That's just one wacky twist in Richard Grayson's nearly 30-year-old book, With Hitler In New York. Grayson rescued the collection using the print-on-demand Back in Print bookstore at the Authors Guild--allowing us to savor every surreal page.
Welcome to the second installment of my interview with Grayson, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...Jason Boog:
In With Hitler in New York, you do a great job of capturing the insecurities and anxieties of a fledgling writer. Can you describe the darkest moment in your career? How did you cope with these feelings? What did you do to keep writing?
Richard Grayson:
I’ve been really lucky with my writing career, so I can’t say I had any “dark” moments. I suspect I’m just genetically programmed to be insecure and anxious and would be that way if I were a plumber or a hedge fund manager...
Probably the hardest times occurred about six months to a year after each of my books came out when I felt discouraged by the lack of sales or critical attention. That kind of letdown was harder to deal with than the struggle to get published.
I coped with these feelings simply by getting on with my life, by choosing a sense of perspective over self-pity, and by devising a plan to kill the leading members of the New York literary establishment.
Seriously, I didn’t always keep writing. I’ve stopped writing for publication several times, often for years. I didn’t publish many stories or a book between 1983 and 1996.
Because I always had other things going on in my life, I didn’t really miss writing until I missed it. I never stopped writing in my diary, which I’ve kept every single day for 37 years, since I was 18 in August 1969. Doing that was often enough for me.
I wrote very little from 2000, when The Silicon Valley Diet was published, until late 2003, when one night, fooling around online, I discovered Maud Newton’s website, which led me to sites like Yankee Pot Roast and McSweeney’s. Believe it or not, I was so out of touch that I hadn’t heard of McSweeney’s.
I decided to start writing again and submitting to webzines as a kind of therapy because I’d been ill and stressed out from a demanding job. And just as in the mid-1970s when my stories began getting taken by little magazines, each acceptance by a webzine encouraged me to write more.
I don’t worry about not writing. For me, writing has been, if not the way I’ve defined or supported myself, an incredibly satisfying hobby.
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