Interview with Dennis Lehane ANDREW COTTO Dennis Lehane. Photo by Diana Lucas Leavengood. Diana Lucas by Photo Dennis Lehane. ennis Lehane is the author of nine novels—includ- AC: What were the first books you remember reading? D ing the New York Times bestsellers Gone, Baby, DL: The first book I ever read was about Smokey Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; 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 Boston, 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 Eckerd College 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 South Boston (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, A Drink Before the War, 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 James Crumley, 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.