An excerpt from the "The Man Who Married a Tree," which is quite literally about a fellow who did take a birch as his wife:

Holly Lang: Can you tell us what you are working on now, and about Nicaragua?
 
Tony D’ Souza: I used to be superstitious about talking about work in progress, just wouldn’t do it, because the times that I did, the story would fall apart or turn out bad. Lots of writers have noticed this, Hemingway called it “Talking out a story.” But I don’t have that luxury anymore after Whiteman for publicity reasons. For example, The National Book Critics’ Circle asked me last summer what I was working on, which was my new novel The Konkans, which releases in October. Well, what am I supposed to do at that point, say: “Gee thanks for the advance publicity, super prestigious NBCC, but sorry, it’s a secret!” because I hadn’t finished the book. So there I was talking to them about my book which wasn’t done. Then it was like, “Crap I better actually finish that.” You see that all the time, too, interviews with writers who have had a hot book, everybody wants to know what they are working on, they talk all about their project, a few years go by, you never see that book. 

Anyway, I am halfway through a new novel called The Voyage of the Rosa, it basically follows a Portuguese caravel along the West Coast of Africa during 1477, very early on in the history of colonization. The ship is very small, the men on it very young, it’s a slaughter fest, they slaughter Africans until they can’t lift their swords. I’m not trying to do a Heart of Darkness or a Middle Passage or anything like that. I’m not even too worried about specific history. It’s a much funnier book than it should be. It’s closer to Blood Meridian, a book I really admire. One of the things I so admire about Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s ability to inhabit those bastards and make you empathize with at least some of them. Because that’s what I feel about history and the human condition. It’s not Hitler who is the great monster, but just us, the everyday people who go along and allow Hitlers and colonization and the slave trade and religious persecution to happen, we are the guilty ones, we are the cogs, we are the ones to blame. Like those monks who immolated themselves to protest Vietnam, they’re not to blame. Anything short of that, you know, we protest, but we also pay our taxes that buy the bombs.

So I’m trying to write this book where these normal, likable guys get wrapped up in a blood orgy, which is what happens. They enjoy it, are repulsed by it, are attracted to it, are empowered by it. I felt these things during the civil war in Ivory Coast. And while I grew to regret it which is what happens to normal people and they become wrecked by it and end up living in public parks, which is actually good, because the guys who go home ‘normal’ and become senators, there is something really frightening about their ability to compartmentalize. The civil war was a turning point for me as an artist, it informed Whiteman, of course, but it also informed The Konkans, which has specific moments of terrible inherited violence driving the story.

At the same time as writing this new novel, I’ve been editing The Konkans with Tina Pohlman at Harcourt, my second book with her. The Konkans has been a little tougher to edit than Whiteman because I put in a much more complex central problem in the book, it’s the story of a Konkan man’s affair with his brother’s white wife, narrated 30 years later by her son. So there are scenes that the son has to imagine that he simply can’t know, anyway, it was tricky, but Tina really pushed me to get it right and that’s advice I’ll give to anyone until the end, push yourself to get it right. Not that any of it matters ultimately. But it matters to me, and that’s it, not money or posterity or any of it, it matters to me that the writers I admire pushed themselves to get it right. So there is a standard to art, like a morality (which is what John Gardner said), and I think that pop writers must not know what good writing really is, or how could they let themselves write what they do? I am also writing a feature article for Outside about Nicaragua, another essay for Salon, this one on Chicago letters, other things. I am a full time writer two years now.

HL: Does the tone of your work shift with your geographic location? That is, do you tend to write at all differently in Havana versus Sarasota, or Nicaragua versus Africa?

TDS: Writing is the only constant in my life. I have changed houses three times in three months here for example. It’s not really by choice, in fact I’m not really into traveling. I like to visit new places and live in one place in them. But like this, I drove my truck here from Florida so I could live cheap and live in another language and be in a new place and get to know it. But the Nicaraguans make me leave the country every month for three days with the truck, so every month I go down to Costa Rica to renew papers, and when I come back, some ex-pat has rented the cheap little dig with an ocean view that I’ve found. The first month, I had this great place with a porch for $250, then I was in a hut nearly as simple as the one I was in in Africa for $150, now I have a room at the back of a noisy bar called The Mexican Corner for $100. If I leave again, I’ll come back and the only thing available will be a tent. Finding a decent, and private, place to work is a constant concern. Really the only concern I have. I’ve been living in the fishing town of San Juan del Sur, which has great beaches nearby.

Location has heavily influenced my work from time to time. I wouldn’t have written a story called "The Man Who Married a Tree," which was in McSweeney’s #20 and was picked for the 2007 Best American Fantasy Stories anthology last week if I hadn’t been living in Northern California after the war and surrounded by trees at a dark period of my life, and this summer when I was writing the last part of The Konkans after coming off a two month book tour, well I had to go back to a novel I’d had to set down because you cannot really write while on tour, though I did write pieces for magazines on planes and in hotel rooms and such, anyway, I had six weeks in London where I was promoting Whiteman’s UK release and had a little flat right on the Kensington Gardens and there is this gaudy, gilded monument about six stories tall in the gardens and facing the Royal Albert Hall call the Albert Memorial, and it’s a masturbatory love-fest to British colonialism, beautiful, but awful because it celebrates in a phony way all that blood. Anyway, that’s what I’d do to take breaks from The Konkans, which I was working on about fifteen hours a day at that point, I’d leave my flat and walk through the gardens and look at that big obscenity and shake my fist at dead and golden Albert on his throne. Because The Konkans is about colonialism and its aftermath, especially British colonization of India and how the Konkans suffered under them, and under the Portuguese. 

But mostly, the space I inhabit when I am in the zone and writing fiction and don’t really know where I am, that place comes with me, and that’s where I feel happiest, though the Muse doesn’t invite me in very often.
 
HL: How has your life changed in the past few years, since your time with the Peace Corps, and in your rise among the ranks of writers?

TDS: My life changed in a very specific way the first week of December 2005. Two years ago. My agent, Liz Darhansoff, managed to get a number of publishers interested in Whiteman . I talked with a bunch of editors, they told me their ideas about editing the book. Basically, Tina at Harcourt said the right things, we went with Harcourt. I was leaning their way anyway because they publish Jose Saramago and he along with Cormac McCarthy and JM Coetzee are our best living writers. I said it tangentially in the New York Times Book Review, I say it to everybody: McCarthy deserves the Nobel.

In any case, Harcourt has Saramago, and so that’s where I wanted to be.

I was teaching composition at a California Community College and dealing with culture shock after three years in Africa, anyway, I knew Whiteman was good and would sell, but that week of negotiating was sleepless and giddy and everything it was supposed to be. Because though I was young (30) or so they tell me because it felt old to me, I was not new to writing and wanting to be a full time writer. I had been publishing stories and poems in the journals since I was 22, then I had my sojourn in Africa where I lost three years of writing during the war, and then I was back and teaching comp and basically Whitemanwas going to be it for me, I put everything I had into it and if it hadn’t sold I simply would not have understood that. I wouldn’t have jumped off a bridge, but I just wouldn’t have understood and it would have broken me. So somehow I am very lucky that my book was noticed and that I was not broken, but in fact the opposite is true now, I don’t think I can be broken because of the satisfaction I feel at coming out of the despair I was in to write Whiteman, and I’ve gotten past Second Novel Syndrome, and the dream of writing that I had as a young man has come true even more than I dreamed it.

So Liz sells Whiteman and at first we were talking about $50,000, and then she calls me back in the morning and she says, $25,000. Well, both were less than I imagined because I thought that you wrote a good novel and got a million bucks. But I didn’t understand books then and what it means to be a first novelist, and even if you are the next great thing to yourself, you are a first novelist to the publishing world and so you get a small advance. In the end, I got $30,000 for Whiteman, less 15 percent agent fees and 15 percent taxes, you can do the math. But it was enough to buy me a year of writing full time, and I wanted that more than anything, and I quit the day job.  I had to teach out the spring semester of my contract. I should probably give some of that money back because I dialed it in so bad, though the students didn’t mind.

Somehow things just worked out. I got the NEA a few months later, then the magazines started picking me up. In one year, my by-line went from The Black Warrior Review, The Literary Review, Stand, Iron Horse, etc. to The New Yorker, Playboy, Salon, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Tin House, the O. Henry Award, etc. Was I really that much better all of the sudden? No. But I had an excellent agent.

That one year of full time writing has turned into two, and I’ve budgeted so that I am looking at about three ahead of me even if no more money comes in and baring bad luck or an act of God. The advance on The Konkans was better, I have a Japan-Friendship NEA that sends me over there for five months, the folks at the Lannan Foundation are going to put me up for awhile at their place in Texas, right now I’m living cheap in Nicaragua. I think I will always think of money as only financing my writing. Lots of people told me it was foolish to leave a tenure track teaching job. But it wasn’t. Nobody ever really believed in me but me. That’s what I feel. I don’t have a Lear complex…it’s simply that after Whiteman and all the hoopla started, my best friend told me, ‘I knew you liked to write, but I didn’t really imagine this.’ My mother told me that same thing. If your best friend and mother say things like that, god. And girlfriends? Twice I was dumped by girls who specifically mentioned the writing. When I was 23 and 29. It rings in my head still, the specific moments they said it: “I don’t want to live on faculty row,” and “You’re not a real writer.” I’ll remember those things forever. But it’s not like I’m some good guy. I treated the people close to me pretty awfully when I was writing Whiteman, and was pretty despicable again to someone while writing The Konkans.

The biggest changes are in the amount of time I get to devote to my writing. There is barely enough time for it as it is. That anyone ever writes a book while working a day job… that will stay with me, too, teaching all day and writing Whiteman all night. I’m proud of that. No one will fully know how difficult that was but me. I get a lot of, and love answering, fanmail. I like interviews and talking about books and writing.     

HL: One comment about your writing is that you managed to sidestep certain traps of the "first book," such as self-indulgent details, etc. How did you approach writing Whiteman , and how do you feel you were able to relay your experiences in a fictional manner?

TDS: I wrote with a very strict discipline from the age of 22, when my father died suddenly, and what had been for me a hobby and something I was lazy about, became the rigorous focus of my life’s energy. Because my father’s death was both tragic and liberating for me. Tragic because I loved him and had a lot of difficult racial issues that revolved around him and me and him being a Konkan and me being able to pass for white when I wanted. And liberating because if he had lived I would have not been able to pursue writing with everything I had in me because I would not have been able to turn 27, 28, 29 and not have made a real penny off of something I spent five hours a day doing, I would have gone to law school and lived my life for my father. Instead, my father died and now all of my possessions can easily fit in the cab of my truck with me, and I am not like happy all the time or anything close, but I know what my calling is in life without question, and I feel very lucky and blessed. And then it becomes a responsibility, too, to really do it.

Now as far as avoiding first novel mistakes in Whiteman , I avoided them because Whiteman  wasn’t my first novel. I wrote a really wretched novel when I was 19 about two guys smuggling a truckload of pot to Chicago from Mexico, then I wrote a goofy, conceptual novel when I was 23 called The Day of the Dead, then I wrote a really bad adventure novel set in Scotland called A Long Walk when I was 29, which should have been called A Long Read,  as well as a much better political novel that same year called Andalusia, which I sent to my agent, and which she rejected. 

Liz Darhansoff and I first met in New York through a mutual friend six years ago. She’s rejected a book of poems, a collection of stories, and Andalusia before she picked up  Whiteman. And she was mostly right too and I’m glad I moved on from them.

Specifically in Whiteman, I avoided any mention of the Peace Corps because it taints the story with everyone’s prejudices about the organization. I wrote the things I wanted to write about, even when it made me cringe to think what people would think of me. I mean all the sex in the book. My favorite parts are still all of Jack’s love affairs and sexual escapades. I have two basic rules that apply to all my writing: something’s got to happen, and be readable. 

Writing takes a long time to develop. Much more than I imagined. I found my voice early on, at 22 I’d written a story where I had a voice that wasn’t copying anyone, was just mine. But, I still feel like I am learning, I still feel nervous everyday that I’ll ever write anything good again. I am a voracious reader, and have been since a child. That as much as developing a discipline got me ready.  

HL: Can you tell us about a bit about how you came to be a professional writer? Is this something you always knew you wanted, and would pursue, or was it an accidental vocation that came with adulthood?

TDS: I knew at 18 that I wanted to write. I’d been up mucking around in Alaska that summer after high school, my father wanted me to come home to Chicago and go to college, I did. I was at a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin, in that tiny dorm room, you know, with a stranger. I didn’t like that at all. There was a writing competition, you wrote this essay about some personal experience, the winner got a scholarship. I wrote a story about being alone in the woods in Alaska, got third place. But the writer in residence wrote me a note and said it was the best thing she’s ever seen written by a student in her time there, I went on to do a few independent studies with her, “The Short Story” “The Art of the Novel.” That was Janet Desaulniers, an Iowa MFA, she’d published in the New Yorker five times, her book was supposedly coming out from Knopf. She turned me on to the great writers and I read Hemingway for the first time. His story “Soldier’s Home” in In Our Time was an epiphany for me, a depth of emotion I had not seen before. Then I saw what could be done and knew that I could do it, and more than that, that I must.

So I wanted to be a writer, a full-time writer. Not a journalist. Not screenplays or scripts. I wrote poetry in the beginning, a few short stories. I worked at the college paper, too, wrote fifty articles for them.  But I was lazy about the craft. I was a busy student. I finished college in two and a half years, went to Europe for a couple years, worked construction in Scotland and Germany. Sometimes I wouldn’t write anything for a couple months at a time. Mostly I would tell people I wanted to be a writer, but I wasn’t writing. Then I took the money I’d saved working and rented a tiny attic garrote in Freiburg, Germany, and didn’t work for four months, and wrote everyday. I had my first taste of discipline there, and wrote the couple stories that would get me into grad school. Then my father died and that just locked everything into place. So my journey from wanting to be a full time writer to being a full time writer, that took 12 years. But the first four years, I had no discipline, and then I more or less gave up three years while I served in the Peace Corps in Africa. But even in Africa, I kept notes, would write stories when I could. But Africa was a very difficult place to write, or do much of anything else except get through the day.

HL: So many want to published in publications such as the ones for which you've written, like the New Yorker and Salon. How were you able to break into these publications?

TDS: It all came about because of Whiteman and my agent. I submitted probably twenty stories in eight years to the New Yorker, most of which would go on to be published in the lit journals. Of course the New Yorker turned them all down. Within four months of getting my agent, I was in the New Yorker, and then I was in it again later that year. They say they take stuff from the slush pile, but….

Whiteman lent itself to serialization. Four of the twelve chapters appeared as stories in the glossies. And then I had non-Whitemanstories ready to go as well, and they got picked up, too. For a while, it was like a feeding frenzy, anything I had was getting picked up. It’s more or less continued like that through now. The new book has that story element, too, that’s about me making the transition from storywriter to novelist. That 25 page/7000 word New Yorker story, that is a definite form established by Carver, Updike, Cheever, Oates, Munro. The names we all know can do the New Yorker form. It’s almost as rigid as the sonnet. Now I’ve written two novels that were structurally built out of that form. That’s been great for getting in the glossies. But I am ready to move on as well. The book I’m working on now isn’t constructed like that.  

So as far as getting in those magazines, it was mostly my agent calling me and saying “You’re in The New Yorker, you’re in Playboy.” Then other places would solicit things from me from time to time, like Salon, somehow they knew I’d spent that time in Havana, they asked for a piece on it. Esquire asked for a contribution to their series on the World’s Greatest Bars. A number of places wanted essays on my writing process. The New Yorker asked me to contribute an essay for their ‘War’ issue. And when the solicits come in, you don’t have much time, like I say, I was writing a lot of that stuff anywhere I could in my sparetime on book tour. By the end of the tour, I was a physical wreck. At every stop, I was busy all day, talking to classes, then the big reading in the evening, then dinner, then drinks, parties, then writing to the wee hours in a hotel, then an airplane ride and do it all again. At a stop in Chicago toward the end, I was reading and my vision started to close in on me and go black and I had to sit down and had this cold sweat. They gave me a glass of water and a couple minutes, and then I went on. I liked being on tour, I like meeting people and being that busy.

I also am always thinking up things to pitch places. So I write a short pitch and send it to the agency and they talk to the editors. Salon picked something up I pitched about New Orleans, Poets&Writers picked something up I pitched about Peace Corps Writers. Then there are the places I haven’t been in and want to be, like Slate and Granta. So that’s something I use to keep me going, too, the thought of breaking into them. As far as poetry goes, I still send out my stuff on my own. I’ve had poems recently in Nimrod, The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, The Notre Dame Review.  

HL: I've read before that you somewhat courted potential publishers and editors by asking them to drinks or dinner... how do you feel this helped open up what are usually rather closed doors?

TDS: That’s not true at all. In fact, I broke through without ever having spent time in New York. That said, my agent and I met through a mutual friend, my agent never closed her door to me even when she was turning down my work. Now I have had dinner and drinks and parties with lots of editors and publishers. But it has always been after they’ve picked something of mine up, after we’ve edited the piece and seen it in print. Because then we have something to talk about. I like meeting those folks, they’re well read and love to talk books. They are decent people who have a hard time getting friendly with authors because authors want things from them, authors get pissed at them, they have to turn so many authors down, it’s hard for anyone to let their defenses drop in a world as competitive as publishing. I’ve felt that at times as well. I am approached constantly over e-mail by people who want access to my agent, who want my agent to read their book. Also on tour some things like that happened. Some people just lose sight of things, cross boundaries, get aggressive, inappropriate. Editors have it happen all the time. I empathize with wanting to be published and feeling locked out. At the same time, I feel like I focused on the work, let the rest just happen. So I was very lucky to get an introduction to Liz Darhansoff, and that she didn’t close her door on me when she didn’t want my early books. But I also would e-mail her once and only once and the e-mails were brief, like, “Liz, I have a new book, will you look at it?” and she’d say “Send it in,” and then a month or so later the rejection would come. Then the thing I did was, I put those books away, maybe got drunk for a few days, but then moved on. I wouldn’t e-mail her or anything until the next book was done, and then I’d write, “Liz, will you look at my new book?”

I know people who have had years long conversations with potential agents about books they hadn’t even written yet. I don’t understand that. If you don’t have anything to sell, why are you talking to an agent? I know a woman who got stuck trying to sell the same book for 25 years. 25 years. At some point, even if you really believe in that book, you should set it aside for now and write a new book.

One of the books Liz turned down is my collection of stories. I know that those stories are good, but the fact is, the market doesn’t want stories. So that’s another thing that keeps me going, writing other books so that one day they’ll publish my early stories. I could bitch and moan about it, and about once a year, I do. But it’s a battle I can’t win. A more likely victory is to shut up and get to work and try to write a new, good book.

When I was looking for blurbs for Whiteman, I went to the AWP conference in Vancouver and basically staked out those authors I admired who I wanted to ask. Bob Shacochis was one. I went up to him after his panel, introduced myself, invited him to a drink. Since we were both Peace Corps alums and Bob is interested in war stories, he took me up on the invite right away. He did write a blurb, and through him I got in contact with Norman Rush, who also cheerfully obliged. I did that same thing to Kim Addonizio there and she blurbed me, too. B

ut people like Paul Theroux, Mary Gaitskill, Ha Jin, Tim O’Brien, they said ‘no’. I approached them through e-mail. They did wish me luck, though. Well, not O’Brien, I wrote him a snail letter. I mean, I’m a guy with one book. There are a million guys with one book. That said, I’m eternally grateful to the people who blurbed me. Someone told me that I didn’t have any integrity for doing things like that, that if I had such a bigtime publisher, then they should do all of that for me. Well I think that’s defeatist, that there is nothing wrong with approaching an author you admire, telling them so, and asking them once, and politely, if they’d look at galleys and maybe blurb it. My publisher appreciated it a lot, too. 

This might not sound helpful, but the best advice I can give regarding agents, editors, publishers and magazines is forget about all of it. Concentrate on writing the best book you can. Believe that the rest will come. Writing is the only thing you have any control over, so don’t waste your energies on anything else. 

HL: How do you feel your educational background (Hollins, Notre Dame) plays into your writing style? Do you feel your MFA prepared you to pursue professional writing?

TDS: My grad programs gave me time to write. I didn’t pay for either one, and think young writers should avoid debt if they can. Before going in, I’d had some life experiences. I also didn’t go to either one expecting to be taught how to write. But I enjoyed both, and the degrees allowed me to get that teaching job after I came back from Africa. That job wasn’t as grueling as working construction, I did have more time. If you want to go to a grad program because it will motivate you to write, and if you read more while you are there than you do normally, I think you’re in trouble as a writer. Getting my MA and MFA were ways to have time, be around writers, to get my early stuff read and criticized, they were great times. They were also just another part of the very beginning of the learning process.

HL: How do you feel your life experiences play into your work, including Whiteman?

TDS: Clearly, I write close to life, not only or always that, but I am aware that I am part of a tradition of writing that includes O’Brien, Carver, Hemingway, London, Conrad. I want to make the reader feel that the story really happened. But it’s fiction because every few lines, something is exaggerated, subdued, different than what really happened, more entertaining, or sadder.  Knowing that I write close to life made me frantic to leave teaching. Because I get my material from life and I didn’t want to write a book set at a college. Having already said that I don’t really like to travel, I have been a lot of places. About 50 countries. I speak, to varying degrees from fluent to basic, about 10 languages. I feel like I have enough material to tell stories so long as I’ll be here.

HL: How do your feelings towards issues, such as immigration or social responsibility, play into your writing?

TDS: I used to be much more overtly political in my writing, Liz helped me reign that in. That was the major change I made moving from my failed novel Andalusia toWhiteman. In  Whiteman, I put politics aside and just let people do what they do. I have my personal politics, but books that are clearly political aren’t very good. Because the reader can see overt politics easily, and then you’ve broken the dream of the story for them and it will never feel like anything but artifice.

But again, I have personal politics, and ultimately the great novels all seem to pose the same questions: Why are people greedy? Why do people insist on hurting each other? What can we do to be happy? How do we deal with death?

You have leftists writers like Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Conrad, McCarthy, Saramago, Orwell, conservatives like Mishima, Dickens, Fitzgerald, fascists like Ayn Rand, Kipling, Knut Hamsun, and anarchists like Kerouac and Burgess. I think Ellison is too political and reads like artifice. I think Toni Morrison is a much better writer because she just tells a story and lets the politics fall where they may. 

I am personally pretty far left, probably closest to Saramago. He calls himself a communist, but I think that word needs to be retired because people think of the ‘Commies’ when you say that, and that’s not what I am. It’s like what happened to Christians. Because the teachings of Christ are not what these people are practicing. So the word gets hijacked and becomes something the original word wasn’t.

I identify myself as a hunter-gather, yes I know that’s silly, but there is no alternative to industrial society in this world, so I consider myself a hunter-gatherer stuck in a culture I can’t stand that’s dominant over me. I don’t believe in private land ownership, I don’t believe in violence. I don’t believe in nations or borders. I don’t believe in drastically altering the natural world. I do believe in universal public health care, education, and social services. I do believe in limits on wealth and poverty. But I make all the same petty, and some not so petty, compromises, that really constitute failures on a day to day, moment to moment basis. I eat meat. I drive a car. I write books that they cut down trees to print. So like I said before, I’m no good guy either.

Now I am just interested in telling stories, true stories, where the characters do what they do without me manipulating them. But sure, I have politics, they are extremely left. My writing deals with race, colonialism, wealth disparity, language, identity, exile, mortality and love again and again and again.  

HL: Do you read your own reviews?

TDS: Yes. I didn’t want to at first because I was nervous, but they all came in very favorable, so that has been more than easy, it’s been enjoyable. Now with the second book, I’m really confident. Sometimes I worry that I’ll fall into The Emperor Has No Clothes trap with everyone telling me my stuff is good even if it’s not. But the people at the agency, Liz, my serials person Michele Mortimer, they cut me down when they need to. Tina, my editor, she does that to me, too. They just kind of roll their eyes at the things I do. Like I was in this Playboy fashion shoot, you can find it on-line. When they saw the pictures, they all just collectively groaned.  

HL: What's the best book or story you've recently read? What's the book you've read the most?

TDS: Recently, Wade Davis’ One River, Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust. Neither are new, both are great.

Gilgamesh is my favorite book. It’s the first great epic of human history, predates the Bible, was written in cuneiform on clay tablets. And nobody has done better. It deals with all the issues about human life during this past 10,000 years that are very different from when we were hunting and gathering. Because we were hunter-gatherers for 190,000 years, then they started planting crops 10,000 years and building cities and setting property laws and social classes and then we had writing about 4,000 years ago, it’s all very new and we’ve changed our relationship to the planet and each other very quickly and dramatically. But Gilgamesh has everything, race, money, greed, sex, jealousy, destruction of the natural world, and then, mortality. After that, Shakespeare and Faulkner surpass everyone and stand alone together. I like Chaucer. I love Saramago’s Blindness. All of Orwell. Lord of the Flies. 

HL: Is there anything about you and your writing that I haven't asked but you feel would be important for people to know?

TDS: I write with a black pen and loose-leaf paper.