January 12, 2010 by Greg Gerke
What was it like? What was said? More than you expected, less? What was taken away, if anything?
Meeting James Salter (for a nice Charlie Rose interview scroll down) was my best experience. I was in the booksigning line but had no book (had no money to buy the new book, not really into the signature thing). I told him how influential he had been for me and he smiled and we shook hands. He wanted to know my last name. “Gerke,” he said. “I can remember that.”
John Madera
John Dermot Woods
Ryan W. Bradley
Michael Leong
Greg Gerke
J. A. Tyler
Stacy Muszynski
A D Jameson
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Rachel Swirsky
Edward Mullany
Aya Karpinska
Paul Kincaid
davis schneiderman
Amber Sparks
Tim Horvath
John Domini
Elaine Castillo
Curtis White
Paula Bomer
Andrew Taggart
James Tadd Adcox
Nick Francis Potter
Brian Kubarycz
Gabriel Blackwell
Janey Smith
Matty Byloos
J/J Hastain
Greg Hunter
Jeff Bursey
i lost robert coover in the south bend regional airport. i’d even made a sign that read: are you robert coover? i thought it was clever. turns out his flight was the first early flight EVER. he arrived 30 minutes before i even got there, took a cab, etc. so when i finally met him, all i could do was apologize, profusely.
Coffee with Dennis Cooper in Paris, he was really nice.
Hoping Rachel will chime in w/ her story abt studying w/ Octavia Butler at Clarion
Man, I want to hear about that, too. I love Octavia Butler. I’ve read almost everything from her I think. The Xenogenesis trilogy and the Parables are probably my favorites.
LOL, I am so tempted to just write “I studied with Octavia Butler at Clarion.”
Um, she was pretty amazing. She was very tall and had that kind of physical drawing-in you get in people who are very shy but tend to get stared at a lot. She didn’t drive herself anywhere, so one of the women who runs the clarion west workshop used to drive her places.
I really wanted her to talk about feminism and race and radical politics! and she didn’t really. My friend Katherine Sparrow asked her, “Are you a radical or a reformist?” and I think that was the first time I really understood the difference between those terms. (She was a radical.)
She was so painfully shy that she came across as kind of hostile, like she wanted you to go away. I mean, she did, I think, want you to go away. But not because she was snooty, but because she was overloaded.
She was very tired. She had been taking medicine for her blood pressure that made her feel exhausted all the time. I have a critique from her that’s hand-written in pencil. I love this critique. It begins “You could go somewhere with this fable, if you” and then stops mid-sentence, because she had fallen asleep.
She had just finished writing Fledgling and really wanted to talk about vampires a lot.
She wasn’t very interested in me or my writing. She was really looking for old-school sci fi. I think I had believed she would be sort of literary and even maybe experimental in her aesthetic, because her work reads like that — but actually, as a teacher, she was very dogmatic. Stories are like this. Stories are like that. Stories are NOT whatever weird literary thing you’re doing, stop it. She quoted Harlan Ellison a bunch.
She was very interested in working with the black woman from our class. I remember that at the parties she attended, all the black women would go sit in a circle. I’m glad that community exists now. Nalo Hopkinson said to me a few years ago that for a while, if there was a black woman at a convention, you knew it had to be Nalo or Octavia. Now there’s Tempest and Nora and Nnedi and Nisi and Alaya and lots of other people.
It’s weird to center myself when talking about that kind of thing, but it was one of the first times I’d really seen a circle of people convening to nurture their community, when it was a circle I was excluded from — or at least, seen that, and recognized it. It’s one of those things white (cis, het, abled, etc) men take for granted, the seeing of one’s self in peers, and finding a way to grow as a writer in a welcoming fold. White (cis, het, abled, etc) women don’t always get it, but there are enough of us around that we can group together when we need to, and the next week our feminist teacher Timmi Duchamp came to work with us, and I was as centered as possible.
But when Octavia was there, I was not at the center. I was watching from a margin. And as much as I wanted her to bond with me and mentor me and be my new best friend, that margin was a warm place.
I was with some of my classmates the next February when she died. They made the announcement over breakfast at a convention.
I spent a long time staring at her while she taught. She sat at the end of the long table with her back to a window and the light made her shine. And I just kept thinking to myself, “This is the woman who wrote Parable of the Sower. This is the woman who wrote Lilith’s Brood. That came from her” and thinking of everything I’d felt when reading her novels, all the awe and fascination and emotion.
I count myself very lucky to have been in that class.
I always get too nervous when I meet someone I admire.
One exception that comes to mind is Mark Danielewski. He visited OSU while I was an MFA student, and I got to be the person who drove him around. My wife and I picked him up at his hotel before his reading and he wanted to see the city, so we drove around and had a good long talk. I suppose I was expecting him to be sort of aloof, being that he’s this uber cool/hip writer, but he was the complete opposite. He was very warm, open, down to earth. He asked questions and listened to our answers (which is a lot more than I can say about many other famous writers I’ve encountered!).
After his reading we went to dinner and he ate raw meat. I think I had salad. Not sure what all we talked about over dinner, but I distinctly remember that we discussed cephalopods.
He seems really smart and interesting, too, and in a way that I’d expect would lead to conversation rather than intimidating. I saw him in conversation w/ Rick Moody during some festival in NY. He told a hilarious Susan Sontag story.
I met Mark Danielewski when he came to the University of Cincinnati; he was really great. I stood in a long line so he would sign my book. I must have looked like I wanted to ask a question, because he said, “Go ahead. Ask.” So I asked, and I remember being really emotional about it. I asked, “Was it hard? Letting them go?” (I meant Zampano and Johnny. I meant finishing that book. He knew what I meant.) He said, “Yes.”
Will and Karen, too, for me. To be perfectly blunt, it takes really good writing for me to give a shit about the marital problems of heterosexuals, and in that book, Danielewski pulled it off, I cared about that couple. …Something maybe to be said here abt that kind of formalist prose that appears or purports to intellectualize and emotionally distance but actually produces an affect that’s super emotional.
…Thanks Molly & Chris, I’d gotten the impression it was mostly considered uncool to like that book/Danielewski and now feel slightly less isolated.
When I first met Thomas Pynchon I was all nerves. He just extended a hand and chuckled a bit. His face was open and honest. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “I bet you’re wondering why I asked you all the way out here to meet up with me…”
hahahaha.
And then he shit in your mouth.
OMG, who gave you the tape?
I drove Steve Almond to the Columbus airport from Cincinnati at some ungodly time early in the morning. He was really nice and awesome and, later, because he’s so nice and awesome he gave me and Blythe a story for the first issue of Twelve Stories. Drive people the airport, folks. It pays off later.
I also stood in a long line at Calvin College, hoping Salman Rushdie would sign the books I had. We’d been asked to please limit to one book, but I waited to be the last in line, and then I started to unload them all, pretending to make a decision about which one I wanted him to sign. He just looked at me and laughed and started signing each of them. Then I asked if he’d ever take a writer under his wing in the tradition of Flaubert and de Maupassant. He said no, then signed a few more books, then said, “Perhaps. Under the right circumstances. Send me something.” He gave me two addresses. Terrified, I never sent anything.
Aimee Bender signed my book, “To Polly.” Hee heeee heee. That’s what I get for mumbling.
Polly, ha.
If I wasn’t so attached to “Moga” (sometimes I actually hum the intro to the Lady Gaga song as “Moga Ooh La La” instead of “Gaga Ooh La La,” seriously), I’d totally ask whether I can please please start calling you Polly.
PoGa. I could do that.
Molly the mumbler. ha.
And Steve Almond! You remind me:
Last AWP, at a panel dealie with Steve A. et al I hunkered down in a corner seat of my own making (read: on the floor, next to the radiator in the front of the room, behind the panelists [wasn't interested in standing in back for another session]). So. Unless I closed my eyes they were filled mostly with Jayne Anne Phillips’s backside and long (silky shiny healthy) hair–as she was a mere three feet from me. Then Steve moved a smidge and totally gave me the clearest shot of majestic plumber butt.
So I pulled out the ol’ cell phone and snapped a pic. Which was a most excellent ice breaker when I caught up with him online.
If you can’t drive em to the airport…
Oh–the following excerpt from one of our quippy convos always reminds me, when in doubt, just snap that pic:
“BTW, I’ve been doing the male equivalent of kegel exercises, in an effort to beef up my cheeks and subsequent cleavage factor.
Yes.
God yes.”
==
As for the pic, I’ll post it soon. I mean, I do have his permission.
Love this story! Steve’s a great guy. Yes, if he wants his ass online, by all means, post that sucker. :) Oh! This is the second time I’ve written these words today: “What buns!” (The first time was over at HTML Giant. Ryan Call’s post with the puppers.)
Met Ray Bradbury at the now defunct Acres of Books in Long Beach, Cali (his favorite bookstore). There were cameras and reporters everywhere. Made me feel happy that there are still literary superstars. He was funny and kind. And I got to ask him about having his work adapted for the film — he said, for the first 451, they asked him about how he felt they should score the film. He liked that one. All other adaptations he wasn’t as fond of. Its a different process, of course, he said. Due to a lack of seating, I accidentally ended up sitting next to his wife (or daughter, I wasn’t sure, I never asked, though there weren’t any weird kissing moments if that’s what you’re thinking). I leaned over after asking him a question and after wiping the sweat off my forehead said, “I was so nervous.” She grinned like its common.
But the guy is incredibly nice.
Check out this link of me asking Anne Michaels some questions (at around 2:06) about her book The Winter Vault. I asked about how researching the historical elements in her novel suggested, invoked characters and a narrative, and then how she decided to structure her narrative within what I was calling a mosaic, a form that mirrored some of the elements in her book:
http://www.youtube.com/strandbookstore#p/c/973257298019CAB4/1/H4eK6oiUuwk
And I met Rushdie, too. I asked him a few questions after his reading from The Enchantress of Florence. I forget what I asked him, but directly after answering my questions he asked, “Will someone please ask me my favorite color?”
http://www.strandbooks.com/app/www/p/tv?videohighlight=3963
Nice questions John. Somehow I think you may have been a White House questioner a la Helen Thomas in a previous incarnation. wink wink
My God man, her answers spill into a second video, you touched a vein with those questions.
Ha! What is it? My guess is navy blue. You should hold a contest.
Met David Foster Wallace a few years ago at a reading, in my MFA years. I had just discovered him, didn’t know much about him, and had recently read “Oblivion.” On the back cover of that collection, DFW looks like a bad-ass– he’s got long hair, he’s with two huge dogs. We thought he was going to eat us.
But, of course, as everyone who met him says, he was a shy, gentle, kindly man. Incredibly sweet. Incredibly humble. And he wore sweatpants.
No interesting author meet-ups, but I did meet the cartoonist Daniel Clowes and it was amazing. He was on a small book tour with Kim Deitch to promote 20th Century Eightball, which had just come out. In the back cover of that book there’s a strip titled something like, “You, the Reader” in which he speculates on the personalities of his readers. The last panel is blank and has the caption “This is what you really look like:” In that panel he drew, with just a few simple hand strokes, an amazingly accurate picture of me. Earlier in the strip there’s a part where he posits that his ideal reader is “either a benevolent millionaire or a lonely teenager.” I was a lonely teenager at the time and I just knew we had made a connection as I mumbled, “That’s amazing. Thanks,” and walked away. To this day, that drawing is my most prized possession.
Also, I’ve been in the same room as David Lynch, but I never got to meet him.
OK, one more. I saw TC Boyle leaving an auditorium after a reading. Foolishly, I’d never read any of his work at that point and therefore couldn’t think of anything to say to him. But I still wanted a TC Boyle story to tell, so I purposely walked closely by him and brushed up against his shoulder so that I could say that I’d “rubbed shoulders” with him.
My favorite writers come and go.
I had a one-on-one lunch w/ Allen Ginsberg at the Ramapo Community College cafeteria. He wore a suit. We had a nice talk. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing wandering around w/ his old buddy Charlie Plymell.
I had driven three hours on a Saturday to go to a Robert Creeley reading at a small coffee shop. He showed up late, drunk, with a six pack. He was in no shape to do anything. I asked him for a beer, seeing as the day was screwed already. He refused. I said something not nice and went home.
I spent some time with Daniel Berrigan. He was in hiding, sort of, if you call that hiding. The best was when he was hitching and I stopped and picked him up and he wanted a ride to the movies.
Gabe, someday I want to meet you in person so I can sit and listen to some of your stories in a longer & more verbal form.
This week my favorite writer is John Nichols. He used to spend his summers in our neighborhood. Friends of mine met him in a whole foods store, standing in line when they were in Colorado shopping for all-natural beer.
I studied with Victor LaValle at Mills College. He was great, and encouraged me so much. I most remember him for “be interesting” and “as writers we need to know our weaknesses and write against them.” Sweet guy, straight-shooter, and an excellent writer. Seemed he scared the shit out of some of my fellow students, which I found hilarious.
I read with Victor a while back in Queens– really nice guy. Entertaining reader as well.
when i was interning at the mfa program i later became a student in, i introduced myself to Pete Fromm, the writer i knew i wanted to work with if i got in. i said “people keep telling me i remind them of you” and he said “i’m sorry.” and when i told him i wanted to have him as my advisor if i got in the program he laughed and said “great! i’m going to kick your ass!”
i scared the crap out of a writer driving him to campus from the airport for a reading. i was going 80 in the far left lane of a four-lane freeway, and realized i was about to pass my exit so i swerved through traffic and merged onto of the off ramp. when i met his wife six months later she said “oh, you’re the guy who likes to drive fast”
i also got lost taking a writer back to the airport once. due to some road closures i got all f-ed up and we ended up about three hours out of our way. i just kept saying “we’re almost there” i wasn’t sure she bought it or not. i confessed to her a couple years later.
I asked Amy Hempel to sign my collected stories and she asked if she knew me from somewhere.
Nope.
I was over the moon.
She dreams you.