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- - - - Copyright Stanford Daily
- - - - Intermission talks to novelist Stephen Elliott
By Karan Mahajan
As a conscientious journalist, I am tempted to do the right thing: First introduce you to Stephen Elliott's writing career and then segue into his bizarre and terrifying childhood. But I can't. Elliot's fiction is so inextricably linked to his life experiences, that nothing beats a brief Amazon.com biography by way of introduction. Here goes: "Stephen Elliott left home at 13 and after a year sleeping on the roof of a convenience store on Chicago's north side he was made a ward of the court and channeled through various large and small group homes and institutional learning facilities. He has since worked as a stripper, a cabdriver, a bartender and a marketing executive. Stephen Elliott was awarded the 2001 Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, offered to emerging writers in fiction and poetry." Elliot is presently a lecturer at Stanford and has published three novels and edited the anthology "Politically Inspired," a collection of political stories by prominent authors. His latest novel "Happy Baby," set for release in February, is a chronicle of sexual abuse and its after-effects — one of the most powerful chapters "Stalking Mr. Gracie," is about a man who stalks the person who molested him as a child. On how he became a writer "I always wrote. Even when I was 10 years old, my walls were covered in poetry that I'd written. But I wrote to express myself and to communicate, which is one reason for writing — other people write because they love or esteem literature. I had no intention of becoming a writer because my father was a writer and I didn't like my father very much. So, I was very surprised when people started paying me for my writing. Then I got the Stegner here and sold a couple of books — all within a month — so all of a sudden I was making a living as a writer. Prior to that, I was just jumping around from job to job." On his new novel "It comes out Feb. 19. It's called 'Happy Baby.' It's about a person who grows up as a ward of the court in the state of Illinois in various group homes and juvenile learning facilities, and learns to associate abuse with affection. It's a very dark, very sexual book. I wrote it while I was here as a Stegner and it's by far the best book I've written." On the anthology "Politically Inspired" "The idea of 'Politically Inspired' was really born from frustration about the political events of our generation. I was in the middle of writing 'Happy Baby'which deals with issues that are personal to me — and I didn't feel what I was writing was meaningful. I became very obsessed with politics and what I wanted to do was create a forum to give fiction writers a political voice." On his next venture, after "Happy Baby" "It's a campaign trail book. It's going to involve just going on the campaign (for the 2004 presidential election) and being on the bus. The only difference is I'm not going to worry so much about getting the facts right and I'm going to use very extensive quotes from unreliable sources to illuminate the candidates and their positions. I'm going to fade in and out of fiction . . . It'll be for people who want to get a generational feel for the election." Recommended Reading "Tobias Wolff has just come out with one of the greatest novels I've ever read, 'Old School.' It's his first novel and anybody who loves writing should read that. But I also think that everybody should go through a Charles Bukowski phase . . . And of course, you've got to read Hemingway. "A lot of the more interesting stuff can be found in the 'gay and lesbian' sections of the bookstores — Dennis Cooper, JT Leroy, Michelle Tea. "David Eggers and David Foster Wallace are going to have more of an impact on where literature is going [than anyone else] — we're currently moving towards maximalism, exploring every tangent. "Read some lady writers too. Because if you don't, then people are going to call you a sexist. [laughs] I'm kidding. Elizabeth Tallent, Michelle Tea and Sylvia Plath are some of my favorite writers." What's next "All I want to do is write books. I feel like with 'Happy Baby,' my fourth novel, I'm pretty much done with the scrape-out-the-insides kind of writing, I've exploited my experiences as far as they'd go. I want to write a detective novel. I like messing around with different genres." Advice for aspiring writers "I would say, don't do it. [laughs] You're going to totally clutter the field and it's hard enough even for an established writer to get published; we'd really appreciate it if people stopped sending submissions so that it wasn't so difficult on the rest of us. Also, if you do write, you should know that it's a really poor-paying position and you get very little in response. Even though you think that by expressing yourself, enough people reading your work will give you a measure of identity, self-worth, self-knowledge and reason to live — none of that will happen. You'll be just as miserable whether you're published or not published: It's just one more thing to be miserable about. But the misery doesn't go away, even when you start accomplishing things. So, I would say, look for your happiness elsewhere. Study economics or something. And then do volunteer work." - - - -
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