Calhoun: Definitely,
Allen: It sounds like seeing your writing in print was one
of the most thrilling things for you as a writer.
Calhoun: Definitely, those first publications were just
great. The first thing I had published was a poem, followed by book reviews and
my first article. It was nice to see my name out there.
Allen: What gave you the least satisfaction, or was the most
frustrating early in your writing career?
Calhoun: I'm glad I made the decision to go away from
fiction. I started out in the mid 70s writing it. I read tons of fiction, of
course, but fiction was hard for me and continues to be difficult for me to
this day. I guess my biggest regret is that I never had a major fiction work
published. I had a few short stories published, but it's not my strong point. and That's the thing I regret most and like
least about my career. I have to give myself credit for making the decision to
let go of this and do other things.
Allen: Was there a writer or poet that you admired and hoped
to emulate in your early writing career?
Calhoun: Actually, there were several. When you asked the
question I immediately thought of three or four writers: Dylan Thomas, the
Welsh poet, and W. S. Merwin, an American poet who I really admired. I
definitely was influenced in my poetry by both. I also thought about Ernest
Hemingway because I really like the conciseness and crispness of his writing
–and I definitely tried to emulate him
for a while.
And then I finally realized there was one writer that
influenced my style more than any other: Harlan Ellison, best known as a
science fiction and fantasy writer. Besides writing entertaining stories, he
would do these really interesting introductions to his stories, and they were
always written so conversationally-- this really drew you into them. A lot of
times today, even as a marketing writer, people say that my style is breezy and
conversational, and I think I owe a lot of that style to Harlan Ellison because
I was deliberately trying to copy his style. I liked the way it sounded and
what he was doing.
And Charles Bukowski, the German poet and fiction writer who
adopted LA as his home, definitely influenced me. I started out reading him in
the 70s and quickly became a fan of his gritty, no-nonsense style, his humor
and his accessibility. In the 80s, I got his contact information from a fellow
fan and began a correspondence with him that lasted from 1983 until just before
his death in 1994. I published his work in Pig in a Poke, a little poetry
magazine that I edited for most of the 80s and even put out a small pamphlet of
his work. and He was an inspiration because he was a well-known writer who
still kept in touch with his small-press roots.
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