A Conversation with Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy’s first novel, The Wilding, will be published in late 2009 by Graywolf Press. His story “Dial Tone” appeared in issue 30.2 (Spring 2007) of The Missouri Review. A frequent contributor at Esquire, he has published two short-story collections: Refresh, Refresh (2007) and The Language of Elk (2006). Percy is a recipient of the Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Iowa State University in Ames, where he is an assistant professor of English. This interview was conducted on the University of Missouri campus in February 2009.

INTERVIEWERS: In the story “The Iron Moth” in your first collection, The Language of Elk, Augustus’s father has harsh words for creative writing classes. He calls them “Poverty and Starvation 101.” How did your family react to your decision to seriously pursue writing?

PERCY: I was originally pursuing archaeology, and my family was quite pleased with that because even though it’s not selling insurance or going into investment banking, it’s science-driven. It embodied, maybe, the passions of my parents more than it did my own interests. But for some time I went along with the ruse, going on expeditions with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Oregon, scouting rock-art sites and digging up Paiute villages. Eventually I realized that this was completely uninteresting to me. It’s not as though I wasn’t fascinated with the history there, but clawing through the soil in hundred-degree heat and finding only a chip of bone or an obsidian flake is just not my idea of a good time. So there was a shift in sensibility that occurred, in part motivated by my then girlfriend, now wife, who was telling me, “You’re really good at this,” when reading these awful love poems that I wrote for her. So she gave me that shove and helped me toward independence from my parents. It’s not as though they haven’t been supportive, but originally I don’t think they were excited about sending someone to an Ivy League university to major in English when you consider the bill that comes along with that. And I shifted gears my junior year of college and haven’t looked back since then, despite the ugly odds and the impracticality of what I’m doing.

INTERVIEWERS: Hunting figures prominently in your writing. Did you grow up surrounded by people interested in hunting and the outdoors?

PERCY: As a child I would often follow my father through the woods and became a kind of scout for him when we would go elk hunting. I remember so many mornings, waking up in the pickup truck, and there would be fog and the noise of elk screaming out in the woods all around us. They sound sort of like a pterodactyl sounds in a movie. So we would go hunting together, and I would help him gut the animals. I’m not sure how much he really enjoyed hunting. He didn’t do it for the thrill but more because we lived in a sustainable way, and that was our meat for the year. We had a hobby farm where my mother grew vegetables, and a chicken coop, and such. My friends were quite obsessive about hunting. I can recall going over to their house, and their dad would throw us all into the pickup, and we’d go over to the farmer’s place. The big exercise of the afternoon would be taking down yellow-bellied marmots that were digging holes in the alfalfa fields, and we’d get five dollars for each one we blasted. This is the territory of my childhood. I don’t love to hunt, but I have the same mind-set regarding sustainability as my father, and I try to eat local whenever I can. I’ve got a freezer full of meat, and I just bought a bow.

INTERVIEWERS: One of my favorite things about your work is how everything is...