Frequently
Asked Questions
Okay, they may not
be all that frequently asked, but they would be, if anyone thought
about it.
. . . about me personally
Who are you anyway?
Gotta tell you a story. A number of years ago, my
then wife and I were attending some sort of benefit in Chicago---one
of those things that go off at $500 a plate (our seats had been comped
to
us by a developer friend). It was boring, as most of those events are
and we sat quietly through most of the evening chatting together. An
elderly and quite grandly turned-out woman approached our table from
the one adjacent.
"Well!" she said, with considerable emphasis and an appropriately arched
eyebrow. "We're
just all dying to know who you are." I struggled to my
feet, a bit non-plussed, shook her hand and introduced myself and
my wife.
"And what do you do?" says
she. I explained that I was a landscape architect.
"Oh no," she replies. "I
mean what do you really do?"
I've thought about that a good deal over the years. What do any
of us really do? For thirty-five years I was a landscape architect
in the Chicago area, but that hardly defines me.
But now you're writing?
Now I'm writing. Slipped away from the old life
at a particularly disasterous time financially and came to Prague to write.
Kind of a late-life choice?
Yes, I suppose. The fact is that the development
business in Chicago and across the country had pretty much gone to hell
in the late eighties---overbuilt and empty space everywhere. I knew it
would come back and my profession along with it, but I knew it would take
ten years and asked myself if I wanted to be there in ten years. The answer
was no.
And writing was yes?
Absolutely. I'd always wanted to either teach or
write and I hadn't the credentials to teach. At 57, it just wasn't a viable
option. But writing was a possibility and I took that leap of faith.
Weren't you scared?
Sure, who wouldn't be to leave their home and go
to a country where they knew no one and didn't speak the language. But
I made a deal with myself that I'd give it a year and see what happened.
That was in January of 1993 and I'm still here.
Why Prague?
It met the criteria. I had to go somewhere cheap
enough to live on almost nothing, wanted very much to be in Europe and
there had been a few articles about Prague. So I came and it's met all
those expectations.
What if I want to know something else?
Something we haven't covered?
E-mail me and we'll talk about it---jim@praguewriter.com
Expatriot living
. . .
. . . about Prague and the Czech
Republic
What's it like in Prague?
Prague is truly one of the world's most beautiful
cities. Its foundations date back a thousand years and it was one of the
few major cities not blown to cinders in the Second World War. Forty years
of Communism pretty much left it alone as well, except for clusters of
outlying panelaks.
What's a panelak?
Pretty much the same thing as the inner-city apartment
complexes we built for the poor in America. Prefabricated, gray, deadly
dull. Thank God they're mostly in outlying neighborhoods.
What's Prague look like?
A fairy-tale city on both sides of the Vltava River.
Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque architecture, all the way to the scattered
excellent Art Nouveau and Cubist buildings of this past century. In the
city center it's all put together in a charming fashion of narrow, winding
cobbled streets. Mozart produced opera in an opera house unchanged since
his day. You can go there and buy a ticket to hear Mozart in the original
surroundings. Kafka wrote while living here.
It was at one time the seat of the Holy Roman
Empire, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hitler's Nazi
Protectorate and finally, shut away for forty years behind the Iron Curtain.
I thought it was Czechoslovakia.
It was, until it peacefully split in 1993 to the
Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
This century has been a tough one for
the Czechs. In 1918 they got their country back after 400 years of
Austro-Hungarian
domination. Then a mere twenty years later, Hitler marched in and stayed
for seven years as Prague fell under the Swastika and Gestapo domination.
Prime Minister Chamberlain of England dealt it away to Hitler in
his bid
for "peace in our time" and then Truman dealt it away near
the end of WWII to Stalin at Potsdam.
Thus it became part of the 'Eastern bloc"
even though it's dead-center in the middle of Europe and west of Vienna.
Czechoslovakia disappeared behind the "Iron Curtain" for forty
dreary years. Half of it re-emerged in 1993 as the Czech Republic under
it's first elected president, Vaclav Havel, the playwrite.
And the language?
Ah the language . . . what to say about the language?
Indesciperable, unintelligible, musical and completely strange to the
ear, with seven cases, three genders . . . who knows what? Expats struggle
with it, some quite successfully, others not at all and I am one of the
latter. I speak more Italian, French and Spanish
than Czech and I don't speak any of those except in phrases. I can get
around, be marginally civil and that's about it.
Doesn't that bug you?
Not really. One of the things I dearly love about
being here is the disconnection from the distractions of daily life. Not
knowing the language makes it incredibly quiet . . . background music,
like linguistic Muzak. That's very good for my writing.
When I visit the US I find it unbelievably noisy,
the push of competition for my senses shoved up against my back like a
shiv in a dark alley.
It bugs Misha a bit, that I don't speak her country's
language, but then she speaks flawless English and there are only two
or three Czechs I wish I could communicate with. That's not enough to
learn a language, at least not this language.
Who's Misha?
Misha is the young Czech lady I have lived with since
1995. She's an artist, a sometimes writer, the creative force behind
our various web pages and an organizer of the first dog-training program
in
the Czech Republic for disabled persons---Helping
Paws. We were married in July of 2004.
What's the countryside like?
Ever been to southwestern Wisconsin? A lot like
that. Gently rolling, patches of woods, small roads that are perfect for
motorcycling and tiny villages every five or six miles.
Lots of castles, more than two thousand that range
from isolated ruins to fully restored masterpieces, open to the public.
Mountains pretty much ring the country, which abuts
Austria, Germany, Poland and Slovakia. We're about the same size as West
Virginia and about as far north as Winnipeg, Canada, which means it gets
dark about four in the afternoon in winter and stays light until 10:30
on summer evenings.
What do you like most about it?
This country feels to me like the US must have felt in the first couple
decades of the 20th century. It's comfortably old-timey, pretty naive
and more than a little bit backward. Maybe I'm an old-timey, naive and
backward guy who has just found his niche.
And the least?
The old-timey, naive backwardness of the country.
That's not trying to be clever, it sometimes gets
to me and I want to scream at the built in bureaucracy that meets every
aspect of daily life. Now that we're not in Prague any more it's not so
annoying.
Praguewriter doesn't live in Prague?
Shhhh . . . don't say that so loud. I lived in
Prague for the first six years, did the bulk of my novels in Prague, nailed
down the domain name when I was still there.
Misha and I still get in once a week or so. But
we live in the mountains now, eighty miles north of Prague, close to
the Polish and German borders, ten miles east of Liberec. They're mountains
by our standards anyway, about 2,000 feet high, densely wooded and very
snowy in the winter. We love it.
What have we forgotten to ask?
If I'm happy.
Are you happy?
You bet.
Film
writer, novelist, whatever . . .
. . . about writing
What's been your greatest frustration?
Same as everyone's. Getting published.
One of the first things I wrote after getting
here was Vintage On Vintage, a sort of trip note on a motorcycle
trip across the Swiss Alps to Italy on a 30 year old Czech motorcycle.
I sent
it to American Motorcyclist and they accepted it.
I thought that was the way it was supposed to work,
that I would write and if it was good, people would publish.
Kind of naive, huh?
Yeah, very naive. I've written three novels
and I know they're good. Not blockbusters, perhaps, but works that
will sell well enough. Until very recently I wasn't even able to get
an
agent interested, much less a publisher. It's discouraging, but I learned
early on to relentlessly send out finished work and bury myself in
the
next work.
Stopping the process is deadly, you just have to
keep going.
How come it's so hard?
I can only speculate. But the business has changed
over the past decade. The profit squeeze is on and publishers have all
but disbanded their editing staff. Most of them are out there today as
agents.
The agent has taken over that intermediary editing job
as an outsource, so publishers will hardly look at an unagented piece
that comes in over the transom.
I talked with Elmore Leonard when he was here
for a writer's conference. He says it was easier when he started
out---Colliers and Saturday Evening Post and a bunch of magazines that
have now gone
south were ready markets for serialized fiction and short stories. Those
entry-level sources no longer exist.
Additionally, although writers don't like to believe
it, publishing is a business and it exists to make money in a more and
more difficult environment. It's terribly risky and expensive to bring
out and distribute a book these days and that narrows the willingness
to take a chance on a new author. These facts conspire in favor of pulp
fiction and known authors with track records. The same forces have dumbed
down Hollywood and television.
So what's the answer?
I don't know. Every writer has to find their
own answer, but they have to somehow keep the faith in themselves
and not
turn away from the craft. As I said, I seem to have an agent interested
in The Island right now but my answer to the frustration was to
self publish EVOKE.
But self publishing has such a bad
name.
Well it does, or at least it did. That may be changing.
Self publishing used to be the source of terrible fiction and little old
ladies' poetry books, where you paid for a couple thousand copies and
hauled them around in a station wagon trying to get the bookstores to
take a few copies.
It still gets its share of bad writers, but the
mechanics today are absolutely cutting- edge and it may be the beginning
of a new empowerment for writers.
It's all happening on the Net, part of this great
big growing thing that's changing so much of how we interact as consumers.
Has it worked for you?
Not terribly well. EVOKE is out and now
the ball is in my court to do the marketing. But incredibly, Xlibris,
where I'm publishing, is able to take an order from Amazon, Borders
(or
a number of other online booksellers), print my novel and mail it in
either
hardback or paperback version by the single copy, as orders come
in.
It's all quite exciting, but way too soon
to tell how successful it will be. The success for me is in being
in print,
having my own work on my own shelf.
Random House has recently taken a 40% investment
partnership in Xlibris, so I guess at least one major publishing house
thinks this may be the way the future operates.
Any advice for everyone struggling
out there?
It's presumptuous to give advice unless you're
Steven King. Support is all we can give. That's what the Alchemy Poetry
Readings are all about, what writers conferences and workshops are meant
to provide.
The fact is that writing is such a naked activity,
it's a candle easily blown out. We need fewer critics and more people
willing to cup their hands around the flame and keep it steady in a wind.
Everybody won't like what you write, doesn't
like what I write, but it will resonate for someone. That's enough.
That's why we don't all wear striped shirts and black shoes, why
some
people prefer to see films other than Titanic. It's like conversation.
We don't like to talk to everyone but all of us like to talk to someone.
It's a good thing to be content with your audience
and not covet Stephen King's.
So you're saying you're content?
I'm saying that I always look for something more,
always expect to find a different angle, say something that seems worthwhile.
I hope to become a better writer, whatever a better writer is, but for
the most part I'm pretty well satisfied with what I've done so far.
I learned in a career as a landscape architect
that there are an endless number of solutions to design problems.
I also
learned, and perhaps it was the better lesson, that there's a time to
call it finished, to put down the pencil and be satisfied with
the work, go on to something else.
I'm a finisher. I think you have to finish if
you think what you're doing has any value at all.
And who's helped you?
Everyone better than I am and that's a pretty big
list. The writers I've known personally have mostly been in Prague and
some of them are so good they give me courage to be as good.
I read a lot and I get permissions from
reading---"oh,
it's okay to handle that the way he did"---"what a powerful
way she has of the sense of place." It doesn't make me write like
that, but it gives me permission to venture into a different direction.
I love Elmore Leonard for his dialog, Salman Rushdie for his mysticism,
Tobias Wolfe and Andre Dubus for their honesty. Lots of others.
I need to read a lot, it keeps my batteries charged.
So, what's an ordinary writing day
for you?
I'd just love to tell you about my discipline,
that writing is essential to my daily existence, that I can't conceive
of a day away from the keyboard, but it's just not true.
When I'm really cranking on a novel, I put in four
or five hours in the morning. But that doesn't happen often or last all
that long. The first few years I was much more dogged by guilt and the
need to produce. I'm a little more scattered and relaxed now, a little
more inclined to let the thing take its own pace.
My writing needs a lot of down time, a lot of swinging
in the hammock to let things sort themselves out. But when I'm writing,
it's mostly a morning activity and I read at night.
If I write at night I get too wound up to sleep.
|
