Left Left Behind by Terry Bisson

Author:Terry Bisson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC016000
ISBN: 9781604860863
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2009-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

“FRIED GREEN TOMATOES”TERRY BISSON INTERVIEWED BY T. B. CALHOUN

Is writing a political project for you, or an artistic project?

I reject the distinction, at least for fiction. Though I have done a lot of straight propaganda writing. For several years I helped write and edit the newspaper of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. For me propaganda is about One Thing, in that case trying to encourage, indeed to build, an anti-racist resistance among white people. Everything was bent to that end. Fiction writing is by definition about complexity.

How did you get into writing? Was it something you always wanted to do?

Ever since I was a teen. I was seduced by the Beat Generation back in the 50s. They were in LIFE magazine and they were so cool. I wanted to get away, out of the South, out of the suburbs, indeed out of 50s America where I was born and raised.

I was always a reader but now I wanted to be Jack Kerouac. I even subscribed to the Village Voice. I’m pretty sure I was the only subscriber in Owensboro, Kentucky.

What is your personal background?

Pretty conventional, middle class, small town Upper South but a liberal family. I was raised in the suburbs but my mother was one generation off the farm. I’m old enough to remember coal stoves and squirrel suppers, but I was raised in the new post-war suburbs, two cars and skinny trees. My father came from the North (Illinois). I was a TVA baby.

My Kentucky family was (and is) pretty liberal, from the days when the “solid south” was still Democratic. FDR brought them electric lights and concrete roads. Once in my twenties, home from New York, I tried (probably foolishly) to explain to a favorite aunt why I was a radical, a Marxist, an all-round anti-war hippie rebel. She nodded and said, “You are still a Democrat, though?”

I said sure.

Did you go to college?

English major. Very conventional. But committed. Literature was my thing by then. I ended up in New York, trying to sell a Kerouackian novel which never sold, and ended up working for romance magazines, softcore porn mags, astrology and western pulps, Enquirer type tabloids, low-end publishing in general. And discovered I liked it.

No science fiction?

SF was my first literature but I outgrew it, or so I thought. I wanted to be a serious novelist. I was working on a “serious” novel called Eats Corpse for Rare Coin, based on my experiences in the tabloids. The problem was, it kept getting short instead of longer. It was ’68 and things were busting loose all over. I quit trying to write and joined up with the hippie movement in the Southwest.

No politics?

We were all political in those days, or so we thought. I went to all the anti-war demos, but I wasn’t part of the organized Left. That came later. I spent a lot of time in hippie communes in the Southwest, and later back in Kentucky.

I didn’t become actively political, in a real way, until the later 70s.

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