New interview with author Clifford Garstang

I’d like to welcome Clifford Garstang back to Reviews and Interviews. Today we’re chatting about his new work of literary fiction, Oliver’s Travels.

Bio:
Clifford Garstang is a former international lawyer and prize-winning author of a novel, The Shaman of Turtle Valley, and three story collections, In an Uncharted Country, What the Zhang Boys Know, and House of the Ancients and Other Stories, as well as the editor of the anthology series, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet. With degrees from Northwestern University, Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Garstang was an international lawyer in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Singapore and a legal reform consultant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. His new novel, Oliver’s Travels, will be published in May 2021 by Regal House Publishing.

Welcome back to Reviews and Interviews, Clifford. Please tell us about your newest release.
Oliver’s Travels is the story of a recent college graduate and student of philosophy who is obsessed with truth and the source of knowledge. Ollie questions the validity of everything he hears from his parents, his girlfriend, and even the voices inside his head. In pursuit of life’s deeper meaning, he invents an alter ego, Oliver, who lives the adventurous and exotic existence Ollie cannot. But Ollie has another problem—a repressed memory that haunts him. Something involving his Uncle Scotty happened when he was young that threatens to derail his life and his relationships. But the memory is a blur. And what he thinks he does remember he knows is unreliable. The uncertainty is paralyzing. What is the truth? What has his subconscious fabricated? When he learns that his uncle, long-presumed dead, is alive and well, Ollie realizes that to move on with his life he must confront him. Determined to find Scotty and solve the mystery, the trail takes him around the globe. First stop, Singapore! Oliver’s Travels is a coming-of-age story that explores enduring questions: What do we know? How do we know it?

What inspired you to write this book?
Since my first venture abroad as a young man (I was a Peace Corps Volunteer), I’ve felt like a global citizen. Many Americans don’t have the opportunity or the will to experience other cultures and languages in depth, and I think that’s a shame. Travel really does open your eyes in so many ways, and living in another country, which I’ve been lucky enough to do a few times, is even better, as it allows you to find a deeper understanding of a place and the people who live there. In my previous work I’ve touched on this idea and have included multicultural themes, but with this book I’m taking a more direct approach. The main character is advised by two mentors that he needs to see the world to better understand himself, and he takes that advice to heart, spending the better part of a year on the road.

Excerpt from Oliver’s Travels:
I should have gone west, like the man said. After graduation, I should have thrown my shit into the back of my ancient Impala—my sister’s cast-off when she had twins and upgraded to a kid-friendly Subaru—and headed west. And by west I don’t mean Terre Haute, or any of the other small cities within spitting distance of Cambridge, Indiana, my tiny college town. I mean California. I mean getting onto I-74, hooking up with I-80, and coasting for a couple thousand miles until I hit the Pacific. Once I got there, I’d have found work in San Francisco or L.A., or maybe I’d have kept going, explored Micronesia, Japan, Southeast Asia, India.

“Travel,” my favorite teacher, Professor Russell, said to me more than once, “is the key to the locked door of consciousness.” Travel. That’s what I should have done.

Instead, I’ve come home to the single-story brick ranch in Indianapolis where I grew up, where my divorced father lives with my wounded-warrior older brother.

Dad starts in on me before I’ve had a chance to unload the car.

“Ollie, is that a tattoo?” he asks from the front stoop, pointing at the tribal design on my bicep, a recent acquisition meant to demonstrate my independence. (No, the irony wasn’t lost on me.) He shakes his head. “You kids with your tattoos and pierced whatevers.”

For the record, I do not have any pierced whatevers.

He leaves me alone while I move into my old room, then lets me have it, not for the first time:

“Why didn’t you major in engineering or some useful subject that would get you a real job.”

Dad, who never went to college, is a salesman—widgets or automotive parts or something.

“Philosophy is useful,” I say, probably without much conviction. I’d started out in pre-med, but that didn’t last long. “I learned how to think. There’s no skill more valuable than thinking.”

My father snorts and shakes his head again. But that’s not the end of his complaints: my hair (too long); my grades (dismal); my job prospects (nil); my mother (a bitch).

I’ve been home five minutes and already I want to leave. What am I doing here?

What’s the next writing project?
For some time, while my last three books have been in production, I’ve been working on a novel that is a departure for me. It’s a blended contemporary and historical novel set in Asia with a female protagonist. It’s been fun because it has required a lot of research, especially in the historical portions of the book. For the most part, the characters are in Singapore, a city I know well from having lived and worked there for nearly ten years. I have to say, though, although the reader will get a sense of the city, it primarily serves as a stand-in for many other world cities.

What is your biggest challenge when writing a new book? (or the biggest challenge with this book)
The biggest challenge is condensing the lives of the characters into an interesting story. Books should let their characters find the plot, and not the other way around, so it takes a fair amount of work to follow the characters around until they stumble onto a novel-worthy plot. That was honestly not so much of a problem in Oliver’s Travels as it was in my first novel and the one I’m working on now. Ollie, the main character, wants to find the answer to a specific question, and his pursuit of that answer is what creates the momentum for the story.

If your novels require research – please talk about the process. Do you do the research first and then write, while you’re writing, after the novel is complete and you need to fill in the gaps?
Oliver’s Travels didn’t require too much research. It’s set in the 1990s in Virginia and several foreign countries, all places I know pretty well. But when research was needed, I stopped writing and did it, so the scenes that I was working on would have the right feel from the beginning. For example, at one point the main character goes to Tokyo, and while I’ve been to Tokyo a few times and have a feel for some aspects of the culture, I wanted to place the action in a specific part of the city, so I needed to research that area to get it right. The novel I’m working on now is a different story because part of the book takes place a hundred years go. For those sections I did a lot of reading before I started writing, and then I have done more a long the way to fill in some gaps. Because the new book is set in Singapore (and Oliver’s Travels is also partially set there), I actually traveled there a couple of years ago to see what had changed since I lived there in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

What’s your writing space like? Do you have a particular spot to write where the muse is more active? Please tell us about it.
One of the things that drew me to the house I live in now was the second-floor loft. Technically it’s a bedroom because it has closets and a bathroom, but it’s open to the great room down below and has a high, vaulted ceiling. I had bookshelves built in (never enough, though) and have arranged a U-shaped work area that, in theory, keeps me focused on the writing. There isn’t a lot of room for art because of the sloped ceiling, but I do have some favorite pieces nearby. As nice as my studio is, I used to love to go out to coffee shops to work, but during the pandemic I haven’t been able to do that. Instead, have sometimes pretended that my foyer—also with a vaulted ceiling and plenty of room—is my coffee shop. I sometimes take my laptop there with a cup of coffee and get to work, especially if I’m working on something other than my primary project.

What authors do you enjoy reading within or outside of your genre?
I read very broadly, but left to my own devices I read literary fiction that has come out recently, although the way these pile up it is sometimes a year or more before I get to them. I’m trying to read Asian novels translated from Chinese and Korean and have recently reviewed a few of those. Some of my favorite contemporary writers are Russell Banks, Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim O’Brien, and Colum McCann, and I’ll read anything they publish. I’m in a book club that I’ve facilitated for over ten years and we mostly read nonfiction books on topics that range from politics and economics to religion and science.

Anything additional you want to share with the readers today?
Only that it is a real privilege to be able write stories and novels and have people read them. I’m always keen to hear from readers and I would love to visit book clubs by Zoom or another medium. Please reach out on my website.

Thank you for coming back to Reviews and Interviews!
My pleasure. Thank you for having me!

If you’d like to read Clifford’s prior interview about his short story collection, House of the Ancients and Other Stories, visit here.