Live Blog: Samuel Pepys Reading Featuring John Dufresne

Thursday, March 27, 2008

7:02 - The bookstore is already overcrowded. Several hopefuls glance around in bewildered anxiety, hoping some extra chairs will fall from the heavens.

7:04 - Said chairs arrive from an unknown seraph. Tom DeMarchi passes around his student checklist, revealing the reason for the squeezin'.

7:08 - DeMarchi introduces Laurie Cornelius, who speaks about Dufresne's impact on her life
"I lived in a world of my own creation, and I probably should have sought psychological help."
"His stories revolve around the writer at work...Dufresne taught me that we are not so strange, that writing stories is really okay..."

7:14 - John Dufresne takes the podium. He's relaxed, a bit disheveled, and unassuming. He cracks open his book of short stories, Johnny Too Bad, and begins reading one of them, "Epithalamion."

Somewhere between 7:14 and 7:20- I lose track of time amid the nearly-tangible ecstasy that poured from his mouth:
"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along."
"In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must, in fact, take place somewhere."

7:20 - He drops a flurry of pop-culture references, clothing brands, etc. during a character profile. Despite their attention-grabbing acerbity, they help a bunch with concrete characterization. Just flashy enough to show how flashy the character is.

7:24 - "On Tuesday night Brandi dreamed of Texaco..."

7:28 - "She wondered what would happen to her other self, on the distant planet Earth..."

7:29 - Dufresne finishes the story and talks about the real people who inspired his characters. He tells us that in real life, Rodo reached into his pocket for an engagement ring and a condom fell out. Everyone laughs.

7:30 - He begins a new story from Requiem, Mass.

7:32 - "Thing 1 had a rock band called 'Glorious Sunrise' that had a racy underground hit called 'A Glands in Your Direction.'"

7:36 - Drastic mood shift. Topic veers from quirky characterization to spousal abuse, a wheelchair-bound wife careens down a flight of chairs, a philandering husband leaves her broken and immobile on the floor. The narrator speculates that the husband later killed her.

7:41 - Concludes this story and reads a brief(?) snippet from "Geography," also from Requiem, Mass.

"Once again hypochondria had murdered sleep."
"I could do what I liked to do. I could make things up."

7:47 - After a lengthy passage of encyclopedic details, Dufresne takes a breath, looks at the audience and says, "You see the problem with memoir?"

7:49 - The Q & A begins. This post will reveal the A's.
"You love your characters but you're not nice to them."
"Writing fiction is a pathetic cry for love and affection."

7:52 - Cites as early influences: Salinger, Harper Lee, Dostoevsky, Kerouac, Faulkner, and tawdry gossip from his mother and aunts.

7:57 - "You write better than you think you can if you revise...revise at least 20 times."

7:58 - "It's the best day when all the words come."

8:02 - Discusses writing Naked Came the Manatee, a collaboration with twelve other authors in which each author writes a chapter. Dufresne's chapter introduces Fidel Castro to the storyline, a bold and apparently controversial move for the book's small readership. Dufresne admits that part of his motivation was to complicate Carl Hiaasen's job of writing a suitable conclusion.

8:05 - Conclusion, applause, exeunt.