Clifford Garstang’s novel Oliver’s Travels features a young man’s coming of age, philosophical discourse, and a darn good argument for world travel to expand awareness. Garstang himself took this advice, living and working all over Southeast Asia and Kazakhstan before taking on writing a novel.
Book Title: Oliver’s Travels
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Genre: Novel
A sentence from the book: “Travel,” my favorite teacher, Professor Russell, said to me, more than once, “is the key to the locked door of consciousness.”
1. In a single sentence, describe your novel or collection. Ollie Tucker, a student of philosophy obsessed with the truth and the source of knowledge, questions the validity of everything he hears from his parents, his girlfriend, and even the voices inside his head, and so embarks on a journey to find the one man who can tell him the truth about the trauma he suffered as a child.
2. Where do you write? What’s on the wall? Is there a cat on the keyboard? A dog at your feet? I love writing in coffee shops, but mostly I write in my home office which is in a loft over my house’s great room. It’s spacious, with a sitting area, bookshelves, and a nice, cluttered, desk. I keep artwork here and there on the desk or on the shelves, including some beautiful signed etchings I picked up in Mexico, framed Henry Moore sketches, a Robert Kipniss lithograph, and more. Alas, there is no dog at my feet, but there was when I started this book, and now there’s a framed photograph of Bhikku, my dearly departed chocolate Lab, on my desk.
3. What inspired you to write a novel? How long did it take to write? At first I envisioned a series of flash fiction stories about a character who travels all over the world, and at some point, I thought I could make that series into a novel-in-flash. I wrote and published a number of these pieces about a character named Oliver (the echo of Gulliver was intentional), and they were fun to write. I hit upon the idea of turning the concept on its head and making the book about the writer of the flash fictions, and so the character of Ollie was born–a young writer who is living vicariously through his alter ego, Oliver. I completed a draft in 2016, so probably it took about five years. I then put it aside–other things were going on–and a year or two later picked it up and spent a half year or so doing a significant rewrite to get it into the form in which it was published by Regal House.
4. How do you keep writing a novel when it’s hard – what’s your secret? Your support system? Your writing snack? Coffee or tea? I’m a coffee drinker for sure, so that’s how the engine gets started in the morning. As for the work itself, I think a writer needs a variety of tools with which to tackle the problems a novel presents. At an earlier stage, I work with an outline, and if I’m struggling with a scene or chapter, I might just jump to something else and work on that. There’s no rule that says you have to work on the chapters in order! At a later stage, sometimes I read the work aloud. Sometimes I have the computer read it to me. In both cases, I’m looking for the rhythm of the sentences and also reminding myself of the narrative voice. Sometimes I search the manuscript for words I know I overuse, just as a way into the text. There’s always something visual to work with, too. For Oliver’s Travels, I found photographs of people who I decided looked like my characters and I might just stare at one of these photographs to get a sense of what the character is thinking or might do next. For a novel I recently finished, I had the main characters write letters to me as a way of discovering what motivated them and what they wanted me to know about them.
Because I live in a small town, my support system is mostly virtual, and I happily commune with fellow writers on Facebook and Twitter.
5. Tell us about two favorite writers you’ve studied for craft. I’ve been fortunate to study with some great writers, which I know isn’t the question you asked, but I’ve also studied their work for craft and have also benefited from hearing them talk about craft. Two I’ll mention now are Elizabeth Strout and Tim O’Brien. Strout was one of my mentors during my MFA program and her focus was at the sentence level. Anyone who has read her work (who hasn’t, at this point?) can see that. She stressed that sentences should be “true” in the sense, as I understood it, that they should be tight, true to character, and honest. I studied with Tim O’Brien at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His work has a similar emphasis on truth, but he’s talking more about emotional truth. Both of them blurbed my first collection of stories, In an Uncharted Country, and I couldn’t be more grateful to them.
6. What are people saying about your book? Blurb, review, your best friend. One of my blurbs, from Jonathan Dee, I think gets at exactly what I was trying to do: “One man’s search for the truth about himself–a tour of his own head that winds up taking him on a tour of the world. A witty, humane meditation on the slippery slope of childhood memory.”
7. Tell us something about yourself that not many people know. I think a lot of people don’t know that I was in the Peace Corps. I joined after college (actually, after one semester of grad school) and spent two years teaching English to future English teachers at a provincial university in South Korea. It was a transformative experience, having an immeasurable impact on the man–and writer–I became.
8. You had another career before you started writing a novel. Why the switch, and what’s the intersection?
In college I knew I wanted to write fiction, but I didn’t know how to prepare to do that. I studied philosophy, thinking that was as good a place to start as any (and it was also meant to satisfy my father, who wanted me to be a lawyer), but the one creative writing class I took wasn’t much help. I started work on a Masters in English, but after one semester I took a break from school and joined the Peace Corps, a move that set me on a very different path. After I got my degree I pivoted to the study of international law and got a job with a large international law firm, then moved to the World Bank’s legal department, practicing law with these two great organizations for 20 years, never making the time to write. When the new millenium rolled around, it seemed like a good moment to return to my earlier passion. I quit my job, enrolled in an MFA program, and started writing.
My experiences living and working internationally inevitably found their way into my writing. But also, as a lawyer, I aim for precision and truth, even in fiction, and in Oliver’s Travels the character Ollie strives for truth and rigorous analysis of how we know what we think we know.
By the way, the new book I just finished brings it full circle, in a way, because it is about a lawyer who works in Southeast Asia.
Learn more about Clifford Garstang at: www.cliffordgarstang.com
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