A Word on Words; 0864; Thomas Sanchez

a program delving into the world of books and their authors tonight thomas sanchez talks about mile zero your host for word on words mr john simko publisher of the tennessean and editorial director of usa today cleaning ladies and then once again welcome toward own words singing i am i guess as a novelist thomas sanchez greg every year for having me eric is going from santa fe new mexico i know that i put you under great pressure type travel i apologize for that but it's worth it said here to talk about oh this new book called mild zero you must be pre happy about mile zero think well it's been ten years in the writing and before i began miles there was actually said in california and mexico it was a novel that really was concerned and its and its origins with the vietnam generation and what they did they're coming of age and out of the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties really handy in the

late nineteen seventies that not been able to get the voice is somehow like i really had half a book without knowing it and i was on the lam from writing this book it was originally called cosmic buffalo soldiers and i in that it ended up seismic connelly sold cars and buffalos so well that is a city where there's a western image that conveys a western and the deathly the us and the uk like that something was off in my own mind and i had a sort of like the opposite the obvious and hamlet you know when he says by my words fly up the pythons remain below for me what was happening is my thoughts were flying up but my words remain below i didn't have the language i didn't have them music i didn't have the sound of the characters and i wasn't on the lam from this book and it was headed up to the caribbean and freedom i had a place above a gambling casino and he said that's a perfect place for you to go and write then of course in the back of my mind i knew was a pretty place not to write poems to do everything so i was headed there was actually insane martin's and for

today's lee i describe up down key west i've always been fascinated by this island that was the southernmost island ways south of the south and i want to have this rather extraordinary history of being for example the only southern city during the civil war that aligned itself with the north and here you think this is the southernmost city in united states of america but always have this sort of eccentric air about it now because i'm sort of founded by pirates but it also have the sort of underground are countless of of the contraband east as those who from the pirate times up to modern times are always rolling in and ready to smuggle anything because there they were and they get sort of like and right at the cutting edge of the caribbean basin with various governments surrounding the weather geek you were or whether the mexico and the united states one thing is legal here it's illegal over there they make about god in a cell refrigerators desk most of that's the way it is that the us was in an apple off refrigerators and this kickstarter has to have a lot to do with the cubans end of the first day

union labor union and america which most people are unaware of was a cuban cigar makers union in key west florida que es and then really at one point the richest city in this country for richer than boston or new york of the time the clipper ships and that went to being the poorest city but der das ist this history of kind of going up and down like the tides when i got there was the right at the time of the first space shuttle launch and at that time when they tremendous wave of immigration was coming out of haiti because it was at the time and baby doc to buy a really a gown than the spores country of the ugly in the entire western hemisphere the haitians people were being driven out on both sides and the wrist shark infested waters starvation dehydration to reach the american shores and reached the american dream and many of them were coming ashore independent places like he was so you had key west which is literally miles early end to the maris wrote if you take highway one down from a new wind up in us and there's a big sign that has a zero on it and if you're a haitian coming

from the other direction ironically this is not the end of the road for you this is the beginning of the dream and that in my own mind for just have a new metaphor because here i was went with that with these extraordinary events happening says this wave of emigration from haiti which is that the enduring american thing that i've immigration and that migration for us americans and at the same time the first patient was large and say here you have people coming to america and yet the americans already having to wear are still half russell another runner here we've made a getaway car and were about to use it and miles are really begins with the first space shuttle launch in nineteen eighty one and a boatload of haitians coming ashore and sql really fascinated by is the year of the way the book began ten years ago and that i guess part of what i'm hearing you say is that the voices are the voices didn't ring true to you right person was creating them and

were characters like girl who stole and voltaire and susie a tv celebrity to show our that tennessee seven dollars rose says it cooked on tv and and bubble bob with a n n n another transformation in the earlier version are did those characters emerge once you went you got them out there if that's a fascinating question about process because they really did emerge from the the way they originally from mapped out in my mind that you know you always hear people say well i have a great story and if i really had time i'd write a novel world really and there are great stories of the world is filled with with three with the most extraordinary stories that remain even yet i'm told the novels really are about great stories novels are really about characters now a real and novels are really about language and really the ability to come veda motion to a reader in that greatest of warfare which is a theater of the mind

man when i heard these particular voices i think every writer really need savoy says that's the key a novel right characters at ikea recently had contemplated and been taking notes on his i'm in china hundreds of pages of notes those characters then grew into something else as soon as they have their own language so the characters you just mentioned originally started out as one thing and that became another thing over ten years very much at the same club is really that keith again and laila yes who is the rector helen becomes a woman's life where i take it that they would have been some form close to the way they came out in a book i might very much they're not that's very fair dan saint cloud ise the characters it was a breakout radical from the sixties in berkeley is an anti war activists and really is on the run from his own idealism which is lost and he ends up he bounces down to make a mile zero and it's there that he meets laila who really jumpstart his heart and that's the beginning of of his reawakening and he becomes involved with

voltaire asian refugee that they're trying to keep from being sent back to haiti gets a big sign clutter from murder to be tried for murder the same club character really if it's a trial and the idea the top of the arctic grayling in that entire country there's only one court of law can imagine i mean and they call a record of laughter but you might have if you have if you have that you do have the south and you have one court of law just says if you begin to get in the toilet at which what i love to do you go off into something is very difficult to return from but this character saying cloud what was the focus of the novel originally because originally i was trying to i want to tell a story of the sixties generation that had not really been portrayed so much in the median and in the end felmy and novels as much as i really thought had been the trade really there was that there was an essence to that generation that had been sold short people are looking back on it but it was a time of a fats of hippies it's like a billion and i really forgot the indian intense commitment both political emotional that existed during that time so i wanted this icloud character

dickens vega but as i started the novel in key west i realize what was a looming me all those years and what was alluding me as if i was still being pulled back to the past to the sixties to the seventies and i had half of the novel and was in key west that i realized i was awakened by this different ship because i been looking as a californian aptly the pacific rim being the cutting edge of the american experience tomorrow and when i got there when i got to the south when i got to that to key west i saw there was another perspective here you are looking at the place where five hundred years ago christopher columbus came ashore and you're looking at the caribbean basin a geopolitical situation which is impacting the southeast of the united states and then moving up across the united states that this is another future and this is the future that really has been map that it's uncharted territory so was there a key west i saw the other half of my novel which was the realities of the post vietnam generation and that is what mile zero concert itself you know it's something of a

mind stretch to be able to write with realism about in one hand the impact of that that the mechanical birds going up until a year and at the same time to be able to write with religion about the route of culture and those things are so alien and one when i think of the money i think instinctively of two stories two books one bit aspect of life is so in the other and i guess as an author it must have occurred you maybe didn't maybe you to bow having having discovered now zero maybe maybe you had more faith into question whether you'd be able

to write about such widely divergent aspects of this society and we found yourself we speak to that little guy did give that is curious you if you would bring that up because you do a route that really is the heart of the matter with miles or the opening passage of miles earl there's a space shuttle being shot off and in the crowd noticing this is another the haitians that have been brought ashore is a character by that goes by the name of a space cadet who is actually in the novel a consciousness called cell block and so bob is the the fragmentation of our culture he's the sort of the breakup of organized everything organized government organized religion you name it mankind i mean huge and he personifies that and he proceeds that's they show being fired as not a great technological new technological leap forward his perception is we have already to spoil the planet earth and that we are now firing a virus

into a pure universe and he says in his dementia that he is going to put him to if he is going to stop that time before mankind kills again he becomes and literature really almost think he's a no wait sorcerer and that speaks to what you're talking about what they eat the bodo in the south korea and you pick up the headlines now and use the siberian the news of the deal in all these strange arcane colts are there are all across this country and in mexico a lot of it is drug related a lot of it is not it's because people have lost their faith in organize government an organized religion that this is beginning to happen more and more and more so you get the individual becomes the most dangerous bubble who has no sense of accountability to anyone or to anything and pursues his own agenda and that is about ten miles arrow and he is dogging the streets of key west and it's only sang clout and mr cameron no acumen cop who really sense that he has something far more dangerous than simply a serial murderer for example right there is that there is that scene with the skeleton where bubble bomb and sink

plant in deep trouble bubble bob's of russia's to the rescue and and that i mean that really is ominous the heart of of the room culture and when i wrote it i related to it never really thought about how it might be to write about it but it read an effort that had a thread that rang true to me and i guess that's the test really is you know how did you get inside how to get inside a well it took ten years to write the smiles ear and i think it was in the process of really not writing myself out there writing myself and it was almost as if there was a personal implosion i got to the point where i had actually no we go left i think if people see offers on programs like this i say oh well they're really at it because i want to be on television and they want to have their their books reviewed in newspapers the site

so if you if that's what one wanna do they would use them like i'd done ten years in a room working on a novel that you didn't have a contract for and really marching to your own drummer and not knowing ten years ago when you finish the book would ever be accepted or for would have any relation to the real world as we would know it ten years later and i really think it's almost when you write a novel and you go out for ten years it's like going fishing or fly fishing and it's you were you had your fly in the end of that book and you toss it out of the way and then it comes down the current and ten years later as the land of the right place and the fish has to be there and when you go out as a novelist as a country that likes to vinnie likes to act as if it has no history of the country that focus is continually on a present and perhaps a bit of the future everything is a three minute love affair it's a good sense of maybe even a five minute marriage and it's a country that is that is naps and that is burned its bridges behind it as well as almost burned bridges before anomalous really is involved in sort of creating

they're not creating of sensing a link to the past from the length of the future that is really what miles earls all about is a good deal of history as you know having read the book that is woven through the chinese have a sign that the gateway to the future is through the past and i think it's very very important as americans that we focus more on our past there isn't as character this is a tough cop i think of it as a pretty cynical no se la life and still he says you know he says and we live about a roulette and this is a paraphrase that there's something bigger than we are something to better life on and it had an almost

so he didn't seem cynical and it was almost as if he were saying i have faith and i guess i think that to the pilot this story is is or is not it's not a message book it is a good story but that but it does seem to me that there is a message of lost hope we discovered that seems that that is an important thing it really is a theme of miles or in mile zero is a novel of redemption it's not a novel of despair and if i really if if i really fell that was all the spare i mean we might as well just poetry isn't all a notorious and get it over with but i don't obviously and that's why would spend ten years on something that has as arcane as the american the hubble and mr cameron i mean it's a this there's that old saying that if you want peace in a country have to have peace and you're in your state you want these unused they get their piece

your town one piece of the county up their piece in your family and who still goes back to the family and he goes back to the history of the family and that's something that many of us in this country no longer have the luxury up and then it becomes the rock that really sustains them visit he has a connection to a past and most of the other characters don't have that they're in migration their transitory their fragmented by this modern society that we all live in and that's why these of these elements of swirl around that swirl around who still all through the novel and he's the only one who maintains that he's continually tested by various salacious piece of business called angelica who runs a barn exactly exactly why that were these were these characters come from a you know i think of single out i think of laila i think of who stole a less a voltaire think voter might be a figment

of your imagination not because he doesn't ring true value does god simply because he's to me that he is a peace created full of thing but the others and in many voter to butt butt where they come from ali people you know lay composites that they knew then weren't continually us that you know i think there's more because of the effect that i think is it's it's i wrote it as i did i feel one part of it is very much and the pats another part of me is much much closer to mr cameron as i live today and as i see the future and how i wanted how i personally want a deal the future but let's take for example voltaire i spent ten years and miles or one of the things it took so long i have this i'm compelled really not only to write words of the imagination that works of veracity i think that writers are not unlike any other reporters i mean we chase in a siren will follow an ambulance

that we just report on something a little different which happens to be the spirit of mankind at a particular point in its transitory situation voltaire was a character that grew out of my going to the chrome detention camp in little haiti actually it went from little haiti to the chrome detention camp in miami which is where they were holding the haitians that they were that they were captured and what bothered me enormously what drew me to the situation was during this time if you happen to be a russian acrobat and you go off of a boat of an airplane in miami and said you wanted a fact you're met with them with roses and champagne and put up in the month as his hotel in miami but if you happen to be someone escaping dubai a and risking your own life to get to america they slammed do in the slammer and you had no idea you were ever going to go back and began be killed in your own country where you would spend the rest of their life in jail and prison this is a very extraordinary situation i spent a lot of time in chrome investigating that and reading a lot of secret documents to the government and compiled their trials going on at that time and some of that documentation i

got in and the lady through various station so voltaire is more real and eyes and i realize real aunts and all of the characters as a character called him k does really the renegade allows a l i was and he a relentless is really exactly an nba is the other side of saint cloud is like i think ironically those people who remember the vietnam war most are those who fought in it and those who fought against him k represents those who fought and it's and clever videos and this interplay between them takes place throughout the novel they are really two sides of the same coin was matter of fact it is the image that they used to have a seven spanish bullfighting something of a logical which was called to fight a bull column on them that meant that too both fighters would be so together in their blood as brothers that they could fight a bull with no pay between them once or between the east and the ball would make a past they would use the other's body

instinctually as a k to mislead the balls of the kill could be made ahead and miles there or the bowl between n k and sang cloud is obviously vietnam it moves into modern times it moves and what's happening right now in central america i spent nineteen eighty two i was in el salvador during the first free elections in thirty five years shot up it if you get there you shot by every side as a negative is what's it happen beyond and i spent five years going back and forth the central americans just background in the character of them carry a wooden very easy for me to be a kind of writer looks out his when his library when dylan looks down the road imagine what's on the other side of the hill but i really feel that you know you really should go down that road and go crawl under the other side of the hill not to bare witness so much but as too as two really the decay your own particular imagination because the novels or works of imagination but there they also have to be works of emotional veracity and that's a very important factor to me so these

characters that may seem even and i would hope that they seem original and they seem like they're made from whole cloth there is a tremendous amount behind that there's a there's a mountain of notes a notation them i can tell you there were good was there was over a thousand pages long and its original draft him k i wrote an entire book and miles are called encased book one there was to be an unpaid book too was over a hundred pages alone i removed it because i thought what happened with the veterans vietnam was in central america was similar in my own mind to what happened back during the vietnam war itself would say the tet offensive in nineteen sixty eight that word been going on for some time but americans get their information primarily through television so finally they see what happens at ted and sixty eight and they say my god there's a war going on where losing the war and this war is growing the american spirit something has to be done here we have nineteen eighty nine people see on television suddenly the fall the panamanian government the fall of the

colombian government the fall now beaten the quantum on government because of this because of this drug war that's going on and they're saying my god there's a drug war going on we're losing that drug war is co wrote in the american spirit and the battle is right here in america so to me there are a tremendous number of parallels between then and now and it's that balance that i really wanted to get to a mile zero to eligible that people like me to ask you about the hemingway poll that draws a writer to that environment i've had three offers a us program who have said that i could never write in orland to live you want to move away i couldn't finish the book that temperature was pretty oppressive situation

and like my creative juices really only juices that could unfold it and some people say that when hemingway got in that mile zero atmosphere that letter and it was not that conducive to to writing good but it's inevitable that other people and i ask about the hemingway him the heroes hurtling down a no no i don't have these i don't look down on them certainly are and he's no hero i'd i'd i'd like to live in a country without heroes were people are personal accountability hemingway was was never to me as a young writer or someone that i emulated or iranians all know faulkner far more than the american ever been hemingway's life was at its particular fascination but the ironic thing for me as of hemingway's worst book was written in key west africa have not and it really is a book about a guy milling around about how is cheating on his wife and if you look back at that time you say how could he have lived there and this one a most extraordinary periods for a backdrop for a novel which

was key west during the depression and shortly thereafter and at its deepest the poorest place in this absolutely become the poorest boys and he was so involved with himself that he overlooked an incredible story a novel of the man who who had to be there now on the fine line and there is some mythology about how close the bullets came but but there it can be no doubt that he was there in the audience and they've been invaded the other times where the world where there was actually i mean he was a good love the bull ring and a man who he saw action was in the midst of it and didn't even know well i can happen all the feminine one of synagogue doesn't follow the same old but that's the fascinating thing about key west says it's a it has attracted writers of a certain stature over the years and even before they

had a particular stature but key west isn't i think it's bigger than all writers i think that's what's always attracted writers tick us from tennessee williams well it goes all the way back to what fascinated me certain writers are certain writings that he was from the writings of audubon for example the writings or down the poetry of elizabeth bishop says there's an entire body of language an american literature that revolves around us that very few people are aware of that it really is bettering because you would think that it was the size of new york state from what's come out of there now why key west what's the reason for key west i mean is it because it's this little island that served between the atlantic and the girl's strength and towing a little while and the silent as the larger than the miami airport and there is this there's something quite unusual about a vigil often hear key west and paris in the same breath or how can you talk like that and what miles there was all about was really trying to explore these layering upon malaria layering of history and happy

happenstance and circumstance and credible american panoramic scope that that little place has in its its really isn't mile zero almost as a metaphoric stage for applying out of you know the american dream that you have in america you won't continues yellowing project runway or any idea was that effect on the plane here today at that time i've written have a baby and you write about i think another play right up as well say setting not very different setting and i'm really after i had written miles around and i hadn't seen my french publisher for sixteen years and i walk an apparatus was harris and he said thomas inches all through boyle's featuring johnson this program was produced in the studios of the bbc and television located in nashville tennessee