The New Henry Miller Speaks Out: Interview With Eric Miles Williamson, Author of 'Welcome to Oakland'
- June 28, 2010
Eric Miles Williamson is the author of five critically acclaimed books: East Bay Grease (Picador, 1999), Two-Up (Texas Review Press, 2006), Oakland, Jack London, and Me (Texas Review Press, 2007), Welcome to Oakland (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2009), and the forthcoming 14 Fictional Positions (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2010). East Bay Grease, a PEN/Hemingway finalist, introduced a radically fresh voice in American fiction, dealing with the agonies of poor people without any failure of courage. Two-Up is a gut-wrenching book about the gory world of the gunite worker (once Williamson's own profession). Oakland, Jack London, and Me is unlike any other recent book of criticism--it is a raw personal response to how the reception of Jack London (always underestimated by critics) reveals more than we wish to know about our cultural blind spots. Williamson's best book to date is his novel, Welcome to Oakland, which picks up on T-Bird Murphy's travails in East Bay Grease, taking us to his early youth in the ghettoes and garbage dumps of Oakland. If readers have reason to complain that American fiction is too genteel, and generally only an academic exercise to feed bourgeois desires, then they need look no farther than Williamson's fiction for a bracing corrective.
Shivani: You were a student of Donald Barthelme's at the University of Houston in the 1980s. Tracy Daugherty recently published Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme (St. Martin's Press, 2009), the first complete biography of one of our most influential writing teachers. Can you share some memories of Barthelme with us?
Williamson: I have had the great fortune to have studied under many superior professors--Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, Kenneth Silverman and Jacques Derrida at NYU; Richard Howard, Robert Pinsky, Frank Kermode and Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston; Ronald Sukenick, Ed Dorn, Anselm Hollo and Steve Katz at the University of Colorado; Nestor Gonzalez and Robert Williams at ÂãÁÄÖ±²¥, Hayward.