This interview with Gary Amdahl
was first published in January 2006. To find out more about the author, you
must visit our Gary
Amdahl page.
What
was it that first got you into writing and when did you start writing?
Gary
Amdahl: I read a lot as a child; the appearance
of the local public library's "Bookmobile" on our street was more
thrilling to me than the ice-cream truck.
And I wrote bits and pieces of things--"stories" and
"plays" and "novels" (I put quote marks around the words
because they had almost no formal structure, were just gushes of fantasy and
prepubescent parody) but it wasn't until I was out of high school--and had
abandoned a dream to race motorcycles for a living--that I took the ideas of
"writing as art," "writing as spiritually and socially
beneficial" and "writing as a living" seriously. I think it was Harlan Ellison who
triggered the change; from whom I leapt to Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. But it was Sam Shepard who inspired my
first successful piece of writing.
Where were you born and raised?
Gary Amdahl:
Born in
the southwest corner of Minnesota, near the Iowa and South Dakota borders, in a
farmhouse that had no running water.
Spent childhood and adolescence in the suburbs of Minneapolis.
Which writers have influenced
you the most?
Gary Amdahl:
In
addition to the writers I mentioned above, Tom McGuane, Barry Hannah, Jim
Harrison, Don Delillo; Patrick White and Halldor Laxness, Jose Saramago and
Gunter Grass; Samuel Beckett and August Strindberg; Chekhov and Pinter; Cesare
Pavese; Cheever and J.F. Powers; Proust and Henry James...the list is endless,
I'd best stop here.
Where
do you stand on the nature v. nurture debate? Were you born a writer, or were
there factors in your environment that enabled you to become a writer?
Gary
Amdahl: I think it's pretty clear that both
nature and nurture are consequential in the life of an artist. What's most important is the accretion
of small decisions and reactions that form psychological thickets from which it
becomes increasingly difficult (and outright unattractive) for the writer to
emerge and NOT write. I mean there
are all sorts of reasons for a writer to not write; the writer who continues to
struggle, because he was born that way and because he lived a certain sort of
life, is the one who accepts, intuitively, a frustrating but apparently
incontrovertible inability to not write.
There
are a lot of courses teaching creative writing nowadays, but do you think that
good writing can be taught?
Gary
Amdahl: No.
But it can be a fruitful or amusing way to spend time with people. (It can also be a sterilizing waste of
time.)
Have
you entered writing competitions? If so, have you won any prizes?
Gary
Amdahl: I won a Jerome Fellowship (twice) for
playwriting at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis (August Wilson was a
fellow at the same time), and a Pushcart Prize in 2002 for an essay called
"Narrow Road to the Deep North."
What kind of things do you
write?
Gary Amdahl:
Prose
fiction, as serious and complex and exploratory as I can make it; an occasional
essay, and drama.
What, for you, is the best
piece of prose that you have ever written?
Gary Amdahl:
They
are like living things to me. I
cannot, will not, choose.
What are you working on now?
Gary Amdahl:
A
novel, longish (about 500pp), set in San Francisco and Minnesota in 1916 and
17, featuring a young female anarchist, a motorcycle racer, and a rich SF
aristocrat.
What is your writing day like?
Gary Amdahl:
A
whining flyblown hell of composition and decomposition, euphoria and confusion,
weariness and disgust and blinding flashes of power. Sometimes I take it all to a cafe where I will have to
behave like an ordinary person, and can be soothed by the sounds of other human
beings being ordinary; sometimes I lie in bed and toss and turn like I've got a
fever. My computer is in a room I
built in my garage, so I often sit out there and listen to music while trying
to juggle a hundred dumbbells.
Where would you like to be in
10 years time?
Gary Amdahl:
Living in
London and an island in Lake Superior on earnings from novels. In 20 years I would like to be in
Stockholm making an important speech.
What’s the most exciting thing
about writing for you?
Gary Amdahl:
Getting
lost in the fog but running as fast as I can, swiftly and surely, as if I knew,
as in dreams, where the end of the road was.
What’s the most frustrating
thing about writing for you?
Gary Amdahl:
Suspecting
that truth and beauty are almost within reach, but failing them, and not
understanding the nature of the failure, or rather: fearing that I have been lazy, blunted my edge, wasted my
talent on trivial pleasures...
What’s
the best piece of feedback that you’ve had from your audience?
Gary
Amdahl: My wife telling me not to give up on my
anarchist novel. That I MUST not.
Making a copy of it and sending it to her friend for safekeeping,
fearing I would burn it.
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