Oregon News

Western Writers

An Interview with Benjamin Percy: Part 2

By Jenny Shank, 9-28-10

In the second half of New West’s interview with Benjamin Percy, whose debut novel, The Wilding, hits bookstores today, we discuss the characters in the novel, how Central Oregon is Percy’s muse, the many creative projects Percy is working on, and how Percy “could definitely beat [James Franco] in a cage match.”

New West: It seems like all the elements that you wove together in The Wilding are introduced to provide maximum tension in each chapter.  Karen is dissatisfied with her husband Justin, Paul has just had a heart attack, the convenience store employee is angry at them, Graham has asthma.  Is that the goal you had in constructing each chapter?

Benjamin Percy: I’m always trying to ratchet up the tension and raise the emotional and physical stakes in every chapter so that by the end, there is hopefully a sense of explosion.  A slow burn that moves toward an explosion.  I’m doing something similar in my short stories.  They’re not quiet stories—they’re all tamped down with gunpowder.  Only trouble is interesting in fiction, and I’ve got a whole lot of trouble going on in my pages.  It helps keep me interested, and hopefully the reader leaning forward as well.

NW: One of my favorite parts of the book is the character of Brian—his behavior is so bizarre and threatening, yet he is still sympathetic because he’s a wounded Iraq veteran.  I like how you got the Bigfoot element in there with the fur suit that he constructs and wears.  You seem to be drawn to stories of soldiers repeatedly.  Did it feel like you needed this element in “The Wilding,” even though it’s not the central strand of the plot, to make it complete?

BP: When I first wrote this story, it was in first person from Justin’s perspective.  It wasn’t quite a novel.  It was, as I jokingly referred to it, a schnovel.  Kind of an extended short story.  Fiona McCrae, my editor at Graywolf, purchased the novel as is, but with footnotes.  One of the principle things she wanted was to transform the novel from first person to third, and in doing that I would afford freedom to all the characters and they could have their own plots.  They could break out and have their own stories, their own paths to follow.  So at first there were five different characters, including Seth, the guy at the gas station, Tom Bear Claws, the tribal elder, and Bobby Freemont, the developer.  So I had all these characters wandering around together.  It took me a year to revise the book, and showed it to Fiona.  She said, “This is great, but let’s go with three intertwined plots instead, and let’s make one of them female.” Karen emerged as one of the principle characters then, giving her almost a third of the book.  Brian stayed—Fiona really like him.

NW: I like how weird he is.  I like that element of the book—the wild, weirdness to Brian.

BP: He kind of represents an exaggerated version of what everyone else is struggling with, the wilding within us all.  The latent animalism within us all.  Everyone’s struggling with this in some capacity.  You have Justin, a suburban dad, struggling with primal urges in the forest.

NW: I felt bad for Justin for a good part of the book.  His dad is dogging him, his wife is dogging him and she tells Brian, the locksmith, that Justin is annoying.

BP: He’s supposed to be kind of the villain of the story actually.

NW: I felt sorry for Justin.  I was sympathetic for Karen, but I thought she was being harsh.  Justin lost a baby too.

BP: Well it’s not about the baby in the end.  That’s just what Justin thinks it’s about.  And then Karen is dealing with wild urges of her own, as she’s trying to decide between this life as a mother and a wife and other lives that she could possibly be living.  So she’s crossing boundaries.  Then you have Brian who is donning this animal suit and wandering through the woods and peering into windows.  It’s almost lycanthropic, the transformation that he goes through.  Regarding one of the other things you said about him—he’s this incredibly sketchy character.  You would obviously never want to live next door to this guy.  At the same time, he hopefully comes across as somewhat sympathetic.  Brady Udall helped me understand this.  I went to grad school to study under him, and one of the things he told me was that I always had to have heart, no matter what the situation, no matter how despicable the character was, I had to have heart in my stories.

NW: I’m interested in what you said about how you thought of Justin as a villain.  I didn’t see that at all.  Was that just because he assented to the development of Bend?

BP: Yeah, I think he’s just an emotionally weak character.  He’s getting knocked around by his wife, father, and even his kid.  In the end he kind of appreciates the wilderness being paved over.  As his marriage stabilizes, he appreciates seeing a cork put in the wildness that once boiled over.  I wanted to do something that was less obvious.  Whenever you’re writing a story that could be seen as partisan or political or didactic in some way, whether you’re writing about abortion or capital punishment or the war in Iraq or whatever, your audience will distrust you if your message is front and center and they feel as though they’re reading an editorial.  When it comes to nature writing, the thing that you encounter so often is these stories that put nature on a pedestal and romanticize it, and show that urbanization is evil.  That’s there in the background of my work, but I’m trying to approach it from an off angle.  The character is happy about this.  I think the story would have suffered if in the end he was in the canyon, mourning what had happened to it.  I’m trying to have a complicated vision of how we view nature these days.

NW:  I’d say that’s the most common theme in the novels set in the West that I review for NewWest—the development, losing the wildness, and the newcomers who come with these changes.

BP: There’s that, and there’s the way we tend to overly romanticize the wilderness through our Thoreau goggles, or we make it into something that’s shadow-soaked and terrifying.  So I’m taking a hybrid approach in that one. 

NW:  I enjoyed your essay for the Graywolf catalog, in which you said that Oregon is your muse and you write, “no more than 200 works of fiction have emerged from its woods.” Have you tried to read as much of the literature of Oregon as you can?

BP: Sure.  One of the things that inspired me when I was first setting off to be a writer was knowing that somebody like William Kittredge came from eastern Oregon and grew up in the sage flats.  He chased the dream and he made it, and became one of my heroes.  Knowing his work, and knowing the work of [Ken] Kesey, I’m definitely following in their tracks.

NW: And yet in the essay you also express that there is room for you to add to the literature of Oregon, and you want to make that part of your project, to write about Oregon as you haven’t seen it portrayed before.

BP: Exactly.  Ezra Pound had that challenge for every writer: “make it new.” So I hope that I’m making it new.  I hope that I’m giving Oregon a different sort of personality than has been seen before.  I’m writing about Central Oregon, which is such a curious pocket of the state.  That’s one region that hasn’t really been distinguished, so I find myself dealing with my own forty acres.  I can’t imagine, for example, writing about New York City with all those Jonathans running around writing about the same territory.  I felt that I was in good company with all of these Oregon writers that came before, but that there was also a lot of open space.

NW: I talk to some Western writers who say that they don’t want to be pigeonholed as a Western writer, but judging from that essay, I think you would consider it an honor to be called an Oregon writer.

BP: Absolutely.  I miss the state desperately, and this is my way of communing with it.

NW: Do you think you’ll continue to set stories in Oregon?

BP: I think so.  I’ve lived in the Midwest for some time now, and I feel a fairly strong connection with Wisconsin, and I’ve set some short stories there.  It’s similar to Oregon with the exception that it lacks mountains.  It does run into a kind of ocean with Lake Superior and Lake Michigan sandwiched in there.  I feel that there are a lot of similarities between Wisconsin and Oregon in a way that there is this tension between agricultural communities and urban centers, and the way that the weather and the wild areas are so extreme that they can make you feel dwarfed as a person.  The weather can be so powerful that it can make you into something half alive.  I’m interested in writing more about Wisconsin, but Oregon is the place where I have my roots and where I’ll return to again and again.  Childhood is the time when we’re most imaginatively open.  When I retreat into imagination as an adult, when the curtains part, what I see is Central Oregon.

NW: In an essay in Poets & Writers, you wrote that you had written three failed novels before you finished The Wilding.  Now, having successfully finished a novel, would you like to write more?

BP: Yeah, it feels fantastic.  I questioned for a long time whether I was a novelist.  I still believe in many ways that you’re really one or the other.  You’re more a short story writer or you’re more a novelist.  There are a few people who are exceptional in both, like Joyce Carol Oates or T.C. Boyle.  But most people are either fish or fowl.  You’ve got people like Tobias Wolff, who even his novel isn’t really a novel.  He’s got a schnovel there with Old School.  Rick Bass, Anthony Doerr—they’re more short story writers.  I wondered whether that would be the case for me.  I could write a novel and maybe it would be good, but I probably would never exceed what I had accomplished in my short stories.  I had all these novels rejected, and they kind of turned to dust in my hands, but they weren’t wasted experiences at all.  I was trying to figure out the form.  It finally clicked for me, and I find myself deep into another novel, and it’s moving along at an incredibly swift pace.  I’m starting to think more in novelistic terms.  Even my short stories are growing longing, nearly reaching novella size, 35 to 50 pages.

NW:  So your next project is a novel?

BP: Well, I’ve got many projects.  I’ve got this book of fables that’s nearly completed, illustrated by Danica Novgorodoff, the same woman collaborated on the “Refresh, Refresh” graphic novel.  I’ve got this novel that I’m deep into right now.

NW:  Are you telling people what it’s about?

BP: I’ll say that it’s a horror novel.  That question that you asked before about the supernatural, in this case it’s front and center.  I’m calling it tentatively Red Moon.  I’ve also got a book of personal essays in the works.

NW: With some of the essays you’ve written for Poets & Writers, or other things?

BP: No, that’s another book that I’m working on, a book of craft essays for Poets & Writers.  I also just finished a screenplay with James Ponsoldt.

NW: Is this the Refresh, Refresh adaptation or something else?

BP: No, this is something else.  He wrote that screenplay and I helped edit it, and that’s being filmed in February.  This is an original screenplay that we just finished.  I’m also collaborating with him on a comic book series pitch.  I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire right now.

NW:  I think you’re busier than James Franco.  I think you could beat him in that contest.

BP: Well, I could definitely beat him in a cage match.

NW:  How do you switch between those projects?  Do you just go with wherever the energy is at the moment?

BP: Yeah, you just plug into the electricity.  I’ve never had writer’s block in part because I’ve always had so many different projects going on.  Even when I was working on The Wilding, when I got sick of it, I’d take a break and punch out three or four short stories and I’d return to The Wilding refreshed.  If I’m working on the novel and I’m starting to get sick of the characters or sick of the setting, or if I just feel like it’s not snapping along at the pace it should, I write an article for a magazine, or I play around with some screenplay stuff, or work on a comic book pitch, or blah blah blah.  I follow the energy.

NW:  So you’re going to France for some events.  Did a French edition of your book come out there?

BP: A French edition of Refresh, Refresh came out, and they changed the title because it didn’t really translate.  They called it Under the Star Spangled Banner.  That came out there, and so did the French version of the graphic novel, and they were received very well, so they’re bringing me out for a festival in Paris and a festival in Bordeaux.  Then I’ve got a crazy month that follows that when The Wilding comes out.  I’ll be hitting the trail.

Benjamin Percy is currently touring the country, 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).

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