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'First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed, then about the murders which happened later.

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The robbery is the more important part since it served to set my and my sisters lives on the

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courses they eventually followed, nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

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Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank, they weren't strange people,

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not obviously criminals, no-one would have thought they were destined to end up the way they did.

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They were just regular, although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void

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the moment they did rob a bank'.

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I always have liked beginnings that were grabbers, I always liked beginnings that would, you know,

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throw down the gauntlet for the reader. The only problem with a beginning like that is that

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then you've got to have a second act, and sometimes if you don't have a second act,

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if you can't follow up a really good beginning like that with something equally gripping then you might as

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well not have it, because you've just basically created a trap for yourself and sprung it so,

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no I just um...I always... I think when I wrote it I knew it was OK.

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I thought it was just a sort of typical old fashioned narrative hook, and, you know,

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you're going to have a murder down the line here, you're gonna have a bank being robbed

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by my parents, so I thought it was good.

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It's an American family of 4 people, 2 children, twin boy/girl, mother/father, and the father has been

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in the air force since World War II, and the book takes place in 1960.

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Eventually after staying in the air force, he gets out of the air force, and then doesn't really

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know what to do with himself, he's been in the military his whole life, and they live in a little town in

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Great Falls Montana, where none of them has ever lived before, and he just happened to be stationed

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there in the air force.

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And he hatches upon a scheme to sell stolen beef to the railroad, to sell to the dining cart customers on the railroad.

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And he very quickly runs amiss and runs afoul of the Indians who he basically goes into business with to

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kill the beef and deliver it to him, and he finds that he owes them $2,000, which is in 1960

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a considerable sum of money, for half a beef that is somehow or other gone rancid before they can sell it.

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And so in a fit of sort of chaotic lunacy rather than just leaving town in the middle of night, or

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borrowing the money, because he had no contacts in the town, no collateral, he didn't own anything,

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he determines he will rob a bank and get the money that way.

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And that sets in motion, the book actually.

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And what happens to him and his wife, who is his colleague in this bank robbery, is that they

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are immediately caught, and once they are immediately caught, then the children are left alone,

33
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and the children fend for themselves.

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I mean I invented that, so I don't really know what relation it bears to most peoples' normal thinking.

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I did discover when I was trying to make plausible to myself the idea that 2 people who didn't

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have to rob a bank would rob a bank, that anybody who robs a bank who's not already a hardened,

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criminal, who's not John Dillenger or Pretty Boy Floyd, anybody who's a normal person who robs a bank

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is crazy, because they're going to get caught immediately, so all manner of assumptions about

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how you do it and how you get away with it and what happens to you afterwards, are complete lunacy,

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because none of those things is going to be true, because as Dell says, without wanting to

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quote my own book as though Dell was a creature I didn't write, but he says when you think you're

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going to get away with robbing a bank you forget one thing and that is that you're the only

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person in town who's robbed a bank, and so you're going to stand out no matter what.

44
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Somehow or another you're not going to be, you've given up your hold on normal, yeah.

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For some reason or other that was very vivid to me that you will have the discretion of all of your

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normal life up to a point, and I think Dell describes it as being on a boat which is getting farther and

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farther away from shore, or you're in a lighter than air balloon that rises higher and higher very quickly

48
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away from the surface of the earth. For a long time you could just let go and be there,

49
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or for a long time you could swim back to shore and be safe, but all at once, imperceptibly,

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you can't any more, and then your life is totally not a life you ever understood.

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In the first book, I was just thinking about this, in the first book I ever wrote there was an image which

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I just collected out of the culture about putting a frog into a pan of water at room temperature,

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and little by little by little by little heating the water up and the frog sitting there perfectly fine

54
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when all of a sudden he's not perfectly fine and all of a sudden he's no longer viable,

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and that's, there's something about that odd change from what is totally normal to what is totally

56
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abhorrent and felonious, it appeals to me, maybe that's just one of the strange perversities involved in

57
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being a novelist I don't know. I don't know. You know Thoreau says that a writer is a man

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who having nothing to do finds something to do.

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I think it's all about being loved, I mean as a child I was loved, and one of the things that my wife

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always says to me, she says you know I grew up in a household of divorce and she says love was always

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conditional, she says, in regarding me, she says with you love is unconditional because I love her

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unconditionally, and that's because I just think that's the way life should be, and I'm far from perfect,

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but on that one issue I do understand that to create a sense of reliable normality that the person who

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loves you loves you, and will always love you, is your due in life.

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And again I'm speculating about a book that I wrote, OK?, so there's a certain fortuity to that,

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but I think that's because those two children, Dell and his sister, were loved as children,

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that they were most impressionably persuaded that normal was normal, that life had its normal

68
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parameters around it, and that no amount of eccentricity and no amount of shocking behaviour by

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their parents quite disturbed that sense of normal so that they were pitched off, at least in Dell's case,

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his sister may be differently, so that they were pitched off into the chaos that no normalcy would describe.

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I always say that if the devil always was in your life wearing a read suit, with a tail and horns,

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you wouldn't get anywhere close to him.

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But the fact of the matter is the devil often comes with certain appeals, it's also true just in dramatic

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terms, that drama is interesting when the villain says something that's true.

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So to create a persuasive villain, to create somebody who has the power that evil must have,

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because if evil was just dispensable none of us would run afoul of it, but to create a character who has a

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sort of tempting evil to him he has to be able to make sense, he has to be able to have affection,

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he can't just be the antithesis of all that is good, he has to be tinctured by something that's appealing.

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Maybe none of us is a character at all, I mean I don't believe in character anyway, I don't believe

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that any of us has a sort of a kernel, hard, essential core, that we are basically as human beings,

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and certainly as literary creations, we are a combination of imputed memory, wishes in will, fears,

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desires, all kinds of things that just kind of get laid on, laid on, laid on, and laid on, and that because

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that is a such a vertiginous kind of human condition, we ascribe to people to have cores,

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to make that vertiginous seem less scary, so Dell is that way, but one of the things he does to establish

85
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his own sense of persuasiveness to himself is that he tells this story, and his ability to intercalate

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good with bad, violent with normal, love with not love, is a measure of his gaining dominion over it,

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into the extent that he can gain dominion over it then he once more performs an act which would conclude that he has a character.

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And I think we don't. It's a kind of, it's not an heretical idea, it may be a slightly nihilistic idea.

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Growing up in the south was lucky in one way because I grew up down the street from Udor Welthy

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and not far from Wayne Falkoner, and the idea that being a writer was a possibility, was ingrained in everybody,

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writing literature was just in the air in Mississippi.

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That was probably the only good thing about Mississippi, and everything else was bigoted and

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racially tense, and unfair, and absurd, and it made most of us who were white kids growing up in

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Mississippi basically kind of absurd creatures.

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So what I wanted to do to escape that sense of burden, a burden visited on me simply by the

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accident of my birth, was to get away.

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And one of the things I found out when I got away was that the south had been perpetrating a great

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lie upon me, many lies actually.

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One big lie was that the south was unique, that the south was in fact a very special place

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in the middle of an otherwise nondescript land country which was America.

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And what I found was that America was equally interesting irrespective of where you went,

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and that the values, if you had particularly good values, which is to say that you didn't want to harm

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other people, you didn't want to be prejudiced against other races, that you wanted to treat people

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equally, that those kinds of morays and values worked everywhere, that the language in America

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was English, that the currency was the dollar, that the President was the President,

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So America was a much more, for me, approachable, and I won't say it was homogenous because it

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really isn't homogeneous at least not superficially, but America was a much more approachable,

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knowable place, even for a southerner than I had been led to believe it was.

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You know, you sort of think southerners only know the south, southern writers only write about the

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south, southern writers only write for other southerners, what southern writers know only

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other southerners can know, all baloney, it's all bullshit, complete bullshit, so I just decided to

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dedicate my life to proving that that was bullshit.

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It was worth doing because those preoccupations and those presumptions and those lies were very

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confining, intellectually confining, morally confining, spatially confining, all those things you don't really

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need in a country as vast as ours. You want to go, you want to see.

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Canada is hugely appealing to me for a lot of reasons, one is I always feel better when I go there,

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and I'm not quite sure why, I feel restored, I feel I'm in a more tolerant place.

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There's also something about Canada which is mysterious, and that is that it is retinally

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similar to America, but that once you pass across the 49th parallel and into Canada you realise

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that you are in a totally different place from where you were before.

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And that combination of retinal similarity and profound difference is to me mystifying and interesting,

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and I can't explain it, this book is not about explaining that but it is about putting that fact

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in play and seeing what can be said on the strength of that peculiar kind of nexus.

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Similarity encased in mystery, mystery encased in similarity.

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You don't need a book to go out there and feel what it feels like, and smell the surf.

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I just appropriate the language of the place and from the language of the place, which is chiefly what

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I'm interested in, I kind of use, I sort of co-opt the reader to in his or her minds eye envision the place,

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where these words are appropriate, so saskatchewan. I would want to write about

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saskatchewan only so that I could put the word saskatchewan on the page as many times as possible.

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Because I think that's exciting, but when I put it on the page then that gives me an opportunity to

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use other language to create descriptions and create word pictures which will help make more plausible

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what the characters are doing in the foreground.

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So it's a kind of a, you know one thing, on the one hand it's just language, it's just words,

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on the other hand, once you have the words well you might as well describe what those words mean to

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most people's experience, and you do that again so you can make what the characters do be plausible.

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And chiefly I think for me the language is pleasurable to the reader. I mean a reader finds it pleasurable

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to read a description and think she or he can identify that out of life.

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But they also take pleasure in the fact of seeing that it's made of all of these words which can be put

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together in such a felicitous way as to become almost but not quite invisible.

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So the complexity of that kind of dual medium experience is very pleasurable for a reader,

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and it's something that we all as people who live on the earth are better if we know, we're better if

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we know, we're better if we know that we look out a window and we see the surf but we also see the

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window, we also see the droplets on the window.

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It's in an attempt to make lived experience be more valuable, to be more morally good, and to be alert to it.

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I have changed as a reader because when I was young I didn't know what I was reading,

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I was just reading books that I was taking on faith, that people said were great books, such as

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'Absolum Absolum', for instance, I just dived into books like diving into the surf, and whatever

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stuck to me stuck to me, without my sense of knowing necessarily what that good stuff would be.

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Now I think I'm much more discerning as a reader, so that I know what the good stuff is when it's

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happening to me, but I couldn't have done that without that act of faith which is to dive in without a clue,

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I mean I was reading the beginning of Arm Parnok's book about Istanbul yesterday,

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and he just starts it off profoundly, you would think that he would give himself a little grace note or two,

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but he starts off profoundly and I just thought wow, wow that's, and I sat down and I put the book

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down and I wrote about five pages in my notebook because it immediately triggered something in me

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that had not been, I had not been able to trigger in my own brain for twenty years,

156
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so I know when I'm being acted on, and I think that's another thing that I know that I maybe wouldn't

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have known when I was young, that books act on you, and that books are fabrications,

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and that readers know they are being acted on, and readers like being acted on if they can feel like

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they're acted on to great profit.

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It isn't as though a book has to become invisible, or that its machinations and its allures have to be

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subliminal, they can be, and I learned this from writings like Bohais and the Latin Americans,

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readers are perfectly willing to be overtly acted on as long as they can feel like it's in some good behalf,

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and I know that in my own work, and I know that in my reading.

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My definition of literature comes from F.R.Leavis, which is that literature is the supreme means

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by which we renew our sensuous and emotional life, and by that means learning new awareness,

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so I'm always reading to learn a new awareness, I'm always reading to have my sensuous and

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emotional life renewed, so that's very crucial to me, because umm well, when I was a young boy

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life was not enough, I had to go to some other place to make life be enough.

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But the other thing, the other side of that duality, that dichotomous sense,

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is that literature is made by regular people, literature is made by....living in her house on Pinehurst street,

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and thinking her daily thoughts, and suddenly realising she has something she can write down,

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it's...as Picasso said you know, all art is local, and by that he didn't mean that it took place in

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somebody's village, he meant that it took place in someone's local heart, with simple thoughts

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and simple expectations, and simple perceptions, and out of those simple perceptions through the

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very hartalymbic that is a work of art becomes something staggeringly wonderful,

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and that to me is irresistible about art, that is starts small.

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You know I just backed into being a writer, I had failed at everything else, I'd been in the

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marine corps, I'd been to law school, I'd failed at staying in the south, I'd taught school

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a year and hadn't liked it.

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Nothing I had tried had opened a path for me that was followable.

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So I was just sitting around my mother's house one day in Little Rock Arkansas,

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January 1968, and she looked at me with a very....I always think about the Scream, the Munch painting

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you know, she said to me Richard, what are you going to do with yourself son?, and I said, for

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reasons that I could probably not replicate, I said I think I'm going to try to be a writer,

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and she just looked at me, because she actually read books, I think she thought I've never heard such a

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thing in my life, but...I don't know why I said it,if I had said something else I would have probably done

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something else but it just so happened fortuitously that I said I wanted to try to be a writer,

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if I said I'm going to go work for a bank she would have been happy, but I didn't say that,

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you know...why...that interests me that you think about a man like me who has had a life as a writer

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for forty plus years, started out really with just a random remark that I made to my mother

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on a cold January day in 1968. You know there was not a drum roll, trumpets didn't play, and then when

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I said within a week to the girl who was going to be my wife, I said I think I'm going to move to

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New York and move in with you, and then I'm going to stay home and try to write, she said to me

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"Oh that's a wonderful idea she said, let's do that", who could resist that?

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You don't have to be an American to write the great American novel,

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you don't have to be an American to write .... to be the curator of the great American museum.

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Anybody can do that, the only thing I don't like about curatorial imagery is that it seems to

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be applied to things that are already there, whereas for me literature is a lively negotiation with the ongoing.

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I don't know the difference between being 68 and 28, so I don't know the difference between

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sitting down to write a story now from sitting down and writing a story when I was 28.

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Seems the same.

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But I just thing that young writers have to be readers, and they have to know that there doing,

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when they sit down at their desk every morning at age 25, with no experience and no hope

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for success, they have to realise that they are doing what Chekov did, because that's what

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Chekov did when he was 25, and he became Checkov, so you have to think to yourself,

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there is no difference between what I'm doing and what Hardy did, or what Chekov did,

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or what George Elliot did, or what Neuhamsin did, it's all the same.

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It's all, no matter how pokey and local it is, it's all shooting for the stars.