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Tiffany’s older brother was more interesting than either Tiffany or her ruffled bedroom. When she introduced us, I felt burnished by his attention, the kind I’d already become an expert at detecting. I could feel a man’s gaze when it sharpened with interest, like the birds who flitted at the feeder in our yard could feel mine. Desire filled my bones with air. Tiffany noticed, too. Later, when she suggested we play truth or dare, she dared me to ask him to join us. Then she dared us to go in the closet. There he kissed me, probing the inside of my mouth with his tongue. As the dresses shifted on their hangers in the dark, I recognized the mix of fear and excitement that fizzed in me. The familiar sense, when he touched me, that I no longer existed. Not girl but vapor. My body a thing in his hands, my mind a balloon bumping the closet ceiling.
I was very low-key and quiet, but I was developing a strength inside. At parties, I wasn’t one of those people who could work a room. I’d be over in the corner by the bookshelf, but I was tuning my ears, my literary ears. I would spend a lot of time working on my writing, and that gave me a quiet confidence. I wasn’t distracted. I am not easily distracted. Eyes on the prize.
INTERVIEWER
What was the prize?
PARKS
Ha! Oh, that’s a good question. I remember one day I was sitting at my desk in my college dorm doing an assignment. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and my desk faced a window and the light was coming in just so, and I was typing, writing a story, trying to figure out what it was about, and all of a sudden it was as if the room was populated by people and all I had to do was listen up and write down what they were saying. I felt like I was in the river, that big river, and I’m in the flow of the stream. After that, the act of writing, the prize, became the chasing of that experience.
So the prize is just the joy of writing, hearing the sounds, hearing those voices. Just being in that river, with the Spirit, having your veins hit the Vein. When these veins in my arm intersect with the Great River and the divining rod goes bzzz. You can feel that thrum. And to come back to it again and again and know that it’s always there and if you work for it, it’s there. The work is the prize.
INTERVIEWER
Do you try to push through a first draft as quick as possible, or do you take your time with it?
PARKS
These days, to stay organized, I outline. Images or actions, actions or dialogue, it’s all the same. In the first draft, it doesn’t need to be written right, it just needs to be written down. I’m listening, I’m watching. And I’m saying, okay, sure, yes to everything, and then at a certain point there’s writing. In the first draft I remind myself, Anything goes. Everything grows. I’m in the garden. Later, in the second draft, I take out my “sword of discrimination” and I put on my favorite music and I cut everything that doesn’t fit.
INTERVIEWER
Did your father ever come around to showing interest?
GURGANUS
When I was twelve, I started selling paintings and he began offering advice. “Double, no, triple your asking price. You’ll sell twice as much in the end. There’s an art to this, I tell you.” Dad feared I would starve to death as a grown-up artist. To prevent that he tried disinheriting me of any stray respect. But this only made me trust art more, him less. Everything he withheld I found quadrupled in a sixty-nine-cent bottle of india ink. Pen and ink became my superpower. I didn’t think of aesthetics as aesthetics but as tactics for survival. When my first book sold, Dad told me he’d assured his golfing partners, “I never doubted it.” I thanked him, knowing better.
GURGANUS
Remember, it was the Summer of Love, and here I was, nineteen, sexually able but with my head shaved and at sea for weeks on end. The best of what I’d done so far and might do just ahead could only be described one blank page at a time. Drawing and writing soon started feeling interchangeable. I could now draw mug shots of my characters, I could write my still lifes. In sketchbooks, I paid studious homage to minds and skills far, far beyond my own. It felt like a religious practice but one freed of tithing to any single God.
INTERVIEWER
You needed to make things.
GURGANUS
I made something every day. Early on, I sensed that—in every art—the ultimate shared subject is human consciousness itself. The more comic-tragic notes you can wrest onto a single active page, the better. I would later suggest to my students that they put something funny on every page and something beautiful on every other. My naive obsession was to shape something so true, energized, and hilarious, it would necessarily outlive me. The goal was not becoming known, it was becoming useful.
INTERVIEWER
You were conscious of a literary immortality even then?
<3
GURGANUS
Plot confuses beginning storytellers by sounding so extruded, mechanical. Simply put, plot is what your characters most want and whatever they will do to get it. I am always attracted to characters having a hard time. Fiction can be summarized as “and then something went terribly, terribly wrong.” The more specific the hero’s trouble, the more unconventional his wish or obsession, the greater chance the story has of saying something new and helpful. Empathy is a writer’s pilot’s license. Without it, you are grounded. You aren’t creating characters. You’re judging them.
The twentieth century said, Nothing and no one is fully accountable anymore. Nothing can be trusted. But the outrageous fiction I love often passes as reliable truth-telling. Huck Finn, Bartleby, Lolita, Gatsby, Beloved. The very word narration derives from the Latin gnarus, meaning “to recognize or know.” So a narration is a knowing, a narrator a knower. A know-nothing narrator has no value to me. Confused narrators? They’re both endearing and essential. But someone setting out to mislead, he’s not my tour guide of choice. You shouldn’t travel with people you don’t truly love or whose credit cards bounce. Ergo, if I’m going to invest my life in inventing stories, I want them to have lasting value and as much meaning as I can possibly impart. They should be difficult but reliably so. And it’s no embarrassment if they’re about something.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s talk for a second about that sexual candor in your work. How have you arrived at such intrepid portrayals?
GURGANUS
Long research, sleepless nights. I want to offer my characters some sexual risk taking, a reflection of the way I once lived my life. I’ve learned so much about others, in and out of bed. Tennessee Williams swore he’d never created a character to whom he was not sexually attracted. I always urged my students to let their characters have erotic existences on the page. We put the poor things through such tortures, why not let them score a few Fridays and Saturdays per annum? What a protagonist eats and wears and how he decorates his rooms and treats his parents—yeah, all that’s important. But what she wants sexually and what she’ll risk to get some of it on a given weekend—that’s a fast, amazing way to show her true hidden identity. I’m pleased to see young novelists now risking far more sexual honesty. What subject is more mystical and entertaining? Most sexual exchanges are far more awkward, and therefore more endearing, than what you find online. Ordinary folks’ groping attempts I usually find far sexier than a couple of tanned models going at it in Malibu. A writer, a real writer, must be fully committed to those people somehow created on his pages. He cannot stand apart from them, cannot cartoon or disdain them. They are not quite villains, they are hardly saints. They are all citizens different from each other, each with a peculiar mission, varying sets of merits and flaws. They are partial talents striving toward something, but what? For sure, it’s a fascinating exercise, creating others and then trying to be responsible both for and to them.
I like to be up by six thirty. I guess I do this as proof to my father—dead for decades—that writing is really manly labor. He himself was an early riser. Like him I prefer those hours when dew is everywhere and birds are first auditioning their day’s likely song. I’m sure that if God created Eden he did it all with a single dawn. Early-hour innocence promotes ambitious, unrealistic hopes. You’ve just been dreaming. You have strong coffee and a piece of fruit. You reread what you got down yesterday. It’s important to leave yourself a handhold on the cliff you are inventing. Most days involve rewriting, boiling out the cornstarch, essentializing a gesture, paring down dialogue that’s grown too wordy or explicit. On schedule you go through familiar rituals that’ve at least produced satisfying results. Most days such work can go on till two or three. Then you get to do your banking or shopping or gardening. You again become a citizen of the sloppy capitalist realm after shoring up the secret world you’ve been home inventing in black and white.
When writing first drafts, the only music audible should be your own language and pulse—the metronomic drumbeat of your personal digestive percussion section. But, later, when I’m typing in handwritten changes, what sometimes speeds my fingers and cheers me is listening to solo keyboard work—played by Oscar Peterson or Glenn Gould, Monk, or Gershwin’s piano rolls. Reading the work aloud is another trade secret that can’t be stressed too often. Every sentence must make logical sense while offering its appropriate ghost song. Even someone reading your work silently should be always registering its music. I prefer chamber works. I love four instruments in conversation, arguing before briefly agreeing. That’s closer to the spirit of my work. Bach, Mozart, and Brahms are some of my friends I daily hear and learn the most from.