A Conversation with Greg Garrett
This novel has a long and interesting history—if you’re fascinated by me and my life, that is. The short version, for folks who don’t share that fascination, is that I wrote the first draft of this novel during the early ’90s, around the time when it is set. I loved the characters but didn’t feel like I’d mastered the art of writing a novel yet. So I put it away for what I thought would be a short time, but, given the adventures you would learn about in the long version, it turned into years. After I wrote my novel Free Bird I felt I had broken through and finally learned how to be a novelist. So a couple of years ago, when I found myself with some writing time on my hands, I came back to Shame, rewrote it using everything I know, and, with my editor Steve Parolini’s help, turned it into something I was really proud of.
Wow. And that’s the short version. Maybe we should just stick with that.
John Tilden is less like me than any other main character I’ve written a novel about, although there are certainly some autobiographical elements. As I mention in the acknowledgments, the book is set in a place I’ve known since childhood, a place where you could find my mother, grandmother, and many of my relatives. Our actual farm outside Watonga, Oklahoma, is where John Tilden lives, and that was important in writing about John. Our day-to-day lives are so different that I really felt like I needed the grounding of knowing exactly where John was brushing his teeth, feeding his cattle, sitting by the pond, because I had been there myself.
In most of the details of our lives, we’re different, though. I left the small town where I graduated high school, got ridiculously overeducated, and live now in Austin, Texas, a large city that has foreign films, sushi, and Episcopalians. I teach at a major university, I travel all over the world. I guess if John were real, I’d be living his dream life. Maybe I’d have to arm wrestle him for it. Perhaps we’re more alike than I thought.
The superficial details of John’s life—farmer, coach, husband, father—were actually less interesting to me than the sloppy inner life—his wants, hopes, desires, dreams. John has been deeply unhappy, wishes his life had turned out differently, and wonders whether it’s too late to make a change. I think all of us wrestle with that “road not taken” question at one time or another. I was certainly wrestling with it in my own life when I was writing the first draft of the novel, and so I really resonated with John’s story.
But what I loved most about telling John’s story was that, restless as he is, unhappy as he sometimes is, down deep at his core John is a genuinely good person. I admire him, I like him, and I hope readers will feel the same. I had written about lovable scoundrels in my first two novels; in this story, I wanted to talk about what it takes to be a solid family man—to do the right thing, as unflashy as that might sound.
Over the years I’ve published about a dozen short stories about Cheyenne Indians who live in and around Watonga. Ellen Smallfeet is a recurring character in those stories, and Michael Graywolf was in one of the very first I published, in the South Dakota Review. Phillip is also in several stories. He’s one of my all-time favorite characters, because I see a lot of myself in him (dating back to all the stuff I left out of the short version awhile ago). In particular, I think the long story Bridges is one of the best things I ever wrote. It retells the action of Shame from Phillip’s perspective. That story shows us John and Michelle through Phillip’s eyes, which is cool if you love those characters as I do, and it’s a story that breaks your heart for Phillip all over again because you hear in his own words what he’s been through.
I guess you could say all the Watonga things I wrote in the 1990s were early stories investigating what William Faulkner said every writer needed, a little postage stamp of land to call his own. Watonga, the farm, small town life, and the mix of white, black, and red people were things I knew about from my earliest childhood, and I thought they were elements I could write about in a way that nobody else could. Writers need material, and the Cheyenne stories showed me that I could tell great stories about this land and the people who walk it. When it came time to write a novel, I knew I could set it in rural Oklahoma and write something universal that people would want to read about.
After Free Bird achieved some pretty considerable notice (Top Ten lists, film interest, that kind of thing), Cycling came out in 2003 and was well reviewed, if (sigh) generally misfiled by booksellers next to the latest book by Lance Armstrong in the sports section. I heard from angry guys who bought it accidentally thinking I was going to help them with their road training or something, but instead, there was all this stuff about this guy who couldn’t seem to get his life together. Suffice it to say that the book never really reached its target audience, although I also hear from people who have read and loved it. I think the wait would not have been quite so long if Cycling had found the audience we expected for it, because there would have been a desire from more than just a few readers who happened to stumble across it.
But the bigger reason is that over the last six years I’ve been doing a lot of new things: I went to seminary full time for three years, wrote a number of nonfiction books, taught, lectured, and traveled, and my life started taking me in a number of different directions. When I published my first two novels, writing fiction was the primary demand on my writing time. Now there are a number of demands. But I don’t ever want to stop writing fiction—I love telling stories about characters who interest me, and being taken away into their worlds.
I don’t know. I’ve been writing pretty hard for the past couple of years, and one of the things I’d like to do is slow down a little and let some stories unfold in my head. You can’t rush a novel into being—or, at least, I can’t. I’d like to write a children’s novel—or several of them—with my son Chandler. We’ve been throwing ideas around and plotting a series. I’ve given thought to a literary detective novel and a novel about a shipwrecked sailor fished out of the sea. And I have a novel finished, I think, about an oncologist who makes some very bad decisions involving one of his patients, a Dallas gangster. Mostly I just want to keep listening for the voice that’s going to start speaking into my ear and telling me about somebody’s life. That’s how all three of the published novels started—I wrote down a first sentence that came to me. And then a second. And then I was off to the races. So to speak.
I’ve got nonfiction projects that people want me to write, and so it looks like there will be Greg Garrett books on the stands for the next few years. The novels are just for me, though, and they take as long as they take.
But not, I hope, another six years.