"I am trying to be true to the power of the adolescent
experience of sex and love"
experience of sex and love"
So why Tilt? Why now?
~ An Interview with Alan Cumyn ~
Q: You have said that you began thinking about Tilt as a result of a writing exercise you did in your first residency as faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts. How did that work?
AC: Well, first of all, a note about the residencies at VCFA. They're crazy. Stark, raving mad. Ten days of non-stop intellectual and social stimulation with far too many interesting people all obsessed about writing. And your first residency, whether it's as a student or faculty, is the most bizarre because you don't know what's going on, and half the time you're muttering to yourself because you can't believe people are going from lecture to workshop to reading to working lunch to lecture again, day after day and well into the evening, without a break to give a person a chance to filter it all. At some point, well past exhaustion in the hot, hot summer of 2008, I found myself in a lecture given by fiction writer Louise Hawes about desire -- what your character wants and why s/he can't get it. Louise is tiny, she has a seductive lecturing voice, and she's brilliant. At the end she had us do a short exercise: to write a letter to ourselves at a much younger age. Immediately about half the audience, which was overwhelmingly female, burst into tears. No tears for me, but I did think of myself at the age of 16. And there was no letter, no words, either. The younger self of my imagination was alone on a basketball court and so we had to play this game of one-on-one in my head first before anything else could be exchanged.
Q: Who won?
AC: Older basketball players have a little bit of an advantage in terms of confidence and sneakiness. So I figured I would win the first game, and then after that I would be toast -- I don't quite have the legs, or lungs, that I had, and my 16-year-old self used to play until he had to rub the brine residue from his lips. I have not pushed myself that hard on the court for years...
Q: So how does this vision turn into a novel about a young, sex-obsessed basketball player?
AC: It just took root in my imagination, the idea, the memory of the intensity of those teenaged days. Usually I'm working on the book I want to read that is not out there yet. In this case, Tilt is also a novel I would've loved to have read at about age 16 or so. It can be a cruel time, with hormones raging and no socially acceptable outlet for, say, sexual appetite. I can remember getting aroused, for no reason whatsoever, just reading the back of a cereal box at breakfast. Teenaged boys have a lot going on beneath the surface and I wanted to explore some of those wild desires with my character, Stan.
Q: Some readers have remarked that, actually, Stan is more "grown up" than many of the adults who surround him. He has his adolescent moments, to be sure. But why did you make him feel as though he has to carry the world on his shoulders?
AC: His father has wandered away from his duties -- has left to start another family. So Stan becomes the "man" of the house, helping his mother, who is not coping very well, raise younger sister Lily. In an early letter to the object of his affections, Janine, that is too honest for Stan to actually send, Stan explains that he doesn't want to deal with adult things -- for which we pretty well have to read "sex" -- until he is much older and it can all be handled in some kind of orderly fashion. I think many young people have that reaction now because they feel a lot of adult pressures already to study the right things, to have their lives and careers planned out. Sex is ubiquitous in the media and yet, so much of what passes for "sexy" on TV or in books and movies, to say nothing of the Internet, is actually misleading and superficial, overly graphic without either being honest or romantic or, even, arousing.
Q: Is this book mainly about sex, then?
AC: There's a lot more to it, of course. I'll leave readers to decide whether the climax of this book actually comes during the... OK, I won't go there, even. But in writing Tilt, I am trying to be true to the power of the adolescent experience of sex and love. First times are, often, extremely powerful. For many people, adolescence is the time when desire is greatest and the frustrations seem endlessly difficult. Yet the connections can be most powerful, too. I didn't feel I needed to write about adolescent love then add, say, zombies or vampires or a plot to ensnare the universe. Love, when it's personal, when it's honest, is enough to explore. I think at heart that's what this book is about.
AC: Well, first of all, a note about the residencies at VCFA. They're crazy. Stark, raving mad. Ten days of non-stop intellectual and social stimulation with far too many interesting people all obsessed about writing. And your first residency, whether it's as a student or faculty, is the most bizarre because you don't know what's going on, and half the time you're muttering to yourself because you can't believe people are going from lecture to workshop to reading to working lunch to lecture again, day after day and well into the evening, without a break to give a person a chance to filter it all. At some point, well past exhaustion in the hot, hot summer of 2008, I found myself in a lecture given by fiction writer Louise Hawes about desire -- what your character wants and why s/he can't get it. Louise is tiny, she has a seductive lecturing voice, and she's brilliant. At the end she had us do a short exercise: to write a letter to ourselves at a much younger age. Immediately about half the audience, which was overwhelmingly female, burst into tears. No tears for me, but I did think of myself at the age of 16. And there was no letter, no words, either. The younger self of my imagination was alone on a basketball court and so we had to play this game of one-on-one in my head first before anything else could be exchanged.
Q: Who won?
AC: Older basketball players have a little bit of an advantage in terms of confidence and sneakiness. So I figured I would win the first game, and then after that I would be toast -- I don't quite have the legs, or lungs, that I had, and my 16-year-old self used to play until he had to rub the brine residue from his lips. I have not pushed myself that hard on the court for years...
Q: So how does this vision turn into a novel about a young, sex-obsessed basketball player?
AC: It just took root in my imagination, the idea, the memory of the intensity of those teenaged days. Usually I'm working on the book I want to read that is not out there yet. In this case, Tilt is also a novel I would've loved to have read at about age 16 or so. It can be a cruel time, with hormones raging and no socially acceptable outlet for, say, sexual appetite. I can remember getting aroused, for no reason whatsoever, just reading the back of a cereal box at breakfast. Teenaged boys have a lot going on beneath the surface and I wanted to explore some of those wild desires with my character, Stan.
Q: Some readers have remarked that, actually, Stan is more "grown up" than many of the adults who surround him. He has his adolescent moments, to be sure. But why did you make him feel as though he has to carry the world on his shoulders?
AC: His father has wandered away from his duties -- has left to start another family. So Stan becomes the "man" of the house, helping his mother, who is not coping very well, raise younger sister Lily. In an early letter to the object of his affections, Janine, that is too honest for Stan to actually send, Stan explains that he doesn't want to deal with adult things -- for which we pretty well have to read "sex" -- until he is much older and it can all be handled in some kind of orderly fashion. I think many young people have that reaction now because they feel a lot of adult pressures already to study the right things, to have their lives and careers planned out. Sex is ubiquitous in the media and yet, so much of what passes for "sexy" on TV or in books and movies, to say nothing of the Internet, is actually misleading and superficial, overly graphic without either being honest or romantic or, even, arousing.
Q: Is this book mainly about sex, then?
AC: There's a lot more to it, of course. I'll leave readers to decide whether the climax of this book actually comes during the... OK, I won't go there, even. But in writing Tilt, I am trying to be true to the power of the adolescent experience of sex and love. First times are, often, extremely powerful. For many people, adolescence is the time when desire is greatest and the frustrations seem endlessly difficult. Yet the connections can be most powerful, too. I didn't feel I needed to write about adolescent love then add, say, zombies or vampires or a plot to ensnare the universe. Love, when it's personal, when it's honest, is enough to explore. I think at heart that's what this book is about.