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It wasn't too long ago when one of the highlights of my job here was stopping by Ryan Boudinot's cubicle to talk books and kids and thumb through the delicious stacks of promo copies from one of the DVD studios he was lucky enough to work with, the Criterion Collection. (And sometimes walking away with treasure: just a few days ago I finally watched Love in the Afternoon, the last entry in Eric Rohmer'sSix Moral Tales set, one of my dearest and most unlikely possessions. Thanks, Ryan!) He was still working here in the Columbia Tower when his first book, the story collection,The Littlest Hitler, came out. It made Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year list, among other honors, and showed he had chops to burn, with stories that ranged from melancholic realism to rule-breaking experiments.
So it was no surprise to see him up to a few tricks in his first novel,Misconception, which just came out from Grove's Black Cat imprint. My first glimpse of the book was in Bookforum's summer issue, where the opening section appeared as part of their Fiction Forward feature. It was a hell of an opener, ending with this, um, evocative sentence:
But once I had the whole book to read, it became clear that this opening scene, which seemed to set a familiar stage for a story of adolescent awakening, was not quite what it seemed, the first of the book's many built-in misconceptions. To say, by the way, that it's Ryan's first novel is true only in the strictest publishing sense. He's been writing like a madman since he went to some crazy writer's camp when he was growing up in nearby Mount Vernon. Misconception is far from his first novel--just the first to see the light of day--and I know he's well along in his next one, which sounds like a doozy. He's left dot-commery behind and is able to focus now on writing, teaching, and being a dad, but day-job or no day-job he's been a writer throughout, and his focus and imagination have been both a beacon and a prod to such layabout wannabe colleagues as myself.
I traded some Qs of mine for As of his this week, on his new book, on the Northwest, and on turning fact into fiction, which he answered in ways that echo Nami Mun's essay for us yesterday:
Amazon.com: The usual expectation for a first novel is an autobiographical coming-of-age story, and someone who knows you're a child of the Pacific Northwest might assume that's what's in store as they open your book. But you flip that expectation on its head pretty quickly with a change of perspective. Did you have that complication in mind from the beginning, or did you find yourself "writing what you know" and then try to extricate yourself from that?
Boudinot: Neither, really. The form the book ended up taking, that of nested perspectives, came about as I was trying to make sure every character got his or her chance to show me his or her true self. This necessitated telling the story from Cedar's point of view in one section, then in Kat's, then in Kat's memoir which is partly written from Cedar's perspective, then in straight-up omniscient third person.
About the autobiographical angle of your question"”let me answer this by way of an illustration. This morning I woke up and had granola, then got in my car to go buy coffee. On the way to the café I passed this horrible accident"”a Ford F250 had completely munched some sort of imported beater sedan. And as I passed the accident I suddenly recognized the guy being loaded onto the stretcher. It was my high school Freshman English teacher, Mrs. Holmby.
Now. The only part of that previous paragraph that actually happened was that I ate granola this morning. Does that make the whole anecdote "autobiographical"?
Amazon.com: At the darkest moment in the book, Cedar says, "Utterly incapable and petrified, I responded in the most inappropriate manner possible; I laughed." How do you find the right tone between tragedy and comedy for a story like this?
Boudinot: Tragedy is really close to absurdity in my mind, and absurdity is neighbors with humor. So it doesn't take much of a leap to move from one to the next. I should say this, too"”I was utterly mystified the first time I heard someone describe Misconception as "humor." Much of the time I was writing it I felt like I was ripping my own guts out with a fork. Then I read the first chapter aloud in a theater and was sort of stunned when people started laughing. I did intend the first chapter to be lighter, inviting the readers in. I'm coming around and realizing that yeah, maybe it does have its funny moments.
Amazon.com: You are, by my count, at best the second most famous writer to come from Mount Vernon, Washington, where Glenn Beck Day has been proclaimed by the mayor for later this month. Did you grow up thinking of the Northwest as a place that writers come from? Is there anything about the place as you know it that you haven't found described in books and want to capture in yours?
Boudinot: Are you calling Glenn Beck a writer? That's almost as absurd as calling me "famous."
Until I was in eighth grade I bought into the subtext of the New York/Los Angeles cultural umbilical cord, that those were the places where real creators of culture lived. There were times, sure, when I figured that the Northwest wasn't a place where writers came from. Then, when I was 13, I read Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, and that all changed. Not only did he live in a town near mine, and not only did much of the novel take place literally half a mile from my house, but his aesthetic hit me in exactly the right spot at the right time. That novel gave me permission to think of my surroundings as worthy of inspiration.
As to the second part of your question, for a long time I saw how rural America was portrayed in the media, and found that living in the rural Northwest was actually a lot weirder and a lot more connected to the rest of the globe than certain depictions would have you believe. ThenTwin Peaks came out in the late 1980s, and I thought, finally, here's a vision of the Northwest that feels recognizable. The Northwest, particularly the pre-dotcom Northwest, has always been weird. Think Gary Larson, Mudhoney, Ivar Haglund. Weirdos one and all.
Amazon.com: I happen to know that you wrote a lot of this book in the cafe at Elliott Bay Book Co. while on your lunch break from Amazon. Do you have any advice on keeping up discipline and creativity for other writers with day jobs?
Boudinot: Yeah. The time to be most ambitious and committed to your work is when your day job is demanding the most out of you. There's really no such thing as saving up your efforts for when your job gets less crazy. Working a 60-hour week? That's precisely the time to write that 500-page novel you're dreaming about. You also have to approach your work"”your real work, not the work you're getting a paycheck for"”as guerrilla warfare. This means being resourceful and not being precious about your routine. There's no "I can only write in the morning" or "I need at least two hours to write" or "I'm just too tired to write after a work day." Most people who ask for advice on keeping up discipline and creativity just want a pat on the head and some sympathy for just how darn crazy their life is. But I always think it's a gigantic insult to writers who've had it far, far worse to complain about your job filling in spreadsheets in an office park. Think of what Raymond Carver had to endure, or Bruno Schulz, or any of the writers who've had to work under oppressive regimes or been marginalized because they happen to be women. We've got it way easy. You're either writing a book or you're not. Quit being a coward, shut up, and write the damn thing.
Amazon.com: You were an editor on our DVD team here, and now you write a DVD blog for The Rumpus. What movie have you learned the most about storytelling from?
Boudinot: There are so many. One movie I recently watched again was Alejandro Jodorowsky'sThe Holy Mountain. I'm so inspired by the audacity of that film. I play this little mental game where I try to imagine what Jodorowsky said to his cast at various times during the shooting of that film. Like, "Stand between the chimpanzee and the amputee," or "Today I want you to take off all your clothes and I'm going to cover you with tarantulas."
I admire directors who take on huge challenges and risks, and even if the result doesn't come out perfectly, I'd much rather watch that movie than a well-crafted movie that plays it safe. I've been really drawn in the past few years to films that came out around 1970. Roeg'sPerformance, Makavejev'sSweet Movie, Klein'sMr. Freedom. What I admire most about these films is how resolutely they disregard the kind of audience that brays for plot. It's all about the mise en scene. So I suppose I'm hoping to achieve in my fiction something similar to The Holy Mountain, except I'm trying to achieve in a paragraph what Jodorowsky so brilliantly achieved in a camera shot.
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