In his debut novel, "Broadway Baby," award-winning poet and essayist Alan Shapiro goes completely out of his mind.
Creatively speaking, that is. In the book, Shapiro's first foray into narrative fiction, he writes from the perspective of Miriam Gold, a showbiz-obsessed 10-year-old girl in 1950s Boston. As the book progresses, Miriam grows into adulthood and old age while Shapiro crosses boundaries of time, gender and circumstance to write from her point of view.
Although Shapiro drew many details of "Broadway Baby" from his own family and his childhood in Boston, the novel is definitely - and deliberately - fictional. It's an attempt, he said, to transcend the borders of his own creative voice as a poet and essayist. Shapiro has published 10 volumes of poetry and two memoirs, and is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Shapiro, who teaches creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill, recently spoke about his new novel, his love for the Triangle area, and the link between writing and basketball.
Q: How did the idea for "Broadway Baby" come about? Can you identity the seed moment when the book began?
Yeah, I can. It originated as a book of autobiographical essays. But it wasn't very good - it was flat and I couldn't get anyone interested in it.
My approach with the memoir or autobiographical story has always been, you're telling a story, but you're telling it under oath. It's fact-bound. When this project started taking off is when I realized, I'm kind of tired of my own life and what's happened to me. So I'm going to give myself permission to just make stuff up.
Q: You write from the perspective of your protagonist, Miriam Gold, beginning when she's a 10-year-old girl. That seems like it might be a challenge.
Well, that's what imagination is all about. Projecting yourself out of who you are and your circumstances. It was a challenge, but it was really fun. That answer goes counter to certain notions in academia, that you're bound by your class circumstances, or racial or even gender circumstances. I guess I just don't believe that. I think imagination is like a muscle of empathy, and the more you use it the more it grows.
Q: Did you find that your creative process was different in terms of writing a novel, as opposed to poetry or essays?
No, actually it was exactly the same. It was just like writing a poem. I still wrote it line by line, sentence by sentence. I tried to make the language musical, it was just a larger canvas. Not to mix metaphors (laughs).
Really, it was like a very vivid dream. It was this world I could enter into anytime I wanted to. Even though the book has a certain darkness to it, the writing of it was nothing but joyful.
Writing has always been, for me, as much a refuge as a passion. I've never suffered, thank goodness, from writer's block.
Q: So the writing process itself didn't really change with the switching of the form?
For the most part, I was able to go along as I usually do. My best days are when I can wake up, go into my study at 9 a.m. Then I look up and it's 3 in the afternoon, and all those hours have gone by as a single moment. That to me is just paradise.
You know, I used to play a lot of basketball. I played college basketball, and all the way up until I was about 50, when I had to have a pacemaker put in. Basketball and writing are very closely related, in my mind. Both experiences, I lose track of time. The reward is the activity itself, the concentration.
Q: It's that sense of getting out of your own head - and there are a million unhealthy ways to do that, and a few good ones.
Right. It's being able to transcend your own mind for a while and see the world from a different perspective.
The other thing I have my students do is memorize a lot of poetry. It's great to have other voices in your head. And as you say, there are a lot of unhealthy ways to have other voices in your head. But this is only a wonderful thing.
Q: Do you have a specific routine or regimen for writing? A particular time or place?
I used to, before my kids were born. I would get up really early, 4:30 or 5 a.m., and write until about 11. Once I had children, I just had to write whenever there was time available. Now, I can write pretty much anywhere, under any circumstances. I'm not nearly as rigid as I used to be when I was younger.
Q: Even considering all the local universities, the Triangle is home to an awful lot of writers. What do you like about living in this area?
I'd always lived in cities, in the North, or Europe, in California when I was at Stanford. Chicago, Boston, Dublin. When I first came here, I thought North Carolina was like the rim of the universe. But now I can't imagine living anywhere else. We're completely woven into the social and cultural fabric of this place.
The literary community here is unlike anywhere else in the country. There's very little of the vanity and competitiveness that seems to taint other parts of the country.
Also the geographical diversity - three hours in one direction and you're at the ocean, three hours in the other direction you're in the mountains. And, of course, the weather is right!
