Due to space considerations, Florida Today was not able to include the entire Phil Deaver interview in the printed issue. Here is the full interview, with the full digressive answers in tact. :-) Reminder that that this interview was conducted to promote the great FIT Creative Writing Institute that kicks off Wednesday evening, June 5 and runs to June 9 on the Florida Tech campus in Melbourne. Plenty of space available and you could just show up and sign in!
An
Interview with Philip F. Deaver, Writer and Keynote Speaker at the Florida Tech
Writing Institute in June
What
inspires you?
My past, people I know and have
known, stories they’ve told me that stick in my mind, feelings I’ve had once I
think I have a handle on them. But most
of all what inspires me is writing itself, the act of it. For me, the motivation to write arrives separate
from what to write. Once I’m writing, what I am going to write
about, or who, arrives in about five minutes.
Favorite
author? Why?
Hard to name just one. I like Richard Ford and Ann Beattie and Alice
Munro and Geoff Dyer and Robert Stone, Andre Dubus II, Annie Dillard and Karen
Russell. My original inspirations were
Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain and Robert Benchley, followed in my college years
by John Updike, John Irving and John Cheever.
In poetry Stephen Dunn, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, and William
Matthews. All these writers have
distinctive voices that I know well. I
embrace their influence because, having read an awful lot of their work, I
think I understand them and their worlds, and as models they represent a high
bar for me. The poets expanded my sense
of what a poem can be about and the various vectors available. In all of these writers I appreciate how
humor and dead seriousness can be joined, blended, to create force and
impact. These writers open themselves up
on the page. They take risks, reach deep to tell their own truths. It could be said all successful writers do
that. No, not really.
Favorite
fictional character?
I like Yossarian and Billy
Pilgrim and Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, Molly Bloom, TS Garp. I’m leaving out
many. I like character-driven stories, that
turn out the way they do because of the unique combination of people in the
story. A different set of characters, a
different outcome. The Great Gatsby
comes to mind. Ann Beattie’s Love Always. Alice Munro’s story “Passion.”
How do
you cope with writer's block?
I deny the very existence of it. If we make up a malady like this and give it
a name, next thing you know Pfizer and Abbott Labs will concoct a test to show
it’s in our genes and a drug to make it chronic, and then we’re done. A few years ago I borrowed a cabin in the
North Carolina mountains. A friend of
mine came up to visit, and on the first day, we ran a road along a mountain
ridge. He only tried it once, and his
reason for not going on that run anymore was that the hills got him out of
breath. I told him that’s what hills are
for on a run, and that the more one does it, the better it gets. Writing also
is very hard. We do it anyway. Rather than not doing it and giving a name to
why we don’t.
You
edited Scoring from Second, so you
must be a fan of America's favorite sport. How do baseball and writing connect?
I am certainly a fan, though I’m
not sure it’s really the favorite sport of America anymore. I can only answer your question in personal
terms, how I as a writer connect with the game.
I played a lot of baseball growing up.
Many initiations into adult realities first made themselves known to me
in baseball. For instance, the
personality types I encountered among teenagers in baseball were similar and in
full bloom during the twelve years I spent in a consulting firm. The last organized baseball game I played in
was an over 50s league here Orlando. I’d
coached my own kids in baseball when they started, and this was the first time
they, as young men, got a chance to see me play an actual game among other
experienced players my age. I was
playing center field because I couldn’t seem to break into the infield (where I’d
played in the past). A fly ball was hit
to me, and I had to run in for it. It
wasn’t a problem, it was straight to me, just a little short so I had to run
in. At the moment the ball hit my glove,
another player, another fielder on my own team, shot by me going for the same
ball and knocked it out of my glove. I
was conscious of my kids watching their dad, from the fence over by first
base. When the inning was over, as I was
jogging past them to the dugout, I rolled my eyes at the idiot who’d knocked
the ball out of my glove. My oldest son
said, “Dad, you have to call for it.” This
was something I’d told them over and over when I was teaching them the
game. If there’s anybody out there who
can imagine the complex wave of feelings I had right then, that person will
also know how I can make stories and find inspiration from the game.
Do any of
the characters you've created keep coming back for more stories? Are there some
characters who are just too good to let go?
A very insightful question. Sometime a character appears in a story and
“owns” that story and that one alone.
Probably won’t be resurrected in subsequent stories. I have a story collection, Silent Retreats, from long ago, and in
recent years I’ve written a novel, Past
Tense (unpublished), that weaves most of the characters in those stories into
novel form. In that case, I took pleasure
in preserving and extending characters I’d created, pushing them on into the
next phases of life as I myself pass through the phases.
How do
you see social media affecting the business of writing?
The business of writing is
changing by the day, literally. I’m not
sure social media is why, unless you call the internet, Amazon, and the fact
that there are fewer people reading than writing issues connected to social
media. Some people will think these new changes
are “opportunities,” rather than “deterioration.” A baseball metaphor perhaps: What if everyone decided it was more fun to
play baseball than to watch it. It would
suddenly become a business to provide everyone with the opportunity. Everyone would either play a computer game
called baseball or they’d go to the ballpark on Sunday afternoon, and upon
arrival they’d be issued authentic Yankees and Cardinal or Red Sox uniforms and
equipment, fancy gloves, bats, and spikes, and be allowed to trot triumphantly
onto the field. Using digital video, a
baseball crowd would welcome them with digital applause. They could play anywhere they want, which
means there’d be many pitchers in the middle of the diamond, but no catchers so
we could have a digital catcher. Everyone
would want to be a star and get paid a lot.
There would be no more major league baseball, just like one of these
days there will be no more Chicago Tribune, Scribner’s or Norton.
If you
could describe yourself in terms of a fictional character, who would that be?
Regrettably, this is very
easy. I’m Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tyler,
played by William Hurt in the fine movie made from that novel. You can get the film on Netflix or the actual
book in your local library. :)
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