Interview: Marc Bojanowski

The Void editors were lucky to catch up with Marc Bojanowski, author of the novel The Dog Fighter. Read an excerpt from the novel here.

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VM: What books did you read that inspired you to become a writer? Or was there a particular influence in your life that led you towards writing?

MB: Both. Like many other people, I come from a family of talented and experienced storytellers. I consider books to be a continuation of that narrative rich environment. As a boy I enjoyed the sports page and detective stories, namely The Three Investigators series. It wasn’t until high school and college that I began reading in earnest. There I was introduced to Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Melville, London, Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, McCarthy, Pynchon, Gaddis, Wallace and Poe. A fair bunch of talented craftsmen. As an impressionable young man born and raised in the USA, I admired the stories they told and how they told them. To this day, I’ve gleaned plenty from everything I’ve read. I figure this is how it, writing, works.

VM: Many have likened your writing in The Dog Fighter to that of Ernest Hemingway. Would you say his work had an influence on yours?

MB: No doubt. But I reckon that is a direct result of the general lack of familiarity with the works of Faulkner and McCarthy. Hemingway’s seed has been, I posit, broadcast to a far greater extent, to date, than both McCarthy or Faulkner’s. Influence is elemental to the evolution of craft. As an apprentice wordsmith working in the longstanding vein of fiction, and in the relatively short but rich vein of American letters, I gratefully acknowledge Hemingway’s influence, but would rather stress the names of those whose influence over my writing I consider to have been more significant and helpful.

VM: Did you spend much time in or researching Baja for The Dog Fighter? If not, then from where did you procure the information necessary to writing your novel?

MB: No, unfortunately I’ve never been to Baja. I pillaged books from the library, mostly old ones, all generous and questionable with their information.

VM: The landscape you created in The Dog Fighter was extremely vivid and intricately mapped out; it felt as though the reader could use your novel as a travel brochure to the fictional city of Cancion. How did you keep track of the locations, landmarks, and people in The Dog Fighter?

MB: I first drew a map on a bar using a straw and ice water. This was one quiet Monday night at The Pourhouse, in Brooklyn. I was acting mysterious so as to lure the attention of the bartender from all the other fellows who frequented the place to admire her Midwestern beauty. She smiled, and then told me to quit making such a damn mess. So the map was an accident, but, as I learned, integral the crafting of a story.

VM: You have mentioned your love for drama and poetry – how much of an effect did your background in these disciplines have on your writing of The Dog Fighter?

MB: You know how they ask people who you’d like to sit between at dinner one night? Well, for me, that’d be Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. I doubt they’d have much to say, but their words would be layered with meaning. We could invite Whitman too, just so somebody would be there to run at the mouth.

VM: You studied creative writing at The New School in Manhattan – to what kind of writers would you recommend pursuing an MFA?

MB: Serious ones.

VM: If you could recommend only one book on writing to our readers, what would it be?

MB: I’ve read Aspects of the Novel, by Forester. This was a while ago. I’d recommend reading everything and writing every day.