Recently Sheldon Lee Compton of Bent Country and Revolution John was kind enough to ask me for an interview, which you can read here. If you don’t know SLC, he’s the author of The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), nominated for the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, and Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014). His novel Brown Bottle comes out in 2015 from Artistically Declined Press. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a judge’s selection winner for the Still: JournalFiction Award, a finalist for the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction, and an associate editor at NightTrain. He’s also a stand-up guy and great interviewer.
My favorite question of the interview:
SLC: Who would you fight – Hunter S. Thompson or Charles Bukowski? Give me a breakdown of how that fight would go.
TB: Well, the wise men say to pick the fight you think you can win, and that would probably be Buk since I’m not bulletproof. But if a metal-detector was involved, I might pick HST just for the hell of it. I think I could better live with myself after being worked over by a high-powered mutant than beating up on old Buk. I’d have to get my sometime office-mate, Peter Maguire, author of Thai Stick and black belt in both jeet kune do and jiu-jitsu, to train me up. HST would definitely have the reach advantage, so I’d have to get inside his hands and bulldog him. If I could do that he might have to watch out. My hope is that whoever won, we’d come out of it sufficiently bloodied and evenly-matched to be friends, and then we could get gloriously drunk and he could squint at me through his purpled eye and tell me about the savage heart of the American Dream and it would be probably the best day of my life.
