An Interview With Ed Allen
by Samantha Davis, Carrie Enge, Erin Hanson, and Allison Williams
If someone had asked a very young Ed Allen what he was going to do with his life, he
might have said play professional base ball (if he’d had the discipline for it), or go into the
military (if not for the Vietnam war), or become a federal fish inspector (he has a gifted nose),
but fortunately for University of Alaska’s creative writing program, Ed chose to be a man of
letters.
As a creative writing instructor Ed Allen once advised a group of student writers to
“Take the words more seriously than you take yourself.” And, as all great teachers do, he
models that advice with good humor, playfulness and a dedication to the words - a dedication
evident both in his work and in his teaching.
At first glance you might not peg Ed as an accomplished author: he looks more like a
Jeopardy star, and actually he’s both. And to help you expand your image of the brilliant, but
moderately eccentric author even further, Ed calls himself “A crazy bastard who’s tried not to
take things too seriously, and who’s … managed to write some things that people have enjoyed,”
a grossly understated description of a man who has published two novels, a craft book, and short
stories in such magazines as The New Yorker, GQ, Story, Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review,
and River Styx. Ed won the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for his collection of short stories,
Ate it Anyway, and in 2006 he published his first collection of poetry: 67 Mixed Messages. In
fact, colleague and fellow novelist Jo-Ann Mapson lists Ed’s “Burt Osborne Rules the World,” a
story that is simultaneously sad and funny and brave, as her favorite short story. Other authors
attribute Ed with “a cool and quirky consciousness… a guy who seems newly arrived in a flying
saucer” (X.J. Kennedy), and say his writings will leave us “terribly sad, hilariously amused, and,
quite often, suffused with unbearable wonder and longing” (Thomas Mallon).
Even as a youngster growing up in New England and the suburbs of New York, Ed
enjoyed playing with words. He earned his undergraduate degree at Goddard College in
Vermont and then went on to briefly study poetry at University of Iowa’s renowned graduate
school. In the early 70s, Ed left his formal education behind to immerse himself in the fresh and
unconventional hippie movement. As a hippie, Ed lived on a commune in Iowa, built himself a
clear plastic tee-pee, drove his VW from Iowa to Mendocino, California with two friends and a
Saint Bernard, replaced a farmhouse roof with hand-hewn cedar shakes, and worried that he
wasn’t a good enough “freak,” all things that a man should experience before he begins a writing
career.
As with many other talented authors, Ed was visited by his muse when he least expected
a visitor. He was working in the meat packing business. Ed recalls an image of the butchers’
hands working on meat, a single image that inspired his literary exploration of the meat-cutting
world. This project led him to Ohio University in Athens where he studied fiction with renewed
purpose: to tell the story he’d discovered in a butcher shop in New York. Crediting his time at
this shop for his subsequent creative work, Ed notes, “There’s something to be said for
monotonous jobs.” The novel that came out of his experiences in the butcher shops and his work
at Ohio University is Straight Through the Night (Soho Press, 1989). Later that same year, he
completed his PhD with a book of poems called The Clean Place.
As if a PhD and two books weren’t enough for a retired meat packer, Ed completed a
three-day stint on Jeopardy in 1990. He prepared rigorously for his time on the program and will
never forget the final Jeopardy question that eliminated him: What was the third country to put a
satellite in lunar orbit? (The answer is Japan.) If the final question had been anything relevant,
Ed would have got it.
Ed has lived in many different locations, from Poland, to Memphis to Nevada, locations
where he has written and taught and read and even found the inspiration for the Hollywood notquite-blockbuster, Easy Six, featuring Jim Belushi and based on his novel, Mustang Sally.
Although Mustang Sally is place based, Ed’s fiction typically utilizes landscapes that
“exclude the speaker.” He explains:
To me a place is interesting insofar as it’s not congruent with whatever a person’s story
is. In my first novel, the most lyrical passages about the suburbs of New York occur
when the narrator is most in despair of ever being able to find a livable situation there for
himself.
Yet while Ed is interested in placelessness, when it comes to his own writing, he needs a regular
and familiar place to work; he says he can’t write anything on the road.
Despite the challenges of the writing life—Ed claims that being a writer is more difficult
than being a game show winner—he never loses his humor and curiosity. In fact, Ed often uses
comedy in his writing to great effect. We asked him about this aspect of his own work and about
the broader appeal of comic writing. He responded:
Life isn’t necessarily funny, but writing something without some underlying sense of the
comic would seem empty. I’ve had an argument with my dad about that issue. I wrote a
series of sonnets addressed to an unattainable and unavailable young woman; when I said
that they were supposed to be funny, he said that disappointment is never funny; I say it’s
always funny. I guess the comedy in my work comes from disappointment and
disconnection, and from the fact that a character’s emotional life can be intense, but that
the consciousness of the narrator, or author, can take it less than seriously.
He asks again: “How seriously should we take ourselves?” and remembers a great piece of
advice he got while working in the meat business: “We’re all fools, but we don’t have to be
jerks.” He elaborates: “I take that as meaning that when we put things in perspective, we’re not
very important, and when we take ourselves seriously, we degenerate from being fools into being
jerks (or monsters).”
Ed revels in the nuances and intricacies of language, something that’s clear in both his
writing and his teaching. (If you’re curious about mondegreens or retronyms or fundamental
rhymes, Ed Allen is your mensch.) Like an explorer, Ed seems to enjoy investigating the infinite
possibilities of language, an investigation that’s led him into new territory. It’s not often that a
writer charts new waters, venturing into new forms where models don’t exist, but this is exactly
what Ed does with his novel-in-limericks: The Cat Food Kid, a piece Ed calls a “stunt” but not a
prank, a novel that includes such gems as Hart Crane’s poem “To Brooklyn Bridge” rewritten in
limericks as well as the irony-laden lines, “ ‘Til the Bronx is out-Bronxed/ You must carry this
angst.”
Over time, Ed has been migrating from longer to shorter forms, forms that can perhaps
better satiate his linguistic curiosity: “For myself, the advantage of a short form over a long form
is that you can pay attention to every sentence, or every word of a shorter piece in a way you
never can with a novel.”
When asked about his literary heroes, Ed cites John Updike, Philip Larkin, and Walker
Percy as “writers who have taken it all the way, and whose work has embodied real life in a way
that is familiar enough and believable enough that I can relate to it.” He adds, “They all seem
absolutely serious and absolutely comic at the same time.”
While there are writers he returns to again and again, Ed confesses that he reads
“extremely unsystematically”:
I pick things off my shelves at random. I have particular sentences and paragraphs that I
like to go back to. I have read the introduction to Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy
dozens of times. I sometimes read The New Yorker, but at times I’ve suspended my
subscription because it piles up and I can’t get to it. Sometimes I wonder why I should
read any new books at all, because I get so much out of rereading the ones I’ve already
read several times.
And then, demonstrating the stubborn side of a brilliant man, he adds:
The one thing that I’ll never read is anything that anybody presses on me and says
“You’ve got to read this!” Telling someone that they have to read something is a way of
being in someone’s face, and I don’t like to have people in my face. I have a section of a
shelf in my office containing books that people have pressed on me and told me I have to
read. The hell with that. Now I can’t give them back, because I’d have to say “Thanks
for the book; I didn’t read it.”
In addition to reading and sharing his novel-in-limericks with the world, Ed has been
writing short stories and teaching at both the University of South Dakota and the University of
Alaska, Anchorage. When we asked Ed what the future looks like for fiction and for writing as a
career, he reflects about changes as well as status quo: “What won’t change is that for people
who really care about what they’re reading and writing, literature will continue to allow us to
participate more fully in our own lives and in our world. In the midst of all the scams, all the
careerism, and all the aesthetic timidity, there are still moments in reading and writing in which
our world and our lives are redeemed, moments in which we can say ‘Wow,’ or better yet,
‘Thanks.’”
And to that we can only say about Ed Allen, our teacher, mentor, author and word
wizard, “Wow.” Or better yet, “Thanks.”