Interview by David Carriere
DC/Q—It’s always fun to hear about a writer’s process, so please indulge me! When do you write? In the morning…or just nighttime…or maybe you are a binge writer?
Also, do you sit down to write consistently day in and day out?
JG/A—Creatively I’m more of a morning person, though I can write anytime the muse comes or characters exerts themselves. But the bulk of my work begins in the morning and can extend throughout the day—night, not so much. Also, I’m not a writer who tethers himself to a fixed quota, some days I’ll write four or five thousand words, some days 200, some days I just think and have conversations with myself. I tell my stories primarily in first person within the characters’ dialog. I write, if you can call it that, a lot of dialog when I’m driving in the car playing the parts of different characters thrashing out the narrative. Of course, I forget some of the conversations, but enough sticks that can be incorporated into a story. It’s a little schizophrenic, but it works. I live a good two hours or so from the nearest large town, so it gives me a good deal of time to work. There’s something about movement that’s good for the flow of a story.
DC/Q—I have read three of your novels, and without knowing you personally, I can tell from your work that you are guided by a moral compass. Please tell me where you were born, how big the family was and how you were raised?
JG/A—Exerting my view of morality and exploring the views of others is what I think writing is all about—it’s where the drama dwells, and dialog is how I get to it. Morality is, in fact, best approached through dialog, if it’s not then it’s a lecture, and while lecture has its place, it is a little stilted when placed in fiction. It’s not that I don’t have a moral message, it’s just best when the readers come to it themselves. Sometimes I even create a character who is the moral compass. In my new novel, JANE, I use the fictional character Jim, purloined from HUCKLEBERRY FINN, functionally as a moral compass for the narrator. All this is to say, I’m not opposed to sticking my take on morality in the reader’s face if I think I can get away with it.
My family is best described as proto hippie bohemians, my father was a good amateur tennis player in Paris and the French Riviera in the late 20’s and early 30’s. He said he retired between the ages of twenty and forty-two and paid for it ever after. I was born in San Francisco when he was forty-two. I had two half-sitters, one by my mother and one by my father who were both twenty years older than me. It was like having three mothers. They were different souls, and I learned a lot from each of them. My birth mother was a singer and dancer who performed in, among other places, Shanghai China in the late 20s. Between Shanghai and the Rivera there were plenty of good stories for a young child’s imagination.
DC/Q—I can tell from reading your work that you are well read. How did you fall in love with books, were your parents readers?
JG/A—I don’t know about being well read, but I was well read to. Primarily by my father who was a bit of an intellectual and would never read me anything he was not interested in himself. My mother filled in the gaps for works my father deemed uninteresting. Both my mother and father were readers, but my father was my literary guru.
So, from an early age I was read Faulkner. Salinger, Harper Lee, Balzac, and of course, Twain. I can remember him reading HUCK FINN to me in a motel we were staying at just having moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. I was perhaps six or seven at the time but from then on, I always wanted to be a writer—Imagined myself as a writer—though I wrote next to nothing. I’ve had sundry careers in between, but I eventually got there. I was read to so richly it wasn’t until high school that I took over the reading solely on my own. I used my reading primarily as an excuse for not doing homework, a strategy that worked fairly well in a proto hippie bohemian family. While it didn’t provide for a broad education, it did provide a good vocabulary. My father also read me detective stories along with literature. One of his favorite authors was Eric Ambler who wrote detective novels of international intrigue. Two of my favorites were A COFFIN FOR DEMETRIOS, and THE LIGHT OF DAY, which was made into the movie Topkapi. You’ll find a good mixture of the detective story in my stuff.
DC/Q—You are quite prolific, and your work is all very different. Have you been writing your entire life? Acknowledging you are a septuagenarian, I have to ask, how many years have these books been germinating inside you before you wrote them down? Has writing this body of work been a lifetime process, or more of a recent burst of creativity due to the freedom retirement has offered?
JG/A—Good question! As I’ve said, I’ve thought of myself as a writer since that time in the Guadalajara motel—HUCKLEBERRY FINN and all. I have always viewed the world through the lens of a fiction writer, taken note, and filed away possible fodder for novels and short stories, but committed almost noting print. ‘So it goes’, said the novelist Kurt Vonnegut every time someone, or something, died or was killed in his story, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. So it went for me, occupied in an academic life, till an Arizona District Attorney made a comment on an upcoming execution of a particular egregious criminal. His words were: ‘It’s not a good case for the opponents of capital punishment.’ As a longtime opponent of capital punishment in all its forms and all its twisted logic, I was incensed. This, I thought, is precisely the case against capital punishment, as capital punishment is not about the criminal and his acts, but of a society that chooses to enact it. It moved me to go from the So It Goes phase of my writing (or lack of it), to my Just Do it phase. And I wrote my first novel, ON THE ERADICATION OF SMALLPOX AND THE INTRACTABILITY OF RACOONS, a mouthful, but the only title for it. If you read the book, the title will become clear. In the book I juxtapose the necessary components of a crime that need to be in place to receive a capital sentence and apply the logic to society in general.
Anyway, after this novel, stories that I’d been carrying around with me for years and decades demanded to be written. And seem only stoppable by death, so it goes, or dementia. Forming them has been a lifelong process in the thinking but less than fifteen years in their writing. But I do think back to my seven-year-old self in that Mexican motel as the origin of myself as an author.
Time’s a tricky thing. My last novel, JANE, the one in which I invoked HUCK’s Jim is a little more half fiction and a little less half memoire. I leave it to the reader to tease out which is what it was and which I imagined it to be. After the close of the story, the narrator writes an afterword I called, Reversing the Telescope. I think it’s a good piece of writing, but in the end, both I and my editor thought it usurped the story a bit and decided to cut it, but I’ll give it to you now as it is the best I can do with time and stories.
The narrator writes: “Telling a story from a point fifty-five years from the time it happened is a bit like peering through a telescope at a distant nebula. I reversed the direction of the telescope so that the story could gaze across time back at me and demand an accounting.”
DC/Q—Each one of your books spoke to me in their own unique way, and while reading them somehow offered me doses of the exact wisdom that I needed to be gleaning at that moment! How did that happen? Do you effortlessly weave overarching themes and soul-searching questions throughout all your novels from the bottom up, or do they somehow just metamorphosize due to the process of writing and trickle from the top down?
JG/A— At some point in the telling of a tale, the characters take it on and assume responsibility themselves. In the end, it’s them telling you the tale, rather than the other way around. But it still takes work, countless internal conversations, with the writer assuming the persona of the characters, many who are in opposition to each other. As I’ve said before, it’s a schizophrenic process. The overarching themes and soul-searching you ask about really come from the characters who assume a reality of their own, or of the writer willing to assume their persona, which, is same thing.
To answer your question of how the various thinking or insights find their way from the characters into the narrative, it’s neither bottom up nor top down. But a matter of being there, inside the story, inside the characters. I make my characters do a lot of their own work. Sometimes I’ll go back and read things I know I’ve written, and find myself saying, “Who wrote this? Where did this come from?” It’s like THE ELVES AND THE SHOEMAKER kind of thing. You leave the work alone long enough, and its clear that it’s the characters writing it themselves. Kind of creepy, eh?
DC/Q—As you noted, in your aforementioned RACOONS, you examine capital punishment. I found the work chilling to read because ironically, at the very same time I had the book in my hands, I saw on the news that a South Carolina inmate was being executed by firing squad in real life. Though you wrote it a number of years ago, that book also taps into other major current societal conversations and seems to me was ahead of its time, how did that happen?
JG/A—Once again, I don’t know how it happened. In RACOONS I plucked a story right from the news about a White female prisoner, maybe one with a mental disability, who was put to death while singing a Negro Spiritual. Sometimes it’s not just your characters who write the story, but reality, and I’m not above usurping reality. The story of the executed woman character, I used in RACOONS was also from South Carolina or a similar state with less than civilized political leadership. So it goes.
The fictional organization I described in that book as a Better World Without You, BWWY, was a vehicle in the story to insert the logic of capital punishment into the logic of extant society. It is presentient, only to the extent that some people might perceive it as a heuristic, or strategy, for dealing with the actions of the current administration here in the United States.
DC/Q—Are you a compulsive reader? How do you most enjoy reading books? Do you lean towards new releases or the classics? Hardcover, paperback or tablet? What are you currently reading?
JG/A—My choice in books is much like my choice of friends and there’s a good deal of serendipity involved in the process. Many of the books in my library are friends that I consult at various times, usually when I’m in need of being grounded in reality, or reassured I’m engaged with the right thoughts and activities. But I’m more a compulsive book buyer than I am a compulsive reader. I often buy books that I find interesting, both fiction and nonfiction, read parts of them, and put them on the shelf like friends that are available for future consultation. I asked a friend of mine who deals with behavior disorders to explain why my daughter, my third child, born with Down Syndrome, is compulsive over green beans being part of her dinners, but never eats any of them, just moves them around her plate. Donna patiently explained that the function of things one is compulsive over aren’t things that one particularly wants but things that make them feel comfortable, just by having them around. It explained my daughter’s relationship with green beans, it explains my relationships to my books. I’ve said the only way I would read all the books I’ve bought was if they locked me in jail and said, ‘When you’ve read them all you can go.’
Back to compulsion and books. I often follow authors, I’ll read the works of a single author ingesting a good deal of their work in sequence. My most compulsive enterprise, however, was to read the 26, or so, TARZAN novels of Edgar Rice Boroughs before I entered high school. I loved that guy, even when the plots were somewhat repetitious.
For completeness, you’ll probably ask me what writers have been my greatest influences? So, I’ll beat you to the punch and list them in historical order: Poe, Twain, Steinbeck, Salinger, Vonnegut, Stephen Jay Gould, Octavia Butler, and most Recently Thomas R. King, a Canadian writer, whose GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER is pure genius.
DC/Q—Are you in the midst of writing another book?
JG/A—Yes. I’m currently involved with the final editing of a book called FETISH, that will be out soon. The tale is narrated by a young woman with cerebral palsy who finds herself to be a shaman. it’s my first full-throated effort in the genre of magical realism, though I’ve used magic and spiritual elements before in some of my earlier books.
I’m constantly writing or thinking about writing. Writing, like tennis, keeps me off the couch and keeps me alive.
About the author: Jamey Gittings is a fiction writer who splits his time between Arivaca, Arizona and Big Sur, California. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in the areas of special education, mental disability, and behavioral psychology. He has founded a school for youth and adults with disabilities, worked for the United Nations, the government of Afghanistan, and with the government of Inda on projects of disability, economic development, and gender equality. Jamey is the author of five novels, including his forthcoming JANE which will be released on April 2, 2025.