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- - - - Copyright Small Mouth Press
- - - - A Conversation with Stephen Dixon - - - - Biographical Highlights
Generally critics recognize Dixon as an urban stylist whose narratives are propelled by protagonists not too far from removed from his own biography. Before joining the writing faculty at John Hopkins University, Dixon worked as a junior high school teacher, bartender, salesclerk, waiter, artist's model and reporter, among other jobs, and many of his earlier characters share similar employment histories. The writer is married with two daughters, as are the protagonists, most notably, of Frog and Interstate. I spoke with Stephen Dixon in his New York apartment, around the corner from Columbia University, the morning after his reading at the National Arts Club in support of Gould, his latest novel. The Interview Q: You're quoted, in the preface to a Glimmer Train interview, as saying, "'Frog's Interview' says most of it for me." To me, Howard Tetch is more cross, ornery and cantankerous in that chapter than in any other part of the book. Is that a fair assessment? A: Yes, it is. But since I was writing it as a short story, I wanted to make it dramatic and funny and interesting and if he was just benign and uninteresting it wouldn't have been a good story. It doesn't serve truth as well as it serves fiction. Q: So what is your opinion of the interview process? A: Oh, I don't like the interview process at all. I would rather not be interviewed and, if anything, that sort of reflected my sort of interior cantankerousness, my covert rather than my overt cantankerousness. I would prefer not to be interviewed but I interview, selectively, because people ask me to and it's probably good for the work. Q: What's the current count of published books? A: A very small press is publishing my twentieth book later this year. It's my first completed novel, the one that I first wanted to get published and never could. It's called Tisch. I worked on that between 1961 and 1969 so this book is thirty years old and a small company in Palmdale, California called Red Hen Press is coming out with it. It's a very small contract. They wanted a book of mine and I always wanted to publish this book. Q: Did you rewrite it? A: No. I'm not going to rewrite it and it's a book that I only would publish with a very, very small house so people would know that it's an old book rather than a book that follows the newest book. Q: What's the story count? A: The story count is probably about 425 now. I lost count. I've had about fifteen stories published this year and fifteen last year. The last time I counted I was at about 350 and that was three or four years ago. Q: If you've published 425 stories, how many finished stories do you have? A: Well, I have, lying around, about another fifty stories. I threw out a whole bunch of material but they weren't really finished. Those were really sort of first or second drafts that didn't work. I would say, altogether, about 500. I'm still writing them left and right. Q: In any article or review of your work, the number of published stories is almost always mentioned. What does publishing a story give you that writing alone doesn't provide? Is there a different satisfaction in the publication? A: No, once I finish writing the story, the satisfaction is over. I don't worry about getting it published. I just send it out. I don't get any satisfaction in seeing it published. I just like to write it. I don't waste any time thinking about a story once it's over with. Q: You mentioned that Tisch will be published thirty years after you wrote it. Are there any other unpublished longer works? A: Yeah, there's one that I love. It's called The Story of a Story and Other Stories. It's a short one, a hundred and sixty pages. I wrote that in 1974 through 1976 but nobody's ever wanted to publish it. Asylum Arts was interested but then they took something else. It's a very sort of experimental work, you could say. Maybe too many tricks for one publisher. Q: Your face lit up just mentioning the title but your contention two minutes ago was that you didn't care about publishing, that there was no extra satisfaction. A: Well, the stories, no, but the novels, yes, because so much time is consumed. That's almost the difference between the short story and the novel. The novel, if you put in one, two or three years and it's wasted, at the end of it you feel that it's a piece of junk. You really feel that three years of your creative life were for nothing except maybe learning what you shouldn't do. But a short story, you can write it and spend two weeks or thirty days on it, or a very long one two months, and if nothing comes of it, well, it's a short amount of time. But Story of a Story I love because it's a one of a kind book. I would love to see it published some day because I still think it's fresh, while Tisch, although I take some chances in it, I'm doing more for historical purposes than anything else. I still feel that it's a valid, funny novel. You'll find the rest of the interview with Stephen Dixon in Rob Truck's collection, The Pleasure of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers. - - - -
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