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Robert Mailer Anderson, Author, Boonville
Tess Uriza Holthe, Author, When the Elephants Dance
Paul Flores, Author, Along the Border Lies
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit series director
Barbara Lane: While many of us have the fantasy of seeing our own brilliantly written novel on the bookstore shelves, the real painstaking business of writing a novel, getting it published and receiving critical acclaim is a different story. Robert Mailer Anderson drew on his own Northern California hometown for Boonville, the dark and funny story of two young people trying to define themselves in a community of misfits, rednecks and counterculture burnouts. Tess Uriza Holthe looked at her family's Filipino heritage for When the Elephants Dance, a work that combines the story of a group of people struggling to survive the Japanese occupation of their homeland with the mythical stories they tell while in hiding. And Paul Flores uses his bicultural background to speak for the often-marginalized people of what he calls that "crazy in-between colony" on the San Diego-Tijuana border. His first novel is called Along the Border Lies. I want to talk about the genesis of your novels.
Tess Uriza Holthe: Growing up, my parents always encouraged me either to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant, so it wasn't until I got my accounting degree that I actually took a hobby. I took a writing class at Book Passage in Corte Madera and the exercise was to write about a myth in the family. And from there I couldn't stop writing for about a year and a half, and this is the product of that.
Lane: So you have a family of storytellers?
Holthe: Yes, moral storytellers. They're not big readers, but big storytellers.
Lane: Tell us about the genesis of Boonville. How did the novel get started in your mind and on paper?
Anderson: My parents were very encouraging in the sense that we had chaos all around us. Ever since I was five, my Dad always said, "It's all good writing material." Early on, I knew that was what I was going to do as a defense mechanism. I just started looking at the world in terms of characters and structure. My parents always had books around, and they'd hand me Flannery O'Connor or something and say, "Want to read a good short story about your grandmother?" And all of a sudden, you're reading, "She would have been a good woman if there had been someone to shoot her every day of her life."
Lane: So you were collecting material all along.
Anderson: Yes. My father ran a home for juvenile delinquents, where I narrowly escaped being one of them, or being killed by them, and my grandfather was a prison guard at San Quentin. I lived in a lot of different universes, and they were all kind of colliding, so I had to try to make art of it or do something else. I wasn't going to be an accountant; it was not an option. I dropped out of school, I dropped out of college, I dropped out of baseball. I kept writing. My uncle has a small radical newspaper in Boonville, and he started publishing my work when I was 15.
Lane: We move to a totally different world with Along the Border Lies. Where did your inspiration come from for this novel?
Paul Flores: Basically from the lack of literature about the area I grew up in, which is the California border between Tijuana and San Diego. I'm sure a lot of people have been to Tijuana and had their share of fun times, but the idea was to put a face on the border, to give it real characters, to not only associate the border as being a place of military action or of illegal immigration or drugs, but to really look at the faces down there and the way people live on the border as a way of negotiating two countries, two cultures and two really distinct communities that share a lot of similarities.
Lane: Robert, are you a hero, or a pariah, when you show up in Boonville?
Anderson: Kind of both. All of us are writing fiction, so whatever is real or otherwise doesn't really matter. You're searching for a higher truth. Sometimes, though, it helps to have a composite. In my book, there's a quick vignette of a guy who is locked out of his house because he's drunk. And he gets his chainsaw, and he's going to cut a new door. It happened to my neighbors and two other people I knew in town. I'm constantly having people coming up to me and saying, "I knew who that was." And since then, I found out that eight people in Boonville have grabbed their chainsaws and walked out on their wives.
Lane: Tess, you based part of your story on your father's experiences in the Philippines during World War II. You wanted to uncover a story that you thought wasn't really well known.
Holthe: I wrote the book selfishly. Growing up, I'd heard the mythical, magical realism tales side by side with the war stories that my family survived. Just about everybody in my family was there during World War II. And so after I did the mythical stories, it just seemed appropriate that they be framed by the war narration. I don't know if I even intended to make any kind of political statement with that; it just happened naturally.
Lane: Paul, yours was overtly political. You wanted to give a human face to a community that's marginalized.
Flores: Absolutely, but I wanted to show that basically in San Diego, you have the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Border Patrol, the FBI, the DEA, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, Special Forces – all of these things. The military presence in San Diego lends itself to the violence that's actually perpetuated down there. I wanted to show that the violence that exists in my book comes from larger social structures. One of the characters in the book assaults undocumented workers as they come across. He's a Mexican also. When you grow up in a racist, violent area where you are told to look down at illegal immigrants and undocumented workers, you feel a hatred for yourself because of this and you see other violence around you. One way of getting attention in this country is by committing a violent act. And I wanted to show that that doesn't necessarily come from the individual so much as it comes from the surrounding environment.
Lane: Whose voice is going to tell the story and how are you going to tell the story?
Anderson: There are two main narrators through the book. You hear the voice of John's internal monologue, and then there's a hippie girl. There are so many people and ideas colliding up in Boonville and in the story as well that it seemed you needed a male-female presence. That part is autobiographically emotional for me. You needed some other voice, not just an unreliable narrative telling the whole story. I was thinking about having more narrators. Then I realized this is way too hard, and I'm not Faulkner, and it'll take about 15 years more practice. I'm going to be under fire anyway for taking on a woman's voice. People are not very happy with you when you try to do that, but they're not happy with you when you're bicultural or overtly political.
Holthe: I had always written journals in the first person, so it just felt more comfortable. And then in our house there are always mahjong games every night. Different people would tell their own stories each evening. I ended up with three main narrators in the first person, but within the short story. When I got to finish counting the characters, there were about 36 different people who told the story. So it was just natural to use the first person.
Flores: My idea was to try to represent the border from both perspectives, rather than have this unifying narrator who says he can represent both sides. There was a character from Tijuana and there were a couple of characters from Chula Vista. I didn't know exactly what the structure would be as I began writing, and I had the story in the third person at first. I thought it was much more interesting if it were told by the person who was experiencing it, so I have a female character who dominates most of the book. I also have a first person gang-banger on the San Diego side. Within that is Alfredo's story, and the other stories that come in and out; it's a circular narrative. It doesn't go chronologically. So, yes, voice is very important. The way I write is that I hear a voice in my head. I let that character speak, and I find out what the narrative is from that voice. It fit the structure of the border, which is back and forth, back and forth to the point where the border gets erased and you just have these voices talking about living there.
Lane: Tess, we hear about your experience as "a successful accountant, who went to a writing workshop and a writer's conference in Maui, who found an agent, wrote a book and everybody bought it." Was there something brutal in the writing of your book, or was it that easy?
Holthe: It was just fluky that way. I really enjoyed writing it; I'd suppressed my creative side for so long. I remember not even considering being a writer two years ago, but I would drive home and have these scenes in my head and these voices, and I remember thinking that it was like being a schizophrenic because I had these scenes. That's when I thought I would take this creative writing class, and it came out whole.
Lane: I know that there's a lot of disagreement among writers about writing workshops, about M.A.s in creative writing and about writers' conferences. Robert, did you do any of that?
Anderson: No. I went to the University of Miami to play baseball. And I was registered down there, and I got out because I wanted to play some more baseball, so I went to a junior college. I immediately took a loan check and headed to Mexico with my dad's Cadillac, because it wasn't going to happen for me.
I think writers just have to read and then write, write, write. I finished Boonville in a welfare hotel. I finally got serious and realized I wasn't good for anybody or myself unless I wrote at least six hours a day. I didn't have any money and finished it in about a year and a half. I got the first one out and I started getting better and tried to keep a regimen of exercise and other things. I think writing programs can be sort of dangerous from what I've seen and participated in. You can end up creating a kind of flavor, because you're vulnerable as a first writer if you haven't found your voice yet.
We're lucky enough, with our first novels, to feel like we already have a voice, but a lot of people don't. So you end up writing like your teacher, or like your teacher thinks you should write, or like the smartest kid in the class. You have to write for a grade and that's even worse than writing for your editor. When you have a class, you think, Oh god, I've got to have something new.
Flores: I was an athlete, playing professional baseball for two years. Through that I was able to get a scholarship to UC San Diego, where I decided to pursue writing. I worked with Victor Herndandez Cruz and Quincy Troupe – poets who were also working on memoirs. I needed some guidance. I went to the M.F.A. program at San Francisco State and I was totally disgusted by it. It was something that I felt was leading me in the wrong direction at first, because you write for the workshop, pleasing the teacher and wanting them to notice your work above everybody else's. But the teacher is being told to recognize everybody equally. So it's a contradiction that was happening inside the class, and the fact that I was one of three Latinos in the whole program, out of 200, was very frustrating for me. So I basically withdrew and worked with Jewel Gomez for about a year.
I had this semi-done manuscript by the time I was 25. I was only a year-and-a-half into my graduate degree and I already had a book contract, so I thought I was big. It was a dream come true at that point, but then four years later, the book barely came out. So in those four years, I learned a lot. It had nothing to do with the creative writing program. It had to do with being a writer and facing yourself, facing your real desires. Is that what you really want to do? Do you really want to spend four or five hours a day writing and being in that seated position? I gained 25 pounds being a writer.
Lane: In terms of making these people real, how do you as a first novelist approach character development?
Anderson: You think of your characters as real people, and you have to pull at the thread of humanity at all times. Part of the reason you're writing novels and are engaged in the artistic process, is to reflect humanity. In most cases, people are flawed, and they're neither here nor there exactly. In Boonville, there's a lot of that going on. There are less than likeable people, but you are trying to search for their humanity or what makes them sort of likeable, coming from a whole different divergence of classes and weird backgrounds.
Lane: Paul, one of your main characters, Alfredo, is self-hating. He shoots people who are coming over the border, but he himself is a Mexican. Creating and developing a self-hating character is a complex thing to do.
Flores: Yes. I'll give you an example. My wife and I live in Oakland now. We had to go to Tijuana to visit her family. We do Christmas Eve there and Christmas in San Diego. So we have to cross the border. And the lines across this Christmas after 9/11 were three hours long, and there were 1500 cars. We were in line and waiting to cross over into San Diego, and the guy who was inspecting us was a guy I knew from high school. He said, "Hey Paul! How you doing? Are you still playing baseball?" "No, I don't live here no more." He was like, "OK, so what you doing down here?" I said, "This is my wife. I married her, her family is from Tijuana." He asked me my citizenship; this is a guy I knew since I was 11 years old, so I started thinking, I hope I was really nice to this guy in high school – he's a Mexican guy and I know him.
Now, when we cross over into San Francisco from Oakland, you get to the line and it's got the portals just like on the border, and my wife starts looking for her green card. She said, "Oh, my God, I left my green card at home." I said, "We're just crossing into San Francisco." But the identification with that type of context lives inside her mind, and so the border is a psychological area, too. And that's what I was trying to get at through Alfredo. How does the border psychologically manifest itself, and how are people's identities influenced by the space around them?
Anderson: You never know what happens with your characters. You put them in motion, and then that's the fun part of writing, when they surprise you.
Lane: I've heard it both ways from established writers. I've heard, " I don't know where the character's going to take me," and I've also heard, "I plot the whole thing out, and I might not know how we're going to get there, but I know where we're going."
Lane: A lot of aspiring novelists don't know how the agent-publisher morass really works. Again, Tess, you had the dream story.
Holthe: Someone in my writing group had gone the previous year to the Maui Writers' Conference and he said, "Let's go this year as a group. It will be fun." I thought, this is just practice and maybe next year I'll have something together that I can really present. Three months before the conference, the book somehow came together so I wanted to see the agents. I signed up for about ten different ones at 40 dollars a pot. Eight people were interested and I sat down with one woman I really loved. I went home, cleaned up the book for about two weeks, and then sent it her. There was an email when I got to work on Monday saying, "I want to represent you." And I was screaming. She sent it out to 20 different publishers, and Random House printed it.
Lane: Did it happen that way for you, Paul?
Flores: No, I had really no guidance at all. That was one of the faults of this writing program. They don't know how to prepare you to be a professional writer; I didn't know how to get an agent. I didn't know that I needed a lawyer. I just took whatever first offer came. My idea, at age 23, was to come to San Francisco, write a book and then sell it. Well, I hadn't even written it, but I had sold it, at least for the meager money I was given. Nevertheless, I'm totally happy with the book. I think that, had I done it again, I would not have sold it so fast. I would have waited five years to finish the book so that I was really happy with it, instead of basically selling one story out of it that became a novel. We don't have any Latino agents out there.
I wanted to write a book for my community. These were people who were from the border, people who know what I'm talking about, yet have never seen it represented in any form except for the movie Traffic. I'm working with somebody who will help me find an agent, but I also do four other jobs. I'm still at that point where I don't know if I'm going to be a performer, or a writer.
Lane: Robert, with your middle name, you've got Norman Mailer to give you a blurb.
Anderson: I was really lucky. I was serious about writing; I had sent things out to people. None of the agents really got the sensibility of my book. The stuff they thought was too outrageous was all true. You get a little cynical. I met Norman Mailer, who was impressed with the novel, as was his assistant, so I asked them if they were interested in the novel once it was done. He said, "There are a stack of manuscripts in my desk, and it only gets taller. I don't read any of them. I'm an old man." After a year in the process of it floating around, they got me my agent. But eventually I sold the book to Howard Junker. We had a very nice conversation about how we were both trying to do something for the arts in California here, and we didn't want our visions subverted by LA or New York. We went to press, and he didn't help at all. It became a vanity press. I had to pay for my second printing. I'm a little bitter.
Lane: What do you think is the primary illusion that aspiring novelists should shed about the glamour of writing?
Flores: The issue that everyone is going to read your book is something that you should put out of your mind immediately. When you think of the novelist or the novel that comes out, you think of window displays, book tours and radio shows. I realized I had to do a lot of work on my own for the book, and that's because I signed with a small press.
Lane: Tess, any illusions?
Holthe: The "mixed reviews." My agent said, "That's a really good mixed review. We actually can pull a lot from that." It can be anything like, "It had too many characters," and you go home and start working on your book and think, I can't add another character! It gets in your head. I don't know if that was an illusion, but it was something I never considered. I just thought the reviews would come, and some would be bad and some would be good, and I wouldn't take that to heart. But then they all started interfering as soon as I started working on the second novel.
Lane: Robert, is there any advice you could give?
Anderson: If you're a writer, write. That's it. That's the end of the point. If you're truly a writer, in it for the long haul, get good, do it all day long, because there are some very fine writers out there, and if you want to be as good as Dos Passos, or Philip Roth, or Flannery O'Connor, you'd better get on the stick. I personally wasn't possessed by genius or anything, so I worked very very hard all the time, and I hope that at some point I might lay something on the altar that other people think is in that league.
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