Simon Van Booy: The Writer’s Art and Practice

Simon Van Booy writes fiction and philosophy, beautifully. Commentators call his prose elegiac, spare, and luminous. Many delight in his gift for surprises. Van Booy’s short-story collection, Love Begins in Winter, won the Frank O’Connor Award in 2009. He has 16 books in print, including a new novel, Night Came With Many Stars, released this June.

Twice during April 2021, Van Booy and I met in our homes via Zoom —he in Brooklyn, I in St. Louis. The author spoke from an ivory-walled room decorated with simple line drawings, a scroll of calligraphy, and a geometric Lucite lamp. The dark bookcase sagging with volumes, perfunctory for writers in virtual meetings these days, was nowhere in sight. Van Booy’s room was as clean and uncluttered as his writing.

When he spoke, Van Booy leaned forward, as if trying to get closer, even to someone separated by 1000 miles. As it turned out, closeness and connection—to others and to ourselves—were key elements in our talk about the art of writing.

Dana Delibovi:  You grew up in the UK. What was your childhood like?

Simon Van Booy:  Unconventional—because of my mother. She came from Jamaica, and moved to rural Ireland when she was about ten years old. Her mother was escaping an abusive husband, I think.

My mother came to the United Kingdom at age 15 or 16. She met my father there a few years later, but she’d already had a child before she met him, which was very hard for her, given the merciless social climate then, and her being considered a ‘foreigner.’ Growing up, I thought my mother’s behavior was bizarre. I couldn’t understand that this was how she had adapted to survive.

My parents worked very, very hard in their lives and did well, considering the dire conditions they had been born into. My mother ended up working as an executive with Fendi, and my father eventually earned his doctorate. They had the wisdom to understand that education is one of the only routes out of poverty. One of the reasons they worked so much was to send my brother and myself to private schools. We weren’t really accepted at these schools, because we didn’t conform to the sort of British-ness you find there. Despite the intolerance of some, we always found there were loving, warm people too. So things balanced out, but in many ways it was a childhood in exile, as I was never allowed to be British in the way I wanted to be. Things have changed a bit now though, and I feel more at home there, meaning, I can be myself without fear of being judged. Also, as you get older, I think you care less what people think—if you’re lucky.

Dana Delibovi:  Did this sense of exile shape you as a writer?

Simon Van Booy:  I think so. I was always in the “suburbs” of what was happening—observing. Plus, not fitting in meant I didn’t have strong roots. I was free. I could go anywhere and be anything, because I wasn’t anyone.

I left years ago, and haven’t gone back to live. I’m happier because I left. Different experiences in a different environment—that’s bound to open you as a writer.

Where I grew up, I felt I couldn’t get ahead because I was an outsider. Moving to America lifted my confidence. America always seemed great to me. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Sylvester Stallone from the film, Cobra. I even had the mirrored aviator sunglasses. I looked ridiculous, but to my ten-year-old self I was the business. My parents let me watch any film I wanted. They had seen real violence in their lives, and so TV was just entertainment and harmless.

Dana Delibovi:  I read that you first came to the United States to play American football. True?

Simon Van Booy:  That’s true. As a teenager, I was playing semi-professional rugby in Britain. I also lived near Upper Heyford US Air Force base. At 15, I got a job there cleaning pots in the kitchens. The guys I worked with were big brothers to me. I finally felt accepted. Americans are really friendly and open to diversity. In the base’s gym, some guys would play heavy metal, and then somebody would change it to hip-hop, yet it all worked out. I liked that unspoken harmony.

About the time I worked for the U.S. Air Force I started playing American football. I wanted more than anything then to move to America and find some kind of job connected to the NFL. I had grown up reading horror and fantasy books, but now I was reading YA novels about American football players. Anyway I found a company that placed athletes in US schools. I scraped through the SAT with a VERY low score, and got scholarship offers from colleges to play football. I accepted one in Kentucky, at Campbellsville University, which covered everything except my plane ticket. I had visited the U.S. once before, at 16, and was shocked by the poverty, racism, alcoholism, homelessness that I hadn’t seen at the U.S. Air Base. I was also surprised at how eccentric it was. People [in San Francisco, L.A.] would just come up and just start talking to you about aliens or Jesus, or anything on their minds. I was intimidated at first, but later on I started to like the openness, because there was no physical threat. Where I live in New York City, it’s still like that. Passing strangers will just stop walking and join your conversation if they feel they know something helpful.

Dana Delibovi:  When did you start writing? Who helped you along the way?

Simon Van Booy:  I wrote from childhood on. As a child, I loved to write stories. I stopped writing after a middle-school English teacher said my work was a bit boring. She didn’t like me at all and I still don’t know why. Then one teacher in private school gave me enormous support, Mr. Howard. He literally told me, you will become a writer, I’m sure of it. After coming to the US, my mentor was the writer Barbara Wersba, who died in 2018.

When I was trying to sell my first book, and getting 30 or 40 rejections from agents, I wrote to Jonathan Rabinowitz, the brilliant publisher at Turtle Point Press. I told him I liked one of his books, and we ended up having lunch. I sent him a manuscript—the first draft what eventually became my book, Everything Beautiful Began After. He passed on it. Tragic, I thought, because this publisher and I are match made in heaven. So I started sending him a short story once a month. Printed it out. Decorated the pages. Even included objects that the characters might have owned, like French candy bars for a French character. After seven months, he said, “Okay, let’s do a book of short stories. Just stop sending boxes.”

That’s how my first collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love, was published. To organize my book tout, I hired a woman who sold me three pairs of shoes I didn’t like. I thought she could sell anything. I got in my Volkswagen and drove across America, to read at bookstores in 18 cities. I had an average of two people at every reading. But I always went out afterward with the bookstore staff for coffee or nachos or something. In the next few months, whenever somebody came into their stores wondering what to read, the staff would give them my book, because we had a relationship. Hanging out with the bookstore workers turned out to be more beneficial than reading to 20 people and I made some lifelong friends.

Dana Delibovi:  You often write about people who face difficult losses, and then, improbably, find contentment again. Have you had that experience?

Simon Van Booy:  It’s an interesting question. Weirdly, I wrote about loss before I ever lost anything. I hadn’t even lost my keys, but I was writing about loss. I seemed to realize early on the meaning of a theme in Eastern philosophy: everything we have will be taken away from us, in life or finally, when we die. At first, this idea paralyzed me with fear. But later, it led me to think about what’s worth living for.

Dana Delibovi:  Are those thoughts your sole guidepost as a writer? Or do you, and do all writers, also have to think about what the market rewards?

Simon Van Booy:  That question assumes we can choose to write what agents and publishers want. The fact is, I can’t choose what to write, anymore than I can choose what to dream at night. When I write, I can’t interfere too much with what I call the “third voice.” The philosopher Bertrand Russell might call the third voice knowledge by acquaintance—direct, immediate, experiential understanding. It’s the authentic voice, my voice, and not the voice of Simon, that insecure slightly annoying British person who writes books. The third voice is what you hear, say, if your car goes off a bridge and you’re underwater. When you contemplate this, you imagine you’ll panic. But that’s not the case. There is a weird, calm voice that says, “try the window.” That third voice has always been strong for me. It’s gotten me out of a lot of sticky situations, earthquake, being held at gunpoint, etc…

I think the third voice guides me toward what I write, toward the expression of authentic experience. I sense poetry in the Long Island suburbs, at Home Depot, at the Olive Garden. The philosopher Jacques Derrida—who once gave an interview leaning on packs of his granddaughter’s diapers—found linguistic mystery everywhere, even in the ordinary things considered unworthy of literature. Likewise, my third voice leads me to poetry and stories in places which may lie in the opposite direction from what the literary establishment deems worthy. I’d rather give up writing than be an author who focuses on what’s trending at the time.

Dana Delibovi:  Poetry is an intriguing term, because your writing style is poetic. It’s uncluttered. No word is wasted. Your short paragraphs read like stanzas in a poem. How did you achieve this style?

Simon Van Booy:  I started out overwriting. I had a lot of ornamentation in my early work. It was like Vivaldi on the page. There are lines in The Secret Lives of People in Love that I would certainly cut back now.

It took me a long time to find my style. I didn’t find it, really, until I read Anne Michaels’ novel, Fugitive Pieces. When you love anything, you imitate it. So, I imitated Michaels’ poetic style a bit, and developed my own style from hers. Like Michaels, I stress the feeling and sound of language, just as much, if not more, than plot.

Dana Delibovi:  I think that style is a pleasure to read. But isn’t it an unusual choice?

Simon Van Booy:  It’s not fashionable in America to write this way. We are still influenced by modernists, like Hemingway, who wrote in the vernacular. The vernacular allows the reader to connect easily with the characters. But I don’t write in the vernacular, because I want to create an experience different from just talking to somebody. I prefer a more crafted language. That is my style. My work is quite popular in China. These craft elements may be well suited to Chinese culture, with its roots in philosophies like Taoism.

Dana Delibovi:  There is so much compassion and warmth in your work, often transcending barriers like age and race. What leads you there, especially now, when there is so much cynicism?

Simon Van Booy:  When you’re intelligent, cynicism is the default position. But it’s toxic. To be cynical, you have to have a set, negative opinion of the world, which is a form of attachment. We know from Buddhist wisdom that all attachment causes unhappiness. Opinions are little prisons.

The ways of the world, the cancer and war and suffering, frustrate me chronically. But I feel my response can’t be cynical. I have to try to “make a heaven of hell,” as Blake implied in ‘The Clod and the Pebble.’ I’m one of the few contemporary writers whose books have happy endings, but with an understanding that, since life is naturally pretty bad, my characters have to struggle to make life worth living.

Dana Delibovi:  Finding the good within life’s suffering is an ancient philosophical idea. But philosophy and literature today are far apart, although this was not always true. Is the rift worth healing?

Simon Van Booy:  Look at the Iliad and the Odyssey. Philosophy? Or literature? They are both. Same with Candide by Voltaire and Camus’ The Stranger. Or most recently, Chigozie Obioma’s, An Orchestra of Minorities.

Secularization in the West has made it seem as though philosophy, religion, and literature can’t be one in the same. But it’s my view that philosophy and literature will come back together as we continue to embrace Eastern philosophies like Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. It’s already happening. Mindfulness, for instance, is a word in common use.

Philosophy might benefit from a creative approach, rather than dogmatism. A philosopher who exemplifies my view is Alain de Botton. His books, like Status Anxiety and How Proust Can Change Your Life, reach a lot of people. Still, some academic philosophers won’t consider him a real philosopher, despite his accessibility, friendliness, and scholarhship.

Dana Delibovi:  Is that because he’s trying to help people, rather than prove a point?

Simon Van Booy:  Well, when I try to make a point, all these other points come speeding towards me. I realize I can’t possibly believe fully in anything, that every single thing is interwoven with everything else. We try to make a point, but the opposite seems true as well. Yet here we are, with our Western ways, hammering away with blunt tools.

Lao Tzu writes that the Tao does not recognize beauty, because, if there is beauty, there must be ugliness. Philosophy need not choose between opposites. That’s had an enormous impact on me. To be open is enough.

Dana Delibovi:  Is that a way of thinking you hope to inspire in your readers?

Simon Van Booy:  I want to inspire a sense of closeness. I want people who read my books to feel close to the story and closer to their own lives than they’ve ever felt. I would be happy if one person reads my writing, realizes she lives in an emotional prison without guards or locks, and then walks out to be free. This does relate to Eastern philosophy: when we go deep into the self, we realize that the opposite is also true—there is no self to be found. Freedom is freedom from self. I want to connect with my readers in this deeply spiritual way.

Van Booy and I talked at length about the writing process. In addition to his writing career, Van Booy is an editor and teacher, giving him ample opportunity to see where process helps writers, or hurts them.

Van Booy is keen on the practices of editing and revision. He was taught to edit by his mentor, Barbara Wersba. Wersba was taught by her mentor, Carson McCullers, who most assuredly did not mince words, in person or with the editor’s pen. Van Booy also knows how to balance the demands of writing and family. He doesn’t let go of either, even if he stumbles now and then. His daily life and routines are instructive for all of us who, too often, drop our pens for the people we love.

Dana Delibovi:  Where do you usually write? With what tools?

Simon Van Booy:  I’ve never had the perfect writing space. It’s either too bright or too hot. Somebody is always running a leaf blower. But I need it silent, dark, and cold. I use earmuffs from a gun-range. I wear sunglasses that fit over my glasses, the type old people drive with in Florida. I close the blinds. I crank the AC.

My writing desk belonged to Barbara Wersba, who gave it to me when she entered a nursing home. I write on a laptop. I look at the keys instead of the screen, because the screen distracts me from what’s coming next. No family pictures either—I have to disassociate from my own life to enter my characters’ lives.

I have to get in the mood to write. I might listen to music, or go for a walk. The big enemy is the smartphone. I can’t have it anywhere near me if I’m going to write.

Dana Delibovi:  Do you write on a schedule?

Simon Van Booy:  I have a family, so I gear my writing schedule around my wife and daughter. I’ll describe my schedule pre-COVID, since the pandemic messed things up temporarily. I get up in the morning, make breakfast for my daughter, then drive her to school. I head home and at 7:30AM go back to bed for half an hour. By then, my wife gets up and heads to an office. This gives me a few hours to write, until about 1:00 PM. I do that three or four days a week; one day, I teach. If I get ten undisturbed hours a week, that’s good.

I don’t think my work is diminished because I have a family. I maybe might have written more if I had stayed alone, but I fear those books would have been monotone in style and theme. Sometimes I have to get away for a week or two, and my wife tells me to rent a car and go away to write. I’ll go to a Motel 6 in Alabama and just write, write, write.

Dana Delibovi:  The time you have seems so short. Is it enough?

Simon Van Booy:  I can only write well three or four hours a day. More than three or four hours and I’m impersonating myself, exhausting myself. If I want the emotional energy to write tomorrow, I have to quit after four hours today.

Then, I turn to what rejuvenates me: reading a book that I’m absolutely in love with. As a writer, you have to be reading. People say you should write every day. I don’t think that’s true. But I do think writers always have to be reading a book they love to have the energy to write.

Dana Delibovi:  What’s your balance between writing and revising?

Simon Van Booy:  There are two Simons. Simon 1 writes new material. He is unconscious. The words fly onto the page. Then, Simon 2 goes into editing mode, revising what Simon 1 has given him. Simon 2 has choices to make, based on what Simon 1 has given him to work with.

When I start a new novel, I’ll write four or five pages on day one. The next day, I’ll edit those pages, and move on. I keep going and going like this: at page 50, I’ll go back to page 45, revise those last five pages and then work forward again. Eventually, I have a first draft of the entire book. Then I go back to the beginning and start again—and again. I edit the book through three or four drafts, going back to the beginning every time, before I send it to my agent or editor. The whole process takes about a year. I can work on two different books at the same time if they’re in different genres.

Dana Delibovi:  Is your process different with short stories?

Simon Van Booy:  Different and more satisfying. Revising a short story is wonderful. You have the six or seven pages on your desk. You can look at them all, see and manage the whole structure. Short stories are difficult to write when I’m around people. They are so mood-based, so tonal, that I need to be alone.

Dana Delibovi:  Do you censor yourself when you’re writing?

Van Booy:  No. Once you start to censor yourself, you’re killing your imagination. Imagination has to run free. Anyone who feels judged can’t write freely. I don’t think there’s such a thing as morality or immorality in fiction. There’s only good and bad writing.

Dana Delibovi:  How do you react when your editor suggests revisions?

Simon Van Booy:  Well, I’m an editor myself. When I edit other people’s books, they are usually very thankful. Sometimes, though, I edit for people who won’t listen. They keep the book as is. Then they wonder why it doesn’t work. This is because they have anxiety about finishing the book, or about being successful. So I try to be gentle and just help them in the way I can. Personally, I listen to my editor (Joshua Bodwell) because we work well together. He’s the best editor I’ve ever had. An editor can help to give the reader a worthwhile experience. After all, it’s about the reader’s experience, not about me. Though if you have the wrong editor, you’ll know it. That person might be a good editor for someone else, just not you.

Dana Delibovi:  One of the things I like about your fiction are all the surprising images. A victim’s shoe at an accident scene. Interns at a business melting snow off a skylight with hairdryers. Do you keep a journal where you collect those things?

Simon Van Booy:  I do write things down, although not as much these days. I remember details well. Hairdryer-on-the-skylight to melt snow—I went into a shop in Paris and people were actually doing that. I’ve been at a few accident scenes in my life, and I’ve been struck by the random things, the McDonald’s shake sitting in the road. The remnants of an accident are like memoires, spilled out and broken into pieces.

Dana Delibovi:  Do you have any long-range goals as a writer?

Simon Van Booy:   I’m hoping to publish 20 books by the time I’m 50, in four years time. I find comfort in certain kinds of numbers. I’d like to be fluent in Chinese and translate Chinese writers. And of course I want to keep writing and helping new writers as a private editor. I would love to start a studio and make children’s television programs based on really good books, or run an imprint at a publishing house. ‘The Readiness is all.’

Dana Delibovi:  Any special craft tips for new writers?

Simon Van Booy:  Two things. First, cut backstory. Readers want action, and once they’ve been brought into the action, they want emotion. History is best shown, not told. Don’t tell us about the old man’s marriage, how he lost his wife. Let the old man pull a black and white photograph of a woman from his jacket. Let him put his finger to the photograph, and touch the woman’s lips, her eyes, her hair. What we need to know everything through his actions.

Second. Get a first draft. It will be rubbish. It will go against my first tip and contain too much backstory. The second draft is where the magic happens.

Dana Delibovi:  So many fledgling writers hope for a career like yours. What would you like them to know?

Simon Van Booy:  Know that getting published doesn’t make you a writer. What makes you a writer is working on your craft, day in and day out, with no thought of reward, no thought of the self. The will to write makes you a writer, not awards or publications. The greatest writers in history were most likely never published.

The better you are, the harder it is to find a publisher. If you’re good, then you are original, but originality is not celebrated in the marketplace. Andy Warhol made a joke about this. His art showed that we don’t celebrate what’s original, only what can be reproduced in a cycle of mass consumerism. When something is original, it’s sticky and weird. People don’t “get it.” So the more talented you are, the harder it is to get published. Just keep going. You are not alone. There are some brilliant editors out there and brilliant publishing houses pushing new, original work. So approach only the editors (and houses) whose books and projects you love. Don’t write to people randomly.

There is not a lot of satisfaction in being published or winning a prize. Satisfaction comes when you rewrite a sentence, and it’s finally good. It comes when you’re at your desk, trying to find words for the feelings of someone who’s lost a child, and you manage somehow to do it. That’s what counts as a writer. Everything else is just a kind of vanity we use to make ourselves less afraid of dying.

 

Author:

Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her work has recently appeared in After the Art, Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, The Confluence, Ezra Translations, Failed Haiku, Noon, and Zingara Poetry Review. Delibovi is consulting poetry editor at Witty Partition, and a first-year MFA student at Rainier Writing Workshop. In 2020, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  For more information visit Delibovi’s website.

 

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