On April 25, novelist TC Boyle took the stage at Field Arts and Events Hall for the first night of The Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher Writing Festival.

He read two short stories, “Chicxulub” and “The Five-Pound Burrito,” and then answered some audience questions. The following morning, we spoke on the phone.

ES: How was your night last night?

TC: I loved it, I love doing this sort of thing with an appreciative audience and a really good theatre, the theatre was superb, and the audience was very welcoming, so I could do really do a show.

TC: The first story is called “Chicxulub” and it’s named after the meteor that hit the earth in the time of the dinosaurs and it’s about the death of a child. It was inspired in part by Ray Carvers story, “A Small, Good Thing,” and this [writing festival] of course was in honor of Ray. Ray was a friend and mentor to me many years ago. That is a very realistic and gripping story, like many of Rays. I’m more of a satirist, and I’m a guy who likes to have fun with the surreal, and the unusual.

So, then I read the second story, by contrast. The whole idea was not only to entertain everybody, but also for the students, to see how stories might develop, and where you might get ideas from and so on. For instance, with The “Five-Pound Burrito,” it just started with an obituary I read in the LA Times about this guy from East LA who had a little taco shop, and he discovered that he could get a lot of attention if he served a 5-pound burrito, and so I just wondered about that, I mean, what kind of legacy is it that you leave to the world? Everybody wants to leave something behind, and he left a 5-pound burrito. So, I wrote a story to find out what that might be like.

ES: Do you have any history of visiting the Olympic Peninsula?

TC: Many years ago, I spent a summer with my family on Lake Goodwin north of Seattle, and I intentionally made a trip over here, so that I could see the temperate rain forest, and I was in Port Angeles once, but just passing through.”

ES: You’ve written extensively across many geographical parts of the world, and obviously the environment is a subject of yours. How does a fictional account of a place affect your perception of a place moving into it?

TC: Well, yes, I’ve written stories set all over the world, some places I’ve been to, some places I haven’t. It is fiction, and I like to imagine what a scenario might be like. If I know a place well, for instance California, where I lived most of my life now, though I grew up in New York, I suppose it’s easier to imagine the landscape, and to write about it, but still, all I really need is some details and some visualization and I can hope that I can recreate some place like Africa for my first novel, with “Water Music”.

ES: I’m wondering, more from your experience as a person, moving through a place you haven’t been, how has reading fictional accounts of a place affected the way you think of it as you move through it for the first time really? For example, have you read accounts of Washington that gave you pre-conceived ideas about it coming in?

TC: Not really, I knew that I wanted to leave LA, but I still wanted to be attached to USC. For a while I contemplated moving to Seattle, maybe, I could imagine living on one of the islands. It would be a very wonderful life, I love it up here, again, I grew up in New York, so the climate and the forest are what I think of when I close my eyes, where southern California will always be a bit alien to me.

Photo by Jamieson Fry/tcboyle.com / TC Boyle in Santa Barbara, California, in 2021.

ES: Historically, you’ve expressed respect for the writer and Annie Dillard …

TC: “A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” of Annie Dillard, which I reference in “Tortilla Curtain” is very important to me. I’ve never been to the south or her section of the country at all, but she brought it vividly to life. Not so much in terms of, what does it look like, or what kind of trees do you see, but the nature itself and the creatures. She is … not only a beautiful observer of nature but very poetic, which means a lot to me. The beauty of the words and the beauty of the images. You know there’s a reference in one of my recent stories to film. So in film you have a cinematographer, the cinematographer creates what you are seeing, and it could be beautiful, or it could be a disaster. So is it with words on the page, and sentences, and the beauty of them, to evoke an image.

ES: In “Chicxulub,” the main characters undergo an excruciating horror which unfolds in labored detail, but from which, in a twist, they are ultimately spared. There is an almost visceral relief when the twist reveals that their perceived nightmare was in fact a misunderstanding. The reality that replaces their perceived tragedy is in fact tragic but removed from their immediate experience. There is a real musicality to the build of this story, and the tension holds almost to the tightest point, before releasing. As a listener, you are led through a major relief, and then just a moment later, you realize that tragedy was not in fact spared, more broadly. Maybe you could talk about the musicality that exists in the story. Also, could you speak to whether or not it’s more of an intuitive or a technical thing to build something so musical?

TC: I love your characterization of the story. It turns on you, because we are subjects to the same forces, because that’s essentially what life is. I love hearing your question about musicality because as we were talking about the prose earlier, it has to beat, it has to have a beat to it. It has to sing. It’s like a kind of singing. I have never written anything without music playing constantly in the background. It’s very important for me, another reason I like to perform the stories out loud, or read them to my wife, is so I can hear it. There’s a different way of getting a story when you hear it and read it aloud than when I’m reading it myself, off the screen. I make different connections and I see it in a different way. So yes, I like your observation and musical prose is very important to me, again, it is like a song, and that’s why I love to do it out loud.

ES: We’re moving steadily into spring on The Olympic Peninsula, people are planting seeds. What can you describe of the germination phase of your stories? Between when there is no story at all, and when you’re starting to muse.

TC: Some stories just appear, especially stories that have to do with my own life like “Up Against the Wall” for instance, or “Greasy Lake”. Others may be something I read in a newspaper for instance, a story like “Swept Away”, I was just intrigued by the fact that the islands off of Scotland were the windiest place on earth and, you know, typically children in strollers will be blown down the street, flower pots will blow off of houses, cats go flying by, that’s all I knew. I had been there once and I didn’t really notice the wind so much, but I noticed how arctic it was out there on the Scottish islands. So, I dreamed up a story, and it became a love story. It’s about a guy who lives hermetically on this island in an enclosed space with the same people for generations. A young American girl, who is an ornithologist comes to study the birds. The story works out as a kind of a folk tale, one of the forms I really love. So, I had been there, but years before and I hadn’t thought I would write a story about it, but I could recall some of those memories and let the story jam itself out. Now, the beginning of any story is the hard part, maybe I’ve thought about it for a while, maybe I’ve done some research, and in the process of that – and anyone writing a term paper can relate to this – you collect material. You don’t know exactly how or what it will be or how you’ll present it, and it begins, and you follow that voice.

ES: I saw in an earlier interview that you disagreed with the cliche “write what you know” in favor of “write what you don’t know.” This points to the virtue of curiosity. How has curiosity driven you to write, and how has writing satisfied your curiosity?

TC: Good question, and as far as that comment, “write what you know” is fine; I have no problems with it. There are writers who write only about their own autobiographical experiences and the place that they know the best, and that’s fine. There are all different kinds of writers, I’m just saying that there are other ways to explore or discover something. Yes, I’m curious. Yes, I’m fascinated by just being alive on the planet earth and what it means, what it adds up to. How are we different from the other animal species and how are we the same? All of that. My way of exploring it is to create a scenario. I don’t know necessarily what I think about things, or think deeply, until I’m writing. It’s a process of discovering something, discovering what the story is, what it means, you don’t know what it means exactly. You look at the stories like the ones you heard last night, and yes, they’re very tightly bound and structured, but that structure is all internal. I don’t ever have any outline or anything, that’s just a process of discovery, day by day, until finally you have this miraculous moment when it comes together. I mentioned to the audience “this monkey, my back” which you can find at TCBoyle.com, in which I talk about this kind of process as a kind of addiction, because it is so exhilarating when you come to the end of a story or a novel, that you want to do it again, and again, and again. There’s always more to discover, you always want to know what’s next. There’s no resting on your laurels, I’m not interested in that, I’m interested in being a working artist, because it gives me a way to try to understand life, and to try to regulate it, in face of a world ruled by chance accident.

ES: You’re prolific; could you speak to your writing practice daily and weekly?

TC: I love doing interviews like this because I write every day, but not today. I work seven days a week, it’s my life. A couple of hours a day till it goes sour or burns out, or I’m tired, or have enough for that day. Then I go outside, I spend a lot of time outside, alone, in nature. Either hiking up in the Santa Ynez Mountains by Santa Barbara or particularly lately, on the beaches, and I know a beach where there are very few people and sometimes no people whatsoever. I like to find a spot and hunker down. Sometimes I read a book, sometimes I’ll just take a snooze with the dog out there. Just to be outside and away from society and mechanical noises and all of that. It’s very very important to me. Even just in my own yard, trimming trees, or hauling stones around, or that sort of thing. That frees my mind.

ES: Back to your curiosity driving you towards the writing. Two books come to mind” “The Women” and “San Miguel.” In both cases close physical proximity seems to have brought about an interest for you. “The Women” is a fictional account of American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, built the home you were living in. “San Miguel”, which refers to an island off the coast of Santa Barbara where you live. Can you speak to the insight you gained of these subjects?

TC: So, when I moved into the house, which is his first California house, it’s a beautiful house, it’s made out of redwood, it’s all windows, the last of his fifty prairie style houses. It was kind of a wonderful place to be, and so that made me curious as to his career and who he was, in more detail. I mean everybody knows him, but I wanted to know in great detail. That enabled me to go to Taliesin and Oak Park and to really plunge into the details of his life and work just simply because I wanted to know about the architect who had built the house.

With “San Miguel”, this is a companion piece to “When the Killing’s Done”, they both take place on islands. “When the Killing’s Done” is Santa Crus Island, which you can see from Santa Barbara, it’s huge, it’s bigger than Manhattan and it’s only 28 miles out there. I often wondered what goes on out there and I discovered an ecological story about the removal of invasive species and the controversies surrounding it. I was fortunate enough to meet some of biologists who work out there and to go out with them on their rounds. It was quite fascinating. At the same time, an Island which is a little further out, smaller, San Miguel appealed to me because I had discovered these historical stories behind it, and they were quite fascinating. So, I was able to visit that island and jam up a narrative. I don’t know if you heard me talking to the audience, but I was very constrained, because I’m mainly a satiric kind of guy and a referential guy, to what’s happening in society today. I kept my voice within the purview of two women who had lived on this island at various times and forced myself to see if I could do it, to write a non-ironic narrative, a straightforward narrative. It was very hard for me, because it’s not playing to my strengths necessarily.

But as with the story “Chicxulub,” I was able to find new fictional ground, and pleased that I did it. I always want to try to do something new, rather than just replicate the same. Which is, by the way, is why I’ve never liked genre-writing or a series of books about so-and-so. I always want to explore something new, if possible.

ES: Can you touch back down on what the effect of Raymond Carvers story (“A Small, Good Thing”), which opened-up the possibility of a more serious writing style, what the effect of that story was?

TC: I wouldn’t characterize it as serious, I would say comic or non-comic, realistic or surreal, or comedic. Ray, by the way, was very funny too, in many of his stories. In the period when I knew him, he was fighting against the trend, the trend in literature was experimental writing and the wild surreal stuff, which I mentioned last night by Luther Cross, Garcia Marquez, and the writers of Latin America, [Miguel Ángel] Asturias and then in America [John] Barth, and [Robert] Coover, and [Donald] Barthelme and the rest of them. This was what fascinated me, and this is how I began as a writer. The absurdist playwrights as well. Rays work, and the work of Richard Yates and few others, kind of bucked that trend. They were writing in a more traditional mode, which is realism. So, I began to experiment with that too, many writers go the opposite way, but this has been productive for me. If you look at my latest book of stories, you’ll see that they are mainly very amusing, but there are also some realistic moments, and realistic stories. Why not use all of the tools that you possibly can? Each story suggests itself in a different mode. If I’m doing anything for my reader in these big collections, like my two volumes of collected stories, and the two volumes that came after that of individual stories, it’s to give a variety, and a variety of voices. Voices, approaches, and settings. Like you said, I could set a story anywhere in the world, why not? If it fascinates me, that’s it. I have a story called “In the Zone” for instance, which I wrote about the zone of alienation around Chernobyl. This also fascinates me. No people were allowed to go in there for 30 years, and so nature came back. Nature may wind up having mutations and so on, but nonetheless, nature came back. Wolves came back, eagles that hadn’t been seen in generations came back. It just fascinated me, what might that mean? So, I wrote a story, “In the Zone”. Towards the end of this the Russian government let old people go back to their villages, they had taken them all out after Chernobyl and put them in homes. They let the old people go back, cause the old people are going to die anyway, so they may as well go back to where they wanted to be. So, I wrote a little story about that to see what it might be like.

ES: You wouldn’t characterize it as serious …

TC: I think they’re all serious, everything I’ve done is deadly serious in my art, but I don’t make the distinction between serious and non-serious, I would make the distinction between dramatic and comedic, realistic and fantastic, or fabulist.

ES: How do you think about your own writing? Do you think of yourself seriously? Non-seriously? Do you embrace a paradox?

TC: I am very gratified and pleased by having a conversation with you about my work, like this, or with other readers that I encounter. It’s wonderful to put my art out there and have someone respond to it, I mean that’s the whole purpose. As far as my role in society, it’s rather limited these days because fiction, literature in general, has receded in our consciousness, because we have scientific advances, we have video games. We have all sorts of distractions, and reading is contemplative. If there’s something terrible about our society, it’s that people don’t have contemplative time, don’t seek it out, or don’t know the value of it. I don’t think any writer of fiction is going to have the currency writers might have had even 50 years ago, and certainly a century ago, when it was big news. Time moves on, what can I do? I’m going to do what I’m going to do. I often cite Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist” in this regard. The Hunger Artist was going to do his art whether anybody paid attention or not. That’s who we are, once you are an artist, there’s no going back from that.