Tom Spanbauer: In Conversation

Tom Spanbauer is the author of five novels, the most recent of which, I Loved You More, was published in April. He talks to Michael Langan about how he uses confessional writing and graphic sex scenes on his search for truth.

Images by Michael Sage Ricci   (Click images to enlarge)

Tom Spanbauer may well be the best gay writer you’ve never heard of. Those who know his work – five novels, including the newly published I Loved You More – can bear witness to a style that is heartfelt, visceral, raw, and deeply poetic. There is a profound urgency to his use of language and his search for the authentic. In all of Spanbauer’s novels there are secrets to be discovered and disclosed, acts of betrayal great and small, with consequences that often seem to upset the entire universe. His narrators are up against it, running for their lives, searching or striking out, which creates the tension and drive in his stories.

Spanbauer was born and brought up in Idaho, a Catholic farm boy in a predominantly Mormon community. His father was a brutal man who bullied him and treated him, to all intents and purposes, as slave labour. Eventually, Spanbauer escaped this repressive and damaging environment, though its effect on him has been far-reaching and profound. For over twenty years now he has developed and taught what he calls Dangerous Writing in highly successful workshops run in Portland, Oregon. Many of his students have gone on to publish memoirs and novels, including, perhaps most famously, Chuck Palahniuk.

Spanbauer’s own novels contain many of the tropes of queer literature – a quest for love; the difficulties of coming out to others and yourself; the possibilities and impossibilities faced in life; and the struggle to be yourself when that self is in doubt. A sense of story is vitally important to how he writes about these experiences. It’s his use of language that is most memorable in his books, but it is also divides his readers. The work can be extremely violent, is often sexually explicit, which he sometimes combines in episodes that are rendered with such beauty of language and emotional complexity that it disorientates and disturbs. The do or die nature of Spanbauer’s own experience with writing is reflected and explored in his novels.

I first encountered Spanbauer’s work over twenty years ago when I read The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon, his second book and still his most well known and best-selling. I was in my mid-20s and it was like nothing I’d read before – epic in scope and with a cast of unforgettable characters, it’s an American Western like no other; a spellbinding, mytho-poetical work of complex imagination that’s compelling and, at times, gut-wrenching. It tells the story of Shed, a young man whose fluid identity is a source of contention – he could be Shoshone, he could be Bannock, he may be half-Irish. What Shed definitely is, is Berdache, or Two-Spirit, someone who contains both male and female.

One of the things I remembered most about it was the sense of place and when I spoke to Spanbauer, who’d just returned home from a book tour visit to New York, I began by asking him about landscape and place in his novels.

Tom, most gay novels have urban, contemporary settings, but in a lot of your work there’s this pull of landscape and the natural world that is outside of the urban, as if the urban is temporary and these landscapes are the place of permanence. What’s your relationship with landscape? It seems very important to your characters.

Generally speaking, what I’m writing about is usually pretty tough. I’m going to deep spaces inside myself that are quite scary and sometimes hard for readers to read so what I often do is use the landscape to soften that. Also, one of the things that’s important to me as a writer is to be present in the physical event and not just in the idea of it. To be present in the physical event you have to be present in a place. Probably the first thing I do when I start writing is to think about a place – how it smells, what it looks like – and then I start writing about bodies, and how bodies look and smell, and then how they are in propinquity with me. So the natural landscape is very important, and the sky too, there’s something there that puts the metaphysical into the writing, something larger, grander than just the human argument that’s going on.

Both your own writing and the Dangerous Writing ethos seem to emphasise the importance of truth-telling, the necessity and compulsion of it even, which makes for work that’s urgent and confessional. Is that confessional aspect specifically linked to your Catholic upbringing, or despite it?

I think it has a lot to do with it – I don’t really like to admit that, like I’m just going to confession as I was trained to do, but there’s something very deeply Catholic about me and my writing. When I was a young man the transition from High School to College was a hard one to make because I was still living at home with my family. It was the time of the war in Vietnam and I had to maintain a C-average or I’d be drafted. I didn’t fit in to the College fraternity system and I spent a lot of time sitting in my car, studying. I felt so alone I couldn’t bear it. I was a queer man and didn’t know it and was still trying to be Catholic. One day I decided to buy a notebook that I would call a Truth Book and write down truths in it that I couldn’t find anywhere else. So I bought this fancy leather notebook and I wrote on the front of it, in big swirly letters, ‘Truths.’ And the first thing I wrote down in it was “Billie Cody has big tits” and the second thing I wrote down in it was “I think Kurt Cameron is a queer” and the third thing I wrote down was, “I masturbated three times today.” As soon as I’d done that it was like alchemy. I couldn’t believe this was actually out in the world, that these things that were part of my life were not just turning around in my head. It was a wonderful thing because once these truths were outside of me I could use them as companions and I wasn’t alone any more.

So writing those truths was a liberating and vital thing for you?

It was, but that’s not the end of the story, because my mother found that book. I came home one night from my job as a busboy at the Holiday Inn and my father said, “You take that thing called the Truth Book and you get out of this house. You’re banished from the family and we never want to see you again. But first go into the bedroom and apologise to your mother.” The bedroom smelled like his old socks and beeswax and my mother was lying on the bed screaming, “You’re going to hell, you’re going to hell, you’re going to hell.” Then we all kneeled down and prayed the rosary for my soul. While I was praying I thought, “Why did I write those awful things? What’s wrong with me?” Two weeks later I finally got my ass out of the house and that was the beginning of my life. It seems to me that, besides the idea of the confessional, I needed people to be true, to speak the truth to me, or I needed to have the truth around me, or else I would die. I had to have something to relate to. I couldn’t relate to College, to the Church, to my family, so I created a space by going to this book and because I had the skill and this intense desire I disclosed to myself a truth that has stuck with me ever since, which is I really need to say what’s true in order to live my life.

Did this incident spark the idea in you that writing is something that can be dangerous – that it’s something that has potentially devastating consequences, but which is nevertheless necessary?

Absolutely it was. You know, Virginia Woolf put herself in the hospital after every book, and after her last book she killed herself. There’s something I call EOB, or End of Book, and it depends on how deeply I go in that book, how strong and overwhelming the reaction of having finished it is going to be. This current End of Book has really been a bitch and so that must mean there’s really some darkness in there. I think I’m still living out that moment with my parents. I tempted judgment with my father. He actually banished me from the world of the family and from the world of men because of what I’d written. When I sit down to write it feels like it’s no less of a battle than that every time.

Woolf described her experience of writing on the edge of madness as being like lava pouring out of a volcano. She also talked about wanting to keep something of the quality of a sketch in her writing – not wanting it to be too full and finished.

One of my favourite artists is Francis Bacon and I like to think I write like Bacon paints. He pushed the image to such an extreme that the image almost isn’t there any more. He once said he “likes to catch the mystery of the appearance within the mystery of the making.” There’s something about the mystery of the piece that has so much to do with how it’s made. When I was at Columbia university I sat in one of Stephen Spender’s classes and he said an incredible thing: “With poetry, how this word lies next to this word and next to this word, the space in between them, and how the words interact with each other, is what makes poetry poetry. But prose is different. With prose all the words have little signs on them that say, Don’t look at me. Story this way.” I thought that was wonderful but immediately disagreed. The making of the voice has to do with tearing those signs of the prose and the prose saying, “Look at me.” So I started treating my prose like poetry.

Your work makes me think of the novel as a controlled explosion. In I Loved You More time is running out for Ben, the narrator. In the other books there’s a sense of pressure of time in telling a story, which creates a real sense of tension.

Something we talk about in Dangerous Writing is that one of the things to do in order to get a voice, in an attempt to not sound like it’s written, to make the language into its own thing, is to have that urgency. I’m trying to get that into the prose.

And Ben, the narrator, says, “When you get close to the vein that’s pulsing truth, when you open that vein, you can scrub your soul clean with that blood.” That implies such risk-taking, and takes a lot out of you, right? You’re right at the edge of what it means to be alive and which puts you close to death, those extreme moments.

That line just dropped out of the sky. When that happens you realise how close you are to what you’re trying to get to. That kind of intensity is always what I’m trying to get to in my books, to get close to that kind of truth. When all’s said and done, what do you have to say about your life? What did you do and why did you do it? It’s a very important question – What did I do this for? It’s those kinds of questions I think a novel should ask.

That quest for authenticity, that search for truth, are such goals even possible? Or, like most quests, is it the journey that’s the most important thing?

I haven’t figured that out yet. There’s an incredible push in me to do this thing that’s almost an obsession. I can say that it’s changed my life in what it’s made me into – I was a boy raised on a ranch 12 miles out of Pocatello, Idaho, a Catholic in a Mormon community where all of my brothers and sisters still live. By all rights I should still be there and I’m not, I’m out in the world. But this hasn’t brought me riches or fame – the New York Times is not reviewing me. I don’t know why I do this. I guess it’s like Judy Garland just had to sing. But this is going to kill me. Sooner or later this is going to kill me because I won’t be able to do it any more. It’s just too hard.

You’re perhaps something of a cult figure in queer literature – do you feel like that? Do you wish your work was better known?

Absolutely, especially at this moment in time. I’m 68 and I have a mortgage and I’m still having to teach four days a week just to make ends meet. This new book – well, New York wouldn’t buy it. I didn’t get the big advance. I was somehow out to pasture, talking about AIDS again and they’d all moved on. I definitely feel frustrated that way – that I’m not more recognized – but so much of me is still a young boy behind the hay baler who was slave labour for his father dreaming of fame and fortune and travel. There’s a part of me that still wants to be invited to that stuff. I’m underestimated, let’s just say that.

I’d definitely agree. So many successful gay writers have crossover appeal and maybe your work is just too like Francis Bacon? It’s too much of a challenge.

When I was just up at the Gay and Lesbian Centre in New York I read a whole section from I Loved You More about getting fucked in the ass and the queer audience loved it but, even to them, it was scandalous. In my truth telling it feels like lots of people just want to close their eyes because it’s too much for them.

In relation to race and sexuality, you’re interested in the in-between spaces; between genders, sexualities, relationships and landscape – and in language too. The notion of being named and people naming you, having an identity, what you’re called and what you call yourself, is an important struggle and quest. Shed in The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon is not really sure what his identity is, and the identity of the Berdache has a mythical quality to it, as does the drag queen Rose in In The City of Shy Hunters.

Again, I think it comes from this idea that, from the very beginning I was an outsider. An outsider like Shed likes to look through people’s windows to see how they do things, so that he can figure out how to do them too. Somebody at the Gay and Lesbian Centre asked me, “How come you can write about sex so well, and make it seem so real?” I said it was because, as a Catholic boy in the family I was raised in, the issue was not whether I was gay or straight but, “Can you touch me? How can I let someone touch me?” I don’t know how to do that. I had to learn to allow people to touch me because I was such an outsider to sex that I was watching everybody and wondering how they did it. The idea of being an outsider has always been so much part of my life that it’s always going to be a part of my narrators’ lives.

Love and sexuality are such strong presences in your novels, they form the motor of the narrative and are both creative and destructive forces. You seem less interested in the idea of sexual identity and more in the idea that sex is something that happens in the moment, between people, regardless of who or what they are. Your gay male protagonists love and fuck women too and perhaps that confuses readers. Your work is hard to pin down.

I think that might be true. What it seems like we’re trying to do these days – and I’m all for the marriage equality – but really what’s happening is we’re becoming normal, we’re becoming conservative, accepted people who can get married because we can. When I was a hippie in the sixties I promised myself I’d never get married because it’s so status quo and ordinary.

The idea for I Loved You More came from the death of a friend and this was something that wouldn’t let go of you. You needed to write about it, though it was something that you’d rather forget. You’ve talked about the idea of “putting on a mask of fiction in order to be able to tell the truth.” This made me wonder whether or not there’s a specific way that, when you’re queer, a mask is something that you learn to put on from a very early age. You’re hiding behind that mask, but it can also allow you to observe but not necessarily be seen. Maybe a by-product of being in the closet is the ability to tell the truth through masks. 

I’m totally with you. Oscar Wilde said, “If you want to know the truth ask the man who’s wearing the mask.” What is that about? When I began writing about my friend who died there was too much anger, too much frustration, too much regret. As soon as I put that mask on and started lying I was relieved of that and I could tell the story. Maybe by being queer, by being on the outside, we’ve been watching how things are supposed to be and because we don’t necessarily believe them, or feel them, it just becomes behaviour. It’s not something that comes from inside you, it’s something that you’ve imposed upon yourself, and that increases your otherness. At the same time, the person who’s never been pushed out of their own form and had to pretend to be someone else, doesn’t have that experience. On your way to trying to get back to what’s normal, you realize that normal is just another idea.

I don’t know if this is an impossible question to answer, or perhaps it’s an impertinent question, but how has your HIV-positive status altered your writing life?

I had never had my body fail me before. I was a strapping young farm boy and always healthy – drank a lot, smoked a lot, partied a lot and I was always strong and could get up the next day and get my job done. All of a sudden, in 1996, at the age of 50, I almost died. What followed after that was 6 months of recuperation. My partner, who’d been taking care of me, needed a break and he went to LA and I got my pills mixed up and when I thought I was taking Zanax I was taking testosterone and it touched off an old thing from my childhood when I didn’t sleep well and I didn’t sleep for 11 days. More recently, I tried to come off my psych-meds and the same thing happened – I didn’t sleep for a long period of time. This is a roundabout way for me to talk to you about HIV… Somehow or other my Catholic self believed that I was banished from the world of men and I must have done something wrong to have got this. I committed the sin of getting fucked in the ass. There was a feeling that I couldn’t go outside because there was this really bright light out there and God was going to see me and I had to hide under a rock, so all of this weird Catholic stuff came up for me and it really has, to this day, meant I’m pretty much a recluse. I’ve just been to New York on my book tour, but the amount of drugs I have to take – sometimes I think I’m Judy Garland with how much nerve calming stuff I have to take in order to do what I have to do. Maybe this is boring but I’m just trying to talk to you about what it felt like for my body to fail me, and in that I’ve had issues with sleep ever since and it’s very likely that the HIV virus attacks what’s weakest in you and it’s attacked my nervous system. Really what AIDS has done to me has made me into quite a fragile being.

And yet there is still this drive in you to put yourself, in your writing, in a space of danger, a stressful space.

A friend of mine pointed out to me that I’ve written three books while I’ve had AIDS. I guess I’m just a type-A personality who wants to prove to the world that I’m more than just an Idaho farm boy.

Do you think you’re still talking to that Idaho farm boy when you’re writing?

Yes, there’s still that scared little boy there. If my father could have owned slaves he would. He was a brutal man who beat me, you know? There’s still some part of me who’s trying to get that little boy out of that space of doom and fear and bring him back up to the light.

In my own life I have at the same time had moments of striking out, of going for it, and it’s always been related to perhaps the two strongest emotions you can have – love and grief. Either you get the strength you need from love, or grief is the thing that gives you the push you need to change things. But there still is in me, like in you, the scared boy inside, who’ll never go away, I think.

I doubt he ever goes away. Hopefully I can make a closer bond with him so he’s not so afraid and bring some solace to him.