Butler appears on So, Is It Done?

 




Robert Olen Butler Abridged

Born: 1945 in Granite City, Illinois
Resides: Butler lives with his wife Elizabeth Dewberry in an 1840 plantation home just outside of Tallahasee, Florida.
University: Butler is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Accolades: National Magazine Award, fiction (2005)
NEA Grant (1994)
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1993)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1993)
Latest: Intercourse: Stories, and Severance: Stories, both published by Chronicle Books
Hobby: Collects hot sauces.

 
Robert Olen Butler—A brief appreciation by Chai-Pei Chang

I first discovered Robert Olen Butler's books when his collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize. I was captivated by the voices in the stories and at the sincerity of human emotion. Years later, when I was asked to select just one short story to share with my classmates in a creative writing class, as a "you-must-read-this" example, I chose Butler's story "The Trip Back" from A Good Scent for its brilliant storytelling, for its insight into human nature, and for the sheer genuineness of emotion in its characters. It’s the story of a stoic Vietnamese businessman in Louisiana who brings his grandfather-in-law to America for the first time and learns much of memory, sorrow, and love in the simple trip back home from the airport.

Having read five of his books, I have to say that my favorite work from Butler (indeed one of my top 10 favorite books altogether) is his short story collection Tabloid Dreams. The title of each story in the collection reads like the headline in a supermarket tabloid, but far from being trashy, each story delves into the human heart to explore yearning, loss, and redemption. A very much alive assassinated JFK living anonymously secretly watches a deceased Jackie O’s belongings get auctioned off. A dead husband returns as a pet parrot to watch his widow move on with her life and take a new lover. The spirit of a Titanic victim moves through water, enveloping women in their baths and inhabiting the waterbeds beneath whispering lovers. The spirit remembers with regret his last hours on the Titanic. With each story or novel he writes, Robert Olen Butler displays a wonderful gift for revealing the delicate nature of humanity through his storytelling.

From the Cutting Room Floor, an interview excerpt not used on the DVD.

“My process is one of working my sentences over very thoroughly before going to the next. A work of art is an organic thing. Every tiny detail, the tiniest detail, must organically resonate into everything else. And if I make an approximation in this sentence, it’s impossible to write an accurate next sentence. And if that one’s also approximate, the third sentence gets farther and farther away, and this is why revision is so difficult for the so-called ‘draft writer’ who just gets everything down—lets it roll—doesn’t know the right word yet, that’s alright. Put in an approximation, keep on rolling. Now the writer does that for good reason: to stay out of his head. If I start planning it or thinking about it now, I’m going to get drawn out of my unconscious. The problem is then you have this great sprawling awful draft. How do you then find the work of art lurking in there? Unfortunately that draft writer has only deferred the problem of going into their heads because then they’re very tempted to be analytical about looking at that great sprawling draft. For me then, I do not go on. I do not go on to the next sentence until this sentence is as best I can get it right now.”

Inside Butler's Process

On Florida State University's website, Butler has posted the 17 revisions (including his first draft) of a short story told in the first-person and inspired by a vintage postcard of a biplane flying just above the trees. The final story is "This is Earl Sandt," which appears in Had a Good Time. Also posted on the website are links to the webcasts of Butler working on the story.
http://www.fsu.edu/~butler/

Text Interviews with Butler:

An interview by Wendy Wallace while Butler was still teaching at McNeese State University in Louisiana, just after the publication of his novel The Deep Green Sea.
http://www.wendywallace.com/robert.htm

An interview by Powells.com just after the release of his novel Mr. Spaceman. Includes images of book covers of Butler's novels up to Mr. Spaceman.
http://www.powells.com/authors/butler.html

An interview at Bookpage.com about his inspiration for the novel Fair Warning. (It began as a short story and involves Sharon Stone and Francis Ford Coppola.)
http://www.bookpage.com/0201bp/robert_olen_butler.html

An interview with The Atlantic Online (requires a subscription to their service):
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200406u/int2004-06-14

Radio interviews with Butler and other audio links:

A radio interview with KPCC 89.3FM in Pasadena, CA:
http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/listings/2005/01/airtalk_20050117.shtml

A radio interview with WBUR 90.9FM in Boston, MA, including images of the postcards from Had a Good Time:
http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/08/20040804_b_main.asp

Audio files of Butler reading five of his stories (purchase required):
http://www.gofish.com/detail.html?gfid=15-30

Audio files of Butler reading from Mr. Spaceman:
http://www.conjunctions.com/avidx.htm

Snippets of His Writing:

A chapbook from WebDelSol with excerpts from Butler's works:
http://www.webdelsol.com/butler/

A snippet of his short piece "Severance" in Tin House:
http://www.tinhouse.com/issues/issue_20/fiction.html

His story "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband" from Tabloid Dreams:
http://www.necoffee.com/escene/knight/glasseye.html

More Links of Interest:

Butler’s home page at Florida State University:
http://english.fsu.edu/crw/index.html

Butler in the news:
http://news.surfwax.com/authors/files/Robert_Olen_Butler_Book.html

Various reviews of his latest collection of fiction, Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards:
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/had_a_good_time/

A short bio:
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/fiction/butler.htm

A lengthier bio, fairly recent:
http://www.chelseaforum.com/speakers/Butler.htm

A group of students at Loyola University in New Orleans discuss A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain:
http://www.dyerhouse.com/butler/