Chris Offutt—: Iowa, October, 2000

INTERVIEW Chris Offutt—Iowa, October, 2000______ Charles May Chris Offutt was born in Rowan County, Kentucky. He has published two collections of short stories, Kentucky Straight (1992) and Out of the Woods (2999), one novel, The Good Brother (1997), and a memoir, The Same River Twice (1993). His newest book, to be published by Simon and Schuster in April, 2002, is entitled No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. He currently teaches at the University ofIowa. Charles May was born in Johnson County, Kentucky. He has published several works of criticism, primarily on the short story. May: It seems to me there are at least two Chris Offutts. On reading your memoir The Same River Twice, I got one image of a drinking, poolplaying drop-out who ran off and joined the circus. But just last year I read a little piece you did for Zoetrope: All Story in which you describe a kid who did not hunt or fish or play sports or hang out, but who stayed pretty much to himself and read a lot. Is one real and one literary? Or are they both you in some way? Offutt: They're me in different time periods. The Zoetrope piece is about when I was a kid, when we lived ten miles from town, and I read all the time. As I got older I became involved in rebellious activities. And then once I left the mountains, there was a whole world at my disposal. For many years, I was happy in Haldeman, a little town of about two hundred people. And then I slowly realized there was more, and the things I was interested in were just not available there. The events in The Same River Twice take place after I left Haldeman. One section takes place during college. What I did was cut out a lot ofperiods ofrelative stability in that book—going to college, having a job, some family things. May: So that was a literary decision—a decision about making the book more . . . Offutt: Well, you know, making it less boring. At one point it was six hundred pages. I cut out a lot. I cut out all my grand theories on philosophy, psychology, religion and a lot about my family and my girlfriends. That book was never written for publication. It was written for myself—to try to understand my life. May: What made you decide to publish it? Offutt: Well, I got a contract for Kentucky Straight, but publishing is a relatively slow process, so it took two years for the book to come out. In the meantime, I already had written The Same River Twice. But it had no context. It was all the past—no connection to the present. Then I found all these notes about the period when I was writing Kentucky Straight and my wife was pregnant and had our son, and I realized that was the ideal context for my past and for the book. May: Also in the Zoetrope piece, you include a story you wrote as a seven-year-old about a feller named Kenny Clark. You said the question of why you write is not worth answering, but that the question of why a seven-year-old boy would write that story in 1966 is more important. You said writing began as an "obsessive habit" with you. Is that what distinguishes writers from non-writers—obsession? Do you feel that you just have to write? Offutt: Well, it was not so much what I had to do it. It's just what I did, what I do. The great chefs of the world aren't people who decided to cook. They were just people who cooked. They always cooked; they were always in the kitchen. The great athletes were people who wanted to be ballplayers. They were people who always had a ball in their hand. They always played. For me, writing was something I did. I never wanted to be a writer. Ijust wrote. And I wrote obsessively. Being a writer never occurred to me. I always wanted to be something exotic—a detective or a race-car driver, you know, or an...