Gonzalo Barr

Akashic Books is a Brooklyn-based imprint that was founded in 1997 by musicians Johnny Temple, Mark Sullivan and brother Bobby Sullivan.  This November, Akashic is publishing Preston L. Allen’s All or Nothing, a novel about an out-of-control gambler and the havoc that his addiction causes to his life.

Publisher’s Weekly described the novel as –

Allen’s dark and insightful [book about] narrator P’s sobering descent into his gambling addiction. P, a Miami native, is a school bus driver and desperate gambler who spends his nights (and many of his days) in south Florida casinos. Both a surprisingly likable and an often despicable character, P is a perpetual loser with a $1,000-a-day habit who lies to his wife and scrounges in the seats of his bus looking for loose change the kids left behind. He takes the small amounts of cash that his destitute, dying mother offers him to support his obsession. P knows he’s sick, but he doesn’t want any help; he lusts for the next big score. Finally, his luck begins to change, transforming him from a broke degenerate into a legendary professional gambler in a signature black cowboy hat. The well-written novel takes the reader on a chaotic ride as P chases, finds and loses fast, easy money. Allen (Churchboysand Other Sinners) reveals how addiction annihilates its victims and shows that winning isn’t always so different from losing.

Preston L. Allen was born in Roatan Honduras in 1964.  His works include the short story collection Churchboys and Other Sinners (Carolina Wren Press 2003) and the novels Hoochie Mama, Bounce, and Come With Me, Sheba.  All or Nothing (Akashic Books 2007) is his latest novel.  He teaches English and Creative Writing at Miami-Dade College.

He will be reading this Thursday, November 1, with Dedra Johnson, author of Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow, also published by Akashic, at Books & Books.

I caught up with Preston and asked him the usual questions –

Barr:  When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?

Allen:  Actually, I’ve pretty much always been a writer, or a story teller at least.  In fourth grade, I wrote and drew comic books.  I attempted my first novel around seventh grade, but I had been making up stories to entertain my brothers with long before that.  We were latch key kids.  Five energetic boys.  Story telling and reading kept us free from injury.  In high school I got serious about it and wrote a few things that I still enjoy reading today–though I would not exactly call them publishable.

Barr:  Have you ever regretted your decision?

Allen:  Haha.  Never.  Writing is what I am.  I do regret, however, that I didn’t get serious about it earlier.  It was always something that I could do fairly well without really trying too hard–I guess because of all of my years of making up stories to tell my brothers and reading voraciously–so it never occurred to me back then that writing could actually be taught.  If I had gotten serious about it earlier, I would have fought harder to get into Padgett Powell’s undergraduate creative writing class when I was in college.  In fact, I didn’t take any undergraduate creative writing classes.  I think I missed out on a wonderful learning experience.

Barr:  You teach creative writing as well as practice it as a published author, does the teaching ever get in the way of the writing?

Allen:  For me, pretty much everything gets in the way of the writing.  I would rather be writing than doing almost anything else.  But teaching creative writing is fun–you actually get paid for mentoring, not teaching, a group of people who have the same passion as you.  The problem is when you meet students who are not motivated, students who are just in there because they need the English credit.  I can deal with all of the other types who could potentially make life unpleasant in there–the student who wants to write the great American novel, but hates to read; the student who does not believe in revising; the student who presumes him/herself more talented than you and scoffs at your advice;  the student who can’t bear to cut; the workshop bully who dominates all class discussion; the student who always starts a project but never finishes it; the student who only writes about sex; the student who hates poetry–I can deal with all of these types, as long as they are passionate about the craft and motivated.

Barr:  I’ve met the one who thinks he’s a writer but doesn’t write at all.  How do you write?  Is there a certain time that you write each day?  Do you write in longhand or on a PC?  Do you have to write in the same place or can you pretty much write anywhere?  This is one of those questions that can go on forever, illustrating, I guess, how many different ways there are of writing.

Allen:  This is my preference — I write mostly at night (from about 5:00 p.m. to maybe 6:00 p.m.–every night!).  I write on the computer.  On the other hand, I can write long hand, and have.  I write during the day, when I get a chance.  The key is to write every day.

Barr:  I can edit at night, but it’s very hard for me to write then.  Where do you get your ideas on what to write?  For example, where did you get the idea to write All or Nothing?

Allen:  My stories are character-driven.  I begin with a character, and then eventually, I find a story for him to be in.  Where did I get the idea for All or Nothing –haha.  That’s a good one, coming from you, Gonzalo.  I was trying to come up with a story for that workshop we used to have at your house, remember?  I had this gambler in my head.  I didn’t know what story he would be in, but his voice was strong when I uncorked him onto the page, he just spilled his guts and out came the novel.  I guess I sorta knew a lot about ga,bling.

Barr:  Write what you know, they say.  So what kind of research did you do for the novel?

Allen:  I gambled.  Ohmygod, I gambled too much.  But it made for a very good book.

Barr:  Your name is Preston and the principal character’s name is “P,” something like Kafka’s K.  Is P meant to be you?

Allen: Yesnoyesnoyesnoyesno.  No.  No, I wish I had named him something else.  At every reading I have done I have been asked that question.  Perhaps he is me.  Perhaps he is what I would have become had I not hit rock bottom and gotten some help.

Barr:  What kind of role does your childhood in Honduras play in your writing?

Allen:  Sensory things: smells and tastes, mostly in my fiction.  In my non- fiction and essays it plays a more crucial part. I have actually written essays about that part of my life, but no fiction.

Barr:  What would you ask yourself if you were doing this interview?

Allen:  If I were doing this interview, I would ask:  How long does it take you to write a piece?  If it is a short story, about a day–maybe two, and then I revise it over and over again anywhere from a week to four months until I feel that it is done.  For a novel, it usually takes a month or two to write, and then I revise it over and over anywhere from a year to two years.  The revision process for All or Nothing took about a year and a half–and then after that, I worked with a professional editor for another five or so months.

Barr:  What are you working on now?

Allen:  Right now, I am working on a second short story collection called Full Metal Sonrisa or perhaps The Terror Gang.

Photo:  Preston Allen

Sunday, nine days ago, I was invited to Books & Books to be a mini-book club “facilitator” and lead a discussion on any topic I wanted.  (Those of you who have been reading this blog may wonder if I live at Books & Books.  The answer is no, I do not live at Books & Books, but if you go there and you overhear someone accosting one of the patient booksellers with questions like — “Where are my books?” and “How are they selling?” — that would be me.)

The set-up was brilliant.  If I counted correctly, there were six tables.  Each customer was assigned a table to begin.  Every fifteen minutes or so, the bell would ring and the customer moved to another table, as prescribed by the game plan.  Each table had its “facilitator” and a different discussion.

The topic I chose was close to my heart now that I am writing a novel.  My topic was, What is a novel?  And to begin the discussion, I compared Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach with Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country.  You may already know that some people criticized the Booker judges for choosing McEwan’s book for the short list.  One of the criticisms was that at under 40,000 words it was not a novel.  Previously, I posted about this and noted that Kawabata’s Snow Country is also under 40,000 words long, but no one has ever questioned its status as a great novel.

Two women participants said that they had liked McEwan’s book because it accurately depicted for them the stress of the honeymoon night in a time before the “sexual revolution” and the Pill.  These women had been married in the late 1950s or early 1960s.  One man and one woman, both looked to be in their thirties, confessed to me that they had hated the book.  This lead me to wonder if McEwan’s book further divided people along generational lines.  People old enough to remember a time when one was expected to have sex only after marriage saw a reflection of themselves.  While younger people thought, Why all the fuss?  So much build up for so little return.

Getting back to our question of what was a novel, one woman hit the mark when she said that a novel gave you a sense of fulfillment that a short story never does.  I think of novels like symphonies, which do something for me that suites and concertos cannot do.  When I finish listening to a symphony, I need quiet.  When I finish reading a novel, I cannot pick up another book for awhile.  I have to give it time, maybe no more than one day, but time nonetheless to cool off, time when I do not read.  No short story has ever done that to me.

It is fun to talk about books.  Sitting for two hours on a quiet Sunday morning, discussing two books, and the topics they inspired was a great experience.  But the real story about that Sunday morning was the fact that over 80 people attended the event in a city renowned for eating late and staying up later on Saturday nights.

The next time I hear someone say that people don’t read any more, I will remember this twister mixer and all the people who turned out for no other reason than to talk about books.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr

Say you are a writer with a project and you want to write in Paris.  What do you do?  One possibility is to contact Sylvia Whitman, daughter of George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris.  Send her an email describing what you are writing.  If you convince her that you are a real writer, you can stay at the famed bookstore for up to one week.  You will also have to do small chores while you are there, but then doing manual labor helps focus the mind.

Can’t make it to Paris but you still want to see the store, here’s a virtual tour.

Daniel Olivas interviewed me for La Bloga, a literary blog based in L.A., Denver, and Chicago.  I thought Daniel did a super job.  It was pleasure for me to participate.

Here is an interview I gave to a young woman from Channel 2, the Public Broadcasting System affiliate in Miami.  The interview took place well into the festivities honoring Mitchell Kaplan and Books & Books on the 25th anniversary of the store’s opening.  We were at the Miami Beach branch of the public library.  Hundreds of people attended the event so that may explain the noise.  The place was so loud by then that I couldn’t hear myself talk, which is something akin to writing longhand in the dark.

Ad Hudler was born in Colorado to a newspaper family.  He majored in Art History and Journalism at the University of Nebraska.  After that, he worked as a reporter in the Ft. Myers paper.  He started writing fiction while living in Macon, Georgia.

His first novel, Househusband, was well received.  Since then, he has published Southern Living and All This Belongs to Me.  The sequel to Househusband, Man of the House is due out from Random House next year.  He kindly agreed to answer some questions about how he writes.

Barr:  OK, here we go, let’s get the obvious questions out of the way:  When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?  And what steps did you take to become a writer?

Hudler:  I really never entertained the thought of doing anything else.  I was raised in a newspaper family and started writing news and feature articles by the age of 13 or so.  There are many paths that lead to fiction-writer, I took the journalist-gets-bored-with-reality path.  After working on newspapers, then magazines, I started writing short stories while I was home with our infant daughter, and short stories, of course, usually lead to novels.  I was never trained to be a fiction writer; I’ve had to learn it all on my own, and I’m still uncertain about the academic aspects of fiction-writing.  I’m getting ready to teach an advanced fiction-writing class at University of South Florida next semester, and I’m scrambling to read and absorb all the academic nuts and bolts behind what I’ve been doing for almost ten years now.  (”Oh, OK, so THAT’S what an emotional plot line is!”)  The fact that all my short stories were published in serious literary magazines continues to boggle me.

Barr:  How do you write?

Hudler:  Like the most anal-retentive, control-freakish person on the planet.  I do not write the next paragraph until I love the previous paragraph.

Barr:  Have there been any writers or books that have influenced your writing?

Hudler:  I really don’t know how any writer or artist of any medium can answer that question objectively and truthfully.  As humans, we are products of what we absorb.  Period.

Barr:  What do you like to read?

Hudler:  I love to read things that are very unlike my own comic novels — more literary fare.  I am obsessed, for example, with a collection of titles published by The New York Review of Books.  They basically find old, out-of-print titles that they THINK should have been classics, and they re-issue them.  It’s very arrogant, but they pick some incredible works.  It’s a very eclectic, literary list.  I highly recommend it.

Barr:  New Yorkers arrogant?  No way.  Name the last book you read that made you go, Wow!  And why?

Hudler:  Warlock by Oakley Hall, one of the titles from the NYRB list I just mentioned.  It’s actually a literary western, written about 70 years ago.  I guess I could compare it to TV’s “Deadwood” series.  Unlike most traditional westerns, this one is character-driven, and the reader is allowed access into everyone’s minds:  the bandit, the whore, etc.

Barr:  How do you write a novel?  Do you outline?  Do you let the characters tell you where to go?

Hudler:  I generally outline the second half of a novel, when the timing and placing of plotting become more important.  In the first half of a novel, the characters are coming alive, and if you try to put a harness on them they might not develop as they should — you might stunt their growth.  So, yes, I let characters lead me at times, as if they were dogs pulling me on a leash, but in the second half of the book I pull tight the leash and rein them in.

Barr:  What do you do when you are stuck?

Hudler:  I have the luxury of being a stay-at-home dad, and I step away from my writing by fixing something in the house, or cleaning a bathroom, or something like that.  I say on my website, AdHudler.com, that fiction-writing and household management are very compatible — one is brain-intensive, the other brain-dead.

Barr:  Do you believe in writer’s block?

Hudler:  I believe that a writer can be writing something that he or she really doesn’t want to be writing, but he or she hasn’t consciously realized that yet.  This manifests itself in something that looks like writer’s block.

Barr:  At a certain point when you are writing you are known to fly to a small city, check into a hotel, and write for days, tell us more about that?

Hudler:  Yes, when I have a deadline I have to meet, I call my mom out from Colorado, who comes and takes care of my family while I flee to some third-tier city that, for some reason, has intrigued me.  I love obscure cities and have written in some interesting ones:  Lincoln, Nebraska; Lubbock, Texas; Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I’m leaving next month for a week in Huntsville, Alabama.  These are very intense writing periods.  I often can’t even remember everything I do while I’m there.  Three days seem like three hours.  Most often, during these jags, I write sober in the mornings, creating six or seven pages in one day.  Then, while drinking gin martinis, I edit through what I’ve written.  I find that having a slight buzz while editing is a good thing because you’re more relaxed, and your mind catches things it didn’t see while sober and clear because you are in a different state, as if you are seeing things from a different angle.  I’m not talking about getting shit-faced, not like Hunter S. Thompson or Ernest Hemingway.  I’m talking about the kind of buzz that lets you float above the table, seeing things from a different perspective.

Barr:  Why don’t you choose bigger cities?  Why such obscure places?

Hudler:  Because I don’t want distraction.  If I were in Seattle, I’d spend all my time at Pike’s market.  If I were in Chicago, I’d be at the Art Institute.  Plus, I have a fondness for obscure cities, especially those that have seen better times.  I’ve always preferred rust over glitz.  NYC and San Francisco are more like the pretty girls.  Buffalo, New York and Sioux City, Iowa have had to look deeper and develop other personality traits because they, well, they’re just not very sexy.  I don’t know why but I’m fascinated with cities that have inferiority complexes.

Barr:  I guess I’ll have to scratch Sioux City off my list of romantic weekend getaways.  Have you ever gone to a traditional writer’s retreat, like Yaddo or MacDowell?

Hudler:  No.  And I probably should because I’m a horrible networker, and that might help me.

Barr:  What is one question you would ask if you were interviewing yourself?

Hudler:  You’ve driven minivans for your entire adult life, Ad.  What is it with the new F150 pickup truck?

Photo: Ad Hudler, adhudler.com

Christopher Tilghman (above left), who led the workshop I attended at Kenyon in 2004, told us something that I have never forgotten.  I can’t forget it because I printed it recently in 70-point font on a sheet of paper that I taped to one of the bookcases opposite the table where I write.  To read the paper, all I have to do is look up and let my eyes adjust to the distance.

Tilghman is the author of short stories and novels, all of which received good reviews, so he should know something about writing.  We were talking about novels.  I told him about the time I wrote 150,000 words only to end up with nowhere to go.

Tilghman told me to trust the medium.  Let the story tell itself.  Don’t interfere.

There is a passage in J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year  (2007), which was published earlier this year to not-so-good reviews, that goes like this –

Stories tell themselves, they don’t get told, he said.  That much I know after a lifetime of working with stories.  Never try to impose yourself.  Wait for the story to speak for itself.  Wait and hope that it isn’t born deaf and dumb and blind.

The last day our workshop met at Kenyon, I wrote on the blackboard in big letters, Trust the medium. Those three words have stayed with me since then.  Each time I try to micromanage my writing, I remember them, recite them to myself.  Last month, when I read the passage by Coetzee, the three words came back.  That’s when I printed them on a sheet of white paper in 70-point font, where they hang before me while I write.  Above them is another sheet of paper with the quote from Coetzee.  The sheets are under the air conditioner vent, so they rustle when the air blows.  The noise startles me, especially if it is still early in the morning.  Learning to trust is one of the hardest lessons there is.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr

Previously, I posted on how the same questions seem to be asked of all authors — How did you become a writer?  How do you write?  Which writer’s work influenced you the most?  These are standard questions that appear in almost all author interviews.

Michelle Pauli, who attended the Frankfurt Book Fair last weekend, noted in her blog at The Guardian, that a unique exhibit asked authors instead, “What’s the question you have always wanted someone to ask you?” The exhibit featured blown-up pictures of the authors and headphones that fairgoers could pick up to listen to the questions and answers.  There were 70 portraits taken by photographer Carolin Seeliger and the writers’ corresponding mini-conversations with themselves.  The writers who interviewed themselves included Isabel Allende, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jonathan Franzen, Jostein Gaarder, Gao Xingjian, Imre Kertész, Donna Leon, Frank McCourt and Richard Powers.  Unfortunately, the self-interviews are not included on the Fair web page that is devoted to the exhibit.  Perhaps a book is soon to follow.

Last night, I had the pleasure of participating in an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Books and Books and honoring the founder and owner of the store, Mitchell Kaplan.  Books and Books was where I launched my first book a little over one year ago.  Like me, many writers in Miami have gotten their start there thanks to the generous support extended to us by the store.

The event was held at the 22nd Street Miami Beach branch of the library.  Miami Beach Mayor David Dermer was there to present Mitchell with a proclamation marking October 13, 2007 as Mitchell Kaplan day.  There were also many other authors and journalists.  I got a chance to say hello to Les Standiford, Lynne Barrett, John Dufresne, David Beaty, Herald literary critic Ariel González, and others. I also got a chance to meet Edwidge Danticat, whose work I have long admired and whose most recent book, Brother, I’m Dying, is a finalist for this National Book Award.

Most importantly, it was a chance to once again thank Mitchell and everyone else at Books and Books and to remind them of how crucial they are as a literary institution in this city.

Among the Booker short-list is Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.  Some people criticize the inclusion of McEwan’s book on the grounds that it is too short to be a novel.  The Booker is given each year to “the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.”

On Chesil Beach is short.  The US edition is small, less than eight inches tall by five inches wide.  It is 203 pages long.  And the average page has 192 words.  That means that the book has fewer than 38,976 words.

Most people agree that a “novel” can be many things.  In 1927, E.M. Forster, in Aspects of The Novel, stated that the backbone of a novel was a narrative of events that made the reader want to know what happened next.  Since World War II, though, we have learned to accept non-dramatic books as novels.

Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style contains 99 titled sections that describe the same event in different ways — the narrator sees a young man on a bus, then again in another part of the city.  Each of the 99 sections, taken alone, could be an example of what we now call micro or flash fiction.  The 99 episodes do not, read sequentially, develop a story.  They simply retell the same two incidents.  Yet that book is commonly considered an example of the nouveau roman or “new novel,” even if it is, like On Chesil Beach, shorter than 40,000 words.

A novel today can even include different genres — essays, journalism, a diary, lists — anything the author chooses, without risking being shelved somewhere in the non-fiction section.  The work of Vila-Matas and Barth come to mind, so does Coetzee’s Diary of A Bad Year published last month.  It is comprised of two streams of narrative and a collection of essay excerpts that are marginally related to the narratives.  When it was long-listed for the Booker, no one complained that it was too short to be a novel.  But one Booker judge, Giles Foden, dismissed it on account of the essays, concluding that it was not fiction.  Diary of A Bad Year did not make the short list.

We know that the publisher of a book is not the final arbiter of what is a novel and what is not.  Gallimard refers to Queneau’s Exercises de style as one of his most popular books, that’s all.  No where on the cover or the title page is it called a novel.  Coetzee’s UK publisher, Harvill, does not call Diary of A Bad Year a novel or anything else.  The covers and the pages are silent.  On the other hand, McIwan’s US publishers, Doubleday, refer to On Chesil Beach as a novel, even if they do so only once, on the dust jacket.  But covers are merely one more medium to market the book.  They are not meant to convey a reliable description of what is inside.

It was sometime in the twentieth century (I want to say that F. Scott Fitzgerald had something to do with it) that the novel was first defined as a narrative exceeding 50,000 words.  It’s an attractively simple definition and one that Jane Smiley adopted in her recent book on the subject.  Word count is an objective measure that can be used to distinguish one genre from another.  Shorter than 50,000 words you may have a novella or a long short story, but you don’t have a novel.  Simple as that.  Industry practice generally requires fiction manuscripts to be longer than 65,000 words but that has less to do with the specifications of a genre than it does with marketing and profit margin.

Perhaps precedent can help us here.  Yasunari Kawabata, the 1968 Nobel prize winner, was a master of the short forms who also wrote fine novels.  Many of the pieces gathered in Palm-of-the-Hand Stories are barely 300 words long.  They stand on their own as stories, even though they are spare.  In fact, it is their spareness that makes them so singularly beautiful.  House of Sleeping Beauties is a masterpiece of a novella.  Snow Country is another masterpiece.  It is also a novel.  Since 1947, the year Kawabata completed it, no one has ever called it anything other than a novel.  And that book is exactly 36,784 words long.

So is On Chesil Beach a novel?