Pictured Brian Bouldrey.
The Boom Economy (Terrace Books, 2003, $24.95), the new novel by Brian Bouldrey, takes on a number of hot topics, including gays within the Catholic church, the birth of the AIDS cocktail, life expectancy, and complex friendships, and does so with a humanity, grace and insight that is rare in contemporary fiction. Currently living and teaching in the Chicago area, I had the pleasure of speaking with Bouldrey about his relocation, his work as an educator, and his new book.
Gregg Shapiro: What is it that brought you to the Chicago area?
Brian Bouldrey: I'd been wanting to move back here for about five years before I actually did. San Francisco became impossible. When I was there for the first 12 years or so, it was the kind of place where you could do what you wanted to do and have enough money to live. It stopped being that way; slowly and then completely. When I finally moved here (to Chicago), people asked me why I would leave San Francisco. I said, 'I can't tell you how much happier I am here.' I am so happy here.
GS: You said that you had been wanting to move 'back' to Chicago.
BB: I grew up in Michigan and I went to Northwestern for my undergrad.
GS: You have come full circle.
BB: It's kind of Welcome Back, Kotter, in fact. It is kind of weird because several of my colleagues at the university are my old teachers.
GS: What are you teaching at Northwestern?
BB: I am teaching in the Creative Writing program in the English Department. It's a pretty rigorous program that they have set up and I was a graduate of it. Which is probably some of the reason why I got the job. I know how it works and I respect its tenets. I'm really happy there and I like my colleagues. I like being on the campus. I'm in the third year of a four-year contract. I would love to find a way to stay.
GS: Is this a B.A. or B.F.A. program?
BB: It's a B.A.—an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing. We're also launching a master's (M.A.) in Creative Writing. I'm co-director with Reg Gibbons.
GS: As with The Genius of Desire and Wrestling With The Angel, religion, specifically Catholicism, figures into your new novel The Boom Economy (or, Scenes From Clerical Life).
BB: I don't want to sound like a lapdog to the Pope, because I actually think he's kind of evil (laughs). But it seems to me that my continued interest in it is more on a cultural level. I think of my Jewish friends and how they respond to their Jewish religious things, and how it is more about cultural traditions. It's how my brain is hard-wired at this point. I do a lot of traveling in Europe, especially Catholic Europe. I'm stunned at the way I feel at home there, when I go to Spain. Most of my friends who are Spanish are actually atheistic, but they're Catholic atheists.
GS: It's like you said, it's how they are hard-wired.
BB: Absolutely. I love this city. I love having my neighbors downstairs being Muslim and my neighbors across the way being Jewish and all the different flavors. But vacation is really vacation in Spain because everybody is kind of the same for me (laughs). It's a weird thing to say. But I have lots of quibbles about what's been going on (in the Catholic church), especially lately. The hypocrisy. My father has suddenly gotten involved with Knights of Columbus. I was talking about one of my best friends here in town who works at Swedish Covenant Hospital and is practicing to become a mid-wife. I was driving in the car with my dad and I was telling him about it. How it's always an adventure working on the night shift, because whoever comes in at night, especially in the wintertime is really going to have that baby. Out of the blue, he says, 'She's not performing abortions, is she?' I'm thinking, 'Don't start this fight, because we'll fight.'
GS: He wasn't that way before?
BB: No. And I said, 'You never cared until you became involved with Knights Of Columbus.' (laughs)
GS: The subject of AIDS/HIV doesn't seem to be as prevalent in gay lit in 2003 as it was in 1993, and it is the central part of The Boom Economy. What do you think of that change in the literature?
BB: It's a case of writing about something after you have walked away from it so that you can get some perspective on it. I can't see it when I'm right there. It's probably going to be a long time before I'm able to write about Chicago. I can now see San Francisco, the shape of it. It almost feels that way with HIV. It's not that it's over, but I'm looking at what happened back there with almost a historical eye. In fact, I'm now working on an essay about a very strange period of time that nobody ever spoke of in the early 1990s. It's kind of in the book, the period between 1990 and 1993, when everything was in full awfulness. People knew when they were going to die, so they made preparations by having wild, weird parties and spending a lot of money at a dinner party where they would have million-dollar bottles of wine or a snake charmer. That kind of living and the legacy of that. For me, it's a legacy because for a long time I really didn't bother saving money. One of the biggest issues in my life—and my life is perfect, except I don't own real estate, because I didn't bother (laughs). I hate that now. I wasn't one of those people who maxed out their credit cards, but I certainly spent all my money on travel and other things. I'm glad I did that and I don't want to stop that lifestyle. But you do have to rein in yourself. I really figured that this book would be a hard sell because nobody wants to talk about this anymore. I'm really curious to see if the book is of interest to people or if they will say, 'That's ancient history.'
GS: I think that one of the things that The Boom Economy has going for it is that it has the distinction of being the first novel that I know of, to deal with the birth of 'the cocktail.' It's this incredibly exacting, heart-pounding thing to read. What was it like to write about that?
BB: Sometimes it felt like being a documentarian. That I wasn't using my fictional tools. There was, in the study that I was in, a time when they were posting these charts … there were 20 of us in the dosage study … and watching the numbers over the course of four hours … it was wild. I would have loved to have asked the doctors for the charts. I took all these pieces of things and weaved them together. Sometimes that stuff is so wild that it looks implausible.
GS: You also address the issue of AIDS survivors in literature.
BB: I went to see the parents of my partner, Jeff, who died, who live in Illinois, about two hours from Chicago, at the end of May for the tenth year of his passing. It's almost a cliché of a small town. The cemetery is on the edge of this farming town. I went out there with my dog and we were looking for the grave and just as I find it, enshrined with plastic flowers, this lonesome train goes by. Then I go to his folks' house to have dinner with them. They're really nice to me and everything. They asked me what I thought of the cocktail and I told them how much it has changed things. Of course, his parents didn't know a thing until he came out to them at the same time he told them he was sick and he was going to die—throwing it all at them at the same time. They really got savvy. These farmers who are now savvy about HIV. Jeff's mom is really happy for everyone, she was like, 'That's really great.' But at the same time there is a bitter edge. If he had only waited two more years then he would have been on that chuck wagon.
GS: There are also multiple locales in novel—Vancouver, San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif., Minneapolis and Mankato, Minn., Alaska and parts of France—have you actually lived in all of those places, if not, why were they chosen?
BB: Most of those places, I have. I actually have two good friends—one who lives in Minneapolis and one who was an Episcopalian minister in Mankato, so I would visit them often. I lived in Alaska, which was insane (laughs). I lived in the interior. I spent a year right after college—one of those, 'I'm going to have my adventure' kind of things—through, of all things, the Campfire Girls. They had this program where they put us together in groups to teach children to swim in the Yukon (laughs). In the weirdest twist of luck, they paired me up with Ida Mae, the Vancouver lesbian, and we got along famously.
GS: In the last few years, Chicago has become the site of both vital queer studies (John D'Emilio and George Chauncey) and queer literary (you, David Trinidad, Aldo Alvarez) scenes. How does it feel to be here at this time?
BB: I'm really excited. Just getting a hit off places like New York or Boston … I keep thinking that they are a secret cabal, but I don't think they all get along at all. Reading between the lines and talking to friends who live in those places, it's a catfight all the time. There's so little turf and they're all fight over it. The San Francisco and Los Angeles scenes have a lot of that new narrative—there's Kevin Killian and Bob Gluck and Dennis Cooper. I think it's interesting, but it's almost academic. It's either academic in those places or it's naughtiness. The people who are here, in Chicago, and I would add the women too, Achy Obejas and Carol Anshaw, there's a friendly kind of loose dialogue. The city's big and there's enough room for everybody. Everybody's doing their own thing. I haven't heard anybody say, 'Oh, that big jerk, So And So.' It seems charitable without being butt kissy. I can do what I want to do and I can do something different. It's a reading town; it's the city that works. That's the other thing—when I was living in San Francisco, if I let it slip that I was a writer, there was always a slacker going, 'I'm going to be a writer, too.'
GS: People do what they say in Chicago, and they say what they do.
BB: It's true. They absolutely do. I love that. Maybe that's because I'm born and bred in the Midwest and that's also in the hard wiring. It's how I live, it's how I am.
