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All Stories Mostly True

Steven Utley

Internationally Unknown

From 1952 into 1954 my Air Force family lived in southeastern England, and, from 1959 into 1961, at Naha Air Force Base, Okinawa. My memories of Old Blighty are vivid, albeit fragmentary — a little kid's memories. The only remotely literary thing that happened to me there occurred on my very-first-ever day of school: I watched and listened, awestruck and appalled, as the other children recited the alphabet in unison, from memory. I distinctly recall thinking, in utter panic, I have to learn all that?

As for Okinawa, had I known at the time that I wanted to grow up to be a writer, I would have paid a whole lot more attention to my surroundings, and taken notes, and then one day written a terrific novel stuffed with local color — like, for instance, Sarah Bird's[1]. Ms. Bird, also the product of a peripatetic childhood in an Air Force family, clearly did pay attention during her own Far East sojourn; I was far too busy being being a ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-old boy castaway on an island just brimming with venomous fauna and unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. But I did somehow get a poem published in the school newspaper. This evidently inculcated in me a love of the sight of my name in print — even smudgy mimeograph print — and seems also to have set me inexorably on the path to wherever I find myself today.

Not too long after I started writing professionally, I signed on with a West German literary agency. Soon afterward, I beheld for the first time my deathless prose as rendered into another language, when I received an anthology called Die große Uhr, edited by Wolfgang Jeschke and containing something called "Custers letzter Absprung." I thought it was pretty nearly about the swellest thing I had seen since my first sight of my own name in print back on Okinawa, and never mind that I don't read German beyond what I encounter in Katzenjammer Kids comic strips ("Mitt dos kids society iss nix!").

In due course I found my by-line adjoining such story titles as "Moches de Nuit," "Subito," and "Damals auf der jungen Erde." Two different Italian translators had a go at a tale called "Upstart" during the same year, one rendering it "Il parvenu" and the other, "Al cospetto degli Sreen." "Upstart" is "Uppkomling" in Swedish and "Tsaboukas" in Greek; I like just looking at both of those words. Several other titles, including that of an unauthorized translation of mine 'n' Howard Waldrop's "Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole," have been rendered into Japanese characters I don't know how to reproduce here, and there are also some in Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Czech. There are even some in British English. I loved the idea of being in print in the United Kingdom and didn't mind too much about being pirated in Japan; because, undoubtedly, of the time I spent in those places during my impressionable childhood, I am somewhat of an Anglophile and a Japanophile.

I've also developed a soft spot for Australia, even though I've never set foot upon nor even come within sight of the place, and know only so much of the language as can be gleaned from movies, television commercials, and hearsay, e.g., "G'day," "beah," "put another sheila on the barbie," and my favorite, strong language reserved for those occasions when mechanical or electronic devices don't work as they should: "The f**king f**k won't f**k!" At least, I'm told that it's Australian in origin; it certainly doesn't seem like something you'd hear fall from the lips of, say, an irate Canadian, assuming you found one.

Anyway, I love Australia because it put me, so to speak, on the map. My first story collection, Ghost Seas, was issued by Ticonderoga Publications, out of Nedlands, which I understand to be on the far rim of Down Under, the side washed by the Indian Ocean. Could I have ranged farther afield in search of a publisher willing to lose money on a book by moi? Not unless there's a small press operating out of Little America.

Actually, it was Ticonderoga, in the person of Russell Farr, who ranged far afield in search of an author on whom to lose money that could have been more profitably ploughed into liquor, lottery tickets, and loose and crazy women. But the tale tells better the other way, and the point is, I finally became the author of a book all my own. Family members regarded me with fresh respect tinged with suspicion ("Is this book about us?"), and a landmass I had theretofore admired chiefly for its exotic marsupials and its tradition of eloquent profanity shot straight to the top of my list of favorite remnants of the supercontinent Gondwana.

My second story collection, The Beasts of Love, came out from the Oregon-based Wheatland Press, but is actually printed in Lavergne, Tennessee, literally right across the road from Smyrna, Tennessee, where I am considered to reside.

The first (and, at this writing, only) review I've seen of Beasts is by one Russell Farr. Well, it is a small world. I told Howard Waldrop that if I were an Aussie writer living Down Under, my most devoted readers would probably be Greenlanders. He reminded me that a prophet is not without honor, save in his own land. "We are doomed," he said, "to have careers in foreign lands." Howard is a sensation in, I believe, Finland.

My third story collection, Where or When, bears the imprint of PS Publishing, based in the United Kingdom — which brings me full circle — but is edited by a guy who lives in South Africa, which also means that my writing career, such as it is, has now touched all the settled continents as well as a select few of your more important islands.

So, you see, though I might joke about being an internationally unknown author, I'd never lie about a thing like that. About other things, yes, but not about that.

Footnotes

[1] The Yokota Officers Club, by Sarah Bird. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. [back]

Steven Utley describes himself as an "internationally unknown writer". To this end he has published a great deal of short fiction, which has been collected in Ghost Seas (Ticonderoga, 1997), The Beasts of Love (Wheatland Press, 2004) and the forthcoming Where or When (PS Publishing). He lives in Tennesee, where he reads Proust, because "somebody here in Tennesee has to."