Settright Road

by Jon Boilard

  So that part of the writing process is difficult for me. The journey can be scary and exhausting because you can learn things about yourself. Don’t get me wrong on this point; it’s a thrill to be able to do it, invigorating when it works the way it’s supposed to. When everything clicks just right, there’s nothing more exhilarating. And like any other addict, I simply have to go back for more. But the reality is sometimes I get stuck in a middle place, a holding cell, between worlds and I have to chase the demons back and there are some healthy ways that I do that and there are some other very unhealthy ones, too.

  During the day, when you are going about your normal activities and some aspect of a story comes into your head, do you need to stop and record a few thoughts, or do your ideas hang around for you to tackle later?

  They stay in my head, haunting me throughout the day. Typically my writing time is early in the morning, between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., so that’s when I put stuff down on paper. I don’t carry a notepad around or anything like that. But the ideas are constantly knocking around in my brain, distracting me, keeping me off balance.

  Between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.? That’s an early start…

  It is early, and to be honest, 4 a.m. comes a lot faster now than it did even ten years ago. By 8 a.m. I’ve got my daughters dropped at school and I’m on the M train heading downtown to the office for the day job. I usually do my best stuff early in the morning, when I first wake up. Sometimes I’ve got some big idea that I need to get down on paper and sometimes it’s just a matter of reviewing the previous day’s work. The house is really quiet and still at that hour, just me and the dog are up, and I need that kind of stillness when I write. I like to crack a window open so I can hear the foghorn in the San Francisco Bay.

  It’s a very blue-collar approach to craft, rising early to get after it, which makes sense, I suppose, considering my background, my work-a-day New England roots. To me the important thing is to punch in mentally and physically, to get my ass in the chair and shut everything else out and be ready when the muse stops by for a visit. She can be very elusive, so I want to be prepared or at least available.

  What about location? Where do you write, or does it even matter?

  It matters a lot. Location is pretty important to me. I am such a damn robot, a creature of habit. If you take me out of my routine, I can get rattled. There is a small room attached to the garage. That’s typically where I bang out my stories, where I do the bulk of the really tangible, hands-on writing.

  But having said that, there is a part of my process that is at least equally important and that I do anywhere and everywhere. Once I get an idea for a story or a character stuck in my head, I noodle on it constantly. This drives the people in my life crazy because I can become very distant and distracted in all other aspects of the day-to-day. So a lot of the pre-work is done inside my head while I’m driving on 101 or running the dog on the beach or mixing a drink or whatever. My older daughter likes to tease me that I’m not very observant, which is funny, and I have explained to her that the stuff I observe or pay attention to is just different than what normal people would care about or notice.

  Not to get too hung up on process, but how do you write short stories? Longhand?

  For years I was a pen-and-notepad guy, a longhand guy. I’m such a terrible typist (I still hunt and peck) that it just didn’t make sense to get in front of a keyboard until the very last minute. But as I’ve grown as a writer, it has become clear to me that I do much of the writing inside my head anyhow.

  When I finally do sit down at my laptop now, it’s really to spit a short story out, to record it. It’s already mostly developed and just needs some tinkering here and there, and that process plays well with my two-finger typing because it’s slow going and allows me to ponder every word. The process is a bit different for longer pieces, but that holds true for the short stories.

  How do your memories of growing up in small New England towns feed your creative process?

  We moved to South Deerfield, Massachusetts, when I was twelve years old. During my years at Frontier Regional High School, I worked on farms picking tobacco and cucumbers and at the gas station in the center of town. I was a full-fledged townie boy, and I got to know a lot of people. One of the big comments I heard from some of these folks back home, when they read my first novel, was, “It’s like you grew up in a different town than I grew up in. I don’t know that part of town you’re talking about.”

  I recognize the apparent disconnect there. Most of my stories reveal these rough and desperate little river towns, but a lot of my memories from childhood are actually that sort of Norman Rockwell feel. I mean, I loved growing up there. But because of how my first twelve years were spent, there was a fair amount of abuse and neglect, so I understood—I could see—that there were other things going on, behind closed doors. I was wary. My brother and I, we could pick up on signals that most kids our age wouldn’t probably pick up on.

  In my work, I do tend to contrast the natural beauty of rural New England with the messy lives of my characters.

  I remember a reviewer referred to your first novel as a “poison pen letter to your former home.” How do you react to that?

  That’s bullshit. I go back home whenever I can. I take my wife and daughters in the summer and we swim in the Deerfield River. I have stayed close with many of my friends who are still back home. Even though I really only lived in South Deerfield for six years, I still think of it as my hometown and feel a strong connection there. My brother is buried back there, too, so of course so we visit his grave and I tell the girls stories about some of the less insane shit we used to do when we were just a little bit older than they are. The older my daughters get, the better the stories get.

  Talk about being a townie.

  We lived in town, worked in town, raised a fair amount of hell in town. After school and on weekends, I worked at the service station pumping gas and learning cars. My buddy worked across the street, stocking shelves at the pharmacy, and we had another good friend, a few years older, who worked at the package store. So we pretty much had the center of town covered. Our friend at the packy would sell us beer out the back door so we could drive around and drink. You had to have a car. As soon as you got your license, you had to be on the road.

  During the summer, we worked on the farms, picking every kind of vegetable you can think of and some tobacco, throwing bales of hay. It was physical work, hard work. There were other kids whose families were maybe better off financially and they didn’t have to work, and I’m sure we thought it sucked at the time, having to get up early and bust our asses all day out in the fields. But looking back, I think we learned a lot about life and responsibility out there.

  What was your first car?

  It was a 1973 Chevy Nova. It wasn’t mint condition, but it was all I could afford and it looked pretty cool. I bought it about six months before I was to get my license and threw a coat of paint on it, got some nice chrome rims. The previous owner had been in an accident and had to replace the fender so it said 307, which told you how big the engine was. So a 307 is a V8, which is pretty fast. But that replacement fender was a lie, because my car only had a straight-six 250, not much get-up-and-go at all. I remember my boss at the service station saying that it was the perfect car for me because he knew I was driving around drinking, trying to show off for pretty girls. I guess he figured a slow car would keep me out of trouble.

  I sold the Nova to some young kid in town when I graduated—I was selling all my stuff to raise money for my trip west. I guess he only drove it for a few months before it shit the bed and ended up at the junkyard, which I hate to admit made me happy. I didn’t want some kid driving around town in my car.

  Why did you move to San Francisco?

  A little while back, I watched an old video where Frank O’Connor talked about his relationship with his hometown of Cork. The way he described it was that the maturity level of Cork for him was eighteen years old. In other words,
once he turned eighteen, there wasn’t anything left for him there. He stayed away for a long while and even spent a bunch of time here in the States and caught a certain amount of shit for abandoning Cork. As he got older and more mature, he sort of drifted back to his hometown and embraced it, and I think it embraced him too.

  When I graduated high school, I could’ve stayed on at the service station where I’d been working or maybe gone to a local college. I was pretty decent at school but never a great student. And I wasn’t ever any good at wrenching on cars or pounding nails or farming—those are the guys who have been successful. Lots of my friends went into long careers in law enforcement. That just wasn’t me, so I headed west when my dad and stepmom offered to help me out. During the college years, I got part-time gigs in a warehouse or waiting tables, but I’d go back home every summer to work construction and make some real money. When I finished up at State, I stuck around because by then I had made some friends and we were still young and dumb for the most part, hitting the bars and having a hell of a time.

  Favorite bars in San Francisco?

  Back then it was Holy Cow, the Boathouse, and Bottom of the Hill—or anywhere there was a good band playing and some pretty girls. Truth be told, I don’t get after it much anymore, but nowadays if I am able to sneak out for a few pops I will go to Gino & Carlo’s, Maggie McGarry’s, or the Philosopher’s Club. The key for me is to have a great bartender, somebody who can really shoot the shit. Maggie’s has karaoke on Wednesday nights. I’m no performer, but I get a kick out of the people with balls enough to do it.

  Where do you get your ideas?

  I’ll be sitting in a bar and maybe the guy next to me says something that kick-starts me for whatever reason. I’ll sort of study him perched there on his stool and build some context around whatever he just said. Maybe I’ll hear people talking on Muni. There are some fascinating people out there. Ideas are everywhere. Snippets of conversation like that, something in the newspaper, a memory from my own life.

  Finding ideas isn’t the challenge. The challenge for me is figuring out which ideas are worth developing right now, which should be put on the back burner, which should be tossed aside forever. And, of course, how to marry an idea with the other elements of fiction.

  What advice do you give to young writers out there?

  I used to write speeches for a guy who started a mutual fund company back in the 1950s. Today it’s one of the top names, among the biggest and most respected players out there. Incredibly successful. That was one of my first non-blue-collar jobs, and even though I haven’t done any work for the man for a several years, I still have a lot of respect for him and what he was able to build from scratch.

  I remember a little plaque on his desk with a quote from Calvin Coolidge: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

  My old boss meant to apply the lesson to a life in business, but it really resonated with me as far as working on my craft. Ironically, it was this exact sentiment that inspired me to quit that company after twelve years and go off and try to finish my first novel. Plus I got into a major pissing contest with another guy at the company who was way more ambitious than I was, but that’s a story for another day.

  Persistence and determination. That’s great advice for young writers.

  What’s next? What are you working on now?

  I’m working on a new novel that right now I’m calling Among the Broken Pines. I’d say I’m probably about a quarter of the way through it as of today, based on word count alone. It’s dark and gritty and in line with what I’ve seen referred to as my tendency for New England Gothic. The opening scene is a kid throwing a child molester off the roof of his house. I’m also pulling together another collection of short stories, but these ones take place in San Francisco and abroad, so that’ll be a little bit of a different deal. There’s always something cooking.

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  On the Title

  We actually lived on Settright Road. That was the first place we lived when we moved to South Deerfield to stay with my uncle and his girlfriend at the time. And my brother and I would cross the street in the morning—we’d get up early, before anybody else—and the cows were there, and the cornfields went on forever, and the fresh air was kind of like, “Everything’s going to be all right.” There were some more twists and turns, of course, but that was really the start of something for me and Carl. So the name has stayed with me, and I eventually figured it might make a great title for a short story and maybe even a book or a movie or a television series. One of the stories in the collection is called “Settright Road”; it’s about a kid dealing with the death of his brother, told in the second person.

  On the Characters

  The characters in these stories have been haunting me for years. That’s why I wrote them down.

  For a handful of years, my uncle taught poetry and short story writing at a jail in Massachusetts. His students were typically guys who were going to be in the system a while because they had done some pretty horrible shit. Morally questionable shit. He used to share my short stories with his class, as well as my novels, and my work really resonated with them. They’d tell my uncle during workshops that they recognized themselves in my characters, they saw their own stories in my stories, and they appreciated that I didn’t judge them. And they wanted to know how I knew so much about what they called “the life.”

  I have always figured I am maybe one or two bad decisions away from being in their shoes. If you look at how these guys were raised up compared to how I was raised up—pretty similar childhood experiences. Abuse of all stripes, neglect, fucked-up adults showing you all the wrong things. But then I got lucky and some good folks stepped in at critical points in my life and got me going in the right direction. Not everybody gets so lucky.

  I do understand how a guy can get off track and desperate and maybe even hopeless and end up in jail or worse. I think his story is worth telling, I think we can learn from it. Don’t get me wrong on this point: having a shitty childhood doesn’t give a person license to go around doing dirt on others. But I feel a certain amount of empathy there.

  The characters I created for Settright Road are pure fiction, but I did sometimes pluck traits from people I know or have met or bumped into. Rather than create the characters in order to serve the stories I was trying to tell, the characters came first and then I put them in situations and developed stories to serve as their platforms. The characters always showed up first.

  Just to be clear, because I get this question a lot, these short stories are not true stories or necessarily based on things I did or experienced. For example, I’ve never choked a guy out like Sean in “Storm Chaser.” I’ve never busted a guy in the head with a pipe like Jabber in “Watch Out, Townie Boy.” But I like to say there is an emotional truth in each one of the pieces.

  On the Stories

  Most of the stories in this collection are pretty short, usually around five hundred to fifteen hundred words, except for “Sometimes There’s God,” which is the last story in the book and just about ten thousand words. The shortest one in Settright Road is “I Won’t Wear Black,” weighing in at less than three hundred words. I don’t sit down to write a story with a word count in mind; I simply write it until it’s finished.

  Trying to figure out what stories fit together for this collection was another challenge for me, because I wrote each piece as a standalone, not thinking about a book. I remember hearing a writer I admire say that, for her, putting together a short story collection was like weaving a quilt, where you have a patchwork of smaller pieces coming together to form a larger, layered one. You can’t just slap them all together and start stitching. With Settright Road, the editor and I put lot of thought into what story shoul
d go where as far as pacing and shifting tones.

  On Making Time

  It is rare that I have a full day I can dedicate to writing fiction, since I’ve got a real job as well as a young family. So by necessity I’m a short-burst guy, a sprinter for sure. The key for me is that I sprint every day. I worked on my first novel full time for eighteen months, but that was definitely the exception and not the rule. I was in between corporate gigs back then and had some money saved up, so figured what the hell. And it was cool being able to do that, write fiction full time. I treated it like a nine-to-five job, packed a lunch pail, mostly set up shop at a noisy little café down by Ocean Beach. It was great.

  But the demands of raising a family in San Francisco require a steady paycheck, that’s just how it is, and so until I start selling a crapload more books I’ll continue to do the corporate writing thing, which I’ve been doing for almost twenty years. Good, honest work. For Settright Road, I worked on it in short bursts between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. every day, just as I did for my second novel. If given a choice, however, I’d sit around and make shit up all day long.

  READ ON

  BONUS STORY: A MAN UNFINISHED

  First appearance in The Sun Magazine under the title

  “Green Street Incident”

  I open my eyes and Carol Doda tells me to fuck off. Then it must be a couple hours later and I’m upstairs and it’s dark and I’m thinking of quicker ways to kill myself. A far-off foghorn is warning ships away from the cliffs. It’s a sad sound, long and low. I can taste on my teeth what I drank all night. Nancy Martini is asleep on her back on the mattress next to me. She’s snoring and her store-bought tits rise and fall and her breath fills the room. It’s not a bad smell; she smokes clove cigarettes, chews cinnamon-flavor gum. Her face is still pretty. The window that overlooks Green Street is open and there’s a chill and I put the white sheet over her white legs; I want to protect her, keep her safe and warm. She moves a little and turns onto her side, facing away. I close my eyes.