Barry Yourgrau caught up to ramble with Kevin Canty, whose novel "Into the Great Wide Open" is the wrenching, cult-favorite story of troubled teen lovers, Kenny and June. The book packs a remarkable intimate authenticity, a graphic in-the-moment aliveness, its metaphors blooming right out of narrator Kenny's fleeting teenage states of mind. Written in the mid-90's, this was Canty's first novel, the second of his four books. He lives in Missoula, Montana and teaches writing at the university there. For starters, the talk was about weather, and how "Into the Great Wide Open" got started.
THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT IN AN ODD WAY
BARRY YOURGAU: How's the spring out there, out in western Montana? You been living there long?
KEVIN CANTY: Yesterday it rained, then snowed, then hailed, then snowed some more -- all in the space of ten minutes. Spring here is a joke. Apart from that, though, it's nice enough; a long cold winter with plenty of time and gloom to write, and the weather in the summer here is perfect every day. I went to college here a long time ago, moved away, I've been back here teaching for seven years now and liking it fine.
BY: So "Into the Great Wide Open"... How'd idea for it come to you, how'd it develop?
KC: This book came about in an odd way. I had been working on another novel -- actually I was under contract for it -- and I kept getting stuck and getting stuck and getting stuck. I was starting to feel pretty desperate. And I had the last fifty pages or so of the novel, the island stuff, sitting around on my desk as a short story that I couldn't get to work. And then one night I woke up at four in the morning and I thought, I know what's wrong with that story: it needs two hundred pages of something else before it starts. And then I thought: I can just drop Kenny the lifeguard in there and he'll make it way more interesting.
I got out of bed and started writing and literally wrote the first draft in six weeks, writing every day. It was crazy. I was in such a hurry that I didn't really want to stop for trivialities and furniture and so I just stole stuff from my own adolescence and the people I knew in DC. Anybody who knew me then got something stolen from them: somebody's house, somebody's mother, somebody's car. The central characters and their fates I made up but everything else is real, more or less. So it's the most autobiographical book and the least autobiographical at the same time.
NOT FOR A MILLION DOLLARS
BY: Regret is such a big part of love, no? Cocteau has this line (he took from someone?): The true paradise is the paradise lost. Do you think everyone's 'first love' feels that way?
KC: I don't know. I think people tend to feel that first love really strongly, because, you know, they're kids, they feel everything strongly. They don't have the scar tissue. Also they don't have any sense of self-protection -- risk feels good, any kind of risk. So you have this big powerful emotion and this sense of recklessness working together and you're going to get a wreck once in a while. Everybody screws up.
BY: Do you feel a special link to teens?
KC: Not really. I mean, I sympathize. But I wouldn't want to be seventeen again, not for a million dollars.
BY: Was it emotionally hard writing the book (and it was your first novel)?
KC: It was. You couldn't sell out the experience, couldn't sell out the emotion. I felt that any tiny hint of an adult voice or an adult judgment in the book would kill it. I didn't want it to be something cute or distant or removed; I wanted that sense that Rilke talks about in Malte Laurids Brigge where he revisits the past and finds all the old unsolved difficulties still waiting for him there. I wanted the matters of this book to feel as huge and impossible as they did to my seventeen-year-old self. In a practical sense this meant a lot of listening to loud rock music in the car, driving too fast and beating on the steering wheel.
UNEXPECTED BURSTS OF FEELING
BY: You cite various writers in "Into The Great Wide Open" - Frank O'Hara especially. You also mention Isaac Babel, his book Red Calvalry. He's a favorite of mine, is he someone dear to your heart?
KC: O'Hara and Babel were really important for me at the time, and they still are. I go through writers all the time. These days it's Dickens, who I discovered I never read in high school (either that or I was too stoned to remember). Basically I like all the people I'm supposed to like: Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor and Joyce and Chekhov. Lorrie Moore can write a short story and so can Wendy Brenner and George Saunders.
I also have a liking for the Kafka strain, Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser and Nabokov and W.G. Sebald; I like the formal restlesness, the unexpected bursts of feeling.
BY: If you were asked these days to recommend one book, which one?
KC: It would depend on the day, the hour, the mood. The best book I read in the last year was "A Tale of Two Cities." I'm rereading "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy now and that would be a hard one to beat.
JAPANESE TOURISTS; SOUNDS KIND OF HORRIBLE AND RIGID
BY: How important is poetry to your work as fiction writer?
KC: The restaurant at Chico Hot Springs here has a breakfast buffet, all kinds of stuff, and the other year I watched a busload of Japanese tourists who were there for the waters come through and try to make sense out of and they couldn't: ketchup on the pancakes, yogurt on the scrambled eggs etc. That's more or less they way I am with contemporary poetry -- I don't know who's who or what goes where or what the movements are but once in a while I find a poet that I love. Lately it's Malena Morling and Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's book "Then, Suddenly--" has been a big mysterious influence on my writing over the last couple of years.
I'm always trying to make my stuff sound like what it means. I move my lips when I write; I think I write more for the ear than for the eye, and that's where there's plenty to learn from poetry.
BY: So where do you work, at home, at office? Longhand? On computer? Any routines you care to share?
KC: I have a lovely office in a converted garage behind my house. I get up every weekday morning, read the paper, have a cup of coffee and report to work by eight o'clock. I work on a computer and I try to write a thousand words a day. The only reason I have a writing life at all is because I have these habits and I keep to them. If I sat around waiting for inspiration to strike, I would still be waiting.
I know this sounds kind of horrible and rigid but in fact I really like this time.
TOM PETTY
BY: What music you listening to these days? And while you were writing "Into The Great Wide Open?"
KC: The top of the pile in the living room: Charlie Patton, Radiohead, Jerry Douglas, Bjork, Billie Holliday, Steve Earle, Yank Rachelle's Tennessee Jug Busters and Sacred Steel Live. I play guitar myself and I gravitate toward blues, gospel, anything that doesn't feel manufactured.
I was listening to a lot of Tom Petty and Rolling Stones and Replacements when I was writing the book, for obvious reasons.
BY: 'Desert Island' question: which two books, two CD's, two movies, would you take with you to a desert island?
KC: Let's see: Gravity's Rainbow, which I reread every couple of years anyway, and some great big collection of Chekhov's stories. Exile on Main Street. The Robert Johnson box. Chinatown, and The Lady Eve.
THAT WAS A REAL EYE-OPENER
BY: Are you a big movie fan?
KC: I used to be, before I had kids -- now I just catch everything on DVD.
BY: Ever write for them? Is there movie interest in your work?
KC: I write a novelization from the film script a few years ago, for the movie "Rounders." That was a real eye-opener, a real education in the differences between the two genres. I think now that if I had what I thought was a good idea for a movie, I would write it as a short novel -- a form I know -- and let somebody with a real feel for screenwriting convert it. It's a completely different approach.
A German writer and director is working on an adaptation of "Into the Great Wide Open" now; he describes his vision of the movie as "a Last Tango in Paris for teenagers." We'll see. There's been a lot of discussion and flirtation around this book but nothing ever happens.
THEY KEEP ME ALIVE; POTATOES
BY: Your most recent book was "Honeymoon," a book of stories. What are you working on now?
KC: I have two novels underway, neither of which I can stand at the moment.
BY: And you teach. How do the kids now compare to say a few years ago? And is it hard balancing teaching and your own writing?
KC: I like the teaching, like the students, they keep me alive and thinking. Right now I'm working with the best crop of students I've ever seen. I do hate the way it sucks up my time, and if i never go to another faculty meeting again it will be fine with me, but overall it would be graceless of me to complain. It's interesting, pleasant work, and there's not too much of it.
BY: There's quite a literary scene out in Montana, Tom McGuane (one of the granddaddies) et cetera.
KC: There continues to be a writing scene here -- Montana's famous for writers the way Idaho is known for potatoes. There's kind of a tribe here in Missoula; we see each other at parties, we go to each other's readings etc. I don't think of myself as a "Montana writer," though I did set one of my novels here. There's something deadening about the regional writer.
THE HABIT
BY: So if you had one piece of advice for young writers, what is it? What was the decisive moment, as it were, for making you as a writer?
KC: This may seem obvious but it took me a long time to get it: the people who succeed as writers are the ones who work at it, who can find the time and place in their lives to do the daily work of getting better. I mean, nobody would think that you could learn to play piano just by wanting to play piano really strongly, or by listening to a lot of piano records -- you would learn to play the piano by studying under an experienced teacher and then by practicing a lot. But somehow people expect to sit down and crank out a finished novel in the first sitting with no serious experience. Once in a while, it's true, somebody will get lucky. But mostly it's just romanticism.
So my one piece of advice would just be to work, to make a habit of working. The rest of it will take care of itself. And i think it's a mistake to think in terms of decisive moments. Everybody wants the Writing Fairy to come down and put the crown on your head and announce to the world that you are A Writer but it doesn't happen. You work every day, your work gets better, at some point it gets to a place where a stranger can read your work for pleasure -- the only finish line there is.
AN OBSCENITY
BY: Okay, now let's dive into the heavy public stuff: what's your thinking about this war? Are you troubled about what's happening to this country? Do you think country handling 9/11 afermath properly?
KC: In brief: I think this country is being run into the ground by short-sighted profiteering jackals. This war is an obscenity. The events of 9/11 have been hijacked by Bush and his corporate pals to further their ambitions for profit and control. I have several other opinions, equally popular, but it makes me angry even to think of it so I will drop the subject.
BY: Any book or publication giving you personally good guidance on what's going on (eg, the Chris Hedges book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning")?
KC: Sorry, no particularly good answer on this one.
LIFE IN MISSOULA
BY: Do you miss city life at all?
KC: I do miss city life. We travel, we get around, but it's not the same. It's one of the shifts in the American writing scene -- the center of gravity used to be New York and Boston and now it's more dispersed. Part of this is cost of living, part of this is the rise of the writing program and the fact that so may writers teach in them, but now the writers I admire are more likely to live in Berkeley or Livingston, Montana or Gainesville, Florida.
What I do get out of life in Missoula, besides fabulous trout-fishing, is an extra couple of hours every day. We lead lives of eccentric convenience: my office at the University is a five-minute bike ride away, the grocery story a ten-minute walk. There are no lines for anything anywhere. There are several excellent bars here and a nice long cold winter to get your work done in. It's really not so bad.
WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD (GETTING BACK TO THE BOOK)
BY: Pardon this, but I'm always curious: getting back to the book, if you had a chance to revise "Into the Great Wide Open," any changes you'd make? Anything differently?
KC: The short answer, I think, is everything would change. My writing, my thinking, my ideas about what it is to live and what a novel should look like have all changed in the time since I wrote it -- which is not to say, particularly, that they have changed for the better. The novel is a snapshot of who I was when I wrote it, a reflection of a particular time and place and way of looking at the world.
BY; And the way Kenny responds to writing, that innate sensitivity -- he simply 'gets' words and language and literature -- was that you too at his age?
KC: I came to writing slowly. I spent a long time out in what is jokingly called the "real world," making a living and generally enjoying myself, before I went to graduate school at the University of Florida, which was my first step. I had written a fair amount in college but I never had the discipline to get my work done, to really finish a story. Some of this I attribute to the malign influence of marijuana. I mean, if you're in a racket where the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is life and death (it's the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, as Twain said), you don't want a drug in your system telling you that everything's all right.
The parallels between me and Kenny have more to do with our lives as readers, as lovers of books and learners from books. Which I always was.
CHARACTERS ARE LIES
BY: So how old exactly are you, and where'd you grow up? Where'd the model for Kenny's lost fuck-up of a dad come from (no names necessary)?
KC: I'm old, and getting older. I went to high school in Washington, DC -- though I moved to Montana as soon as I legally could, for a variety of reasons. As I said somewhere above, almost all the furniture of the novel is stolen from life, though not, in the case of Kenny's father, my life. And in fairness I should say that he started out as one particular person but grew in the course of the novel into an entirely different one; he's too important in the novel for him to be true to life. Characters are lies, you know? They are invented for the purpose of performing their roles in the book.
What interested my bout that time, going back to write about it, was that the children were growing up with no particular useful guidance from their parents, not good modeling of adult behavior. The adults were as self-absorbed and self-indulgent as teenagers. This is kind of a punk attitude but the situation was going on for a while before the punks got hold of it. How do you grow up without these models? That's one of the big questions of the book.
Barry Yourgrau is the star and co-writer of the film, "The Sadness of Sex," based on his book. His most recent book is "Haunted Traveller."
THIS BOOK CAME ABOUT IN AN ODD WAY
BARRY YOURGAU: How's the spring out there, out in western Montana? You been living there long?
KEVIN CANTY: Yesterday it rained, then snowed, then hailed, then snowed some more -- all in the space of ten minutes. Spring here is a joke. Apart from that, though, it's nice enough; a long cold winter with plenty of time and gloom to write, and the weather in the summer here is perfect every day. I went to college here a long time ago, moved away, I've been back here teaching for seven years now and liking it fine.
BY: So "Into the Great Wide Open"... How'd idea for it come to you, how'd it develop?
KC: This book came about in an odd way. I had been working on another novel -- actually I was under contract for it -- and I kept getting stuck and getting stuck and getting stuck. I was starting to feel pretty desperate. And I had the last fifty pages or so of the novel, the island stuff, sitting around on my desk as a short story that I couldn't get to work. And then one night I woke up at four in the morning and I thought, I know what's wrong with that story: it needs two hundred pages of something else before it starts. And then I thought: I can just drop Kenny the lifeguard in there and he'll make it way more interesting.
I got out of bed and started writing and literally wrote the first draft in six weeks, writing every day. It was crazy. I was in such a hurry that I didn't really want to stop for trivialities and furniture and so I just stole stuff from my own adolescence and the people I knew in DC. Anybody who knew me then got something stolen from them: somebody's house, somebody's mother, somebody's car. The central characters and their fates I made up but everything else is real, more or less. So it's the most autobiographical book and the least autobiographical at the same time.
NOT FOR A MILLION DOLLARS
BY: Regret is such a big part of love, no? Cocteau has this line (he took from someone?): The true paradise is the paradise lost. Do you think everyone's 'first love' feels that way?
KC: I don't know. I think people tend to feel that first love really strongly, because, you know, they're kids, they feel everything strongly. They don't have the scar tissue. Also they don't have any sense of self-protection -- risk feels good, any kind of risk. So you have this big powerful emotion and this sense of recklessness working together and you're going to get a wreck once in a while. Everybody screws up.
BY: Do you feel a special link to teens?
KC: Not really. I mean, I sympathize. But I wouldn't want to be seventeen again, not for a million dollars.
BY: Was it emotionally hard writing the book (and it was your first novel)?
KC: It was. You couldn't sell out the experience, couldn't sell out the emotion. I felt that any tiny hint of an adult voice or an adult judgment in the book would kill it. I didn't want it to be something cute or distant or removed; I wanted that sense that Rilke talks about in Malte Laurids Brigge where he revisits the past and finds all the old unsolved difficulties still waiting for him there. I wanted the matters of this book to feel as huge and impossible as they did to my seventeen-year-old self. In a practical sense this meant a lot of listening to loud rock music in the car, driving too fast and beating on the steering wheel.
UNEXPECTED BURSTS OF FEELING
BY: You cite various writers in "Into The Great Wide Open" - Frank O'Hara especially. You also mention Isaac Babel, his book Red Calvalry. He's a favorite of mine, is he someone dear to your heart?
KC: O'Hara and Babel were really important for me at the time, and they still are. I go through writers all the time. These days it's Dickens, who I discovered I never read in high school (either that or I was too stoned to remember). Basically I like all the people I'm supposed to like: Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor and Joyce and Chekhov. Lorrie Moore can write a short story and so can Wendy Brenner and George Saunders.
I also have a liking for the Kafka strain, Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser and Nabokov and W.G. Sebald; I like the formal restlesness, the unexpected bursts of feeling.
BY: If you were asked these days to recommend one book, which one?
KC: It would depend on the day, the hour, the mood. The best book I read in the last year was "A Tale of Two Cities." I'm rereading "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy now and that would be a hard one to beat.
JAPANESE TOURISTS; SOUNDS KIND OF HORRIBLE AND RIGID
BY: How important is poetry to your work as fiction writer?
KC: The restaurant at Chico Hot Springs here has a breakfast buffet, all kinds of stuff, and the other year I watched a busload of Japanese tourists who were there for the waters come through and try to make sense out of and they couldn't: ketchup on the pancakes, yogurt on the scrambled eggs etc. That's more or less they way I am with contemporary poetry -- I don't know who's who or what goes where or what the movements are but once in a while I find a poet that I love. Lately it's Malena Morling and Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's book "Then, Suddenly--" has been a big mysterious influence on my writing over the last couple of years.
I'm always trying to make my stuff sound like what it means. I move my lips when I write; I think I write more for the ear than for the eye, and that's where there's plenty to learn from poetry.
BY: So where do you work, at home, at office? Longhand? On computer? Any routines you care to share?
KC: I have a lovely office in a converted garage behind my house. I get up every weekday morning, read the paper, have a cup of coffee and report to work by eight o'clock. I work on a computer and I try to write a thousand words a day. The only reason I have a writing life at all is because I have these habits and I keep to them. If I sat around waiting for inspiration to strike, I would still be waiting.
I know this sounds kind of horrible and rigid but in fact I really like this time.
TOM PETTY
BY: What music you listening to these days? And while you were writing "Into The Great Wide Open?"
KC: The top of the pile in the living room: Charlie Patton, Radiohead, Jerry Douglas, Bjork, Billie Holliday, Steve Earle, Yank Rachelle's Tennessee Jug Busters and Sacred Steel Live. I play guitar myself and I gravitate toward blues, gospel, anything that doesn't feel manufactured.
I was listening to a lot of Tom Petty and Rolling Stones and Replacements when I was writing the book, for obvious reasons.
BY: 'Desert Island' question: which two books, two CD's, two movies, would you take with you to a desert island?
KC: Let's see: Gravity's Rainbow, which I reread every couple of years anyway, and some great big collection of Chekhov's stories. Exile on Main Street. The Robert Johnson box. Chinatown, and The Lady Eve.
THAT WAS A REAL EYE-OPENER
BY: Are you a big movie fan?
KC: I used to be, before I had kids -- now I just catch everything on DVD.
BY: Ever write for them? Is there movie interest in your work?
KC: I write a novelization from the film script a few years ago, for the movie "Rounders." That was a real eye-opener, a real education in the differences between the two genres. I think now that if I had what I thought was a good idea for a movie, I would write it as a short novel -- a form I know -- and let somebody with a real feel for screenwriting convert it. It's a completely different approach.
A German writer and director is working on an adaptation of "Into the Great Wide Open" now; he describes his vision of the movie as "a Last Tango in Paris for teenagers." We'll see. There's been a lot of discussion and flirtation around this book but nothing ever happens.
THEY KEEP ME ALIVE; POTATOES
BY: Your most recent book was "Honeymoon," a book of stories. What are you working on now?
KC: I have two novels underway, neither of which I can stand at the moment.
BY: And you teach. How do the kids now compare to say a few years ago? And is it hard balancing teaching and your own writing?
KC: I like the teaching, like the students, they keep me alive and thinking. Right now I'm working with the best crop of students I've ever seen. I do hate the way it sucks up my time, and if i never go to another faculty meeting again it will be fine with me, but overall it would be graceless of me to complain. It's interesting, pleasant work, and there's not too much of it.
BY: There's quite a literary scene out in Montana, Tom McGuane (one of the granddaddies) et cetera.
KC: There continues to be a writing scene here -- Montana's famous for writers the way Idaho is known for potatoes. There's kind of a tribe here in Missoula; we see each other at parties, we go to each other's readings etc. I don't think of myself as a "Montana writer," though I did set one of my novels here. There's something deadening about the regional writer.
THE HABIT
BY: So if you had one piece of advice for young writers, what is it? What was the decisive moment, as it were, for making you as a writer?
KC: This may seem obvious but it took me a long time to get it: the people who succeed as writers are the ones who work at it, who can find the time and place in their lives to do the daily work of getting better. I mean, nobody would think that you could learn to play piano just by wanting to play piano really strongly, or by listening to a lot of piano records -- you would learn to play the piano by studying under an experienced teacher and then by practicing a lot. But somehow people expect to sit down and crank out a finished novel in the first sitting with no serious experience. Once in a while, it's true, somebody will get lucky. But mostly it's just romanticism.
So my one piece of advice would just be to work, to make a habit of working. The rest of it will take care of itself. And i think it's a mistake to think in terms of decisive moments. Everybody wants the Writing Fairy to come down and put the crown on your head and announce to the world that you are A Writer but it doesn't happen. You work every day, your work gets better, at some point it gets to a place where a stranger can read your work for pleasure -- the only finish line there is.
AN OBSCENITY
BY: Okay, now let's dive into the heavy public stuff: what's your thinking about this war? Are you troubled about what's happening to this country? Do you think country handling 9/11 afermath properly?
KC: In brief: I think this country is being run into the ground by short-sighted profiteering jackals. This war is an obscenity. The events of 9/11 have been hijacked by Bush and his corporate pals to further their ambitions for profit and control. I have several other opinions, equally popular, but it makes me angry even to think of it so I will drop the subject.
BY: Any book or publication giving you personally good guidance on what's going on (eg, the Chris Hedges book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning")?
KC: Sorry, no particularly good answer on this one.
LIFE IN MISSOULA
BY: Do you miss city life at all?
KC: I do miss city life. We travel, we get around, but it's not the same. It's one of the shifts in the American writing scene -- the center of gravity used to be New York and Boston and now it's more dispersed. Part of this is cost of living, part of this is the rise of the writing program and the fact that so may writers teach in them, but now the writers I admire are more likely to live in Berkeley or Livingston, Montana or Gainesville, Florida.
What I do get out of life in Missoula, besides fabulous trout-fishing, is an extra couple of hours every day. We lead lives of eccentric convenience: my office at the University is a five-minute bike ride away, the grocery story a ten-minute walk. There are no lines for anything anywhere. There are several excellent bars here and a nice long cold winter to get your work done in. It's really not so bad.
WAY OF LOOKING AT THE WORLD (GETTING BACK TO THE BOOK)
BY: Pardon this, but I'm always curious: getting back to the book, if you had a chance to revise "Into the Great Wide Open," any changes you'd make? Anything differently?
KC: The short answer, I think, is everything would change. My writing, my thinking, my ideas about what it is to live and what a novel should look like have all changed in the time since I wrote it -- which is not to say, particularly, that they have changed for the better. The novel is a snapshot of who I was when I wrote it, a reflection of a particular time and place and way of looking at the world.
BY; And the way Kenny responds to writing, that innate sensitivity -- he simply 'gets' words and language and literature -- was that you too at his age?
KC: I came to writing slowly. I spent a long time out in what is jokingly called the "real world," making a living and generally enjoying myself, before I went to graduate school at the University of Florida, which was my first step. I had written a fair amount in college but I never had the discipline to get my work done, to really finish a story. Some of this I attribute to the malign influence of marijuana. I mean, if you're in a racket where the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is life and death (it's the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug, as Twain said), you don't want a drug in your system telling you that everything's all right.
The parallels between me and Kenny have more to do with our lives as readers, as lovers of books and learners from books. Which I always was.
CHARACTERS ARE LIES
BY: So how old exactly are you, and where'd you grow up? Where'd the model for Kenny's lost fuck-up of a dad come from (no names necessary)?
KC: I'm old, and getting older. I went to high school in Washington, DC -- though I moved to Montana as soon as I legally could, for a variety of reasons. As I said somewhere above, almost all the furniture of the novel is stolen from life, though not, in the case of Kenny's father, my life. And in fairness I should say that he started out as one particular person but grew in the course of the novel into an entirely different one; he's too important in the novel for him to be true to life. Characters are lies, you know? They are invented for the purpose of performing their roles in the book.
What interested my bout that time, going back to write about it, was that the children were growing up with no particular useful guidance from their parents, not good modeling of adult behavior. The adults were as self-absorbed and self-indulgent as teenagers. This is kind of a punk attitude but the situation was going on for a while before the punks got hold of it. How do you grow up without these models? That's one of the big questions of the book.
Barry Yourgrau is the star and co-writer of the film, "The Sadness of Sex," based on his book. His most recent book is "Haunted Traveller."
keith:
I like the format you used for this interview, Barry, inspires me to try to change mine up a little bit.