[Alex Shakar's first novel, The Savage Girl (HarperCollins), follows the adventures of Ursula Van Urden as she discovers "the strangely intoxicating world of trendspotting where one lesson prevails: At the heart of every product lies a paradox, and when cultivated successfully, it yields untold riches." Kirkus Review calls the book "A crystalline satire of a preening media elite too exhausted with pillaging the minds of consumers to notice the collapsing world around them," and Booklist says "Shakar's satiric extrapolation of the cannibalistic aspect of our frenzied pursuit of what's hot is searing and brilliant." Dave Zauhar interviewed Shakar about his work and his thoughts on the paradoxes of popular culture.]
Dave Zauhar: Where do you write? How? Do you have a particular time of day when you need to work on fiction? Do you have any rituals (that you don't need to keep private for them to work) that helps you get to work?
Alex Shakar: For what it's worth, I'm one of those jokers with the laptop in the coffee shop that you think couldn't possibly be doing anything significant. At least, that's what I tend to think when I see other people with computers in coffee shops, even though I myself tend to get a lot of work done in such places. Writing is a lonely business, and just as it helps a goldfish be less depressed to stick a mirror in its bowl and let it entertain the notion that there are others of its kind around, I think it helps me to see those other dudes with the laptops, even though I tend never to talk to any of them and actually get annoyed when one of them talks to me.
What writers did you read as a younger man that made you want to write yourself?
As a kid I read nothing but junk, pretty much. Lots of science fiction--and not the high end stuff either but primarily the TV and movie spinoff books--Battlestar Galactica, and so forth. In high school I read Salinger's novels and had a girlfriend who loved Vonnegut, which I liked a lot as well. Around that time I decided I wanted to be a writer. Looking back on that decision, it amazes me how seemingly arbitrary it was, how little I had to go on. But somehow my intuition was right. When I went to college and really started immersing myself in literature, I was all the more certain that that's what I wanted to do. I loved Dostoyevsky and Faulkner especially.
Who are some other writers whose new work you always anticipate or whose work you like to re-read? Feel free to focus on the living or the dead. Keep in mind that the dead won't be offended if you forget them, and as to the living, remember that this is an E-zine, so if you piss someone off by forgetting about them temporarily, we can edit your response a lot more easily than can The Paris Review.
OK, I'll give you one of each. Among contemporary writers there are many whose new work I look forward to but I'd have to say that Don DeLillo's one of the few whose books I'll spend the extra dough and buy in hardcover when they first come out. He's always doing something new and he's always grappling with the zeitgeist in interesting ways and he writes a great sentence as well. As for a book I've found myself returning to, I'd mention Julio Cortązar's Hopscotch, which I continue to find daring and beautiful and liberating and brilliantly constructed.
It's pretty easy to come up with the potential drawbacks of creative writing programs, but you seem to have benefited from a couple of them. How can programs in creative writing be useful to developing writers? How can the drawbacks be avoided?
I went to two writing programs, one at U.T. Austin, where I got an M.A., and one at University of Illinois at Chicago, where I got a Ph.D. Both degrees were in English with a Creative Writing concentration, meaning I'd take a bunch of literature classes and a bunch of writing classes as well. While I went into both of these programs for purely mercenary reasons--to eke by on teaching stipends and fellowships while writing books, I have to say I think I also benefited from the support of the ready-made communities of writers and academics who, quixotically and heroically, believe literature to be important. One drawback about workshops is that at their worst they can tend to promote a polished, but generic and mediocre product (in a format that every one can agree upon) and can stifle innovation. Personally, through a combination of carefulness and luck, I managed to find programs and faculty who were open to and encouraged a wide variety of forms in their classes. There were definitely times when I felt like one more comment from someone in a workshop would sap my will to write beyond resuscitation, but when this started to happen I would just hand in old stories and keep my new work to myself, or better yet avoid the workshops altogether and sign up for independent studies. But I have to say that while it was sometimes painful, I think the best thing that I got out of workshops is the ability to listen to criticism and advice. Among writers, as individualistic as we tend to be, that's a very underrated skill, and I still know plenty of writers who can't listen to feedback and whose writing suffers because of it.
Next page: "A love-hate relationship with pop culture"
