Interview by Christopher Schobert of Buffalo Spree.
Responses are below questions--not necessarily in order...
You call Niagara Digressions an “indirect memoir”—what do you mean by that?
Tell me about the process of crafting this. You say it took you “seventy years to write,” but as you explain, the question catches you off-guard.
How does it compare to your other work? Are the links obvious?
Considering that Digressions is a form of “memoir,” I’m curious if you find it odd to now have your story out there, in the world, to such a degree. In other words, were there any instances you considered holding back?
There are several photos in the book. (There is also a painting, by poet d.a. levy.) How did you choose them, and what do they mean to you?
Nature, and animal life, is vital to this story. Do you consider yourself a “naturalist”?
Much of the imagery in the book seems to center on sights that are dying, or gone. Is writing about them a way of taking them from memory back to a form of existence?
You specifically discuss deer, and the current treatment of the animals, and even reference the “Deer Lady” (though not by name). This treatment seems particularly symbolic to you—what does it represent?
This is clearly a personal vision of WNY, but do you imagine readers will identify, too? Is that a goal?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yes, I consider myself a “naturalist,” or an “environmentalist,” or any of those other words used to describe those who seem (to others) to have an abnormal preoccupation with the natural world. From my perspective it’s those who don’t identify as naturalists who are abnormal...how would they describe themselves? Weren’t they born as were all the other creatures of the planet and don’t they rely on air to breath, water to drink, food, shelter--all of which derive from the natural world? Won’t they, collectively at least, grow to maturity, eating and drinking and amusing themselves, beget young, work at some job or jobs or not, grow old, and die? If a person insists he or she is not a naturalist, how does this person wish to be defined: as an anti-naturalist? We’re part of the planet’s animal life, like it or not.
I’d say we’re all naturalists, some of us more aware of it than others...so if I have some dim awareness of the value, the respect due it, the beauty, the rock-bottom absolute necessity of preserving the natural world because we are part of it, and it’s part of us, inseparable, really, and can write about my experiences in the natural world, then others, far beyond the confines of Western New York, can recognize that also, perhaps more sharply than before. If I’ve written about it distinctively in Niagara Digressions, then it has the potential to provide enjoyment for others when they read it. This may sound like a big order, and that I’ve taken the question, and myself, far too seriously, but I do recognize there are millions of naturalists, and millions of writers, too, and that this is what most writers hope for--so there is no big deal here.
Niagara Digressions is the latest book-length manuscript I’ve written and so the memories and stories in it are the total (related to its themes) of what I’ve experienced thus far--my thoughts, people who’ve touched my life in meaningful ways, and so on. So that’s how long it took, all my life so far. I went back to the past in memory as far as I could and cruised up through to the present, saw threads, tugged on them: read an early account of settlers trying to protect their corn crop from deer, had the child’s adventure of finding a dead deer in the Niagara gorge, saved a shoulder bone (which appears for the first time in the first sentence of the first chapter), then wrote about other deer bones over a half century later ending up on a fence post of my property (on the book cover photo), and noted the recent occurance of deer being impaled on the fence of a cemetery. It seems to me that for hundreds of years the deer has been present in our lives if we are paying attention--we shoot and eat them, collide with them in our cars, see them at dusk in countryside and suburb, love them, hate them for their destructive feeding habits--but they are a large reminder of the wilderness that once covered the Niagara Frontier and beyond. We all love Bambi, don’t we? Even if we spend our entire lives in cities, maybe especially. We might have read James Fenimore Cooper and remember his character Deerslayer. There’s a model of Ithaca slug gun for killing deer, named Deerslayer.
The buffalo is also an important animal to us, or should be. It’s important in Niagara Digressions as a marvelous animal that once roamed the plains in the millions until we “settled” them, the plains and the buffalo. The buffalo is tied up with Manifest Destiny and Native Americans of the plains. What do we know of them? If I cannot be a scholar (and I can’t, too late, even if I were capable) can I at least tell a tiny sliver of truth, so that others might look with a keener eye? We should all know more about the Place in which we live and the blood on which its history floats.
In the meantime, ND is an “indirect memoir” (I accept that description as apt, though I didn’t invent it), in which I tell stories of my family and people I’ve known, not unique except to me, perhaps, in which others will see their families and friends reflected--indirect because there’s no attempt to tell the story of “my life” as such.
So I’ve held back a lot. There’s no need to record the intimate details of my life that have no relevance to anything in the book. Telling stories reveal a great deal, anyway. What can be more intimate than what a person really thinks? Why tell that particular story? Of course, I lie a little, too. This can’t be helped even by good intentions, by me, or anyone else. That’s why it’s called “innovative” or “creative” nonfiction, as far as I’m concerned. Discussions about this issue are ongoing, but I feel no need to participate.
I do focus on the “dying or gone,” as the question suggests, the past, the disappeared. In some way this is a lament, a meditation. And it is, for me, a way of recording the personal feel of eras I’ve lived through that echo those times, of honoring them, the men who fought in War, who drank too much, who worked hard in the factories, who laughed and cried. It’s a way of not forgetting them, the people, the places they once occupied, and the times. But there’s some “life,” too, as it occured in the present (for as long as that stays with us): the family of fox raised up in our back yard, the little blackbird my late wife, Loraine, raised to maturity, to be released, set free into the part of the world that belonged to it.
The photos were chosen because they illuminate, provide another dimension to what has been explored by the words of the book. They especially illustrate frozen moments that immortalize. The cover photo was taken by my friend, Harry Brashear, long before ND became a reality, but which turned out to be central to a main image of the book. Each one of them, for one reason or another, breaks my heart. Including them was the idea of Ted Pelton, the editor of Starcherone, a good idea for which I thank him.
When I first had the feeling there should be a way to tell a series of loosely related stories, combined with regional, if not national and world history, and how other writers have dealt with specific topics that touched on my life’s experiences--and it was a feeling more than an idea--it just simmered for a time, I don’t know how long, easily months. Gradually I realized that even if everything I wanted to write about were to be unusually organized, and that was a format that could provide both challenges and opportunities, I still needed a rationale, an entry point, permission. Then one day I wrote the six sentences that now precede the first chapter and I had my leaping off point.
Who can say why or how such a thing happens? In days gone by the Muse was credited. But I was now writing, carrying the stories forward via repeated words, ideas, by content, by contrast, by footnote, by riding on the back of an animal, by what appears to be free association, by dropping an idea and picking it up later, and in other ways we’re all familiar with in free-flowing conversations or in the monologues of long-talking story tellers who just won’t shut up. The narrative is a clumsy graph of the mind working. Anyway, for better or worse, that’s how that happened.
The other writing I’ve done, most of it unpublished thus far, may reflect similar concerns, at least in the setting, but if other links exist, I don’t know what they are. There’s an out-of-print book of poetry, Looking for Niagara--and a novel ms, Captain Hooter at Niagara. Hooter is about a Viet Nam vet in conflict with low-level drug dealers, who goes missing and is believed by the community to have been killed. The actual waterfalls is central to the action. I intend to put the first chapter on the website, www.erbaxteriii.com. Then there’s a speculative fiction ms (novel), entitled The Small Problem, which takes place about 300 years in the future, having to do with genetic manipulation. The action occurs in a small city, surrounded by a landscape dominated by enormous landfills, such as we have the beginnings of in Niagara County. A transformed Frankenstein tale surfaces periodically in this one. Yet another novel ms (set in Niagara Falls, NY, but without special significance) entitled The Girl from Philadelphia, explores a psychologist’s obsession with a woman patient. He’s compelled to hire a private detective to “stalk” the woman’s present life and then her past as a girl in Philadelphia. “Niagara,” in various guises, appears to be the constant in all of these.
Responses are below questions--not necessarily in order...
You call Niagara Digressions an “indirect memoir”—what do you mean by that?
Tell me about the process of crafting this. You say it took you “seventy years to write,” but as you explain, the question catches you off-guard.
How does it compare to your other work? Are the links obvious?
Considering that Digressions is a form of “memoir,” I’m curious if you find it odd to now have your story out there, in the world, to such a degree. In other words, were there any instances you considered holding back?
There are several photos in the book. (There is also a painting, by poet d.a. levy.) How did you choose them, and what do they mean to you?
Nature, and animal life, is vital to this story. Do you consider yourself a “naturalist”?
Much of the imagery in the book seems to center on sights that are dying, or gone. Is writing about them a way of taking them from memory back to a form of existence?
You specifically discuss deer, and the current treatment of the animals, and even reference the “Deer Lady” (though not by name). This treatment seems particularly symbolic to you—what does it represent?
This is clearly a personal vision of WNY, but do you imagine readers will identify, too? Is that a goal?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yes, I consider myself a “naturalist,” or an “environmentalist,” or any of those other words used to describe those who seem (to others) to have an abnormal preoccupation with the natural world. From my perspective it’s those who don’t identify as naturalists who are abnormal...how would they describe themselves? Weren’t they born as were all the other creatures of the planet and don’t they rely on air to breath, water to drink, food, shelter--all of which derive from the natural world? Won’t they, collectively at least, grow to maturity, eating and drinking and amusing themselves, beget young, work at some job or jobs or not, grow old, and die? If a person insists he or she is not a naturalist, how does this person wish to be defined: as an anti-naturalist? We’re part of the planet’s animal life, like it or not.
I’d say we’re all naturalists, some of us more aware of it than others...so if I have some dim awareness of the value, the respect due it, the beauty, the rock-bottom absolute necessity of preserving the natural world because we are part of it, and it’s part of us, inseparable, really, and can write about my experiences in the natural world, then others, far beyond the confines of Western New York, can recognize that also, perhaps more sharply than before. If I’ve written about it distinctively in Niagara Digressions, then it has the potential to provide enjoyment for others when they read it. This may sound like a big order, and that I’ve taken the question, and myself, far too seriously, but I do recognize there are millions of naturalists, and millions of writers, too, and that this is what most writers hope for--so there is no big deal here.
Niagara Digressions is the latest book-length manuscript I’ve written and so the memories and stories in it are the total (related to its themes) of what I’ve experienced thus far--my thoughts, people who’ve touched my life in meaningful ways, and so on. So that’s how long it took, all my life so far. I went back to the past in memory as far as I could and cruised up through to the present, saw threads, tugged on them: read an early account of settlers trying to protect their corn crop from deer, had the child’s adventure of finding a dead deer in the Niagara gorge, saved a shoulder bone (which appears for the first time in the first sentence of the first chapter), then wrote about other deer bones over a half century later ending up on a fence post of my property (on the book cover photo), and noted the recent occurance of deer being impaled on the fence of a cemetery. It seems to me that for hundreds of years the deer has been present in our lives if we are paying attention--we shoot and eat them, collide with them in our cars, see them at dusk in countryside and suburb, love them, hate them for their destructive feeding habits--but they are a large reminder of the wilderness that once covered the Niagara Frontier and beyond. We all love Bambi, don’t we? Even if we spend our entire lives in cities, maybe especially. We might have read James Fenimore Cooper and remember his character Deerslayer. There’s a model of Ithaca slug gun for killing deer, named Deerslayer.
The buffalo is also an important animal to us, or should be. It’s important in Niagara Digressions as a marvelous animal that once roamed the plains in the millions until we “settled” them, the plains and the buffalo. The buffalo is tied up with Manifest Destiny and Native Americans of the plains. What do we know of them? If I cannot be a scholar (and I can’t, too late, even if I were capable) can I at least tell a tiny sliver of truth, so that others might look with a keener eye? We should all know more about the Place in which we live and the blood on which its history floats.
In the meantime, ND is an “indirect memoir” (I accept that description as apt, though I didn’t invent it), in which I tell stories of my family and people I’ve known, not unique except to me, perhaps, in which others will see their families and friends reflected--indirect because there’s no attempt to tell the story of “my life” as such.
So I’ve held back a lot. There’s no need to record the intimate details of my life that have no relevance to anything in the book. Telling stories reveal a great deal, anyway. What can be more intimate than what a person really thinks? Why tell that particular story? Of course, I lie a little, too. This can’t be helped even by good intentions, by me, or anyone else. That’s why it’s called “innovative” or “creative” nonfiction, as far as I’m concerned. Discussions about this issue are ongoing, but I feel no need to participate.
I do focus on the “dying or gone,” as the question suggests, the past, the disappeared. In some way this is a lament, a meditation. And it is, for me, a way of recording the personal feel of eras I’ve lived through that echo those times, of honoring them, the men who fought in War, who drank too much, who worked hard in the factories, who laughed and cried. It’s a way of not forgetting them, the people, the places they once occupied, and the times. But there’s some “life,” too, as it occured in the present (for as long as that stays with us): the family of fox raised up in our back yard, the little blackbird my late wife, Loraine, raised to maturity, to be released, set free into the part of the world that belonged to it.
The photos were chosen because they illuminate, provide another dimension to what has been explored by the words of the book. They especially illustrate frozen moments that immortalize. The cover photo was taken by my friend, Harry Brashear, long before ND became a reality, but which turned out to be central to a main image of the book. Each one of them, for one reason or another, breaks my heart. Including them was the idea of Ted Pelton, the editor of Starcherone, a good idea for which I thank him.
When I first had the feeling there should be a way to tell a series of loosely related stories, combined with regional, if not national and world history, and how other writers have dealt with specific topics that touched on my life’s experiences--and it was a feeling more than an idea--it just simmered for a time, I don’t know how long, easily months. Gradually I realized that even if everything I wanted to write about were to be unusually organized, and that was a format that could provide both challenges and opportunities, I still needed a rationale, an entry point, permission. Then one day I wrote the six sentences that now precede the first chapter and I had my leaping off point.
Who can say why or how such a thing happens? In days gone by the Muse was credited. But I was now writing, carrying the stories forward via repeated words, ideas, by content, by contrast, by footnote, by riding on the back of an animal, by what appears to be free association, by dropping an idea and picking it up later, and in other ways we’re all familiar with in free-flowing conversations or in the monologues of long-talking story tellers who just won’t shut up. The narrative is a clumsy graph of the mind working. Anyway, for better or worse, that’s how that happened.
The other writing I’ve done, most of it unpublished thus far, may reflect similar concerns, at least in the setting, but if other links exist, I don’t know what they are. There’s an out-of-print book of poetry, Looking for Niagara--and a novel ms, Captain Hooter at Niagara. Hooter is about a Viet Nam vet in conflict with low-level drug dealers, who goes missing and is believed by the community to have been killed. The actual waterfalls is central to the action. I intend to put the first chapter on the website, www.erbaxteriii.com. Then there’s a speculative fiction ms (novel), entitled The Small Problem, which takes place about 300 years in the future, having to do with genetic manipulation. The action occurs in a small city, surrounded by a landscape dominated by enormous landfills, such as we have the beginnings of in Niagara County. A transformed Frankenstein tale surfaces periodically in this one. Yet another novel ms (set in Niagara Falls, NY, but without special significance) entitled The Girl from Philadelphia, explores a psychologist’s obsession with a woman patient. He’s compelled to hire a private detective to “stalk” the woman’s present life and then her past as a girl in Philadelphia. “Niagara,” in various guises, appears to be the constant in all of these.
