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306 Theodore Weesner Theodore Weesner is the author of six novels and one short story collection. Born in Flint, Michigan, he left high school at sixteen and enlisted in the U.S. Army. Later, he graduated from Michigan State University and the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. His work has been published in England, and in translation in Germany, Japan, Romania, and elsewhere, and he has received National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Emerson College, where in 1994 he received the school’s Distinguished Faculty Award. Writing full time since 1996, Weesner lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he walks daily by the water, sits often in downtown cafés to edit manuscripts, and has never escaped a feeling of skipping school and doing something illegal. The Car Thief, 1972; A German Affair, 1976; The True Detective, 1987; Winning the City, 1990; Children’s Hearts, 1992 (stories); Novemberfest, 1994; Harbor Lights, 2000 Many novelists describe a moment of combustion: a number of things crash in and you sense a novel forming. Harbor Lights is a novel that has its roots in an actual news story. Would you describe how that and other novels formed for you? For a time I had been walking around wanting to write about possessiveness , because it seemed to visit people uninvited and do incredible damage. I was also following news stories, reading with an eye for such things—of which there are many. When the love-triangle story broke, I was taken with it at once, and felt something of a mission because the perp in the incident—a deeply damaged man, I thought—was treated without the vaguest degree of understanding or sympathy—as if he actually wanted his wife to cheat on him for thirty years, and actually wanted theodore weesner 307 to kill her. “Two Die as Love Triangle Ends in Gunfire.” The headline captured my interest, though the story—an open-and-shut case to most people—remained in the news but a couple days. I tucked the clippings away in a file and now and then added thoughts about characters and how I might present them in a story. Several years went by before I finally took it on as a short novel. My basketball novel, Winning the City, came out of a larger consideration of writing some sports stories that dealt with losing rather than winning —the painful side of sports that is almost always overlooked, even in fiction, if sports is the subject. Ask any man or woman about experiences in losing in sports, even as fans, and you’ll see a parade of broken hearts. You will also see experiences which have changed them as human beings to far more profound degrees than experiences of winning. My young kid in this novel really is the winner of the city, because in losing he comes around to accepting who he is, where he comes from. He takes up smoking and says adios to basketball and is a better man than he ever would have been had he been on the winning team, is therefore the ultimate winner. Few readers quite got that, however—couldn’t deal with the big game being lost—readers who were, I’d suggest, victims of Hollywood. A couple even had the gall to tell me they did not like the novel because the main character ended up as a loser! I hate ever to say readers didn’t get it—they should be made to get it by the author—but in that novel, sports-story brainwashing proved itself so prevalent, I’m afraid, that most—not all—readers just didn’t get it. Another sports story I wrote, “Playing for Money,” was about a young guy winning another kid’s entire paycheck from carrying out groceries, and [then]coming to the unhappy realization that rather than win something , by winning big, he had lost, in terms of the heightened isolation he was left to endure. That, too, was an autobiographical story and an experience that, when I took a look at it, when I conceived it, presented itself in that moment of combustion you indicated. Other times I’ve written from without, from research. For The True Detective, I researched four children who had been abducted and murdered just north of Detroit. I interviewed the parents and the siblings. I interviewed cops and rode...

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