Writer on Writer: Geoff Hyatt vs. Ben Tanzer

Things change, get warped and molded and yet still always come back to some basic themes, over and over again, love, confusion, safety and risk, finding oneself, being different, seeking individuality, and how these themes are among the many that make for coming of age tales. Arguably though a goal of any coming of age tale is to make it fresh, both familiar and unfamiliar, or more accurately, familiar, yet new, all of which is to say that Birch Hills @ World's End by Geoff Hyatt does much of this exceedingly well. And yes, freshly. Is there another novel set against Y2K and Columbine, and did I remember they happened so closely together? I did not. Birch Hills @ World's End is so much more though, and it pushed so many buttons for me about what it means to be different and young and male, being a freak, or geek, bullying and violence, and so yes, while I am most self-servingly quoting myself here, I am also happy to report that with all these questions and buttons and freshness swirling around me I decided to ask Geoff if he would talk Birch Hills with me and he most graciously accepted.

Please tell us five things we need to know about Michigan if we are to truly grasp the goodness that is Birch Hills @ World's End. Also, please note that you are under no obligation to reference Kid Rock or the Fab Five. Really.

In terms of what you should know about the state, well, it has its rough edges and sometimes gets called “Canada’s Alabama,” but it’s a much prettier and more vibrant place than most folks realize. Distance there is measured in driving time. For example, things are 20 minutes away, or an hour north, and so on. Growing up, I assumed every adult knew how to drive and everyone over seven knew how to swim. The fact that this isn’t true for the entire country still messes with me, because two fundamentals of being alive in Michigan are water and cars. The state is home to Vernor's Ginger Ale, called a "regional thing of beauty and unending quality" by Eve Babitz. What else? Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent still get regular rotation on the radio there.That’s five things, I think.

I really, really want to go Nugent here, and in one sense, I kind of will, pumas, why?

The longer and more cerebral answer approaches the puma in the basement as a creature suffering in a state of unnatural confinement paralleling how the boys in the novel feel about their own lives. Mike pretty much spells it out the first time it comes up, saying, "We're all trapped like the puma in the basement." Also, the bars and concrete evoke the threat of imprisonment looming over some of them especially Erik.

The shorter and more direct answer is that when I was in high school one of my neighbors kept a puma in his basement. It's a bit of both, I guess.

Speaking of boys, we were speaking about boys, right, good, I imagine there are people, reviewers, bloggers, and such, who want to label this a Young Adult novel, or young adult like anyway, how do you respond to that and does your response involves hives and/or cartwheels?

"Young Adult" isn't a type of literature, it's a target market. If you have an adolescent narrator these days, people are going to say that.That's just how it is, you know? I suppose The Remains of the Day is "Elderly Adult" fiction and Hideous Kinky is for five-year-olds. I would hope the shorthand label assigned to a book has little to do with how a reader evaluates it. That being said, I've really enjoyed some "Young Adult" novels.

I sort of feel like I set you up there, not that I feel bad about it necessarily, still your response got me thinking, what Young Adults novels have you enjoyed and did any inspire you as you worked on this book? Along that same line, what inspired you in general, outside of Ted Nugent of course.

When it comes to authors who work primarily with young characters, I like Robert Cormier because his books shatter the treasured, romantic myths the young adult market often perpetuates. Tenderness, for example, obliterates the lie that young women can turn monsters into princes if they just love them enough. The Chocolate War shows an individual opposing a powerful group and getting pummeled into the ground for his efforts: “They tell you to do your thing but they don’t mean it.” I took in the voices from a lot of other things for inspiration: Jerry Stahl’s Perv: A Love Story, John McNally’s short fiction, Salinger, some of T.C. Boyle’s and Denis Johnson’s stuff, to name a few. In terms of Ted Nugent, I pretty much just dig The Amboy Dukes material and the solo in “Stranglehold."

Man do I love Robert Cormier, did you ever read I Am The Cheese?

Oh yeah, but it's been awhile. Hell of a twist ending in that one, which is unusual for him.

And now that we talked inspiration, I would like to ask you to talk vision or goals, very Covey I know, but what were you hoping to do or say with this book, and given its coming of age nature, what did you try to do to make it fresh?

The initial impulse was to write about the "everyday weird" as seen by a pretty average kid. I felt drawn to the malaise of the late-1990s as a setting because it seemed like a time that also spoke to the characters and their town, neither here nor there but someplace in between. A lot of major changes were about to occur in America then. The spate of school shootings and later 9-11 ushered in an era of paranoia and a reactionary obsession with safety. Generally, while everyone freaks out about responding to the Last Bad Thing, they are wide open to getting hit by the Next Bad Thing. Sometimes the response to a perceived threat becomes more damaging than the threat itself. I liked to have these ideas going on in the background while I wrote. I also tried to resist epiphany and create a main character who fails without painting him as a failure. I didn't really think of it as a "coming-of-age" story. The novel revolves around people trying to understand why things are the way they are, determining what is right and wrong, and learning how to love. That's pretty much what a thinking person does throughout his or her entire life. It's one long process of coming of age.

Very much digging the phrasing "every day weird" and "one long process of coming of age." Which gets me thinking that the intersection of these themes could be played out in any number of ways over any number of time periods, locations, genres and ages. Which makes me want to ask what's next for you and your writing, and so I will there, done, thanks?

It might be a minute before I attempt another novel. A friend of mine is working on a gorgeously complex interactive fiction project and I’m trying help out with it. He’s a game writer who has gotten a group together to develop electronic media that makes the reader an authentic participant in a literary experience. They’re writing some very original code to enable that. Besides that, I’d like to see what more I can do with short fiction. Lately I’ve gotten into reading and writing about film as well. I want to record some music and learn to
cook Indian food. There’s lots of stuff. I’ll figure something out.

And finally, this being an Orange Alert interview and all, we need to finish by talking coffee and music, or music and coffee, yes, no, what kind, how often, likes, dislikes, both either, right now, what?

I’m totally a snob about my coffee. I insist on Folger’s Classic Roast because it is medium-dark and, I don’t know if you know this, it has crystals in it. Crystals of flavor. Any kind of chemical sweetener compliments the crystals nicely. I like the old school Saccharine stuff because I continue to taste it for awhile after the coffee is done and it makes me feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. I have about two or four cups of this every morning, when I have to get up in the morning, but it’s probably going to go up to six now that I don’t smoke.

Music, I dig it. Who doesn’t like music, except for maybe the Pinkie Browns of the world? I’m a bad guitar player but I write good riffs and can rock a minor pentatonic and a Locrian. The music I’m most fond of is all some sort of permutation of Black Sabbath. I’ve come to terms with this. The first rock band I liked as kid was The Cars, but the first group I was crazy about was Sabbath. “Paranoid,” that was the gateway drug. The heaviness of that band’s simplicity is still unmatched. I mean, Iommi is some hood who got half his fretting fingertips chopped off in a factory press. He and these other totally out-of-it yobs made something unexpected from a collision of influences that still resonates decades later. I think some kids will always hear “Paranoid” or “Vol. 4” and be like, “Holy shit, this is heavy, I want to make stuff like this.” That’s inspiring, right? I think we’d all like to write something like that.

Indeed we would.

Thanks to Ben Tanzer for conducting this tremendous interview with Geoff Hyatt. You can find more from Ben Tanzer here.