An Interview with Writer Andrew Wice

Andrew Wice is a novelist, haiku poet and blogger, as well as a world traveler and avid sports fan. His latest novel, To The Last Drop, was recently published by the Bäuu Press. In an email interview, Wice, 34, reveals which writers inspire him, what he thinks about the war in Iraq, and how he would give it all up to be a professional football player.

To The Last Drop imagines a present-day war over water rights between Texas and New Mexico. The Texas State Guard invades and occupies New Mexico and provokes an increasingly violent New Mexican insurgency. How did that idea come about?

I live in a former coal-mining town in New Mexico, and the diminished quantity and quality of water confronts me every day. Quantity, because it's the high desert near Santa Fe which has an enormous demand for a very limited supply. Quality, because the water is contaminated with heavy metals, coal, sulfur gas-it reeks of rotten eggs and isn't fit for drinking.

That pointed me toward the importance of water. The war aspect was inspired by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In watching the footage of our soldiers, I was struck by how similar Afghanistan's mountainous terrain is to New Mexico's. It certainly looked like a place where the defender has an enormous advantage, and I imagined that New Mexicans would fight with the same tactics as the mujahideen.

So I had the primacy of water in one hand and the imagery of a dirty guerilla war in the other. I simply made mud.

How did your personal feelings about the war in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, influence the story?

Personally, I think that it is important we make a distinction between those two operations. We invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban was aiding al-Qaeda in that country. Committing to a ground war in Afghanistan should only be undertaken with great caution and a keen eye for history. But it was justified by 9/11 and the "clear and present danger" to the U.S. which al-Qaeda represents, and we had the support of most of the world.

Invading Iraq is another story. There was no danger to the U.S., the intel was deliberately fudged, and all we've done is destabilize the entire region. The rest of the world is aghast and sees our invasion as an act of imperialism in the interest of oil. There is no question that the invasion has created terrorists and precipitated a civil war.

My fictional invasion by Texas runs closer to the Iraq quagmire. If someone were to occupy your home and you fought back, are you a patriot or terrorist?

What did your preparation for writing the book involve?

I prepared for the book by grinding out nine months of research before I started the first draft. I continued to do research while I was writing, as gaping holes in my knowledge opened up.

My main areas of research were water rights, hydrology, biology, military history and theory, Southwest history, Afghani history and some computer science. My knowledge had to quickly broaden; limits of my time are responsible for the shallowness of my understanding. To protect me from my ignorance, expert readers helped me out enormously, particularly in the legal and military areas.

The great majority of my research was done at the Santa Fe Public Library, supplemented by the internet. My research time included more immediately pleasurable activities such as inventing characters and shooting guns.

Shooting guns?

Shooting guns, indeed. New Mexico, like most of the Western states, embraces the Second Amendment. It's a well-armed populace with a fair distrust of government. That would contribute to this territory being difficult to occupy-just like Afghanistan.

So as part of my research, I got the feel of the guns I had to write about. I'm not a gun-blazing man by nature.

To The Last Drop follows five main characters, two of whom serve as first-person narrators. You've used multiple narrators in past novels as well. What do you like about telling a story this way?

I enjoy reading and writing with multiple narrators. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying was the first novel I read in which a storyline is told from many points of view, some of which contradict each other. A novel can be considered an orange, and each self-contained narrative is like a distinct segment. When each segment is separated, there's so much more surface area. As the orange is opened up, its facets multiply.

In the case of To The Last Drop, I thought the story would be too dry and depressing if it were told from a classic third-person God's eye perspective. Drought, war, terrorism ... I never would have finished writing it. The humor and the life in the book are entirely character based.

The reader needs to be empathetic with the characters in order to follow them through their multiple storylines, down dusty roads. All of the characters are flawed, and several are deeply flawed. Villains are usually more interesting characters than heroes, but they need to have some kind of charm, grace, wit or intelligence.

To The Last Drop is your sixth novel, but the first to be published. Is this a reflection of how difficult it is to get published for the first time?

I think I was definitely caught in the familiar bind that no one wanted to publish my novels because I was unpublished. Breaking out of that closed circle has been a long struggle. I hope that now that the door has cracked open, I can publish some of my earlier novels.

Do you think it's any harder to be a working novelist today than it was in the past?

There's always a nostalgia for the golden days. I think it's always been hard, and since we only know about the very successful 1%, it is easy to imagine that everyone who finished a manuscript would be published by Scribner's.

However, the numbers do show that fewer and fewer people are buying from a smaller pool of options. The drive toward economies of scale in publishing has certainly made it harder to be affiliated with the little guy. But the little guy is the only one interested in publishing books that don't have to sell twelve million copies to be successful.

You recently adapted To The Last Drop as a screenplay. What was that like?

It is my first feature-length screenplay, and I had to learn as I went. An early lesson was that a screenplay adaptation must be considered a completely new piece. I had to reconceive the plot, consolidate characters, and cut out everything that wasn't absolutely necessary. I even had to cut one of the main characters. This was all in the interest of turning a 300-page novel into a 100-page screenplay, as well as playing to the strengths of film. We've all known the disappointment of a faulty adaptation of one of our favorite books; I didn't want that to happen to mine. Rather than try to cram the novel into 100 pages, I wrote the screenplay from scratch but with the book's established characters and story in mind.

On your website (tothelastdrop.com), you claim that a To The Last Drop movie would be a cross between Red Dawn and The Wild One.

Half-joking. I'm not a fan of that sort of comparison, but it seems to be how one explains a film to somebody in the industry. It gives a rough idea of the feeling and audience. Red Dawn (defending the homeland from invaders) + The Wild One (the brooding leader of a rebellious bike gang) = box office gold!

Incidentally, Red Dawn takes place around Las Vegas, New Mexico. I didn't realize that until I moved out here. My novel makes a couple of (hopefully) subtle references to that movie, which was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw.

You grew up in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and have lived all over the country (and beyond). How did you end up in Madrid, New Mexico, a "tiny island of artists and freaks" as you once put it?

I was camping around New Mexico with my dog in the spring of 2001. I fell in love with the state as soon as I entered it. I decided I wanted to settle here for a bit, but wasn't sure where. In Taos, a woman at a coffee shop told me to check out this strange village south of Santa Fe called Madrid. It had been a coal-mining town, then a ghost town, and was making a comeback as a community of artists.

I drove down and fell in love with Madrid at first sight. It looks like most of the old refurbished coal miners' shacks might fall down at any moment, and it's dusty and the water is undrinkable, but it has become a home for me. It's been a good place to write. The amount of creative talent concentrated in such a small place is inspiring. There are writers, painters, sculptors, jewelers, musicians, filmmakers ... and my coal miners' shack hasn't quite fallen down so far.

The places in your novels often reflect where you were living or traveling at the time. Do the places you go motivate what you write about or the other way around?

It's definitely both. Travel is a first-rate provocation, one of my favorites. There are so many places in the world, so many potential homes. And "home" for me is a place where I can write.

I moved to a specific location to write some of my novels (Pirates of Crude, Sacking Iceland). For some others, where I was living influenced the book from its very conception (The Malignant Inferno, To The Last Drop).

I love making things up, and one doesn't need to be in Guatemala to successfully write about Guatemala. My next novel will take place all over the world, and most of it will probably be written at my same old desk. But-and this is a secret-I'm looking forward to using it as an excuse to take a few wandering journeys.

What's the new novel about?

The new novel is called The Object: a love story. It's about a woman's life, but told by all the men around her. There will be fifty or so narrators, some who are intimately connected to her (her brother, her lovers) and some will be merely tangential, people who cross her path only once. What I hope to achieve is a three-dimensional portrait in negative space. The omissions and contradictions of the people telling her story are as important as the story itself.

You are a published haiku poet. When and how did your interest in haiku develop?

J. D. Salinger introduced me to haiku in his brilliant Seymour: An Introduction when I was in high school. Investigating, I came across a haiku that made me see and feel poetry so clearly and powerfully. Nothing in literature had ever done that before. It was this poem, by Basho:

So cold are the waves
the rocking gull can scarcely
fold itself to sleep

It hit me with great force. Nothing extra, nothing missing, and absolutely true and sincere. I've been writing haiku for many years now, trying to abide. Here's one I wrote last year visiting my little brother in Japan:

Some unnamed scent,
some unseen bird's song
haunt this cool green bamboo forest

You also write for the irreverent sports blog, I Dislike Your Favorite Team (scuffedballs.blogspot.com). What is it about writing for the blog that you enjoy?

I Dislike Your Favorite Team was created by my college roommate. I love sports, especially football. I would trade all this pen and ink to be a professional defensive tackle.

The other contributors are by turns clever, funny and obnoxious. We are dispersed all over the country, and the blog allows us to entertain and ridicule each other as if we were together.

The number of people we've drawn into our reindeer games is shocking. If each one of them were to buy one copy of my novel ...

Recently, you switched from using a pseudonym ("Badcock") to blogging under your real name. Given that I Dislike Your Favorite Team's content-yours especially-is not G-rated (one commenter lovingly referred to it as "filthy"), have you had any second thoughts about revealing your identity?

I was convinced by a friend to use my real name because of the startling number of people who visit the site. Self-promotion isn't my strength, so it seemed like an easy way to steer some traffic toward the To The Last Drop website.

As for the nature of my sometimes profane posts, it's nothing that I wouldn't say in person or in one of my novels. My sense of humor has always tilted toward the dark side. That's where all the funny stuff seems to be.

Finally, who are your favorite writers, and why?

"Favorite" can mean many things. As with many young writers, J. D. Salinger was a great inspiration and provocation to me. Looking at the top shelf of my bookcase, you'll find Hemingway, Bukowski and Kafka. Hemingway for his technique and sincerity, Bukowski for his dark truth and bright light, and Kafka because both his joy and his claustrophobia make my heart beat like no other.

As far as influences go, I think the haiku poets Basho, Issa, Shiki and Buson taught me to convey an experience purely, without selfishness or sentimentality. I think my "style," when it's working, is most influenced by seeking what they sought.

Of living writers, I've read everything by Martin Amis and David Mitchell at least twice. They're both British. Amis's sentences are diamonds, cold and sharp and exact and sparkling like mineral fire. Mitchell is my favorite writer going. He's done a brilliant job using multiple narrators and a fractured chronology in his novels. He is very brave and assured, and I don't think he's ever struck a wrong note. I have a tremendous amount of respect for his work. He's only a few years older than me; I hope he has a long career. Reading his novels always reminds me why I read and write.