Ron Currie, Jr.
Ron Currie, Jr.'s prizewinning fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun, Other Voices, and Night Train. He has been shortlisted for the Fish International Short Story Award and Swink magazine's Emerging Writer Award.
In June 2007, he applied the Page 69 Test to his acclaimed debut novel, God Is Dead. More recently, he shared some thoughts with My Book, The Movie on the cast should the book be adapted for the movies.
Last year, Sarah Woehler Michaud interviewed Currie for Bookslut. The opening exchanges from the interview:
What compelled you to write a book such as God Is Dead? If I can recall, there is a very famous philosopher who coined the term.The simple and probably most honest answer is that it was what I needed to be writing at the time. Which sounds sort of mystical, and consequently a little suspect, but it’s true. I was at a point in my growth as a writer where I was really exulting in the absolute freedom that fiction (as opposed to reportage or creative nonfiction) allows. My brain was popping with all these crazy, improbable ideas, and I had a blast trying to string them all together in the same book. I wanted to recreate the experience of wanting to read a book over and over. And of course Nietzsche said famously “God is dead,” but my book is much more in the spirit of a line from The Brothers Karamazov: “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Now that’s a fun premise to work from. How has the path you’ve taken led you to where you stand today?
Completely by accident. Okay, no, that’s not entirely true. But there were definitely substantial detours. After high school I spent only a semester in undergrad studies, then came home and floundered about for a while, drinking a lot and not thinking too much about anything, least of all my future. It’s easy to do in your early twenties, I guess, with your life stretching to the horizon and beyond.
I worked and traveled a bit. At first I worked crap jobs because I was sort of lazy and without much ambition. As I got more serious about writing I continued working crap jobs to protect my writing time and energy. Though I never believed I’d have a chance to call my writing a career, in the sense of making a living from writing fiction. I think I had some vague idea of parlaying good publishing credits into a teaching job somewhere, kind of circumventing my lack of credentials.
Read the full interview.
Visit Ron Currie, Jr.'s website, his MySpace page, and learn more about God Is Dead.
--Marshal Zeringue
