Litquake’s Feb. 28 Epicenter features Steve Erickson, revered as a writer’s writer by such literary heavy hitters as David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. The Epicenter event will be Erickson’s only Bay Area appearance for his latest novel, These Dreams of You.
While you’re waiting for the live event, enjoy Erickson’s answers to the Litquake Questionnaire (below). Or try one of his “surreal and apocalyptic” novels, including Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d’X, and Amnesiascope.
1. What is your favorite book?
Tropic of Cancer.
2. Who is your favorite writer?
William Faulkner.
3. If the answers to 1 and 2 are different, why?
Because Miller wrote one great book and Faulkner wrote four and a half.
4. How old were you when you were first published?
Twenty-three.
5. What writing style do you most abhor?
Fiction that is born out of theory rather than instinct, passion and imagination.
6. What is your favorite writing cliché?
Two I coined for myself and have inflicted on others: “Do not have an adversarial relationship with your own creativity” and “The novel has secrets from its author.”
7. What is your favorite word?
“Miles” and “Silanchi.”
8. When and how do you write (typewriter, Mac, in a café, for four hours each morning, etc)?
When I’m writing a novel, I start as soon as I get up in the morning. Routine and regularity are more important than output, which is to say that it’s more important to write one page every day for five days than to write five pages in one day and take the next four days off. I wrote my first three novels on a typewriter and the last six on a computer, and it made no difference except that whereas my natural obsessiveness once was curbed by the physical effort of having to retype something, I’ve since had to curb it by force of will — which is to say I’ve had to become more obsessive about not being as obsessive.
9. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“Obsessive” and “which is to say.”
10. What is your greatest fear when you first turn in a manuscript?
That I’ve so lost perspective on the work that it will be read as an entirely different work, and not a better one).
11. In what era do you wish you’d been born?
The one I was but five years earlier.
12. Which talent would you most like to have?
To live in the moment.
13. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Irrational tenacity.
14. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Ahab.
15. How would you like to die?
Like Picasso.
