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A FASCINATING Q&A WITH DENNIS TAFOYA: WRITING, INSPIRATIONS, AND THE POOR BOY'S GAME

7/10/2014

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I’m always on the lookout for outstanding crime fiction, especially contemporary stories in the great noir tradition. A few years ago, I discovered the writing of Dennis Tafoya. I started with the gritty and evocative novel, THE WOLVES OF FAIRMOUNT PARK, and realized within a few chapters that I had found a new favorite writer. I raced through his darkly terrific debut, DOPE THIEF, and then devoured stories like “Above the Imperial” (from PHILADELPHIA NOIR) and “Satan’s Kingdom” (from NEEDLE Magazine and just selected for BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES 2014, edited by Otto Penzler and Laura Lippman).

Now, Dennis Tafoya is back with a brand-new novel, THE POOR BOY’S GAME. In a Starred Review, “Publisher’s Weekly” said: “Tafoya delivers a gut-wrenching crime thriller as gritty and harsh as a Philadelphia winter … Tafoya does a superb job keeping the reader guessing to the surprise end.”


A student of literature, film, and creativity, Dennis is also a thoughtful and insightful teacher. I was fortunate to take a writing class Dennis taught with members of the Philadelphia Liars Club and I really connected with his teaching style and the writing examples he used. Generous and encouraging to fellow writers, he helped me discover Wells Tower and THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, and even connected me with one of the editors I used for my own debut novel. 


An exquisite writer and an all-around great guy, Dennis Tafoya stops by the blog today for a fascinating discussion about the creative life — and I couldn’t be more thrilled.


Hey, Dennis, thanks for being here. Tell us, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you were one?
I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I started writing horror and science fiction inspired by movies and TV shows and the short stories I loved when I first started reading, by guys like Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch. There were a lot of monsters, a lot of dinosaurs lurking in remote canyons in the desert. Demons that passed through portals or holes from other dimensions. When you’re a certain kind of kid there’s a lot of cataclysmic stuff in your head trying to get out.

I don’t think I accepted that I was a real writer until I was walking from Penn Station to the Flatiron Building to meet my editor for the first time. Before I had an agent and contract I think writing was something I didn’t let myself consider a serious aspiration. It was a desire I kept hidden for all the reasons we hide things that really matter to us – fear of failure, fear of ridicule for wanting something that seems beyond the normal possibilities of a life defined by work and family and a high school diploma.

What creative work most recently inspired you?
I’m constantly looking for cool stuff to light up the creative parts of my brain. I love poetry and will sit and read the Writer’s Almanac for hours for the daily poems. There’s a poem that I stumbled on in an issue of Poetry by Mary Szybist that I can’t stop thinking about called “On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes.” I think it’s about the irreducibility of some experiences, like the death in the title. The narrator asks the girl what the eyes taste like, and she says, ‘they taste like eyes.’ Some things aren’t like other things. Death isn’t like anything else. If I knew Mary I’d love to ask her. But even if I’m getting the poem wrong, it’s beautiful and dreamlike and startling, which describes all the stuff I really love and (most importantly) that I can feel myself learning from as I read. From Annie Proulx’s Western stories to Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything or Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. It’s not just that I love those stories, it’s that their dreamlike quality almost overwhelms the narrative in the way that our obsessive thoughts, our endless attempt to understand our experiences can overwhelm our daily lives and obscure reality.

Have you ever abandoned a creative project?
I start and abandon work constantly, but I don’t think much actually goes to waste. If I’ve come up with anything good I’ll most likely reuse it somewhere else. Also, it can be tough to sort out abandoning from writing…really…slowly, which I also do. If when I die there are a hundred unfinished stories on my hard drive, it might be that I really did intend to go back and finish them. I need a really good idea to write the next thing in a story, and I force myself to work almost exclusively in a linear fashion; I’m not allowed to jump around in a story because I know from experience that I’ll end up with a bunch of scenes that don’t mean anything because they lack connective tissue. A sack of bones instead of a living, breathing thing.

The last film I enjoyed was …
Loved Blue Ruin  by Jeremy Saulnier. It’s about violence and retribution, but without any of the self-righteousness or schmaltz of pictures that are usually about those things. The main character is avenging a wrong, but he has no idea what he’s doing, either in the particulars of attacking a violent felon or when trying to concoct a strategy to keep his family safe. The result is certainly horrifying, but also affecting because you can’t help but feel for this mentally-fragile guy who’s so completely out of his depth. Also really intrigued by The Rover and Under the Skin, both of which I think are more about evocative situations and imagery than compelling narrative.

What creative work might we be surprised to find on your shelf, iPod, or TiVo?
I read a lot of true crime, which I guess wouldn’t be surprising, but I also read a lot of military history and have a lot of old books about UFO conspiracies and ‘strange but true’ stuff from the fifties and sixties (including a few great old paperbacks given to me by Wallace Stroby) I have the collected books of Charles Fort and a copy of They Knew Too Much About UFOs by the huckster Gray Barker.  I recently tore through The United States of Paranoia, by Jesse Walker, which is a terrifically smart survey of American conspiracy theories going back to the Revolution. There’s a point in the sixties where all these threads of conspiracy-obsession, UFO-obsession and Illuminati-obsession get so tangled that folks like the Discordianists - who consciously promoted conspiracy myths as a kind of cultural performance art - began to believe themselves part of an actual disinformation conspiracy, and leftwing tricksters concocted a spoof of a RAND Corporation analysis that became a staple of rightwing conspiracy mongers who thought the document was real. I’d like to use all of this stuff in a book someday, but I think I’d need help from someone much brighter than I am. Maybe one of my kids will help me sort it all out.  

Facebook and Twitter: friend or foe to a creative?
I think using social media is another endeavor that requires the help of smart friends. I really admire people who do it well (the brilliant Megan Abbott comes immediately to mind), but the lure of fascinating nonsense on the web can be a little like alcohol: When does a bracing shot of brandy to steady the nerves become a three-day, Lost Weekend bender? Anyone who’s gone online to check their mail and found themselves hours later looking at pictures of freakishly huge sand crabs or a fox that adopted a pit bull will know what I mean.

The internet is absolutely essential to what I do. I’m way too shy to approach people and get information I need to write, as a rule, so I make tremendous use of online forums, wikis and other sites maintained by people with a passion for esoteric bits of data. And social media as a promotion tool clearly works, when applied correctly and diligently. My friend Don Lafferty is a fantastic resource in this area, and I always feel guilty that I don’t follow his advice more than I do. I think the trick is to get to the useful stuff and get back to work, and I haven’t mastered that yet. So, as with many things, I guess I’d say watch the folks who are doing it right and take some lessons.

In addition to writing, how do you express your creativity?
I love to take photographs. I’m not very good at it, but it’s a lot of fun.

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Here in the Philadelphia area, we are proud to call Dennis Tafoya one of our own. But we’re so glad the rest of the world is quickly getting to know him as well. With THE POOR’S BOY GAME, you’ll find Dennis exploring, as he tells us, “family connections and obligations, how much we’re innately ourselves and how much we’re formed by (and in opposition to) the people who raised us.” It’s time to discover the deep and dark literary world of Dennis Tafoya for yourself. You’ll find him on his website, Facebook, twitter, and in bookstores everywhere.

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BRAD MELTZER ON CREATIVITY, ANIMAL HOUSE, AND THE MOST UNDERRATED ARTISTS IN THE WORLD

7/1/2014

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More than fifteen years ago—wow, yes, fifteen+ years ago—I went into an independent bookstore to pick up the debut novel by a guy named Brad Meltzer. I was taking a chance buying the first book by an unknown writer (in hardcover, no less), but a review I saw compared the author to Scott Turow and John Grisham and that was good enough for me. I was something of a connoisseur of legal thrillers in those days and I couldn’t wait to check out this new hotshot. Guess what--I read THE TENTH JUSTICE, loved it, and I’ve been a Brad Meltzer fanboy ever since.

A native of Brooklyn and Miami, a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia Law School, Brad Meltzer is the author of nine novels, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers THE INNER CIRCLE and THE BOOK OF FATE, as well as bestselling thrillers including DEAD EVEN, THE FIRST COUNSEL, THE MILLIONAIRES, THE ZERO GAME, THE BOOK OF LIES (another personal fave!), and THE FIFTH ASSASSIN.

Listen to this: Brad is one of the only authors to ever have books on the bestseller list for Fiction and Non-Fiction (HISTORY DECODED), Advice (HEROES FOR MY SON and HEROES FOR MY DAUGHTER), Children’s Books (I AM AMELIA EARHART and I AM ABRAHAM LINCOLN), and comic books (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA, which won the prestigious Eisner Award).

Allow me a special shout-out here for Brad’s IDENTITY CRISIS, a controversial murder mystery involving some of my favorite superheroes.

Brad is also the host of BRAD MELTZER’S DECODED on History Channel, a show my family has loved to watch together. The Lincoln Assassination and UFO episodes were particular hits in the Cadigan household.

Brad's terrific new children’s book, I AM ROSA PARKS, was just released in June. (Perhaps you saw him talking about these great hero stories on “CBS This Morning” a couple weeks ago.) 
His latest thriller is THE FIFTH ASSASSIN. 

As you can see, Brad is a busy, busy guy. But he always has time for fans and he’s generous to other writers. When we met last month at BookExpo America, Brad was all too willing to support a new novelist who has been with him since THE TENTH JUSTICE. I am thrilled that he took time out of his crazy schedule to visit the blog of a longtime fan (and unknown writer) as we talk about the creative life. A big thanks and welcome to Brad Meltzer.




Brad, thanks so much for being here. Let’s start with this:  What creative work most recently inspired you?
I’ve been using the summer to show my younger and older sons some true film classics. THE IRON GIANT and THE TRUMAN SHOW still do it to me.

The most underrated creative (writer, musician, artist)  …
Storyboard artists in film. They’re directing it with lead pencils and getting no credit at all. Viva la storyboard artist! 

Which of your works comes closest to the way you heard/saw it in your head?
THE FIRST COUNSEL. It’s the only opening I ever wrote that I didn’t rewrite by the time I got to the end. It’s word for word the same.

What was the best creative advice you ever received?
"If it was easy, everyone would do it."

What creative work might we be surprised to find on your shelf, iPod, or DVR?
No one loves ANIMAL HOUSE like I love the film ANIMAL HOUSE. On my iPod, I’ve got a sudden love for the soundtrack of A STAR IS BORN, since it reminds me of my mother.

In addition to writing, how do you express your creativity?
Little notes for my kids. Tiny emails and texts and post-its. I will take them everywhere.

The most difficult thing about the life of a creative is …
That day where you’re convinced you don’t know what you’re doing. Those days come all the time. To me, if it all always goes perfectly for me, I’ll know I’m done.

Works that simultaneously made you want to write and to quit writing:
REPLAY by Ken Grimwood. THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY [Robb's note: this is my top candidate for a Great American Novel]. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. The play AVENUE Q. Any great comic book art. FOX IN SOCKS by Dr. Seuss. Watching any documentary about Jim Henson or Mr. Rogers.


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My thanks to Brad for stopping by the blog today. We had a terrific chat at BookExpo last month. A great, great guy. And particularly supportive and generous to new novelists (and longtime readers) like me.

You can find Brad at his website and he's quite active on Facebook and twitter. His wonderful children's books, like the latest--I AM ROSA PARKS--are here, along with all of his thrillers, graphic novels, advice books for our sons and daughters, and other non-fiction. 

Thank you, Brad Meltzer! So great to meet you face to face after all these years.

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