TDR
Interview: Dennis E. Bolen
 Interview
by Michael Bryson. April 2007.
Read more about the author on his
website: http://dennisbolen.com/
*
You've published five books, three
of which featured the same protagonist,
Barry Delta, a parole officer. You are a former parole officer yourself.
I don't want to confuse the work and your biography. However, perhaps
you could begin by describing briefly how the two have overlapped.
I was a professional writer years
before I did much else. My first story was published in the Spring 1975
issue of the Canadian Fiction Magazine, and I did arts journalism
at Monday Magazine through the late seventies. My education was a
classic 1960-70’s liberal arts BA with detours through psychology,
political science and English.
I only sought the job in corrections
because there were few opportunities for creative writers in Victoria at
the time, 1977, and I craved a career that might offer non-boredom. So I
talked my way into the federal prison service and pretended I was a
conscious participant for a good long time. I considered it just another
formative process. Then I wrote about it.
Sheila Munro, in her BC Bookworld
review of Toy Gun, says your work laces "sordid truths with
humour and wit, mixing horror with the banality
of everyday life." She also says the work grapples with the
"theme of redemption" and claims "the worst has to happen
so redemption can begin." However, I wonder if she isn't closer to
the truth when she writes that your work "forces us to look at
things we don't want to look at." Such as: redemption is unlikely.
It seems to me that you're writing about dark themes, and that readers
who are looking too intently for the light, however dim, may miss
something central to your purpose. So, the question I want to ask is
about this idea of redemption. Is it in the work? Or is it more in the
expectations of the reader?
I agree with you about the problem of
reader expectations, though I wonder if such lapses, if they exist, aren’t
solely the responsibility of the writer (i.e., me). If readers expect
something, likely they are justified because of something the writer is
doing.
This is why I try to get publishers to
market my work properly. Often I am without success in this endeavor. At
a certain point in the process I have to shout ‘I am not a crime
writer!’ I guess I have to expect that it might take some time—perhaps
generations, perhaps it’ll never happen—for publishers to get the
idea that what I am writing is a hybrid of literary fiction set in and
employing the elements of the noir/thriller/police procedural milieu. My
stuff has little of what one reviewer from The Georgia Straight
whined that he was missing; the ‘pay-off’.
Nothing blows up good in my books;
misbehaviour ends not with a bang but a simper; my protagonists do
little but despair; my villains are often oblivious to their own
villainy. This is an interpretation of what I concluded after a 23-year
career mucking about with criminals. I offer it through my books as a
kind of antidote to the wrongness of most contemporary portrayals of
social misbehaviour in popular art, as well as the tragically
superficial coverage typically offered by news media.
Regarding redemption, my characters are
simply people I’ve seen and heard who say and do things I find useful
for weaving into fictional conceits. I have no interest in whether or
not they seek, attain, deserve or deny affirmation or approval or
spiritual well-being of any kind. If somebody says a distinct theme of
redemption is present in the work, I’m fascinated. It’s that kind of
reviewing that might get a fella reading his own writing (something I
haven’t yet be able to bring myself to do!). But mostly I advocate
letting the reader decide what they think and feel about characters;
redemption residing, as it were, in their own souls.
I’ve had people tell me they dislike
my fiction because the characters, most often the protagonists, do
things they don’t approve of. This is ridiculous, of course, but it
might reflect something of what you are suggesting by ‘things we don’t
want to look at…’ I occurs to me that readers might be embarrassed
at their level of closeness to a given character, and then cannot
reconcile this condition with the actions of the character. I mean,
anybody who can’t stand the casual acceptance of adultery is never
going to be comfortable with Barry Delta, though he may be a hero in
many respects.
You have something in the idea that
redemption or some such might be irrelevant and Toy Gun might
actually be about the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle act of
reconciling one’s nasty side with the larger, though sometimes
obscured, altruistic and/or virtuous side. I think that is the case with
this book. This notion goes beyond moral ambiguity, I hope, and gets
into the consequences of specific societal changes occurring in the 20th
Century which, I posit, has obscured Everyman’s conception of
goodness.
For example, in my opinion, the world
is only just beginning to reel from the one-two punch of the World Wars,
particularly the second, particularly as it relates to the Holocaust. I
mean, how does one comprehend good and evil after the standards were so
radically reset from the previous world—of relative decency,
considering—to this wild and extreme socio-political violence
bacchanalia we have now? I have trouble with it, and so do my
characters. I attempted to address this question in Stand in Hell,
and it is also the reason, by the way, that I try to reference Hitler in
all my books.
For many years, you were the fiction
editor at sub-TERRAIN. How did that experience help shape your work?
What are some highlights from that experience?
I fell into sub-TERRAIN just
after it was starting up. I’d invested money in it, and Brian Kaufman
had nobody else interested in the dawn-to-dusk chore of reading and
editing the mountain of prose your typical lit-mag receives. I thought I
had sidestepped that particular bullet (lit-mag slavery) during my MFA
studies when I evaded George McWhirter as he tried to evangelize me into
working on Prism. To this day I think I am the only miscreant who
ever got a University Graduate Fellowship, did not get chained to an
Olivetti at UBC Creative Writing, and lived to write about it!
But seriously, yeah, it’s a
character-building rite-of-passage to saturate yourself in the plethora
of unsolicited middling-ness which is the lit-mag slush pile, mining for
that elusive nugget of written gold… Have I mangled enough metaphors?
Highlight? Working with Brian K; one of
Canada’s most shrewd, tenacious and important literary combatants in
this here cultural war we’re in.
Vancouver, and the West Coast in
general, seems to have more writers attacking working-class themes than
the rest of the country combined. I wonder if you have thoughts on that.
Is British Columbia really home to more rebel writers per capita than
elsewhere? What accounts for that?
I think it’s the air and seascapes,
the way a writer can set up their computer by a window so the vista-scapes
inform their art, and beauty and isolation saturate their mind as they
crank out the deathless literature of an ignored generation, blah blah…
Actually, I don’t exactly know what
you mean by ‘working class themes’. Do you mean we have more people
writing about logging? If there is a good salmon-fishing book anywhere
let me know. I would observe, though, that it seems harder (at least it
is for me!) to get Canada Council support out here (look at the stats!),
so your average west-coast writer is more likely to have a gritty day
job than are you eastern literary aristocrats.
You've been publishing novels for 15
years now. I wonder what changes you've seen in the Canadian literature
scene over that period of time. Has there been a greater acceptance of
the type of work you do? What other changes have you seen?
The change I’ve seen is: when I
started I couldn’t get publisher interest because I was unknown.
Nowadays, I can’t get publisher interest because I’m burned out and
have a ‘reputation’ (maybe it’s because I so readily insult
easterners!). I don’t know if this is happening to others but I sure
as hell find it happening to me.
Another thing I find different now than
thirty years ago is the absence of the kind if writer who can make a
reader sit up and blanch. I think you guys recently ran a great piece on
‘grit lit’ or some such. We had writers like that back then, Juan
Butler comes immediately to mind. I’m not sure where or if The
Garbageman would get published today. The gritty writers nowadays,
if they are working at all, get fringified into the smalls and barely
sold in the mainstream outlets. The papers seldom review them. They
remain an obscure substrata of our literary sediment and I think it’s
a shame.
And even mainstream books like Fifth
Business, with it’s overarching theme of violent revenge; and The
Wars, which to my mind was a festival of horror; don’t typically
get seen today in Canuck fiction. These books elated me, filled me with
confidence that CDN fiction would be a literary institution of world
standing.
I don’t feel that way now. I mostly
read the Americans, who are absolutely terrific these days (McCarthy,
DeLillo, Baker, Elroy, Mosley…), and other than the work of Alice
Munroe—and since Mordecai Richler died—I haven’t been able to read
Canadian fiction in years. To me, if it’s not sadly incompetent (Come
on people! Run a word-search to excise the ‘really very sudden(ly)’s’
and instantly improve your prose by half!) it’s just stiff,
academic-constipated non-entertainment. No wonder the rest of the world
is less of a market for our stuff these days, and the struggle to get
book buyers to pull money from their pockets just gets worse.
Do have some new work on the go?
What's next for Dennis E. Bolen?
I’m working on a collection of short
fiction; had a story in The Scrivener last fall, got a piece
coming out soon in Front & Centre. I edited a book about
Indo-Canadian gang violence last year. This year I’m editing a massive
Tolkien-style children’s book. I write reviews for anybody who’ll
pay me, mostly the Vancouver Sun and sub-TERRAIN. I have
no novels in my head presently, but hope springs infernal.
Michael Bryson is the
editor of TDR. |
