EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

 

Diane: Thank you for dropping in. Welcome to the show everyone. I’m Diane Dewey and I know that busy schedules get in the way of meeting folks we want to meet. Dropping In is a lost art. When I was a kid my parents would sometimes go over to the neighbor’s house or vice versa just dropping in on them or we’d be hanging out and somebody would knock on the door and right away it was a fun surprise. Where I live now on the gulf coast of Florida I sometimes don’t see our neighbor friends. Our digital lives haven’t made it easier instead it’s more complicated. It’s time to drop in and see what folks are up to.

 

We’ll do a deep dive into the subject at hand. We’re dropping in to find out what makes our guests tick artists, musicians and writers who’ve discovered how to make a statement usually one that goes against the grain. Making a contribution to the world is tough. It’s a tough goal but there are people who’ve come at it usually the hard way and won. We will listen to their diverse stories about identity. Identity can refer to biological, nurtured, gender, cultural, racial and spiritual and other labels we assign ourselves insider, outsider, hipster, square or nerd. Sometimes the I in identity gets lost. Everyone wants to become our authentic selves despite the odds against it. We each have a context whether it’s in the family of origin, an adoptive family or a marriage. That makes maintaining identity the call to rediscover and reclaim who we are that much more challenging.

 

For me the call came when at 47 years old I got a letter from my Swiss biological father. Having always known I was adopted from the German orphanage at age one I faced his question. Would I like to meet him? I would I said and why did I agree to that? Maybe I was filling a void. My beloved adopted father had just died six months before. I’d ended a long-term romantic relationship with a man who just drove me crazy. I was ready for a new anchor and that letter started me on a 16-year journey of learning my roots and discovering a new identity.

 

I visited Switzerland with my biological father and went cross-country skiing in the Engadin Valley. He had done 18 ski marathons. I was petrified but I told myself I could keep up. Maybe it was to please him. The Engadin is a special place, very raw, very rural and remote where the old language Romansch is still spoken. It’s almost extinct. This struck me as being like I was far, far away from who I had become as an art gallery assistant in New York. My biological identity had been obscured but back there in my father’s homeland I had aha moments. Why had I gone to Vermont years before and become a cross-country skier? Had my genetic coding been in spooling all along? What else would I learn about myself that had been hidden?

 

Otto and I visited my biological mother’s family in northern Germany. Helena had passed away before I could meet her but the family showed me pictures in an old musty smelling leather album. In the photos Helena wore outfits that she’d sewn herself. I thought back to my teenage years when I told my adoptive mother that I had to have sewing lessons in order to make the kinds of clothes I wanted. It was another uncanny connection with biological identity but that’s not all. Her siblings had kept Helena’s baby spoon, pearl earrings and grandmother’s ring for me and while I didn’t have her through these talismans I felt I had found her love.

 

When I asked her siblings what made them think they’d ever meet me. They said we just knew. They didn’t question their intuition. It was something I’d have to reconnect with. Faith in what I knew that if I were to find inner guidance and stay true to my identity I’d need to accept my intuition. I felt like I’d won the lottery with this loving biological family. I knew many others didn’t get this chance. Even though it would be years before I pieced together what really happened to put me in that orphanage I had gained juice, strength and validation to move forward. Through meeting biological family I realized that love is the strongest force in the universe. People across the globe will find one another especially now with the advent of DNA kits.

 

I’ve also learned that the truth has a special force all its own. It will prevail over deception. Faith that the truth would come out gave me trust in the world, a world that had been uncertain. I’d been told by my adoptive parents that my biological family were dead. Finding this truth is the subject of my book called Fixing the Fates. My identity was formed by parts of all of these people, biological and adopted but I also became aware that I was a person I had created myself. I had to ask who did I imagine myself to be. After I sift through and locate myself who I am is who I designate myself to be, the labels I attach myself to.

 

We are always becoming. Part of this process is to look beyond a traumatic past and push through self-limiting beliefs and often to do a reality check on self-love where every dream is attainable. My job is to resist the traps of magical thinking either too positive or too negative. Part of my arsenal in this fight was knowledge. With a Master of Science and mental health counselling I’ve tried to unravel my story. I help writers get to where they want to go with their manuscripts and my strength is in analyzing the intention and execution to see if these two match up in their story. I investigate the writer’s goals and look at how language carries that out or doesn’t just yet.

 

Writing takes shape in the editing. I’ve crossed out and replaced all the way along and then I had a year’s plus worth of content and copy editing. Reviewing text to make it as real as life itself is an irresistible obsession for me. At True Nord Media I’m aided by two ace editors one from the world of journalism and one from corporate public relations. You’ll find their input indispensable. To light the way forward towards publishing we have an on-staff book agent. My fellow writers work forms, shared truths that we want to polish and tell through story.

 

I come out of the art world in New York where for much of the 1990s I worked for the Guggenheim Museum. It was a place of great visual beauty. The visual arts relate to how you set a scene in creative writing. It’s the revelation of the senses sight, smell, sound and touch that brings the scene alive. Since we live through our physical bodies and feel our instincts there. It’s key to listen when the stomach goes into knots or our breathing gets shallow or our eyes are squinting. Maybe we can’t adjust what’s happening or relax enough to breathe or there’s some, this doesn’t add up.

 

Writing is a way to access what’s happening with ourselves. We make sense of our own thoughts and emotions through words laid down side by side like bricks. There’s both left brain logic and insight and if we can name the emotion the right side brain forms a whole. That’s what I’ve done in Fixing the Fates which readers tell me reads like a page turning novel. I hope that you too will find the inspiration to define or redefine yourselves from dropping in. We’re stopping by to talk, to take a deep dive into a subject while we skip the small talk.

 

We’ll meet a musician who’s written a Grammy award-winning song when before his dyslexia delayed even his reading. We’ll hear from a best-selling writer who didn’t believe in his own strength until he found it through bodybuilding, violence and sometimes sentence building finally. We’ll talk to an intellectual who’s discovered that her elderly mother found her own truth sexually in the role of a dominatrix. An author who did things she swore she’d never do traveling in an RV for example. Now she lives full time on the road enjoying wanderlust. An American living in Qatar who woke up one day to find that the rug had been pulled out and she was no longer that person, that wife.

 

An individual who became a humanitarian when her father then governor of a southern state represented all that was evil in racism. Gender questioning persons for whom birthright is a starting point for the conscious choice of deciding who they are. Important truths about identities worm their way out. By listening to others get a foothold on who they are and learn about their process is to become more ourselves. I hope you’ll take away clues for how to do this at home. You may find the person you’ve always known and imagined yourself to be.

 

Dropping In guests are people like you and me who have shown the world what it means to be an individual to sift through, create, discard or reclaim and to listen to their intuition not always easy with all the noise of our busy lives, our yapping brains, our self-judgments and censorship. Somehow I never thought I’d have much to say. I wasn’t empowered but others who had more confidence encouraged me that everyone knows a unique truth. Now we’re empowered to tell our diverse stories about identity. Authors, writers, musicians and artists have been my teachers at how to arrive at a place that’s aware centered and even brave especially when the facts around me were collapsing. Their creativity is contagious. When we listen to their stories it’s easier to recreate ourselves the way we had intended. We may have gotten derailed by something shiny, hooked on a glamorous detour or focused on something that turned out to be false.

 

These distractions are not failures. They’re proof that we’re growing. Jim Carrey said that depression occurs when your avatar no longer identifies with who you’re trying to be. The psyche knows what’s real and what’s not. Its signal is whatever becomes vibrant to you an inexplicable affinity with African drums, an ethnic tile, textile or a poem. We construct identity constantly through an organic process of binge and purge.

 

At Dropping In we’ll explore diverse stories on identity. What makes people unique? We’re done with shoehorning ourselves into preconceived notions of who we should be being told who we are. Dropping In stories are stories of self-discovery. They enable us to find our truth reconfigure ourselves to that truth, reimagine who we want to be and become stronger for it. By listening to others talk about their own path ours becomes less fearful. We’re always supposed to know what we’re doing but often we don’t and there’s no shame in that. We need a compass. Drop into the conversation. Create a new dialogue. You’ll get the answers you seek or even the questions you want to avoid. The adventure continues on Dropping In where unique stories become far part of the fabric of diversity.

 

We’re going to take a short break now and when we return to today’s guest Andre Dubus III will drop in to chat with us about being a knockout. How he came this close to pummeling someone to within an inch of his life before he stopped, looked around, asked himself what he was doing and began writing the books that would save us, some of us in our lives. You won’t want to miss this. We’ll be right back.

 

Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: Welcome back. Today our guest is Andre Dubus, the author of four novels. They’re all tremendous. One collection of novellas, one memoir and I’m just really lost in how much wonderful stuff he’s written but let me tell you this. His book House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award. It became a New York Times bestseller and was made into an academy award-winning film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connolly.

 

A second book The Garden of Last Days, another novel is soon to be a major motion picture. His memoir Townie is the focus of our conversation today and why I felt compelled to invite Andre to join us. His accolades go on and on but I think you’re going to find that as a person he shines through even more than any of those. Thank you Andre for being with us.

 

Andre: Thanks for having me Diane. It’s good to see you.

 

Diane: Thanks so much. Townie, this is your memoir. It’s a book where sometimes I hear people say oh yeah, that affected me for like days. I think to myself this memoir has permanently changed me. I won’t be the same after reading this. It’s a book that is so closely tuned to the truth. I don’t have my tolerance for bullshit anymore that I did before. Can you talk a little bit about writing it and how I mean do you edit yourself to this very shorn down, spare place or how does this happen?

 

Andre: That memoir came about the way a lot of my work comes about. It’s really the phoenix that rose from the ashes of what failed and what I actually wanted to do. What I wanted to do was write an essay. My wife and I are blessed with three kids, two boys and a girl. I want to write an essay about my sons in baseball. We live north of Boston and my kids grew up with little league sports and I didn’t know how to play baseball until I watched them play baseball and I began to coach. I was a coach but I didn’t know how to play baseball. It was kind of funny and I thought I’m going to write about it was my sons who brought me to America’s past time not my father.

 

I thought it was going to be a funny essay. 500 pages and three years later I wrote what I was doing instead of playing baseball which is living with my single mother in first world poverty and moving two to three times a year for cheaper rent, getting beat up a lot, accosted and snapping in my early teens and becoming a fighter for many years until it was very clear that the road I was on was harmful to myself and others to a point that was no longer negotiable. I found creative writing which saved my life spiritually and physically.

 

Diane: Well thank you for that because I think that transmits through the pages. I think that feeling of redemption of getting at something and the baseball part I remember you going to the game and your father not being clear on why you didn’t know that sport, why you didn’t know the very arcane facts of the sport or even the basics. It was because you had lived um with a fair amount of deprivation. I think the thing I loved was that you resisted being accusatory. You were I think reaching inside yourself for a kind of compassion even if you didn’t know how to articulate that.

 

Andre: Thank you for perceiving it that way because I felt no anger. Years ago before I ever thought a memoir would come out of me I read this line from some writer who said if you’re going to write memoirs you should be able to sue yourself for libel. In other words you better be honest about your warts and your failings. When I started to write this memoir I was pushing 50 and it was old enough that I felt I could be very honest with myself about my own failings.

 

There was a time in my life especially my 20s and 30s where I was angry at my parents for the childhood we’d had but by the time I began to write Townie, I was no longer angry at anyone. I just felt compelled to try to capture what it was like to be in a dead mill town, north of Boston in the 1970s as a kid in neighborhoods where there were very few fathers around it seemed and a lot of kids were doing drugs and alcohol. There’s a lot of violence and violence against girls and women. That’s the time and place that formed me.

 

As you mentioned the violence, I hate violence but I became a perpetrator of violence mainly against those who victimized other people. I got a lot of social rewards for that and  the local police like me because I was beating on people they want to but without losing their badges but that little voice we all have intuition. I love the word intuition. Maybe you and I have talked about this. I don’t know if it’s a Latin or Greek root but you know what it means intuition?

 

Diane: You must remind me.

 

Andre: To watch over or to guard.

 

Diane: Which is lovely.

 

Andre: So that little voice in me knew that okay so you’ve changed. I should tell whoever’s listening that I was a small boy, very sedentary, very soft and there was a traumatic event with my brother that really pushed me into weight training and boxing but that there’s a little voice that told me look, no matter how positive these changes have been you’ve changed your body from soft to hard, from passive to active. You’ve gone from being a victim to a victimizer of victimizers. That little voice inside me said but this is a dark road and you could get killed doing this but maybe worse than that you might kill someone with this unbridled violence. That’s what led me towards changing my life.

 

Diane: I mean I think the part that was really graphic for me was the membranes. You talk about membranes. Once you punch somebody in the face you have you have transcended their membrane. It’s something unspoken. It’s something, it’s intangible but it’s there and once you do it it just gets that much easier because you’re inside now. You’re inside the membrane. I wonder if you could talk about membranes because that image it also made me think about like once you put your hand in the till it’s just as easy to take. Once you violate the membrane that’s between you and the faith you have in your husband infidelity, that’s a membrane. The membranes are anyway, I wonder how it is for you now with membranes.

 

Andre: I think you described all that really poetically. I mean it’s a subtle barrier that’s invisible and I think that when you’re in a heightened state of awareness and for me the heightened state of awareness came in a fight situation. Then writing about fighting years later put me in another heightened state of awareness and that’s where I really began to articulate to myself just what you did really well but someone’s face is given by God and mom and dad or wherever the universe derives these miracles called babies. We’re not supposed to hurt each other the way we do. We not supposed to shoot each other and stab each other and punch each other and kick each other.

 

I remember the first man I ever punched in the face as hard as I could had pushed my brother down two flights of stairs. He was a thug and a predator and he routinely did cruel things to people who were innocent. I punished him for it by knocking his teeth out with a right cross punch I’d learned in the gym. It was my first punch. I was 17 years old and it felt so good to do that to a man who consistently had done ugly things that I kept doing it.

 

Now once you punch someone as hard as you can in the face it’s always easy to punch someone in the face psychologically because in order to cross that membrane that person’s inviable. Years later a psychologist who read the book said you know it’s called the kinesphere. It’s a kinetic, it’s actually a thing that psychologists talk about. It’s the kinetic energy field around every human being which should be inviable. It should be totally private. This boundary is not, you’re not allowed to cross this boundary unless I give you permission to cross it.

 

When two adults have consensual sex they’re both giving permission for the other to come close. I’m going to let down the boundary but one of the things that has occurred in the last few years especially since writing about that in my memoir Townie is I feel this in creative writing all the time, the sense of the boundary I’m stepping into the blank page which is a blank page. Now I’m trying to step into the private skin of another human being I’ll never be called a character. I’m a white American male. Well I’ve written from the point of view of women. I’ve written from the point of view of girls and in Iran. I’ve written through the point of view of Saudi Arabia. I’ve written from the point of view of people who have jobs I’ve never have and of course that’s the writer’s job but that also feels like a transgression into another membrane. The violence that I was involved in for about 10 years of my youth it does have parallels that are not violent which I find fascinating.

 

Diane: Absolutely. Well for one thing you were doing the right thing by offering protection to ones that you loved. I also want to play devil’s advocate and say there’s a way in which you went from being passive to being active. You took action. That trauma, the definition of trauma that which we can’t process it’s reliant on helplessness. You kind of stood up and said I’m not going to let myself be traumatized anymore.

 

Andre: You’re so right. It’s strange now at age 60. I mean the moments we’re talking about are 40 years ago in my life but I’m very aware of I’m not quite sure why my awareness is a little more heightened about this but I’m very aware that well I know it is. If I’m ever in a position with a bureaucracy or a politician or a policy change or a tax audit, grown-up challenges, I’m really aware that I will not be anyone’s victim.

 

I decided at about 14, 15 to never be victimized again. I do know and love people who have not been able to make that choice. Now at the same time my brother, my only brother he’s in the book and he gave me permission to put in what’s in that book. He was suicidal for years. What I saw him do is take the dysfunction of our youth, the pain of our poverty, the shadow of the violence and then he was also a victim of daily sex abuse by a grown woman who was supposed to be his teacher.

 

He turned inward and his depression made him sick. He just wanted to die. He became suicidal while I became homicidal. I turned it outward. The truth is if I lived in a different kind of neighborhood and maybe had a different kind of family maybe I would have channeled that by throwing a football or acting in a play but where I grew up it was street violence.

 

Diane: I wondered if, you did disarm a man once in the book who had a knife in his hand and self-destructive tendencies. You talked him off the ledge basically. I think about words and how you got agency over yourself maybe through words, maybe a tool that your brother didn’t have, words on the written page where you started to claim a narrative. You started to own yourself more that way and found the power of words even in speaking to this person who sadly was on the verge. There’s a power in words. I want you to, could you talk about it?

 

Andre: I should back up before we talk about that moment with this young man who was in a halfway house where I was an overnight counselor because I discovered writing about three years, two years before that. I don’t know if I would have had the tools I used in that moment. Can I tell that quick story?

 

Diane: Absolutely.

 

Andre: So that little voice told me I was on a road that was going to get me killed. As a way to control my violence I knew I was no longer afraid to fight. I was afraid not to fight so no more fighting had been years of that. I began to box. I said well, I’m good at this. It’ll be a sport. I’m training for the golden globes competition. I’m living this little apartment. I’m working construction with my brother, in my 20s and something to this day I can only call some divine influence. I have I have a hard time believing in a god but I don’t disbelieve in the divine. I believe deeply in mystery and divinity and something quite beautiful in and around us. Something made me sit down, grab a piece of paper and a pencil, brew a cup of tea and began to write from the point of view of a woman in the woods with her boyfriend.

 

I took a sip of water, the tea and it was room temperature when it would have been boiling. I thought I’d been writing for 10 minutes but it had been an hour and a half. I put it down and I’d never felt in such a higher state of awareness. I noticed details about my little rented kitchen I’d never noticed before. I felt more like me than I’d ever felt in my life. Now what I’m getting at is that is what began to show me the power of finding a way to express myself. It was without fists and feet to someone’s body. It was with words and a pencil and paper. There was something quite beautiful about that journey inward and I couldn’t have had that moment with that young man and that knife to his throat if I hadn’t had that moment first.

 

Diane: I can totally understand that and I agree your brother did live thankfully found and found a way through but I still think that there’s a relationship between your physicality. You still work out and you’re writing so there’s some active dynamic. When we come back from a very short break we’ll take up the question of how these two inform one another and is this so is this somatic or what really goes on there. Love that you became as close you did to yourself through writing.

 

Andre: Thank you.

 

Diane: We’ll be back. Don’t go away.

 

Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: We’re back with Andre Dubus and we’re talking about his wonderful memoir Townie in which he really looks at himself in the mirror but also through the lens of fighting as a young boy and how that came about as a maybe an act of resilience when he felt himself to be growing into the victim that you didn’t want to be. If you wouldn’t mind Andre because I and I love listening to you but I’m going to listen to you on the page for a moment and read just an excerpt from Townie and why this book so grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

 

In minutes the street was quiet and empty again. My brother Jeb’s teacher and my mother had walked him back into the house. I stood there on the sidewalk where Tommy J had beaten up my brother and called my mother a whore. What had I done? I’d pleaded with him. I’d called Tommy. I called him Tommy and pleaded. I stood there a long time. If there were sounds I didn’t hear them. If there was something else to see I didn’t see it. There was the non-feeling that I had no body, that I had no name, no past and no future, that I simply was not. I was not here.

 

This is a question of existence. Were you even existing if you weren’t existing in your body? How did you start to feel when you asked a paragraph later was there a me? I can’t tell you from a deep personal place how many times I have wondered if there is a me? Then you climbed back from that place.

 

Andre: To give a little context as you know this grown man was beating up my 13 year old brother. I was 14, maybe 15 and I couldn’t protect my brother. My mother was swinging a stick at this man and I didn’t defend her because this man terrified me. He was 60 pounds heavier and after that moment of nonidentity I felt cut off from everything. Then what started to come back when I started come back to myself, what came was just abject self-loathing. It felt like poison to be in the private skin, back to that phrase again of this coward, this coward.

 

What I described later is as I walk into this rented house my mother couldn’t afford, I look in the mirror at my 14 year old face and I say you are never going to not fight back again because I don’t care what happens to you anymore. I don’t care if you get shot, stabbed, killed. I don’t care. You’re going to not not fight ever again. That’s when I began to fight back. The way I climbed out of the hole was and this is the big thing that I learned is as much as I hate violence and as thrilled as I am that I don’t normally have physical violence in my life and I haven’t punched anyone 30 years. That was someone beating up his wife by the way. I mean it’s hard for me not to. I have great hatred for male violence against women and kids. Extreme hatred like my temper really flares.

 

What I learned from all that is I learned you could actually change your life. this is the big thing I learned and I do know now that I’m 30, 40 years down the road of life I’ve met thousands of people. So many of us don’t know that and I want them to know that. I want them to know you actually can change your life. You can change how you view yourself. You can change how you view the world. You can change your relationship to it and its relationship to you. While the beginning of my life had a lot of darkness and really a lot of harrowing trouble that I’m lucky to have survived even physically. I learned so much from it Diane. I learned so much and of course creative writing all these years has taught me even more.

 

Diane: When you were actually enacting this change, I mean I remember another scene in an airport where you were deliberating right back and forth whether you’re going to sock this guy who had harassed a young woman in the airport. I guess I just want to because I love this idea like yes we can change ourselves. Thank goodness. What are the interventions? What are you saying to yourself now when you’re backing yourself out of this?

 

Andre: Well to give a little context to that moment because it’s really interesting you brought up that. This was at a big airport in a major American city and it was after thanksgiving. I see a woman who’s crying with a bunch of women around and I pass by. I hear her say he kicked me and he pushed me and he’s down there and he thinks it’s funny. I went over to her. The cops weren’t there yet. I said, look I’ll walk you to your gate and that’s all I should have done but when I saw these two men blasting their boom box and looking like bad asses and snickering at her. I got so angry so I walked her to a gate. I ended up beating one of them unconscious and it’s not good.

 

My point is the local police came and they loved me when they heard the story. They patted me on the back. They treated me like a hero yet and part of me and I got a lot of pats on the back from some guys at the gate yet I get on the plane and I’m buckling up. I see that both my arms are spotty with blood. I go into the airplane bathroom and I wash up and I look in the mirror again. This is the book end of the mirror. Now it’s seven years later. I’ve been doing nothing but fighting just the way I promised that 14 year old he would fight. Now I tell it you must stop fighting. This is not the way to live life because here’s the truth to get to your question.

 

What should I have done? What I should have done is just walked her to her gate but Diane why did I go exact revenge on these guys? I didn’t do that for her. I did that for me and that’s what I’ve been trying to be aware of all my life since. Is this truly helping or are you just getting your rocks off and you don’t care who it hurts? By the way that airport was full of young families and kids and I probably traumatized a bunch of young kids with the violence I did in front of them.

 

Diane: Yet I still feel the beating heart of a really nice person in what you did.

 

Andre: Well I’d say there is a hatred of injustice but I don’t I don’t justify, I do believe that violence begets violence to quote the Bible. It really does.

 

Diane: I have taken several workshops with you. I mean I just can only say I’m very proud to know you as a person as someone who did transform themselves this way. I feel as though the realization that instead of acting out you’re to go to a reflective place and ask is this my ego? Obviously revenge is not all it’s cranked up to be because you have hell to pay for it yourself. I wondered if you felt as though you’d be able, if you hadn’t come to this place of stillness or some kind of truth and some kind of peace whether you’d be able to write as well as you do. I mean in terms of conjuring or whether there’d be more release of energy going somewhere else?

 

Andre: Who knows? I mean as you know I’m the son of the great short story writer Andre Dubus and my cousin is James Lee Burke. There are about seven writers in my family, two of my three kids are creative writers. I think it’s kind of in our gene pool so I think I would have written anyway but a weird thing happened after writing this memoir Townie that came out a few years ago. My next book which is a work of fiction had no violence, no physical violence in it.

 

It was interesting by writing directly about the physical violence of my life it sort of freed me up to now look at the world in a slightly different spectrum of light. I don’t know if that sheds any light on what you just said but I do find that peculiar and interesting. Then within the book that followed. My new novel is called Gone So Long and there’s all sorts of violence to deal with in there.

 

Diane: Yes and it’s juicy. I can tell you that. I can attest. Okay so you’re kind of almost alluding to a genetic unspooling like we were talking about but I feel as though your life could have gone a lot of different ways before you got a hold of yourself. I was looking at a documentary and about guys behind bars and the perpetration of violence. One of them was just saying look, you got to put that out there. You got to put the meanness out there and otherwise somebody’s going to take advantage of you. There was justification for it and I just wonder about like all of that psychic energy that goes into being defensive all the time versus being a receptor, a person who’s taking in a lot.

 

Andre: That’s some brilliant insight. The truth is in those years when I lived in those scary neighborhoods and let me make it very clear. Now kids the age I was then are facing getting shot to death as opposed to getting beaten up with fists or maybe an occasional knife pulled. It’s gotten exponentially worse but you’re right. If you’re in a state of hyper vigilance all the time which I still am by the way. All these years, I haven’t been in a fight in 30 years. I still am in top physical shape. If I get injured or sick and can’t work out for a week I begin to feel endangered which is just totally rooted in my past.

 

I still have a Louisville slugger baseball bat beside my king-sized bed where my wife and I sleep in this lovely home in the woods, in this townie neighborhood where really the trouble isn’t around the corner very often but fear is paralyzing. When I look back at my earlier life I was afraid all the time and anxious all the time. It took at least a decade of daily experiences with physical safety before I began and really let my guard down but here’s the thing.

 

I’m hesitant to say it out loud because I don’t want to romanticize fighting in any way but when you’re squaring off with a man in a bar room or a street corner or an alleyway with the man who’s intent on hurting you. You don’t know how good he is at the ability to do it and there’s no backing down you are not going to be in this fight. There may be no one around to break it up if he gets the better of you and starts to pound your head against the concrete or pull something on you. It is uh incredibly I don’t want to say exhilarating. The word is talk about you’re in a state of hyper awareness. I have felt and this is where I don’t want to make the comparison but I’m going to. Writing and fighting do have a parallel for me because as you know as a writer yourself and a very fine writer when you step into that naked space it’s just you and it. The stakes are very high. It takes great courage.

 

The word I’d like to reach for even more now with creative writers is nerve. It takes nerve to step into the unknown with a pencil or a pen or keyboard and to honestly try to find what there is to find. It is not unlike stepping into a battle.

 

Diane: Absolutely and it’s a battle to the core, to life and death. I think that what you talked about in terms of exhilaration, let’s not glamorize it but there is something coursing through you’re on your adrenaline now. I don’t necessarily equate not fighting with I’ll give you a personal tidbit when I was something like in my early 20s. I experienced an attempted rape but I beat the guy off.

 

Andre: Good. Did you know him?

 

Diane: No. I mean it was a stranger coming out of the backyard through the bushes. Tackled me to the ground. Pounded my head onto the flagstones. Was on top of me. The worst nightmare possible. You just go into a completely another gear but when that was over and believe me it’s not really over because just right now it’s in my, I can feel it in my…

 

Andre: It’s in the body.

 

Diane: It’s in the body.

 

Andre: It stays in the body.

 

Diane: But there’s still a sense of triumph that I got this guy away from me. I also think that in a subtler way look, we’re all looking for power whether it’s swimming. It doesn’t have to be fighting but like when you talk about not exercising or working out and then you start to feel a little vulnerable. You think maybe that’s a little crazy maybe that’s instinctive, maybe that’s who we are as a species.

 

Andre: I have a recipe for people who stop taking antidepressants. Nothing against antidepressants. It can help a lot of people who need it short term but I truly believe that we were born with these beautiful bodies. We’re supposed to use them every day and not just to eat and drink and sleep and excrete. We’re supposed to do something with them. I think if everybody did something vigorous pretty regularly all week long whether it’s a fast walk or tennis or lifting weights or swimming. If everybody put their hands to something creative whether it’s a loaf of bread or a poem or a scarf they’re knitting their depression would just about evaporate because I mean that alone I think activates so much of our potential as human beings.

 

While I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I was beaten up so much as a kid and went through what I did. If nothing else because I have my five, six day a week workout habit which at my age has helped me be healthy but more importantly it is such I spend my days, my writing every morning and then I finish the session by working out to clear my head and get into the rest of my day. I’m very grateful for that way of life.

 

Diane: That’s awesome and your body tells you something. If you’re using your body the better able it is to tell you something, the things you need to know. When we come back we’ll be with Andre Dubus and we’re going to talk some more about life and death, fighting it off and fighting it on the page. We’ll be back in a moment. Don’t go anywhere.

 

Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: And we’re back with Andre Dubus talking about life and death, fighting for survival and then turning to writing to fight the fight with words on the page. I must say Andre in both in your book Townie, your memoir. It’s bravery. There is bravery on the page and I think it sorry, it makes you a better person to read the book because you end up feeling like yes, I can take this on. I can take on stuff that I didn’t think I could take on before. I wonder about the, you mention your father. I see you as a standalone mostly because I just do.

 

Andre: So do I.

 

Diane: You have to. I mean there’s only one of you but the thing is that but towards what you didn’t know was the end of his life. He phoned you. You were on a construction project. You were renovating a house and he called you and said, do you want to come over and watch the fight. Of course watch the fight, the boxing match that was on. It was a title and um you were like bushed. You’d been up all night. You’d been up working hard, schnitzing. Then he called again and he called again. Can you just kind of, was there…

 

Andre: Let me tell you for those who don’t know my father stopped on the highway to help someone at age 49 and was run over and lived the last 12 years of his life in a wheelchair. He was also a former marine but he’d never been a fighter. He looked up to me for that part of what my life. Anyway, I’m remodeling a house. He calls me and I have to go on a book tour the next day. I need to get the tiles done. I’ve been at it for 14 hours and he called. I said dad, I can’t come. I got to do this. He said you’re going to regret it. I said, I got to go. Called again. Tell me about the fight coming up. You’re going to regret it. Three times, five times he called me. Every single time he used the word regret.

 

Something to this day back to intuition to watch over, to guard. Something said go see your father. I did something uncharacteristic for me. I didn’t clean up my tools. I didn’t empty my mortar bucket. I just drove to his house. Normally there’d be like seven or eight guys watching these fights. It was just me and my father. We sat there and watched the boxing match. He gave me like the one beer he had in the house. He told me stories of his boyhood that I never would have heard.

 

I had to go. It was three in the morning. I hugged him and we always kissed on the lips. He said I love you and I said I love you. As I’m leaving going down the wheelchair ramp that my brother and I built for him. He’s saying some positive things about the book tour. I yell back some things like thank you. The last image I saw was his breath coming out of his mouth and spurts with the stars above. I never saw him again. You know that in Townie I fly home as soon as I can when I hear it. My brother and I build his coffin. We spend all night building his coffin. We ended up digging his grave with pick and shovel.

 

I have to say at the end of all that building the coffin.  I go back to my house. My wife and kids are asleep. It’s dawn and I grab a book just to get my mind off death. Here’s the epigraph for the book from the French writer Leon Bloy. Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence. That’s from the writer Leon Bloy. If I’ve learned nothing the only way to light is through the shadow.

 

Diane: Absolutely and you took us to a place where we could see the light. Thank you very much Andre Dubus.

 

Andre: Thank you Diane.

 

Diane: It was a pleasure.

 

Thank you so much for dropping in. please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.