Short Stories: An Interview with Novelist Dennis Bock

Tevis Shkodra: Dennis, tell us about the first story you wrote—how old were you and what was it about?

Dennis Bock:If you’re asking about the first good story I wrote, well, that’s a whole different question than if you were to ask about the first story I wrote, or tried to write.

There’retoo many to remember, those pages you’re turned on by when you’re looking for your voice and subject matter, casting your net as wide as you can.

It’s an important time for a beginning writer—that time when you’re experimenting with form and voice and structure and falling in love with the masters of the genre.Cheever. Ford. Munro. Wolff. Hemingway. Gallant.

I read these writers and did my best to rip them off as well as I could. Whichwas never well enough, of course. But you’ve got to read and try to take what you can from the masters, and in trying you mightfinally stumble onto something that you might call your own.

Atlong last I wrote a good story. I might have been twenty-four ortwenty-five. It’s the first story in my first book. It has somethingto do with childhood memories, which I think serves a lot of starting writers.

I sent it to Canadian Fiction Magazine, now sadly defunct, and got an acceptance letter back. I was over the moon.

TS: What was the moment when you knew you had to be a writer?

DB: Hard to say. I don’t think there was any sort of lightningstrike. I started reading novels late as a kid, at fifteen or sixteen. But when I finally came into my own, it felt like a world I’d beenmissing all my life without even knowing it.

I started admiring writers more than I did all those singers and guitar players who’d wowed me for so long. It wasn’t like I admired writers for the fact that they were writers, though. All that romantic nonsense. I admired them for the books they wrote.

When I fell into a great novel there was nothing better I knew. No song or record could match the feeling that came over me when I settled into a Truman Capote or Somerset Maugham or Lawrence Durrell novel or collection.

I guess it slowly dawned on me that I’d love to try my hand at it. What could be better than having a book ofyour own? Maybe it offered me a place to inhabit that was purely my own. (I grew up in a house busy with lots of brothers.)

I asked my dad for a typewriter. It was this big, loud, electric cast-iron Smith-Corona that rattled the house when its keys slammedagainst the platen.

I think it was DH Lawrence who said graffitiis the common man’s stab at immortality. Something like that. I think most writers have some need to see their experience live on beyond their own best-before date.

As a teenager I was beingaffected by books whose authors had died decades earlier, and itwas like they were reaching out from the grave and grabbing me by the throat. I thought that was pretty cool. I wanted to write something that might do the same.