Greg Downs: Author Interview by Nannette Croce

Like many writers these days, Greg Downs––whose short story collection, Spit Baths , won the Flannery O’Conner Award for Short Fiction––keeps a day job. In this case it’s Assistant Professor of History at City College of New York. Before that, he had a string of careers, including basketball coach, reporter, and high school English teacher, many of which he drew on for his stories. Prior to coming together as a collection, Greg’s stories appeared in Black Warrior Review, Glimmer Train, Meridian, The Greensboro Review, Sycamore Review, New Letters, and Witness. He has both an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania.

R&T: While it’s no longer unusual for writers to have another career, you've had several. How have these careers informed your writing?

Downs: None of it was planned; I wish I could say that I had some complex system for giving myself a range of experiences to draw upon, but in fact I was just living. Just trying to figure out what I was doing with my life, and how I could make use of the talents I had, and nurture my interests, and still keep a roof over my head. Now, I'm very grateful that I was able to learn a little bit about different kinds of lives and different types of work and workplaces, and I wish I had been forced to try out more lines of work before settling down.

It seems to me that many writers, including myself, draw first upon their individual history, in fictionalized and sometimes unrecognizable form, and then slowly start to draw inspiration from the rest of the world around them. My own personal and family history is interesting, but unfortunately it is more interesting to me than it is to you or to any other reader, so there's a danger in using it. I have an intimacy of knowledge, and a depth of feeling, that I don't have anywhere else, but I also have blind spots. There is something freeing and also terrifying about learning to draw material from other places in your life, from people on the periphery of your life.

R&T: Was any one career more influential than the others?

Downs: As a junior high school teacher, you live inside of an opera. The drama dial goes up to 11, sometimes among the parents and teachers as much as among the students. That is exhausting, but it's an incredible anthropological education. You learn to see around the edges of people, to see the comedy in tragedies and the tragedy in some comedies. You see into so many people's lives. Too many people, often. I remember getting home and going into my room and closing the door, so my roommates wouldn't touch me or talk to me. The reservoir of stories in my brain was filled to the top and spilling over. It's a great, exhausting, draining, exhilarating experience.

Unless you write about teenagers, though, the problem becomes translating those lusts and anxieties and joys into the often more muted terms of adulthood. I'm not sure I have figured that out. And adults are much more adept at hiding the operatic nature of their lives, at least most of them.

R&T: When did you start writing fiction?

Downs: I wrote stories casually in high school and more than casually in college, and I planned to keep writing after college. But then I didn't, for the first year and a half. I was busy and distracted and I had the typical 22-year-old's problem of too many goals and too little discipline. When I was 23, though, I decided that it was now or never, so I quit my job, moved 750 miles away, signed up for a class, and set a writing schedule. Two years later I was at Iowa in the Writers' Workshop.

R&T: You also lived in a variety of places––Kentucky, Tennessee, Hawaii––in your youth, and then cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and now New York, as an adult. Many young writers would choose the urban settings for their work, but your rural past seems to play more of a roll in your writing. Why do you think that is?

Downs: I always thought the life I saw as a child, both in the South and in Hawaii, was more interesting than the life I see around me now in the big cities of the country. Not more pleasant; I do, after all, choose to live in cities. I love cafes and specialty bookstores and city parks and all of those things. But there is, even in New York, a certain sameness about big-city life. The forces that make city life interesting are also the ones that make cities rich, and one of the things I learned as an historian is that big infusions of capital, which is after all what makes Boston and Chicago and New York go, has predictable effects. New York is different because its size lends itself to an unusual degree of specialization––cafes that only serve peanut butter, for example––but in the big picture there is a sameness about the lifestyles of upper-middle class educated, urban people.

The old world, the one that is getting changed more slowly, if at all, by the big money power, was stranger and more interesting. It, too, was a product of the money power, but a different stage of it, an older moment of rural capitalism, when people developed a family life around growing cash crops on medium-sized farms. That moment has passed, but the ways of living haven't, or haven't fully, and the conflict between those folkways and the changing world around them is to me one of the really interesting topics for fiction. It leads to stories; it delivers news to the people in the provinces (who in this case are people in the province of the city).

But Philadelphia, unlike Chicago or Boston or New York, does feel to me as if it still contains those same types of stories, as if it were "southern," in the way I think of that term, not as geography but as a legacy of defeat and its consequent pleasures.

In Philly, we lived on a rowhouse block alongside three different siblings from the same family, with more cousins a block or two away. There were truly eccentric local specialties and favorites—cheese steak eggrolls at the Chinese takeout, homemade buffalo sauce at the Korean-run steak shop. People belonged to the neighborhood. All of these things are wonderful and sometimes not-so wonderful, but they are also the flowers of defeat, although beautiful ones. Places are "homey" or neighborly because people didn't move out or move in, because the economy didn't make them richer or encourage outsiders to come in, because the fear of things getting worse draws people together in a shared pessimism. That was true of the South I grew up in, and the eclipse of cotton and the failure to develop other industries made the South what it was from the 1860s until the 1970s or 1980s.

Now, the South isn't the South, at least the stretch from Nashville to Charlotte to Atlanta, not because northerners have moved in but because people are flush with money, which makes them like people everywhere else who are flush with money. But maybe the South is going to be in the places that are still being left behind. Buffalo or Rochester or Detroit, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if those places produce the best fiction of the next 20-30 years, just as the South produced the best American fiction of 1920-1990. Victory makes you cheer; defeat makes you think.

R&T: "Black Pork" and "Freedom Rides" involve interaction between black and white characters. What inspired those stories? Did you see them as a comment on modern day race relations?

Downs: I don't know if they are a comment or not. They are an effort to tell a story, not to teach a lesson or advance a thesis. Black people and white people, especially in the South, grow up with each other. Not in a hold-hands-and-sing-along kind of way, but nevertheless in knowledge of each other. That doesn't necessarily seem true in other parts of the country, even where blacks and whites live close by. Watching those relationships--naive childhood friendships--change over time, deepen and draw apart, is one of the first ways we learn the hard fact that we aren't free agents in life; the world shapes us. We struggle against it, but we aren't usually able to throw off the chains. We live in worlds not of our own making, and we live with the consequences of it, if we are honest, and we recognize the limits and the hypocrisy of thinking that are internally pure thoughts make a bit of difference.

What was interesting about my experiences as a child is the way that typical clashes of children and parents become freighted down with much broader and more profound philosophical questions about how life works, about the nature of what people owe to each other. My family had the typical rural family's combination of neighborliness and suspicion, of fear of scarcity and a consequent disdain for lots of consumer goods. I had, in retrospect, a very typical attachment to privacy and to consumer goods, and fairly little fear of scarcity, even though we were poor for part of my childhood, so poor in fact that for one fairly brief stretch we did not have a refrigerator and ate food we kept in an ice cooler…. And what really makes it interesting is that, in retrospect, it is clear to me that I was arguing the wrong side, that I was coming from a pleasurable but shallow culture and was fighting against something much more interesting and profound, if also restrictive. That friction between my desires and my beliefs is what I like to write about. Writing as if one's own desires were in and of themselves virtuous or aesthetically pleasing--which is what I see in a lot of fiction—is not only dull but probably immoral.

R&T: In "Black Pork" you chose to use the offensive slang word for black people that many, these days, will not tolerate. Did you wrestle with that or did it seem natural in the context? Did you have any concerns about whether the story would be publishable?

Downs: In fact, "Black Pork" is a difficult, disturbing story, and in fact a few good literary magazines did say it was too raw and painful for them. They wanted to look away, which is a normal human reaction, and one I share. But the good folks at storySouth did publish it, lovingly, and I appreciate their courage.

I didn't write it in hopes of getting it into a certain magazine, though. I wrote it because I felt that these characters could tell a story I wanted to tell. A true story, even though none of the particulars are literally true.

So I didn't worry about the word. It reflected the lives under observation; to hide that word, to give those characters the etiquette of other people--of urban, educated people--would be to tell a grievous lie.

One of my teachers, James A. McPherson, used to say that that particular word hits so hard because we make a taboo out of it. By drawing a fence around it, we clad it in mystery, instead of exposing it to the world. Repressing the word, and feeling proud of ourselves for doing so, doesn't resolve any problems of the world, and it certainly doesn't eliminate racism or help us to understand it; it is a distraction.

Now, do I use the word in daily speech? I do not. But my obligation as a writer is to show the world as it is… [a]nd my obligation is to tell the truth about myself enough to know that I can imagine being the person who would use that word in the complex, unforgivable, understandable way that Big Pop uses it in the story.

R&T: Did winning the Flannery O’Connor award make it easier or harder for you to continue writing? Do you experience writer's block?

Downs: Writing isn't ever that easy. In some ways, the book resolves some of the doubts you have about whether you will ever write a finished, published book. In some ways, it can make you anxious about living up to it, or not just repeating it.

I really believe in the power of bad first drafts. Writing starts when I sit down and pick up my Sarasa pen and lay my clipboard on my lap. I might have coffee; I might have a book nearby so I can take a quick "reading break" for inspiration. But the act of writing is literally the act of writing. It is a muscular exercise, and the muscle is my hand. I really try to think of it that way. If I can get writing, the work of my hand stimulates my brain, not vice versa, and I find my ideas getting clearer and stronger. When I have writer's block, it's because I have forgotten this, and because I let my brain get in the way of my hand.

R&T: You teach and research history, and historical events play a roll in some of your writing like "Ain't I a King, Too?" where a man is mistaken for Huey Long shortly after his assassination.

Downs: I became obsessed with Huey Long many, many years ago, when I was in 8th grade. I was always drawn to wild, brilliant, difficult, troubled political characters from history, and Long more than anyone. He was…an artist in that he wanted to be simultaneously destructive and creative. He wasn't an accumulator; he was a maker. Very few politicians are artists, of good quality or bad. It is hard to think of any major politician now who is an artist…. They are simultaneously too good and too bad to be the kind of artist I am talking about. Huey Long was good and bad; he was like many artists almost comically overdrawn. He had every good and bad quality a person could have. He did not want you to like him; he wanted to dominate you and also to be you.

Regular politicians bored me, but someone like Long or, less pleasantly, someone like Tom Watson or Joe McCarthy fascinated me. Long was doubly special because I agreed with his politics, or at least at the time, and because he died for his art, on the Capitol steps.

I wanted to be him, and it took me a long time to understand that the way I could be that kind of person was not through politics but through writing. It was the artistry, the stretching of the soul into the good and the bad, the bitter truthfulness, that I admired, and those aren't things you find in practical politics. An artist doesn't have to kiss ass and she doesn't have to get her ass kissed; that is one of the few things that you can honestly say about the profession and about very few other professions. It is what keeps an artist honest.

I always wanted to write a Huey Long story, and after I finished "Ain't I A King, Too?" many people asked if I was going to turn it into a novel, but I didn't have any interest in that. By that time, there were other stories I wanted to tell.

R&T: How did you manage to write a short story collection while, I assume, you were also working on your dissertation?

Downs: Not sleeping! No, seriously, by dividing time. I write fiction in the morning, history in the afternoon. I have a very understanding wife. I had been working on some of the stories for several years. I also have a year-old daughter, so that helps train you to avoid sleep. Actually I find the different types of work help recharge me. I don't have time to stew around or get bored. My unconscious mind is thinking about fiction while I'm reading history and vice versa.

R&T: Is there a historical novel in your future?

Downs: I am finishing up a novel set in the 1930s, so I guess that is historical, but it's not a costume drama. It's historical in the way that a lot of literary novels are historical. I think most really good literary novelists cared about the past because they understood that by looking backward they could separate the wheat from the chaff, all the distractions that circulate around us from the truly important things. Does that make them historical novelists? I don't know. Is Edward Jones an historical novelist? Was Tolstoy? If they count, then yes that's the kind of novelist I want to be. But Arthurian legends and bodices and scabbards, that's for somebody with different interests than mine.

R&T: What is the writing life to you? Could you imagine a time when you would not want to write fiction?

Downs: I remember reading The Sportswriter by Richard Ford and being shocked that such a committed writer would write so lovingly about someone who gave up on a writing life, in that character's case after publishing a book of short stories. Now, I think, I have a better understanding of why Ford would make that choice. That person--the one who walks away--is a writer's twin…[T]he life without writing is the life just the other side of the doorway every morning. So in a way there's nothing more imaginable, and more interesting and enervating and painful than imagining it. It presumably comes from the same place that leads Ford--a longtime married man--to write about a man who is divorced. There are some lives that are so near at hand that you can really see them vividly; they are the life you could choose at any moment but choose not to.

That friction between the known and the unknown, between the real and the fantastic, is really productive. I can't picture myself ever putting down the pen, but I can imagine the life I would lead if I did make that choice.

R&T: Many of our readers are also writers. What advice do you have for writers just starting out?

Downs: Write, whether it is good or bad. Read, but only if it is good. Find people who also write and who will read your work honesty and seriously and tell you the truth. Be good to those people, even when their criticism makes you want to hit them over the head with a baseball bat. Keep writing. Keep reading. Remember why you write. If all I get out of it is a lifetime of thinking better thoughts, of inching toward an understanding of the world through the daily act of writing and reading, then isn't that enough? Isn't everything else just gravy? A book, an award, the chance to talk to people who have actually read my work for pleasure, all of that is wonderful, but the real reward of writing is the process, the kind of person that the process makes you.

Read Nannette Croce's review of Spit Baths.

You will find more about Greg Downs and his writing on his website.

Nannette Croce is Co-Managing Editor at The Rose & Thorn. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including The Rose & Thorn and The Philadelphia Inquirer. For samples of her work visit her website and her Native American & Western History Books Blog.

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