Description

This tape is labeled "Question & Answer--Graduate Class SDSU, 10-77," although the date is in September. A class member asks if the author writes about sex and alcoholism, how much does the author need to know about those things? Bumpus says he tries to write about “those possibilities” that are “beneath the surface” but are not consensual reality. Another student asks about the “façade” we maintain, and he says “it’s a tremendous accomplishment,” maintaining that façade. In dreaming we may escape it. Another student reads a description of Bumpus and asks about alcoholism in Bumpus’s book Anaconda, and why he wrote about it. Bumpus says he knew about drinking from living in an economically depressed community and from students at Iowa State University, which he attended. “A lot of my early experience was seeing” people who were broke and drinking heavily. They discuss plot elements in Anaconda. Bumpus talks about William Faulkner. Another question concerns “the unconscious,” and Bumpus talks about Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Freudian “forces.” Questions include one about D. H. Lawrence and professional writing, another about illustrations in Anaconda, and one about patterns in Bumpus’s work, which Bumpus answers using one of his characters. Reading, he says, is always “inspiring.”