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Conversations with Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison (b. 1937) is well known for his blunt, brave style in prose, poetry, screenplays, and nonfiction. In Conversations with Jim Harrison, the Michigan-born writer's directness and passion shine throughout. Conversations with Jim Harrison is the first-ever collection of interviews by this well-known, prolific writer whose books include twenty-two volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published over a period of thirty-six years. In addition to standard literary forms, he has written sporting essays, reviews, literary journalism, food columns, and almost twenty screenplays. Harrison, a writer devoted to small presses and independent bookstores, has a formidable reputation as a recluse and defender of his privacy. However, he has been open to interviews in America and abroad, particularly in France, where he is very popular. Conversations with Jim Harrison features interviews given between 1976 and 1999. Although the conversations vary in length, most are traditional questions and answers. In these Harrison has the opportunity to develop his responses fully and cover a wider range of topics than he can in the briefer, profile pieces. Harrison discusses his peripatetic early life, his desire to be a poet since he was sixteen, and his subsequent "quadra schizoid" attraction to writing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. A literary outsider who prefers rural life Harrison talks in detail about his colorful, eventful life. He also explores the mutual enrichment he received from nature and civilization. He talks specifically about a number of his important books-- including Wolf, Legends of the Fall, Sundog, Warlock, and The Road Home. Harrison speaks eloquently about habits of mind, aesthetic choices, intellectual resources, and psychological contexts in his writing. By turns thoughtful, cantankerous, witty, and erudite, his voice reveals a man fully given over to the single-minded pursuit of the art
- GenresBiography
276 pages, Paperback
First published May 6, 2002
15 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
About the author
Robert DeMott
33 books6 followersRobert DeMott is an American author, scholar, and editor best known for his influential scholarship on writer John Steinbeck, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 6, 2019
Some years ago—probably thirty, at this point—I was sitting with a bunch of book reviewers and editors in New York, celebrating the publication of a friend’s book, and the conversation turned to Jim Harrison. One of the men there edited Harrison at Dell, where they produced a uniform edition of his works in paperback, and told us that when Harrison showed up at the office the first thing he said was, “Where’s the whiskey?” Ah, the old days of publishing.
One reviewer, actually a prominent book review editor, made a cutting remark about the new Dell editions of Jim Harrison’s work. “It calls him an outdoorsman and a man of letters. Can you imagine calling that guy”—in his photos Harrison looked like a cross between a bricklayer and a professional wrestler—”a man of letters?” The Dell editor who was with us folded his arms and put his head down on the table. Turned out he’d been the one who had written that copy. Gales of laughter all around.
But if Jim Harrison wasn’t a man of letters, I don’t know who ever was. He took up poetry as a teenager and said repeatedly, to anyone who asked, that if you don’t dedicate your life completely to that vocation there’s no reason to take it up at all. He continued to write poetry all his life, apparently died of a heart attack while writing a poem at age 79. He took up the novel at the suggestion of his friend Thomas McGuane, after Harrison had seriously injured his back in a fall and was laid up in bed, and his first effort in that genre—Wolf: A False Memoir—was published by the first publisher that saw it.
He singlehandedly rescued the novella form from oblivion—it was a collection of three novellas, Legends of the Fall, that initially made him famous—probably wrote more novellas than any other writer in history. For a while early in his career he supported himself with non-fiction about his outdoor pursuits for Sports Illustrated, and he later spent years making money, big money, writing screenplays.
He also apparently was a prolific writer of actual letters; he mentions once-a-week letters to his friend McGuane (we hope that collection will be published), also a number of letters to his shrink in New York. He saw the man in person when he was in town, but spent most of his life far from New York and pretty far from civilization. I should also mention that Harrison answered the one fan letter I sent him, something not all writers have done.
What might have shocked my book reviewing friend, as we discover in Conversations with Jim Harrison, is that Harrison was extraordinarily well read. He mentions several times, for instance—this was one fact that startled me—that when he was a young man, Finnegan’s Wake was his Bible; he read through it a number of times. He was widely read in poetry and fiction in general; one of my reasons for reading a book like Conversations with Jim Harrison is to get ideas for things to read, and suggestions pop up on every page of this book. You don’t see how a man who worked such long hours on his writing, had an active life as a hunter and fisherman, spent hours cooking (and eating), seemed to end every evening in a funky bar somewhere, ever had time to read. And yet he apparently did. Maybe he just didn’t sleep.
I approach volumes of interviews with some trepidation, especially when I love the writer (and I don’t think I’ve ever loved another writer the way I’ve loved Harrison). Writers often come across as pompous and self-conscious in interviews; it’s just not their genre. But Harrison was as relaxed and down home in interviews as in his writing. He just chatted away, didn’t give a damn what he said (people obsessed with political correctness should beware). He’s one of the few writers that I think I would have enjoyed having a drink with—several drinks, it would have been—as much as sitting and reading his work. The cigarette smoking, which everyone mentions, would have driven me nuts. But what you saw was what you got with Jim Harrison. You could take or leave the whole package.
Benjamin DeMott has done a superb job with this volume, not only collecting these interviews and indexing them, but also writing an excellent introduction to the man and his work; this volume will have to do until we get a good biography, and God knows when that will be (I’m hoping to live long enough). Harrison speaks several times of his admiration for DeMott’s work. DeMott, like almost every interviewer in the volume, was devoted to Harrison’s work and loved the man. The recent documentary about Toni Morrison compelled me to read through all her work in order, and I’m starting to get the same itch about Harrison, hearing him talk about his books. I’ve read them all already, of course. They have the most prominent space in my bookshelves, right at the top of my favorite writers.
If you haven’t read Harrison—and if that’s so, where the hell have you been?—Legends of the Fall or Dalva would be good places to begin. I remember how startled I was years ago when the entirety of that title novella was published in a single issue of Esquire. Is there a magazine around that would do that today?
www.davidguy.org
One reviewer, actually a prominent book review editor, made a cutting remark about the new Dell editions of Jim Harrison’s work. “It calls him an outdoorsman and a man of letters. Can you imagine calling that guy”—in his photos Harrison looked like a cross between a bricklayer and a professional wrestler—”a man of letters?” The Dell editor who was with us folded his arms and put his head down on the table. Turned out he’d been the one who had written that copy. Gales of laughter all around.
But if Jim Harrison wasn’t a man of letters, I don’t know who ever was. He took up poetry as a teenager and said repeatedly, to anyone who asked, that if you don’t dedicate your life completely to that vocation there’s no reason to take it up at all. He continued to write poetry all his life, apparently died of a heart attack while writing a poem at age 79. He took up the novel at the suggestion of his friend Thomas McGuane, after Harrison had seriously injured his back in a fall and was laid up in bed, and his first effort in that genre—Wolf: A False Memoir—was published by the first publisher that saw it.
He singlehandedly rescued the novella form from oblivion—it was a collection of three novellas, Legends of the Fall, that initially made him famous—probably wrote more novellas than any other writer in history. For a while early in his career he supported himself with non-fiction about his outdoor pursuits for Sports Illustrated, and he later spent years making money, big money, writing screenplays.
He also apparently was a prolific writer of actual letters; he mentions once-a-week letters to his friend McGuane (we hope that collection will be published), also a number of letters to his shrink in New York. He saw the man in person when he was in town, but spent most of his life far from New York and pretty far from civilization. I should also mention that Harrison answered the one fan letter I sent him, something not all writers have done.
What might have shocked my book reviewing friend, as we discover in Conversations with Jim Harrison, is that Harrison was extraordinarily well read. He mentions several times, for instance—this was one fact that startled me—that when he was a young man, Finnegan’s Wake was his Bible; he read through it a number of times. He was widely read in poetry and fiction in general; one of my reasons for reading a book like Conversations with Jim Harrison is to get ideas for things to read, and suggestions pop up on every page of this book. You don’t see how a man who worked such long hours on his writing, had an active life as a hunter and fisherman, spent hours cooking (and eating), seemed to end every evening in a funky bar somewhere, ever had time to read. And yet he apparently did. Maybe he just didn’t sleep.
I approach volumes of interviews with some trepidation, especially when I love the writer (and I don’t think I’ve ever loved another writer the way I’ve loved Harrison). Writers often come across as pompous and self-conscious in interviews; it’s just not their genre. But Harrison was as relaxed and down home in interviews as in his writing. He just chatted away, didn’t give a damn what he said (people obsessed with political correctness should beware). He’s one of the few writers that I think I would have enjoyed having a drink with—several drinks, it would have been—as much as sitting and reading his work. The cigarette smoking, which everyone mentions, would have driven me nuts. But what you saw was what you got with Jim Harrison. You could take or leave the whole package.
Benjamin DeMott has done a superb job with this volume, not only collecting these interviews and indexing them, but also writing an excellent introduction to the man and his work; this volume will have to do until we get a good biography, and God knows when that will be (I’m hoping to live long enough). Harrison speaks several times of his admiration for DeMott’s work. DeMott, like almost every interviewer in the volume, was devoted to Harrison’s work and loved the man. The recent documentary about Toni Morrison compelled me to read through all her work in order, and I’m starting to get the same itch about Harrison, hearing him talk about his books. I’ve read them all already, of course. They have the most prominent space in my bookshelves, right at the top of my favorite writers.
If you haven’t read Harrison—and if that’s so, where the hell have you been?—Legends of the Fall or Dalva would be good places to begin. I remember how startled I was years ago when the entirety of that title novella was published in a single issue of Esquire. Is there a magazine around that would do that today?
www.davidguy.org
August 29, 2019
Conversations with Jim Harrison has been reissued by the University Press of Mississippi in a revised and updated edition, including an interview completed shortly before Harrison’s death.The book is a must for Harrison’s admirers and should be a damned good experience for any reader.
At a point when Harrison was seriously contemplating suicide, he wrote this never-to-be-forgotten sentence: “My three-year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting stop.”
From the 1986 Paris Review interview: “I was in a snit the other day over the infantile mechanics of minimalism, the extreme posture of fatigue. Minimalism is that old cow, naturalism, rendered into the smallest of print.” (As a teenager, Harrison read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake four times and regarded it as his Bible.)
From a 1990 interview in Publishers Weekly: “The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior and then he just dries up. Irony is always scratching your tired ass, whatever way you look at it. I would rather give full vent to all human love and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
From a 1997 interview in Wild Duck Review: “What fascinates me about the Nature Conservancy and what I admire about them as opposed to some groups is that they do understand that the cogs and wheels turn so slowly in Washington we had rather buy habitat now and take it out of harm’s way. Things with enormous moral force are often completely ignored in Washington. You can’t be like a big muffin going to Washington, you have to unify and go in like a big axe. It’s the only way things are perceived there and I don’t care if the head of our groups have to spend a lot of money. It’s a Machiavellian world and there’s no excuse going in there like Gandhi.” (Harrison’s syntax can be screwy, but keep in mind that he’s talking, not writing, and it would appear that most of the interviews received minimal or no editing. Truth be told, I’ve often had considerable difficulty with syntax in his novels and novellas, even while admiring them.)
From a 1999 interview In Red Cedar Review: “I bypassed deconstruction because I thought it was an elaborate plot to make the instructors more important than what they were reading. (laughs) But those things seem to fade. I mean they have their efflorescence for a while and then they dissipate.” From the same interview: “When you’re reading the Bible, which I did a lot as a young man, so and so rich man had nine cows and three horses and a granary full of wheat. That was a rich man then. Now what is it? I had three Land Cruisers in a row, because I’m out in the boonies. When I went to get another one, suddenly they’re fifty-eight thousand dollars. I got in it and I said that the inside of this car looks like Liberace’s toilet. (laughs). It’s no longer a functional vehicle; it’s being built now for soccer moms. It’s amazing. You can get the one I want, but you can only get it in Africa. They’re about thirty grand there and they’re functional, but they don’t have our emission standards. I looked at a farm, I certainly don’t need another farm, but I was looking at a farm and this is what drove me crazy —in the UP (Upper Peninsula in Michigan) there’s eight acres and this house for fifty-eight thousand. ... So you could buy a whole fucking farm for the same price as you can buy a car, you know.” (It’s quintessentially Harrison that he uses “toilet” where most editors would probably prefer “bathroom.” ”Restroom” would surely have made Harrison guffaw.)
A little later: “I got hundreds and hundreds of books on the brain under the hubris that after a couple of months of reading I could understand the human brain. Well, forget it.” In an interview for The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum asks Harrison about an article he wrote for Men’s Journal about living on the U.S.-Mexico border. Bless Birnbaum for including in the published interview this deeply moving passage from Harrison’s article: “So Anna Claudia crossed with her brother and child into Indian country, walking up a dry wash for 40 miles, but when she reached the highway she simply dropped dead near the place where recently a 19-year-old girl also died from thirst with a baby at her breast. The baby was covered with sun blisters, but lived. So did Ana Claudia’s. The particular cruelty of a dry wash is that everywhere there is evidence of water that once passed this way, with the banks verdant with flora. We don’t know how long it took Ana Claudia to walk her 40 miles in America, but we know what her last hours were like. Her body progressed from losing one quart of water to seven quarts: lethargy, increasing pulse, nausea, dizziness, blue shading of vision, delirium, swelling of the tongue, deafness, dimness of vision, shriveling of the skin, and then death, the fallen body wrenched into a question mark. How could we not wish that politicians on both sides of the border who let her die this way would die in the same manner? But then such people have never missed a single lunch. Ana Claudia Villa Herrera. What a lovely name.”
Later in the Birnbaum interview: “I used to get criticized for putting food in novels. These are people ignorant of the novel tradition. It was always in French and English fiction. But a lot of us are still; puritanical, still sort of ashamed they have to fill up every day. It’s like food isn’t serious. And a faculty meeting is? (both laugh) What gays used to say, “Puhlease!’”
Harrison’s lifetime output includes more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. It never stopped: he became even more prolific in his late years. Asked by interviewer Angela Elam about the source of his extraordinary productivity, he cited naps as essential and quoted Henry Miller: “Everyone should have a full dress nap every day.”
Warning: Harrison is repetitive, sometimes annoyingly, from interview to interview, and there is one interview, conducted for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, that is almost completely a bummer. Interviewer Eleanor Wachtel asks lame questions, and Harrison unfortunately provides for the most part lame responses. He should have just asked her to leave. But even in that one, the no-nonsense Harrison we’ve grown to expect occasionally comes through: “I can’t give anybody advice except to say more red wine and garlic.”
The late photo of Harrison on the book’s cover is haunting. I kept turning back to it. When he appeared here in Chicago for a large public reading some years ago, the shock in the audience when he appeared on the stage was palpable. W. H. Auden famously and pretty accurately said of himself late in life that he had a face “like a wedding cake left out in the rain.” Harrison’s mature face, weatherbeaten and clearly affected by lifelong gross overeating and boozing, has been described by Terry McDonell as “still handsome, in the manner of a mahogany stump.” Add to that the glass eye. Harrison lost an eye when at the age of seven he tried to play “doctor” with a little girl and she gave him a poke in the eye with a glass shard.
At a point when Harrison was seriously contemplating suicide, he wrote this never-to-be-forgotten sentence: “My three-year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting stop.”
From the 1986 Paris Review interview: “I was in a snit the other day over the infantile mechanics of minimalism, the extreme posture of fatigue. Minimalism is that old cow, naturalism, rendered into the smallest of print.” (As a teenager, Harrison read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake four times and regarded it as his Bible.)
From a 1990 interview in Publishers Weekly: “The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior and then he just dries up. Irony is always scratching your tired ass, whatever way you look at it. I would rather give full vent to all human love and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”
From a 1997 interview in Wild Duck Review: “What fascinates me about the Nature Conservancy and what I admire about them as opposed to some groups is that they do understand that the cogs and wheels turn so slowly in Washington we had rather buy habitat now and take it out of harm’s way. Things with enormous moral force are often completely ignored in Washington. You can’t be like a big muffin going to Washington, you have to unify and go in like a big axe. It’s the only way things are perceived there and I don’t care if the head of our groups have to spend a lot of money. It’s a Machiavellian world and there’s no excuse going in there like Gandhi.” (Harrison’s syntax can be screwy, but keep in mind that he’s talking, not writing, and it would appear that most of the interviews received minimal or no editing. Truth be told, I’ve often had considerable difficulty with syntax in his novels and novellas, even while admiring them.)
From a 1999 interview In Red Cedar Review: “I bypassed deconstruction because I thought it was an elaborate plot to make the instructors more important than what they were reading. (laughs) But those things seem to fade. I mean they have their efflorescence for a while and then they dissipate.” From the same interview: “When you’re reading the Bible, which I did a lot as a young man, so and so rich man had nine cows and three horses and a granary full of wheat. That was a rich man then. Now what is it? I had three Land Cruisers in a row, because I’m out in the boonies. When I went to get another one, suddenly they’re fifty-eight thousand dollars. I got in it and I said that the inside of this car looks like Liberace’s toilet. (laughs). It’s no longer a functional vehicle; it’s being built now for soccer moms. It’s amazing. You can get the one I want, but you can only get it in Africa. They’re about thirty grand there and they’re functional, but they don’t have our emission standards. I looked at a farm, I certainly don’t need another farm, but I was looking at a farm and this is what drove me crazy —in the UP (Upper Peninsula in Michigan) there’s eight acres and this house for fifty-eight thousand. ... So you could buy a whole fucking farm for the same price as you can buy a car, you know.” (It’s quintessentially Harrison that he uses “toilet” where most editors would probably prefer “bathroom.” ”Restroom” would surely have made Harrison guffaw.)
A little later: “I got hundreds and hundreds of books on the brain under the hubris that after a couple of months of reading I could understand the human brain. Well, forget it.” In an interview for The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum asks Harrison about an article he wrote for Men’s Journal about living on the U.S.-Mexico border. Bless Birnbaum for including in the published interview this deeply moving passage from Harrison’s article: “So Anna Claudia crossed with her brother and child into Indian country, walking up a dry wash for 40 miles, but when she reached the highway she simply dropped dead near the place where recently a 19-year-old girl also died from thirst with a baby at her breast. The baby was covered with sun blisters, but lived. So did Ana Claudia’s. The particular cruelty of a dry wash is that everywhere there is evidence of water that once passed this way, with the banks verdant with flora. We don’t know how long it took Ana Claudia to walk her 40 miles in America, but we know what her last hours were like. Her body progressed from losing one quart of water to seven quarts: lethargy, increasing pulse, nausea, dizziness, blue shading of vision, delirium, swelling of the tongue, deafness, dimness of vision, shriveling of the skin, and then death, the fallen body wrenched into a question mark. How could we not wish that politicians on both sides of the border who let her die this way would die in the same manner? But then such people have never missed a single lunch. Ana Claudia Villa Herrera. What a lovely name.”
Later in the Birnbaum interview: “I used to get criticized for putting food in novels. These are people ignorant of the novel tradition. It was always in French and English fiction. But a lot of us are still; puritanical, still sort of ashamed they have to fill up every day. It’s like food isn’t serious. And a faculty meeting is? (both laugh) What gays used to say, “Puhlease!’”
Harrison’s lifetime output includes more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. It never stopped: he became even more prolific in his late years. Asked by interviewer Angela Elam about the source of his extraordinary productivity, he cited naps as essential and quoted Henry Miller: “Everyone should have a full dress nap every day.”
Warning: Harrison is repetitive, sometimes annoyingly, from interview to interview, and there is one interview, conducted for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, that is almost completely a bummer. Interviewer Eleanor Wachtel asks lame questions, and Harrison unfortunately provides for the most part lame responses. He should have just asked her to leave. But even in that one, the no-nonsense Harrison we’ve grown to expect occasionally comes through: “I can’t give anybody advice except to say more red wine and garlic.”
The late photo of Harrison on the book’s cover is haunting. I kept turning back to it. When he appeared here in Chicago for a large public reading some years ago, the shock in the audience when he appeared on the stage was palpable. W. H. Auden famously and pretty accurately said of himself late in life that he had a face “like a wedding cake left out in the rain.” Harrison’s mature face, weatherbeaten and clearly affected by lifelong gross overeating and boozing, has been described by Terry McDonell as “still handsome, in the manner of a mahogany stump.” Add to that the glass eye. Harrison lost an eye when at the age of seven he tried to play “doctor” with a little girl and she gave him a poke in the eye with a glass shard.
June 19, 2017
I miss Jim so much. His love of great food, the pioneer spirit, conversation, big sprawling landscapes, horses,and poetry made him a so much larger than life human being. This book captures much of him. Oh, and he could write like an angel.
Read
July 7, 2024this is a placeholder for True North, the sequel to Dalva, which I also re-read. his masterpieces I think.
May 18, 2020
https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/co...
Jim Harrison is an American treasure and this book adds additional evidence to prove it. Along with an enormous body of work, Harrison’s friends and associates have also contributed to his growing legend. This iconic man of letters is a writer and citizen of the first rank. His great love for nature, animals, fine food, fishing, women, and drink are no match for any human still remaining on the planet. What follows are chronological snippets of quotations from the many interviews and conversations that daily lit me up, brightened my mood, and certainly caught my attention.
...The poet laureate of appetite in all its configurations and permutations is not a writer for all tastes or sensibilities, because his habitual excesses and obsessive quirks have not always been easy to embrace...
...But they hate you if you are making a lot of money. And when I start making money, I behave like Leon Spinks…
...people think they can’t bear the nowness of now. They can’t bear the present tense. In Zen terms they’re either rehearsing something they’ve already done, to make it come out right. Or they’re expecting something to occur in the future. Or trying to change the past…
...You write sometimes to find out what you know…
...The idea of getting bad reviews is not nearly as bad as getting no reviews, frankly…
...You don’t write—an artist doesn’t create, or very rarely creates—good art in support of different causes…
...Greed is killing the soul-life of the nation. You can see it all around you. It’s destroying what’s left of our physical beauty, it’s polluting the country, it’s making us more Germanic and warlike and stupid…
...The whole point is not to need any strictures and to still maintain balance and grace, and if you can’t the danger is a life-and-death thing…
...You realize the shape-changing keeps going on. Life is a fundamentally unreliable experience…
...It’s hard to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, I am part of nature too. But you are, what the fuck do you think you are? We’re just the most dangerous form of nature and we better be aware of it with all our brilliant little ideas…
...Here in America we’ve had a theological basis for land rape too, with the Christian assumption that we’re going to die and go to heaven and, meanwhile, it’s our duty to do anything we want to the land to prosper…
...Writing isn’t something for people who don’t want to spend their entire lives at it…
...When my father and sister were killed in an auto accident, I thought, isn’t this strange, any possibility of agreeing with the world has just left me…
...Everything about the literary life is basically catty and trashy from the start, so my point of view, which gets better organized every year, is that you may as well ignore it all and just do your work. All of it moves too fast for any of that stuff to matter. All that reputation stuff dissipates so fast so you may as well do your own work and forget about it…
...The gift of fiction is to make life live itself, just to live itself, so that’s what you do…
...think poets are mostly shamans without portfolios, and very bad ones at that. Failed shamans…
...it’s not a very large percentage of feminists that place a great deal of stock in never being understood. We can’t understand them. Which is bullshit…
...We’ve had a lot of friends die recently. I was going to read this poem last night about my shrinking address book. My wife’s best friend died within three days of my brother. How can this be? Well, it’s the end of everybody’s story. As they say the last track you leave, as a mammal is your skull…
...The other trouble is that I had shingles three years ago. But it developed into what they call postherpetic neuralgia. Which means that where all the sores were on my scapula, the sores have all gone, but the pain remains because of the quarrel between nerves and my scapula. So it’s very unpleasant to deal with the spine problems, the shingle problems, and plus my wife’s death…
...I’ve started to get very depressed these last few months over the death of my wife and the loneliness—but there’s a difference. Most depressions are about an amalgam of things. But when somebody you love dies, it’s just reality, so it’s a different kind of feeling altogether...
Jim Harrison is an American treasure and this book adds additional evidence to prove it. Along with an enormous body of work, Harrison’s friends and associates have also contributed to his growing legend. This iconic man of letters is a writer and citizen of the first rank. His great love for nature, animals, fine food, fishing, women, and drink are no match for any human still remaining on the planet. What follows are chronological snippets of quotations from the many interviews and conversations that daily lit me up, brightened my mood, and certainly caught my attention.
...The poet laureate of appetite in all its configurations and permutations is not a writer for all tastes or sensibilities, because his habitual excesses and obsessive quirks have not always been easy to embrace...
...But they hate you if you are making a lot of money. And when I start making money, I behave like Leon Spinks…
...people think they can’t bear the nowness of now. They can’t bear the present tense. In Zen terms they’re either rehearsing something they’ve already done, to make it come out right. Or they’re expecting something to occur in the future. Or trying to change the past…
...You write sometimes to find out what you know…
...The idea of getting bad reviews is not nearly as bad as getting no reviews, frankly…
...You don’t write—an artist doesn’t create, or very rarely creates—good art in support of different causes…
...Greed is killing the soul-life of the nation. You can see it all around you. It’s destroying what’s left of our physical beauty, it’s polluting the country, it’s making us more Germanic and warlike and stupid…
...The whole point is not to need any strictures and to still maintain balance and grace, and if you can’t the danger is a life-and-death thing…
...You realize the shape-changing keeps going on. Life is a fundamentally unreliable experience…
...It’s hard to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, I am part of nature too. But you are, what the fuck do you think you are? We’re just the most dangerous form of nature and we better be aware of it with all our brilliant little ideas…
...Here in America we’ve had a theological basis for land rape too, with the Christian assumption that we’re going to die and go to heaven and, meanwhile, it’s our duty to do anything we want to the land to prosper…
...Writing isn’t something for people who don’t want to spend their entire lives at it…
...When my father and sister were killed in an auto accident, I thought, isn’t this strange, any possibility of agreeing with the world has just left me…
...Everything about the literary life is basically catty and trashy from the start, so my point of view, which gets better organized every year, is that you may as well ignore it all and just do your work. All of it moves too fast for any of that stuff to matter. All that reputation stuff dissipates so fast so you may as well do your own work and forget about it…
...The gift of fiction is to make life live itself, just to live itself, so that’s what you do…
...think poets are mostly shamans without portfolios, and very bad ones at that. Failed shamans…
...it’s not a very large percentage of feminists that place a great deal of stock in never being understood. We can’t understand them. Which is bullshit…
...We’ve had a lot of friends die recently. I was going to read this poem last night about my shrinking address book. My wife’s best friend died within three days of my brother. How can this be? Well, it’s the end of everybody’s story. As they say the last track you leave, as a mammal is your skull…
...The other trouble is that I had shingles three years ago. But it developed into what they call postherpetic neuralgia. Which means that where all the sores were on my scapula, the sores have all gone, but the pain remains because of the quarrel between nerves and my scapula. So it’s very unpleasant to deal with the spine problems, the shingle problems, and plus my wife’s death…
...I’ve started to get very depressed these last few months over the death of my wife and the loneliness—but there’s a difference. Most depressions are about an amalgam of things. But when somebody you love dies, it’s just reality, so it’s a different kind of feeling altogether...
April 26, 2016
Good stuff from Harrison here, but a lot of redundancies in the interviews because he gets asked the same questions over and over.
April 26, 2016
harrison is my most favorite writer. ever.
September 16, 2020
Scattered gems. Helpful for writers and fun for Harrison fans.
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