Q: A life on paper is a life, not a living.
A: Yes. What kind of a life do you want to have?
Q: Vocation and career in conflict.
A: That’s the theme.
Also, many are called but few are chosen.
It’s a tradeoff and a crapshoot.
Q: You can have, or there can be, a reversal of fortune.
A: It happens.
Or it doesn’t.
You can’t make it happen.
Q: Talent unrewarded is the most leprous hotdog in the pot.
A: John Cage said it’s the subject of all art.
Q: I think of John Cage and Merce Cunningham at
A: I think of me and Brenda at Penland. Brenda weaving and me helping Jack Neff out around the pottery.
Q: You left to take a job working construction.
A: I left that when I got fired for stealing.
But then I got a job as a technical writer and our troubles were over.
I worked for IBM. I worked for Lucent Technologies.
I was a sharp tool for the company.
Q: What happened there?
A: The Bush-Enron administration.
Lucent became Enron.
No more Bell Labs.
No more Western Electric.
Q: Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback trilogy.
You were
stationed on
A: Yes. Before Stanley Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove. But after he made Paths of Glory.
I saw both of those movies in the base theater when they came out.
Q: That must have been bizarre.
A: Mondo Bizarro.
I caw Mondo Cane some time
after it came out. In a drive-in out
west of
Q: When did you see it?
A: 1965. Before I went off to the big university.
I was out of the Air Force, working as a computer tester at RCA/EDP.
I worked for RCA. The Barking Dog Company.
Q: Red Seal Records. The economy line.
A: I bought Red Seal Records in the company store.
I read Marshall McLuhan and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
I read Tom Wolfe,
Jimmy Breslin, and Dick Schaap in the
I thought I was going to be a New Journalist.
Instead of applying the techniques of fiction to journalism I would apply the techniques of autobiography to the novel. I would apply nonfiction to fiction.
Q: Norman Mailer called The Executioner’s Song a nonfiction novel.
A: No, Truman Capote called In Cold Blood a nonfiction novel.
I wasn’t writing yet.
I was reading.
I was thinking critically about writing.
Q: You think critically about writing by writing.
You think critically about writing in the writing.
A: That’s what I meant.
Once I started writing, I thought critically about what I was doing. As I did it.
My first book, OVER THE TRANSOM, was an exercise in literary form.
It was a novella, a reminiscence about becoming a writer, and a dialogue between the hero of the novella and the hero of the reminiscence, a conversation between author and character.
Q: What a happy accident.
A: There are no coincidences.
Q: In Generation of Strainers: A Life on Paper you think critically about writing. About genre. What genre is it?
A: What have you got?
In The Wild One, Mary Murphy asked Marlon Brando what he was rebelling against, and he said, “What have you got?”
Q: I remember.
A: It’s poems.
I’m an Internet poet.
Q: Of course.
Where else would you publish poems.
A: Where it’s free.
Or cheap.
$20 a month for a web site.
Plus paper and printer ink.
Postage. To send the query letters out, get rejection slips back, in an SASE.
Q: Or by email.
A: Yes. Sometimes I am rejected the same day.
They can tell I’m not what they’re looking for.
Q: Areas not interested in agenting.
A: Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
Q: Some of them only accept email queries.
A: Yes. It speeds the process up.
Q: Nobody has time to read a good book anymore.
A: Watch less TV.
Read on the commuter train.
Q: There is no commuter train.
A: Stay at home.
If you have to drive there, it’s not worth going.
Let them send a limousine.