Janet Rater (JR): I’d like to welcome all of you here this evening to our Conversations with Books.

I feel real honored and I’m very glad to welcome you to our June session of Conversations with Books. We are pleased to have with us this evening Clark Blaise, a novelist, a short story writer, an essayist, and also a former Director of the International Writers’ Workshop.  I’m sure many of you are familiar with that. He was born in South Dakota.  He is French Canadian by descent, he was educated at Denison University, Harvard, and also of course at the University of Iowa. He is going to be leaving Iowa very shortly, as a matter of fact at six a.m. tomorrow morning and is going to be teaching at Berkeley. And his wife is out there now.  He’s been working all day in the process of getting his many belongings all packed up and ready to go.

Our second guest this evening is Nicholas Johnson.  He is Professor of Law down at the University of Iowa Law School, and also he was on the Commission of the FCC.  And many people say he was Chair. Do you know why they say that?  Because he did most of the writing for that Commission.

Nicholas Johnson (NJ): Actually it was most of the writing against that Commission; seven years of dissenting opinions.

JR: He’s also running for the Iowa City School Board, so we wish him luck in that.  I think they’d be lucky to have him down in Iowa City on that Board.

So we’re going to give a warm welcome then as they begin their discussion on I Had a Father: A Post Modern Autobiography.

NJ: Thank you, Janet.

Well, Clark and I talked about beginning this as sort of a conversation. Then I will fade into the woodwork as he does some readings later on.

And I thought I would at least survey some possible topics that you might want to ask questions about, and that I want to ask questions about, some of which he and I have already talked about at one time or another.

We met in April, I believe it was, on an airplane; happened to be sitting next to each other.  I’d heard of him, of course, and not only that, but had extolled his virtues as a part of my 45-second stand-up routine that I’m compelled to do on the East and West Coasts of North America when asked the question, "Iowa, Nick.  Why would you want to be in Iowa?"  And then I launch into all my Iowa brags, and Clark was always well up on that list.  But I’d not in fact met him, nor had I, I’m really embarrassed to confess, read of his great works.

And after a very stimulating conversation on the plane when we discussed the similarities and differences of our two fathers, I found in inter-campus mail the next morning an autographed book, this very book here.  And I was so taken by this fellow that I had met on the plane that I dropped everything and did nothing that morning but read the book and send him off an e-mail that morning about how wonderful it was.

I have been intimidated ever since at the prospect of ever writing myself, notwithstanding the inscription to me which was, "Now it’s time for you to get on with your own."  And my wife, Mary Vasey, who teaches at Metro High School here in Cedar Rapids, got me into a writing program this summer in Iowa City. But I’m having difficulty doing the kinds of things that Clark does with such seeming ease, although we’ll pursue with him how much ease there is in that.

I’m just going to survey, first of all, kind of a potential agenda of  topics we might talk about.

One, and the most obvious I suppose, is the content of the book, the story of his life, the insights about his father, the places where he lived, the things that are in this book that many of you, if not all of you, have read.

A second category would be to talk about the life of a writer; how he first got interested, how does he go about writing every day, what advice would he have to young aspiring writers with regard to the economics of the life of a writer, a short story writer, a novelist.

A third would be the structure of this book because you may have been taken, as I was, by the brilliance of his ability to weave from description of person to place to personal insight.  Was this something that just comes out when he sits down with his word processor or his pen and paper, as it may be, or is this something he really very carefully outlined from the beginning and knew where he was going with that?

Another is, as you know from the book, he sometimes was in as many as three schools in the course of one school year, moving from town to town with this father and mother of his. I thought it might be interesting, particularly because he is now writing a piece that is to some degree related to this, it might be interesting to hear his comments about the impact that he believes there is on a child who goes through this kind of moving from school to school, and some of the other experiences he had as a young person in school.

Then there are a cluster of issues that have to do with globalization.  As Janet has said, he was the Director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, which has involved now some 112 countries and 1100 writers from all around the world who come here to Eastern Iowa and so enrich our state.  So he’s had that experience and the travel that has necessarily gone with that.  He has traveled the world to find and talk to these people and help fund the program, and so forth. He is also the husband in an inter-cultural marriage, and some of you may have had the experience of trying to maintain a relationship with someone in another country or of a different culture. And he certainly has a wealth of observations about that that might be interesting to us.

And finally, in the globalization domain, is the matter of globalization in general. My last plane ride, the day before yesterday, from Washington to Chicago, I was sitting next to the Commander of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station who said that in his judgment the number one national defense concern that he had was the general ignorance of the American people about what is going on around the world.  The very first thing they have to teach these 50,000 new entrants into the Navy is basic geography, even to know where the oceans are and what the countries are.  And so here’s a man who certainly knows where the oceans are and what the countries are, and I thought that Clark might have some observations on that as well.

Now, we can either begin to go through these topics now, or we can open it up to questions that you may have in one or another of these areas, or other subjects that may be on your mind.

We might even be courteous enough to let Clark have an opening statement of his own rather than sit here and listen to an old law professor.

Clark Blaise (CB): Thank you Nick.  You were a Commissioner and I was only a Director.  So I yield to your expertise.

All of those topics are touched very much on what I wrote and the way I wrote it of  I Had a Father.  I stress, first of all, it’s not my only book, it’s one of about eleven books. So it’s not necessarily the way I write.

But it was the way I was writing in 1992 under the influence of this job at Iowa, for example, which was putting me, as I think I said in some parts of the book, in New Zealand one day and Argentina the next and Iowa City the third, and then off  to Finland or something the next.  It was the kind of a job that stretched me, but also stretched any concept I had of a coherent and stable self, of a coherent and stable world, you know, that I was the comet making a kind of movement between these planets, these fixed planets. I would land in Argentina and everyone there was Argentine and Spanish speaking. Everyone was very much at home in Argentina. I wasn’t.  Then I’d move to New Zealand or Australia, and similarly I was always having to read the literature, meet the people, and quickly try to at least get one foot on the ground.  And listen to the writers especially, and talk to the various writers, and then, of course, try to raise money for the IWP.

All of that was part of my job, which would have been the part of anyone’s job who was in that position, but as a writer it adds a particular kind of flavor to what it is you’re writing. It really does make you ask,  "Who are you, where did you come from?" Because that’s the first thing you’re asked, "Where are you from?" I say, "Well, I was born -- not in South Dakota but in North Dakota, you are trying to claim me a little too close to Iowa -- I was born in North Dakota, but I’m not from North Dakota, my parents wanted me to be born in the U.S. in 1940 because Canada was at war and the U.S. wasn’t and there was a lot of fear in 1940 that Britain would fall under the Battle of Britain."

Britain was at that moment very, very tenuously free.  Parts of Britain were already occupied by the Nazis. The Channel Islands, Newfoundland, the big island off  the coast of Canada was a British Colony, it was not a part of Canada at that time. It would become German. The two little French islands off  Newfoundland, which are French dependencies, would become German with the fall of  France. Quebec, the big buffer between all that was in fact quite sympathetic to the Nazis, just as Spain and Ireland and Portugal were -- even though they were neutral. Quebec refused to fight a so-called English war so that the Canadian draft was suspended so far as Quebec was concerned. Very few French Canadians fought in World War II.  You simply didn’t do it. Even Pierre Trudeau, who became the Prime Minister of Canada later, said "I regret that I was part of that world view, that I, too, sat out the war."  My father would never have fought in that war, it was an English war. The perception in Quebec was that it was an English war and you had a number of pro-fascist groups in Quebec that were supporting some sort of idea of a Catholic agricultural, Catholic ruralism, very right wing, very authoritarian. Unions were illegal. Protestants were virtually illegal. Jews were not allowed to vote. I mean it was a real right wing state, Quebec. So that meant that Ontario, the Ottawa River in a sense the dividing line between Ontario and Quebec, was going to be the frontline of the war if you were a Canadian nationalist as my mother was. And so they thought the best thing to do was to have me born at least in the country that would never go to war, the U.S. The U.S. was out for another two years.  So I was born in Fargo.

NJ: No relation to the movie?

CB: None, whatsoever.

I do have a thing, as you will recall if you’ve read this book, about that moment that I in fact consider to be almost germane or central to my life. And that is that moment in New Delhi in 1977 when I was attending a party. I was at a Canadian agricultural attaché’s party. He was a friend of my family from Winnipeg. And I met a man, an older man. He said, "Actually I‘m an American. I feel guilty being at a Canadian party, but I’m almost a Canadian because I’m from North Dakota."

And I said "Well, hey, I’m almost an American. I was born in North Dakota, too. I was a Canadian citizen at that time."  And he said, "Well what hospital?" And I mentioned the hospital. "What doctor?" And I mentioned the doctor. And he said, "Would you like to meet the woman who delivered you?"  And that was his wife.

And I’ve thought many times that in 1977 I was 37 years old. And if you look as your life as a kind of rocket going off and falling down to earth in a kind of parabola shape that is probably the top, that was probably it.  Double 37 you get 74, a healthy life. That probably I would not succeed in going further out than that. I had a mystical sense that something was calling me back to my origins -- what more than the woman who actually held me -- I mean something was calling me back to my origins at that moment, and it was a mystical thing to me.

And mysticism lies not central to my concerns, but it’s there, it’s another organizing principle in my work, coincidence and the various kinds of patterns that begin to emerge in your life.  Most of you have lived long enough to have seen the patterns. You are not surprised by anything anymore. When I was 37 I could still be surprised. I was astonished by meeting this woman. Now I say "Of course" that I expect that the world is growing denser and denser and denser with coincidence.  Patterns are coming closer and closer, more and more finer textured. So by the end the bright little scheme of interrelated activities in my life will probably be able to be held in one hand.  Everyone will be there. Everyone I ever contacted will all know one another, and they will all sort of make their final appearance.

NJ: Do you know the play Six Degrees of Separation?

CB: Yes, of course.

NJ: That’s sort of the theme there; that if you go far enough you are connected to everybody one way or another.

CB: Yes, that’s one thing. Of course, we are connected. They’ve had all those DNA tests to show that we are all related.

NJ: Now you talk about both mysticism and coincidence. Coincidence suggests something that doesn’t have any particular force or reason behind it. Do you think there is some hand that is guiding your life into these events or do you think that they really are random? Are you agnostic on this?

CB: No, I think that coincidence is coincidental.  That is, that there probably is not coincidence, if you sit down and do the mathematics of it, there is a high degree of probability that you would be in a particular place at a particular time meeting a particular kind of person being responsive to, giving the right signals, the right body language, the right eye contact, to where you will somehow make contact with someone who is significant to you. Even though you don’t know it. And that person will in fact read you in the same way.

But I think the mysticism part of it goes back to classic mysticism. That is, where the mystical vision is that the world is inside you. It’s not that you are being directed as a puppet by some higher force. It’s rather the unification of whatever is inside you with the sense of whatever is outside you. That’s what mysticism is usually about. You look at a stone, or you look at a flower, or you look at a bird on the wing, and suddenly you see all. Everything makes sense in that one moment. Now that’s the mystical moment that I’m talking about.

Whatever set of autobiographical peculiarities that led me from North Dakota to Quebec to Florida to Pittsburgh, you know, and gave me the life that I have, and then marrying an Indian woman and going and living in India for a long time, living in Europe a long time.  All of those particular things are special to me and to no one else. But they all radiate in patterns to people who’ve never left a small town or small city or a region or a country.

I’ve talked with hundreds of writers, of course, who specialize in coincidence about this, and, you know, people come from every corner of the world. This is a common experience I think that we all have. I think, in fact, a fiction writer cannot write fiction unless he believes in these things.  That first of all you have to have the arrogance to believe that if I set down my experiences in a book that are only peculiar to me, you are going to be interested. What arrogance that is. What chutzpah that is. How can anyone believe that my life is going to relate to them in any way? You have to have some degree of confidence, some degree of luck, some degree of arrogance that is going to make the bridge.

I said as an autobiography at the beginning of that book that autobiography is the triumph of consciousness over experience. And I think that’s what I was trying to do in I Had a Father, was to elevate not the experiences I’ve had, but the consciousness behind the experience. So that I’ve tried to say, "OK, I may have been in New Zealand and Australia and Argentina in one week and maybe you haven’t. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is the connections I can draw from it, or the consciousness that it brings to me, so that fiction, however, is the elevation, it seems to me, of experience over consciousness.  I mean if the character is too conscious it’s going to ruin it as fiction. I mean if he already knows if he can draw a parallel or some sort of a conclusion from everything, then he’s a boring character.

NJ: But a lot of what connects with a reader, at least with me, is just the sheer joy of reading it, your way with words, your eye, the things you’ve observed that you comment upon, that you relate one to another. That’s another aspect of this book that to me at least stands apart from the particular story you’re telling.  Now maybe that’s because, since Mary now has me in this class where I’m supposed to be writing description which I’m having great difficulty with, that I’m so intimidated by your capacity to do that. But I just think that’s a joyful experience, and isn’t that a part of what writing’s about?

CB: Yeah, the pleasure of it is certainly there.

But I’m aware, just as I get older, that I’ve lost an awful lot of the sheer observational talent, let’s say, that I once had.  When I started writing in my early twenties, I was under the beat, under the throb if you wish, of Faulkner.  He was my writer because I was writing about the Deep South of my childhood. And I could smell it, I could hear it; those voices, those characters, those defective people that were part of my childhood experience in rural north Florida -- which is not anything to do with the Florida that people visit, I mean it’s still not visited except by fires these days -- that that world spoke to me in kind of clotted words like Faulkner’s. It was thick in my blood, and I could write like Faulkner in my youth, in my childhood.  I can’t do that anymore.

A long time ago when I lived in India in the early 70's I was writing a book with my wife called Days and Nights in Calcutta which I didn’t bring here. Days and Nights in Calcutta is about living for a year in the joint family of Calcutta, my wife’s family, and being responsible as I told it to myself, being responsible for the outsider’s view, that I was going to give an outsider a sense of what it’s like to live in Calcutta and my wife is going to give her side which is like what it’s like returning into the family.  So she had access to things that I didn’t have, and presumably I had access to things she didn’t have.

And it was at that time, getting to know a great Indian filmmaker -- any number of great films -- to me he was the greatest single man I’ve ever met in my life, and I can get into that later if you want. It was getting to know Rai, and seeing him as the archetype of the artist in society, not just the Third World Artist, but the artist -- to him wherever he was was the First World. He may be living in Calcutta, but he was playing Mozart on the piano, and he was reading French and German and English, and he was doing art work, and making great movies. But seeing how he as an artist worked in the world, and how he was a man of total lucidity. In other words there was light, there was lucidness that he aspired to. He did not want to get involved in tortured and sensuous things. You know it’s very easy to do that in India. I mean the world of India is just omnipresent, it’s just in your face the whole time, you can’t escape it. But he gave you a measured distance and very uncluttered vision of India. And it was at that time I saw that lucidity – it’s been now my burden for 25 years -- that lucidity and consciousness was the thing I wanted to write about, not the tortured and jumbled life that I had had. And that was one big turning point in my life. I owe that to Rai.

NJ: You say, maybe it’s just at the beginning of the epilogue, you had given up with this book in despair for three years, and then you came back to it and finished it.  What was the despair, what was the problem, and what brought you back to it?

CB: Well, a part of it is the sheer idiocy of the publishing world. I mean we could get into that.

I was asked to write an autobiography by an editor that I admired very much, kind of a legendary old drunk of an editor. And I started writing it for him. And he had been an old hockey player. He was the only American hockey player in the NHL in the early 1940s. And then he was fired for being an old drunk, reprobate that he was. He was fired.

And that company assigned me to someone from the office, a woman who knew nothing about Canada, knew nothing about hockey, knew nothing about French Canadians, and who was pregnant and couldn’t even come into the office. She was, you know, sitting at home to protect her fetus. And she said, "Tell me, what are some of the things you’ve written?" This was like starting all over again, after I’d already turned in 50 or 60 pages and was really on it. So it took another year and a half for my agent to break that contract and get me out of that and get me into a new house and a new editor that we mutually approved of.

So that was one part of the system.

The other thing was that the 80's in general, the late 80's, were not a good time for me.  I was writing constantly and not publishing at all. The stories were not falling into print. And I was losing confidence in myself.  The idea of writing about my father is something I had done briefly in this book Resident Alien, eight years earlier and I thought I had exhausted it, there was nothing more I wanted to say about it. And I was so involved in this IWP, so involved in the Iowa job, that that’s what I wanted to write about. I didn’t see how it had anything to do with my father, how it had anything to do with my autobiography. So wedding the two became difficult, something I wanted to do. And it took me awhile to find a voice for it.

NJ: I’d like you to say a little more about the International Writing Program, what you think the benefits are for Iowa, for the University, for the writers who are brought here.  How would you go about explaining it if you were subjected to a management information reporting system with the new fourteen-year-old MBA’s from Harvard who seem to be running everything?

CB: I left that.

NJ: How would you document the success? How would you know whether the money put into this was accomplishing what it was set out to accomplish or not?

CB: First, I should just say it was founded by Paul Engle, Cedar Rapidian, in 1967. This was after he left the Writer’s Workshop he started the International. He and his wife started the IWP.

And I would not have given it much of a chance, I think, if I were thinking of it. I was living in Montreal then and I didn’t think about it.  If I had thought about it, it looked incredibly idealistic. That you are going to bring established authors.

The Writers’ Workshop you know brings infant writers, that is, talented, very talented youngsters, generally, who have not published yet, and who are hoping to learn in two years all of the techniques and all that is going to carry them. That’s what I did. That’s why I left Harvard to come to Iowa and that’s how I met my wife.

NJ: The Writers Workshop.

CB: The Writers’ Workshop. There was no IWP then. We were very, very thankful for it.

But the idea of bringing established authors, that is, people who are in their, from 70's down to late 20's, who have published, in some cases, a hundred books, but in most cases at least five or six, and who have won national prizes in their own country, and who are writing in languages not English, and to bring them to Iowa -- not New York, not Los Angeles -- bring them to Iowa, and put them in a dormitory, cinder block eight floor dormitory, in which they share a kitchen and a bathroom, and can’t smoke or drink, and have to observe quiet and decorum in general, is doomed to failure one might think.

And yet, for the very reasons that I have mentioned it has been a success. Because it’s Iowa it’s been a success.  They come here because this is an America that no one from their country has ever seen. Everyone in reasonably affluent countries has gone to New York or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington; no one has ever gone to Iowa.  No one would choose to go to Iowa frankly. But this is a city they soon learn that the bank throws a reception for them -- what writer has ever been welcomed at a bank, you know?  First National Bank throws this wonderful reception.

This is a town that writing built. It has the bookstore that gives them all sorts of freebies, such as Prairie Lights, and there are more writers coming through, more writers per square inch than probably anywhere outside of Calcutta in my experience.  It’s an incredible collection of people.  And writing did make in many ways Iowa City and the University, and the town is aware of that, and the town shows a great deal of respect, the people show a great deal of respect for the IWP writer.  Again, very few writers are accustomed to respect frankly, maybe Nobel Prize winners get it but most writers toil in oblivion.  So they know that when they give a reading there’s going to be an audience. They know when they give a talk there’s going to be an audience, and it’s going to be a well informed audience.  These are things they’ve never had.

They don’t live munificently. We give them $35 a day while they are in Iowa for those three months,  but they find that that’s more than enough. They’re amused at that because they remember going to New York and spending $500 on a weekend, and suddenly they are told $35 a day, they feel they are going to be you know, frying hotdogs in the park or something, but they very quickly adjust.  And they find that the community of writers who are all living on the same floor, 35 writers from 35 languages, or at least ten languages or 15 languages, are all living together, and they’re in it together, they’re in Iowa City together.

And they start making translation projects, they translate each other’s work. You have beyond our attempts to translate their work you have Albanians translating Hebrew, and you have Poles translating Africans, you have all sorts of other strange things going on that are based purely on personal affinities.

So there is a lot of stuff that happens and I’m merely, was merely, the remote director.  I get to know them very well, I introduce them at talks and at their readings, and I’m on panels with them, I do interviews with them, but I can’t control their daily or nightly life, of course, so its a matter of setting a tone and hoping that they are all writers such as yourself. Writers universally, no matter what their background, have the same love of mischief, they enjoy the same kinds of humor, they have generally the same kind of skepticisms about the world and about authority. They are a brotherhood, a sisterhood, that’s universal though it takes different forms. Muslims are going to take different forms from Buddhists, different forms from Jews or Christians. French is going to be different from English, Polish is going to be different. There are enmities that exist between countries that you can’t overcome in some cases, thinking particularly Israelis and their neighbors, has nearly always failed.

NJ: Well, I have a lot more questions here and would be happy to keep going.  Normally when I begin to speak it takes a semester for me to stop. But I thought this might be -- we checked, it’s been going about 45 minutes -- maybe we’ve piqued some curiosity, some questions on your part.

Yes sir, maybe you’d identify yourself, unless you wish to be anonymous.

Q from floor: I noticed you move around a lot, you mentioned your childhood where your father moved around a lot.  I also noticed in your writing, a break in the thread of your writing, you would go on, you take large gaps and write about something else, and then you’d pick up on your thread. It seemed like there was something in this continuity in life that carried on in your writing. Do you do that in other books that you have written, or just this book and are you finally settling down in one place?

The second question is related to racism in Canada.  I consider Canada as inviting emigrants from all over the world and am surprised to see racism in Canada, particularly Toronto.

CB: And Vancouver.

OK, as to the first question I figure you rightly picked up the thread. I was like a kitten with a ball of wire, you know I was going like that. ball of thread.  I was trying to make the form of the book imitate the sputtering of my own consciousness and the ways in which it comes to self- knowledge.  It does follow an associative linkage, so that I am associating memory and ongoing activity and trying to make sense of the chaos that was thrust upon me.  I had a chaotic life up to a certain age.  And I thought I had achieved release from that chaos. I thought that I had taken control of that chaos once I left home. But I realized as I was writing this book that in fact, no, I had probably had more moves since marriage, I’ve been married 35 years, more chaos since I’ve probably imposed on my family than I had as a child.

In other words the persistence has gone on and that was a sobering notion; that in fact I still thrive on taking my seat in an airplane and sitting down and waiting for the next chapter, knowing that I’m going to be a certain number of hours without a telephone that can reach me, without any expectations, without having to talk to the guy next to me or anything else like that, it’s going to be restful and it’s going to end up in a new place without any responsibilities on my part.  I may have to learn a few words to get around.  That I realize was a kind of thrill.

So I was trying to give both the pain and the confusion and the chaos a free rein in that book, as well as the growing sense that there is something inside me that is feeding on it or demanding it or wanting more of it or to try to understand it.  Where does it come from, this-- I called it at one time border consciousness -- where does this border consciousness come from where you are constantly if you are on one side of the border you want to be on the other; if you are on the other side of the border you are a defender of the other side? That I was more American than the Canadians, I was more Canadian than the Americans, more English than the French, more French than the English.  I was all of these things at various times in my life. I think a lot of it had to do with the moving at a very tender age.

I don’t mean tender, at a sensitive adolescent boy’s age from about the time I was ten to the time I was thirteen was when this reached a crescendo of chaos, just at the time your hormones are kicking in, just at the time when all of your adolescent confusions are starting to hit. And that was the time starting in central Florida, and moving through Winnipeg and back, that ended in the Cincinnati ghetto. I was a 12 year old fat, white boy in a ghetto school.  And not only was I attacked frequently but I was assaulted; nearly died from an attack, and then I was beaten by the teacher.

Suddenly, all of this, I was put into Jewish schools at that time because that was the only way you could be protected. The only white community around were Jews. So my mother put me into a Torah.  So I was studying my letters for my bar mitzvah, for my virtual bar mitzvah. If I had stayed I don’t know what the rabbi would have done, but he was happy to have me there. But that influenced a lot of my life actually, that was the only community I’ve ever had.

So my father, who was in the furniture business. The furniture business is sort of top heavy; the ownership and the general managers are largely Jewish, but the salesmen are largely Catholic guys like my father, Irish-Italian, French Canadian, whatever they may be. So that you have a kind of a non-speaking relationship; at least you did in the ‘50s between the guys like my father who are out on the route getting drunk every night, getting laid every night, doing all sorts of naughty things every night in a different town. And then you had the owners, who I realized much later had been sort of rerouted in their lives by the depression. They were immigrants’ children usually themselves who would have been heading to law school or medical school, would have done the professional thing, but the depression in the 30's rerouted them into business.

But they had behind them the interest in art, the interest in culture, and they saw my mother as a godsend. "How did you ever marry that man?" they would say. And they saw me as fit for their daughters. They saw me as just the right kid, a terrific kid, and so that’s how I survived my teens was in a sense feeling that I still had that ongoing connection to a community I could talk with. And my friends and where I hung out. So that was an important part.  I didn’t talk about it too much in that book.

And then when I went to Harvard I studied with Bernard Malamud. He was my real mentor in writing, the great figure in my writing life was Malamud, and that influenced me a lot too. And then I came to Iowa and studied with Philip Roth. That was a comedown.

NJ: And then he asks also about the discrimination in Canada.

CB: The discrimination in Canada was largely directed against particularly my wife’s people, the South Asians. It started in the mid ‘70s because of the Uganda expulsion of Indians by Idi Amin, and Canada took in the bulk of those people who were expelled. Britain refused to take them even though they had British passports. So they came to Canada, and that caused an awful lot of ethnic Canadians -- meaning Ukrainians, Italians, Icelandics, the people who had been the traditional second or third force in Canada behind the French and English -- to say, "Hey, what about us?  These people are getting special treatment; what about us?" So they settled in Toronto and Vancouver for the most part, because they were English speaking towns, and you had a lot of thugs that started attacking Indians on the street, any Indian on the street.  And my wife was turned away from shops, spat on, you had Indians being pushed on the subway in Toronto, pushed on the tracks and things like that.

NJ: Describe the book dealer.

CB: That was in Montreal; refused to carry her book.  There was a lot of stuff.

The Canadian government in 1977 issued a Green Paper, which is the government floating of a document in the hopes that it’s going to excite a particular kind of reaction, so they floated a paper saying, "What kind of Canada do we want by the end of the century?" If we keep having these immigrants coming in they are going to change the nature of Canada. It will be no longer Scottish plaids and Tartans and whatever; it’s going to smell differently; these people cook strange foods.

There was a lot of that sort of thing, so it almost invited reaction. And that reaction was quite virulent. I must say now Canada has weathered that, I think quite well.

I’ve just come back from two months in Ottawa in the National Archives researching a new book and everyone’s Indian. I mean there are a huge number of Indians in Ottawa and in Toronto.  Generally they’re the Indians from the West Indies; they’re Indians from Trinidad who have been in a sense kicked out by the black majorities of Trinidad and Ghana, so they look Indian but they’re not from India. They’re of Indian origin people. And they’re seemingly doing quite well and I don’t think they face anything more than a suspicion they are not really of us. But it’s not like it was.

NJ: There’s another hand up back here.  Yes.

Q from floor: In the past five years since you’ve completed the book have you made any significant recent exclusions or added anything significant to this book in your self awareness? And then secondly what has living in the state of Iowa added to your life?

CB: That’s an interesting first question.

I don’t think I’d want to return to that book to change anything too significant. There are things I could add. There are things you could continue the narrative on. I ended it at the Rodney King episode in Los Angeles; that was to me a very significant kind of postmodernism where the actual film footage becomes -- in fact, the very thing you think would indict the officers becomes the thing under postmodern scrutiny that gets them off. That’s part of the book; you would have thought 20 years ago if you had a film of a man being beaten, open and shut case. Now you can cut the film in so many ways and slow it down and  comment on frame by frame until finally you’ve reduced it to a Road Runner cartoon in which there is no consequence for that kind of brutality. There is no antecedent.  And that’s how I was writing my book. I was going without consequence or antecedent.  Probably I would add a number of other things; the world keeps throwing up examples of the same things, but that’s just patterns, you know, O.J. Simpson becomes a pattern, Rwanda becomes a pattern, India going nuclear becomes a pattern.  These are all things you could say are implied in the book but not really talked about. And I’ve been writing about a lot of  things, so I’ve been busy in other ways.

Iowa gave me my life; that is, I came here as a student in the Writer’s Workshop, got my degree here, met my wife here, had our first child here, both our sons are graduates of Iowa City high schools, our older son is a graduate of the University of Iowa, and it gave me my most satisfying and most prominent job. So I could say without Iowa I don’t know what my life would have been like.  I would have probably been an academic out of Harvard or something. But I’m also moved by Iowa; that is, that people are coming out on a 90-degree night for this. But of course it’s cool in here, it’s nice.

Iowa has created a literary atmosphere; Iowa cares about the things I care about. When I go to other communities I see that this is not a universal trait just as our writers in the IWP find out; this is not universal.  You know they go to larger cities to give a talk and they don’t get anything like the reception that they do in Iowa City, and they realize they may call it Minneapolis but it’s not Iowa City; they call it Chicago but it’s not Iowa City.  And I have that same feeling, too.  I ’m going off to Berkeley, San Francisco to be with my wife, this commuter marriage, and to have more time just for my own writing.  If I could have done it here, if she would have come here, I wouldn’t have left. And I will continue to come back.  It’s the only place -- Montreal, I’ve lived in longer than any other place, but Iowa City is second.

Q from floor: You talked about the problem when you were 37. I remember when I was 38, I was teaching high school at the time; was on Cape Code half the summer, Canada. It was a good year, but I always considered that an apogee in my life. I think you need a mode of experience whether its being a writer, artist, filmmaker, scientist, a lawyer.  You can strive for perfect pitch. For example your friend Rai, the filmmaker, got very close to it. . . . But you have to choose you have to somehow be resilient and be able to pursue that thing.  My question was, when you are with your students who are from all over the world who are searching for this perfect pitch in creative writing, how do they have the resilience to continue and put aside things like materialism, nationalism, other things that distract people?

CB: I would first of all agree with you to a point; that is, I feel after 37,  after that experience, that experience didn’t cause it but is the nexus of examples around it in a sense; that I’m not as surprised; that is coincidences have happened but they have all been analogous; events that happened seem to be analogies to earlier events; they don’t seem to be in and of themselves fresh and new even when I’m in fresh new places, like here.  And yet, haven’t I said this before, haven’t I done this before?  Yes.  Will there be something that can actually shock me? I just felt that things had settled in after that experience, more or less things settled into a pattern. Even though I kept doing new things I didn’t feel that they were new.  Maybe that’s just me.

The other question about not rerouted by political or materialistic concerns is a big, big, big question.  The writers who are good, who are true to writing, the artistic vision, to the vision of  their work, will transcend, it seems to me, national and religious and all  other abstract pressures upon them, or abstract loyalties even. And those who are lesser will in fact write through them, will use those as the filters, not just the filters, but use it as the trench through which they filter everything, through which they pour everything into. And their work becomes tedious, it lacks character, it lacks depth.

But how do you teach people?  You can’t teach it, it seems to me; you can’t teach people not to be stupid, not to be fanatical, not to be materialistic; you can’t teach that.  You can try to give them the example of the finest works around and say, "Isn’t this how you want to see your work, isn’t this how you want to be remembered?" And say to them, "The work will endure. You may not be rich, but wouldn’t you like to have the royalties that James Joyce earns now? Wouldn’t you like to have the royalties that Faulkner eventually earned?"  He didn’t touch it in his own lifetime, but those writers who tend to become very, very popular in their own lifetimes tend to fade later on.  Its a question of which would you rather have, happiness and wealth now or in a hundred years?  I think it was Flaubert who said, "Writing is like picking a ticket in a lottery, that you really are picking for a hundred years.  If  in a hundred years, if in ten years, your work is remembered you have won. If  in a hundred years you are still being read then you are part of immortality."  And even though in his own lifetime he, too, was not seen as anything other than as a sensationalist.

NJ: But a part of the question is mortality. How much of a satisfaction is it for a young budding writer that there may be some money a hundred years from now when the rent is due next Tuesday? What advice do you have for folks who probably aren’t going to be remembered a hundred years from now, but would like to be writers now, would like to be actors now, would like to be graphic artists now; that they get some other job that provides the money and do this in their spare time?

CB: In all those fields the lessons are clear. Actors wait tables when they’re not being killed by O.J. Simpson. Actors do what they have to do. They work as fitness instructors, they do white river rafting, whatever it may be. They put the money aside for acting lessons, singing lessons
or dancing lessons. They live five to an apartment and take whatever job is available.

And the same thing is true of writers.  We fortunately can teach, but even those jobs are rare.  If  you can’t teach and you still want to write you do whatever you have to do that doesn’t stop you from writing; that is, if you can find a job at a Kinko’s that pays the room, do it; if you have a spouse who believes in you and will set you up, do that, without guilt, but produce.

And then I think all the arts have this history that the apprenticeship process and the early emergence of the artist is really like a little crocodile coming out of an egg. The big bad birds are waiting before you can even get to the water, the bird’s are going to pick you apart; even hatching doesn’t guarantee a long life.

NJ: What in terms of the daily routine? Do you recommend that a writer write every day?

CB: I think so. It would be unthinkable, for example, if you wanted to be a musician that you wouldn’t be practicing all day every day; it would be unthinkable for anyone in any other art not to be working all the time. I think it would be unthinkable for a writer not to be writing every day.

So much of it is practice. It’s not just practice; you are really trying to reinterpret the world through your art form. So if you’re a dancer you’re trying to make every movement reflect so much passion, so much agony, so much world history, whatever.  If  you’re a filmmaker you’re sitting there going through life saying, "Can I do this? Can I make this? How does this look?"

If you’re a writer, you’re doing the same sort of thing. "Can I use this, can I turn this into something narratively interesting? Is this an interesting character? And what is it that makes it interesting?"  And the descriptions; yes, the descriptions are terribly important, to make it concrete, to put the reader in this reality and keep that reader in a reality that she doesn’t want to be in particularly. She has many other distractions around her and yet you have to keep that person in a sense not just amused but informed and instructed and making them say, "Yes, I’ve been there. This person is speaking to me. This is true." And to do that without being didactic, and without being pretentious or bombastic in some way, is how you learn by reading and writing.

NJ: Lots of note taking throughout the day?

CB: All of that. All of that.

NJ: I violated my rule, I interjected myself.

Q from floor: [inaudible]

CB:  It is a book about consciousness.  As I say, I was trying to play on consciousness, not on experience.  I could have written about "I was born," you know, starting at the beginning and taking you through the narrative of a lifetime.  I could have done that, but that seemed to me to be a betrayal of the kind of life that I led.

Anyone who wants to start an autobiography by saying "I was born" means that he has already separated himself from his experience. Because you were not conscious when you were born. To go back and try to claim that as an experience is invalid in some way. It seems to me that autobiography functions best when it is written out of a moment in which you realize you cannot go on further until you assess or reconnect with the past. And so it starts not at the beginning, like a biography would. If you were writing a biography of  Dickens, yes, you would probably start, "His parents were hardworking, blah, blah, blah."

But if you were writing your own autobiography you are saying, "Here I am a guy in his 50's,whose father died 12 years ago, who suddenly is seeing his father everywhere."  He is smelling his father’s cigarettes in an apartment that he is living in in Atlanta. That’s how it starts, right? It’s the ring of the cigarette burns on the bathtub; suddenly I remember my father even though he’s been dead a long time. And it was that, and I realized that I was living a life very much like my father; I was living apart from my wife who was in Iowa City, I was teaching in Emory for a semester, I was put up in this institutional housing of Emory University in Atlanta; I’d never been to Atlanta, I had been a kindergarten student there but that was a different Atlanta, that was an Atlanta that was segregated.  And I realized that I was leading a life like my father and that my life had degenerated if you wish into a series of semester gigs; I could work a semester here, I could work six weeks there, I’ll take this, I’ll take that, anything I can to support the family. I was becoming like my father though I don’t smoke. And that was the thing that triggered it.

Why was my father speaking to me then?  Why did I hear him, why did I see myself in him because it’s an impostor as you say in French to think of myself as like my father. You saw the cover of the book; we are not similar. He was a prizefighter and a very different sort of person. But nevertheless the patterns were clear about what I was doing. So that is what seems to me is the formula for me of a real autobiography: is that I have to write this book, and it is in the writing of this book that I will come to a conclusion; I will find the answer as I write, as I pull it out of thin air. And I will not rely on experience, I mean I’m not Colin Powell, who’s going to sit down and write a so-called autobiography out of copious notes and press clippings of a documented life.  I don’t have a documented life.  I’m an anonymous person; no one’s going to read the book because its by me; if they are going to read the book its because they are going to be caught somehow by the web of circumstances or the style or something in the book.  I’m not John Irving writing his autobiography. It’s that situation that is I hope universal to people at a certain age that I can’t go on until I account for who I am right now and why something is bugging me.

Q from floor: I was wondering how your commuter marriage has contributed to your idea of the shape of your life and how commuting has affected this.

CB:  Yes, people always say that.

I’m about to experience the joys of cohabitation. We have been leading very interesting lives alone and reporting back to the other, but in some cases not really being able to share it.  Yes, I have been seen as a person alone and she has been seen as a person alone which means a lot of people hit on you, especially on her.  There is a lot of that. But there is kind of a sense that you are having to almost daily reinvent the bond you know that brought you together or keeps you together, that its a virtual kind of connectedness in a sense because you are not there to boil the water for coffee, you are not there to do this or to do all those little things so that you are having to keep the other virtually present at the other side of the table and you are reinventing that person almost all the time.  I find myself thinking of what its like to be an Indian woman in North America who doesn’t drive, who was raised for much better things than I was ever able to give her. She was raised to be servanted to, and she has had to do all this totally herself.  And I was not born or raised to be married to an Indian woman. It was not in my stars let’s say, I don’t think. So that the wonder of it all has never left me; the wonder of it has never left.  I’ve never settled into an idea that this is a familiar person and we share all this together; we don’t share a damn thing; there’s nothing in her past and nothing in my past that would bring us together; there’s only this ongoing momentary present.

NJ: Do you try to talk every day on the telephone?

CB: We do and we do far more than once; we have horrendous phone bills.

NJ: I always had sort of a 24-hour rule when trying to maintain relations with people.

CB: Oh, yes.

The Iowa job was such that I was always able to be out in California in the spring; it was four 4 months in Iowa in which I was totally occupied with the program; then the next 4 months I was based in California but that’s when I would be out in the world recruiting and raising money  Then the summers she would come out to Iowa while I was starting the next year so we were together more than that.

Q from floor: [inaudible]

CB: That’s very perceptive.  I just would add a little broth to what you said.  It is incumbent on the reader and even more incumbent on the writer to make experiences into metaphors. The fact that you see it as a metaphor, I didn’t write it as a metaphor but I’m aware that it is metaphorical. I didn’t say "I need a metaphor for my boxes."  This is what I mean about practice, going through life like this so that it becomes so much second nature so that anything really, anything that a professional writer writes about out of experience has a metaphorical dimension to it. It just automatically does; its like a Dominican shortstop who just knows to glide to the ball. He has practiced it so many times that he’s not going to be caught out of position in baseball. The same thing with a writer. There’s a journalism that will say a box is something that contains books.  A writer says a box contains memories, right.  You can make it journalistically a dull, I shouldn’t say dull, you can make it journalistically an accurate portrayal of nothing more than a piece of cardboard that contains objects. And if you are writing in the newspaper that’s what it would have to be. It would be considered a violation of journalistic ethics to make it anything else. But for a fiction writer or for an artist in general everything, every square inch of the canvas is metaphorical.  Watch it all. For a writer its all metaphor. Its all standing in the way of something larger; something else. Something that cannot be contained.  If you were to try to describe it you would come up with an abstraction. So you are always  looking for these concrete things that give you that abstraction.

NJ: I should remind you also you do have a piece that no one has ever heard. If you’d like to hear that.

CB : We have just about enough time to do that.

NJ: We have to clear out of here in about 20 minutes.   [To an audience member:] So do you mind holding off your question?

[Clark Blaise then closed the evening by reading a new short story from a collection scheduled to be published in January 1999.  The story is called "Sitting Shiva with Cousin Bennie," but is not, of course, reproduced here prior to publication.]