Featured Interview With John Grabowski
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Philadelphia, just outside of Bucks County, and grew up in a pretty ordinary suburban middle-class environment. After law school I decided to head west and moved to Northern California, where I live now. I've worked in TV news, public relations and advertising, and done volunteer work for classical music organizations, as classical music is a passion of mine (and figures into several of my written works). Currently I'm working on a novel about the dotcom mania of the SF Bay Area while pursuing a new career in residential real estate. Real estate has long been a passion of mine.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I learned to read before I started kindergarten. Actually I can still remember the day my father sat me down and started teaching me the alphabet. I've read books since I can remember but I rarely read "children's books." I preferred science, especially astronomy, then history and biographies. My interest in fiction came a lot later. I still like my fiction marinated in reality, and shy away from pure fantasy and sci-fi.
Throughout my school years I wrote parodies and funny stories. They just flowed out of me without any need for revision. Some time in high school or early college I was bitten by the bug to write "serious" fiction, but there was only one problem: I hadn't really lived life yet, so I could never get a novel or story past the exposition, or the "problem." To solve your characters' problems you need to know things, and at the time I didn't know very much about anything. I also tried writing a screenplay about the late 90s bull market but things in real life came to a head before I could finished, which brought a realization to me: If you want to write stories "ripped from the headlines," you have to work *fast.* One day about ten years later I was sitting at my newswriting job one evening between shows and literally heard a voice in my head whisper the one-sentence elevator pitch for what became my first novel, *Entertaining Welsey Shaw.* It took me nearly eight years to finish it however, but in that lengthy period I learned a lot about what not to do. So my second book, a collection of my shorter fiction, was born a lot more quickly. Thank heavens!
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite contemporary author—and I've been blessed enough to meet her and correspond with her—is Deborah Eisenberg. She may not be a household name for many, and they likely are more familiar with her lifelong companion, Wallace Shawn, whom I've also met (on a rather interesting night where I also encountered their friends, Howard Hesseman—Dr. Johnny Fever to you—and his wife). Deborah Eisenberg's stories have clearly influenced my own in numerous ways. Other contemporary favorites are Joseph O'Neill (Netherland), Richard Ford, Richard Yates, Milan Kundera, and José Saramago. Oddly, I like either realism or magical realism, if the magical part is there to illustrate a point about the real world we live in. I generally don't like anything that's "escapist." My next novel, which will be expanded from an award-winning novella I wrote some years ago, will be magical realism, the story of a man who starts dating Death, Death being a beautiful, sad and mysterious woman who appears from the shadows when it's time to take people away. He falls in love with her.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
i Violet Rothko and Other Stories is a collection of my shorter works, some of which I wrote while I was working on my first novel, Entertaining Welsey Shaw. I wrote shorter works to take a break. I wrote the titular story to enter into a contest and I sent it with reservations on the last day for entries. I was close to hitting the delete button instead, because I was so ambivalent. To my surprise it won first prize, and the editors of the site (now defunct; it was bought by Random House) told me it was the best story they'd ever read. Joseph Freda, author of the superb The Patience of Rivers, recently told me it was as perfect a story as he'd ever read. That's the only reason I included it in the collection—I still don't know if I like it!
The rest of the stories have less clearly-defined, good-bad characters. I like to write slice-of-life stories that observe people from a certain distance without insisting that some are heroes. I have a somewhat jaded view of humanity, in other words. Okay, let's just say I'm an outright pessimist. Most of the time. Personally, my favorite stories in my latest collection, which comes out in paperback on February 25th and is already available in hardcover, are "Katabasis" and "Haydn." The former is about two married movie stars with their pampered children as we see what life behind the scenes is like, and it's not pretty. The couple is so self-indulgent and divorced from reality that the children, we realize, don't stand a chance of being normal. The latter story is about a rich Southern California power broker whose fragmented family includes a daughter who wants to do good in the Third World (much to her father's puzzlement), a wife he's slowly losing to dementia and mistress he likes because he can control everything about her right down to exactly what she wears and what she says and thinks. His world comes crashing down at the end, even if he doesn't quite learn from it.
Yes, my take on humanity is a bit dark and unromanticized. I find people fascinating, especially their flaws. And as my bio on my own website says, I write stories steeped in the zeitgeist of today, that are often complex and boast neither heroes nor anti-heroes.
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