11 Questions  With Chris Offutt

Note: Monday, February 4, Chris Offutt is going to give a talk about writing for HBO. There will also be a dramatic reading from his script for "Tough Trade," a series about three generations of a celebrated country music family in Nashville.

Sidebar facts: Chris Offutt’s debut collection of stories, Kentucky Straight, won him awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Whiting Foundation. He also made the list of Granta's 20 Best Young American Fiction Writers. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Men's Journal, and Oxford American. He played the role of Charlie in the 2002 film The Slaughter Rule starring Ryan Gosling. He’s currently writing for an HBO show called True Blood with Nancy Oliver, who wrote the Oscar-nominated Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling. He has a new story collection coming out soon as well as another novel.

“Chris Offutt’s Three Dumb Things Not to Do: number one) Don’t start smoking at age 45; number two) Don’t jump into a car that’s rolling backwards downhill; and number three) Don’t try ear candling.”

Going in, I knew Chris Offutt as an excellent writer with an arm’s length list of credentials and awards. I was impressed when Mercer brought him for the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer-in-Residence chair. But I didn’t know he was a singer as well. Explaining why he likes 96.5 FM, he cited the song “Brickhouse” and then sang the chorus. “She’s a brick”—his mouth wide-open like a snake’s swallowing a bowling ball—“HOW-oose!”

It’d been my idea to go to The Rookery, but it was his idea to play trivia. “When in Rome,” Chris said, taking the playsheet from Leslie (we would later name our team “Leslie’s Dimples” for a lack of more creative options). Responding to the first question we heard, Chris yelled the answer, unaware of bar trivia taboos. This became a running joke—Chris hollering out false answers. We ordered food and played trivia. We talked about movies, and he said he’s got a screener of There Will Be Blood—all casual-like, as if that’s the sort of thing anyone could say.

So I asked…

 #1) Where’d you get a screener of There Will Be Blood?

 Offutt: Oh, I’m a member of the Writer’s Guild. I’m on strike, man. I’m on fucking strike.

Horne: I thought that was only for TV and movie writers. How’d you get in?

 Offutt: It is just TV and film. I got hired in September to write for a HBO show. It’s not out yet—I only worked two months till the strike hit, just long enough to get my feet wet. It’s set in the South. It’s called True Blood. It’s about vampires—vampires, sex and homicide. It’s coming out as soon as the strike’s over.

 #2) How’d you get hooked up with that?

Offutt: This guy at HBO, Alan Ball, who’s from Marietta—he wrote American Beauty, Six Feet Under—he read a pilot I’d written. He wanted to create this new show about Southern vampires set in a working class bar in a small town. See, vampires have always been around and the Japanese have invented a synthetic blood that you can buy in the supermarket. Vampires can drink it and not have to feed on humans. So now, a vampire writes an amendment act to congress so vampires can sort of “come out of the coffin”, and this little town gets its first vampire, who’d grown up there before the Civil War. He’s come back to build a home place. That’s the simple plot—there’s a lot more, but that’s the premise. So anyhow, he had this slot. Everybody else was an experienced television writer—none from the South, and none from a working class environment. They needed somebody so he called me up.

 #3) When they decided to strike, did they consult you guys? How’d that work?
Offutt: They didn’t consult me personally, but to get this job, I had to join the union. About that time, they were already gearing up for it. All I can talk about is what I did. The job consisted of spending six hours a day sitting in a room with six writers talking about vampires, sex, homicide, shape shifters, mind-reading, and possession by a demon. We did that for two months then the boss assigned scripts. The collaborative part was fun. After 25 years in a room alone, I got to be in a room with people.

#4) Is that why you took the job at Mercer, because of the strike?
Offutt: No, I took the job at Mercer for two reasons, really. First of all, Gordon Johnston (Ed. Note – Johnston oversees the Sams chair) is the nicest guy in the world. He was a big reason. Also, it’s only six weeks. I had not been to this part of the country and it seemed like the ideal amount of time—not so long that I’d be away from my family too long, but long enough that I could get a feel of it. I mean, I visited Atlanta but that’s not Georgia. It’s a great opportunity to be in a new place for just about the right amount of time. Six weeks—I can pull that off without getting too lonely.
Chris yells, “Three L’s” to help someone spell parallel then Leslie asks everyone where an arboreal animal lives. Chris shouts, “Ann Arbor!” He does the same thing after hearing: “The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of which country?”

 #5) How did you transition from having regular jobs?
Offutt: I never had a regular job; I never had a full-time job. Never in my life. I refused. Part of it is just contrariness, I guess. I never saw the point of giving the best part of my day to an activity that I wasn’t interested in. Having bosses has always been a problem. Most bosses like the power and I don’t like bosses like that. Plus, I thought, if I’m going to be a writer then that’s what I have to do. That’s my job and I have to make money somewhere else. I’ve had over 50 part-time jobs. That’s what this is at Mercer. It’s certainly a helluvalot better than washing dishes.

 #6) Were you reluctant about going to college?
Offutt: Yeah, I dropped out of high school to join the Army but failed the physical. I wound up getting a part-time job at a hardware store but I really didn’t like it much. At the end of August, I signed up for college. I left for New York City to be an actor; I hitchhiked there when I was 19. And it didn’t really work out, but that’s the first time I saw art. I went to museums, and decided “Oh, I’d like to do that.” I went back to Kentucky and studied art for a while. Then out west for a while. Lived in Arizona as a dishwasher; worked my way up to the boss of the dishwashers. I was very proud of that. Took a job in Florida at the Everglades. A hurricane had come up in Florida and I didn’t like that much so I hitchhiked to Boston, worked in restaurants. I wanted to be a park ranger, but you have to have degrees in biology and course management, and of course I didn’t have that. So, I thought I’d just work in these parks in concessions. I got a job in Yellowstone. They put you up in barebones housing with barebones meals and real barebones pay, but for a guy from a town of 200, I was seeing pretty country—and foreign country. Then I moved to New York again and then back to Kentucky. Then I went back to school when I was 30.

 #7) You didn’t finish your undergraduate degree until you were 30?
Offutt: No, I finished it in six years then I drifted around the country for a while. Then I went to a graduate program for creative writing. It was my wife’s idea. I didn’t even know they existed. I just didn’t know you could do that. I went to Iowa. I applied there because it was ten bucks to apply, and everywhere else cost twenty. When I went back to school, what I got from that was that I began to take myself seriously as a writer. It was a big difference. There was always a part of me that had been like, “What am I doing? I’m just scribbling in all these notebooks and journals. I’m alone in a rooming house with a beat-up typewriter.” There, I was around other writers and it helped me accept that writing was a valid pursuit. It was acceptable for me to think of myself as a writer.

We were clueless about a musical featuring Grisabella. Leslie told everyone that there was a character named Mephistopheles too but that wasn’t much help. We asked for another hint, but she said she couldn’t give another because “then everyone would get it.” Chris said, “That may be a hint itself.” And it turned out to be as we—he, while I listened—deduced that the answer was Cats.

 #8) Your dad was an incredibly prolific writer, but you didn’t feel it was a valid pursuit until then? Were you just rebelling against the idea of being a writer?
Offutt: I think I was rebelling against it. My dad had written 150 paperback novels, and used pseudonyms because he was writing them so fast. I think that’s why I was studying theatre and art and joining the Army. I really didn’t want to do what he did even though I had a talent for it. And I wrote—I was writing. At one point, I decided to take up photography. I’d been reading Hemingway and he had these hobbies that he wrote about. These were things he liked to do and they informed his writing, and other writers had that too. So I started writing essays about photography. I wrote an essay about why photography was a better form of expression than writing prose. I finished it before I realized the irony of using language to essentially talk myself out of using language. That’s when I put the camera away and started writing stories about where I grew up. I’d never done that before. I’d never written about Kentucky before that.

 #9) What were you writing before that?
Offutt: I was writing about Jack the Ripper and 19^th century England. And I wrote Conan the Barbarian stories. I wrote science fiction stories. I wrote poetry. I wrote plays. I just wasn’t really ready to write about where I grew up. I tapped into what I needed to be writing about. I’d much rather write about Jack the Ripper and prostitutes and England—it’s a lot more fun. 

#10) You work in different forms. How do you decide which to use?
Offutt: Two of the stories that’ll be in this new book started off as essays; they were non-fiction. They weren’t working—it was something I wanted to write about, but as a piece of non-fiction they weren’t strong enough. So if I could make stuff up, add a dramatic element, add another character and have a big ending, it’d be much more interesting.  There was a whole 15-page section of a story about a guy whose job is to play World of Warcraft and accumulate fake gold in the game. Then he sells the fake gold on eBay for actual money. That’s his job. Great fun to write. Unfortunately, the guy was an utterly unnecessary character to the story—he wasn’t even secondary. He was just a throwaway character that I got obsessed with. So, I cut it, of course, but it stuck with me because I liked writing that.
So now I’m thinking about writing an essay about—this is ridiculous, right?—My son just turned 18 and he plays World of Warcraft. What’s a typical present for an 18-year-old boy? A car, right? I can’t afford to give him a car, but in World of Warcraft, I saved up enough gold to give him an Epic Flying Mount. Essentially this is a flying bird that his World of Warcraft character can fly really super fast around this virtual world—5000 gold, takes a lot to get it. It’s the top of the line. It’s the Lexus of the flying birds in World of Warcraft. So I gave it to him for his 18^th birthday and he could not be more pleased. None of his buddies have one because it takes all this effort to get it. So I’ve been thinking of writing an essay about that. You asked how do I differentiate. Well, I try it one way and it doesn’t work then I try it another way and it does.

 #11) You’re not a novelist or an essayist specifically—just a writer?
Offutt: Oh yeah. I’ve written comic book scripts. I love writing comic books. That’s my favorite. I’ve written pilots. I’ve written two episodes for a TV show. I’ve written two screenplays. I’ve written about 100 short stories, two novels, maybe 50 essays—I like to write. To me it’s all about sentences and dialogue. I’m not very good at writing poetry, and I tried plays and don’t want to. I tried journalism and was really bad at that—too much pressure, and I wasn’t good at that.

 (The trivia crowd gets loud so we pause. Leslie starts calling out the teams and their scores. One team, the Cunning Linguists, scores 350 and at that point, I figure we’re toast. They even cheer like they’ve won. But then Leslie says, “On a side note, we had an absolutely perfect score, but they left.” The Linguists cry out, “Disqualified!” And I’m wondering why she hasn’t announced our score yet. Then it dawns on me around the time that she says the team’s name: Leslie’s Dimples. It’s us! I leap up and run to the front from our back booth. I’m absolutely enthralled. I’ve left Chris behind without even thinking, yelling out, “No! Leslie, we’re here! We didn’t leave! Dear god, please, Leslie, here we are!” I didn’t even turn off my tape recorder. When Chris joins me up front, he brings with him the dignity and class that I’m missing. He buys the Linguists a beer. John Swantz snaps a photo in which I tried to affect the appropriate gang sign, an L for Leslie’s Dimples. It looks like I’m a proud loser instead. A Linguist asks Chris if he’s from here. He answers, “I’m an itinerant trivia player. I’ve got to be in Pensacola tomorrow.” The kid doesn’t get it, saying what a nice place Pensacola is.)

 Horne: In all seriousness, I’m probably going to brag about this later.

 Offutt: How often do you get to brag about something totally ludicrous? Walked into a bar, and not only did we win, we scored perfect—their first one. Ah, the Rookery.

 Horne: Where magic happens. I think that’s their motto.

 
Offutt: Is it really?

 Horne: No, but it should be.

 Offutt: I wonder what we can get to rhyme with Rookery.