Interview with non-fiction writer Thomas Farber

Writer Thomas Farber is chatting with me today about his new creative nonfiction book, Reckonings.

Bio:
Thomas Farber has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction, the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and, three times, National Endowment fellowships for fiction & creative nonfiction. A Fulbright Scholar and Rockefeller Foundation Scholar at Bellagio, his books include Penultimates, Acting My Age, The End of My Wits, and The Beholder. Former Visiting Writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, he’s Senior Lecturer Emeritus, the University of California, Berkeley.

Welcome, Thomas. Please tell us about your current release.
At age eighty-one (!!), taking stock of our deeply unsettling political moment, in freewheeling “creative nonfiction” I’ve tried to appraise personal accountability, impending second childhoods, mortality, and the hunger for immortality. I weigh the functions of satire and the meaning of art as part of my efforts to illuminate, debunk, commiserate, and celebrate by rejoinder.

What inspired you to write this book?
Like others, I’m taking the measure of our democracy in crisis. In addition, at my age I’m thinking about the loss of friends and my own mortality, the role of the writer, and the fate of books.

What exciting project are you working on next?
I have notes toward a sequel of Reckonings. More about what it was all about, all for. About

those I’ve loved, cared for, miss greatly. About how beautiful the physical world is. About how lucky I’ve been to read and learn from the (far too) many books in my garage library.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?
In the turbulent 1960s, in my twenties, almost by chance I was invited to write a story for an underground paper. Soon I was writing more. Each week I’d stand on a corner selling copies of the latest issue, which often contained something of mine. An editor from NYC saw those pieces, invited me to do a book. All this seemed/was fortuitous: it took a while, and several more books, before I began to consider myself a writer.

Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
For many years I taught and worked as an editor or consultant on issues of social justice. Often very satisfying work. Fulfilling. A good, even beneficial, systole to the diastole of writing. But more than once I found myself turning down “opportunities” that would’ve taken me away from being the kind of writer I was becoming. I said “No thank you” to fulltime teaching or fulltime foundation positions, declined being a weekly columnist at a very good newspaper. Seemed my default setting was having enough time to write, an expensive habit, but my…vocation. One of my books, published back in 1988, was Compared to What? (W.W. Norton). It came out after my previous nonfiction, short story collections, and my first novel. Also after the death of a second parent as I turned forty. Was my way of taking stock of the métier I’d fallen into, then committed to. What it took, was taking, for me to be a writer. Whether or not to continue. Compared to What? might still be worth a look for those in or contemplating a writing life.

What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I don’t think I ever once thought about the book market when starting a new book. Just launched into what I wanted to explore, needed to try to say. Reckless? Perhaps, but otherwise I’d have found other things to do.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
I hope my creative nonfiction will please and instruct the reader…