Benjamin Percy
Photo by Jennifer May
Bio
Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette in 2013) and The Wilding (Graywolf Press, 2010), as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Esquire, GQ, TIME, Men's Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, and the Paris Review. His honors include the Whiting Writers' Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
Author's Statement
Every time my birthday approaches, my wife asks what I want -- and I always say, "Time." There is never enough time, not when you have kids to raise, a house to renovate, classes to teach, deadlines to chase. The NEA has given me the gift of time. Time at the keyboard. Time in the library. Time to interview sources and time to travel for a book project I could not have undertaken without this assistance. I'm humbled and grateful and excited to share the work the NEA has made possible.
Excerpt from The Locksmith
In eighth grade he dressed up as an ape for Halloween. He had a fullbody suit with shaggy black hair and a mouthful of teeth. No one knew who he was at school. He would walk up to girls and stare at them and say nothing and they would press their backs to their lockers and hide behind their friends to give him wide berth. Some people laughed but with a nervousness that made their laughter come across as forced and wheezy. It was the first time he felt powerful.
He kept the ape suit in his closet and sometimes he would put it on and stare at himself in the mirror and thump his chest -- once, twice -- while breathing heavily into his mask. He did not know why but it gave him an erection. Normally his father would not return from work until dinner time, so he felt safe to walk around the house in the ape suit and watch television and do his homework at the kitchen table, but one day his father came home early and because Brian had the television volume up he did not hear the growl of the engine or the crunch of gravel or even the rattle of keys. When his father pushed open the door to the garage with a pizza balanced in one hand, Brian sprang up from the couch. This startled a yell from his father and he dropped the pizza box on the floor where it opened as a cardboard mouth blurping cheese and pepperoni. Moths -- Pandora moths the size of hands -- fluttered in from outside while his father leaned against the open door and observed Brian with hooded eyes that revealed his curiosity and disappointment. "What's wrong with you?" he finally said. The ape suit went in the garbage that night, but Brian hasn't stopped thinking about it -- the way an amputee will never stop thinking about a lost limb -- remembering the sense of power that came with it.
Over the past few months he has trapped weasel and pine martens and coyote and beaver and even a wolverine. For all except the beaver, which required an open-cut dissection, he sliced around the hind legs below the hock and sliced up the back of the hind legs to the anus and from there stripped the pelt off the hind legs. He removed the tailbone by slicing from the anus along the bottom side of the tail to its tip and then worked it free from the bone. He pulled the skin delicately off their pink bodies, as if pulling a damp nightgown from a woman, pausing at the head, where he had to cut through their ear cartilage and around the eyes and through their lips to slip off the pelt completely.
Then came the fat, the flesh, the gristle -- scraping it off -- and then washing the pelt with soap and water and patting it off with a towel. He keeps several wooden stretchers in the garage and he centered the pelts on them and pulled them taut and waited a day for them to dry and then turned them and waited another day and then wetted their underside with vegetable oil to keep them pliant and brushed their fur with a dog comb so that they appeared fluffy, shiny.
From the Goodwill he bought a mannequin to use as a frame. He had learned how to sew in the service, but never with leather. The Internet told him everything he did not already know, such as how to keep the holes clean by lightly dampening the stitch groove and polishing the diamond awl blade with a block of beeswax before every punch. With a waxed fivecord linen thread that runs from a thousand-yard spool, he used a saddlestitch method, pulling snug so as not to break the thread or rip a stitch. He made the leggings first -- from four gray-furred coyotes -- and then puzzled the rest of the pelts together to match his upper body, binding the variant furs and their colors to make a patchwork coat that hung from him loosely and would not tear if he ran and contorted himself oddly when climbing a tree or leaping across a canal.
And now he is nearly done, tying off the final stitch for the helmet or mask -- he isn't sure what to call it -- made from the beaver he trapped the other day. He is in the living room -- seated on the same lumpy couch and watching the same wood-framed Mitsubishi television as he was when his father surprised him so many years ago. Wheel of Fortune is playing. Pat Sajak is making small talk with a contestant, a man from Kentucky who has a wonderful wife and dreams of one day taking a cruise to Alaska. His hands are deformed. They look like fleshy lobster claws. Another contestant spins the wheel for him. The sun has set. The curtains are closed. The mannequin stands nearby, draped in the hair suit. Its blue eyes stare into a void and its pink mouth puckers into a dead smile. On television the wheel is spinning, and in the living room Brian is biting off a loose thread and knotting its end. The category is Action and the puzzle is three words. Brian sharpens a pair of scissors over a whetstone, then holds his fist inside of the furred mask to brace it as he scissors two eye holes and carves open a slit for breathing. The wheel is rattling its kaleidoscope of pie-wedge colors, glittery numbers. It nearly comes to a stop on bankruptcy but clicks forward another notch to the silvery promise of a thousand dollars. "Touching you naked," Brian says to the television. And then, more loudly, "It's touching you naked, you idiots."
The man closes his eyes and lifts his deformed hands as if in benediction. A moment passes before Brian realizes the man is crossing his fingers. "Thumbing your nose," the man guesses. Lights flash. Bells ring. The audience claps and Pat Sajak smiles and the man does a little dance and throws back his head and opens his mouth to reveal a black cave of laughter that seems to swallow up the screen when Brian punches the remote and everything goes dark.
Brian stands from the couch and approaches the mannequin. He stares into its blank blue eyes a moment before fitting the mask over its head. He surveys his work as a tailor, tidying a sleeve, brushing his hands across the fur, petting it. A musky smell rises off the suit, somewhere between a groin and a wet dog -- a smell that surrounds him, minutes later, when he strips naked and steps into the pants and tightens their belt and then pulls on the jacket and finally the mask. The noise and the heat of his breathing surround him and he experiences that old familiar feeling of power and excitement. An erection throbs to life. It is his first in months.
He walks from the living room down a narrow hallway and into his bedroom. There is a full-length mirror mounted on the closet door and he studies his reflection in it. The only source of light is a 40-watt bulb glowing above him. It has about the same effect as a flashlight to the face in throwing long shadows that squirm all over his body when he moves. He likes the way the mask fits snugly to his face, like armor. He pulls on a pair of white tube socks and then his combat boots, shined to a black gleam. "I'm going out," he yells to the house and pauses a moment in the doorway as if awaiting a reply.
All his life he has lived in this house -- this three-bedroom ranch with the lava-rock chimney and the red cinder driveway -- located in Deschutes River Woods, a thickly forested development on the outskirts of town. There are no streetlamps here. Only the stars spiraling above him, the moon staring through the trees like a scarred eye from another world. For a moment Brian stands in his driveway, letting his eyes adjust, before loping off into the nearby forest.
(Published by Graywolf Press, 2010)
Blog interview, December 12, 2011
Not only does writing apparently run in the blood for Benjamin Percy and his younger sister Jennifer, but so does winning NEA Literature Fellowships. The duo were among the 40 creative writers to receive the awards this past November, and have the distinction of being the first siblings to win the award in the same year. Jennifer, whose work appeared in the Best Women's Travel Writing 2010 from Traveler's Tales, is currently a Truman Capote Fellow in the Iowa Writers' Workshop and an Iowa Arts Fellow in the Nonfiction Writing program. Benjamin, a Whiting Award winner, teaches in the MFA programs at Iowa State University and Pacific University, and has previously published two collections of short fiction. His novel The Wilding was published by Graywolf Press in 2010, and a new book, Red Moon, is forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette. We spoke with the siblings via e-mail about the writer's life, the impact of place on their writing, and how they've influenced each other.
NEA: What’s your version of the artist’s life?
BENJAMIN PERCY: I am obsessed. This obsession drives me to gobble up books as though they were candy---drives me to spend eight hours a day at the keyboard, to turn down social engagements, give up on hobbies---and to constantly mine the world for material to bring to the page.
JENNIFER PERCY: I just finished reading Walker Percy’s [no relation] The Moviegoer, and I became intrigued by what the protagonist Binx calls “the search,” or a striving toward authenticity. “The search,” Binx says, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life….To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is despair.” At the time, Percy was reading Heidegger, who says in Introduction to Metaphysics that the origin of philosophy lies in experiencing the question. I think that’s a great phrase, “experiencing the question.” It means one is always in a state of bewilderment---always asking more questions than answering them, embracing mystery, and wading through discomfort. It’s counterintuitive, but I think that it is in this realm of discomfort that we end up finding the most clarity.
NEA: What do you remember as your earliest experience/ engagement with the arts?
BENJAMIN: I grew up in a family of readers. Most nights, we’d end up in the living room, our faces shoved in books, occasionally reading passages aloud. But that’s a more generalized memory. Freshman year of high school, I played the role of Clive in Five Finger Exercise, and I remember, after so many rehearsals, feeling infected by the dysfunction of the family---and feeling a strange power, after the curtain fell, after we stripped our costumes and smeared away our makeup, when I noticed a couple remained in the darkened auditorium, still and quiet and staring at the stage as though paralyzed by the production.
JENNIFER: When I was a kid, every year my family drove to a three-million-year-old dried lake bed we called Great Bear. My parents would give my brother and me a time when we had to meet back at the truck and everyone would head off in separate directions. I’d walk as far as I could into the lake and find the bent arm of a juniper tree to sit on. It was at these moments that I was completely alone; the white, cracked earth stretching out to the end of the horizon as if it contained the whole world. I’d watch the frost from last night’s cold glint in the valley, the antelopes wandering in groups from the shade of one tree to the next. That’s pretty much it---appreciating this overwhelming beauty and understanding that I’m part of something greater than myself.
Jennifer and Benjamin Percy circa 1986. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Percy
NEA: What’s been your most significant arts experience to date?
BENJAMIN: A few years ago, the actor Ted Marcoux read one of my stories---“Refresh, Refresh”---aloud at Symphony Space in New York. I was in the audience, and I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips through the whole experience. I was able to spy on people, hear them laugh and gasp, watch them shiver and go tense. At one moment, toward the end, a woman in front of me clapped her hands over her ears and huddled down in a ball. The writer’s life is spent alone---at the desk---the missives we write equivalent to notes in a bottle tossed into a midnight sea. This was the first time I really felt the impact of one of those bottles reaching a farther shore.
JENNIFER: I found an internship advertised on the internet to live and study the “natural world” in Russia for three months---everything but airfare included. I applied and I was accepted. Three Americans and two Russians showed up in St. Petersburg along with me. One American ran away, explaining that she only wanted to be in the program for the visa and that she wanted to become a Russian puppeteer instead. After a week, a woman named Olga put the rest of us on a train heading north for the woods above the Arctic Circle. This sounds like the beginning of a clever (or not so clever) kidnapping---but it wasn’t. We hung out with these mysterious Chechnyan soldiers on nature reserves. It was light all day and there was always vodka and saunas and tea and stories about wild boars, big as men. The experience was confusing, horrifying, and wonderful. When I returned to America, I sat down and wrote about it for weeks on end. I couldn’t stop. I’d never really done any creative writing prior to that trip. The writing I produced won me a scholarship to Bread Loaf, and this is where I found “my tribe.” I dropped my physics major and switched to English. It’s all quite random. But again, I didn’t have a lot of conventional arts experiences as a child, and so I’m putting more weight on the experiences that drove me to art.
NEA: What decision has most impacted your artistic career?
BENJAMIN: I made the decision, about halfway through college, to give up on archaeology and geology, which I had been hell-bent on pursuing since middle school, and put all of my energy into writing. This was at the behest of my then-girlfriend, now wife, who---after reading my many lascivious love letters---said, “You should be a writer.” I said okay.
JENNIFER: Well, I didn’t decide to pursue writing as a career until I was around twenty-three (I dabbled in publishing for a while after college), and I’d say that the time I spent before making that decision (traveling, working odd jobs, enduring bad relationships) trying to figure out what I didn’t want to do with my life, gave me significant fodder to work with. So, in some ways the lack of decision was an important one. But, on a more practical note, deciding to do an MFA has had the most traceable influence on my career. I’m still in an MFA program, so I don’t have much else to draw on, but without this time and space to write, I would have never taken the risks I have taken, including taking on the extensive research required to begin my book. I also would not have been given the opportunity to teach. I fell in love with teaching.
NEA: What do you think is the role of the artist in the community?
BENJAMIN: The artist does not give a community answers, but raises questions, and in doing so forces people to reflect, engage, empathize, escape.
JENNIFER: Artists need to make themselves accessible---as people. Artists need to try to be normal people, real people and, by doing so, they can help extinguish the romantic notion of talent and the fantasies of genius that deemphasize the role of hard work. Art too, even if it’s not something one pursues as a career, should be something everyone engages with on a daily basis. For this reason, the artist needs to advocate art as an essential part of any liberal arts education. Art teaches one to think more complexly about the world and it’s this complexity of thinking that builds greater opportunities for empathy.
NEA: What do you think is the responsibility of the community to the artist?
BENJAMIN: Life can blur by---meaning can escape us---and we need the artist the way we need a mirror, even one with many fissures running through it, to ascertain our gaze.
JENNIFER: I think societies have a tendency towards deception and mythology, and are inclined to embrace language that is both delusory and insincere. The artist is sifting through this detritus, finding clarity. And we need to occasionally take moments from our daily lives and gaze head-on at whatever treasure the artist has pulled from the rubble---whether or not this provides a moment horrifying comprehension or intense comfort.
NEA: How does the idea of “place” work for you in your writing? What about the influence on your writing of the physical place in which you grew up?
BENJAMIN: Oregon is such a fractured landscape. Geographically---with so many environments smashed together, coast and rain forest and mountains and desert and plains. Politically---with the blue pockets of Eugene and Portland dominating the vote of an otherwise red state. Economically. Which makes a great stage for drama. Oregon---the geography, the culture, the history, the myths---will always be a character in my work.
JENNIFER: I’m writing about a guy named Wildman who runs a Civil War surplus in Kennesaw, Georgia. He has long gray hair, wears cut-off jean shorts, carries two loaded pistols, and believes he is a reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson. When I told him I was from Iowa he said, “Is that near Georgia?” Turns out he grew up 13 miles down the road and he considered that a long way away. He’d never left the state. All over the U.S. there are people like Wildman, people who isolate themselves and through that isolation are able to create a false sense of control over their lives by limiting what they do and do not know. There’s something beautiful to me about his retreat from the world, about the way he carved out a space for himself, picking and choosing whatever he wanted to be included, carving his own landscape---in a way preferring to dream instead of to live. I often find myself writing about people who create imaginary worlds for themselves, and who use the landscape as a way to retreat from whatever it is they are trying to escape.
Unlike my brother, I moved from rural Oregon to Portland when I was fifteen and that move was rather traumatic---I think I lived in four different houses during those four years. A lot of my writing is about displacement. My stories and essays take place in Hawaii, Russia, Iraq, Germany, Brazil, Serbia, Italy, Washington, DC, Georgia, North Carolina---I’m all over the map.
NEA: Benjamin, why fiction?
BENJAMIN: Because sometimes emotional truth is more striking and engaging than literal truth. But I write a great deal of nonfiction for magazines, and enjoy leaping back and forth between the genres.
NEA: Jennifer, why nonfiction? Do you ever write fiction, and if so, when and why?
JENNIFER: I have this bag in my room under my bed---I just call it “the bag”---and when I get ready to go on a trip I pull it out. Inside I have camo pants, a hat that says REBEL on it in gold letters, a pair of aviator sunglasses, a mesh shirt a Russian soldier gave to me, a sweater from a truck stop in Missouri with a picture of an elk moaning Bible words, and these underwear you’re supposed to be able to wear for a long time without washing. Every time I go on a trip, I collect something and put it in the bag. I tend to travel to odd places, visiting subcultures and talking to people a lot of people wouldn’t talk to. The bag serves as a little history of my travels and is testament to why I began writing nonfiction---I like to get out and get my hands dirty.
When I decided to apply for MFA programs, I was forced to choose between fiction and nonfiction (there are no MFAs in “prose,” though I believe there should be). When I arrived to Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, I discovered I had a very limited understanding of nonfiction. I’m so grateful to the program for exposing me to new forms and refreshing my notion of the genre. We always joke that nonfiction has an anxiety disorder: “no we don’t write journalism, we write creative nonfiction or literary nonfiction.” The terms “fiction” and “poetry” never need to be qualified. Creative nonfiction writers, on the other hand, fear where their books will end up in the bookstore: Cooking? Gardening? Nature? Psychology? Self Help? (Dear God, no!). It’s rare to find a bookstore with an “essay” section or a “literary nonfiction” section. Anyway, the program encourages a broad reading of the essay and hopes to carve out new space for it by elevating the essay to the level of art. In John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay, he writes: “My point is that the essay exists. And it seems, in fact, to have always existed. But even now, five thousand years since the earliest essay appeared...essayists who are trying to offer more than information are still not being recognized as practitioners of the form.” I love the indeterminancy of the genre---it is always surprising me and challenging the way I think about the world. But, despite all that, I felt that so many things I wanted to write about could only be expressed as fiction. The subject chooses the genre—---not the other way around. So, yes, I write fiction---I’m currently in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
NEA: In which ways, if any, have you been influenced by each other artistically?
BENJAMIN: Often, when I’m reading her work, or when we’re telling stories, I see something I recognize, something I’ve forgotten---and all of a sudden a trapdoor opens in my head and I’ve fallen into someplace that otherwise would have been lost. And I’m constantly impressed and inspired by her bravery in life and on the page.
JENNIFER: When I was eight or nine, I began a short story about a dog. He was in love with a beautiful young cat and very tortured by his feelings, of which he could tell no one, not even the hamster. I showed the story to my brother. “What do you think?” I said. He read the story and threw it on the ground. “You did not properly introduce the character of the dog,” he said.
So my brother is pretty much a badass.
I came upon writing on my own, but when Ben read my early work he was nothing but enthusiastic and encouraging. I don’t know if I would have continued on this path without him or if I would have ended up in a lab studying moon rocks. He’s always been incredibly supportive and a huge inspiration.
NEA: How do you expect the NEA grant to impact your writing life?
BENJAMIN: I’m deeply grateful for this grant, and I can’t tell you how special it was to win the same year as my sister. Whenever anybody asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I always say, “Time.” And that’s what you’ve given me, given us: the gift of writing time. Thank you.
JENNIFER: I’m still a graduate student and though I’ve sold rights to Scribner for my nonfiction book, it’s not out yet. So, in many, ways I feel that I haven’t “come out” as a writer. I think it is incredibly exciting that this is an award judged blindly by a panel of writers based on the manuscript alone. It is not one of those awards given to the people with the most awards. I see a lot of writers around Iowa City desperately trying to move from one reading to the next in an attempt to brush shoulders with the next famous writer. And though networking is important, in the end, it should always come down to the work at hand. The writing should always speak for itself. There are so many writers on the list of current and past NEA winners that I admire, and it’s such an honor to be celebrated alongside them.
I probably don’t even need to talk about the money---every one knows that writers rarely have any---but I’m so grateful to the NEA that I will mention it. When I began my book, all the trips I took to the South---all my research---went on a credit card. Every time there was a break in the academic calendar, I took another trip and conducted more interviews. I wracked up over ten grand in debt just beginning this book. I guess I just hoped for the best—---and it’s a good thing I took that risk because it paid off.