Preston L. Allen's Interview with Street Miami, by Jessica Sick, November 2004
MEET:
In his short stories and novels, local author Preston Allen presents everything from lesbian cops (Hoochie Mama) to a horn player with an Oedipal complex (Churchb oys and Other Sinners). The Miami-Dade College, North Campus, creative writing professor, who reads Sunday, November 14, as part of Miami Book Fair International ( www.miamibookfair.com ), spoke with MEET about being a latchkey kid, high school pranks, and why, in seventh grade, he put the thwack! down on Shogun.
**You're one of those Miami transplants who plans on staying a few years and ends up staying for 20.
I thought I was going to be going right back to Boston. And it's been almost 30 years. I think that once you get used to Miami, it's difficult to live other places, because you have all the things you have access to in, say, New York, but it's slower-paced.
**You have four brothers. Are you a creative bunch, or are you the oddball?
We're all creative. We were fortunate as children to grow up as latch-key kids, because we had to find things to do. We generally did artistic things -- told stories, drew. I have a brother, Chief, who is a rapper. I have another brother who is a ''journal-ist;'' it's not journalism, but he writes these wonderful letters, and we think he's mad, but he thinks he isn't. I have another brother who attempts to write novels and things like that and another who's a fairly decent letter writer. I keep telling them that one of these days we're going to have to sit down and write a group book: The Allen Boys Remember Childhood, and each chapter would be from a different point of view.
**Usually writers are also book worms. Does that apply to you?
Oh, yes. I had a voracious appetite for reading. At a young age, mostly science fiction, sword and sorcerer stuff. That was my regular diet, but I read everything I could get my hands on. My parents, at one point in my life, were very religious, and so movies were forbidden. But books weren't. I remember reading The Godfather, because I couldn't go see the movie, and my mother stuck her head into my room and said, ''Oh, look, he's so smart, he's reading about God.'' I think the first scene was Sonny Corleone having sex with Lucy in the closet, and my mother thinks I'm reading about the Lord. ''Yes, the Lord, mommy.'' [Laughs.]
**A reviewer once wrote of your short story collection, Churchboys and Other Sinners, that it was refreshing because it was about reality, not just issues. Surely you have issues, though.
What are my issues? Parents and children, how fathers ruin their sons, the church and how it shelters us. The world of work is another of my issues. I write about telephone solicitors, car salesmen, and people who are in minimum wage jobs -- pizza men, people like that.
**You're a college professor, though. Can you relate to cubicles and minimum wage?
I was a pizza man. I was an evil car salesman. My first published short story was about a car salesman. College instructors are very lucky. Some of the young teachers here have never had a job other than teaching. You ask them, ''What was your big job before coming here?'' And they say, ''Teaching.'' You mean you haven't worked at Burdines? You've never had to punch a clock? You never had a manager who was younger than you? None of those experiences? They missed certain rites of passage.
**Do you see any of your novels as movies?
Hoochie Mama is a thriller set in Opa-locka, and I don't know of any novel set in Opa-locka, so it's definitely a book I want to shop around. Some of my short stories could be turned into movies -- ''Prince William Blows Good,'' for example. It's the Oedipus story. He loves his wife, and he loves playing his horn. They have a child, which saves their marriage. But the child is kidnapped and the stress on the marriage is too much and they break up. The grief from the kidnapping makes his music beautiful -- that's why I keep repeating the line ''Prince William blows good, real good'' -- and his career begins to blow up. He meets his next partner in life, a singer. She's not the best singer in the world, but she's beautiful and young. In the end, they make love. His child had a birthmark that is the same as the one he finds on this woman. I'd love to see one of my stories made into a movie.
**Out of all your characters, which one most resembles you?
Elwin in Churchboys and Other Sinners. Elwin loves the Lord, Elwin loves the piano, Elwin loves Sister Morrison, who is 20 years his senior. They carry on, they do what the church says not to do, and they get away with it because she's old and he's young and no one would suspect the two of them together. He shows up in five stories, and in the end, Elwin ends up as a car salesman. Also, the character in Bounce, Cindique. I do that in a lot of books -- I take myself and I become a female or I become white. To get truth, I have to change who I am, so that I am able to see the world with new eyes. Elwin was too easy to write. When I write from the point of view of a woman, I have to re-think things. I tell that to my students all the time -- you've got to practice writing stories from a different point of view.
**So you shouldn't always write what you know.
Yes, you are writing what you know. Absolutely. Just don't write who you are. And you say that, but, really, you do it anyway. Cindique, for example, in many ways, is more me than Elwin is. If I were a girl, that would be me.
**What are you working on right now?
I write a lot. The thing I really want to spend some time on right now is about my father. It's tentatively called Gamblaz, because my father was a sailor, a minister, a cook, a husband, but he was always a gambler. We didn't know this. He tried to reach out to me at one point, and I didn't understand.
**Do your parents ''get'' your writing?
Yeah, mostly. I write a lot of erotica, so it's difficult sometimes for my mother to read it. I've never shown her my erotica, stuff I've had published in Brown Sugar, for example, but I have shown her other things. Churchboys she read cover to cover; Hoochie Mama, she just cracked up. I haven't shown her Gamblaz yet, and I don't know if I will. It was a very hard book for me to write. It was one of those books I knew I was going to write, but after my parents passed on. I have three more books like that. It's like, ``There are just certain things I can do better when you´re not around. I´m sorry, I love ya, but I want to be honest, and I can´t be honest as long as you´re around.´´
**Did any of your teachers really encourage you to pursue writing?
Jean J. Eargle. She was about 60 when I was her student in English in seventh grade. This woman made the mistake of saying, ''Oh, I see you write. If you'd like me to look at your stuff, I will.'' She would give me these great books to read, books by Langston Hughes and such, and one day she gave me Shogun. And I didn't like it. She said, ''That's interesting. You liked all the other books, but you don't like this one.'' I told her I thought it was boring, and she said, ''But you loved The Good Earth, and that was about Asia as well. And Shogun is a very popular book, they're making a movie out of it, and you don't like it?'' Then she said, ''Ahh, you only like the classics. You only like really good writing, don't you?'' At that point I hadn't made a distinction between the two, but now that I think about it, it took me years before I could read a popular book, because they weren't as dense and beautiful and artistically rendered as some of the great ones.
**And in return for her giving you such great literature, you let her read your own stuff.
I would bring in a chapter or two of the book I was working on. It was a sword and sorcery fantasy with characters named Grisnak and Gorbag, which I stole straight from The Lord of the Rings. There was a lot of thwapak! in it, which is the sound a testicle makes when you cut it off with a sword, and she would write, ''thway-pack?'' She'd go through all of it. She'd sit there reading it just like she would any other novel. That wasn't amazing to me back then, but it's amazing to me now, that she would do that for me.
**Has that had an impact on how you teach your own students now?
I think that's one of my methods as a teacher. It's this idea that they are students, and so you have to see where they're going to be down the line, their desire, their ambition. Because if you look at where they are now, and you say, ''He's no Hemingway,'' well, Hemingway was no Hemingway in ninth grade. Some of us forget that. The most talented students don't need our help -- they're going to keep writing anyway. It's those who have the desire and the ambition but just need a little polish -- a good teacher can point them in the right direction.
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$14.95 (Akashic Books)