Meet Scott Blackwood, Local Prize-Winning Author

That must have made for a pleasant surprise when you got the cell phone fixed. So what does it mean, aside from glory? A publication deal?

Yes, it means a publication deal with New Issues Press, which is mostly known for its poetry. But they've now contracted with AWP for the award. They put out some nice books and have a good distribution deal. I'll get to work with them on designing the cover.

I've read that you wrote part of the new novel while living on the Dobie-Paisano Ranch outside of town. What was it like to live and write out there?

I did write at least 120-130 pages of it there, finished it there. The ranch house sits on Barton Creek, so the sound of the water is everywhere, which becomes part of your consciousness after awhile. And the creek—which was more like a river at times—weaved its way into the book (though it's Deep Eddy's Johnson Creek in the book). The Ranch appears in other guises throughout.

It's a beautiful place, but it's a stark beauty. It's a kind of barren beauty, punctuated by springs and wild flowers and moss here and there. I think that kind of starkness lends itself to fiction writing, where lushness might not.

I also heard about the novel being set in Deep Eddy. What drew you to writing about that neighborhood?

I set it there for several reasons: at the turn of the century and into the 1920's, Deep Eddy was a wilderness that brushed up against the city. People camped and hunted there (and had for thousands of years—the Tonkawa were mainstays along the river). There was a huge boulder that stuck out of the river, off the shore where the Deep Eddy Pool is now, and people flocked there to dive off and swim in the current. But the current (the deep eddy) was dangerous, too, and drowned a number of people. They later dynamited the boulder but the area kept the name.

Deep Eddy pool became a big attraction in the teens—part bathing beach, part carnival. [There was] Lorena and her Diving Horse, a diving baby who'd go off this hundred foot platform, and Jack Frueth, "the human fish," who’d eat his dinner under water. Floods would wash it all away, and then they'd rebuild the pool area.

Anyway, there was an odd history there, a meshing of the wilderness and city life that I liked and seemed important. I think the book reflects the split... one that's always been a part of Austin. Wilderness/civilization.

Another reason I set it there was I'd once worked at Deep Eddy Bookstore and delivered fliers door to door through the neighborhood. People would be sitting on their porches, people out of work, people with kids at home, people watching things go by. Several offered me beers (it was hot) while I was walking by and I thought it had a communal feel to it. A large part of the book, I should mention, is told in the collective voice of the Deep Eddy neighborhood—like Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and somewhat like The Virgin Suicides (though I hadn't yet read this when I started.)

You can really get a feel for a neighborhood when you're a stranger going door to door, huh?

Yep, you see into rooms, down halls. If you're a good voyeur.

Wait, that's not very communal of me...

I take it you've lived in Austin for a while. What do you think of the literary scene here?

I came to Austin in the mid-eighties to go to school and stayed. I really love it here. It would be hard to leave. The book is kind of a weird love letter to Austin, in a way. The literary scene: it's pretty vibrant but there's not a center to it, that I can tell. Maybe that's not a bad thing. But things seem to be changing rapidly, with more fiction writers and poets moving here, more screenwriters...but not all that many write about Austin. Karen Olsson's novel is set in Austin, I think.

Do you have any favorite places to write in Austin? (When you're not on the ranch...)

Well, I like my house, which finally has a little office in it with lots of light. I like Bouldin Creek Coffee House, when I have the time to go. You can always help Leslie with her crossword over there.

You work with young writers at the undergraduate writing center at UT. Any advice that you find yourself repeating all the time, that you'd like to offer aspiring writers in our audience?

I work with undergraduate writers at the writing center and with an older mix of students in the fiction workshops I typically teach for the night school here at UT (University Extension). I think the thing I try to get across to student writers is that they need to be patient—the typical writer's apprenticeship is probably ten years. You can't rush it much. There's a lot of falling down and getting back up again.

I think you have to read like a writer reads all of the time, for the sensibility, the techniques, the craft your favorite writers are using. I think that some people think talent is enough, but from my experience, it's the knowledge of craft and the development of a writer's sensibility, the sense of rightness and proportion, that evoke talent—not the other way around.

And then there’s just the discipline to stick it out, a certain hardheadedness (not to be confused with resistance to change or to revision.)

We choose to do this, though sometimes it makes no sense...so there must be something driving this compulsion. Something way back in the subconscious that knows what's best for us, even when we don't.