Boxing is a metaphor for stuggle in Cuba memoir

I enjoyed interviewing Brin-Jonathan Butler about his memoir The Domino Diaries for Kirkus Reviews. Here's the opening:


Brin-Jonathan Butler owes his life to Mike Tyson.

Butler was a battered and bullied teen afraid to leave the front door of his house when he heard the enigmatic former heavyweight champ in a televised interview talk of also being bullied and of the famous authors he was reading while in prison for rape.

Never good at school, Butler raced out to buy five Tyson biographies and all of the novels Tyson had suggested. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was a revelation. In the years that followed Butler wrote half a million words in three novels he'd rather forget. He left his Vancouver home at 18 for Spain, then went to Cuba at 20. “I thought I had to lead a life worthy of writing about,” he says.

But first there was the Vancouver boxing gym a frightened Butler entered at age 15, all 5' 2” and 115 pounds of him. He'd never kissed a girl, but he'd soon learn to take a punch. “If you're out of shape or new, the ring is one of the loneliest places in the world,” Butler writes in his memoir The Domino Diaries. “The worst blow, for my money, is the first big one that hasn't hit you yet, it's just hanging there on the way to hitting you.”





Read the rest here.

'Destination Unknown' examines biggest taboo

Somehow I became the death guy.

It happened after a penned the novel-in-stories Evacuation Plan, a book I never planned to write. I was chosen as part of a group of writers and artists to go into Hospice Austin's Christopher House to tell the story of the dying, their families and the people who work in and around this place of last days. I applied for the project because I was working on a mystery novel with a plot that dealt with death.

I didn't plan to write my novel, and I wonder if John H. Clark III set out to write Destination Unknown (it's free on Amazon as an ebook as I write this) or if it just forced itself on him. Either way he's the new death guy. "What happens to us when we die?" the cover blurb asks.

It's the big unanswerable. My novel took knocks for not having enough death in it. Clark's book faces the same challenge; it can't tell you how to die, but it does tell you everything you need to know about how we think about dying.

The consummate interviewer (he and I worked together years ago as newspaper reporters), when Clark has a question, he sets out to get the full answer. He interviewed more than 40 people for their takes on the final curtain. He talked to people from many different walks of life, many religious faiths or lack thereof. Some are hopeful, some are fearful. There are no easy answers in this book, and that's OK. Just taking time to think about the big questions is enough.

Clark professes to once being "scared to death of God." He flirted with organized religion at different points in his life, but still wrestles with the questions inherent in a Bible that is often full of cruelty. How do we reconcile this? Perhaps we just keep asking questions. "I have screwed up a lot of things, but I’ve also done a lot of things right," Clark says in the book's closing.

At Christopher House I met a 40ish guy full of anger. When he died, the nurses told me, he was holding on to this life, kicking and screaming, full of regrets. Clark's thoughtful book leaves me with this message: Live a life you can be proud of now before it's too late. You won't find happiness in making a whole lot of money (though I wouldn't recommend being poor either!) or drowning in kudos from others. You're going to have to live the life of a person whom you'd be proud to meet. The rest is gravy.

Get this book while it's still free or slap down some cash if you have it. It's full of important ideas told in a refreshingly honest way.

Fear drove Hitckcock, author says

My conversation with Michael Wood about his new Alfred Hitchcock bio for  Kirkus Reviews:


The famed director Alfred Hitchcock’s secret to success? He was afraid.
 
That’s Michael Wood’s take in Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much, a thoughtful peek into the director’s work and psyche released as part of the Icons series, which has in previous volumes delved into everyone from Jesus to Stalin to Edgar Allan Poe. Hitchcock is most famed as the master of suspense, and the book submits that it points back to his youth when Hitchcock was consumed by the fear of being stopped by a policeman.

Read the rest here.

'Thieves' tells fictional truths about a writer's life

This piece ran in today's San Antonio Express-News. It's behind a paywall, so here it is in its entirety (along with a photo I took of David):

By Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

January 12, 2014
SAN ANTONIO — A sign by David Marion Wilkinson's writing desk reads “Joy.” It was his guiding principle as he attempted to write the ultimate comic novel, but life and the book took a different turn.

The result is “Where the Mountains are Thieves,” a solid novel that is equal parts funny and tragic, but 100 percent honest about human failings and what it means to be a writer today.


“I came to this place where writing a comic novel wasn't possible,” said Wilkinson, who is best known for writing historical novels of the West.

“Thieves” follows Jesse Reverchon, a middle-aged author fresh from rehab and an affair who moves with his wife and young son Travis to Alpine to patch their lives together. Reverchon coaches his son's baseball team and tries to buckle down and get his writing career back on track. Along the way, the reader is warned of an accident lurking in the pages ahead that will rock Jesse's world.

Jesse says, “I came to understand that most novelists are strictly observers. At first I struggled with it, agonized over it. And then, about the time Travis was born, I accepted it.”

But in heartwarming and funny moments, Little League baseball proves Jesse's salvation. Á la “The Bad News Bears,” he tries to whip a ragtag group of misfits into a team.

“It's his catalyst to getting connected,” Wilkinson said. “His only success is impacting the lives of fatherless boys, but what he comes realize is they are saving his life.”

Wilkinson's latest novel is itself a lesson in the vagaries of the publishing industry and the human heart.

Like his main character, Wilkinson had moved his family to Alpine (he has two sons and, unlike his character, no history of drug or alcohol abuse) to make a new life in the Big Bend region. He became writer-in-residence at Sul Ross State University, built a house overlooking Cathedral Peak, and befriended the sometimes-eccentric residents of the beautiful but isolated place. But his real-life marriage was falling apart.


Courtesy

David Marion Wilkin-son's new novel, “Where the Mountains Are Thieves,” follows a middle-aged author who moves with his wife and young son to rebuild their lives.

“You could sit there and watch the sun go down with a sense of peace and a feeling that everything's OK, but then you look around and see it's not,” he said.

Careerwise, it actually started in 2001. After three years of work, Wilkinson's last novel, “Oblivion's Altar,” was hot off the presses and receiving positive reviews when the events of 9/11 changed everything. The nation was in turmoil, and no one was reading fiction. Wilkinson turned instead to nonfiction with “One Ranger,” a biography co-written with famed Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson.

Suddenly nonfiction agents were hitting him up with work-for-hire projects, and he realized they saw writers as interchangeable widgets. Like his character Jesse, Wilkinson was desperate to prove he still had fiction-writing chops.

Nearly broke and recently divorced, he found himself back working oil fields as he had in his youth. He didn't write for two years. When the words came, “Where the Mountains are Thieves” became a different, better, more honest book.

“There's a little anger in the book, along with frustration, sorrow, regret,” he admitted.

It's the writer's story of when art meets commerce. Wilkinson cites Herman Melville, who stopped writing and became a customs inspector. Only after his death did perhaps his best novel, “Billy Budd,” see publication.

These days, Wilkinson is not sure about his next novel. His writing career has taken another turn. He's been working as a writer on a History Channel miniseries about the Texas Rangers, and another in development about women spies during the Civil War.

“It changes every day,” he said of writing for television. “I'm good at that from what I've been through.”


Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer. Reach him at therealjoeo@gmail.com.