1.
Interviewer: I have a hard time believing someone
could actually live in a shack made from shower curtains.
Why did you make up something so unbelievable?
Yale: You know the old saying,
“Truth is stranger than fiction?”
I didn’t make this one up. In 1974, when I had
just turned 30 years old, I decided to spend the summer
living in the Ozarks in Arkansas. I knew I wouldn’t
be spending a long time there, so I didn’t want
to spend the time or money building a conventional
cabin. That’s why I came up with the idea of
using old shower curtains, which I got from friends
or bought at Goodwill Industries for 25 cents each.
Although there are many fictional scenes in my novel,
Saying No to Naked Women, the parts about building
the shack are told the way they happened. I’m
pretty sure nobody else has built a shower curtain
shack before or since, and I think it’s a fascinating
story, so that’s why I included the shack in
my novel.
You can see pictures of the shack on my website,
from the frame to the walls to the finished shack,
complete with writing corner featuring an ancient Remington manual typewriter. It turned
out my shower curtain shack was inexpensive –
I spent less money, penny-for-penny, than Thoreau
did on his shack – and it provided a good shelter,
too.
2.
Interviewer: Why did you choose Arkansas?
Yale: I had always wanted to farm.
But I realized that I had never lived in farm country,
and I didn’t really know what a farmer’s
life is like. So in the summer of 1973, I took a friend
with me, and went looking for some cheap land. We
drove due south from Minneapolis.
Iowa was flat and not interesting to me. As a child,
I spent summers in the rolling hills of northern Westchester
County in New York, and I wanted woods and mountains,
not flat fields. Missouri started to get more interesting,
but land prices were too high.
But then we got to Arkansas, and I loved the mountains.
A real estate agent said he had just the type of land
I wanted: remote – about 30 miles from town,
with water
on it, wooded but also including a small
flat field that would make an excellent
vegetable garden – and it was cheap. If memory
serves me, I paid $96 down and $48 a month for five
years – and then I owned it, free and clear.
My total tax bill was $1.80 a year, payable in three
equal installments if need be! When I saw the
rock-rimmed pool and
waterfall, I fell in love with it and wrote a check
on the spot.
Among my other discoveries that summer, I realized
that I was in love with the idea of farming,
but I didn’t want to actually do it myself.
3.
Interviewer: How much of this novel is based on your
life and how much is fiction?
Yale: Saying No to Naked Women
is loosely based on my life; I think most first novels
are. But a great deal of it is fiction. Katie and
Celia, for example, are fictitious characters based
on composite personality traits of a number of women
I’ve known. In real life, I did not have a confrontation
with a cougar or the town pharmacist. But while the
scene where Amos Childers clams up when Jack Derritt
(the novel’s hero) mentions he’s Jewish
is based firmly on reality, it is fictionalized, as
scenes in a novel should be.
Another difference between real life and Saying
No to Naked Women is that I didn’t have
any visits from a magical mentor during my Ozark summer,
and many of the insights Jack develops while working
with his mentor didn’t come to me until years
after I lived in my shack.
4.
Interviewer: In your book, the mentor, a Jew who you
refer to as “The Chassid,” is an older
version of Jack. Were you trying to go back in time
and somehow reach your younger self with the life
lessons you learned over the years?
Yale: Yes, but that’s only
part of the picture. Like many authors, writing this
novel helped me understand myself a lot better. I
had a bad case of, “If I knew then what I know
now…” I wanted to go back in time, find
myself, and say “Hey! Stop doing those things
that are interfering with your happiness! Stop thinking
that way!”
In fact, I actually tried to do that. In 1999, I was
on assignment in Southern Missouri, teaching writing
skills to insurance agents. I had a free weekend and
a rental car. So I drove down to Arkansas, and out
the state highway to my land. I parked my car at the
foot of the County Road. Like The Chassid, I hiked
up the hill. All the way up, I prayed for a miracle:
my younger self would be there in my shack, and I’d
be able to talk to him and be his mentor, his Chassid.
Instead I found just the barest outlines of my shack.
Parts of the frame were there, and a little bit of
hogwire fencing, with a couple of scraps of striped
shower curtain. But my younger self was not there
in those hills anymore. I guess he had come away with
me!
I drove down to town, hoping to eat lunch at the Springtime
Café. But it had been abandoned
for years, done in by the fast food chains. So it
was really brought home to me: I no longer belonged
in Hushpuckanna, even though Hushpuckanna is still
very much a part of me.
5. Interviewer:
Jack’s older self in the novel is a Chassidic
Jew. Have you become a Chassid, yourself?
Yale: No, I’m not Chassidic.
Actually, Jack’s mentor takes on the appearance
of a Chassidic Jew to get Jack’s attention,
overcome Jack’s resistance, and give the very
clear message that he is somehow tied to Jack’s
identity and past. At a certain point in the novel,
Jack’s mentor takes off his Chassidic clothes
and wears blue jeans and a work shirt, just like Jack.
6:
Interviewer: One of the central themes of your book
is Jack’s struggle to overcome his pornographic
fantasies and values. Why couldn’t Jack just
use a little old-fashioned self discipline to stop
his pornographic fantasies?
Yale: When a man develops a problem
with pornographic fantasies, it’s almost always
because he is angry about something – and he
starts associating anger with sex. This is especially
common now, with the explosion of pornography filled
with hostile, aggressive, angry images of men humiliating
and hurting women.
In addition to expressing anger, a man uses the pornography
to reduce tension and anxiety caused by his personal
problems, and, for a moment or two, release some of
them with an orgasm. But since he’s done nothing
to get at the causes of his problems, anger, tension,
and anxiety quickly return, and it’s back to
the pornography again. And since he uses pornography
to masturbate, he starts to associate his anger with
the pleasure of orgasm.
He may actually despise the pornographic images in
his head, or a magazine or online – many men
do – but because he hasn’t worked on his
problems and his anger, the need to use pornography
to release anger and tension keeps returning.
In Saying
No to Naked Women, you’ll see
how Jack Derritt, the novel’s hero, figures
out the problems causing anger and anxiety that drive
him to pornographic fantasies. One of Jack’s
problems is that he is so harsh with himself, he’s
built up a tremendous self-hatred. Jack’s mentor
insists that Jack must learn to love himself.
His mentor helps Jack identify all his strengths and
achievements – powerful assets Jack doesn’t
even realize he has. When he finally strips away the
self-loathing and looks at the man who is really there,
Jack learns to love himself.
You might even say Jack has created a new identity
for himself, because the old one was false and distorted.
And that new identity does not need or want porn.
The result: Jack reaps the reward of a great romance
with the woman of his dreams.
7.
Interviewer: Why do people need therapists? Can’t
they just solve their own problems?
Yale: Only supermen and superwomen
can solve their own problems. This is especially true
for men because we’ve been taught to suppress
and repress our emotions as children, to the point
where we may not even know that we have them or what
they are. So we’re angry, and we don’t
know it. Or if we do realize we’re angry, we
don’t know why.
This is certainly true for Jack. The Chassid has to
use a wide range of therapy tools to bring Jack to
the realization that he’s not angry with women
– that’s a myth. But he is furious with
his parents, and he has displaced that anger onto
women. It’s only when Jack is able to forgive
his parents that he finally can let go of his anger
and find the love of his life. As The Chassid says
to him, “Without loving guidance from someone
who’s been through the process himself, you
can’t get past the myths you’ve created
to survive.”
8.
Interviewer: Can you describe the invisible
behavior patterns that interfere with Jack’s
happiness and ability to forgive?
Yale: There are many of them, but
I’ll mention one. Jack is attracted to women
with big problems and big needs because he knows they’ll
need him. But he can’t relate to women who aren’t
needy, because he’s sure they won’t want
him. When he first meets Katie, who is not needy,
he’s sure she would never have any interest
in him – even though she does. He can’t
see the actual woman inside the beautiful body, let
alone understand her.
The Chassid helps Jack decode this invisible behavior
pattern. Jack is able to see why Katie is the love
of his life, and why she would passionately want him,
and nobody else.
In a way, trying to decode your invisible behavior
patterns on your own is like trying to see the back
of your head without a mirror.
9.
Interviewer: You’re not a trained psychologist.
How can you be sure your novel’s scenes about
sexual and pornographic addiction and relationship
problems are on target?
Yale: That’s a very important
question. Because you are right, I am not a psychotherapist
or any other kind of therapist.
However, during the time I was writing Saying No to
Naked Women, I worked closely with Dr. James Kousoulas,
Ph.D., a licensed practicing psychotherapist. We discussed
critical scenes as I was writing them, and he read
the entire novel more than once. If I occasionally
wandered off target, or missed a point, he helped
me see and fix the problem. The end result is that
I wrote the story I wanted to tell, and he enthusiastically
endorses it.
10.
Interviewer: You have five songs in Saying No to Naked
Women. Who wrote the words for them?
Yale: One of them, Midnight Special,
is an old folk song, and although I’ve searched
the Internet, I can’t find an author’s
name for it. But I wrote the other four: Sunshine
Blues, Distributor Man, One-Woman Man, and a
little rhyme The Chassid sings to Jack.
11.
Interviewer: How did you get the stories about Arkansas
in the olden days that you’ve woven into Saying
No to Naked Women?
Yale: I borrowed a book by Studs
Terkel from the town library during my summer in Arkansas,
and got an idea of the kinds of questions he asked.
Then, tape recorder in hand, I asked senior citizens
if they had stories to tell. And boy! Did they ever!
I transcribed the tapes myself, and then came the
hard part. I had to figure out how their stories fit
into my novel, and set up a tension between their
stories and Jack. So when, for example, the retired
waitress talks about moving from town to town and
never being happy, I played that off Jack’s
feeling that the town of Shitsville follows him wherever
he goes.
In the process, I captured a part of Arkansas that
is probably gone by now: folks who knew how to build
a wooden wagon wheel and put a steel tire on it, backwoods
sawmills, tiny country stores, small-town cafés
serving real home-cooked meals, and memories of the
dustbowl and the great depression.
12.
Interviewer: Did you fictionalize the stories you
gathered?
Yale: Of course! The living breathing
people who told me their stories had to become characters
in the novel, so I took the essence of what they told
me and worked from that.
13.
Interviewer: I understand that you earn your living
as a marketing copywriter. Isn’t that a waste
of your talents?
Yale: Writing a direct mail promotion
selling jewelry or an alternative health newsletter
is in many ways a different skill set from writing
a novel. However, the two do overlap. I’m known
for using unusual mini-stories in profitable direct
mail promotions. But more important, working on deadline,
day after day, has sharpened my writing skills.
Before I started writing marketing copy, I had difficulty
with organization. Writing direct marketing copy taught
me how to figure out – fast – what the
beginning, middle, and end of a piece must be.
And since I often write headlines that must fit an
exact character count, I’ve learned to edit
tightly – a skill that has been vital in writing
and revising Saying No to Naked Women.
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