Robert Boswell

Robert Boswell has written 11 books and a prize-winning play, but he’s not what you’d call a typical New Mexico writer—you won’t find in most of his work tales of coyotes, cultural icons, or folklore. Instead, you’ll find interesting characters and superbly crafted stories. His recent short story collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (Graywolf Press, 2009), has received attention from The New York Times book review and O magazine. When not writing, Boswell teaches at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where he lives with his wife, fellow author and NMSU professor Antonya Nelson. In January, he’ll be teaching at the University of Houston. Jeff Berg catches up with him about the craft of writing, life in New Mexico, and Oprah.

Q: What inspires you to write?

A: I’m not so much inspired to write as driven to do it. I worry stories to life.

My writing process goes something like the following: I scuttle and scramble about to get some words down, and then I revise endlessly—30 to 50 drafts of everything—hammering at the pages as if they’d insulted my wife. I wrangle with language, tussle with characters, and even take ill-advised swings at the settings. I find ways to make my fiction happen, but it involves pillaging the past, shadowing wild geese, staring at strangers, mixing oil and water, striking a lot of dead matches, planting bombs in paragraphs, beating a whole team of dead horses, and working like a three-dollar mule.

Do you find that living in New Mexico inspires some of your work?

I’ve lived in New Mexico exactly 20 years. My wife and I bought a big old adobe house in Las Cruces in the summer of 1989, and we began teaching that fall at New Mexico State University. Over those years, I’ve published nine books. All have been affected by living here, but two are very clearly the products of New Mexico, and they could not have been written had I lived elsewhere.

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards has garnered attention from the New York Times book review and made O magazine’s list, “25 Books You Can’t Put Down.”What’s your reaction to this media exposure?

Being a literary writer is something like being a backup shortstop on a team that’s 20 games out in August. Anytime anyone notices your efforts, you are both surprised and grateful.

The reviews of Heyday have been sweet, and there have been enough of them that the book has actually sold quite well. As for Oprah, I was a fan of hers even before she gave my book the nod on her summer list. I know a number of the writers who have appeared on her television program, and they’re artists I admire. I’d like to make her an honorary member of our English Department.

Are you working on another book?

I’m working on two novels. One is a novel in stories. I have two obsessive characters about whom I’ve been writing for the past 12 years. Their lives are intertwined in meaningful and unfortunate ways. I’ve written a few new stories about them recently, and I completed a draft of the book [last] summer.

I’m also cranking out a few stories and considering writing a memoir about a ghost town in Colorado, a piece of which my wife and I bought a couple of years ago. I don’t know if the story would be compelling, but my efforts at carpentry are definitely funny. We own the old post office, and we’re trying to restore it. I think owning the post office officially makes me a man of letters.

For info: www.robertboswell.com

Himself a postmaster when he lived in Montana, Jeff Berg, now of Las Cruces, has for many years now been a different sort of man of letters.

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