I began writing, as I begin many things, as a lark. I had heard of a Three Day Novel Writing Contest from some Canadian press called Anvil and decided it would be quite romantic to lock myself in a motel room for three days and make an attempt at a novel. To that point, I had written only theatre and poetry and just welcomed the challenge -the bizarre nature of it, especially, as I felt that I could not necessarily write a better novel than anyone else, but I probably could write a better novel In three Days than most anybody at all. The result was October People, which did not win the contest, but resulted in the far more important need I have to compose literary fiction.
If I had to name influences, I would site Knut Hamsun, Hjilmar Soderberg, Patricia Highsmith, Jose Saramago, G.K. Chesterton, Anne Michaels, Bret Easton Ellis, though i am hesitant, in a way, to do so, as my work in hardly any way resembles the work of these people (I could mention also Albert Camus, James Joyce, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Margurite Duras). I find what they do, being that they produce raw, unaffected literature for the purpose only of literature, not for intriguing a readership, not for seducing with marvelous sweeps of picturesque prose (though they do produce such sweeps)an inspiration and it is what I also seek to do. Influence is a strange word, though, as the writers I admire I do everything in my power to avoid imitating, sounding like, being in any way similar too. They are an influence more like intoxication; they do something to me that I have no control over, dig out a hollow in my unconscious that I am aware of but powerless over.
I am an American of Argentine and Danish descent. In the last decade I have written eighteen novels (fourteen of which are published), a dozen works of theatre and four collections of poetry (which are now publsihed as the collection Voices Restless Inanimate).
