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Writing Against the Bone: An Interview with Chuck Kinder

October 16, 2001

Chuck Kinder is the author of several novels, most recently Honeymooners, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. He has attended numerous colleges, and was a Mirreelees fellow at Stanford University. He is currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Jon Manning/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux

 

Heather Thomson is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and a former student of Kinder's.

 

 

Thomson: How did a kid from rural West Virginia end up in the San Francisco literary scene of the 1970s?

 

Kinder: How did I get from the hills of West Virginia to Stanford? That's so convoluted . . . well, I never really took school seriously, unlike everyone else I can think of, and I really attended maybe about a half dozen various colleges in southern West Virginia. I'd go for a term, knock off for a term or a year and work and I've had a multitude of interesting jobs. I've worked in coal mines, I worked in the steel mills up in Cleveland, I--what else did I do?--well, I ran moonshine with my uncles. I was a bartender, of course, and a bouncer...

Finally--what happened to me?--well, I was at West Virginia Institute of Technology in the Kanawa Valley, and I married the homecoming queen, Miss Golden Bear. I'm a man who was married to Miss Golden Bear. She was a very linear, sweet, dear woman who looked like Mary Tyler Moore, and she got a job in Morgantown, West Virginia teaching math at the junior high school level and I simply went up there and popped into their MA program . . . I was supposed to go to law school, that was my original idea, but I found out that I couldn't do it, simply because I had a little bit of a record, and you can't go to law school with a little bit of a record. And so I got into the MA program, and wrote the first creative writing thesis there--it was called Memorial Day--and then I got a job handed to me at Waynesburg College. I mean, literally, the English department chairman came to my door and knocked on it. He wanted to start a writing program, and since I had written the first creative writing thesis out at Morgantown, he just knocked on my door and said, "Do you want a job?" and I said, "Yes, yes!"

I taught there for about two years, maybe three, and I had a scholarship offered to me by Indiana University . . . so I was gonna be an academic, but then various, sort of expatriate, doper West Virginians had a house together, a commune together, in San Francisco, and I had sort of a mid-life crisis when I was 23, and I said, "I'm not gonna do this," and literally I bagged the scholarship, I quit my job . . . I bagged everything, including my first wife. I didn't bag her, I basically just begged her to let me go be a hippie and a flower child, and got on a Greyhound bus and went to San Francisco.

My idea was to be a flower child. I wanted to be a hippie. I wanted to be part of the Age of Aquarius. I got out there and moved into the commune, and I realized that I would never be a successful flower child because I was too much of a redneck. I had to eat red meat, I mean a lot of it, you know, six burgers a day. All my little flower child friends started calling me "Big Mac breath." And the peace and love stuff, the free love stuff. I'm from West Virginia--anything "free" makes me nervous, and especially love, free love? I really couldn't handle it. And plus the peace stuff. There was this big, thuggy flower child, much bigger than me, who would come to my part of a little room, in my little commune, and he would liberate my love beads. I was wearing love beads, and a bandanna, sandals, of course, and that's when I grew my hair long. I would say things like "groovy" and "far out." So he would come in and liberate my love beads, and liberate my purple-tinted shades, and say, "Well, they're the peoples' shades man, you know, man." And I said, "Don't do this any more," and so I liberated his lip, that's what I finally did. I popped him. And my little flower children buddies threw me out, I got drummed out of the commune. It was heartbreaking.

Meanwhile, I'd applied to Iowa and Stanford at the same time, and I got accepted into Iowa with a teaching fellowship, and I accepted. But then two weeks later I got offered a Mirreelees [fellowship] at Stanford so I said, "I'll go to Stanford," and so I did.

 

Thomson: Honeymooners has been described as a "Pittsburgh literary legend." How does it feel to have your work described in those terms?

 

Kinder: To be called a legend, under any circumstances, no matter how inaccurate it is, feels wonderful. It's only a legend 'cause people said, "Poor old Chuck--he's still writin' that big dumb book" . . . the word "legend" just means that people talk about it, and you know, as I said, "Poor old Chuck, he's still workin' on that big dumb book." And that's basically it, you know. If anything lasts long enough, is around long enough, it's going to be a legend in some sense. So in other words, it's not a term I take too seriously as applied to me or my work.