Literary Birthday – 9 September – Bob Shacochis

Happy Birthday, Bob Shacochis, born 9 September 1951.

Seven Quotes

When you meet powerful men or just read about them in the newspapers, you see that they don’t have a sense of boundaries.
For any artistic person who creates imaginary people, the art is like inhabiting the life and mind of a seven-year-old child with imaginary friends and imaginary events and imaginary grace and imaginary tragedy.
From the minute Europeans landed on these shores, the bloodshed hasn’t stopped for a second. We are a nation that has killed itself toward the summit of beautiful ideals and exceptionalism and ultimately global power.
I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it’s to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.
Trying to get the sentences right and the structure of the narration right is about as big a job as I can handle. But I also know that if you handle that job properly, everything else just clicks into place.
You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in – the crises in which you’ve placed them.
We choose the lies in which we participate and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time.

Bob Shacochis is an acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, and literary journalist. His works include The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love.