readable books there.  The library in my town was a good one, and for the youngster there was a nice children’s library downstairs.

Q:  How about books?  When did you start to read books? 

A:  Age eleven, I’d say, for long-form fiction and non-fiction, in seventh grade.  Over the next couple of years I read books from the library about pirates or World War II, exciting stuff, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs, all of the Ace paperbacks came out at that time, Rider Haggard, Edgar Poe, books about gangsters, Sherlock Holmes, Fu-Manchu.  I read memoirs by World War II guys, like “Stuka Pilot,” by Hans Rudel, and “Zero Fighter,” by Saburo Sakai.  And more of the books at the house, I had more patience for them than before.  I found a paperback called, “The Beats,” about all of the Beat writers, real Top-of-the-Pops stuff, but I liked it.  I found that book amazing.

Q:  The Beats?  What did you find most interesting about them?

 

A:  Well, it seemed to suggest that an individual could be himself and still become successful.  That’s pretty exciting. 

Q:  What was the first serious book that you read?

A:  Nice dig, youngblood!  Maybe I should pad my list. 

Q:  No . . . I mean . . .

A:  Forget it.  I’m fucking with you.  It was probably “Junky,” by William Burroughs.  I was thirteen, I think, a freshman in high school, I hated high school with a passion.  I’m sure that I shop-lifted the book, I had mastered that behavior by then.  I had developed a voracious appetite for magazines and paperbacks and the money to pay for them was just not there, so I improvised.  I liked “Junky” a lot, I re-read it about a year afterwards.  I mean, it wasn’t a bolt-from-the-blue moment or anything, but I liked it a lot.  It was a lesson in the layers of the societal onion, worlds within worlds.  I had no idea of that stuff, what half of it meant, but I learned that there was more out there, those people on the bus had more on their minds.  Of course I remembered Bill Burroughs from the book about the Beats. 

Q:  How about school assigned reading? 

A:  I never read what was assigned by school.  It was a matter of principle with me.  I got Cliff Notes or I faked it.  I only read what I wanted to read.  A novel a week, plus the history stuff.  I hated school, but I loved reading.  Oh, I did read “Huckleberry Finn” as a freshman in college.  I liked that.  I’d already read some Mark Twain. 

Q:  Did it occur to you that you might write someday yourself? 

A:  You know, I did have a “Eureka!” moment at that time.  Thirteen, or maybe fourteen.  It was after school, I was in my room pretending to do homework.  Really, I never did homework, I always copied it from other kids the next morning.  Anyway, I’m in my room reading a pornographic novel.  I had a couple of them around, the best part of them was definitely the six or eight nude drawings by Frank Frazetta.  Those’d be big E-Bay items now, I’ll bet.  The writing itself was disappointing, even to my critical faculties, which were primitive.  I remember thinking:  I could do better than this.  The exposition was minimal; the sex scenes were shallow and not very entertaining; there was no coherent narrative, no real story.  I thought, somebody got paid to write this shit?  That was actually very encouraging to me.  I thought that maybe it would be a job that I could do, someday, if I had to.  I was always worried about the whole making a living thing. 

(Reminder, none of this interview has happened yet.  I am just thrilled with the idea that someday, who knows, it might happen, someone will want to interview me.) 

Q:  So now you’re published, or self-published anyway.  Are you making a living at it? 

A:  Shit, no.  This is a love thing.  If a couple of hundred people read the book, I’ll be totally delighted, it’ll all have been worth it.  The interesting thing these days is that self-publishing has become something of a misnomer.  You’re not on your own anymore.  Not only writers have been put out of business by the new paradigm, lots of publishing professionals are out in the street now too.  Editors, the whole lot of them.  Many of them have hung out shingles and are now in business for themselves, trying to make a living with the talents that they developed over the decades in the old, pre-Internet publishing business.  So I have help, I’m happy to pay for it, these guys are good.  So I can get an editor on as grand a scale as I think I need, I can get someone to do the packaging, it looks a lot better than I could do, I can pay for as much marketing as I can afford.  By now it looks like Forest Park will at least break even.  That’s a blessing.  But making a living?  Please, don’t mock me. 

Q:  Sorry, I was just curious.  Back to reading, what have you read more recently?

A:  More recently than high school?  That’s quite a list.  I’ve always been drawn to crap, but I’ve always found quality books rewarding too, as long as they were not too hard to read.  So I’ve always read a mix of “good” books and crap; fiction and non-fiction; newspapers and magazines.  I’ve always been a dedicated library goer, borrowing books and reading them.  I’m all over the place.  I never totally gave up comics, for that matter. 

Q:  What have been some of your favorites?

A:  Very early on, Evelyn Waugh and Dash Hammett.  Ambrose Bierce.  “Clockwork Orange;” “Lord of the Flies.”  I liked Evergreen Magazine in the Sixties, and I had a subscription.  That led me to more Bill Burroughs, and some wilder stuff, like "491," Scandinavian stuff.  Some of the Hard Boiled stuff, Mickey Spillane early on, later George V. Higgins and Charles Williford.  Nathanial West! And a lot of crap in all of these genres, Science Fiction, crime, I rather liked some of the crap too.  I recently discovered Edward St. Aubyn, I find him very good.  Over the years I read "Moby-Dick" three times, finally understanding it, more or less, at the age of sixty.  Favorites?  Of the modern guys I’d say Haruki Murakami and Jonathan Franzen.  I’m thunderstruck by those two. 

Q:  How about a favorite character? 

A:  Tom Ripley, hands down.  How could I leave Patricia Highsmith off of the favorites list?  Those Ripley books, that’s five of my top ten right there.   I only read them in the last ten years or so. 

Q:  What do you feel have been the biggest influences on your work?

A:  “My work  . . .”  That’s a little grand.

Q:  How about, “. . . on your writing so far?” 

A:  Probably newspapers.  Between journals, and letters, and legal writing, maybe I tend to stick with the who, what, when, where and how.  Be direct, don’t hide the ball.  Tell the story.  So newspapers.  Maybe newspapers and movies.  I’m pretty sure that I construct movie-like narratives.  I’ve seen a lot of movies. 

Q:  Regarding style . . .

A:  Let me cut you off right there, I’m not the one to be discussing the style of anything, or the literary this and that.  I leave the close examination of language and literature to people with much better educations that I have. 

Q:  Fair enough.  What about “Forest Park?”  What’s the book about? 

A:  It’s about the first TV generation.  It’s about the effect of the Sixties on certain young people.  It’s about the Vietnam War.  It’s about temptation and the difficulty of redemption.  It’s about the layers of culture, what you can see, what you find if you dig, and what you find if you stay right there and dig some more.  It’s about young people who walk in the world but chose not to engage with it.  It’s about friends, parents and children, it’s about right and wrong in shades of grey.  It’s about growing up, discovering things about yourself.  It’s about, not my favorite word, but it’s about alienation.

Q:  You sound like you had given that question some thought beforehand.

A:  Yeah, my PR guy helped me with that one.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A:  Oh, just more stories about tattooed fuck-ups from Queens.  I’m like Marc Chagall, I’m stuck in a frozen moment.  He and I look at the whole world through the filter of one moment in time.  For Chagall, it was the Stetl, for me it’s a little corner of Queens after midnight.