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SASQUATCH MUSIC FESTIVAL - POSTER ART SHOW

GUERNICA MAGAZINE - ANTHOLOGY DESIGN


FICTION

NON-FICTION

INTERVIEWS

POETRY

Contents Guernica Magazine


19

G: And what happened to those writings?GS: [Laughs] I hope they’ve mildewed into nothingness. I wrote a lot of those things--”O this” and “O that”. And I was in love with this girl and would write these long, crazy, purple poems. But I hadn’t at that point read any short stories. I remember once getting a copy of de Maupassant, because I think he was mentioned in Hemingway. And I went down to this river in Colorado and read it. ‘Yeah, it’s ok,’ I thought, ‘It’s kinda cool. But it’s not as good as Wolfe--it doesn’t have the high-flown farty language of Wolfe.’

Every writer knows that when you’re imitating somebody--you know,

G: None of these writers remind me much of your writing. So how did you get from reading Wolfe at a college engineering program to Syra-cuse’s MFA and then writing what you write--about reality TV shows and trend setting test tube models?GS: I had a long saga. I went over to work in Asia and then came home and kind of beatnicked around a little bit. And then only when I was about 27 I learned that there was such a thing as an MFA program, and I applied to Syracuse and came here. So there were about five or six years when really what it was was me finally getting off my butt and encountering this series of increasingly sophisticated writers. Or at least increasingly contemporary writers, like Hemingway, Faulkner, �omas Wolfe. �en from there I went to Kerouac and Mailer, and finally at the end of that cycle I went to [Stuart] Dybek and Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. But in each phase I was trying to take whatever writer I was reading and try to make my life look like that. (And of course, there was a Kerouac phase.) So, really, in retrospect there was kind of a slothful person who didn’t really want to face the real job of being a writer, and wanted to live the drama, the sidestories, without doing any of the work or reading.

G: So you started relatively late, no?GS: You know, one of the things I did was I dis-covered �omas Wolfe--not Tom Wolfe, but the Look Homeward, Angel �omas Wolfe. And that really moved me a lot. Maybe it was the first time that a literary writer got under my skin. Again, you know, not ironically, and not aware that I was be-ing kind of a weirdo. I would do a lot of imitations of him, you know--try to write in that sort of lyri-cal voice, and--

you’re sounding like Faulkner--you’re doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn’t Faulkneresque.

18

GM: So you don’t consider Ayn Rand real literature?GS: Not now. At the time, I thought she was a god, and that everything she said was per-fect. And I was reading Khalil Gibran and Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I didn’t really know that that wasn’t mainstream contemporary literature. But I loved it. It definitely went directly from the page into my heart. I think I was a really good reader in the sense that I was a desperate reader, desperate to find out what was good, what was true, how a person should live. And those are the first books that really spoke to me.

It’s comical to me now to see how powerful that internal life was,

the fictional life--my habit of projecting myself as a character in

an Ayn Rand book.

GM: Did Rand influence you much in your decision to study en-gineering in college?GS: Yeah, that’s exactly what hap-pened. I read [her books] and I thought that’s what I want to do; I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. And I don’t want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches. So

fast reader. But that’s all I read for a really long time, just kind of this genre stuff. And then really--it’s funny because I don’t remember reading any book in high school that really stuck with me except Walden. I read Walden and that was really something. I read Rand and thought, ‘I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don’t want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches.’ So I was work-ing against my actual abilities. I think I was getting my literature through other media--like music, and especially through television; Monty Python was really a big influence. And then actually when I was a senior in high school I really wasn’t planning on going to college. But one of my teachers gave me some Ayn Rand, like Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. And that really was a big deal to me. So I think I had kind of a funny background--I wasn’t reading any of what I would call real literature, certainly not until I went to college.

I was kind of working against my actual abilities. I went off to this engineering school in Colorado and really it’s comical to me now to see how powerful that internal life was, the fictional life--my habit of projecting myself as a character in an Ayn Rand book. Seeing the world in that way was just pervasive at that point, and not ironic at all. If you read Toby Wolff ’s novel Old School, which I thought was wonderful, there’s a section in there where he talks about the main character’s relation to Ayn Rand, and it could have come out of my head--perfect!

G: Did you go right into college after high school?GS: Yeah.

G: Were you writing short stories or anything in high school or college?GS: No. Not at all.



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F I C T I O N » N O N - F I C T I O N » I N T E R V I E W S » P O E T R Y

OCTOBER 200 4

THIRTY-SEVENTH OF TALES OF THE NAMELESS BY ALIMORAD FADIE NIAOur acquaintance began in a used bookstore, which had recently opened; we were interested in the same book. And, I believe, our acquaintance was my fault. Something in his face did not corre-spond to the book, a volume of poetry, he wanted. This contradic-tion made me want to speak with him. Yet his face could have been that of a killer. No, not his face, his eyes, they had a poison that, clearly, is the sourcelight of murder. How I came to that, I don’t know; but when he looked at me and said, you saw the book first,


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