Kerry Slavens interviews Michael Lebowitz — runner, photographer, diner philosopher and author of the diary series “Tarmac Meditations”.
I know a little bit about one of our first Life As a Human authors, Michael Lebowitz, from our occasional 8 a.m. breakfasts at Floyd’s diner when he’s in town, our crackly phone calls (with him in Eugene, Oregon and me in Victoria, BC) and Michael’s famously cryptic emails. But saying I know Michael amounts to something like saying I know the Grand Canyon from just flying over it. And like that famous canyon, there is a great deal of depth and many layers of meaning to Mr. Lebowitz.
That depth comes through in his poetry, his creative non-fiction and his “Tarmac Meditations,” a mind-strumming series of diary entries about the day-to-day struggles, thoughts and wins of this self-described “recovering addict, out-of-shape long distance runner, expatriate New Yorker, and writer/photographer with an MA in political philosophy and a Ph.D. in wrong turns and bad choices.”
With a book in the works and miles of tarmac still to run, Michael is in it for the long distance and, as he would say, “adjusting course, living in the moment, having dreams, and taking life as it comes in order to become better able to, well, take life as it comes.”
KS: Here’s a multi-part question using the journalist’s 5 W’s. Just have fun with your answers. First question: Who are you?
ML: Me sometimes, mostly though not you.
KS: What are you?
ML: Everybody’s brother and son.
KS: When are you?
ML: Now and then and maybe later.
KS: Where are you?
ML: Here or there or maybe not.
KS: Why are you?
ML: Because….
KS: As a writer and a runner, what are the similarities between writing and running — and what are the differences?
ML: The similarities? The short version is that if you don’t start, you don’t finish. All the rest, as they say is just conversation. The biggest difference between writing and running is perceived permanence, or so it seems to me.
KS: Any idea how many miles you have run? How many words you have written? And what was tougher, the miles or the words?
ML: No idea in either case. The miles are tougher in their immediacy and my lack of preparation in an interior sense-exterior obstacles versus interior obstacles. The words were easier to begin with, until they weren’t, if that makes sense. Once a run is over it is gone; the words are there and as the writer once wants to make them perfect so they remain until you let them go. The permanence of writing is that it lasts until one destroys it …or beyond, in the memory of the writer and/or the reader.
KS: Are marathons still in your future?
ML: From your mouth to God’s ear/ears…not fast ones, but yes as long as I can get ready to run one every now and again, or more accurately as long as there is an “every now and again” I will celebrate with a marathon.
KS: When did you start writing?
ML: In the sense that I think you mean [when did I begin] seriously as a “writer” — five years ago. Writing held the greatest fear for me, embodied the best chance for my total failure on every level of my perceived reasons for living. I had always thought that I was better than most writers I read and certainly [better] than most writers I knew and worked with [but] it was fantasy, envy, sheer delusion. Now that I am in the stream, they have become so much better and I still have a great deal to learn — the difference being that my words speak for me and for the first time in my life that is just fine with me.
KS: You are part of a generation that came out of such a rich part of history (Vietnam, civil rights, the heyday of rock). What kind of impact did living through these amazing times have on you and your writing?
ML: Well, the easy answer is –wait for the novel/s! Rock and roll is the simplest of the three if only because it told me that sex and music, girls and hard times (no puns here) went together — it pointed the way to manhood where those other “little things” you mentioned were waiting. That and the words, my god, the words, the poetry of late drifting on A.M. radio, all the way to leaving home and losing love to coming back and finding nothing but a rose in Spanish Harlem, a place up on the roof or under the boardwalk, boots of Spanish leather and one too many mornings when the times would be a-changing and all of those words — the words.
KS: How did you come up with the name “Tarmac Meditations” to describe your series of journal entries?
ML: In its way, it is a perfect tale. One morning I was telling my friend Rena’s mother, an elegant gal in her 80s, what I was doing, telling her about writing little pieces about road running and like that, telling her how I wanted to come up with a name for the thoughts and scribblings (and feeling all the while like I always did when an ADULT was asking me what I doing “these days?”). {So I thought about] Road Meditations, Running in the Morning Meditation, Morning Song, each one more saccharine than the last. “Well, “ Rita Herberts said, after putting aside the crossword, with a twinkle that had been there for decades, “Why don’t you just call it Tarmac Meditations and be done with it?” So like all the best writers, I stole it.
KS: How do you feel when you are writing?
ML: Like I’m at work. Some days it feels like something gets done, some days not. Very rarely does the sensual over-ride come into play, but sometimes [it happens] in the long hours and the interior meditation, the explosions of the words, thoughts. Whatever it is that becomes words on the page feels like the end of a long run, a very long run, a mixture of exhilaration mixed with both the knowledge of exhaustion to come and the inevitable sense that no matter [what] today’s result, tomorrow you will be at it again.
KS: …and when you are not writing?
ML: Pretty much the same as the above, except for the feeling good about anything in my life part.
KS: There’s a certain sense that some of your creative non-fiction pieces may be autobiographical…how true or not true is this?
ML: I think all writing is autobiographical in the sense that the writer is using what they know as a starting point and bringing their skills to bear on how what they know or want to explore gets presented. My writing is entirely autobiographical except for everything that I make up, either because I can’t remember it the way it was, or it was boring that way or it never happened that way anyway, or I want to see what happens if he dies in the end or doesn’t. In other words, my father had a study, he worked in his study; probably he closed the door. I have written that the door was always closed. True? Not factually but true emotionally for the 12-year-old me voice in the piece. Yes. I write feelings more than facts, I guess — that is, I change the facts to suit the truth of it for my characters. If I am any good at it no one (or maybe everyone ) will ask, “Is that true? Did you do that? Where did THAT come from?”
KS: Who are your biggest influences?
ML: Antoine de St. Exupery, Ernest Hemingway, Romain Gary, Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Bob Dylan, Richard Hugo, Homer, Dante, Leonard Cohen — and all them poets from Virgil to Stafford as they come and go.
KS: What fuels you to write?
ML: Coffee and the nagging sense that time is wasting and the sun is coming up.
KS: What are your goals as a writer?
ML: Like most, I think I look for the true word in place, the true sentence – writing as doorway, as path, never object — to tell a story cleanly and never name the thing itself but by writing it, making it available for the reader to do with as they will
KS: If you could choose any song as the theme song for your life, what would it be?
ML: “As Time Goes By”, “I’ll be Seeing You”, “In My Life”, “Lay Lady Lay”, “Rhapsody in Blue”.
KS: When I read your work, it’s like listening to terrific Blues. Have the Blues been an influence on you? If so, who and in what way?
ML: Leadbelly, Billie Holiday, Dexter Gordon, Coleman Hawkins, Howlin Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Muddy Waters, BB King, John Mayall, Paul Butterfield, the folkies, Dylan and Clapton to mention a few. The answer is a cheat. [There are] too many to name — they all (and so many more) brought me to know that the music was about feeling that had happened and might happen again, that truth was where you found it, and that heart was lonesome hurtin’, soarin’ thing; that to be alive was to be alive with everything — and lots of everything — just ain’t that easy. The Blues are, for me, about heartbreaking, fronting everything, stepping out in to the world looking always for love and loving, finding redemption despite every evidence that it won’t work — else what is a heaven for.
KS: You have a talent for getting down below the surface of the sentences and underneath the page to really drill deep into human experience. What is your relationship with language that you are able to evoke such substantial depth in your writing?
ML: A poet friend of mine, someone I no longer see but will always admire and, more to point, I guess, love, told me that I ought to give myself permission to be a writer, that I ought take the chance of carrying my own weight instead of thinking I might have done it better than the others I was producing. [This person] told me to own it, to make the words mine, to allow them to come and to trust that they would, to get out of my own way, to do the work of being alive. I’m not sure they would agree with your assessment of my writing, I’m not sure I do. I do know that these words that you publish are mine, they come when they do and they tell the stories as truly as I know them to be when they work, and that I don’t let them out of my sight until I think they do.
KS: You write often of addiction and recovery, sometimes with unnerving depth. What do you hope people will understand about addiction and addicts from your writing, if anything?
ML: The first thing that popped into my head just now was a Dylan line “I said, you know, they killed Jesus too/and they said, you’re not him…/ I write about that stuff because I know it from the inside out. Sometimes I think it is too easy to write about it. I don’t think about what people will understand save that the writing make sense to me. Whatever the reader takes from it is out of my hands in the end despite my intentions for good or ill. Addiction and recovery, way stations on my road to this page, these words, never over, never here again — I hope to never preach, to always hear in the voices of the people who walk across my pages that they have seen some things and that they are changed by them, that sometimes it ‘just be that way’ and sometimes all a poor boy/girl can do is cry until the sun comes up and then get up and start an new day, and like that.
KS: Can you talk about some of the places you’ve lived and jobs or careers you’ve had. What have been the highlights and the low points?
ML: I lived in New York, I lived in France, I lived a long time in Toronto and Vancouver, and a great time in Bamfield, BC. Saw the sunrise in Texas for several years, had good bread and great coffee by the San Francisco Bay, been in love in all them places as I am now here in Eugene, Oregon. Worked as a swamp logger, a bad actor, a movie producer, a carpenter, painter, trail guide, ditch digger, hod carrier, common laborer, limo driver, long haul rider and general layabout. And in truth, they have all been high points, right along with the low, on account of there I was, often despite my best efforts, breathing in and breathing out, carrying on the best I could with what I had to give at the time.
KS: I’ve just asked where you’ve been. Where are you going?
ML: Down the stairs to write a little, up the road to run a little, across the country to one day dance at my son’s wedding. The true answer is that I will take it one day at a time, the greatest gift we, any of us, have and equally the most important obligation, if only because it is our opportunity to make our lives over if we wish to, and for me, to make my life shine.
To read more of Michael’s writing on Life As a Human, visit his author’s page. See Michael’s photography at Long Run Photography.
Photo Credit
“Michael Lebowitz” © Chris Holt. All Rights Reserved.
Terrific interview!
Both Q’s & A’s
best observation on writing is not to get in the way of yourself.
Bravo.