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Items of interest concerning Hawthorne Books and its authors

Q&A: Portland author Tom Spanbauer on writing, teaching and his latest novel I Loved You More, by Ghoncheh Azadeh

27 Feb 2015|

Ghoncheh Azadeh: Was there a specific experience that drove you to write?

Tom Spanbauer: I started writing when I was just a kid. In the eighth grade I won a contest for writing an essay on John Barry, father of the American Navy. I was always a strange kid, off to myself. I lived in a Mormon community and was the target of many a bully. I really couldn’t relate to much in my life other than school. As I got older, I wrote poetry, bad poetry, mostly as a way to communicate with myself. Because it seemed that there was nobody in the world like me, I created another persona within my diaries. And that persona was my friend. Somebody outside me who could accompany me.

GA: I’ve read about your teaching of the technique “Dangerous Writing” in Portland. You define it on your website as “the act of overcoming fear to write painful personal truths.” Has your understanding of Dangerous Writing changed over the years?

TS: Dangerous Writing is in constant flux. It started out with a lot of influence from Gordon Lish, but soon turned into its own entity. Now, there is so much more emphasis on how to structure a scene; that is, how can the first person present the story from within the story while at the same time be outside the story telling it at the same time.

The premise of Dangerous Writing is still going to the sore, sad, secret place and investigating it fiercely.  The other basic part of Dangerous Writing is developing the art of pay close attention to your sentences. In a way, it’s like treating prose like poetry.

To read the entire interview, go to Daily Emerald.