Tamas Dobozy

How did you become a writer?

I grew up in a very small town on the west coast of Canada. The options there were pretty limited. Most guys I knew ended up working in the pulp and paper mill, or in logging. I think that very early on I realized I didn't fit there, and needed an out, and stories offered that. Language could conjure another world, whether of event (for lack of a better word), or of feeling. My interest led me to poetry, which is where I started, writing incredibly bad poems for many years. Then, in the first year of my masters program I took a fiction workshop (four months—the only one I've ever taken) and realized I was much better at, and more interested in, the "event" of narrative, than the "feeling" of the lyric poem, or, rather, I just couldn't really get the poem to do what I wanted it to do. Not sure I've had more luck with fiction, to be honest, but it's been a little less frustrating to write.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

I always go blank when asked this question in person. Luckily, we're doing this through email, so I have time to think. When I was a kid I read a lot of Marvel superhero comics. My parents were suspicious, but I think we now know that any reading is good reading (though not all reading is equal). Later on, I had two really good teachers in high school, who pointed the way out of the limited environment I was in. One was a drama teacher, and the other taught me Social Studies, then English, then Literature. I dedicated my book, "Siege 13," to them. Their contribution was pretty basic, but essential: That the purpose of art was to enquire beyond the given, particularly beyond one's certainties. My father also helped out. He gave me a book called The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe (a strange hybrid of novel and memoir, as I recall) when I was thirteen. I loved that. Then he told me to read Hemingway. Afterwards, I kind of went about it in a self-directed but also scattershot way: ransacking the bookshelves at home for whatever was there (Fitzgerald, Poe, Greene), and, later, the library. Once I started reading in a more targeted and thorough way, certain writers became touchstones. Thomas Pynchon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Samuel Beckett, John Cheever, Camilo Jose Cela, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Mavis Gallant, these were all really important to me starting out. Since then, there have been many others, and I don't think I've ever stopped seeking instruction by reading other writers (as opposed to just reading them to marvel at what they do). These days, I love Patrick Modiano, Joan Didion, Alvaro Mutis, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Sigrid Nunez, Fleur Jaeggy, Gilbert Sorrentino, Louise Gluck, Alice Munro, among a million others. I'm not sure these lists are very useful.

When and where do you write?

Before the current plague, I wrote mainly in my office at the university, and a few nearby cafes, and in my basement office. Now that I'm confined to home, I had to move my office upstairs, because the constant darkness of the basement was getting to me. My desk is now in the middle of the house, a thoroughfare for my four kids and wife, who are also all at home. I'm not really bothered too much by the presence of other people. I've written in airports (probably my favourite place to write), busses, hotels, airplanes, cottages—it doesn't matter. I write most days Monday to Friday, but almost never on the weekend. I don't have a particular time of day. If I can, I'll write for hours, with occasional breaks for food, walks, etc. That being said, the most productive moments in writing usually come when I'm doing something else—watching a movie, going for a walk, mowing the lawn. I keep a small notebook nearby. My memory is terrible. There's nothing worse than knowing you had the perfect solution to a problem in a story and not being able to remember it. The notebook prevents that.

What are you working on now?

I have a memoir/novella on the birth of my twin daughters, and the nightmare of premature birth, that I'm chipping away at. Writing long stuff is so boring. I have a story on pornography in the hopper, but it feels like it's failing, so I might ditch it. I have one manuscript of stories and novellas, Ghost Geographies, coming out in the fall, and am shopping around another manuscript of three linked novellas that are basically detective stories.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Yes, all the time. Often it's because I don't know what kind of writer I want to be. Where I want the work to go. It's almost always connected to wanting to arrive somewhere rather than letting the work dictate your destination. The only way to overcome is to sit and stare at the page. Or go for a walk or a run and let it churn through your mind. Or to just forget about writing altogether and play video games. It is good to realize sometimes that nobody's really waiting for another book from you. There are so many out there. Chill. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Anne Cameron taught the first creative writing course I ever took. She once said: "You should all know you'll never ever make any money at this." That was the best and most precious advice I ever received. I totally freed me up to do whatever I wanted, without worrying about whether it would bring the black to anyone's ledger. I think I knew it subconsciously, but having it said openly like that was pure liberation. The minute someone tells you to change your writing, or write something different, because then you might make more money at it, I advise you to run in the other direction. There is so little fun in it already, don't deprive yourself of what there is for an illusion.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Enjoy those first few years where it feels like everything you write is totally brilliant, because you'll never feel that way again.

Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published four books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, Siege 13: Stories, and 5 Mishaps, with a fifth collection, Ghost Geographies: Fictions, due in the fall of 2021. Siege 13 won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General's Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014. His scholarly work—on music, utopianism, American literature, the short story, and post-structuralism—have appeared in journals such as Canadian Literature, Genre, The Canadian Review of American Studies, Mosaic, and Modern Fiction Studies, among others. He has also published numerous chapters in peer-reviewed anthologies published by Routledge, University of Nebraska Press, University of South Carolina Press, and Wilfrid Laurier University Press, among others.