Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers.
I'm Joe Donnie.
TC Boyle has been called by The New York Times, one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant
writers of his generation.
He is the best-selling author of 14 novels, nine short story collections.
His newest book is TC Boyle Stories 2, a 944 page sequel to the first volume of TC Boyle
Stories published in 1998 and winner of the Penn Malamoud Award for short fiction.
Boyle's novels include Sam Miguel, Drop City, The Road to Wellville and Worlds End, and
it is always a pleasure to welcome TC Boyle to the book show.
Thank you very much for being with us once again.
Hi Joe, and it's great to be here physically because when I've done your show in the past,
we've done it long distance to the West Coast, and I love being here in Albany.
It's nice to see you.
You're a local boy.
You're from these parts.
I'm from Peaksville.
As my 1987 novel Worlds End will testify, I've been living in the West Coast, by the way,
most of my life now.
I teach at USC in Los Angeles.
When I came back, it would have been around 86 or so and spent the summer.
As penance for being such an arrogant punk in high school and ignoring the local history,
I deeply absorb all the local history and the result was Worlds End.
About the Hudson Valley from Dutch Times up until the present, which at that point was,
I went up to around the late 1960s.
Do you feel that you still carry that area with you?
Many of us feel that we are a product of our environment.
Do you feel that you are a product of the Northeast?
Absolutely, and 100%.
Don't forget, I also went to Sunni Potsdam before going off to the IWR workshop.
I did have, briefly, a girlfriend here in Albany, whom I would spend a little time
with on my way up to the I.C. wastes of Potsdam.
And further, I grew up in Peaksville, as I say, and I still have my closest friend there,
whom I've known since I was three and a half years old.
My wife is a much more recent arrival in my life.
She's my college sweetheart from Potsdam.
By the way, I never call my oldest friend without prefacing it with this.
So, Karen, I'm now going to call Alan, my oldest and dearest friend, whom I knew and
loved 18 years before I met you.
Why do they hate each other so much?
As I mentioned in the introduction, this is a collection of stories.
It's 944 pages, and it comes many years after the 1998 first edition of these stories.
So is part of your process and part of what you want to do to write stories?
Is that part of who you are as a writer?
Oh, absolutely.
I'm one of the rare ones, I think, who writes both stories and novels?
And I'm committed to equally to both forms.
There is a preface to this, which my editor asked me to write, in which I'm looking back
over my career and why I'm doing this.
And in it, I tell an anecdote about the late Stan Lee Elken.
We were students at Iowa in the workshop writing was the most important thing in the world.
We were writing short stories, writing novels.
We were thrilled, we were idealistic.
And many writers came through and read to us and talked to us.
And one was Stan Lee Elken.
Stan Lee was a brilliant performer of his own work.
We knew enough not to sit within the first three rows because of the flying spittle as
he worked himself into an actor's rage.
He was great.
So during the Q&A, a student raised his hand and said, Mr. Elken, you've written one terrific
book of stories.
Why haven't you written another?
And Stan Lee said, no money in it.
Next question?
See, I don't feel that way.
I feel that if you're a writer, you write.
And to me, a story could be of any length, whether it's five pages, 15, 25, or 500.
It's still the same basic technique.
And it's still a story.
If a short story is built in scenes, well, a chapter of a novel is built in scenes.
And then the scenes accumulate into chapters.
And you know, it's all a matter of organic structure and telling a story.
The simplest two I have spoken to who write short stories will often say that novels will
often come from a short story that they take on a wife of their own.
I've also heard writers say that it is a very, it is one or the other.
I'm going to write a short story or I'm going to write a novel, which is it for you or
is that too?
A great question, Elke.
And I'm going to pick Choice B.
I am absolutely rigid in what I do.
I've never worked on two things at once.
I will sit down to write a novel.
I know that it will require some research and it will be a longer and more difficult thing.
I can have an idea of how long it will be, how long it will take me, even though I don't
know what the story is.
When I'm done with that, as I am now, by the way, I begin to think in terms of short stories.
Never have I had the experience of having a short story and expanding it to a novel
or vice versa, having a novel and shrinking it down to a story.
I don't know this is the way my brain works.
I just do one thing until it's done and just steam straight forward.
Obviously that is your process.
Do you understand how it could happen artistically where you are writing a story and it goes in
another direction?
Of course, I can understand it, but what's so interesting about this, is that people
ask you about process as if there's some magical component to it.
Well, no, everybody has his own process.
You do whatever makes you comfortable.
And so for me, absolute determination and rigidity in work hours and in pursuing a given
story is how I do it.
I'm afraid if I were working on two things at once, I might hit the wall on one and go
to the other and back and forth and never finish either of them.
So yeah, I am very disciplined and this is the way I work.
Is it a different discipline for stories than it is for novels in the sense of process
of development and character dispensing with the obvious, which is linked?
Two a degree.
I've written as well as this preface, I wrote an essay called This Monkey Cama My Back,
in which I talk about my origins as a writer and compare writing to a kind of drug high
and drug addiction.
So that when you finish a story, you feel this tremendous rush.
Not as with any addiction, then it burns off and you want to do it again to see just
what a story is.
Yes, I have my PhD in English Literature.
I'm a professor, but I never wanted to be a man of letters and have not been.
I don't give speeches.
I don't write essays.
I'm not interested in doing book reviews.
I don't want to go to meetings.
I don't want to serve on panels.
I just love this artistic process.
And so a story can be about anything.
You'll see all the 58 stories here.
And I think there are 68 in the first volume.
They are completely various in setting tone.
I don't see any limitations.
And I think maybe that's why I've been able to write novels and stories both with such
a degree of persistence.
And always being inspired.
Oh, everyone further thing.
You're asking about the inspiration for these.
When you're writing a novel, the good thing is, you know what you're going to do tomorrow
morning.
The bad thing is you're locked into something and you must maintain the tone and your enthusiasm
for it.
And I might learn something from you today that I want to write or something happens in
the world, but you have to block that away.
With a story, you can address anything at any moment.
The problem is once you finish a story, then you have a dead period in which you feel
utterly miserable.
And you think, despite appearances to the contrary, that you're completely talentless,
you're uninspired.
You'll never, ever write anything ever again.
And you've never written anything before.
But after a while, another story comes.
In the preface, you note that the approach to this collection is a bit different than
the first one in that it is roughly chronological.
Yes.
That makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, the traditional way to do it, collected stories is chronologically.
It's an historical artifact.
It's there for whoever is interested in whatever period of time if the human race should
go on, which I doubt, to look and see what's been written.
In the first book, I did a very whimsical approach and I took all my previous stories and collected
them in three sections.
One is love, two is death, and three is in everything in between.
This time, I went more or less chronologically.
So this book collects the previous collection since DC Ball Stories in 1998.
And an entirely new volume called the Death in Kitchen Wank of 14 new stories that I wrote
since Wild Child came out in 2010.
In putting them together, do you reread everything?
Yes, absolutely.
But also one of my heroes in this is the late John Uptake who put out his first volume of
collected stories, but didn't put out second one because he passed away in the interval.
And I presume that his publisher will have it in the works and so on.
He said in his preface that he changed the stories as he read through them.
I would never do that.
That interested in that.
I'm interested in what I'm writing now and what's coming next.
They exist in their time, as I said, as an artifact of that time.
I feel good about these stories.
They are the best I could do in the moment I did them.
And for anyone who's interested, you can see Tracer development perhaps.
Certainly there are references to current events that are distant history now, all of
that sort of stuff.
It's part of what the story or novel is.
You know, when we think that we're current and that we are so cool and we are living
on top of our time and we have current references, but those references are dated the minute
they get to the page.
One of my most enthologized stories is Greasy Lake.
A story I wrote in the early 80s about teenage problems.
A teenager who want to be wild and want to be tough but really aren't so wild and tough
and they come up against that.
Within a couple of years of the story being published in anthologies, there are footnotes.
Who were Tuts and the Maytiles?
What is a 57 Chevy Bel Air?
You know, these things need to be footnoted already.
That's annoying.
I don't know if it's annoying, but it's just...
Well, you know, we have these.
Certainly we can go back in time.
To me, that's much like having to have a different edition of Harry Potter in this country
than they had in England.
Oh, really?
I wasn't aware of that.
Yeah.
Well, because they felt that it was too English and they had to Americanize some of it,
otherwise we wouldn't understand it.
That is purely bizarre.
I will say this in the early days of when I was publishing in England, they would translate
my books into English English.
That is, change the spelling of honorable to put a U in it and that sort of thing.
But they realized that it's not cost-effective.
So they just take the American version and the same plates and just print it over there.
And by the way, I noticed that in translation, like in German and French and so on,
of my books, is not translated from the English.
It's translated from the American.
And I like that.
You think of yourself as a very American author?
I have no choice.
Here I am.
Yes, absolutely.
And I've never been an expat.
And I never could be.
I lived the way for the country I really once.
And it was in Ireland in the late 80s.
And I lived there for about three and a half months in a little village near Skibarine.
And it was great.
You know, common language, common ancestry was wonderful.
But those people aren't sufficiently interested in the Dodgers, for instance.
You know, come on.
Yes.
I'm totally American.
TC Boils.
New collection is Stories 2.
It is out from Viking.
We should note as well that Sam Miguel is also out in paperback.
This was your last novel, the 14th.
So when you were done working on the novel, did the work on the stories and putting that
together?
Yes, of course.
The last 14 stories here, the first six of them were written prior to San Miguel and
the last eight after San Miguel.
And before I began the new novel, which I've just finished, it's called The Harder They
Come.
So we talked about my roots here in the Hudson Valley.
I've always been a kind of fish out of water in California all these years.
And so it's been a new arena for me to find material.
So you refer to San Miguel.
The previous year was when the killing's done, these are two books set on the Santa Barbara
Channel Islands.
I was looking at these Joe for years, driving up the coast from USC, looking at these
islands here, wondering what goes on out there.
Well, now I know.
So when the killing's done, it's set within the past 10 years and it's about the ecology
of these islands.
Specifically, there was a big fight over the park service.
It's all now National Park, by the way, going in through move invasive species.
And so I wondered about that.
How do you decide what's an invasive species should we do it?
And in fact, the novel is inspired by an article I read in the Santa Barbara News Press
about a guy who went out in 2001 to save the rats of Anacapa Island.
The park service had decided they were going to bomb the island with rat poison.
This guy went out with a buddy and big backpacks full of vitamin K, which is the antidote,
and spread it all over the island so the rats could be spared.
He was arrested for feeding wildlife in the National Park without a permit.
Now, you couldn't make this stuff up.
So that got me to that island, Santa Cruz, the big one, and Anacapa as well, which
is that novel.
But while doing it, I discovered some historical material regarding the San Miguel Island,
which is the farthest out, was about two families that had lived there as sole possessors
of this island, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s.
The correspondences between the stories were quite remarkable to me.
And of course, I'm always writing about ecological matters.
Sheep, as we know, eat everything right down to the dirt and have destroyed San Miguel
Island.
And now the sheep been removed since the 40s.
I just wanted to wonder about what it would be like to be apart from everybody else.
The novel has such a haunting quality to it, which I think comes in no small measure to
the weather of the place.
Yes, absolutely.
Foreign publishers sometimes like to change the titles of your books for their own constituency.
I insisted they have to call this San Miguel, the Germans, the French, everybody else.
It must be called San Miguel because it becomes a major character of the book.
It's about this island.
And the people, of course, the drama is in the forefront, but they're also kind of incidental
to the drama of nature and what goes on there.
And so the first story came from a very fragmentary diary left by Maranthe Waters.
She was only on the island for five months.
Like many women, she tried to live to please her husband.
And he took the money she'd had from her first husband to buy into this, brought her down
there with her 15-year-old daughter, stepdaughter, and a house servant and two field hands.
And they lived there.
It's like a Eugene O'Neill play.
I mean, stuck on this island where you, on a clear day, you can't see the coast of California.
But even today, in the fastest boat, it takes four and a half hours just to get there over
very rough seas.
And Maranthe had been a city woman living in San Francisco in a nice apartment with a
piano and a cat.
Now suddenly, she's here to be a farmwife and she was totally unsuited for it.
And further, she was dying of consumption.
And of course, the cure in those days, we didn't have antibiotics, was to have rest and
dry, hot air.
And he told her, well, you know, you live in San Francisco.
It's so cold and miserable.
All the way south near Santa Barbara, it will be so wonderful.
But in fact, San Miguel is where the northern currents smacks against the southern currents.
And it is as inhospitable, windy, cold, damp as any place on this earth.
And of course, Maranthe didn't do very well there.
So the story takes place in dual stories, really, of 1880s and one in the 1930s.
And was that always your intention to go back in time and not look at a contemporary snapshot
of this place?
Yes, absolutely.
When the killing's done is contemporary.
And I'd seem if I look back through my career, I seem to be doing a historical novel, then
a contemporary novel, then a book of stories.
And it kind of works.
I don't know.
That's just the way it's worked out and it's kind of fun.
The second story takes place in the 30s and another woman.
She was a minster.
She was 38 years old, living in New York.
She was a librarian at the New York Public Library.
And she was swept off her feet by this bouncy little war veteran of World War I, Herbie
Lester.
And he took her, at least, out to the island.
And whereas Maranthe was pretty miserable there, at least, throw.
I mean, even though she was so ridiculously old, 38, she still was able to produce two beautiful
little daughters and live on this island until World War II came and took them away.
And her story is fascinating as well.
From the beginning, I thought, I don't even need to connect the stories.
Take just, San Miguel is the connection.
But I realized that, since I'm a fiction writer, I could take the character of Jimmy, the
young boy who was the farmhand in the first story and have him stay on the island and
now be 60 years old and link the two stories.
And so that was how it evolved.
And you think of careers, you say you've come into a pattern.
But teaching is part of that as well.
Do you consider that a separate profession or very much a part of what you do as a writer?
I am the guy who started the writing program at USC.
I mean, writing programs are fairly new to the world.
I have to explain this to the Europeans all the time, by the way.
They keep saying, well, how can you study or teach somebody to be a writer?
Of course you can't.
But we have always had in the university art department and music department and why not
have this other art, the verbal arts.
I mean, why not do this?
And anyway, I've always taught until recently, by the way.
Now I'm writer and residence.
And it's been great for me in a couple of ways.
One, in the most altruistic way, yes, I'm giving back to the community that gave to me,
of course, and being a mentor as I've had great mentors.
But in a more selfish way, it gets me out of the house and into another world altogether
where I can forget about the problems of whatever I'm working on in order to fight traffic
to LA from Santa Barbara, no small feet by God, and have an exhausting day doing something
else.
And of course, talking about literature with people who are interested and vitally interested.
So it's been a great, great thing for me to get me out of myself.
I think if I had to simply work as a writer 365 days a year without the book tours, without
the teaching, we'd probably be conducting this
interview in the sub-basement of the mental hospital where I'd be wrapped in chains with
a sock in my mouth, which sort of leads to a thought that this is something that could
completely consume you.
It does.
It does.
I mean, Hemingway is one of my heroes, of course, as he must be for all American boys when
they're growing up.
He ended his own life because he lost the ability to do the only thing that defines him.
There's a great danger there in being only one thing, and that is the danger.
Of course, I do keep a loaded pistol on the desk at all times for inspiration.
I've given, as the preface explains, I did other things.
I went to SUNY POTSEM to be a musician.
I had my own band for a while.
As a rock and roller, I love music.
I've never written without music playing, but I would never perform any music ever again.
I would never touch my saxophone.
I would never do it because this is all consuming.
This is who I am.
This is what I do.
This is my life.
I'm happy to be having this fat second volume of stories.
This is really my life's blood here.
Did that realization come either before or during or right after going to Iowa?
Came before Iowa.
That's for sure.
The reason why I teach and love the idea of a liberal arts education is that I come
from working class family.
We didn't have any books.
I'm the first ever to go to college.
My father's raised an orphanage and educated to the eighth grade.
We had great public schools in Lakeland.
I went to the Lakeland District just outside of Peakskill.
I had great mentors from my English teacher in the eighth grade, Donald Grant, and my history
teacher, Walter Greenstein, up through SUNY POTSEM, where I had three great mentors there
who really, really turned me on.
It wasn't to my junior year that I discovered creative writing.
I blended into a classroom.
I started as a music major, flunked my audition.
So there I am.
What am I going to do?
I always liked history.
I said, I'll be a history major.
I had a great mentor, Vincent Napp.
But then in the second year, we went into a class and read the American short story.
I discovered Flanneryl Conner and John Optike and I thought, wow.
So I became a double major, history in English.
Especially English was great because I was thinking, they pay you to read books.
Great.
And in my junior year, I blended into the creative writing classroom.
Then subsequently, I had four years in which I taught high school, one in Peakskill, and
three at Lakeland.
And then I got a story published.
And on the strength of that, I applied to Iowa and went there.
And when I left Iowa, I went to USC.
It's my life story.
I'm hoping as we, as we ran out our conversation that you could, we could finish up with a brief
portion of a story that's in the collection.
Sure.
I'll be happy to.
The beginning of one of the new, one of the 14 new ones.
It's a story that explores sexual attraction and love.
And the way we objectify physicality of women in this particular instance, but of men
as well.
It's called The Way You Look Tonight.
He was in the teacher's lounge, 7.15 am sipping the latte.
He'd picked up on his way to work and checking his emails before classes started.
When he clicked on a message from his brother Rob and a porno filled the screen.
His first reaction was annoyance, shading rapidly through puzzlement to fear.
In the instant he recognized what it was, a blur of color, harsh light, movement.
He hid escape and shot a look round the room to see if anyone had noticed.
No one had.
The lounge was sparsely populated at this hour.
And those who were there were sunk deep inside themselves, staring into their own laptops
and looking as if they'd been drained of blood overnight.
It was Monday.
The windows were dark with the drizzle that had started in just before dawn.
The only sound was the faint clicking of keys.
All of a sudden he was angry.
What had Rob been thinking?
He could be fired.
Would be in a heartbeat.
The campus was drug-free, alcohol-free, tobacco-free, and each teacher, each year, was required
to take a two-hour online sexual harassment course just to square up the parameters.
Downloading porn at your workplace?
That was so far beyond the pale the course didn't even mention it.
His fingers trembled over the keys, his heart thumped.
He clicked on the next message.
Some Asinine joke, his college roommate had sent out to everybody he'd ever known, all
thirty or so of them when their email address is bunched at the top of the screen, and
deleted it before getting to the punchline.
Then there was a reminder from the dentist about his appointment at 3.30 after school
let out, and a whole long string of the usual sort of crap, orphans in Haiti, Viagra, an
opportunity too unique to miss out on, which he hammered with the delete key one after
another, with a mounting erasibility that made Eugene McAfry, the math teacher, look
up vaguely and then shift her eyes back to her own screen.
Rob had left no message, just the video, and the subject heading.
I thought you'd want to know.
A portion of the way you look tonight, which is included in TC Boyle stories too, which
is published by Viking.
TC Boyle, it's always a great pleasure to have you before these microphones.
Thank you so much for being with us.
Likewise Joe, thank you very much for inviting me.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show.
You can email us at book at wamc.org.
You can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org.
Sarah Ladouk produces our program bookmarkers for next week, and thanks for listening for
the book show.
I'm Joe Donaue.
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