I don’t love America. I just don’t get that concept. I loved my dog. I love some people. I loved a 1956 Chevrolet station wagon, black and white. But I don’t understand loving a country. Maybe that would occur to me if I ever went to another country to live, maybe then I would understand. Right now I do not.
Okay. Well, they call lots of things anti-American and I just see that as stupidity, really. Lack of education, reading, perspective, whatever, too much TV.
Well, anyone who doesn’t hate the federal prison system just simply has never been to federal prison. You see it as benign because you don’t understand. Same with America. You see it as benign because you don’t understand it.
It was the way I was as a high school senior. I would have gone to Vietnam, would have done anything anybody told me to do. I was eager to please, to fit in, to be liked. I did not question.
And so, I see most Americans as still being tourists in America. They run around in groups taking pictures of this and that, of the tinsel put up for photo ops, but they have not really been to America. I have been to America.
I have walked down the side streets.
That’s not really true. I have not lived in real poverty. There is so much I do not know or have not experienced.
But even my tiny bit is more than those who run around with yellow ribbons from their antennas and call that being American."
4. How do you respond to critics who contend that you write fiction because reality does not support your beliefs about our “great nation”?
"Actually, I wish there were critics who said this. I wish my books were discussed to this extent. In reality they are not read by anyone, not really.
This question would never come up, but it is a good one. I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer actually. It might be too deep.
I can try to answer by saying why I write fiction. There are lots of ways to answer this and none that I really feel I have command of yet, a real understanding of why I write fiction, but I’ll say whatever comes to mind as I type.
I write fiction because when I started in 1994, well, I wanted a way to tell my story, my personal story, and also to tell the truth about America, to bring about justice and peace, and I wanted to do it in the way the great writers did.
I was never a real reader, and at that time I started to read, sat out on the back porch with Moby Dick and dug in.
That was after our small newspaper failed [same year it won newspaper of the year in MN] and just before we moved to Iowa when I got a job as an editor at a small daily.
I wanted to do great things. Be a great priest, great protester, great writer, great novelist.
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