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An interview with Paul Buck on his latest short story
Below are excerpts from our conversation.
The first, pretty obvious question I have is: what made you decide to write this story?
Well, after the last story I wrote for my grandma, I forgot how much I like to write prose. So I played around with a couple different stories, trying to make up characters, and I realized I wasn’t practiced enough yet. So I thought, okay, I’ll stick with something I know. And I remembered this weird memory from when I was a kid, of my cousin and I getting ourselves into trouble again for something stupid like this, and I just thought it was a good story… I ended up writing the whole thing in about five hours.
So, you describe the town of Ute a bit, and how small of a population it has, and how hilly it is. What else can you tell me about the town?
The whole town, almost like every other town in Iowa, was centered around agriculture. The town is basically a couple fields that were set aside and built on, and then everything else around it is completely populated with corn and soybeans. The only purpose of these towns was to have a place to take your grain that had a railroad connection. So all these towns had railroad spurs and subspurs that would go to the main lines.
So is Ute comparable to Globe in any way?
No! Ute has a one-block main street. It has a single school, which has closed, because the population has dropped too far, which is sad because that school had been open for 100-plus years. It’s the school my dad went to when he was a kid. In fact, you can still find my dad’s name on plaques in the hallways of the high school.
Really, for what?
Football records. A friend of mine had a textbook – it was so old in 1998, it had my dad’s name in it, from 1973. They were still using it as a textbook. So he cut my dad’s name out of the book and gave it to him.
So, what about people-wise? The small-town people, are they comparable to here at all?
There’s a lot more diversity here. Like I said, people in Ute were born there, raised there, and die there. They don’t move. No one moves there, but people move out. So it’s a dwindling population, and everyone is related somehow. It’s amazing.
Remind me where you actually grew up.
I went to school and grew up during the school year in West Des Moines, Iowa. I spent as much as I could of winter break, spring break and summer break at my grandparents, In Ute.
And that was to avoid Dad?
Well that, and I just was not happy in the city. I hated living in the suburbs, and because of my personality and my personal hang-ups, I didn’t get along with a lot of people or relate to a lot of people at home. But it seemed like it was so easy to talk to everybody at my grandparents’ house. I knew every kid in town.
Why do you think you got along with the rural kids more than the urban kids?
Money had to do a lot with it. The school I went to, the average household income was over $100,000. My dad was a police officer and my mom worked for a newspaper; we didn’t have a lot of money. I mean, we never went without, by any means, but we couldn’t compete with the kids that drove the Porsches to school, either.
Tell me about this river with the snapping turtles.
Oh, the Soldier River. It was named, I believe, after the French dragoon soldiers that were shot and killed in it. It’s a deep-cut river now, because of erosion. So if you’re standing in a field, looking across the river bank, you almost can’t tell there’s a river there. From the banks it’s a 20-foot drop to the water line. It’s highly nitrogenated because of all the agriculture. They found high levels of mercury and heavy metals in that water [laughs]. Very sedimented, but you can also pull out 60, 70-pound snapping turtles out of this thing.
And you guys used to swim in it?
Yeah, cautiously [laughs]. If the water was high enough, we used to jump off the bridge into it. It was pretty murky. Yeah, those turtles were all over the place. The last thing you wanted to know was that your toe was missing.
So, there are a lot of things I like about this story, one of them being how well you describe everything, from your emotions to just small details of the wrapper of the candy. Was that really easy for you to just remember these things so vividly, or did you really have to dig deep back into your memory?
No. And of course, every story has some inflation to it. But most of it was pretty easy. It was one of those memories that always stuck. For example, my cousin wasn’t nearly as much of a butt as I made him about to be in the story. I inflated that a little bit. I probably was about that passive, though. He definitely did have a stronger personality than I did, and I really always was relegated to the one-speed bike because he claimed the other one, all the time. In actuality, we didn’t go up to the school after I took the candy, we went home, but I didn’t like that, so I recreated something else. But I can see the town so well in my head that I could go anywhere, so I thought, oh well, we’ll go a little closer, or a different direction.
Did you really cry that hard?
Not that hard, because men don’t cry, you gotta suck it up. But I wanted to.
So how do you think Kevin would react if he read this story?
He’d first say, “What the hell, dude! I’m not an ***hole!” If he understood I embellished him, he’d probably think it was funny. I’m sure he remembers it about as vividly as I do, because he’s only about a year younger than me. He probably would say, “Well, that’s not what happened.” But he’d probably like the story; he’d get a kick out of it.
Is there a selected audience you would like to read this story?
I think stories about childhood, anybody can pull something to relate to out of. I mean, that’s why I think it was easy to write this, because anybody could relate to it. It’s one of those stories where everybody says, “Oh, I remember doing something like that, or I knew somebody that did something like that.”
Some of it that I write is also self-therapy, too, just to get things out and discuss it for the first time. You know, I wrote at the end of the story how my dad has changed, and how we all have changed. He has a good idea, but I don’t think he realizes how much we did hate him when we were growing up. He always denies it.
So does anyone know this story, to this day, aside from the people that were involved?
Kevin.
Right, and then…
Nobody else knows it.
Jenn Walker began writing for Globe Miami Times in 2012 and has been a contributor ever since. Her work has also appeared in Submerge Magazine, Sacramento Press, Sacramento News & Review and California Health Report. She currently teaches Honors English at High Desert Middle School and mentors Globe School District’s robotics team.
