|
|
Untitled
|
|
|
| |
 ZZ: Were you thinking you would be a writer while you were in the Peace Corps?
BS: I was an agricultural journalist in the Peace Corps. I went to journalism school at the University of Missouri. I wanted to write fiction, but the life of a fiction writer was so amorphous to me. Spike Lee said he knew where babies came from long before he knew where movies came from, and it was the same with me. Even up to college, I had no idea where books came from, what the writing life looked like, what you do exactly. Did you go to an office? How did you survive? Where did the discipline come from, the long-term year after year discipline? I knew none of these things.
I was in an environment where, expressing a dream like that,you were immediately discouraged from pursuing it. "Don't do that." You can hear the parents saying, "Literature's too big a gamble, you'll fail, do something that you're sure to exceed at. Anybody can be a journalist, a bad journalist or good journalist, there's plenty of room for you." So I became a journalist.
I wanted to go back out into the world, so I joined the Peace Corps, and was actually doing something in a profession, doing something as a writer. Even though I was writing about banana diseases and the artificial insemination of pigs, at least I was writing. It somewhat looked like a living.
|
|
|
|
|
On video: "Spike Lee said he knew where babies came from long before he knew where movies came from, and it was the same with me."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bob Shacochis
',375,490);)
