Why are we filled with so many contradictions? How does writing help us make sense of the absurdity and chaos of the world?
T.C. Boyle is a novelist and short story writer based out of Santa Barbara, California. He has published 19 novels, such as The Road to Wellville and more than 150 short stories for publications like The New Yorker, as well as his many short story collections. His latest novel Blue Skies is a companion piece to A Friend of the Earth. His writing has earned numerous awards, including winning the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best Novel of the Year for World's End.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I read that Blue Skies is a companion piece to your 2000 novel, A Friend of the Earth.
T.C. BOYLE
I call Blue Skies a companion piece because, in A Friend of the Earth, written in 2000, I projected to 2025 to see what the environment might be like. We have the fires, the floods, the pandemic, etc., all the way back to 2000. This was kind of surprising to everybody, but now that we're here and it is the daily reality, I wrote Blue Skies in order to see how we're dealing with it. How do we live with these conditions?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You've been writing about man's relationship to the planet for decades. Did you imagine you'd still be having to write about the absurdity and the ways we keep on trashing our own home all these years later?
BOYLE
I was born in a democracy. I now live in a fascist dictatorship. The first thing that this president has done is cancel all green initiatives. It's a "drill, baby, drill" mentality, just to make everything that much worse. I don't really have a lot of hope for the future. What I have done in my career is just try to assess who we are, what we are, why we are here, and how come we, as animals, are able to walk around and wear pants and dresses and talk on the internet, while the other animals are not. It's been my obsession since I was young. I think if I hadn't become a novelist, I might have been happy to be a naturalist or a field biologist.
I try to limit my footprint. Although, just having been an American in my generation, I have used far more resources than people who are not living in America. I do try to limit it. Everything on this property is natural; there are no pesticides or anything like that.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You said you're not that hopeful, but there are some grace notes of hope towards the end of Blue Skies.
BOYLE
Yes, I had to have some mercy on my characters. It's another interesting thing about being a novelist. This world, as we have discussed so far, is way out of control and dangerous and frightening. But when you create a novel, you are the god of that universe and can make anything happen. So, yes, I want my characters to suffer, but at the end of Blue Skies, there is a grace note. Absolutely.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I also love that you’ve inhabited the voices of animals in your books.
BOYLE
It's about language, and I'm fascinated by that. So I've written two books in this mode: Talk to Me, which has a deaf heroine, and her language is as adequate as ours. But we look down upon the deaf because they are not speaking to us properly. So it's just a question of whether we can hold other animals to our standard, which is very prejudicial. I had an interest in these subjects, and I don't really know what to say about them unless I explore them in a work of fiction.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Before you became a writer, you were a musician. Do you still perform, or is your short story a kind of way of doing singles?
BOYLE
Wow. Good question. Yes, I think that doing short stories is like doing singles. I gave up music a long time ago because I am not the kind of person who can do two things and do them well. I want to excel in one thing, and that takes my entire focus. So, I was never really serious about music.
I just enjoyed being in a band and doing my vocals and carrying on. The other guys in the band knew that I had already written two books, and that was my focus in life. Well, why can't you do both? I can't. I'm not that sort of person who can do both. I have to put 100 percent into what I'm doing and make it as good as I can. I've never written a word without music playing in the background. I listen to music pretty much all day long, except when I'm at the beach or hiking in the mountains.
I write every day. Sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn't. But it confines me to sitting right here, at a desk, at a keyboard. When I'm done, I just go out into nature. Sometimes I'm doing yard work or just walking the streets, but when I can, I go to the beach. I walk on the beach, sit there, read a book, enjoy nature, see what's happening, just to witness the pelicans crashing into the water or the seals. It's amazing to me.
In the Sierra Nevada, where I haven't gone for a while now, but we used to go a couple of times a year and rent a place there. I could just simply open the back door and be in the Sequoia National Forest. I never went on any trails or anything else. I knew everything there, like my favorite waterfalls and my favorite spots. I would do essentially the same thing: walk out into the woods with the dog, hike about half an hour to someplace, and just stay there for the day. I was not worrying about the bark beetles or the scientific names of the plants; I was just like a child, looking around in my own mind, and then I would go see what it is. I think that's really refreshing, and I know people in the world don't have the opportunity to do that.
Nature, for them, is often confined to the city and the weather, which is beautiful and great. But I like to be totally alone in nature, to commune with nature in a very basic way. Sometimes, I'll even take a nap out in the woods—just close my eyes and let it happen.
Often, in my stories, I address technological things that are happening right now. For instance, one story, “Asleep at the Wheel,” which The New Yorker published a couple of years ago, is my take on the coming revolution of fully automated cars and the banning of individual driving.
That's going to happen eventually. What would that be like? What if this happens? So, you'll find in the stories, as in my most recent book, several that deal with what's happening right now technologically and what that promises for us, good or bad.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It's not just about the future of driverless cars because I think asleep at the wheel is a good metaphor for our relationship to technology; when we're outsourcing our imagination, communication, and creativity to AI. We're kind of agreeing to be asleep at the wheel and it's dangerous. I haven't tried it, but if I typed into ChatGPT, “write me a T.C. Boyle story, it would produce something based on your stories that it has scraped. And I find that scary.
BOYLE
I think what AI is giving us now on the internet to do research, if you need to know a fact at a specific moment, there it is. That's great. I haven't really had much experience with chatbots, although my fans on Twitter always provide me with little blocks of what they're getting. I think it would be difficult to reproduce a novel that would be interesting to anyone, simply because the novel comes from a single human being's experiences. The beauty of that, for better or worse, is that no one else has these experiences, and no one else could be this individual. Otherwise, you could just have a committee writing books. I don't think it would have the same spark.
Literature and music give us a basis; they give us our humanity. I don't know what form it will take in the future, but we certainly need stories. We tell stories. Everybody, you know, the guy delivering the bread to the supermarket, is telling a story to the guy picking up the bread.
Everybody has to have stories. Stories build our psyche. We can't live without stories. I don't know how they are going to be delivered in the future, but I am just doing what I'm going to do. One of my best friends is a painter, Pablo Campos, and he paints all day long, every day. That's what he does. This is his life.
This is his joy. I am similar. I didn't want to get into music. I didn't want to write for films. I didn't want to do anything. I just want to create these works of art because they amaze me. I don't know what it will be. It's a puzzle. It's always a big puzzle. And when it's solved at the end, the joy is just a tremendous creative rush. So, this is all I want to do. I've been lucky enough that all my life, this is what I've done.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You're not a misanthrope at all. I mean, no one who's that dedicated to beauty and trying to understand us and all our human insanity could be misanthropic because you wouldn't put yourself through that if you didn't care about us and the planet and all the other animals.
BOYLE
Aw, shucks. I think you're right. Yes.
