Interview with Lewis Buzbee
Swetha Amit
Lewis Buzbee is the author of The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Blackboard, After the Gold Rush, Fliegelman’s Desire, and First to Leave Before the Sun (with Dave Tilton), as well as three award-winning books for younger readers: Steinbeck’s Ghost, The Haunting of Charles Dickens, and Bridge of Time. His essays, poems, stories, and interviews have appeared in Lit Hub, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, ZYZZYVA, Black Warrior Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A former bookseller and publisher, he lives in San Francisco, where he has taught writing for thirty years. Diver is available for preorder, and will be published March 4, 2025, by Palmetto Publishing.
Swetha Amit: Diver is an immersive and moving autobiographical novel about a son's love for his father, a career Navy deep sea diver, and the memories of their family, whose lives were shaped by military life and the wars they lived through: the Second World War, the Cold War, and Vietnam. How and when did the inspiration to write this novel come about? How long did it take you to put this together?
Lewis Buzbee, provided by Swetha Amir
Lewis Buzbee: A couple of months after the first Covid lockdown started, I was sitting around one Saturday night, reading, thinking about nothing in particular. Out of nowhere, the sentence “I couldn’t find him,” ran through my head, and I was immediately carried to the memory of a Boy Scout ski trip with my father, a memory I’d carried since he died, in 1970, when I was twelve. I immediately got up and “transcribed,” if you will, that memory. In that piece, the son can’t find his father in the noisy, communal cabin, so he goes out into the snowy night, searching for him. He eventually finds him at a bar up near the main road. That was the extent of it. The next day, I wrote out another short memory — the memory door seemed to have opened — of a day in 1966 when my father and brother, then a Marine, were chased off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk by the Shore Patrol; there had been an altercation with a “hippie.” The day after I wrote out this memory, Monday, May 4, 2020, was, coincidentally, the fifthieth anniversary of the Kent State Massacre. I had not been aware of that. It was also the fiftieth anniversary of the day my father died. For the first time in decades, I sobbed like a child over my father’s death.
I kept writing more of these childhood memories — “shards,” I came to call them — and soon realized I was working on a novel, clearly casting it as fiction now, giving the father and son names that were not ours, and filling in, sometimes inventing, details from my family’s life. I simply kept writing these shards, as they came to me, without much intention. I wrote the shards patiently, letting memories guide me. It was two years before I had a full draft.
SA: Speaking of shards, some chapters are written as vignettes, while others are more prolonged. Was this structure deliberately used to capture how memory works?
LB: I didn't set out to do that deliberately. But soon understood I was letting that twelve-year-old boy, sitting at his aunt’s house where the family has gathered to mourn, guide me to all the memories and questions and stories that assaulted him that morning. I wrote them down as they arrived, diving into each one, without questioning how or why they arrived when they did.
SA: Some chapters are in first person; some second, with the narrator directly addressing his father; and others in third, where you tell the story of the father’s life before Robert is born. What made you decide to use three points of view?
LB: I did not want this story to be a narrative. I could have easily made it a simple narrative, starting with the father's life and moving on to the son's. However, our lives are not such clean and direct arcs as we often pretend they are. Lives happen in shards, small and finite dramas, only slowly building up to a larger narrative. I didn't want to impose the narrative of a realistic novel on this life — that felt false. All of this was intuitive, of course, though when the draft was finished, and as I began to revise, I saw the narrative that was this family’s life, an arc created shard by shard.
The three different points of view allowed me to offer, I hope, a broader approach to this world. I could channel Robert’s own memories through the first person. Then I could dig more deeply into his confused thoughts on his father’s death by speaking to the father directly through the second person. Finally, I could tell the story of the father’s earlier life through the third person, as if Robert, having heard all these stories, was imagining how they had played out in the past. Memory, introspection, imagination.
SA: What made you choose to tell the story from a child's perspective? Did you face any challenges of transforming into a child narrator?
LB: The twelve-year-old in me woke up one day and made me realize it was time to remember. I wanted to stay in that moment, to capture what that first morning was like, as Robert’s world spun about him and shattered. I did not want any retrospective tone or voice or wisdom to intrude, not understanding but onslaught instead.
Along with my own — or Robert’s memories — I also wanted to investigate my father's life, a life shaped and shadowed by the winds of history: Leaving Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl as a boy, going to California with the Depression sinking in, abandoned in an orphanage for a year by his indigent parents, roaming the West by himself at fourteen, lying about his age and joining the Army in 1939, enlisting in the Navy after Pearl Harbor and becoming a deep sea diver, and finally, after more wandering, finding a settled home in San Jose, California, during the Vietnam war. My father had told me all these stories, so Robert knew them too, and I could look at this vagrant life my father had lived through the lens of the son. It felt more immediate that way.
A friend recently asked me if it was difficult emotionally to return to being that twelve-year-old. But it was not; in fact, it was exhilarating, bringing those people and places and times back to life, living in them again. For me, memory is a muscle. Over the years, I feel I’ve learned how to use that muscle in my writing, and the more I used it while writing Diver, the more alive the past became. Writing even the most complicated parts of these lives was sheer joy, a resurrection.
SA: Your language is a unique blend of prose and poetry, and I couldn't help but notice a few passages with breathless sentences. Was there a reason behind this technique?
LB: No. At this point in my writing, I try to be open and available to the sentences that arrive and allow the rhythm of these sentences to take me on whatever journey they will take me. Nothing was conscious — I merely agreed to sit down at the desk when called. I constantly read aloud when I’m working, over and over, before I move on to the next paragraph. For me, it's all about the rhythm. I won't stop until it sounds right to the ear. Breathless? I hear that, but that tone simply arose, as if the urgency of Robert’s memories on that morning insisted upon it.
Part of the aural quality, for me, is always found in the details. These names and these nouns add so much texture — a can of Olympia beer, a pack of Parliament cigarettes, the brassy Mark V diving helmet, the P-3 Orion submarine chasers that flew over our house every hour of every day. For me, these details are the driving force behind the rhythm of the sentences. I’m with Nabokov when he says that one of the goals of literature “is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right." I didn’t know it when I was drafting Diver, but this was, in some way, my main intention.
SA: There are many thought-provoking lines in your chapters. In one of them, the father says diving is his connection to life. Do you feel writing is your connection to life?
LB: Many people talk about writing, or reading, as an escape from the real world. For me, it's never been an escape; it offers, instead, a profound attachment to the world, an engagement. Writing gives me a sense of what religion and faith do for others. It can bring order to your life and make things more comprehensible. Writing makes me more curious about the rest of the world. When I'm writing, I want to know more; it fuels that hunger. “Writers are people upon whom nothing is lost,” said Gertrude Stein.
SA: In another chapter, the father says nature is a better teacher than books. What is your take on this as a writer who has also worked in bookselling and publishing?
LB: The great thing is we don't have to make that decision. My father wasn't a great reader of novels, though he always read newspapers and men’s magazines like Argosy and True. He would dive, and then he would read about diving. Books are key to making you a citizen of whatever world you inhabit. But you must go out and experience the “real” world as you read and write. It's hard to separate those two; one promotes the other.
SA: Since you talk a lot about the natural world, what is your relationship with nature as a writer?
LB: If I had a choice, I would write nothing but descriptions of landscapes. This is the world we live in. I am neither a big hiker nor a camper anymore, but nature is everywhere around us, even here in the crowded city where I live. We are part of nature, simply that. It would be weird to read something without any mention of landscape. As much as history, nature determines who we are. Studies show that we spend seventy percent of our brainpower merely keeping ourselves oriented in space, mammals trying to find their footing.
“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
SA: In the chapter “Friends,” you discuss your father’s loneliness and something of Robert’s too. Since writing is often portrayed as a lonely occupation, is it tough for writers to make long-lasting friendships?
LB: Oh, not at all. I have friends I've known for forty-five, fifty years, and many others, of course. Writers don’t just sit in poorly lit garrets, starving and raving. The solitude of writing makes me more appreciative of my dear friends and our connections. My father's life was quite lonely in some sense — a military life can do that. And he always seemed to be searching for the family he had lost earlier, but he was always making friends, too, in whatever bar we went to, by the side of a lake fishing with strangers, everywhere.
Writing is solitary but not lonely. I was once given a cabin in the woods to write for a week, and found I couldn't write a line, just too lonely — and a little spooky. I prefer to write at my desk and later see my friends, hang out at bars and bookstores, or with my daughter. I need both solitude and connection — that staves off loneliness.
SA: You also mention a lot of music. Does it influence your writing?
LB: Constantly. When I discovered the Beatles’ Abbey Road at twelve years old, it opened up a new world for me. The other night, watching a Fleetwood Mac concert from the 90s, I was transported back to the late 70s, when I first knew their music. It inspired me to write a story based on the rather lost twenty-something young man I was then. Music is always a source of inspiration for making a particular world and time come alive. And the rhythm, of course, the melodies, how those underlie my prose — or at least I hope they do.
SA: Speaking of time, two timelines are covered in your book: the narrator’s childhood and the early life of the narrator's father. There are a lot of similarities in those timelines. It is said time changes everything.
LB: We never get far from where we came from. Still, we need to change, and we do. Change creates time, the physicists say. If there is no change, there is no time. Time changes everything, but it changes nothing. Things distinctly change for the narrator from the moment of his father's death. He starts to see the world differently. My father and I were very close, but if he had lived through my teenage years, well, that certainly would have changed the relationship we had. I shudder to think about that.
SA: How has writing this book changed you?
LB: Every book changes the writer, I think, but because this book is so autobiographical and so personal, I know it has changed me, though I’m not sure how yet. I was grateful to go back in time and relive those memories. I sometimes wish I had written this book earlier, but I don't think I could have. Also, I hadn't written adult novels in a while, writing nonfiction and novels for younger readers. Diver, happily, made me realize I could still write adult novels.
SA: Your book primarily concerns memory. What was the most memorable aspect of writing this book? Do you consider memory a boon or a bane?
LB: Writing this book was memorable because, as I’ve said already, it brought that world back to life. I have been carrying these memories around for fifty years and have never escaped them. It was lovely to find that world more significant and brighter when I dove into it. Memory is neither bane nor boon. It's a wonderful tool that we possess. Memory makes us more cohesive and whole, and most importantly, it makes us human.
SA: Is there any intended message for readers?
LB: No message, really, I’m not sure that literature requires a message. But I do hope to provoke my readers. With all my books, I don't want readers to say that was entertaining, then move on. I want them to close the books, reflect on their lives, and evoke their own memories and imaginations. I want readers to be involved in the conversation. Provocation.
SA: This must be a long list. But which books and writers have been a significant influence on your writing?
LB: Being a voracious reader, I read broadly and deeply. But my clear favorites are John Steinbeck, Raymond Carver, and Joan Didion, all, not surprisingly, writers who grew up in the West. Beverly Cleary is another, a wonderful children's writer, but also one of the great Western prose stylists and a great comic novelist. Italo Calvino cracked open the idea for me that a novel doesn't have to be linear. And I’d be nowhere as a prose writer without all the poetry I’ve read — Stevens and Gluck top my list. Every prose writer should read poetry; it does wonders for the rhythm and sound of your prose and that bigger view of the mysterious world, along with its many other pleasures.
SA: Lastly, are there any more books in the pipeline?
LB: I’m just starting a new novel with a fourteen-year-old narrator. It takes place on the beaches of Troy, where, first enslaved as kitchen help, he finds he’s about to be sent into battle. I am interested in exploring themes like class and coming of age — a boy turning into a man.
