Craig Davidson

Thursday, September 29th

Some Recent Reviews

Did an interview with the St. Catharines Standard today, and one with PAGES magazine yesterday regarding the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Both went well, I think. Getting used to answering writer-type questions. Got word back on my novel from my agent yesterday. The news was somewhat grim. There is serious work to be done. Time to roll up the sleeves and get back into it. I'm also working on a kid's book, strangely enough. So: writing the kid's book in the morning; cooped up in some library cubicle revising the novel in the evenings. What an exciting life I lead.

Here are some recent reviews for the book. There's only been two Canadian ones so far: one from Quill and Quire, the book industry newspaper (not the best I've ever gotten), and another from the Edmonton Journal, which was very complimentary. Here are a few, yanked off the Amazon.com site.

From Publishers Weekly:

A strong stomach, an open mind and a morbid sense of humor are essential to enjoying Davidson's accomplished, macabre first collection. Calamity lurks around every corner, these stories suggest, and you never know when fate will smite you—only that it will. Davidson catapults his characters (sex addicts, fighters, gamblers and drinkers) into ingeniously grim situations that test their will. In "Rocket Ride," a young man who loses his leg to the orca he performs with in a marine park show tries to rebuild his life, in part by attending meetings of the Unlimbited Potential support group, which is full of substance-abusing amputees who wonder if karma's to blame for their plights. In the gruesome "A Mean Utility," a normal-seeming couple—an ad exec and his wife, a nurse—breed and fight vicious dogs, while in the sad "On Sleepless Roads," a repo man leaves one night's job not with the camper he was supposed to reclaim, but with the destitute man's hamster and guinea pig, which he brings home to his disabled wife. Davidson, 30, is a fine young writer with a keen sense of the absurd and a bracing, biting wit, but his focus on gore may keep many readers from appreciating his obvious talent. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Like author Thom Jones in the story collection The Pugilist at Rest 1993) and novelist Marc Bojanowski in The Dog Fighter (2004), Davidson's eight short stories home in on men addicted to action, depicting boxers, basketball players, and gamblers in kinetic, ferociously detailed prose. In the title story, a boxer mournfully chants the names of the 27 bones that make up the human hand, all of which he has broken in the course of a career that now sees him fighting in ever-seedier venues. He sees the beauty of boxing even as he admits that his fights are a matter of survival and atonement for past sins. In "A Mean Utility," ad executive James Paris, frustrated by his and his wife's attempts to conceive, displaces his paternal feelings onto his pit bull, Matilda. He overmatches her with a vicious rottweiler, then experiences a change of heart, wading into the fray to save his pup and losing a chunk of his leg in the process. Davidson matches his stellar, energetic descriptions of physical confrontation with subtle, quirky explorations of human motivation. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

I love both Jones and Bojanowski. THE PUGILIST AT REST is one of, if not the, best collections I've ever read. If you haven't read it, please consider doing so. THE DOG FIGHTER is a brutal but I think quite wonderful story of a huge Mexican man who spends much of his late adolescence in a pit fighting dogs with a knife in one hand and a bit of carpet wrapped around the other. There's a love story wrapped in there, too. Needless to say, it's not everyone's cup of tea. But the writer is young (27), and hugely talented.

---Craig.
Craig Davidson on 09.29.05 @ 04:33 PM EST [link]

Tuesday, September 27th

Oprah's Book Club

First of all, check out that picture of me. I am looking TOUGH. Do not---I repeat, do NOT---mess with me. I will kick your little heinie up and down the block. Unless your name is Jason Luke. In which case good day to you, sir.

Oprah's Book Club. Got into a conversation about this the other day. People have divided opinions on it. Some feel it's the proverbial 600-pound gorilla, the Kingmaker, and it is: last week the newest Oprah pick, James Frey's A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, sold 85,000 copies in 4 days. This, in industry parlance, is known as "a shitload of books." Our country's own Anne Marie McDonald received a significant boost when her book was Oprah-fied. Also Rohinton Minstry, I think. The problem, as always, is which books are selected. It's the same as will happen when the Giller and Governor General awards shortlists are announced: the main kerfuffle will come from who was nominated, and at what other writers' expense. And of course, now people will again be wondering if James Frey is deserving of the magical kiss bestowed upon him---but, after reading his book, I doubt he'll give a damn. Still, I think the idea of a huge national book club, anything, really, that encourages people to read, is a good idea. As to the crabbing about which book was chosen---that's probably inevitable.

I'm also heartened to see Oprah chose a book that might be seen as fairly "macho": A MILLION LITTLE PIECES is an addiction memoir told with a bracing, profanity-riddled flair. I say this for purely selfish reasons: a sort of "macho" writer myself (take a look at that picture again---man, am I TOUGH!), I can only hope that either (a) the choice encourages more men to read, or (b) the choice encourages women to seek out more masculine fiction. That's a lot of hope to heap on Mr. Frey's shoulders, but I'm sure he can handle it.

I didn't know this fact a year ago, but 85% of all fiction is bought by women. Had I known this, I may have swapped out one of my boxing stories for...I don't know...a story about...uh...uh...see? It's hopeless! I have no idea what women might like BETTER than a boxing story! The best I could figure was a story about...WOMAN boxers!

And what the hell are all you guys doing instead of reading, anyway? Playing video games? Flying kites? Masturbating? I mean, come on, life's a vast panoply of sensations and experiences. Pick up a book, for the love of god! Nobody's going to call you a Poindexter; nobody's going to call you a pencil-necked geek and kick sand in your face at the beach.

I read this article where someone in London tried to hand out FREE books: in half an hour 30 women had taken a book versus ONE man. Most of the men thought it was a trick: [cockney accent]---"Whoot's 'is then? A book, you says? Eeeeey, are you having a lark or sumfink? I ought to call the bobbys on you, you sneaking little dandyprat! A book, eee says! What on earf do I want wif a book?!"

So come on, guys, put down your pingpong paddles and yo-yos and jack-in-the-boxes and grab a book. What, do you want your brains turning all to pudding in your heads? Well---DO YOU? No? Then go read something. Exercise your medulla oblongatas! Blast your cerebellum! Do super-set squats with your frontal lobe!

Reading is FUNdamental, fellas.

---Craig.
Craig Davidson on 09.27.05 @ 04:23 PM EST [link]

Sunday, September 25th

The Seven Dollar Tube of Toothpaste

I just got back from the gym. I was, uh, blasting my quads. Okay, not really. Anyway, I needed some toothpaste. I stopped in at this grocery store called The New Pioneer Co-Op. I'd never been in before, but it was on my way home. I quickly found it was not your usual grocery store. It was one of those health food/New Age/Hippy Dippy sort of places. The sort of place you expect to see Wavy Gravy spraying down the ethically-grown vegetables. The sort of place that probably has a manifesto. Anyway, my teeth were developing a fine coating of fuzz, so I needed toothpaste. I bought the cheapest tube they had.

It was seven dollars.

What the hell?

Your average tube of toothpaste runs you a few bucks---99 cents, you catch a special. This place had 12-dollar tubes. What, do fairies make it? Is it magical toothpaste? Can it make you fly, or give you great luck? My 7 dollar tube is called SPRY. It's active ingredients are MAXXylitol and Aloe Vera. ALOE VERA? It's also got hydrated silica, vegetable glycerin, and parsley seed oil. Great. Wonderful. The box is pretty funny: it's got the words DENTIST RECOMMENDED, and a picture of a grinning man one must assume to be a dentist, though he could just as easily be a carpenter or a tailor wearing a white labcoat. DENTIST RECOMMENDED---it's such a weak, wishy-washy statement. Recommended as opposed to what---digging at my teeth with a pipecleaner? Chewing on a pine cone? Dear god.

There were some toothbrushes there, too. Ten, fifteen dollar toothbrushes. I didn't look at them too carefully---I was still too overwhelmed by the toothpaste---but I thought, walking home, what could they possibly have been made from? I mean, what environmentally-safe, morally upright, socially responsible materials could be used? Certainly the bristles couldn't be made from anything artificial, as the manufacturing process would damage the earth. I thought maybe horsehair, but then that means dead horses. I thought maybe a wooden handle, but then think about all those trees. In the end I figured the bristles must've been made from hair taken from Haliburton CEOs and captains of seal hunting ships and other rotten cusses, and the handle was maybe the coccoon of some pupating bug that, after three months or so, would crack open to reveal a stunningly-beautiful butterfly that would flap out the bathroom window. Once the butterfly hatches, you have to buy another brush. This leaves the question as to how effective a butterfly-coccoon-evil-tycoon-hair toothbrush would really be at its primary task---cleaning your teeth---but I imagine it would be about as effective as my seven dollar toothpaste, which is brown, smells like sea algae, and falls off my brush in digusting, egg-yolky tendrils.

But at least I have the pleasure of my moral superiority over all you Mother Earth-hating Crest and Colgate users. For shame, all of you! For SHAME!

---Craig.
Craig Davidson on 09.25.05 @ 05:32 PM EST [link]

Friday, September 23rd

Character Names

Haven't written much the past few days. My novel, tentatively titled either IN THE PIT or FIGHTING STOCK, is finished in rough and off to my agent. Now I have to wait and see the changes that need to be made before moving on in the process. The only other person to have read it so far is my dad, and maybe my mom (although, bless her heart, she might've had to stop at the first chapter, after the scene where two unruly fellows pound one another into ground chuck. My mom likes Diana Gabaldon: her novels involve a Scottish Highlander, I'm told, who travels around in time solving mysteries and dispensing refreshing knee-tremblers to winsome lasses. Perhaps I'm off on this. Anyway, FIGHTING STOCK isn't Diana Gabaldon---but it probably won't sell like her, either. Maybe I should add a Scottish time-traveller to my novel.)

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about character names. I've always had a tough time coming up with names. I know some writers use them as tricky devices to provide insight into their characters (I named my character Hitler 'cause he's BAAAAAAD, etc), but I've never been that deeply invested in names. I remember my friend (let's call her...uh..."Merrin"), who has read about every book on planet Earth, objected to one of my characters who I'd named Beatrice. She said, "Ohhh, you can't name her that. Everyone will think you're making a reference to Beatrice, the underage love object of 16th-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri." I said, "Merrin, about .0000001 percent of all people on earth would get that reference." She said, "It's your funeral." And indeed it is.

So I usually just use the names of my buddies, my family, people I know, make them characters. An homage, of sorts. Not that the characters in any way reflect the personality of the person him/herself...or, not usually. My brother, Graham, is the feature character of ON SLEEPLESS ROADS. My buddy Jay (aka Snake, aka Jayboy, aka Banana Back, aka JAYBOT the futuristic massage-craving cyborg) is the main character in A MEAN UTILITY, and he shows up again in ON SLEEPLESS ROADS. My buddy Ben, aka BueeennnAAAA! (to make this sound you just scream BENNY really loud) gets his leg bit off by a killer whale in ROCKET RIDE. Jay gets his ass bit by a rottweiler. So I can't say the characters named after my buds are treated particularly WELL in these fictional worlds. In the first novel I ever wrote (published under a nom de plume), my buddy Neil, Jayboy's brother, gets his face eaten off by some demonic entity.

Anyway, for all you friends, family, and close confidants, be sure to note that the trend of me naming characters after all of you continues. You'll just have to wait and see who I chose, and the particular fates your namesakes have in store for them.

Now I just need to figure out a name for the time-travelling Scottish gigolo. I've got a few ideas.

---Craig.
Craig Davidson on 09.23.05 @ 03:30 PM EST [link]

Wednesday, September 21st

Story Ideas

A few people who have read the collection have asked me about the stories. Not about where I came up the ideas, exactly---this is the question I'm told writers are asked most often, to the point that they start coming up with silly answers (Stephen King, for example, says he sends away for his ideas in the mail, then grows them in an aquarium like Sea Monkeys)---but more did any of my stories have their basis in my own real life experiences. One person asked had I ever been to a dogfight. Another asked had I ever boxed. Another wondered had I ever been a repo-man, or ever been friends with one. Another asked if I'd ever been on the set of a pornographic movie. Some of the questions were posed in a jokey tone, as though the questioner was only half-serious, but underneath I could sense a sincere curiosity.

I think part of the interest stems from the fact that I don't seem at all like my characters when you meet me in person. I think some people who've read the stories expect, when first meeting me, to see some knuckle-scarred Cro-Magnon Troglodyte lurch into the room. And while I'm somewhat troglodytic, I clean up okay, smell pretty nice, possess the requisite social graces, don't make a habit of flying into fits of blind rage, etcetera. In fact, a few times I've even gotten the sense that whoever I'm meeting is somewhat UPSET by my un-cavemanlike demeanor. So maybe it's something I need to work on. Maybe I'll show up to readings barechested with a bearskin pelt girding my loins. We'll see.

Anyway, to answer the question as to whether or not my stories come from real life experience---yes, they do. I have been to several dog fights, usually just after a spirited round of seal clubbing to "get my motor running." And not only have I visited the set of many a porno movie, I have in fact worked in them: first as a gaffer, then as a best boy, later as a sound tech, then finally on a walk-on role as "The Saucy Plumber." My line was, "I'm told you have a pipe that requires snaking, ma'am," then the base guitar kicked in: Oom-chaka-oom-chaka-oom-woah-waooooh... My screen credit was "Johnny Rapier." True story.

Okay, so none of that is true. The whole truth of the matter is, no, I haven't been to a dog fight. No, I have not been on the set of a porno movie. No, I have never been a repo man. I did join a boxing gym, and participated in all the training and the rigorous regimen. The rest of it, though...I don't think I could handle a dog fight. No way. I guess I wouldn't mind being a repo man; I might enjoy stealing people's stuff. I think it's every man's fantasy at some point in their life to be an adult film star (a "workin' dick" as they're known in the skin flick biz), enjoy all that businesslike sex, but maybe I'm past my prime on that front.

So there you have. The whole story.

---Craig.
Craig Davidson on 09.21.05 @ 02:44 PM EST [link]

Tuesday, September 20th

American Dreams

So I'm down here in America---Iowa City to be exact. I had a few choices where to go, but chose Iowa because I felt, of the possible choices, it would probably be the most like where I'd come from. It's not that I'm afraid of change---I would've stayed put in Calgary had that been the case---but I've lived in a lot of different places, and wanted something that was conducive to writing. I think I made the right choice. Iowa City's a lovely little town (pop. 60,000), and I live in a nice little apartment in a quiet neighborhood. My downstairs neighbor seems to hold a totally unfounded grudge against me for some reason---every time our paths cross she makes a dismissive and allergic-sounding little snort, like she's crossed paths with a cloud of pollen or goldenrod spores---but otherwise it's all quite nice.

Every morning it's part of my writing routine to go grab a coffee. When I lived in Calgary, on 17th Avenue, no problem: there was an embarrassment of coffee shops, 4 or 5 in a two-block radius. I was never much of a Tim Horton's guy---I know some swear by it---but I have come to appreciate the kick of their emblematic Canadian-style coffee. The coffee I'm used to is dark, flavorful, and, uh, "gutty": the dark blend at one place was the equivalent of being kicked in the teeth by a mule. Here in Iowa City it's different. There's one or two coffee shops. It's not that I need the coffee shop for the social aspect; I don't head down with my ringed binder or laptop and work away. I need a good cuppa joe to wake me up, is all. Here you get your coffee at gas stations. Places with names like HANDIMART or KUM AND GO or GASSY JOES. It's not bad coffee, but pretty weak. On the upside, it's cheap as dirt. A lot of places, if you go in with your own cup, it's 25 cents. I'm thinking about heading down with a garbage pail and see what they say.

Another thing is the beer. I guess I sort of expected it to be weaker, but really, it's not bad at all. If you want a dark, tasty beer, you can find one. Although someplaces here they sell what are referred to as "guzzlers." The first time I ordered a beer, I was asked if I wanted a guzzler. Of course, I cried, who WOULDN'T want a guzzler! Lamentably, what is known at certain Iowa City establishments as a "guzzler," the rest of us know by its more common name: a pint. I was expecting some massive fishbowl of beer, with, y'know, paper umbrellas and one of those crazy straws to drink it. Plus it sort of makes you sound like an alcoholic:

YOU: "I had three guzzlers last night."
YOUR FRIEND: "Oh, man, were you wasted?"
YOU: "Not really, no."
YOUR FRIEND (serious tone): "Dude, you might have a drinking problem. Here's a pamphlet I think you should read."

---Craig.
Craig Davidson on 09.20.05 @ 01:37 PM EST [link]

Welcome to My Blog

I've been told to update this section. It's getting a little cob-webby, I must say.

I'm Craig Davidson, and welcome to my blog set up by the fine folks at Penguin. My upcoming book is called THE FIGHTER. You can read all about it at www.thefighter.ca. You can buy it online at www.Penguin.ca, www.amazon.ca, www.chapters.ca. It is a harrowing book about love in the time of cholera. It is a heartwarming book about the triumph of the human spirit against impossible odds. It is the story of a horse named Gimpy Sue who won the Belmont Stakes on three legs and a broomstick. It's a story of love, honor, redemption, and the hero that lives inside of us all.

HA---no way, Jose! It's about NONE of that stuff.

It's called THE FIGHTER. You can guess what it's about.

Your most humble servant,

Craig Davidson, Esq.
email: craigiepops[at]hotmail.com (tough email addy, huh?)

"Davidson…smudges the line between comedy and horror, cruelty and mercy. His remarkable stories are challenging and upsetting…Don’t look for comfort here." —Chuck Palahniuk, FIGHT CLUB.

"These big, riveting stories about tough guys in trouble are the best I've read in a long time from a young writer. There's enough incident, shock, and suspense for a dozen books. This collection is filled with stories you haven't heard before." — Bret Easton Ellis, AMERICAN PSYCHO

"There is a strikingly original tone to Mr. Davidson's stories. The prose is spare yet elegant, the insights are fresh and real, and best of all there is a boundless humanity in Mr. Davidson's writing: a love of life that is beautifully woven with an acute sense of its darkness. This is in every way an extraordinary book." — Clive Barker
Craig Davidson on 09.19.05 @ 12:44 PM EST [link]