Description
Story, Story, Story: Conversations with American Authors by Jim Schumoch
ISBN 978-0930773519
Interviews with nineteen major American authors, including: Carolyn Kizer, William Styron, William Kennedy, Robert Stone, Thomas McGuane, Tim O’Brien, Carol Shields, Ethan Canin, Tobias Wolff, Paul Theroux, Jim Grimsley, Lorrie Moore, Dagoberto Gilb, Philip Levine, Thom Jones, Robert Wrigley, Stephen Dixon, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Robert Olen Butler.
These interviews were conducted by Jim Schumock on his radio program Between the Covers over a seven-year period during which he has been been associated with KBOO in Portland, Oregon. The conversations focus on the interaction between the authors’ lives and their literary work. “While there are points of commonality within these pages there is also much that is original and peculiar to individual authors. Many of the authors contained herein are ‘writers’ writers,’ by which I mean that they are widely read and enjoyed by their writing peers as well as by the community of readers.” (From the author’s preface.)
Reviews
“Schumock has been interviewing award-winning authors on his Portland, Oregon, radio show for seven years and has now compiled a collection of 19 lively and revealing conversations. By maintaining a question-and-answer format, Schumock preserves each writer’s distinct voice, and what a distinguished and outspoken cast he has assembled. Interviewees include William Kennedy, Carol Shields, Robert Stone, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Philip Levine. The discussions veer from the strictly literary to the magnetically personal, the aesthetic to the anecdotal, a swing that emphasizes the intrinsic role that writing plays in both the inner and the outer lives of a writer. Schumock asks intelligent and penetrating questions as he traces the evolution of each writer’s current book as well as the course of the writer’s career, and his guests respond at length, displaying their innate talent for storytelling, profound involvement with literature, and the curious mesh of the intentional and the unexpected that shapes every work of art.”
—Booklist, November 15, 1998, Donna Seaman
“‘Between the Covers’ host devours literature, with painting on the side”
“Seven years ago, painting contractor Jim Schumock was working on the house of one of his softball teammates. The man who lived next door, Joe Bohorfoush, got to talking with Schumock and learned, among other things, that Schumock loved literature and loved to talk about it. “He thought I had a good voice for radio,” Schumock said, “and he thought I should give it a try. He’s the father of my radio career.”
Schumock took Bohorfoush’s neighborly advice down to KBOO (90.7), where he soon found himself working as one of the hosts of “Between the Covers.” The show has been on for 28 years, making it one of the longest-running in Portland radio history. Its format is one of the simplest: an author is interviewed and reads portions of his or her work. “I just ask the questions and then have them read something I’ve selected ahead of time,” Schumock said. “The interviews are sculpted around the readings.”
Schumock has collected 19 of his best interviews from “Between the Covers” and put them between hard covers in a book called “Story Story Story: Conversations with American Authors: (Black Heron Press, $26.95). The book has some surprising insights from some of the biggest names in contemporary literature, including William Styron, Robert Stone, Lorrie Moore, Thomas McGuane, Thom Jones, William Kennedy and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“They’ve all been so gracious,” Schumock said. “William Styron is the most gracious person in the world. He was one of the first ones I did, and I couldn’t believe how respectful and kind he was.”
The authors repay the compliment. In a blurb for the book, Jones said “Jim’s intelligent, well-considered questions and breadth of knowledge make it easy for a writer to get excited and talk, talk, talk. This collection proves that Jim Schumock is quite clearly the best literary interviewer on radio in America today.”
That’s high praise for a Portland State University graduate who does many of his interviews at his Northeast Portland home and squeezes in his reading and interviewing around his painting business, Finishing Touches. His normal routine is to read everything an author has written, mark selections he would like them to read, and talk to them for an hour, usually when they are in town for a book tour or lecture.
He then edits the tape down to 28 minutes, 30 seconds — “an NPR half-hour” — puts music at the beginning and end, and gives it to KBOO, which airs it at 9 a.m. Tuesday. Most of the 250 programs Schumock has done have only been used once on the radio, which gives him a full library of fascinating audio tapes and gave his publisher a long list for his book. (Three of the interviews in “Story Story Story” first appeared in Glimmer Train, the Portland literary quarterly.) “I interviewed my publisher, Jerry Gold, about five years ago after he’d done a book on small-press publishing,” Schumock said. “We talked for awhile about doing a book, and I eventually gave him 45 transcripts and he chose 19.”
Besides Styron and Stone, Schumock said his favorite interviews in “Story Story Story” are the ones with Moore, Jones, Tim O’Brien and Philip Levine. He gets interviews by working with publishers in New York and is looking forward to a spring lineup that starts with Daniel Wallace, author of the acclaimed first novel “Big Fish,” on January 12 and moves on to Ian McEwan and Martin Amis in February.”
—Oregonian, December 25, 1998, A&E, Jeff Baker
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