In Bill Loehfelm's new novel, Bloodroot, Kevin Curran wants to unite his family, but he's ready to give up on his younger brother, Danny--three years lost to heroin addiction and hard, desperate living on the streets of New York. When Danny shows up on Kevin's Staten Island doorstep, looking clean, fit, and prosperous, Kevin can't help but be overjoyed that his brother has escaped his past life. But at what price? Not even Kevin's worst nightmares could have prepared him for the horrors he'll discover about his brother's dark history.Recently, Big Thrill contributing editor Carole Bugge caught up with Bill for a discussion about his latest.
A lot of writers use autobiographical elements in their work. What aspects of Bloodroot come from your own life?
The most obvious connection is that Bloodroot is set on Staten Island where I grew up. For the creation of the Bloodroot Children's Hospital, a key locale in the novel, I did draw on the history, both factual and rumor, of the Willowbrook State School, a Staten Island institution for severely disabled children. Willowbrook was closed years ago, after Geraldo Rivera of all people did a television expose in the 70's on the terrible neglect and abuses suffered by the children living there. When I was growing up in the '80's, Willowbrook took on an evil, mythic, haunted house-type quality in our collective imaginations as kids. I drew on some of the other urban legends we had on the island as well: Satan worship in the parks, the legend of Cropsey, a child murderer. For a part of NYC, Staten Island had a lot of real rural-type urban myths, often revolving around the parks and old buildings off in the woods.
More directly, I have lost two close friendships to heroin use, something else important in the novel. Both guys are still alive, as far as I know, but we're not friends anymore. No one I know knows for sure where they are, what they do. It's all second and third hand stories. It's crazy, and heartbreaking, the way drugs can just make ghosts out of people, people you love, that you've known for years.
Is Bloodroot a sequel in any way to your well received debut novel, Fresh Kills?
Bloodroot's not a sequel in that it doesn't continue the story that's told in Fresh Kills. Bloodroot has a new story, new characters. It does use the same setting, Staten Island, though it explores other sides of it. And, like Fresh Kills, it's partly the story of a family struggling to stick together. The Currans, from Bloodroot, are a family that the Sanders family from Fresh Kills might very well have known. They're not, but they easily could've been neighbors. So while it's not a straight sequel, I guess you could call Bloodroot a companion piece.
In what way did your experiences in Hurricane Katrina figure into your writing?
Katrina figures emotionally and psychologically into my writing, if not geographically, since I haven't yet set a novel in New Orleans. In both my novels, a single event resets the course of the main character's life. In Fresh Kills, it's a death. In Bloodroot, it's a resurrection of sorts. But in both, you wake up one day and your life is different, forever. That's certainly what happened with Katrina. August 28, 2005 I had one life, on the 29th that life ended, for six weeks I had no life and then on October 12, the day we came home, another life started. It's a lot to handle. The struggle to handle it, whatever "it" is, makes up a lot of what I write about.
Also, for Bloodroot, I drew directly on the experience of survivor's guilt. It was so heartbreaking to watch something I love so much, New Orleans, just laid to waste. Not being able to do anything to help in those first days, when things were at their worst, it just killed me. I knew intellectually that there was nothing I could do. You know, I'm not gonna evacuate the Superdome in my Saturn, no matter how bad I want to. But no matter what your brain knows, your heart still cries out in agony: "Do something, do something." A lot of what Bloodroot is about is that regret over being powerless, about having to watch, and about a second chance to "do something."
Was there a particular "aha" moment when you decided to become a writer, or was it a gradual dawning?
I was always a writer. I can remember enjoying it and being good at it in the third grade. It was just always there. Developing the discipline and the work ethic to be good at it, to really produce quality work, now that was a gradual dawning. I pretty much always wrote, but I didn't really, really commit until about ten years ago. Summer of '99. Though there was an aha moment then, I guess. I can remember sitting at the computer at about three a.m., music going on the stereo, drinking cold coffee, having already been at it for hours, and thinking: "Okay, if you get what you say you want, a large portion of the rest of your life will be spent just like this. Can you handle that?" I said yes, and so far, so good.
Is there anyone you find especially inspiring, or anyone whose work you aspire toward?
As far as aspiring toward, right now, Cormac McCarthy looms large in my mind. The accomplishment of No Country for Old Men and The Road back to back absolutely blows my mind. I read No Country and was like, okay, maybe if I work really hard I can write a book half that good - in twenty years. Kate Atkinson is another one. Her work is so complete, it functions on such a high level in every way. Roddy Doyle and Alice Sebold, I admire their ability to be hard-edged and graceful and funny all at the same time. Dennis Lehane is great for that stuff, too. He gives you whole worlds and entire lives that are so real. I admire a lot of musicians as well. Artists that have had long, consistent, and challenging careers: U2, the Tragically Hip, Bruce Springsteen. Artists that seem to become more and more themselves as they get older, if that makes any sense. And Johan Santana. He is my idol. I worship him. I want to be to writing what he is to pitching.
Does your love of baseball and the Mets figure into your writing or your characters?
Well, baseball is the handiest of metaphors, there's nothing in life that can't be described in baseball terms. And it's got a rich language all it's own that I love, and I love the sport itself, the ever changing nature of it, it's a new game on every pitch. One thing that unites all my characters is that they're all underdogs and so they're all Mets fans. They lead with their hearts, not their heads, which is how you have to act to be a Mets fan, 'cause the smart money is always on the Yankees. I couldn't imagine any of my characters as a Yankee fan, it's just not who they are. And, to be honest, writing about baseball and the Mets is just a lot of fun. Don't get me started on baseball, I'll go on forever. Just ask my wife, though she does an awesome job of pretending to care about Johan Santana's change-up and whether David Wright's covering the outside part of the plate with his swing. Early in our relationship, my editor sent me an e-mail about the Mets. She never did it again.
What effect (besides Katrina) did living in New Orleans have on your writing? Do you feel you're part of a literary tradition of that city?
When I was in high school on Staten Island, my dad saw an ad in the paper for free creative writing workshops at the public library. I ended up attending those workshops for a year and a half or so. They changed my life and put writing in my blood for good, made it magic, even if I took another ten years to get the work side of it together. I met my first real girlfriend in those workshops, met other people like me. I was such a solitary kid but suddenly I felt like part of a clan. Those workshops were a place where what I loved most and what I was best at really meant something to people I admired. Those Saturday mornings were the highlight of my life.
New Orleans, the way life is here, the people I met here that are now my friends, the city gives back to me as an adult everything I got from those Saturday mornings, a hundred times over. I think just now I'm starting to feel like part of the tradition. I've published a couple of books, published some work with a local independent publisher in their anthologies. I'm guesting at literary festivals in the city, and this fall I'm a writer-in-residence in the University of New Orleans' MFA program. So I'm feeling more and more like a real part of the city's literary present, and hopefully it's future. It's a unique time to be a writer in New Orleans. After the storm, there's been a real surge of emerging talent, like in Paris after WW I, especially out of that UNO program. I hope to do my part for it.
C.E. Lawrence's debut thriller, Silent Screams, coming out in
December, recounts NYPD criminal profiler Lee' Campbell's dark journey
into the mind of a serial killer. She has just
completed the sequel, Scorned, to be released in 2010.
Bloodroot's not a sequel in that it doesn't continue the story that's told in Fresh Kills. Bloodroot has a new story, new characters. It does use the same setting, Staten Island, though it explores other sides of it. And, like Fresh Kills, it's partly the story of a family struggling to stick together. The Currans, from Bloodroot, are a family that the Sanders family from Fresh Kills might very well have known. They're not, but they easily could've been neighbors. So while it's not a straight sequel, I guess you could call Bloodroot a companion piece.
In what way did your experiences in Hurricane Katrina figure into your writing?Katrina figures emotionally and psychologically into my writing, if not geographically, since I haven't yet set a novel in New Orleans. In both my novels, a single event resets the course of the main character's life. In Fresh Kills, it's a death. In Bloodroot, it's a resurrection of sorts. But in both, you wake up one day and your life is different, forever. That's certainly what happened with Katrina. August 28, 2005 I had one life, on the 29th that life ended, for six weeks I had no life and then on October 12, the day we came home, another life started. It's a lot to handle. The struggle to handle it, whatever "it" is, makes up a lot of what I write about.
Also, for Bloodroot, I drew directly on the experience of survivor's guilt. It was so heartbreaking to watch something I love so much, New Orleans, just laid to waste. Not being able to do anything to help in those first days, when things were at their worst, it just killed me. I knew intellectually that there was nothing I could do. You know, I'm not gonna evacuate the Superdome in my Saturn, no matter how bad I want to. But no matter what your brain knows, your heart still cries out in agony: "Do something, do something." A lot of what Bloodroot is about is that regret over being powerless, about having to watch, and about a second chance to "do something."
Was there a particular "aha" moment when you decided to become a writer, or was it a gradual dawning?
I was always a writer. I can remember enjoying it and being good at it in the third grade. It was just always there. Developing the discipline and the work ethic to be good at it, to really produce quality work, now that was a gradual dawning. I pretty much always wrote, but I didn't really, really commit until about ten years ago. Summer of '99. Though there was an aha moment then, I guess. I can remember sitting at the computer at about three a.m., music going on the stereo, drinking cold coffee, having already been at it for hours, and thinking: "Okay, if you get what you say you want, a large portion of the rest of your life will be spent just like this. Can you handle that?" I said yes, and so far, so good.
Is there anyone you find especially inspiring, or anyone whose work you aspire toward?
As far as aspiring toward, right now, Cormac McCarthy looms large in my mind. The accomplishment of No Country for Old Men and The Road back to back absolutely blows my mind. I read No Country and was like, okay, maybe if I work really hard I can write a book half that good - in twenty years. Kate Atkinson is another one. Her work is so complete, it functions on such a high level in every way. Roddy Doyle and Alice Sebold, I admire their ability to be hard-edged and graceful and funny all at the same time. Dennis Lehane is great for that stuff, too. He gives you whole worlds and entire lives that are so real. I admire a lot of musicians as well. Artists that have had long, consistent, and challenging careers: U2, the Tragically Hip, Bruce Springsteen. Artists that seem to become more and more themselves as they get older, if that makes any sense. And Johan Santana. He is my idol. I worship him. I want to be to writing what he is to pitching.
Does your love of baseball and the Mets figure into your writing or your characters?
Well, baseball is the handiest of metaphors, there's nothing in life that can't be described in baseball terms. And it's got a rich language all it's own that I love, and I love the sport itself, the ever changing nature of it, it's a new game on every pitch. One thing that unites all my characters is that they're all underdogs and so they're all Mets fans. They lead with their hearts, not their heads, which is how you have to act to be a Mets fan, 'cause the smart money is always on the Yankees. I couldn't imagine any of my characters as a Yankee fan, it's just not who they are. And, to be honest, writing about baseball and the Mets is just a lot of fun. Don't get me started on baseball, I'll go on forever. Just ask my wife, though she does an awesome job of pretending to care about Johan Santana's change-up and whether David Wright's covering the outside part of the plate with his swing. Early in our relationship, my editor sent me an e-mail about the Mets. She never did it again.
What effect (besides Katrina) did living in New Orleans have on your writing? Do you feel you're part of a literary tradition of that city?
When I was in high school on Staten Island, my dad saw an ad in the paper for free creative writing workshops at the public library. I ended up attending those workshops for a year and a half or so. They changed my life and put writing in my blood for good, made it magic, even if I took another ten years to get the work side of it together. I met my first real girlfriend in those workshops, met other people like me. I was such a solitary kid but suddenly I felt like part of a clan. Those workshops were a place where what I loved most and what I was best at really meant something to people I admired. Those Saturday mornings were the highlight of my life.
New Orleans, the way life is here, the people I met here that are now my friends, the city gives back to me as an adult everything I got from those Saturday mornings, a hundred times over. I think just now I'm starting to feel like part of the tradition. I've published a couple of books, published some work with a local independent publisher in their anthologies. I'm guesting at literary festivals in the city, and this fall I'm a writer-in-residence in the University of New Orleans' MFA program. So I'm feeling more and more like a real part of the city's literary present, and hopefully it's future. It's a unique time to be a writer in New Orleans. After the storm, there's been a real surge of emerging talent, like in Paris after WW I, especially out of that UNO program. I hope to do my part for it.
C.E. Lawrence's debut thriller, Silent Screams, coming out in
December, recounts NYPD criminal profiler Lee' Campbell's dark journey
into the mind of a serial killer. She has just
completed the sequel, Scorned, to be released in 2010.
