The Shattercolors Author Interview (2008)

The Shattercolors Magazine Standard Interview—Author Version: Robert Levin
Conducted by Robert Scott Leyse (2008)

(Interview consists of 15 pre-set questions. Authors have published at least one novel or short story/poetry collection.)

1) Why did you begin writing, and how long have you been doing so?
I started writing when I was ten, the day after my mother showed me a
booklet of stories that my father, and in his own hand, had written for
her. In just weeks my mother had a volume of my collected works
to read. Not counting interruptions that are apparently common to the
biographies of many writers—intervals devoted to drinking, drug abuse
and womanizing—I’ve been writing ever since. Which is to say for some
time.

2) What does your writing routine consist of?
I write best in the period that immediately follows waking up. To arrive
at this special place more than once a day—and I’ll swear to the death
that this is the sole reason—I take frequent naps.

3) Have specific events ever flung you into an extended and productive period of creativity?
Pointed reminders of my mortality have always worked wonders for my productivity.

4) What are common sources of inspiration?
Reading writing that’s superior to mine, especially writing that
addresses or touches upon my own themes. That and conversations with
people who at once encourage me to express my ideas and challenge me to
better articulate them.

5) What does a book need to do to get you to read it from beginning to end?
I rarely read books for entertainment purposes alone. (I use
presidential debates for that.) I belong to a generation that read books
to learn more about life. I would open a new novel by Hemingway,
Steinbeck or Faulkner with the expectation that my consciousness would
be raised. To sustain my interest, a book still has to be telling me
things I don’t already know.

6) Who are some of the authors you most admire?
I admire, and for a variety of reasons, a great many writers. The five
who’ve had the most direct and enduring influence on me are Norman
Mailer, Ernest Becker, Alan Harrington, Amiri Baraka (when he was LeRoi
Jones) and Dave Barry. Although he was not to my knowledge an author, a
major early inspiration was an English teacher named Israel Frank.
Another important person in my writing life was a doctor. Daniel Crane.

7) How familiar are you with the literary canon?
I was a lit major in college and I’ve read a great many of the classics.
That there remain significant gaps in my reading is something I tend
not to flagellate myself over anymore.

8] What’s your take on politics and literary endeavor?
If you’re asking if it’s okay for writers to make a political tract of
their fiction I’d say that there have certainly been writers who’ve done
that and managed to create exceptional literature in the process. But
fictional prose that’s intended to convey a political message is usually
too bridled by its agenda for me to take much pleasure in reading it.

9) What are your feelings about formal vs. free verse?
If I were a poet, and I learned early on that I wasn’t, I would probably
worry about such details. As a reader, it’s the vision and talent of
the poet that concerns me, not the discipline he or she is coming from.
Having said that, and having been inundated by classical verse in
school, I’m more likely to look into a poem that’s been composed in a
modern rather than a traditional manner.

10) Do you feel “flash” fiction (300 words or less) is a viable form, or nothing more than a writing exercise?
It’s an exercise when that’s all that it amounts to. It becomes a
legitimate and viable form when a writer who’s using it writes something
terrific. For me, however, form always follows content. I might write a
piece that by chance came to 300 words, but I would never deliberately
confine myself to a pre-fixed word count.

11) When not writing, what do you do for amusement?
You mean besides Googling myself? Well, that’s it. I Google myself.

No. There are times, of course, when it’s absolutely necessary to
empty your head of thought. But advancing in age and a considerable
distance shy of what I hoped to accomplish by now, I try, when I’m not
writing, to not stray too far from it. My choices of recreation tend to
be things—books, theater, films—that promise to be intellectually
stimulating and to keep my mind sharp.

12) What’s one of the most annoying things you can think of?
What’s guaranteed to spill bad chemicals in my brain is arrogant stupidity.

13) Briefly describe what you consider to be one of your standout childhood pranks.
I’m put in mind of an incident in a nursery school when I was five.
Precociously philosophical and already cultivating the maverick persona I
would continue to hone throughout my life, I was prepared to question
every custom and convention I came across. In this particular case, and
in respect to the different uses assigned to various waste disposal
receptacles, I found myself challenging what seemed to me to be the
arbitrariness of strict designations. Removing my fresh feces from the
toilet, I placed them into an adjacent trash basket. (When five minutes
later what I’d done met with universal condemnation from my peers and
supervisors, I was convinced that I was onto something.)

14) What are your upcoming projects/works in progress?
Edward Albee was ready to punch me in the mouth when I asked him a
similar question years ago. Later, in respect to my own work—and with
all proportions kept, of course—I would understand his rage. I can lose a
piece forever by discussing it. (And it makes no difference if the
response I get is negative or positive.) Talking about ideas in the
abstract is good—it’s invigorating. But describing something I’m
writing, or planning to write, is, in effect, to “publish” it. And with
what should have been the final step of the project already taken, I
tend to separate from it. The sense of urgency and the emotional
engagement with it that I need to go on slips away.

15) Care to conclude with a sweeping philosophical statement?
It’s been a conviction of mine for quite a while that to stifle too much
consciousness of our mortal condition—or to twist and belie the
unacceptable fact of it—constitute the true objectives of virtually
everything we do. We can immerse ourselves in endless discussions about
the economic, social, political, psychological, historical and cultural
factors that determine and shape our beliefs and behavior, but when we
do that we are obfuscating the most important factor: the need,
constant, urgent and universal—and demanding the cultivation of all
manner of evasions, illusions and delusions—to mollify our terror of
extinction.

I know how disagreeable this notion is, even to people inclined to
concede the truth of it. To acknowledge what’s really driving us leaves
us to confront precisely what we’re trying to flee. We want to stay
ignorant of where we’re coming from and with good reason. But
considering what’s going on in the world right now, the failure to
recognize for what they are the distortions of reality that we concoct
and entertain in order to deny the prospect of oblivion can come at a
very high price for everyone—a price that’s greater than the rewards.
The Muslim suicide bombers who’ve discovered a quick and certain passage
to eternal life (the objection to a Western presence in the Middle East
is only a rationalization), and the Christians who helped to twice
elect a dangerously feckless president because he professed to share
their belief in death-transcending myths are just two of the more
salient demonstrations of my point.

Now if you were to ask me what I think writers are for I would say,
with my bias duly noted, that it’s to enlighten us on this issue (and
its myriad secular as well as religious aspects). And I think that
authors, however edgy, deep and “serious” they may be, who ignore or
skirt the critical dynamic of death denial—who don’t in some way attempt
to remind readers of the real purpose of their actions—are only
reinforcing the reader’s willful innocence. They’re writing, in essence,
what amount to children’s books.