This is Jim Valvis’s first full-length collection
of poetry. He is 44 years old & grew up in Jersey City and presently lives
with his family in Washington State. How
To Say Goodbye consists of a whopping 143 tightly written but highly
accessible poems. The poems are extremely varied in style, narrative voice and
subject matter and were written over a period of twenty years. Valvis told
Heavy Feather Review in an interview (see link below) that ‘one of the reasons
I put off publication so long is I don’t like the idea of poems being in a
final form…The notion these poems, some of which I’ve had in my possession for
twenty years, finally being locked down is akin to sending a kid off to school
for the first time. Only the kid is never coming home again’. He adds tersely,
‘My feeling is that most poets rush into book publishing too soon and too
often. They’re hardly done with one poorly received book when they start
working on putting the next- and cheap and easy publishing is not discouraging them
any.’
The poems are mostly free verse narratives
based on everyday situations the poet has experienced- working out in a gym (‘Lifting’),
watching his mother play bingo (‘Waiting’) or walking across the road with his
daughter (‘Crossing the Street, My Daughter Reaches for My Hand’). The writing
is clear, unembellished, often confessional in a wry, reflective manner. The
collection is divided under three separate headings: I. So Long, II. Farewell
and III. Godspeed with a short foreward by the writer Paul Kareem Tayyar. The
subject matter and the chronology of the poems in the collection appear to have
been mapped out randomly by the editor Kevin Patrick Lee.
The title poem ‘How to Say Goodbye’ is
an interesting study in the transitory and sometimes fickle nature of
relationships. The speaker, presumably Valvis, receives an urgent phone call
from his wife’s estranged lover who is desperate to find out where she is.
Valvis has mixed emotions: ‘Part of me feels sorry for him’ yet another side of
him savors the irony that ‘the guy/ who drove my wife from our home/ then found
himself on the other side of it.’ He admits matter-of-factly that his
relationship with his wife has ended but they have not yet worked out how to
bring closure to it, ‘She knows/ I won’t beat her or even beg her/ to return.
We’re beyond that place/ and trying to discover how to say goodbye.’ Learning ‘how
to say goodbye’ is perhaps about reflecting on one’s past and then moving on to
what is most important- the present moment. In speaking to Heavy Feather Review
when asked about whether he had any other titles in mind for the book, Valvis
stated, ‘That was the only title I ever considered. The moment I wrote the
title poem I knew I would use it to headline a book.’
How to Say Goodbye
My wife’s estranged lover telephones
me.
He asks if I know where she is,
and I reply, You gotta be
shitting me, pal.
Even if I knew where she was, why in
hell
would I tell you?-- and hang up in his face.
Later I’m in an all-night diner in
Stark,
the kind of hole that caters to
truck drivers
and drunks, serves a triangle of
apple pie
the size of a pizza slice. A
slow night,
my wife’s on a break from waiting
tables.
I tell her about her former lover’s
call.
She can’t believe he has the nerve,
but then again she can. I ask
how
he got the number, but we both know.
She gave it to him when she left me.
Plans were made, desires spoken,
into that phone that sits on my
porch
that looks out at the loneliest
dying lake,
its shoreline receding like a man’s
hair.
My wife is with another guy now
but she suspects he may become
violent,
so I’ve gotten the call. She
knows
I won’t beat her or even beg her
to return. We’re beyond that
place
and trying discover how to say
goodbye,
how to let what we could’ve been
become what we’ll never be.
I tell her I can fly her home to her
parents.
She says she’ll return after all
this blows over,
but we know it’s a lie, and I know
it best.
In the morning she returns to the
new lover
for a couple more nights of sex
charades,
until her check arrives and we can
work out
a time to leave when the guy’s not
home.
Part of me feels sorry for him,
not knowing he’s living with a ghost
who in just a few hours will be on a
plane.
A day later, I’m looking out at the
lake,
a husband about to help his wife
flee her lover,
one definition of a fool. The
phone rings.
I stare a long time before picking
up,
and sure enough it’s him again, the
guy
who drove my wife from our home
then found himself on the other side
of it.
He asks me once more if I know where
she is,
and I tell him, Jesus
Christ. Let her go already.
Not knowing if I’m talking to him or
to myself.
Then he begins crying, and I know
I should hang up the phone--
I have every damn right to hang up--
but I don’t. Instead I listen
to him weep
and watch the wind ripple what’s
left of the lake
until he forces himself to break the
connection.
(Reprinted with the permission of
the author)
The main thrust of the book is centered
on Valvis candidly recounting his experiences through first person
auto-biographical narrative poems. He treats the reader with a smorgasbord of
poems- memories of growing up in the ghetto of Jersey City, his troublesome
relationship with a violent father, his army tales, the failure of his first
marriage, the joys of seeing his daughter grow up, the unmasking of his own vulnerabilities
and his determination as a writer & as a man to make a ‘good life’ for his
family ‘from nothing’ (‘Watching the Boy You Were Walk in Snow’).
Poem by poem Valvis carefully constructs
for his readers a detailed, authentic portrait of himself, his family and his
reflections on life. In an interview he told C.L. Bledsoe (see link below): ‘What
I wanted was to get on paper the essence- not the reality, but the essence- of
what I had experienced as a human being in a way that all people who could read
would find valuable.’ Some of the most memorable auto-biographical
poems involve Valvis taking an ordinary event and then moving on to make highly
insightful observations about existence. In ‘The Old Film’, for example, he explores
the passing of time and the impermanence of the flesh, in ‘Last Orders’ he focuses
on how words ultimately fall short of capturing feelings, and in ‘For a Girl
Whose Name I Can’t Quite Remember’ explores the incompleteness of memories. Because
of the universality of his themes it is easy for us to relate to his work and
often his poems evoke similar incidents & emotions from my own past.
Valvis has also included in his
collection a variety of other types of poems. He dabbles in micro poems and has
a liking for poems which use extended metaphors as in ‘The Pinball’s life’,
‘Ball in the Air’, ‘Inside the Egg’ and the meta-poem ‘A Poem That’s No Damn
Good’. Often Valvis will also run with a concept & will feed the reader a
mass of detail- throwing in every nuance, variable or thought. In ‘The Lye Vat’, for example, he
contemplates the various causes of death, in ‘To a Self-help Guru on PBS’ he
satirically explains how people follow their bliss of booze or bingo or power,
and in ‘After the Blade, the Blame’ Valvis explores the toxic recriminations
which befall lapsed love. There is also
a series of poems scattered throughout the collection, including ‘The Eyes of Oedipus’, ‘Sophocles Reading
Oedipus at Colonus’ and ‘For the Womb’ which use allusions to Ancient Greek
literature to draw parallels with Valvis’s own life.
More appealing to me are Valvis’s
portrait poems which compress the lives of quirky, often outcast individuals. The
best of these poems include ‘Master Sergeant Hoffman’ a Vietnam vet shabbily
treated by the authorities, ‘June’ the tragic story of a dying neighbour, ’Minnie
and Joanne’ a third person poem about down & out lesbian squatters, ‘Trailer
Trash’ about an elderly woman suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s, and ‘Whopper
Board’ about an ex fast food worker who recalls his job years later.
Over the last two years I have closely
read How to Say Goodbye several times.
This is one of the best first small press collections of poetry I have read in
the last five years. It is up there with Rob Plath’s Bellyful
of Anarchy and Mather Schneider’s Drought
Resistant Strain. This is a rich and immensely enjoyable book worthy of
multiple readings. Valvis is an authentic American voice of the underclass and I
urge you to investigate his work further.
INTERVIEW WITH JAMES VALVIS 26 APRIL 2013
It’s been two years since the publication of
How to Say Goodbye. You
revealed in an earlier interview that you were never in a hurry to publishing
your first book of poetry. How was the process of being involved with Aortic
Books, especially in terms of how your poems were assembled in the collection
and promoted? How has your book been received?
There really was no process as far as submission goes.
Kevin Lee, who edits Aortic, noticed that I publish a great deal and decided he
wanted a book from me. I never approached him, and if he had not approached me
it’s very likely I would still not have a book out. I don’t think in terms of
books and am a little surprised and disbelieving of poets who claim they do.
Like, “This is my book about my father.” Oh really? And you will never write
another poem about your father? Who thinks like that? I have my obsessions and
could write about these themes and characters that obsess me, but once they hit
a book do those themes and obsessions disappear? Hardly. For me, poetry is a way of living, not a
destination. A process, not a product.
Speaking of process, the process for putting together the
book was straight-forward. I sent Kevin something like 300 pages of poetry and
he selected from that pile about 190 pages. Why he chose those 190 and left out
those 110 is a question you’d have to ask him. In fact, he left out some of my
favorite poems, and included poems I’m not sure would have made the cut had I
been choosing. Not that I have any bitterness over this. I think it came out
well, maybe better than had I done it myself. Our favorite poems are not always
our best.
Promotion? Little promotion was done on his end. Mine
amounts to social networking and continuing to place poems in the journals,
which brings forward new readers. Not a lot, mind you. This is poetry, and
after a century of pretentious pedantry in poetry the audience is so small you
could fit them all a shoebox.
That said, those who read the book have loved it, almost
universally. In fact, some of the reviews surprised me by their praise. I’m
probably not as good as they claim, or as bad as I fear.
The three sections of your book have similar
titles ‘So Long’, ‘Farewell’ and ‘Godspeed’. Can you explain why you included
these headings?
That was Kevin entirely. He probably thought that 190
pages of uninterrupted poetry were too much. The average poetry book runs 60-80
pages. So he came up with the plays off the title and cut the darn thing into
three more easily digestible slices.
What are your overall intentions as a
writer?
A big question. I’m not sure I ever sat down to think
about it. I usually define my intentions by what I am not intending. I’m not
out to change the world, let alone save it, since as a Christian I do not
believe a fallen world can be saved, only made a little better. I’m not out to
overthrow the capitalists or right some long ago wrong that can never be
righted. I’m not out to impress people with my vocabulary or knowledge of
arcane of obscure literary minutia. I’m not trying to pad my resume so I can
get tenure. I’m not trying to get in anyone’s pants.
My causes, where I have them, seem to be local and
universal rather than global and identity related. Be decent. Tell the truth,
especially to yourself. Don’t cheat on your spouse. Don’t pretend to be better than you are. Be
nice to children. Nobility comes more from doing than saying. Be grateful.
Especially that last. It seems to me that much that is
wrong with the world is a lack of gratitude. Why does the man cheat on his
wife? Because he doesn’t appreciate her. Why does the employer cheat the
worker? Because he doesn’t appreciate him. Why does the man kill himself?
Because he doesn’t appreciate the life God gave him.
So those are some of the overall intangible intentions,
but there are also the intentions within each piece of writing. For instance,
the desire to create a mood or feeling or express an opinion. For instance, in
“How to Say Goodbye,” the poem, not the book, which I will use because it’s
available to read, the intention of the piece is show how despair and heartache
can lead to compassion for a fellow sufferer, even one that has wronged you.
You are a full-time writer. Can you describe
a typical day?
With variations, my to-do list has these same 18 items
every day.
1. Read 5 poems (usually more)
2. Read 1 short story (usually 2 or 3)
3. Read some novel (at least a chapter)
4. Read some nonfiction (at least a chapter)
5. Exercises
6. 1 hour walk
7. Write poem #1
8. Write poem #2
9. Write 500 words of short story/prose
10. Write 500 words of novel
11. Edit
12. Submissions
13. Shower, shave, brush teeth
14. Eye drops for glaucoma
15. Time with family
16. Clean house
17 Make dinner
18. Pray
I don’t always (heck, ever) get all these done, but I
make an honest effort when the Seahawks aren’t playing. I often try to double
them up. I clean while I cook. I listen to nonfiction while I walk. I edit a
story between poems.
I pray when I submit.
How has your style
and subject matter evolved over the decades? In terms of chronology, what are
some of your earlier and more recent poems?
I’m not sure the style has changed much, maybe the lines
have grown longer, the language lusher, and I no longer screw with grammar
much. The subject matter seems largely the same, though of course new subjects
pop up periodically and I think I write less confessional work today than in
the past. I think what has changed most
is my worldview.
I started out like any other outsider poet, though even
then I was more a fan of Edward Field and Gerald Locklin than Charles Bukowski
and Todd Moore. I did a lot of crying about the academy, which the academy duly
ignored, since they’re getting all the money, awards, tenure, and care not a
whit what the peons think. My poems of
that time, some of which appear in the book, are clever but not especially
accomplished. After a decade of that nonsense, I realized it was pointless to
kid myself into thinking I’m a transcendent genius and began to study the works
of the people who were getting the awards and found them very well put together
but often lifeless and pretentious. But really what got to me was that, deep
down, when probed to the root, the academic writers and the underground writers
were the same. Or at least they were saying basically the same things. The
tropes and language and subject matter were different, more or less
accomplished, more or less image-based or bestial wail, but the philosophy
behind the work was monolithic. And yet, as I read all this poetry, my daughter
having just been born, terrorists having just flown planes into those two ugly
skyscrapers, my certainty of atheism buckling under the arguments of Chesterton
and Lewis, I felt with increasing dread that I disagreed with almost all of it.
The endless focus to the point of obsession on people’s identities: black, gay,
female. The outright hostility to God and religion. The loosening, in not
abandoning, of morality, especially any sexual morality. The disdain for
western culture, especially the western literary canon. The glorification of
suicide and alcoholism and drug addiction. The elevation of animals to the
status of men, deserving of all the rights of a human being, and the demotion
of men to mere animals, who should never fight against his baser instincts but
accept every depravity as natural and his “true self.”
In many ways I believe I am a counter-revolutionary
poet. In the sixties, the dominant
culture was attacked and eventually overcome by a counter-culture. This
counter-culture has triumphed to a large degree in society, but in the literary
arts its victory has been total. In this view it is not enough to say that
blacks were mistreated and deserve full franchise in the American dream, which
any decent person ought to believe, but instead the American dream for everyone
is a thin lie, an idea that is not nearly such a no-brainer. In this culture, suburbia
is a hotbed of hypocrisy (especially religious) and repression (especially of females).
Middle-class white Christian males are villains by definition, unless they
declare themselves complete automatons for the monolithic progressive culture.
Victim groups, like homosexuals or Native Americans, can do nothing wrong and are
always portrayed as noble, funny, smarter, and a hell of a lot cooler than the
squares.(I’m part Chippewa Indian, by the way.) If they are cruel, it’s because you had it
coming, you racist, bigot, homophobe. Read any Joyce Carol Oates, who is not
much of a poet but is one of our finest prose stylists, and you will see a
misandry that is stunning. All men are either creeps or victims of a system run
by creepy men. It’s a worldview where dead white male is a slur, and you wonder
what exactly is the crime there, that they’re dead, white, or male? Imagine a
male writer writing this way today about women. He would be rightfully
excoriated.
Yet my experience ran exactly opposite all this. I had
grown up poorer than poor in the ghetto where my friends were blacks and Puerto
Ricans and poor whites. To be sure, some of those people were wonderful and
some were victims, but a great many of them, maybe even a majority of
them, were poor not because of the
system but because of a combination of a debased culture and their own
failings. This is shocking to those who
love to spew the 99% rhetoric, but the truth is the 1% doesn’t have to screw
over the 99%. The poor, and increasingly the middle-class, are busy screwing
over each other and themselves.
As a young adult, just sprung from the army, my best
friend was a homosexual, and so I spent a lot of time in a gay bar, shooting
pool, refusing the offered free drinks, trying to decide which unmarked
bathroom was for the men. I met a lot of people there, from some of the finest
people I’ve ever known to some of the worst, but try and find a villainous
portrayal of a homosexual in a poem or short story. No, don’t bother. It’s the
third rail of poetry. It simply would never be published, probably not even
written. To my mind, this robs these people of their full humanity, makes them
mere pawns for our righteousness and self-congratulatory proclamations. I don’t
think any group can truly be free until everyone is free to call someone in
that group an asshole if he is an asshole—or to even call the whole group out
if there is something wrong with it. (Think, for instance, of the horrible
misogynistic ramblings of thug rappers.) Dr. King put it more elegantly than I
just did, character not color, but how far we’ve travelled from that ideal.
Meanwhile, when I lucked out and married above my
station, I found this horrific suburbia to be filled with decent, hard-working,
thoughtful people. The wives are happy enough, and the men are not looking for
a reason to beat them. Do unhappiness and beatings happen? Sure. But are they
the norm? No way. Did some of them get their nice houses by cheating people? I
suppose. But a lot of them got them by working three jobs while putting
themselves through medical school. My wife is such a person, the most decent
person I know. Somebody ought to defend them, these people, I thought.
If you look at poems like “The Anti-Pinocchio,” “Revolution,”
“Trailer Trash,” “The Absentee Fathers,” “To a Self-Help Guru on PBS” and others
you’ll see me taking a stand against this monolithic culture that says suburbia
is the worst possible fate, the poor are kind and the rich (or at least richer)
are greedy and evil, irresponsible young men cannot help themselves because
they are controlled by their dicks, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the
law. Even a poem like “How to Say Goodbye” is revolutionary in this way because
it takes a member of a protected group (females) and shows her to be far less
than perfect, though fully human. It is in granting others their full humanity
that I think makes the finest art.
There was a book of essays about Bukowski’s poetry called
“Against the American Dream.” Well, that describes not only Bukowski’s writing,
but nearly the total sum of poetry and much of literary fiction for the last 50-100
years. It’s about time someone defended the American dream, defended America,
defended dreams. After all, who the hell wants their kid to grow up to be
Bukowski?
Do you have one or
two poems which clearly stand out as your favourite babies?
I have a soft spot in my heart for “About Your Iguana.”
It was written when I was still in the army and just starting to write poetry
seriously. It was the first poem where I thought to myself, “You know what,
Valvis? You can do this thing at a high level.”
The poem went on to win the 1993 Chiron Review contest,
still the only poetry contest I ever entered.
Is it my best poem? No, probably not. That will hopefully
be the next one I write.
What literary magazines do you consider the
best and most innovative in America?
The best and most innovative are two different things. I’m
not a big fan of innovation for innovation’s sake, and you can be pretty sure
something is going to be unreadable if they call it “innovative.” We’ve been
making it new so long that making it new has become old. Anyway, it’s hard to
know what’s the most innovative because I don’t know the thought processes of
the editors. I fear that a lot of the ones with the best reputations care
nothing at all about diversity of thought. Oh, they’ll bend over backwards to
make sure a binder full of women are in the issue, and maybe a black person,
but you read the work and it’s hard to tell one writer from another. I sent
“The Anti-Pinocchio” to a couple of dozen literary magazines and they all
turned it down. Why? Too hot to handle, I imagine. It might make an old lady clutch
her string of pearls.
I used to love The Wormwood Review and Chiron Review
before they went goodbye. Those markets are disappearing and being replaced
with online journals that not only don’t pay but also aspire to be as dull and
respected as many of the university presses and as poorly crafted as any of the
old mimeos. The best way to do this (since a change in editorship is all that’s
required for a great magazine to become ordinary or even bad) is to list what I
think would make up a shockingly interesting and entertaining magazine.
1. No guest editors. Guest editors are a recipe for
endless nepotism. While some guest editors are honorable, the majority simply
reward their friends.
2. Open to all points of view. Especially *marginalized*
points of view.
3. Avoids cliques and schools and any kind of groupthink.
4. Open to beginners and newcomers and those who were too
poor to get an MFA. No, not just open, but actively seeks them out.
5. Never publishes with an eye toward awards.
6. No quotas of any kind. Merit is the only criteria.
7. Doesn’t publish friends/students/colleagues.
8. Prizes clarity over pedantry and obscurity.
9. Does not abandon the free market entirely. If you
cannot sell your journal to non-writers, that’s telling you something. Charging
fees or moving online won’t save your journal. It will only preserve its
already fetid corpse.
10. Stop thinking that challenging what used to be
mainstream America back in the 1940s and 50s is new and daring and exciting and,
God help us, brave. It’s not. It’s been going on uninterrupted for decades, and
it’s old, and nobody’s risking anything by taking yet another stand against creationists
and Prohibition.
Any journal that does that, or most of that, is going to
be okay in my book.
In earlier interviews I was keenly
interested in your recommendations for writers and have since followed up poets
such as Ted Kooser, Ron Koertge and others. Have you come across the work of
other writers who have impressed you more recently? As a follow up to this,
have you read any good books lately?
Well, it wasn’t that long ago that I gave that interview.
I still love the writers I named. I try usually to name one or two writers that
people may not have heard about before. I guess recently I’ve become a fan of
two short story writers, Ron Carlson and Ron Rash. Maybe it’s a Ron thing. I’m
presently reading a collection by a writer little known in America, but was and
is loved in France and Russia: Andre Maurois. He’s a joy to read. Also, the
aforementioned Joyce Carol Oates, because, dammit, whatever her flaws
philosophically, the woman is an elemental force. I’ve also been enjoying the
poetry of Anthony Hudgins, James Laughlin, and C.P. Cavafy. I just finished
Life After Death: The Evidence by Dinesh D’Souza, which was excellent. Also reading Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope. Hunger
by Knut Hamsun. Man oh man, don’t get me started. Since I write poems, short
stories, novels, and some nonfiction, I read at least some of each of those
every day.
Let me finish up by recommending to everyone Raymond
Hammond’s Poetic Amusement. Must reading about why the poetry world today is in
crises.
What are you working on at the moment?
Poems. Short stories. And I’m about to start a novel
draft, if I can ever finish the outline.
Some of the poems have been about shipwrecks. God and his
muses alone know what got me interested in shipwrecks. I’m an old army guy, not
navy, but I find the tales of these people going into the waves utterly
fascinating and full of poetic possibilities. Every one of them is an end of
the world scenario, where the earth is the ship and the iceberg is the comet
come to kill all. The recent bombing in Boston has got all kinds of people
running to their keyboards to write poems, but I don’t know why. At least I
don’t see why this horror show is more interesting to them than the sinking of
the General Slocum, where a thousand people, mostly women and children, burned
alive or drowned just outside New York, except that the Boston thing just
happened and the General Slocum is old news.
Well, eventually everything becomes old news, and the
fact that it is old news allows me to go into these events and pull out what
poetry that might be in there without seeming to be profiting off the carnage.
In this way, I’m paying tribute to men and women whose lives and deaths we had
no business forgetting, but did.
What advice would you give to a group of
young talented writers?
The first thing I would tell them is to forget about
talent entirely. Nothing matters less than talent, unless it’s inspiration. In
fact, in some ways, it can be a hindrance. Too much early facility with
language can turn a promising young poet into a vapid old one, content with playing
word games while the reader yawns himself to death.
Better by far to focus on study and hard work. But even
these are not enough.
The best thing is to understand what makes a poem
memorable—for it is the same thing that makes anything memorable. And that is
simply this: quality of emotion. Emotion is the key experience in writing and,
for that matter, life. I talk to young people sometimes and they say things
like, “Well, we’re getting married. If it works, it works. If not, we’ll just
get a divorce.”
I gotta shake my head at such a person, more if he
imagines himself a poet. He or she will never be a good writer of any kind.
This may seem common sense, but it is surprising to a lot of people. In order
for the reader to care the writer must care. And not just about his writing! If
you can get married without much care whether it will work out, you are screwed
as a writer (and a spouse.) It has to mean everything. You can’t go into a poem
thinking, “Well, if it works out, it works out. If not, not.” Who the hell
wants to read that poem? Or for that matter, marry that person.
So this is my advice to them: care. Give a damn. Find
those things that matter to you and make them matter to others. But here’s a
caveat: don’t bullshit yourself. Yeah, I know you’re supposed to love those fat
beasts of the sea we call whales, but the fact of the matter most of us don’t. It’s
much better to write about hating whales, if you hate them, than to pretend to
love them because you’re supposed to. What I’m saying is fuck whales. Those fat bastards.
(PS: Don’t send me any hate mail. I love whales. Truly I
do. And llamas. And tapirs. And penguins. But fuck manatees. You know what I mean? Manatees. Sea cows. I
mean, what the hell?)
If you’re a person who doesn’t care, you’ll never be a
writer. You can learn all the rules and memorize every sonnet by Shakespeare,
but in the end the poetry will be flat, uninvolved, and boring. If you deceive
yourself into writing about stuff you don’t care about, or, worse, stuff you
don’t agree with, then you will hate your writing. It will always be a chore. You’ll
get “writer’s block.” Its only joys will be in publications, but even that
satisfaction will soon fade for nothing has a half-life shorter than the
happiness that comes from an acceptance.
There is a fear out there, practically palpable, of being
seen as sentimental, of caring too much, of looking like a weepy sap. No ideas
except in things! But what they mean is rip your heart out and write like a
robot. You see it every time when some ass says, after you said how you really
feel, “Tell us how you really feel!” Well, I don’t know about you, but the only
reason I read anyone is to find out how they really feel. If I wanted to know
how they pretend to be, I can go watch them try to pick up each other in
nightclubs. To hear how someone really feels is a great gift.
It’s been said that art is the human heart at war with
itself. This war is impossible without a soldier who gives a damn. In an era
when everyone is so damn cool, cynical, and aloof, when people want to save the
earth but have no desire to save their souls, when people will fight for gay
marriage but not their own marriages, is it any surprise there are so many
worthless writers?
Thanks James for
being so honest and generous with your time.
Thanks for such great questions.
Buy How
to Say Goodbye on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/How-Say-Goodbye-James-Valvis/dp/0978798333
