Floyd Skloot

[November 5th, 2008]

You Really Should Read: In the Shadow of Memory, A World of Light, The Wink of the Zenith.

Few things are more precious to a writer then memory. The web of recollections and associations springing from the author’s past experience provide the raw materials for most effective prose and poetry. So what is a professional writer to do when he wakes up one morning to find that a virus has robbed him of his past? This is the task that has been set before Oregon writer Floyd Skloot, who has used his memoirs and poetry to reassemble the life that was taken from him 20 years ago. MATT GRAHAM. 3:30 pm Sunday, Nov. 9. Community of Writers Portland Stage.

What’s your personal writing ritual?
Put on Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap, place tea or water (in a glass mug) to the right of the computer, and sit at desk barefoot.

What are your favorite themes to write about (or that you’re most guilty of rehashing)?
Love, resilience, the search for coherence.

The most beautiful word in the English language is:
Remember.

What authors made you want to pick up a pen in the first place and why.
Prose: Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Walker Percy.Poetry: Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Thomas Kinsella.

Fight Club time: If you could fight one author (or critic), who would it be and why?
Marianne Moore: one of the few writers smaller than me, and if I surprised her I might win.

Name a book that you think is highly overrated. Be honest.
The Magic Mountain.

Dream project:
Write a book about participating in a weeklong Dodgers baseball fantasy camp.

Most recent nightmare:
Flying through deserted rooms in a house, turning a corner and encountering a cloaked figure wielding a net I cannot avoid.

Your cure for writer’s block:
Book reviewing.

Pessimistic question: Will you keep writing even after people stop reading?
Yes. There is no choice.

Optimistic question: Kittens? Discuss.
I am allergic to cats. Besides, I always said I was not a cat person. Then Beverly and I got together in 1992 and her two cats won me over. We added a third. After all three had died, we adopted a kitten. I take an antihistamine and sleep with a cat on my legs.

Please paste a short paragraph from a story, poem, article, blog post, etc., you’re currently working on below:
From an essay on the gains and losses that accompanied my learning, in a high school class, to speak without an accent.

SENIOR SPEECH

I usta tawk like dis. Worse, really. Woise. Because I was born in Brooklyn, then moved at age 10 to Long Beach, a small barrier island off the south shore of Long Island. Lawn Guyland. So I grew up speaking a hybrid of two heavy, distinctive and—according to public opinion surveys—ridiculous American accents. Yeah, no less an authority than the BBC says Americans not only find the accent “the most unpleasant and most incorrect,” but even those who speak it “don’t really like their accents either.” And according to a City-Data.com poll, a third (a toid!) of all respondents found New York’s to be their least favorite English-language accent.