RQ: You started in daily newspapers. Up, down or indifferent on that experience as a writer? Are you worried that with newspapers in retreat, young writers won't have that training ground available anymore?
JG: I could never be indifferent about my experience in daily newspapers. I worked at a variety of them — The News & Observer in Raleigh and the Santa Barbara News-Press, primarily, but also the Los Angeles Times and the Modesto Bee, and probably a few others — and the people I encountered at those newspapers had a tendency to be whip-smart, witty, tireless, inspiring, heroic, and utterly, despondently miserable. Daily newspaper offices seem to be houses of woe and despair, which is understandable, I guess, because even back in the 1980s, when I first became a summer intern, there was a sense of industry-wide doom on the horizon.
To be honest, that’s probably one of the factors that propelled me from newspapers into magazines — I wanted to go where I figured there was a bit more vitality and long-term viability. I didn’t want to be depressed all the time. (Plus I transparently wanted to do exactly what Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson had done, and they’d made the leap from newspapers to magazines, too. So I tried to copy them.)
But I learned so much at those newspapers. When I was 21 I thought I knew how to report a story, but I didn’t. I had no idea. I needed editors and other reporters to teach me. I’d mostly studied fiction and poetry in college, so I was relatively clueless when it came to a city council meeting. If there’s anything worthy in my magazine work now, I suspect its roots can be traced back to the daily lessons I absorbed in Raleigh and Santa Barbara — how to interview people, how to do enough research in advance, how to be accurate, how to be fair, how to ask the tough question, how to keep a story moving along in such a way that the reader doesn’t get bored. Do I worry that young writers aren’t getting the same training anymore? I suppose I don’t really “worry” about it, per se, because there’s nothing I can do to prevent it (right now I’m hearing Yoda’s voice in the back of my head), and because there’s something really vain and solipsistic about presuming that every writer should follow the same route that I followed. Still, yeah, I do believe that if you don’t learn how to report, you’re shortchanging your storytelling. Whether you’re pursuing nonfiction or fiction or even screenwriting, for that matter, you increase the value of your craftsmanship exponentially if you force yourself to go outside and do the legwork. How does a band fine-tune its sound? Sit through a rehearsal and find out. What does a coal miner eat for lunch? Go down into the mines and find out. Why are the neighbors angry about those new spotlights being put up around the high school football field? Go stand in their backyards and find out. Find out by going there. Don’t just start spouting an opinion before you know what you’re talking about.
Blogging is injecting a massive jolt of energy into American journalism, and we should all welcome that. I think it’s terrific because it’s giving news coverage a fresh sense of immediacy and passion, just as the New Journalism movement did in the ‘60s and ‘70s. When you read the best blogs, you’re hearing voices. On the other hand there are a lot of writers blogging about people they’ve never met. I’m old-fashioned in this regard; I think it can be useful to meet the people you’re actually writing about; it makes the act of “loving” or “hating” them a great deal more complicated. A lot of times these people in the news are very different than you’d expect. Sometimes it’s more difficult to work up a froth of furious indignation about someone when you sit down with that person and make an effort to recognize his or her humanity.
So my experience in daily newspapers was a positive because it taught me this. It taught me that if I didn’t hop into my car and go visit the people and places I was covering, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Of course I hope we don’t lose that, because personally I prefer reading the work of writers who know what they’re talking about.
RQ: Last year you wrote a piece for Spin encouraging rockers to quit while they're ahead. No more albums for the Strokes, for example. Should novelists follow the same advice? Do you see anyone getting increasingly brilliant with the years the way Philip Roth managed for so long?
JG: I was being willfully provocative with that essay in Spin. I do believe that there are certain bands that capture a kind of planets-aligning perfection on one album, and there’s no real need to keep going. I’m thinking of the eponymous debut by The La’s, or In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, or The Trinity Session by the Cowboy Junkies. I just don’t think every artist in the world needs to saddle us with a “body of work.” That’s an overrated concept. Our landfills and recycling centers are plentiful enough as it is.
It can be tiresome to slog through a body of work if the artist in question was really only capable of a couple of flukey, firefly-in-a-Mason-jar moments of inspiration.
That said — duh — making mistakes is part of the progression forward. Philip Roth is one of my heroes and I’ve read nearly every book he’s written. His prose is so addictive. But the man has given us some stinkers, okay? Without purging himself of the stinkers, without somehow getting them out of his creative system, maybe Roth wouldn’t have progressed to the place where he was capable of writing Portnoy’s Complaint and The Counterlife and American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater. I’m glad his evolution didn’t stop with Letting Go.
Other than Philip Roth, though, almost everybody’s writing too much. Blogs, chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook status updates —there’s a wordy data glut going on, and it’s made me more reverent than ever of strategic silence. I’m fond of the J.D. Salinger approach — just evaporating from public view. Is it wrong that Salinger hasn’t left us with 30 or 40 books? I’m not so sure. I can return to Nine Stories over and over and it always entertains, enlightens, and nourishes me in new ways. Isn’t that enough?
RQ: Does poetry make you nervous? (I just want to see if I'm alone or not.)
JG: Yes, it often does. What’s wrong with being nervous?
I read a lot of poetry, it’s true. I even spend a lot of money on it, recession be damned. When I say “a lot” I mean that I probably buy close to 100 new books of poetry in the span of a year. No joke. I guess that’s rare. I suspect it might even qualify as a psychological malady.
When it comes to poetry I’m omnivorous. I don’t stick to any one aesthetic trough. I like what’s mainstream and experimental, contemporary and vintage, comforting and destabilizing. Right here at the foot of my desk, in fact, I see Robin Robertson’s Swithering, Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler, Olena Kalytiak Davis’ And Her Soul Out of Nothing, Thom Gunn’s The Man With the Night Sweats, Jane Hirshfield’s The October Palace, Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel, Terrance Hayes’ Wind in a Box, Jim Carroll’s Living at the Movies, Sam Shepard’s Hawk Moon, Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems, James Tate’s Selected Poems, James Schuyler’s Selected Poems, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Selected Poems, Paul Verlaine’s Selected Poems, Rabindranath Tagore’s Selected Poems, Sarah Manguso’s Siste Viator, Erin Belieu’s Infanta, Catherine Pierce’s Famous Last Words, John Ashbery’s A Worldly Country, Ko Un’s What? 108 Zen Poems, Dean Young’s Skid, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Images, Juliette Torrez’s Madness and Retribution, Ashley Capps’ Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, Gary Snyder’s No Nature, Mary Oliver’s West Wind, Richard Hugo’s Making Certain It Goes On, Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me, and about 25 or 30 others.
And then there are certain books that mean so much to me that I haul them around in my shoulder bag as if they were liturgical texts — especially Kay Ryan’s Say Uncle and The Niagara River, Robert Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields, Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, and John Berryman’s The Dream Songs.
I don’t know why people resist poetry. Can you tell me?
I guess the language can seem knotty and off-putting when you first encounter it. What I tell my friends is that the more poetry you consume, the more your metabolism adjusts to it — and the more it eventually makes sense. Well, some of it never “makes sense,” but it still gets under your skin.
Another good thing about poetry is that a lot of poems are short. I’m not being facetious. I’ve got a full-time job and two little kids and I seem to exist, probably like you do, in a state of perpetual distraction, interruption, and noise. Plus I’m often brain-fryingly tired. So when it’s late at night or I’m on the commuter train and I’m just way too blurry to concentrate on the vastness of a novel, it can be rejuvenating to flip to a 42-line poem like Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” and spend half an hour with it.
RQ: What deep itch did writing "X" scratch for you?
JG: For about 15 years I have had a small patch of neurodermatitis in the middle of my right forearm, and I can assure you that I scratched it on a regular basis while I was trying to finish the book.
RQ: Your writing packs a lot of forward propulsion. Do you power through a first draft fast and then finesse it, but somehow retain that initial energy?
Come on, what's your secret?
JG: That’s a good question, because sometimes when I look at certain passages I wrote in X Saves the World I don’t know where they came from, either. I can’t remember writing them, and they seem to hurtle forward in a manner that brings to mind excessive caffeine consumption and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
I had a tough deadline. Maybe that’s part of it. I had to write fast. Also I wrote the book in the middle of the Bush presidency, when it felt as though we had a daily opportunity to be disgusted by one colossal wrongness after another — Hurricane Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo. Watching that stuff week after week seemed to put me into a kind of fugue state for a while, even when I wasn’t specifically writing about the news of the day — even when I was actually writing about Paris Hilton or American Idol. In fact, much of X Saves the World is supposed to be humor writing, but you can probably hear my teeth gnashing in between the riffs.
That said, my original drafts, the ones that I don’t show to anyone, tend to be pretty boring. I don’t “roar” through my opening paragraphs the way some writers do; I plod and trudge and drag my feet and chip away until I’ve got enough raw material to play with on the page. I like to have the foundation in place first — a very basic and un-flashy infrastructure — so that I can then go in with a blowtorch and a canister of purple spray paint and turn it into something completely different.
RQ: My dog and I play a literary game called 'Rewrite!' We throw book or movie titles at each other. The object is to pitch a rewrite to the ending that changes everything. Like, the other day he turned to me and barked, "'The Empire Strikes Back.'" I answered, "Instead of Darth Vader telling Luke, 'I am your father,' Vader intones, 'I am your AUNT.'" This means that in the prequels, Hayden Christensen will either have to do the role of Vader in drag, or be replaced by Scarlett Johansson. So, here's one for you ... 'Pretty Woman'! (this is probably the dumbest interview question you've ever had to deal with. I am sorry. So sorry.)
JG: [I’ve been staring at this question for a year now and I still can’t come up with an answer. It’s like a Zen koan. I’m paralyzed in the face of it. I keep trying to be funny but nothing seems to work. I just end up coming back to “Julia Roberts has a penis.” But that’s too predictable.]*
* This is my actual answer.