Sam Shepard Interview

 "The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is." *

It's the sort of thing a Sam Shepard character might say. In the new book, Day Out of Days, characters wander through the pages, lost within their own lives (one of the most memorable features a man trapped in a public toilet who is literally driven mad when he's forced to listen to Shania Twain on an endless loop). They struggle for personal agency or a sense that they're in control of their own lives.

"And they never are," he says. "That's the one thing about being an author as opposed to being in one's life is that you have the illusion that you can bring some form to it. Which is the beautiful part of it. You don't feel that you are so much in chaos. I don't know what it would be like if I didn't have some form, short stories or plays or whatever."

He feels "blessed", he says, to have discovered writing. "It fulfills something in me that I don't know how I'd serve otherwise." His father was a bright man, the winner of a Fulbright scholarship, a fluent speaker of Spanish, but he never found that outlet. Or at least the outlet he found was drink. He struggled with the return to civilian life after the war, moving his family from airbase to airbase, training as a Spanish teacher, until he was sacked for drinking, and then moving the family to Duarte, California, where he attempted to farm, his drinking increasing year by year. "The alcohol just completely deranged him," says Shepard. 

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