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Home , A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane, James Crumley, Mystic River (novel)

Interview with

ANDREW COTTO

Dennis Lehane. Photo by Diana Lucas Leavengood. ennis Lehane is the author of nine novels—includ- AC: What were the first books you remember reading? D ing bestsellers Gone, Baby, DL: The first book I ever read was about Smokey Gone; ; ; and The Given the Bear. I got it out of the library when I was six. Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories, On one page it said “For ages eight and up,” and I and a play. He is currently at work on a new book set thought I was pretty slick because, hey, I was only during prohibition in , Tampa, and Havana. This six. From that point on, I begged my mother to take interview—a thesis project for Andrew Cotto, who has me to the library at least once a week. an mfa in creative writing from The New School—was conducted online in April 2008 and April 2011. AC: Did you go to in Florida to study writing? Andrew Cotto: What was your neighborhood like DL: I did. I’d dropped out of two other colleges, growing up? Emerson and UMass, where I’d clung to two differ- Dennis Lehane: It was a bit of a war zone. We ent safety majors. I realized there was no way to be- were situated between Roxbury and Mattapan (both come a writer by playing it safe, so I scored a partial primarily poor and black) and (poor scholarship from Eckerd and took the leap, which and militantly white) at the exact moment the pow- was, for a kid of my background, a pretty scary leap. ers-that-be decided to desegregate the public schools AC: As a fledgling writer, did you have a mentor? (great idea) by way of busing (bonehead idea). The neighborhoods exploded and the underclass fought DL: I’ve had a few. The first was Larry Corcoran, a race war amongst itself that my little Dorchester a Jesuit priest I had in high school. Then it was parish was caught smack dab in the center of. So, Sterling Watson, who guided me through the writing yeah, fun. workshop at Eckerd. After him, John Dufresne [in the graduate program in creative writing] at Florida International University, who truly walked the walk Andrew Cotto is the author of two novels—The Domino Effect, to be as a working writer and seemed incapable of artistic released this spring by his own Brownstone Editions, and Promised Land Blues, coming in spring 2012 from Ig Publishing. He has written nu- compromise, which was exactly what I needed to merous articles for national journals and is a regular contributor to the see at 26, 27. Mentoring, after a certain point, is not Good Men Project Magazine. He holds an mfa in creative writing about teaching mechanics. Mentoring at the grad from The New School and currently teaches composition courses at ASA Institute in downtown Brooklyn. More about the author can be found at school level and beyond becomes more about helping www.AndrewCotto.com.

3 Teachers & Writers Andrew Cotto

you come to grips with whether, now that you know the faculty at fiu? Your classmates? how to write, you have the fortitude to actually do DL: I wasn’t really writing genre fiction when I was it on a consistent basis. And John, Sterling, and the at fiu. I was primarily a short story writer, even late Andre Dubus, whom I consider my final men- though it was common knowledge I had a genre tor, they were all ass-in-the-chair guys—get up every novel being shopped around nyc. And, yeah, there morning and write. No whining, no hand-wringing, was a certain looking down the nose at genre fiction. no drama about the horror of the empty page. Sit Hell, I looked down my nose at genre fiction. But there and force it out of you, day in day out. Which, what was also happening at that time—we’re talking in the end, is the only way it gets done. the early nineties—was the beginning of a backlash AC: Your first novel, , was against faux-literary fiction. If you were published by in the detective story genre. What inspired this type of Vintage, did that automatically make you literary? story? If you wrote a self-indulgent, sexually embarrass- ing, “semi”-autobiographical DL: What ultimately led me novel in which the protagonist to genre fiction was that I What ultimately led me referenced Virginia Woolf knew I didn’t have a bildungs- to genre fiction was that and Molière enough times for roman in me at that point. Did us to accept that you’d read the world really need another I knew I didn’t have a literary fiction, did that make white-boy-goes-to-college- bildungsroman in me at your work literary? What, in and-learns-about-himself essence, was literary fiction? book? I didn’t think so. But I that point. Did the world I’ll accept that it’s Edith also didn’t know how to plot. really need another white- Wharton or Julian Barnes, but Nobody had ever really talked I refuse to accept that a writer about it, so I had no real clue boy-goes-to-college-and- like, say, Bret Easton Ellis can how to do it. What I did learns-about-himself book? hold the jockstrap of James know was that in crime fiction Lee Burke or , something bad had to happen I didn’t think so. or that some precious, plotless and by the end there had to model of post-modern, post- be some kind of reckoning in structural masturbation is comparable to something terms of that bad thing. Once I understood that, I as majestic as James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet or Thom understood how to loosely plot a crime novel. And I Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest. was off to the races. AC: How do you feel, in general, about writing work- AC: Patrick Kenzie and Angelo Gennaro appear in six shops? of your novels. Where did these characters come from? DL: I think they’re great. You identify the peers DL: The character-getting place, I guess. I dunno. you respect and you hopefully have a professor you That’s creative process, which I’ve never been good respect and you take what you can about your work talking about. You sit in a room, you stare at the from them—good and bad—and ignore the rest. You ceiling, and somehow in the doing of that you stare can also never underestimate the positive impact of through a morass of crappy ideas and undercooked both having a deadline every four weeks or so and characters and you pluck out a successful character going into a room every week and talking about and place him or her on a page. Who knows how it the craft. It keeps your head in the game, keeps the happens? I’ve been doing this twenty-plus years now instruments oiled. and I don’t have the faintest clue. AC: About mfa programs? AC: What was the response to your writing genre from

4 Teachers & Writers Interview with Dennis Lehane

A writer is a mutant, a freak of nature who thinks about flowery, intangible things like sentence DL: At the very least, they’re construction and the music of paragraphs, but in a great place to hide from the world and work on your an mfa program he’s surrounded by like-minded craft for another two/three years. That’s a luxury you will mutants. He’s not alone, he’s embraced. not have in the real world ever again and it’s no small that I’ll be showing a student why a scene doesn’t thing. It’s everything, in fact. When people go to work—because there’s no change in the energy of MacDowell or Yaddo, what are they doing except that scene, say—and I’ll realize that the scene I just trying to emulate and recapture the ethos they wrote doesn’t work for the same reason. had in grad school? A writer is a mutant, a freak AC: When did the first inkling of Mystic River come of nature who thinks about flowery, intangible to you? things like sentence construction and the music of paragraphs—things nobody else in the population DL: Writing my graduate school thesis. I’d moved gives two shits about—but in an mfa program he’s back to Boston and was living in a once-tough, surrounded by like-minded mutants. He’s not alone, hardscrabble neighborhood that was undergo- he’s embraced. Never underestimate the enormity of ing gentrification. I wrote myself a note—“What that. happens when Pat’s Pizza becomes a Starbucks?” That was Mystic River in a nutshell. After I failed to AC: Can you describe your own writing process? write it as a successful novella, I knew my reach was DL: I write in the morning because if I get to my extending beyond my grasp. So I went back to the desk as soon as I wake up, I’m much closer to the Kenzie and Gennaro books to teach myself how to dream state than to reality, which is better for me write better. With each book I’d challenge myself in as a writer. As soon as the real world intrudes, the a different way until around `99 I finally felt I had words are fifty per cent harder to lay my hands on. I the muscles necessary to tackle this story again. need to write in an office that makes me feel com- AC: What was the greatest challenge, in terms of craft, fortable and where it’s unlikely I’ll be disturbed. I in writing this story, compared to your previous books? don’t get people who can write in coffee shops. More power to them, believe me, but I need seclusion. DL: Third person pov. It was liberating to suddenly have it at my disposal after five books told in first. AC: How do your roles as teacher and writer overlap? It felt like getting handed wings in a prison yard, DL: Full-time teaching is bad for writing because you know? Wow—I can fly! But then I immediately the workload for a full-time teacher is insane. I had the “be careful what you wish for” experience wouldn’t have written ten books if I’d had to grade because all these decisions I never had to make with 160 papers four times a semester for the last fif- Patrick Kenzie, I now had to make. Whose pov do teen years. And design quizzes and tests. And go I choose? Whose story is this? When do I go into to meetings. And deal with department politics. Sean’s pov? When do I go into Celeste’s? How many And raise a family. No way I would’ve been able to povs are too many? Must a pov justify itself or can balance all that. But if you have the kind of luxury I I just go into someone’s head for the hell of it? (The had to sub-contract and design my own classes and answer to that is “yes” and then “no,” by the way.) contractually refuse to go to meetings, well, teach- And—again—whose fucking story is this? ing can be great. The give and take with students is AC: Did you set out to write something that went always helpful because it gets you thinking about beyond genre into more literary terrain? your positions and defending them, if only to your- self. And it’s happened more than half a dozen times DL: I could lie, but the answer is yes. I wanted to

5 Summer 2011 Andrew Cotto

A book is to be judged on its depth—depth of language, depth of character, depth of insight, depth of structure. If those are successfully in ture. If they’re not, a book is not. place, then a book is literature. If they’re not, a AC: Why is genre, in general, book is not. so rarely taught to students in literature or writing classes, on blow some doors off. an undergraduate or mfa level?

AC: Why? DL: I don’t think it should be taught in writing classes. I mean, what’re you going to say about how DL: In ’99, I was on vacation and tried to read a par- to write a mystery? Dude dies in Chapter One, ticular type of commercial novel—one of those crass, someone spends a whole bunch of chapters looking plot-is-the-only-thing pieces of shit that line the into why he died, the killer is revealed in the penul- racks at the supermarket checkout—and it opened timate chapter. End of lesson. The laws of literature with this fourteen-year-old girl being murdered. It are the same, no matter the genre, and should be was immediately obvious the author was pretending taught thusly. Let’s not Balkanize things any fur- to condemn violence against poor fourteen-year- ther by teaching a class on how to write the thriller old girls who also happen to be black and therefore or how to write chick lit. The issue isn’t whether prostitutes (as if it’s all so axiomatic as that), but in how to write genre should be taught, but whether reality he was getting his rocks off, and expecting the books that have been ghettoized as “genre” can be reader to get her rocks off depicting the sensational taught as literature in literature classes. I think they and the salacious aspects of said death. It disgusted can. Put another way: Heart Of Darkness is a great me, and I decided to write a book in which someone book, a masterpiece, and well worth teaching, but dies and dies off-stage in the best Greek tradition, by the time I finished undergrad and grad school, and yet that one death hurts like hell. Hurts ev- I’d been assigned it five times. Isn’t there something eryone within the orbit of this girl’s life. I was very else we could have studied? How about Greene’s determined to make that loss of life rip the reader’s The Quiet American, or DeLillo’s Players, or Ellroy’s stomach out. Because violence does not exist for our American Tabloid, all of which are thematic cousins fucking entertainment. Death is finite and wasteful to Conrad’s work. and it destroys the lives of those who cared about the victim and sometimes even the lives of those who AC: Do you find that the study of craft is something didn’t even know the victim. Violence ripples out students can use more of? from the center and those ripples can scald anyone DL: Sure. I like to teach plot because very few they touch. teachers talked about it when I was coming up in the AC: What particular elements of story allow a book to late 80s/early 90s. And because I taught myself how cross over from genre into literary fiction? to do it, I had a heightened clarity about what I was learning and I’ve since tried to pass that along in as DL: Labels are marketing tools that have no real concrete terms as I can muster. But—here’s the kick- bearing on you, the author, until after you’re dead. er—plot’s about the last thing I think about when Only then can a sober assessment of your body of I envision a story. I’m naturally inclined toward work take place. The rules of all literature—be it the character first, then language second. Plot occurs to science fiction of and Ursula Le Guin me somewhere around 10th or 11th on the list of or the magic realism of García Márquez or the dis- Things I Need to Write a Story. And that’s why I topic paranoia of DeLillo—are the same. A book is teach it—because you do need it. People read for it. to be judged on its depth—depth of language, depth At the end of the day you can do whatever you want of character, depth of insight, depth of structure. If with every element of your novel as long as you’ve those are successfully in place, then a book is litera-

6 Teachers & Writers Interview with Dennis Lehane

obeyed the first law of storytelling, which is quite AC: What makes noir, or crime stories, so consistently simple: Tell the fucking story. If you do that—and popular in America? it’s hilarious how much we all forget to bring that to DL: I don’t know. Readers throughout history the table initially—then everything else you do will have loved to read about life lived at the extremes. be indulged. But if you forget the story, God have Cormac McCarthy has a term for it—fiction of pity on you because the reader sure won’t. mortal event—that may explain why so many people AC: Is there any part of story you advise your students dig noir. In noir, shit’s serious, man. Characters don’t not to stress over? have a whole lot of margin for error.

DL: Yeah—stop worrying if we’ll realize how AC: Can shows like , which you’ve written brilliant you are. Stop showing us how well you for, or socially conscious novels such as yours have an write. I call it WRITING, as opposed to writ- effect on America? ing. WRITING is often just smoke and mirrors to DL: If you go into narrative art trying to change the shroud the fact that you’re world or “teach” people some- not telling a story. Look at I make sure to remind my thing, you will write a polem- Pat Barker, for example, one ic. You want to write polemic, of the finest living writers we students that writing is not become a speechwriter. If have; I defy you to find me an you’re a narrative artist, how- example of her showing off. open heart surgery; you ever, your job is to tell a story. Good writing is a whisper. can’t lose a patient on the First and foremost. And then Bad writing is a scream. Stop (if I may be so pretentious screaming. Otherwise, I make table. It’s a story—have for a moment) it is to birth sure to remind my students fun with it. Hell, fail. You something universal about the that writing is not open human condition from that heart surgery; you can’t lose learn as much from your story. And if, ancillary to your a patient on the table. It’s a failures as you do from your original goal, something with story—have fun with it. Hell, social ramifications organical- fail. You learn as much from successes. ly manifests itself from your your failures as you do from tale, well, good. Nice job. your successes. Take your story out and drive it around the block and goose AC: What is the responsibility, if any, of the artist in the gas pedal and even smash it into a tree if you our society? feel like it. It’s all cool. DL: E.L. Doctorow said an artist’s responsibility is AC: Do you instruct your writing students to read dif- to be true to the times in which he lives. I love that ferently? line. I can’t top it, so I’ll just quote it and be done.

DL: No. They get there on their own. You can’t AC: What is the single most important issue in the teach someone to love Henry James. You can only world today that artists, of any discipline, can address? teach them the difference between good writing and DL: There isn’t one. Jeffrey Eugenides is going to go bad. Once they realize what bad writing is, they’ll out into the artistic wilderness and come back with find themselves unable to read it, if they’re any good something completely different than, say, Marilynne themselves. If they’re not unable to read it, then Robinson would. But I know it will be a light of they’re probably not going to get any better because some kind, an illumination. And I’ll be grateful for they’ve failed to fashion a respectable aesthetic. At it. which point, you can’t save them.

7 Summer 2011