From leafy academia to Portland's gritty underground: a Reed professor does some delving
Sunday, July 02, 2006
JEFF BAKER
The Oregonian
Reed College exhales in early summer. The students are gone, taking their end-of-semester angst and all-nighters with them. There won't be much business at the espresso stand until the chamber music concerts and writing conferences get started.
The campus feels quiet and full of promise, like a library that's just been opened for the day. It's the kind of place where a writer can concentrate and find unexpected connections in his work, connections between electric shock and the need to feel alive, between the Burnside skate park and a PGE substation in Sellwood, between Yukio Mishima's novel "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" and Playboy magazines from the bicentennial year of 1976.
"That one surprised me," Peter Rock said. "I had no idea it was there."
It's there, one of the many strange connections in Rock's novel "The Bewildered" (MacAdam/Cage, $13 paperback, 303 pages), the July selection of The Oregonian Book Club. Rock can explain it -- there was a 1976 movie version of "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace From the Sea," and a racy pictorial featuring stars Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles appeared in Playboy the same year -- but he swears he didn't plan it and has no deep reason behind it.
"I did not mean it to be a metaphorical book," said Rock, an associate professor of creative writing at Reed. "It was my aim to make it as physically grounded . . . as possible."
"The Bewildered" is grounded in Portland, but not the leafy, intellectual Portland around Reed College. Its settings are grittier: a trailer on a winding dirt road south of Johnson Creek, a hobo jungle in the woods above Forest Park, the "Shanghai tunnels" under Old Town. Rock researched it by riding TriMet -- he doesn't have a car -- and hanging around lower Burnside, where his three teenage characters skate and meet a strange woman who hires them to strip copper wire from telephone poles. One of them gets zapped and becomes forgetful and withdrawn. As his friends try to pull him back, they tap into a subculture that's way off the grid. What happens in the tunnels and on the utility poles is shocking, but Rock said it could happen the way he wrote it.
"I've had questions about whether it's a realistic book," he said. "I think it is, but I respect those who think otherwise."
There's no straight line dividing metaphor and reality in Rock's fiction and no clear path showing how he became, at age 38, a tenured professor at Reed and the author of five books. He's taken chances with his writing and made unusual choices that reflect a restless intelligence and eagerness to experiment.
Rock grew up in Salt Lake City, the son of an economics professor at the University of Utah. As a nonbeliever in a heavily religious community, he found himself on the outside looking in.
"Mormon girls frustrated me and drove me to writing," he said. "They're so attractive and smart and can be so willingly naive."
A year abroad in Australia jump-started Rock's "pretentious quest to be a writer" and taught him some of the discipline necessary to actually produce something. More discipline came at Deep Springs College, a small, all-male school in the California desert near Death Valley that is also a working cattle ranch. Students help set the curriculum and the combination of freedom, hard work and few distractions has developed several notable writers, including William T. Vollmann and Benjamin Kunkel.
After his two years were up, Rock transferred to Yale, "the place most unlike Deep Springs I could find." He graduated and spent two years on a ranch in Montana, working and writing novels that didn't work out. He spent another two years in Ithaca, N.Y., working as a security guard in an art museum, then went back to Utah and worked on what became his first novel, "This Is the Place."
Rock brought the manuscript to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow and one of his advisers, John L'Heureux, told him it was publishable. That book and a second novel, "Carnival Wolves," came out as paperback originals, earning great reviews and small advances.
Rock met his wife, Ella Vining, in California and moved to Philadelphia with her while she attended medical school. He got a job temping for the University of Pennsylvania football coach and after his wife showed him an article about people who participate in drug trials for money, began to research another novel.
"I didn't do any drug trials, for various reasons," Rock said. "The vast majority of the trials I did were neuropsychiatric trials where I was (allegedly) providing a kind of base level of normalcy while undergoing a battery of tests. Sometimes this just involved questioning or riddles or games, but I spent a huge amount of time in MRIs."
Drug trials were intriguing, and that's where the money is, but Rock's wife wouldn't allow it. He came away with material for his third novel, "The Ambidextrist," whose main character wants to be the best drug trial subject he can be.
Research is serious business but also "a form of procrastination" for Rock, who started "The Bewildered" after seeing an article about children in the former Soviet Union being hired to steal copper wire. He strung plenty of wire fences in Montana and was shocked several times but was more interested in challenging himself in writing "The Bewildered" than in shocking himself for the experience.
It was shocking enough that Reed offered him tenure after five years. Rock taught at several other schools, including Penn, Yale, Deep Springs and San Francisco State, but doesn't have an MFA and knows from running faculty searches himself that there are hundreds of qualified candidates who do.
"Reed fancies a vision of itself as a place that would appreciate someone with an unconventional career path, or who had arrived with qualifications that are not exactly the expected ones," he said.
Jeff Baker
Original link
Sunday, July 02, 2006
JEFF BAKER
The Oregonian
Reed College exhales in early summer. The students are gone, taking their end-of-semester angst and all-nighters with them. There won't be much business at the espresso stand until the chamber music concerts and writing conferences get started.
The campus feels quiet and full of promise, like a library that's just been opened for the day. It's the kind of place where a writer can concentrate and find unexpected connections in his work, connections between electric shock and the need to feel alive, between the Burnside skate park and a PGE substation in Sellwood, between Yukio Mishima's novel "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea" and Playboy magazines from the bicentennial year of 1976.
"That one surprised me," Peter Rock said. "I had no idea it was there."
It's there, one of the many strange connections in Rock's novel "The Bewildered" (MacAdam/Cage, $13 paperback, 303 pages), the July selection of The Oregonian Book Club. Rock can explain it -- there was a 1976 movie version of "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace From the Sea," and a racy pictorial featuring stars Kris Kristofferson and Sarah Miles appeared in Playboy the same year -- but he swears he didn't plan it and has no deep reason behind it.
"I did not mean it to be a metaphorical book," said Rock, an associate professor of creative writing at Reed. "It was my aim to make it as physically grounded . . . as possible."
"The Bewildered" is grounded in Portland, but not the leafy, intellectual Portland around Reed College. Its settings are grittier: a trailer on a winding dirt road south of Johnson Creek, a hobo jungle in the woods above Forest Park, the "Shanghai tunnels" under Old Town. Rock researched it by riding TriMet -- he doesn't have a car -- and hanging around lower Burnside, where his three teenage characters skate and meet a strange woman who hires them to strip copper wire from telephone poles. One of them gets zapped and becomes forgetful and withdrawn. As his friends try to pull him back, they tap into a subculture that's way off the grid. What happens in the tunnels and on the utility poles is shocking, but Rock said it could happen the way he wrote it.
"I've had questions about whether it's a realistic book," he said. "I think it is, but I respect those who think otherwise."
There's no straight line dividing metaphor and reality in Rock's fiction and no clear path showing how he became, at age 38, a tenured professor at Reed and the author of five books. He's taken chances with his writing and made unusual choices that reflect a restless intelligence and eagerness to experiment.
Rock grew up in Salt Lake City, the son of an economics professor at the University of Utah. As a nonbeliever in a heavily religious community, he found himself on the outside looking in.
"Mormon girls frustrated me and drove me to writing," he said. "They're so attractive and smart and can be so willingly naive."
A year abroad in Australia jump-started Rock's "pretentious quest to be a writer" and taught him some of the discipline necessary to actually produce something. More discipline came at Deep Springs College, a small, all-male school in the California desert near Death Valley that is also a working cattle ranch. Students help set the curriculum and the combination of freedom, hard work and few distractions has developed several notable writers, including William T. Vollmann and Benjamin Kunkel.
After his two years were up, Rock transferred to Yale, "the place most unlike Deep Springs I could find." He graduated and spent two years on a ranch in Montana, working and writing novels that didn't work out. He spent another two years in Ithaca, N.Y., working as a security guard in an art museum, then went back to Utah and worked on what became his first novel, "This Is the Place."
Rock brought the manuscript to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow and one of his advisers, John L'Heureux, told him it was publishable. That book and a second novel, "Carnival Wolves," came out as paperback originals, earning great reviews and small advances.
Rock met his wife, Ella Vining, in California and moved to Philadelphia with her while she attended medical school. He got a job temping for the University of Pennsylvania football coach and after his wife showed him an article about people who participate in drug trials for money, began to research another novel.
"I didn't do any drug trials, for various reasons," Rock said. "The vast majority of the trials I did were neuropsychiatric trials where I was (allegedly) providing a kind of base level of normalcy while undergoing a battery of tests. Sometimes this just involved questioning or riddles or games, but I spent a huge amount of time in MRIs."
Drug trials were intriguing, and that's where the money is, but Rock's wife wouldn't allow it. He came away with material for his third novel, "The Ambidextrist," whose main character wants to be the best drug trial subject he can be.
Research is serious business but also "a form of procrastination" for Rock, who started "The Bewildered" after seeing an article about children in the former Soviet Union being hired to steal copper wire. He strung plenty of wire fences in Montana and was shocked several times but was more interested in challenging himself in writing "The Bewildered" than in shocking himself for the experience.
It was shocking enough that Reed offered him tenure after five years. Rock taught at several other schools, including Penn, Yale, Deep Springs and San Francisco State, but doesn't have an MFA and knows from running faculty searches himself that there are hundreds of qualified candidates who do.
"Reed fancies a vision of itself as a place that would appreciate someone with an unconventional career path, or who had arrived with qualifications that are not exactly the expected ones," he said.
Jeff Baker
Original link
posted by Russ Campbell at 5:56 AM
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