Author Interviews

Davis, Crutch, and Katzenburger the cat in Iowa City, 1971.	Will and his wife Rose at a Stanford party, around 1975.

Crutch, Davis, & Will: That Was Them, This Is Now

Joel Shoemaker
(June 2002, 94 - 99.)

When Chris Crutcher visited my school several years ago, he mentioned that he, Terry Davis, and Will Weaver knew each other back in the ’70s. I had noticed that their books have much in common. Their male protagonists participate in sports, have girlfriends who are sometimes lovers but usually objects of distinct and sexual longing. There is competition beyond sports. There is commitment to things deeper and more meaningful—a concern with living the right way, following a personal moral code. Fathers are often demanding, emotionally distant, or downright hostile, but are balanced by warm and supportive females, often moms. The boys' mentors act as surrogate fathers. There is at least a shadow of violence. And always there is a constant, self-deprecating humor. All three authors exploded out of the gate with strong, positively reviewed first novels. All have gone on to write other acclaimed novels for both adults and young adults. All have seen some of their writings converted to film.

Who were these guys? Terry Davis was undefeated during two years of high school wrestling. Will Weaver was captain of his high school basketball team and president of his class. Chris Crutcher played multiple sports in high school and captained his college swim team. And who are they today?

The following interview was edited from e-mails exchanged between December 2001 and March 2002.

CRUTCH: I met Terry in 1965, my sophomore year at Eastern Washington State College. I didn't know him well in those first years, but he was visible on campus as a funny and sensitive guy. In a Shakespeare class I sat close enough to see his paper during tests and got a C. He, of course, got an A. When he was teaching high school English in a small town near Seattle where I was doing my student teaching, we lived together and got to be very good friends.

DAVIS: I tell the whole story of meeting Crutch in his biography, Presenting Chris Crutcher (Twayne, 1997/VOYA June 1998). Crutch was acutely identified as a swimmer and a leader among the athletes. Or at least a leader of the lettermen who didn't want to kill him because he wasn't a racist. That Black Fist thing is a good story, Crutch.

CRUTCH: The coaching staff recruited black athletes from the south side of Chicago. They got some great players but didn't accept them outside the athletic arena. The head coach was racist—my conversations with him prove it. In a time of unrest in the country, black athletes were boycotting the Olympics, and Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their fists from the Olympic podium. When colleges in our area joined to form a Black Student Union, there were demonstrations and all kinds of ugly racist things were said. The swim team was the only team on campus that supported the BSU, and we took some big-time heat for it. The athletic department pulled their offer to hire me as head swim team coach for the following year, because of my leanings.

CRUTCH: If the team had taken a racist position, I would have left. I can be pretty stubborn. Louie Banks in Running Loose was probably more heroic than I could have been in high school, but by college some things were becoming more evident.

CRUTCH: Mostly we were a bunch of renegades.

DAVIS: Remember the cast of characters in Stotan!? Those guys are based to quite a degree on the swim team at Eastern; I was friends with Banger, the model for Lionel Serbosek. Stotan! really touches me still. Because it's a fine book, of course, but especially because it recalls those days—sodden with the cheap beer of self-belief. And I don't mean self-delusion. [It's self-belief when] you've lived just a certain number of years and maybe haven't made the number of mistakes yet that you will eventually make.

CRUTCH: Yeah, Stotan! is special to me for the same reason. Actually, Davis, you and I and Linda Wolcott were going to write a screenplay about it. We started that story in my basement, meeting once a week. We couldn't get it told, but Nortie Wheeler, the character who travels the greatest emotional and psychological distance to become a Stotan, was your invention. That name is stolen from a minor character in your Vision Quest. And it isn't self-delusion. It is self-belief. We were right to believe.

DAVIS: I met Will at Stanford. Will had a reserve, a dignified quality that touched me, as did his insight as a reader, and his narrative. Will has many skills. I admire that quality, which not many writers possess.

WILL: I met Terry at Stanford in 1975. We were in the M.A. writing program there, Terry as a prestigious Stegner Fellow and me a rube from the Midwest. I was not long off the farm and a B.A. in English, University of Minnesota—a good degree but still light luggage. I had written less than anyone in our group, but a story about the dark side of deer hunting caught the attention of Nancy Packer, a protégé of Wallace Stegner, and she got me into the program. I remember the first day, seated around this big oak table with Terry, Brett Singer (Isaac Bashevis Singer family), and Judy Gold (Herb Gold), plus several other lean and hungry young writers, thinking that I was out of my league. Raymond Carver was roistering about Stanford then, a hot new fiction writer with his first stories recently in Esquire. The fall start-up party was at director Richard Scowcroft's house, where later that night Raymond stole all the liquor. I insulted Mrs. Scowcroft by asking for the recipe of her chiles relleños (we always ask for recipes in the Midwest, and I'd never eaten Mexican food).

I remember feeling that Terry was my guy; I felt I could trust him. Later, when I was struggling and playing catch-up with my fiction and writing totally dumb stories, Terry was always positive. That's what I remember best—his unfailing optimism and cockeyed sense of humor. He also kept mentioning some guy named Crutcher, who was down from Spokane to the Bay Area.

CRUTCH: One night we met for dinner at Davis's house. Some of his writing friends were there, and Will was one of them. I remember Will best because I thought he looked like the guy who played Billy Pilgrim in the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five. I went back with my girlfriend for another dinner at Terry's with Will and his wife, Rosalie, and [Terry’s partner,] Mariette, a wonderful French woman who made fondue that tickled taste buds I didn't know I had. We drank wine and beer and had great conversations until midnight, when the three of us—very clever guys—dared each other to get naked and jump into the freezing cold swimming pool of the apartment complex. Real men fear no temperature.

WILL: All three of us had a chauvinistic attitude toward Californians—what a bunch of wimps—so we made a major statement that night, impressing our women at the same time. Some guys naturally have all the right moves. F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition of personality was "an unbroken series of successful gestures." Scotty was talking about us.

CRUTCH: To seal the male bond, we decided to meet at an outdoor basketball court the next morning at six. I stayed at Davis's place, and we got up the next morning and drove to the court. Davis was hyperventilating all the way, trying to get oxygen in his bloodstream to replace the alcohol. I was praying for the strength to remain upright. Will showed up with a couple of buddies, looking like he'd gone to bed at eight the night before, and proceeded to shoot a nasty little hook shot over me all morning. I called him "Dream Weaver" but later I crippled a character I named after him, just to get even. [See The Crazy Horse Electric Game.]

Joel Shoemaker, library media specialist at South East Junior High School in Iowa City, Iowa, is series editor of the teens@the library series for Neal-Schuman Publishers. Like Davis, he enjoys motorcycle cruising. His interviews of young adult authors appear each June in VOYA.

This interview has been excerpted from its original form published in the June 2002 issue of VOYA on pages 94-99. See its complete version in the magazine for the rest of this conversation that moves from recollections of youth to the authors’ current lives. A Publishing Time Line combines the works of all three writers at the end of the interview.