Bozeman News

Western Writers

An Interview With Benjamin Percy: Part 1

By Jenny Shank, 9-27-10

Benjamin Percy is a busy man.  The Central Oregon native’s debut novel, The Wilding (Graywolf, 288 pages, $23), hits bookstores Tuesday.  This gripping novel tells the story of a man, his father, and his son taking one last hunting trip into a wooded canyon near Bend that’s slated to be razed for development.  Publishers Weekly wrote, “It’s as close as you can get to a contemporary Deliverance.” Percy is an award-winning short story writer and teaches in Iowa State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment and Seattle Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.  Percy regularly writes stories and articles for Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, Outside, and Poets & Writers.  Percy recently sold his next novel, Red Moon, to Grand Central/Hachette.  Meanwhile, he’s writing a screenplay, completing a book of fables, and touring the country in support of The Wilding, with stops at the Wordstock Festival in Portland (October 9), NOW Literary Center in Bend (October 11, 7 p.m.), and the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula (October 29-30).  I recently spoke to Percy on the phone from his home in Ames, Iowa, about all these topics and more.

New West: You have been traveling a lot recently.  You just returned from the Grand Tetons, right?

Benjamin Percy: Yes, I was in Jackson Hole.  I’ve been doing these Mad Hatter assignments for the Wall Street Journal.  They send me on these weekend adventures.  The idea is, if you get away for two or three days, what can you do?  I scaled a 250-foot old growth Douglas Fir in Oregon and spent the night in it.  This past week I went up to Jackson Hole for three days, did some trails, rafted the Snake, and did a hang gliding trip.

NW:  So you came into journalism through fiction writing?

BP: Yeah, bizarrely.  I never really had any interest in nonfiction when I started out, then I stumbled into it, and now I find it as compelling as fiction.  It all started with my relationship with Esquire.  After I published my first work of fiction with them, they started giving me some assignments.

NW:  When did you publish your first short story in Esquire?

BP: I received a large envelope with “Esquire” in the top left corner in my campus mailbox and I ignored it for about two weeks because I just thought they wanted me to subscribe to their magazine.  Then one day during office hours, I thumbed it open and found inside a solicitation from Tom Chiarella, the new fiction editor at Esquire, inviting me to be a part of this “cocktail party.” Inside the envelope, there was a cocktail napkin with the Esquire logo on it, and he wanted me to write a story on it.  He sent this out to hundreds of writers he admired.  He said that stories had been written on napkins forever—a napkin written on with lipstick, or a napkin hastily scrawled upon and shoved under a windshield wiper.  So he invited me to part of this big cocktail party, with no guarantees of course.  He was going to publish ten napkins for his inaugural issue, and he chose mine as one of those ten.  So the door opened there, and after that, I was just one of the guys.

NW:  Did you have to use very good penmanship?

BP: I did.  My handwriting is very sloppy, so I did a test napkin first.

NW: I enjoyed your story “Keep Doing What You Are Doing, James Franco” for the James Franco issue of Esquire.

BP: That’s another one of their experimental issues that they did.  For one story, they wanted a line of it to appear at the bottom of every page, and they assigned the topic of another short story I wrote for them, which was April 20th, this cursed day in history.  I had to write a story about that day that incorporated the mythology of the day and read like today’s news.  Then here they have this James Franco issue, and I’m assigned to write a story about James Franco.

NW: Have you met James Franco?

BP: No, and I didn’t do a lick of research.  I just knew from the gossip what he’s been up to.  The fact that he’s publishing these short stories, some of which I’ve read, the fact that he’s pursuing multiple degrees, the fact that he’s pursuing visual art projects.  It was rich material for satire.

NW: I think you’re a good match for James Franco, because he’s famously busy, but you’re just as busy.  He’s enrolled in four graduate programs, but you teach in two graduate programs.  He makes movies and stars in General Hospital, but you write fiction and essays for Esquire, Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers and Outside.  Plus you have two kids and you renovated your own house.  I’d like to see how much James Franco would get done if he had two kids.

BP: Yes, as you know, kids are a full time job, and I don’t sleep a lot.  I’m never not working.  I have no hobbies at present.  I think that some people think that writing is an indulgence, but I feel very strongly when looking at my own life that you give up other indulgences to write.  I can’t even watch a movie without having a yellow legal tablet out next to me.  I’m either working on some other project at that same moment—I’ve got one eye trained on the pad, one eye trained on the TV—or I’m taking notes on the film itself.  I’m a workaholic.  I used to think of it as a calling.  But I think that it’s the case for most writers that it’s simply an obsession.

NW:  Did The Wilding grow out of being a father?  A major theme of The Wilding is fear.  Every character has to confront his great fear.  Lorrie Moore recently conducted a writing workshop in Denver in which she had the audience list their greatest fears, and all the parents, of course, were most terrified of losing a child.  You use that fear in multiple ways in your novel to propel the action.  Were you addressing your greatest fear through the plot of The Wilding?

BP: I’ve found that over time, as things enter into my life, whether that’s falling in love with somebody or falling out of love with somebody, being betrayed, grieving, marrying, having a child—when these things happen, you push into a new level of consciousness.  This is true of anyone, but writers are maybe more aware of it because you can look on the page as it’s documented, as your psychology matures, and as your concerns and fears grow rounder.  So yeah, as a father, I have a whole host of interests and concerns that now take up a good deal of my life and years ago didn’t exist at all.  You see that manifested in The Wilding. 

You also see me tracing my family line, in a way, looking to the way that certain behavioral patterns have been passed down, the way that we’re trained by our parents, and how they attempt to mold us.  I find myself a participant in that right now, and I can look to my grandfather, my father, and myself, and understand how things have been passed along from man to man.  I now find myself very conflicted when instructing my son, when trying to figure out what it means to be a good father.  My father’s father was a kind of dictator.  You can see him in the Paul character in the novel.  My grandfather was somebody who was always in your business, always telling you what to do, trying to shape your behavior.  My father took the very opposite approach with me.  I don’t think he spoke to me until I was thirteen.  We have a great relationship now, but growing up, but he was very hands off.  He was very interested in me working constantly.  So I would be working jobs to earn money, or I would be working for him on our plot of land, whether that meant we were under the hood of a car or we were out in the desert unearthing stones, or we were out in the woods, dragging a deer carcass along a logging road. 

And then I have my son.  Sometimes as I am hanging out with him, I can just imagine what my father and grandfather would say to him when certain things come out of his mouth or he acts a certain way.  I find myself questioning, what is the best way?  How involved should you be in telling someone this is right or wrong?  How protective should you be?  I think we live in a very overprotective time, where every child is swaddled, cushioned, and belted to excess.  It’s good to let them bloody a knee now and then, or go wild in the woods.  I’m fighting those two instincts at once.  Here I am a part of this Kids"R"Us culture, the parenting magazine culture, and at the same time I’m negotiating the ghosts of my past.

NW: And in your novel, the little boy Graham thrives when he’s allowed to be under the influence of his grandfather Paul, which no one would have predicted, because he has asthma and he’s not that outdoorsy.  But when Graham is allowed to hunt, he really changes and gains a new confidence.  So it’s interesting that the child kind of picks the parenting that he wants, out of the two models, his dad and his grandfather.

BP: Oh yeah.  And I found myself in that same position growing up, which is not to say that I modeled these characters in any way after myself.  But what I mean is that if I was hanging around with my uncle, I would lean towards him—his loosened restrictions, his freewheeling attitude—and turn my back on my father.  Or if I was with my grandfather, I might suddenly find myself standing at attention and saying very few words, except to agree with him.  As a kid, you are definitely aware of the power structure that’s around you, and you experiment with it, trying to figure out what works best for you, or trying sometimes to rebel against the superstructure at home.

NW: I enjoyed the story “The Woods” in your collection Refresh, Refresh, and the The Wilding is an expansion of that, isn’t it?

BP: Yeah.  My father once said, “You know what the problem with your stories is?  They’re too short.” I thought that was funny at the time, but in a way it makes sense to me, because sometimes you’re writing a story and it is too short.  You don’t feel like you’re done with it, even after it’s appeared in a magazine or been collected into a book such as Refresh, Refresh.  I kept thinking about the story and kept trying to think of different ways to approach it from another angle and expand upon it, and that was the seed of the novel.

NW: One of the keys to how you expanded it into a novel was that in the story, there was a strong indication that creature menacing the men in the wilderness was Bigfoot. But in The Wilding, you leave the menace open-ended, and it comes from a variety of possible sources, including a rampaging bear.  I like a good Bigfoot story as much as anyone, but this approach seemed to give your novel room to breathe and the ability to explore multiple directions.

BP: And in the end, the bear remains unfound.  I like to think of the bear as a kind of manifestation of the wilderness.  You have this battle going on throughout the book between urban development and the wilderness, so the bear rises up out of the shadows of this canyon that’s going to be developed.  It’s sort of the spirit of what’s being destroyed, taking one last lash at these tractors and payloaders that are parked at its borders.

NW: In taking out the Bigfoot element, you shifted the story from having a supernatural dimension toward having a realistic direction.  In an essay in Poets & Writers, you wrote that “Refresh, Refresh” also used to have a supernatural element, and your “agent helped [you] transform it into scorched earth realism.”

BP: I grew up on horror novels.  I think everybody has a genre that they’re obsessed with early on.  I went through phases.  I was obsessed with Westerns, I was obsessed with spy thrillers and mysteries, and I was obsessed for a time with books that had dragons on their covers.  If it had a sword and a dragon: thumbs up.  I’ve had a lifelong obsession with horror.  A lot of the stories in Refresh, Refresh are horror stories.  Some of them are more obviously supernatural, such as “The Woods.” But others, I don’t think you would recognize them as a horror story.  If you look at “The Caves in Oregon,” for example—people are always a little bit surprised when I tell them it’s a haunted house story, and yet their eyes widen with a kind of recognition at the same time.

What I’m trying to do is borrow from some of those archetypes, borrow from the deep syntax of the genre, and at the same time observe it through a literary lens.  So I’ve got all the things that make literary fiction great—rich language, three-dimensional characters, sparkly metaphors and such—and I’m blending that together with elements of genre, which has a lot to do with plot, and making the reader wonder what happens next.

Check back tomorrow for part two of New West’s interview with Benjamin Percy.

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