Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

"At an all night cockfighting tournament in Huehuetenango, to which I'd gotten a ride with a man in a black SUV who'd accidentally, intentionally let hundred-dollar bills fall from his pocket when he reached for his money roll to buy a bear, it seemed like half of the people there had been to the United States and back."

That's Brian Francis Slattery describing a real-life trip to Guatemala that inspired one of the most violent, vivid scenes in his novel, Spaceman Blues. Guatemala is one of my favorite places, and his travel writing nailed some dark and beautiful things about the country. 

This first-time novelist is my special guest this week, and today he discusses the research and politics of immigration swirling around his novel.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
How did you convert your real-life travels through Guatemala into hallucinatory interludes in your novel? In other words, what's your advice for writers as they travel to new places, how can they capture the experience in a creative way like you did?

Brian Francis Slattery:
The parts that physically describe Guatemala I tried to do as accurately as I could; allusions to what happened during Guatemala's civil war are taken from what people there told me and from what I learned through reading about the place. Continue reading...

That said, as with the more fantastical parts of the book generally, I also I tried to infuse the language with enough emotion that it would convey a sense of how it felt (meaning how I felt, at least) when I was there--I was trying to make the gap between having the experience and reading about the experience as small as I could. And it felt more honest, in some ways, to be subjective.

I wasn't a dispassionate observer, after all; I had taken a side, I was trying to help in what miniscule way I could, and trying to learn as much as I could in the process.

As far as advice for traveling writers--to the extent that I deserve to be dispensing advice to anyone about anything--I did try to make sure that the more hallucinatory episodes served a thematic purpose, illustrating something about a character, something about the plot, or perhaps something about the couple of ideas I was batting around in the book.

Really, the crazier the book got, the harder I worked to make sure that it stated--sometimes very explicitly--what I was trying to say. Otherwise, those episodes would just be smug and self-indulgent (some readers will probably find them so anyway, but hey, you can't please everyone).

But as I've told a few people at this point, I think that I finished the first draft while I was in Guatemala affected the way that the book turned out, and I completely share your affection for the place. I wasn't there nearly as long as you were, and in many ways I barely understand it, but it had a really powerful effect on me; particularly in my professional life, the people I met there never been far from my mind.

'm often frustrated that as a writer-editor type, I can't help them and people like them more directly. But perhaps someday that may change.