09/14/2006: "Good, Good...Now Give me GRITTIER!"

Hello All,

First thing's first. Please go take a look at the Bookshorts site featuring the short film of THE FIGHTER. My thanks, as always, to the whole Bookshorts team for the great production. This film will also be screened October 5, at the fight:

www.bookshorts.com/watch_fighter.htm

Now as things ramp up for the release of THE FIGHTER (I don't really know what the hell I mean by "ramp up," because nothing is truly ramping up except my level of nervous agitation), anyway, as things go forward to the book's release on Sept. 26, I have been doing a few little publicity things including an interview with Canadian Business Magazine. The interview was conducted by Mike Doherty, who interviewed me last year for the National Post. A glutton for punishment, he stepped up to the dias once again to ask me some very pointed, very intelligent, very well-thought-out questions that I, as is my wont, proceeded to totally flake out on. Some excerpts:

MIKE: So, what was the compulsion to write this book?

ME: Ah, well, I, uh, you could say it seemed like the thing to do at the time. [lowering my voice to sound like that giant talking Kool-Aid pitcher who busts through walls in those old commercials] Ooooh YEAH!

MIKE [nervous laugh]: Your publicist tells me you actually took steroids while editing the book. Can you tell me why you went that route?

ME: Because I'm an idiot.

MIKE: Any other reason?

ME [thoughtful pause]: Oh, I don't know, as a personal statement on society's relentless focus on youth, beauty, and personal appearance? No, check that: because I'm an idiot.

MIKE: And I hear you're getting into a boxing match---can you tell me why?

ME: Because I'm an idiot.

MIKE: I think I've got everything I can use...

So they send a cameraman out to Iowa City to take photos for the interview. And where do they want to take them?---of course, the boxing gym. The photographer, a very cool and obliging fellow originally from Texas, was sent out with the mandate of capturing my "grittiness." This, I assure you, is a fool's errand: a photographer dispatched to catch Tom Cruise's "grounded-ness" or Paris Hilton's "virginal nature" would run into the same roadblock. There is nothing particularly gritty, or tough, or manly (except for the fact I have a penis and a few Y chromosomes) about me. My writing, as I've whinged before, is not meant to be tough; it merely comes off as tough in the world of Canadian literature, but only since most of CanLit is about as tough as a springtime rainbow.

You got a problem with me saying that, Alice Munro? Well, I'm RIGHT HERE, milady. Take that winsome little sunbonnet off and let's RUMBLE!

Okay, so, I would never threaten Alice Munro, grand dame of Canadian letters. I just went off my rocker for a minute, there. Apologies. I'm stressed, is all. God bless you, Alice.

Anyway, so, we're down in the boxing club taking photos. I'm feeling like a total jackass. I've got my workout wifebeater on, a slinky pair of shorts over my toothpick legs, handwraps on. I could tell the guy was trying to find the "grittiness" of the scenario, of his subject, but was totally at his wits' end. He had me drape myself over the heavy bag like some sort of pugilistic lecher, tangling my fingers with the chains it was suspended on, even turning my hips towards it so it looked like I was humping the damn thing. He was getting all agitated, like he wanted to click his heels 3 times and have me turn into someone else, an entirely different person, a gritty human being like a coalminer or something, but I persisted in being me, about as gritty as cotton batten, and this I could tell was plaguing him.

PHOTOG: Let's see a fist. Can you make a fist?

ME [thinking to myself]: Can I make a FIST? What am I, an infant? What's next: can I touch my own nose?

PHOTOG: There you go! Good! Great! Great fist! Okay, now, look menacing! Give me GRITTY!

ME [desperately, growling like a junkyard dog]: Grrrrrr~!

Well, okay, so I didn't growl. And yeah, okay, the events are a little embellished. And, yeah, okay, my shorts weren't all that slinky. I was actually wearing pantaloons.

But the point---and yes, I do have one---is that it seems like any promotion or publicity is a constant negotiation of what you'd like to do and what you feel you have to do to please others. And the newer you are, the more precarious your position, the less room you have to negotiate and the more you may find yourself in uncomfortable positions.

Here's what I was trying to avoid: A few years ago, a young Canadian writer came out with a book of short stories. A good book, good stories. It had a nautical theme, and so one newspaper or another, I foget which, takes him down to the Toronto lakeshore for a photo shoot. Now this guy is a dashing fellow, a handsome lad, but the photog has him lay over these jagged rocks down along the shore, bedded down with the flotsam and jetsam and old syrofoam cups and sun-rotted 'domers, has him splay himself across these rocks so he ends up looking like some waterlogged derelict coughed up by the sea. He was laid out all wackily, his body stressed at these weird angles, his head lolling---he looked like some hermaphroditic mer-creature sunning itself in a position of great discomfort.

And you know what, my friends? He was never heard from AGAIN.

Okay, so I'm bullshitting you. He was heard from again, I'm sure. But he's not published another book---although there could be several reasons for that. Maybe he found God.

My point is, I can imagine he was sitting there, laid out over those rocks like a bit of cast-off driftwood, thinking the same thing I was in the gym: Why, precisely, I am doing this?

And the answer is pretty simple: because you can't afford to lose whatever slim exposure you might garner. Most writers aren't rock stars: nobody's clamoring to interview us, nobody's pining to catch the honeyed gems that drip from our lips.

So if they want us to throw ourselves over some rocks down by the lakeshore or hump a heavy bag while looking gritty...well, we do it. I don't think there's a hell of a lot of choice in the matter---I mean, people will tell you you have a choice, but my thinking is, not really.

Anyway, just a head's up to anyone who wants to read my "gritty" interview or see my "gritty" gym photographs, check of the upcoming issue of Canadian Business Magazine.

Grittily yours,
Craig.