Andre Dubus III grew up in mill towns on the Merrimack River along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. He began writing fiction at age 22 just a few months after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology. Because he prefers to write in the morning, he took mainly night jobs: bartender, office cleaner, halfway house counselor, and for six months worked as an assistant to a private investigator/bounty hunter. Over the years, he’s also worked as a self-employed carpenter and college writing teacher.
Dubus is the author of a collection of short fiction, “The Cage Keeper and Other Stories,” and the novels “Bluesman,” “House of Sand and Fog” and “The Garden of Last Days,” a New York Times bestseller. His memoir, “Townie,” was published in February 2011. His latest novel, “Dirty Love,” came out last year.
Dubus appears at the SPACE Gallery with Richard Russo as part of an event hosted by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance to benefit the Cobscook Community Learning Center. The evening will be moderated by Joshua Bodwell, executive director of the MWPA.
The following telephone interview with Andre Dubus III was conducted by Timothy Gillis on January 28, 2014.
TG: Is it true Josh Bodwell beat you at pool?
AD: I’m afraid he did. I’m mortified. In my defense, I haven’t played that badly in my entire life.
TG: What is it about writers and pool?
AD: I don’t know. I like watching that ball roll into that little hole. Maybe it’s like word precision. Getting that shot just right, just that right angle, not too much force. Maybe it’s like finding that right string of words and nailing that sentence, who knows?
TG: Would you say that having the life you did growing up – the son of a writer and a worker at many odd jobs, and now also writing and teaching – would you put yourself in the blue-collar world, the academic world, or somewhere in between?
AD: I have a feeling that a lot of us are somewhere in between. I’ve got a foot in both. When I’m at the lumberyard or around blue-collar guys and women, I feel like I’m at home. And also with my (academic) colleagues, I’m home too, in a different way. So I’m at home in both worlds.
TG: Tell me about the process of writing for you. Where do you get your inspiration? Where do you work when writing? Do you listen to music while you write?
AD: My inspiration always comes from a combination of a situation, some sort of human situation, and there’s trouble in it. And then a character will start to show up in my mind. If I have a character, and I have him or her in a situation with there’s a bit of human trouble, it’s a good start. And I wade into that with curiosity. I write in longhand pencil and notebooks. I built a soundproof cave in my basement, and I write with absolute silence, with (Eberhard Faber) Blackwing 602 pencils and Mead composition notebooks.
TG: It’s been said your father (Andre Dubus) was a master of the semi-colon. Do you have a favorite punctuation mark?
AD: The semi-colon, but also, I remember sitting around with him and some other writers, shooting the shit, and he said “When I was younger, I diagrammed the perfect sentence,” and then he actually laid it out with commas, and semi-colons, and a period like a piece of music. He actually gave it some thought. I was shocked. You know, (Kurt) Vonnegut (Jr., a family friend) hated semi-colons. I hear a lot of writers trashing the semi-colon, but my father was a master of it. His prose was deeply musical, too, so it makes sense to me.
TG: You only want to use it once in an essay, and use it properly.
AD: I used to work as a carpenter and tile a lot of floors. You can’t go from a hardwood floor to a tile floor. You need a threshold. To me, that’s what a semi-colon is: a nice, little transition from the hardwood to the tile.
TG: What’s your favorite punctuation mark?
AD: Oh, man. I love them all.
TG: Not the exclamation mark!
AD: No, you can never use that. Or use it sparingly. I like commas. It seems in the last five to eight years of my writing life, I’ve been writing longer and longer sentences. You gotta give the reader a little half breath of air as they turn their face out of the water and keep swimming. I’m gonna go with the comma.
TG: Your books have been characterized as melancholy, insomuch as there is so much “moral grayness.” Do you think of yourself as serious or more light-hearted?
AD: (laughs) I give these talks, and a few times I’ve had, usually it’s an older woman, stand up and say “Excuse me, but are you sick? Because you’re like a friggin’ stand-up comic up there, but your books make me want to kill myself!” I said, “Well, look. We all have our private lives, and our private demons and fears and dream worlds. I would say I’m light-hearted in my daily life and, yeah, once I sink into my dream world, where the fiction comes from, I tend to be expressing what haunts me. I don’t think of these things consciously and try not to, in fact, but I do seem to be haunted by how wrongly things can go.
TG: What writers make you laugh?
AD: Make me laugh? Rick Russo, and you know what’s great about him? He can also make me cry. Who else? That’s it. It’s true. I’m wracking my head. The truth is I don’t need to laugh. I just need to go somewhere, somewhere substantial. You know who else makes me laugh? Elizabeth Strout, another Maine writer.
TG: When your children were younger, you probably found yourself reading, and rereading, to them. Were there any books that surprised you and stood up to rereading?
AD: There’s one that I really love called “Night Cars.” It was when they (the kids) were really little, about four. It’s a beautiful picture book by a Canadian pair (Teddy Jam and Eric Beddows). Beautifully illustrated. It’s about a single dad who does a lot of the home care stuff, with his little baby boy, and it’s really just this beautiful poem about the sounds off the window, the night sounds, the night cars going by in the street and it’s snowing. They would want that, and I never got tired of reading that book. And “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” Remember that one? And, of course, I read all the Harry Potter books to them. I never would have picked up a Harry Potter book if I didn’t have kids. You know I’m glad I read about that world J.K. (Rowling) invented.
TG: For people who are going to your event with Rick Russo at SPACE Gallery: Let’s say they don’t know too much about you. What can they expect?
AD: Rick and I have done a few gigs together. We’re good buddies. They can expect some laughs because we always find ourselves laughing about shit. I’m doing this not just because I love John Bodwell, even though he kicked my ass in pool, but I’m proud to have a small part in helping the Maine Writers (and Publishers) Alliance, and especially the community college. I’m a huge believer in two-year colleges; they save lives. I give a lot of talks to the two-year teacher association; I’m a big believer in community colleges. It pisses me off that there’s a stigma about them in our culture.
TG: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be? A boxer, perhaps? (Dubus chronicles his life as a street-fighter-turned-boxer in his memoir, “Townie.”)
AD: I’d be a retired boxer with really slow speech patterns. I hated getting punched in the head. I liked punching, but I hated getting punched. You know, it’s a funny thing to say, but I think I would have been a country doctor. I’m a lover of human beings. I’ve always worked out and taken care of my body. And I love knowing stuff. If not that, maybe a chef. I love cooking.
TG: What are you working on now?
AD: I’m working on a novel, and (laughs) it’s what I tend to write more than anything. I’m laughing because just a few months ago, I had one of those days, you know, writers will have, which was: I looked at that, read over the six months of work and cut it all down and started again.
TG: Do you have a working title?
AD: No, how about “This is Shit.”
TG: I think Vonnegut has already written that.
AD: If I did have a working title, I couldn’t tell you. I’m very secretive about what I’m working on. It can take me three to five years to write a novel. My wife – I will not tell a word to. I won’t tell a word to anyone. I’ll never talk about it. Even if my editor calls, I won’t tell her a thing. I really need to keep it in the womb.
TG: I’m happy if I can come up with good short story titles. I don’t actually write the stories; I just come up with names for them.
AD: What you should do is come to this gig with me and Rick, and then give both of us all your titles.
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