Tim
O'Brien
Author of
July, July talks with Robert
Birnbaum
 Posted:
November 5, 2002
Copyright 2002
by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Print
this interview.
Tim O'Brien was born in Minnesota and graduated from
Macalester College in that state. He served in Vietnam and did graduate
work in Government at Harvard University. He was briefly a reporter
for the Washington Post. Tim O'Brien has published the 1979
National Book Award-winning novel Going After Cacciato, in
addition to The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods,
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age
and Tomcat in Love and now July, July. His writing
has also appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Harper’s,
The Atlantic and has been included in several editions of Best
American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. Tim
O'Brien has received numerous literary awards and fellowships. He
is currently teaching at Southwest Texas State in San Marcos, Texas.
Robert Birnbaum:
What was your starting point for July, July?
Tim O'Brien: Well, it’s
the story of a group of people who get together, a reunion, 30 years
after graduating. And that seemed to me to be an interesting hilltop
from which you could survey the past and see the person you were
and who you are now and the person you may become. From there it
goes into an investigation of each of my 10 major characters and
the turning point in that character’s life. To me it’s
more a book about middle age and disappointment and joys that people
have had that aren’t commonly with associated with what people
call the ‘60s. It was more a look at life and what life had
delivered to these people.
RB: I should have been more specific. I wanted
to know what your starting point was in writing this novel.
TOB: I see what you mean. Just as a historical
matter I was called by the fiction editor Rust Hills, at Esquire
back then. There was a new feature that the magazine was running.
A one-page story. He asked if I would do one. I agreed. I did a
story about 2 people talking at a reunion. One had breast cancer
and they knew each other all these years ago and she was just trying
to get her old boyfriend to dance with her at a reunion. He keeps
on saying no. Something about it intrigued me. I kept on picturing
these nametags bobbing in the back ground—who are these people?
I’ve never been to a reunion—what would it be like? It
brought back a lot of ghosts from my own past as I was writing this
story. And then one thing leads to another and I wanted to see who
the name tag people were. So I did another chapter. And then another.
And another. I found most of the chapters of the book were taking
place not then but now. The things these people have gone through
I had recently gone through. And then the troubles they brought
to the reunion—they seemed to leave it a little bit lighter,
marginally, so that tomorrow might be a little bit better than yesterday
and that felt like my own life. All these things feed in, just story
lines. The individual chapters intrigued me—writing about the
death of Karen Burns intrigued me. Or about the dirty pictures and
Jan Huebner or Marv’s big lie or Dorothy’s breast cancer.
I became intrigued by each life and they became real people to me
so the more I wrote about them the more I wanted to know about them.
RB: Is this a book you could have written
any time before you wrote it?
TOB: No. No book has been that way.
RB: (laughs) No book was written before its
time.
TOB: I couldn’t have written The
Things They Carried now…it's true of every book. What your
interests are and what your psychology is as a human being have
a lot to do with what your content or subject matter is going to
be. Here I am at middle age and I’m interested in middle age.
| I
became intrigued by each life and they became real people
to me, so the more I wrote about them, the more I wanted to
know about them. |
RB: On looking back…
TOB: And forwards. Both. It’s a time
where you survey. You have some time left and it’s not as much
as it used to be and where have you been and where do you go from
here? Of course, it varies radically by person and so I wanted a
lot of people in the book to be able to look at different angles
of this period of life.
RB: Did July, July require you to
pay more or a lot of attention to structure and pacing? Or did it
just come out?
TOB: I’ve always paid attention to structure
and pacing. Because it’s an ensemble novel I knew I couldn’t
do a whole life for each character. It would have been a 50,000-page
book. So I had to find a structure—it seemed to me to be natural
thing to do was people in their lives more or less recall points
of crisis, points of decision. Most everything else is erased. We’re
left with certain bundles and clusters of memory and images that
have stuck and everything else is gone. So for each character I
thought if I could find one of those clusters of moral choice, a
period in life where something was done and there was no going back,
where life would always be different afterwards. So when Dorothy
walks out without her shirt on, that’s something she would
remember. It says a lot about the person she is. Not just the breast
cancer. She needs to be loved and touched and she is desperate for
contentment that she doesn’t have. So it’s a gallant move
on her part.
RB: And unexpected, given her behavior so
far in the story.
TOB: Yeah, it is unexpected. Almost inevitable
too. Someone who has lived that kind of straight-laced life, sooner
or later they all lose it (both laugh). Eventually, in modest ways.
RB: How much does what you have written before
enter into your approach to a new story?
TOB: It enters in ways that are not related
to plot or story. It enters in terms of style—the sentences
in July, July are equal of the sentences in Things They
Carried, In The Lake of The Woods, or Going After Cacciato—
they’re good sentences and that enters in. One doesn’t
want to repeat oneself as a writer. I don’t want to write a
book I have already written. It enters in the sense that I had never
done female characters and I had always wanted to. Lead characters
and that kind of technical challenge and the fun of it came out
of past work…I hadn’t done it before in the past and I
wanted to do it now.
RB: Is it a technical challenge?
TOB: Kind of. Technical may be too vague
a term. It’s a question of trying to enter the skin of another
human being with whom I share little. Not just in terms of gender
but in terms of experience. I never posed for dirty pictures and
I’ve never won a lot of money playing blackjack. I’ve
never done anything that these people did. After a while it felt
like I was living in the skin of 10 other human beings. I don’t
know if technical is the word. You write differently, not relying
on the movie camera inside your head that has recorded your own
experience. You are trying to imagine the movie camera inside the
head of Dorothy or Jan or Amy—their lives. Even David Todd,
I never went through anything like what he went through. I wasn’t
ever in danger of dying. But I watched it all around me. I know
what morphine is. I took it once. I know the hallucinogenic properties
and that kind of disembodied—it brings you into the center
of your brain with this little bead in there and it seemed in that
[David’s] case a good place to go with the story.
 RB:
What’s the value you place on accuracy? In the drug scenes,
for example?
TOB: You want something interesting. There
are a lot of uninteresting things that come out of drugs. I wanted
something interesting to come out which is a voice of conscience
or history.
RB: Or as in this novel, a deejay.
TOB: He also appears as a TV evangelist,
a cop, and a black jack dealer. To me, it’s not meant to be
supernatural. It’s meant to be what all of us go through at
some point just talking to ourselves those hours before sleep sometimes
when we got fired or your girlfriend left you or something. You
just talk to yourself saying, “How did I get in this fix? How
do I get out of it? Why did I do what I did?” Sometimes in
an alarmist voice and sometimes in a reassuring voice, “This
was a tough divorce but not as bad as Anne Boleyn’s.”
It comes out of us but it doesn’t feel like our own voices—a
mixture of us and our ideal selves. Then as a dramatist you try
to give it a personality. Like with the deejay, I try to rev it
up a little bit and it becomes an emblem of what all of us at some
point or another do.
RB: In the past you have been identified
as a Vietnam story writer and Vietnam has a presence in this novel.
Has that been an issue in the critical reception of July, July?
TOB: Some reviewers really hated the book.
Some loved it. That’s been pretty much the case with all my
books. Vietnam does figure in the book but obliquely. There is one
chapter set there but aside from that, it’s a backdrop for
the ‘60s and the baby boomer generation. I’m flattered
to be known as a Vietnam writer. I can’t and I don’t want
to write the same books over and over. And haven’t. The
Things They Carried—I’d written Cacciatto and
The Things They Carried was another angle on it and way of looking
at the experience. More about storytelling, about what stories do
in our lives. About writing, about memory, reality. So Vietnam even
in The Things They Carried wasn’t the dominant topic—it’s
set there but it’s not a rehashing of what happened in combat.
I’m sure I’ll return to it if some similar angle appears
to me where something new can come of it.
RB: Were there many Korean War novels?
TOB: No, I’ve only read one. I’m
not a historian or political scientist. I’m interested in human
lives. All my books are—in some way or another—about the
impact of big global things on individual human beings, what it
does to people. Not the demography of it all or the sociology, that’s
for another province of writing. Mine is storytelling and I try
to find stories that I care about. The things I care about have
to do with people making choices and decisions in the context of
what’s right and wrong in the world, the political environment
around the characters. But ultimately, especially in this book I
almost write against that grain and say what mattered to these people
were not just Vietnam and the ‘60s. What mattered to these
people finally is what mattered to everybody—love. The trials
of marriage and divorce and all these characters seeking love in
one way or another and having a tough time finding it in every case.
RB: Is Vietnam in your books taken too literally?
TOB: Depends on the reader. My books are
taught in schools—high schools and colleges—there’s
a tendency to do what you just said, over politicize the books and
use them almost as history lessons. It’s a bit like using The
Sun Also Rises as a history lesson about the Lost Generation.
It would be true in a way but it would undermine the artistry of
the book. It’s about Jake and Bret and their need for love.
RB: It’s a story.
TOB: Yeah, it’s a story. And it set
then and you can talk about it in those terms. That’s only
one way of talking about it if I close my I see Jake and Bret at
the end of the book sitting in a cab, The Lost Generation is a backdrop
for it and it’s all related—but it’s about Jake and
Bret. (both laugh)
RB: Did I hear you correctly—you said
most of the characters at the end of July, July are looking
at their lives hopefully?
TOB: Oh yeah. Billy and Paulette might get
married. Spook and Marv on a plane together. They are fantasizing
together. Sure they go down but they are together. Jan and Amy walk
out, looking for a man. They haven’t given up, despite all
the bitterness, and through the whole book, in fact, looking around
the corner for some possibility of happiness. Think of Marla and
David—sure they’ve been divorced but for the first time
in their lives they say, “Tell me about the river. Let’s
talk and sit on these chapel steps.” And…there’s
not a character in the book that doesn’t leave it—there’s
no glorious sunset happy ending that you’re going to find in
a Danielle Steele but by God, they make progress. Even Ellie when
she goes into the shower and she’s told her husband about the
affair and the drowning and a hopeful breeze go through her thoughts
and maybe it’ll all be forgiven and the weight of confession
or that secrecy, rather, is gone. “Maybe he’ll forgive
me and come back.” That’s why I said marginally. I mean
there’s…nothing huge in terms of Happy birthday and Merry
Christmas and the world’s a bright place but there’s a
marginal improvement in these lives.
RB: That reminds me of the opening scene
of the film Milagro Bean Fields War where the aged Mexican
peasant gets up and thanks God for one more day. (laughs)
TOB: Yeah! That’s kind of how it is
for these people. Tomorrow might be just a little better. And I
think their characters are plucky. You know, they don’t quit.
And that seems to me how the world more or less is. Otherwise, we’d
all be in Jonestown, drinking Kool-Aid, I mean we do have to have
some …idea of a fantasy about a better tomorrow—even if
it’s a little better.
RB: One does have a sense of how many people
do get to a certain point in their life and don’t recognize
the deep disappointment that they have.
TOB: Sure. I think you’re right. Basically
it’s a bunch of love stories of various sorts. It’s a
book of love stories. I’ve never talked about it that way before
but it’s really what it is. It’s hard. It’s not romance
but about things people will do for love.
| The
things I care about have to do with people making choices
and decisions in the context of what’s right and wrong
in the world, the political environment around the characters. |
RB: In Gail Caldwell’s review in the
Boston Globe, she took you to task for this dialog about
Karen’s death. Early in the book they’re talking about
her death and someone says “That’s such a Karen thing
to do.” And Caldwell seems to think that’s not the way
women would talk.
TOB: I didn’t read it.
RB: What’s a womanly way to talk? Does
a woman get to say that’s not a womanly way to talk?
TOB: Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
Lots of great reviews have come from women and they think the characters
are great. Not all women talk the same nor do all men. How did she
say women are supposed to talk?
RB: She didn’t. Do you read reviews?
TOB: No. I don’t read them. I mean I
hear about them. I know my own book and I know it’s a beautiful,
beautiful book and so I really don’t—I mean I hope people
like it but I’m not going to change anything. I don’t
know many writers who really read them…You can’t really
learn anything positive. You just get a general impression if people
like it or they don’t. It’s a beautiful book. You have
to reflect back—Cacciato, Things They Carried, In the Lake
of the Woods, they’re never unanimous. And in five years,
the book will make it or not and succeed or not and it’s not
up to the contemporary reception—it’s just never is for
any book. There will be five or ten years and then history will
take charge after that and…books will surface or die over time.
It depends more on the passage of time, history and word of mouth.
RB: I recently I watched One Flew Over
The Cuckoo’s Nest and I started thinking about Ken Kesey
and the books I was reading in 1969 and 1970 and 1971 and there’s
not a book that I’m really interested in re-reading or that
changed my life in the way I expect some books to do.
TOB: Yeah. Certain books do it for certain
people. People for whom Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t change
their lives …they read it in that facile, surfacy kind of way.
For others, you know, it’s a crucial book. It goes for Catcher
in the Rye or lots of books. Some books, people are totally
dead to it—they don’t have the temperament. I remember
reading Catch-22 and at the time, it meant nothing to me.
A couple of years back I read it again and it meant the world. I
mean, time of life and…I think I read it first before Vietnam
but I know it was just a funny book at the time and then later it
meant a lot more. That’s the part where the reader brings stuff
to the book and the book has to deliver the goods in return.
RB: I have a sense—reconfirmed recently—that
you’re one of those writers’ writers (whatever that means)
and it was reconfirmed because I have a young friend who’s
out at a writing program in Montana and in his classes he says,
“My god, whenever we mention Alice Munro or Tim O'Brien, the
room gets hushed as if it’s a religious ceremony or something
like that.” Do you have a sense of yourself as being revered
by your peers?
TOB: I know my books are read, but I’m
the guy who sits in his underwear in front of the computer all day.
People forget that. That’s how I spend my days for four years
in a row. I’m just sitting here in my underwear trying to write
a book. So you’re not aware of those things. You’re kind
of aware of them when you’re on a book tour and many people
come out but otherwise you just live your life.
RB: You’re in contact with a lot of
other writers, aren’t you?
TOB: No.
 RB:
Were you teaching before you went to Southwest Texas?
TOB: No.
RB: This is your first real solid teaching
job?
TOB: Well years ago I did it very briefly
at Emerson—30 years ago whenever Cacciato came out.
Aside from that, this is the first time I’ve ever done it and
even now I’m not teaching much. I teach for a semester then
I have a year and a half off and then I do it for another semester
so it’s not a lot. It’s embarrassing.
RB: Good deal! This is a kind of a change
for a guy who grew up in Minnesota and spent his time in Cambridge
and now you’re in San Marcos, Texas. You’re living in
Austin, but San Marcos is very close isn’t it?
TOB: Oh yeah it’s like 10 minutes away
from where I live. It’s a change but I arrived here in Boston
and I realized why I had left…It’s so cold! I got off
the plane and it was snowing.
RB: Wait a minute, you grew up in Minnesota!
TOB: I know! That’s what I mean. I’m
getting old can’t take it anymore. Couldn’t take it then
either…I didn’t like it then…
RB: One of my favorite lines in a recent
movie [Spy Game]. Robert Redford gives some advice to his
protege, he says, “The point is to save up enough money so
you can go die somewhere warm.”
TOB: (laugh) That’s a good line! There’s
a lot of truth in that. That’s what 401k’s are for.
RB: Judging from what you said it doesn’t
matter whether you’re in Texas or Minnesota or you’d still
be in front of your computer in your underwear writing…
TOB: Yeah…but it’s just nice after
you’re done writing to be able to go outside and not freeze
in October. There’s something about the light that’s mood
enhancing. You feel better when it’s not gray and dismal all
the time. I’m not urging everybody to move to Texas, it does
have its drawbacks. Politics of the state stink. The polyester crew
is out in force but there’s a lot of bad stuff here too. Austin
is a kind of oasis—great music and a lot great writers live
there. I don’t know ‘em but they live there. Movies get
made there. There’s plenty to do. Dagoberto Gilb teaches at
the school I’m at. He’s a pretty good writer and he’s
a great guy, so I can hang with him when I get bored. So, it’s
a good place to live.
| I’m
the guy who sits in his underwear in front of the computer
all day. People forget that. That’s how I spend my days
for four years in a row. |
RB: Do you do a lot of reading?
TOB: Oh yeah.
RB: And how do you decide what you are going
to read?
TOB: There are two main things. One route
is blurbs. I am sent a lot of books. I’ll read until I don’t
like it or finish if I do. Then I have a lot of debts to pay back.
People helped me and I want to try to help others especially if
I like the work. I know how hard it is especially for first novelists
and novels in general are hard. Fiction’s hard. If it’s
serious fiction, it’s just hard to publish it, hard to sell
it, hard to place it. Just always hard. So whatever I can do to
help it feels like I am paying back. So I do a lot of that. I have
authors that I have learned over the years I know I’m going
to—if not love the book—at least I am going to really
appreciate it. There’s a list of writers that I really like
I always read those people when they have new books come out. I
read all the time. I don’t just read fiction I read other stuff
too.
RB: Do you watch television?
TOB: Not much. I watch baseball. Not much
to watch. I look now and then. There are 390,000 channels and I
look and there is nothing to watch. Dismal. So I really end up watching
baseball.
RB: Movies?
TOB: A little. Not much. I should do it more.
I just don’t like going out. I rent them now and then. My wife
teaches acting so I go to the theater with her sometimes. Live theater.
Now and then if there’s a movie she says I’ll love then
we’ll rent it.
RB: I’m dancing around asking the pretentious
question of what informs your work?
TOB: There’s no real answer to that
question. Everything. It’s not just stuff you’ve read.
It’s life in all its perverse variety. Dialogue comes at me
and I just copy it and steal it from the world. Writers are noticers.
Maybe not taking notes but I hear a bit of dialogue—I heard
some people in a bar the other night in New York, sitting behind
me. A guy and a girl and I guess they had gone out at some point.
The guy says to her, ”Why didn’t we ever make it together?”
(TOB snickers) She said, “You were suicidal and I was doing
porno. That’s why.” (RB & TOB both laugh). I thought,
“I’m going to use that line.” What a weird line and
you notice that stuff. I laughed but also in my writer’s mind
obviously I remember it and 2 days later I don’t know where
it will come in but little images will stick. Influences are not
all literary. It’s just the struggles of life itself where
things that matter to you make good stories.
RB: Do you pay attention to the ebbs and
flows in the book publishing world? Do you note the awards?
TOB: I know nothing about it. I never have.
Even when I lived in Cambridge. I didn’t subscribe to the NY
Times. I read the sport section of the Globe and the
front page. It doesn’t interest me much. I don’t know
why it should. It’s got little to do with what’s inside
books, with the story.
RB: Well, it’s another setting where
people act out their stories.
TOB: But when you do it for a living it doesn’t
interest many of us. It has to do with commerce. I’m not down
on it. I’m not trying to say I’m above it. I’m just
not interested in it. I never have been.
 RB:
When you read the sports page to read about the managerial job competitions
and such things?
TOB: Yeah, I follow all the little human
ins and outs. That’s what interests me about it. I’m interested
in the psychology of competition. Always have been.
RB: Has there been a great baseball book?
TOB: I don’t know if I know. I‘ve
read some. I wouldn’t call them great. I read The Natural.
RB: Hey Rosie! [Rosie enters the room and
tangles herself up in the microphone cord.] Do you like dogs?
TOB: Yeah. I’ve had three in my life.
Mugs was a three-legged dog, eight years old and got caught in some
hunter’s trap and came back with his left hind leg dangling.
Had it amputated. That dog would chase anything that moved. It was
fast even with three legs. A great dog. He didn’t slow down
a step. Maybe a little faster, he didn’t have the extra weight.
RB: Anyway, we were talking about baseball
books and The Natural. I don’t remember that it was
much about baseball.
TOB: That’s kind of what made it good.
It wasn’t all baseball.
RB: I liked the Mark Harris book, Bang
the Drum Slowly.
TOB: I did too. I didn’t like the movie
much. I don’t know what it was about the movie I didn’t
like. I don’t even remember now.
RB: You spent four years writing July,
July?
TOB: They are all the same. 4 to 5 years.
RB: How do you know when it’s finished?
TOB: It’s like music. You hear the end
and it sounds right to me. Like the end of song sounds right to
me. You hear the harmony and the closure and it sounds like it is
finished, the way a song does. There’s no real answer to it.
RB: Intuitive?
TOB: Not intuitive. It’s like you are
doing a painting and you see that it is finished and there is nothing
more that you can add. You don’t want to take away. So it looks
and feels finished.
RB: When you get to that point is there much
more to do?
TOB: I’m an endless tweaker. Every book
I’ve ever written I’ve tweaked all the way through the
paperback edition. If you can improve a book, even a little bit,
there is no reason not to.
| And
that seems to me how the world more or less is. Otherwise,
we’d all be in Jonestown, drinking Kool-Aid, I mean we
do have to have some… idea of a fantasy about a better
tomorrow—even if it’s a little better.
|
RB: Many writers tell me they don’t
reread their published work.
TOB: I don’t really either. But I have
to give readings. So when I notice something, I go, “Oh gosh,
I can make that a little better, I think.” And I’ll do
it. I find things over the course of having to go out and give talks.
I notice a word here and phrase there a paragraph there and I just
adjust things and no one every seems much to notice. Well, sometimes
they have.
RB: Is there a book that you have been dying
to write that you haven’t written?
TOB: Yeah, I’m not sure how to approach
it though. So it’s hard to talk about it. It will probably
will be my next book. But I’m not sure how to get at it really.
Something that happened in my own life.
RB: Some kind of looming presence on the
periphery?
TOB: Yeah, a scary thing happened to me and
I don’t want to address it directly but I am still kind of
frightened by it. So I have to find a back door where nobody will
recognize themselves. The actual event is so compelling that it’s
going to be hard to leave behind the reality because it’s so
compelling. It’s a real story and the details are so compelling.
So you find yourself trying to find analogues for something but
they are not sufficient to the real thing, the potency of what happened,
that’s the story. So I’m fishing around trying to find
a way to get into the material. I haven’t found a way to do
it yet. I have been thinking a lot about it. Daydreaming about the
story I could find to get at that story. I wish I could tell the
real story but I can’t.
RB: How long have you been thinking about
it?
TOB: Ever since it happened. A long time.
RB: How do you try to “get at it?”
You sit and try to write it down or does it only take place in your
head?
TOB: Both. You have to think of a general
story line that is compelling. Something like Huck on a raft. Something
that will flow. If you chase a whale then you’re going to chase
a whale. It’s got to be a simple way of entering a book. Simple
for me, and yet compelling and that way has to approximate, more
or less, what I went through in this experience. So it’s doubly
hard. You have to think of something interesting and simple and
you want that thing to get at what happened. Ordinarily, I'll begin
a book just from the story angle or from the real angle. This one
is more difficult because it’s so terrifying. So I have to
find a story that will carry that freight for me, somehow. I will.
I already have some ideas that in theory seem okay. They don’t
quite seem good enough yet.
RB: Are you able to start something and if
it’s not working put it down and come back to it?
TOB: Oh yeah. Absolutely. In July, July.
The first chapter I wrote was not the reunion chapter but the drowning.
It was written years ago and I knew I wanted to make it part of
something bigger because it was insufficient. I wanted consequences.
And I put it aside until I saw her appear in this book. Yeah, I’ve
done that a lot of times in my life. Some of them I never pick up
again.
RB: Well good. Any predictions on the World
Series?
TOB: I think Anaheim is going to win it.
I felt that way before. They are a tough team. I didn’t realize
how tough they are. I didn’t watch them much because they aren’t
shown in Texas except an occasional Game of the Week.
RB: What happened to your Red Sox hat?
TOB: I lost it on the tour so I bought this
as a backstop hat.
RB: What do you make of the fact that Sporting
News (this is a vote of the player’s peers) voted Barry
Zito AL pitcher of the year over Pedro Martinez?
TOB: There are a lot of good pitchers in
the AL. And he (Pedro) may not be liked, personally. He’s a
tough customer. I don’t know how much of it is personality
but he is one tough customer.
RB: Well, who knows? Thanks very much.
TOB: A pleasure.
Robert Birnbaum came to journalism, where
he has been a practitioner for the past two decades, from a series
of possibly (it's too soon to tell) educational vocational experiences
that are too numerous to mention. In the '80s and '90s, as publisher/creative
director of STUFF magazine in Boston, when he wasn't attending industrial
gatherings, he interviewed nearly 500 hundred writers — from
Martin Amis and Isabel Allende to Marianne Wiggins and Howard Zinn
— and read almost 1000 books. He is currently, among other
things, pondering if there is a place for him in a profession increasingly
infested with vulgarians who believe 'editorial content' is celebrating
restaurant and shop openings, endlessly lionizing the same small
group of celebrities and reiterating the press releases of the publicists
they have just had lunch with. He lives with his Labrador retriever
Rosie and helps parent his young son Cuba Maxwell.
Note:
Featured author in November 2000
E-mail: reddiaz@aol.com
Writing interests: Interviews, Photography
Author interviews: Dorothy
Allison, Nicholson
Baker, Julian
Barnes, Andrea
Barrett, Alex
Beam, Jill
Bialosky, Amy
Bloom, Amy
Bloom 2002, Alain
de Botton, Arthur Bradford,
Ethan Canin, Stephen
Carter, Sandra
Cisneros, Michael
Connelly, Richard
Conniff, Frank
Conroy, Mark
Costello, Elizabeth
Cox, Jim Crace, Nicholas
Dawidoff, Andre
Dubus III, John
Dufresne, Tony Earley,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Gretel
Ehrlich, James
Ellroy, Richard
Ford, Alan
Furst, Alan
Furst 2002, Anthony
Giardina, James
Gleick, Adam
Gopnik, Allan Gurganus,
Barbara
Haber, David
Hadju, Ethan
Hawke, Christopher Hitchens
#1, Christopher
Hitchens #2, Gabe
Hudson, Elizabeth
Inness-Brown, Ben Katchor,
Nora
Okja Keller, Chip Kidd,
Anthony
Lane, Annette
Lemieux, Alan
Lightman, Paul Lussier,
Ruben Martinez, Daniel
Mason, Thomas
McGuane, Thisbe Nissen,
Tim
O'Brien, Susan
Orlean, Ann
Packer, Arthur
Phillips, Samantha
Power, Christopher
Rice, David
Rieff, Hazel
Rowley, Richard Russo #1,
Richard
Russo #2, John
Sedgwick, David
Shields, Ilan
Stavans, Darin
Strauss, Manil
Suri, Nick
Tosches, Brady
Udall, Sarah
Vowell, Brad
Watson, W.D. Wetherell,
Mark
Winegardner, Howard
Zinn
Author portraits: John
Sayles, Howard
Zinn, Robert
Stone, Ana
Castillo, John
Waters, Allen
Ginsberg, Carl
Hiaasen, Carlos
Fuentes, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Eduardo
Galeano, Isabel
Allende, Junot
Diaz, Joan
Didion, James
Ellroy, John
Edgar Wideman, Martin
Amis, Michael
Ondaatje, Richard
Price, Rigoberta
Menchu, Louis
de Bernieres, Studs
Terkel
Photography: "I
am the Son of my Son"
Journal: "A
Reader's Progress"
Link: Review
of Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion at Hyde Park Review
of Books |
