Larry Baker

Larry Baker was raised an air force brat and spent much of his childhood traveling with his family all over the country and then overseas. He started elementary school in Louisiana, went to junior high in the Azores, and graduated from high school in Texas.

Baker, who holds degrees in English from the University of Oklahoma and a doctorate from the University of Iowa, put himself through college by managing movie theaters. He once ran the Admiral Drive-in in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the worlds largest outdoor theaters and the inspiration for the Flamingo Drive-in Theater in his book. During his "movie" career Baker was robbed four times, shot at once, stabbed once, beat up by a motorcycle gang, sold sex education books at intermission, found a dead woman sitting on a toilet at his drive-in, and caused a thirteen-car pileup on an interstate highway nearby with windblown fireworks.

Baker’s other jobs have included time as a sportswriter, hotel clerk and house detective, pizza restaurant manager, Pinkerton security guard ad agency writer, twice-elected and twice-defeated politician, standardized
test writer and grader, and a short stint as master-of-ceremonies at a burlesque/strip club.

Larry lives with his wife and two children in Iowa City, Iowa, where he teaches history. He is currently working on his second novel, tentatively titled TEACHER TEACHER, the story of a thirty-eight-year-old widow who gets her first job as a teacher at the high school from which she graduated twenty years earlier.

 

 

"This is much more than a sum of memorable parts; it is a literary tour de force, a study of barriers built and torn down." --New Orleans Times-Picayune

 

Pageonelit.com: Who were your Literary inspirations when you were growing up? What did you read? What do you read now?

Larry: Sorry to be so uninspiring here, but my youthful reading was usually the Readers Digest condensed version of every novel published in the 1950s. Thus, volumes of abridged stories. I don't remember being a "serious" reader until I got to college. Strange, I wanted to be an English teacher before I actually got serious about reading AND writing. I was president of my high school literary club, but I did that to impress my favorite teacher. In college, especially in graduate school, I digested more books than food. I was in my thirties by then, so I could actually understand and appreciate Melville, Hawthorne, Crane (in fact, my first major fiction publication was a re-write of "The Open Boat" published in the Georgia Review), Dickinson, Dickens, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. My great love was Flannery O'Connor. I would fantasize about a threesome of me, O'Connor, and Emily Dickinson. I tell my students that and they gag. Their loss. In the past few years I have been reading a lot of history books. Fiction? I just discovered Pete Dexter (where have I been?) Now, my big confession is that I don't read a lot of fiction. John Irving and Pat Conroy, sure, but few other notable names. Some wonderful single books like I WAS AMELIA EARHART, Bauby's BUTTERFLY AND THE DIVING BELL, Schwartz's RESERVATION ROAD. And a few short stories, especially in the quarterlies.

 

Pageonelit.com: How difficult was it for you to get your first book published?

Larry: How much time have you got? I finished FLAMINGO three years before it was published. First agent who read it liked it, but he was unable to sell it for over a year, and I did revision after revision. I really liked this agent, so it was very hard to sever our relationship. But I could tell that he was losing his enthusiasm for the book and I was out of ideas about how to improve it. I put it on the shelf, went to work full-time (my wife was
pleased) and just happened to send out one more letter to another agent. He liked it, made a phone call to Sonny Mehta at Knopf, and Sonny is now sending my kids to college. In other words, I am very very lucky, and persistent.

 

Pageonelit.com: Tell us a little about your last novel and it's theme. Where did the idea come from?

Larry: My last? You mean my first, and only? THE FLAMINGO RISING is narrated by a man in his forties looking back at his childhood when he lived with his parents and sister INSIDE the worlds largest drive-in theater screen. I had owned and operated my own theaters, indoor and drive-in, for fifteen years. A lot of the episodes in TFR come from my own experience. I had originally planned a book told by the manager of that drive in, but he was too weird (imagine a southern combination of Captain Ahab and PT Barnum) to tell his own story, so I finally figured out that it s/b told from the son's p.o.v. A veritable stroke of genius. I had started the book ten years ago, set it aside for six years, changed narrators and finished it in nine months. Theme? Love, sex, and death...all understudied topics. Actually, to be uncharacteristically serious, TFR is about a young man surrounded by three adults who represent three sides of a faith triangle: devout Christian mother, agnostic father, atheist neighbor. By the end of the book, the narrator (Abraham Isaac Lee) confronts his own responsibility in a tragedy and chooses one of those three options for himself. And, it's a comedy, too.

 

Pageonelit.com: Are you currently working on or finishing your next novel? How do you go through the plotting process? Outline or no outline?

Larry: Notes, and a final sentence that I work toward. I am almost finished with my next book, titled TEACHER TEACHER, about a 38 yr old woman who gets her first job ever as a teacher at the high school from which she graduated 20 yrs earlier. I told my agent that I have three good books in me: about theaters (TFR), teaching (TT), and local politics ( I served two terms as a city councilman and lost two elections.) The plot for TT is governed by the school year calendar. But, unlike most other books about teaching, TT focuses on the relationships between the teachers themselves, not as much on the student characters. If TFR was a coming-of-age story, then TT could best be described as a coming-to-terms-with-age story.

 

Pageonelit.com: What are your feelings on the Internet and do you feel it has or will have a good or bad effect on fiction writing? Do you think it is a bad idea or a good idea for beginning writers to publish their work on the Internet?

Larry: On both the hard and soft cover editions of my book, I include my e-mail address under my picture. I have gotten comments from around the world. As for publishing fiction on the Internet, I don't have an intelligent opinion. My first impulse is to say it diminishes the experience for the reader. But, heck, Dickens serialized his stuff in magazines and newspapers. He did all right. I guess I am too old fashioned for my own good. My emotional thought about this question is that fiction on a computer is like reading fiction off a television screen. Why bother? Should beginning writers do it? If you can get an audience and an income, why should anyone else criticize that. I think the Internet has vast potential for the spread of information, such as the Page One concept. A great idea. But fiction is not the same thing as information. In other words, I don't have a clue how to answer this question.

 

Pageonelit.com: It is an honor to have you as a guest of Page ONE. In closing can you offer any advice to hopeful writers out there who are currently working on their first novel?

Larry: The best answer to this is the most obvious, and the one most writers would agree on. Read a ton of books before you presume to write your own. Live an interesting life. Write and prepare to be rejected. Rewrite. Keep your day job, especially if you're married and want to stay married. Write and prepare to be rejected. Don't take it personally. Find honest intelligent reader(s) and DEMAND that they be honest with you. Never change something merely because another person doesn't like it, but if several of your readers say the same thing---pay attention. Write and prepare to be rejected. Did I say "write and prepare....