Benjamin Percy was raised in central Oregon and now lives in Milwaukee, where he teaches writing at Marquette University. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Swink, The Greensboro Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Land-Grant College Review, Western Humanities Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Mississippi Review, The Florida Review, and Best American Short Stories 2006. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Idaho Review Prize for Fiction, and was among the winners of the 2002 Nelson Algren Award. Carnegie Mellon University Press recently published The Language of Elk, a story collection, and Graywolf Press will publish his second book of stories, Refresh, Refresh, in 2007.
What are you working on right now?
The Wilding, a novel. I guess you could call it literary horror, with a healthy dollop of the Western added for good measure. It uses one of the short stories, “The Woods,” from my forthcoming collection as the grain that grows into a boulder of a narrative. I don’t want to say too much about it—exposing it to the air might make it spoil—but here’s a sneak-peek at the thematic backdrop.
All throughout Central Oregon, a kind of Californication is going on, as sushi parlors and tanning salons and European car dealerships pop up overnight, as golf course communities sprawl into the surrounding desert like an oil slick. I’ve drawn off of this in much of my work, because it strikes me as just another form of the Industrialization seen in so many Western novels; only instead of railroad tracks hammered into the earth, we have fresh asphalt lacing together cul-de-sacs and ski lifts rising up mountains. In the novel, one of these resort communities will be built over the Black Canyon wilderness, territory once owned by the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, now sold to a local developer. This is the setting my characters inhabit.
I expect to finish it by March of next year, but who knows. My problem is, at any given moment, I’ve got five or six stories boiling inside my head. And I know, if I don’t write them as they rise to the surface, they’ll lose their buoyancy and sink, never to be seen again.
So I’ll work on the novel for three weeks—then I’ll get sidetracked and sprint out a story, and maybe another story still—before I get back to the marathon.
What’s the last book you read and admired?
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. For this reader, McCarthy is it, the greatest living author. He thrills me. He writes sentences that make me clench my fist with jealousy. He helps me understand the cruelty and generosity of the human spirit while opening up territories of my mind I never knew existed. Fifty years from now, one hundred years from now, without question, his voice will remain.
In The Road a nuclear holocaust has left the world an ashen wasteland. A father and son, “each the other’s world entire,” wander through the stark black burn of the earth where the “charred and limbless trunks of trees [stretch] away on every side” and “the blackened shapes of rock [stand] out of the shoals of ash.” So bleak and beautiful and terrifying. The best book I’ve read in years.
Oh, and I’ve just begun Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. The man has an ear like no other. He captures the swing and sway and snap of the Ozark tongue and makes it into a kind of vulgar music that makes you want to down a whiskey shooter and tap your feet to the beat.
Can you describe your workspace? What do you have on your desk at the moment?
I work on an antique library desk, passed down from my great-grandmother. Solid oak. There are no nails, the whole thing fitted together with slots and tongues and wooden bolts. And there are no drawers, so I’ve got piles of books and papers rising perilously from every corner. Here is an empty cereal bowl glazed with milk. And a pencil I broke in half, just because.
When I wrote, I used to face a window, but when I found myself distracted by dogs and cars and people and birds, I turned the desk around. Now I face a wall. The only talisman, a two-foot dragon carved from yellow jade; my father brought it back from China. Hanging above it, a framed piece of paper bearing a favorite quote by a favorite writer, Harry Crews: “You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live. That’s what I’ve discovered about writing. The world doesn’t want you to do a damn thing. If you wait till you got time to write a novel or time to write a story or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read--if you wait for the time, you’ll never do it. Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”
What’s your favorite recipe?
I’ve got a dry-rub for a steak that will knock you flat. For two twelve-ounce New York strips, mix together 3/4 tsp garlic salt, 1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/4 tsp pepper, 1/8 tsp cinnamon. Massage it into the meat. Heat the grill to 500. Sear the steak, maybe ten seconds on either side, cauterizing the meat, trapping the blood, so that in the end your steak will be as juicy as a pear. Then lower the temperature to 350 and cook maybe seven minutes before flipping. Then two minutes. Pop a beer. Pull out a knife. Prepare for a mouth orgasm.
Who did you hang out with in high school?
Weird people. Angry people. Smart people. The people who didn’t have straight teeth, who didn’t play football. I only had three or four honest-to-goodness buddies. One’s now a butcher in the Twin Cities. Another works for iTunes in London. Another for 20th Century Fox in Hollywood. We’ve come a long way from a hick town in Oregon.
We talk now and then, but really, have lost touch almost entirely. I was on friendly or hateful terms with everyone else, all of them acquaintances. This was as much their decision as mine; I can be rather grumpy and hard to tolerate. Not much has changed. I’ve got a few people I keep close to me, the rest at a distance.
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack. When I listen to it—I don’t care how corny this sounds—I can’t help but imagine I’m running through a moss-laden forest, dressed in buckskin and carrying a long-rifle.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
Whenever October rolls around, I get a terrible hankering for horror movies. In the last few weeks I’ve watched The Birds, The Hills Have Eyes, The Dead Zone, An American Werewolf in London, and Dracula. Most I had already seen; I like to revisit movies.
An American Werewolf in London—not to be mistaken for the shitty “sequel,” An American Werewolf in Paris—stands out, not only as a horror movie, but as a movie. In the directory’s commentary, John Landis talks about how the script confuses people. Is it comedy, or is it horror, people want to know, because people like to label things, and when they can’t put their finger on a movie or a book or a person or anything, anything at all, it makes them uncomfortable. An American Werewolf is neither fish nor fowl, and that’s what makes it so brilliant. You’re laughing out of one corner of your mouth and screaming out of the other. It keeps you off-balance and catches you unaware, like a quick-fisted boxer.
The writing is smart and the characters are real and the world is this world, only not quite. It’s a very literary approach to horror. When I think of some of my favorite writers—Jim Shepard, Tim O’Brien, Michael Chabon, and Larry McMurtry, for example—they manage to do exactly this: they use some of the devices and tropes of genre fiction within a realist’s world.
Anything coming out soon?
I’ve got a story—“The Bearded Lady Says Goodnight”—coming out in Swink in November or December, whenever they release their third issue. And another story—“The Caves in Oregon”—coming out in Glimmer Train sometime in 2007.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
I don’t feel guilty about enjoying any of them, but here are a handful of things people like to scold me about. Mountain Dew: I drink at least a can a day, sometimes two when I teach. Entertainment Tonight: I’m a shameless consumer of Hollywood gossip. Stephen King: he’s compulsively readable and a brilliant storyteller; The Gunslinger is the book that made me want to become a writer.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
In May, The Paris Review flew me out to give a reading at the New York Public Library. This was soon after I heard about the Best American inclusion and the Pushcart nod. I was in a ‘holy shit’ mindset at the time—I still am, really—feeling so unworthy and so grateful at once. The editors gave me a Paris Review T-shirt. To me, it represents all of the incredible things that have come tumbling down the chimney this past year. The label says 100% cotton but I swear there’s fairy dust woven into the fabric.
Stones or Beatles?
The Beatles are all about Coca-Cola and ice cream, and the Stones are all about vodka and heroin and leather pants. It really depends on my mood, but more often, the Stones will shout from my stereo. “Play with Fire” has such a visceral effect on me. It’s one of those songs I sometimes loop through five or six times before letting the next track play.
Boxers or briefs?
Boxer briefs. All of them black. I used to wear plain old boxers, but then one day I was at the gym, working the bench press, when my buddy came over and said, “I’m glad there aren’t any women and children present.”
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Heidi Battlecreek. If I ever write a bodice-ripping romance novel, that might make for a good pseudonym, eh?
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