Please share about your journey to
become a published author. Looking back to you childhood, can you
remember any early signs you would later put pen to paper?
I had the requisite dysfunctional
family. And I was a ‘reading under the covers with a flashlight’
kid. It wasn’t until I was in junior high that I started to get a
taste of the thrill of writing.
You are also a Creative Writing
Professor, founding editor in chief of the Los Angeles Review of
Books, founder of The LARB Radio Hour, The LARB Quarterly Journal,
The LARB/USC Publishing Workshop, and LARB Books. How do all these
different areas of your career affect your writing? Do they help you
bring an extra element? Do you feel any extra pressure when releasing
a new title to deliver a strong story?
All the editing I have done for
LARB made me a better writer, and all the reading I have done for it
opened my sense of the possible.
How does the writing process work for
you? Do you schedule a time every day, work madly when inspiration
hits or ?
Because I have so many other jobs to do
on a daily basis, I think of writing as the great treat I get to give
myself, and I will admit that I often play hooky from looming
deadlines by stealing time to write. So on a daily basis it is very
regular—that is I do some just about every day—and highly
irregular, too, as the times when I can sneak it in are
unpredictable. But when I have a block of free time, I never waste
it.
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As an author - what do you enjoy most
about writing process? What feels like a chore?
I just love it. I know it isn’t
fashionable to say, that we are supposed to struggle for our art, but
it’s the most pleasurable work I know. I’ve worked construction,
restaurants, factories, farms, teaching, administering, lots of
things—writing is the place where I can get lost in the flow of my
work and experience the pure pleasure of building something. I have
had pleasure in all those other jobs, too, but not as regularly.
This is your first published work of
fiction. Where did the inspiration for this storyline and the main
characters come from?
It started with a guy I knew, who was
the basis for Dmitry, my antagonist. And I took some details from my
own life for Frank, the protagonist. But then those characters just
grew organically. For instance, I did not remain an autodidact
carpenter. I went to college and graduate school and became a
professor, and of course I didn’t end up falling in love with my
friend’s wife, living on an enormous sailboat on the South China
Sea, or any of the rest of it. And the model for Dmitry never became
a money launderer or murderer (that I know of….).
Inspiration can mean many different
things—I prefer to think of it as allowing one’s imagination and
intellect to roam free.
What type of research was necessary
when writing Born Slippy to bring a sense of reality to the
locations, career and cultures shared?
Most of the places my characters
go—Connecticut, California, Taiwan, Tokyo, Vietnam, Myanmar—are
places I have spent some time in. There is only one city that I
describe that I’ve never been to, but I won’t say which one it
was. That required a bit of research.
I was intrigued by the title Born
Slippy, and in fact had to look up the reference. Can you share in
your words why you chose that specific title and how it applies to
the storyline in your novel?
My original title for the novel was The
Unlucky Lovesong of Franky Baltimore. Not surprisingly, nobody liked
that title. I then settled on Sugarfish, which is just a password
that Dmitry lands on at one point in the novel, and he gets that
password from looking up at a restaurant sign in Los Angeles—it’s
a sushi restaurant with a few different locations. It’s a
restaurant that many readers in Los Angeles would have recognized. I
liked it as a title because it was sweet & savory at the same
time, and I thought vaguely or subliminally sexual.
My editor, who is based in London,
hated it. He didn’t know the restaurant, of course, but also he
just hated it as a title. He suggested Born Slippy, which is a song
that is associated with Liverpool, Dmitry’s hometown, and became
famous in the film Trainspotting. The lyrics—and I went back into
the novel and have Dmitry sing a few lines of it here and
there—really do get at part of what I think is interesting about
the novel, which is the fluidity of sexuality.
What advice can you offer budding
authors working on their first title?
Enjoy it. If you are not having fun,
you might not be allowing your imagination to do its best work.
What's next on the horizon? Do you have
any new books in the planning or writing stage?
I have a new book
of philosophy, called Aimlessness: An Introduction, which is coming
out in the fall. And I am about to finish my third volume of travel
writing, this one called The Kindness of Strangers. Then I’ll get
going on Still Slippy, a sequel: I’m not quite finished with these
people….
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