Great Profiles

I realized that writing could be about the contemporary world rather than Wordsworth or Shakespeare or Pope or Chaucer and that you could write about running around looking for drugs and pussy and getting drunk and I went, oh yeah, of course.

–Bryan Di Salvatore on the day he decided to become a writer

Probably not the most traditional response, but then again, Bryan Di Salvatore is not a traditional writer. He didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. If you cast a gaze over his 6-foot, 230-pound frame, writer would be the last thing to come to mind. When he walks you can see his knees are stiff, victims of numerous injuries. It could be the breadth of chest or the powerful shoulders that throw people off, chances are just as good it’s the horseshoe moustache and the unkempt tussle of gray hair. In the deep South he’s even been mistaken for Wild Bill Hickock. “Bryan reminds me of the Wild West outlaw: not only does he wear the prototypical moustache,” said University of Louisiana at Monroe English graduate student Shane Thompson, “but he’s also damn accurate when he needs to discharge a few words.”

Ask him a tough question and you’ll likely wait a few seconds for an answer as he looks away, stalling to give himself time to locate and arrange the appropriate words into a response in which every utterance must be heeded. His speech is rhythmic, steady, enunciated, metered, meaningful, sometimes faster, usually not. His brown eyes are engaging, curious, windows into an active mind.

Good buddy William Finnegan says Di Salvatore is more interested in language qua language than most writers now working. He and a select few others (Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, now a major motion picture) are diehards that way. He’s deeply committed to arcane forms of the American vernacular. From this perspective he sounds pretty pretentious, one of those people who use big words because they want you to know how intelligent they are. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
He’s much more comfortable having beers at the Missoula Club than at Finn and Porter. The man’s a fan of Walker Texas Ranger, for crying out loud. Facts are facts though, and he doesn’t get up with the birds every morning and have coffee to prepare for a long day at the construction site or lumber mill. He wakes up to write.

Every day, at a small office near the Missoula Club on West Main, Di Salvatore sits down in his spartan space to write letters, a sort of warm-up exercise. He made a conscious decision to not have telephone or Internet here. He doesn’t like them. Finnegan says he’s generally ahead of his time (loved McCarthy before anybody else had heard of him), but also gloriously stuck in his ways (may be the last great letter writer).

He liked Microsoft-DOS, the operating system that came out over 25 years ago. Problem is, no one can open his files when he sends them. Christmas break will be spent converting 4,000 files into Word documents.
By one o’clock he’s played out. Enough writing for one day. It’s time to go play golf, do yard work or drink beer. At night he reads magazines or novels, about a book a week. Reading is really where it all began.

Bryan Di Salvatore was born to working class parents in La Crescenta, a suburb of Los Angeles. His dad was a machinist. His mom served lunches at the local elementary school. They didn’t go to college. Neither did his grandparents or anyone else in his extended family. Di Salvatore, an A student, a football player, student body president, was going to be different. He didn’t work unless it was summer.

Schoolwork was important. No TV until it was done. He could borrow the car to go on a date but couldn’t go and earn money to get his own car. There was pressure to go to college. School was easy for him, like basketball was easy for Michael Jordan. Jordan worked harder than anyone else. Di Salvatore spent weekends studying, he was good.

They (his parents) treated me really well but, you know, there was pressure. If you’re a good student, if you’re an A student, people give you shit. Like, do you think you’re too good for us, I mean its there. Looking back you know, all these years, there were times I just wanted to go out with the guys and drink beer you know and I didn’t. Now later, I did.

–Di Salvatore on high school

Yale offered a full ride scholarship in 1966. Three thousand miles away from home, people were starting to smoke marijuana, it was fun. He hooked up with fledgling writers and photographers and artists. They would spend countless hours just goofing, creating things. Somebody would be playing music, he would be writing poems, this was their world.

It was really weird because all my good friends in high school weren’t the smart sort of book worms, it was the jocks. Getting thrown into that very rarified world of the Ivy League, I was with a bunch of people that I wouldn’t have spent any time with in high school cause I was just a big, swaggering, asshole jock, you know. That freshman year was very lonely in some ways because I was hanging around with these little pencil- neck weird guys.

–Di Salvatore on college

It was different, but after going back home, he realized that it was the world for him. It was at Yale he first read “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, by chance really. Spring break his freshman year and he didn’t have enough money to leave town. Someone gave him a copy and said he might like it. The very wild story about driving across the country and being crazy changed his view of writing forever.

The experience of discovery didn’t end at Yale. In the fall of 1974, Di Salvatore was accepted to the M.F.A. program at UM. It was the second place in the whole world he had ever felt comfortable. He wasn’t some kind of weirdo or wimp; there were other writers. It was different here. People here wrote some real tough books, detective books. He learned that literature could be muscular and beautiful at the same time; it wasn’t little fairy poetry like he had envisioned it in high school. He found roaring parties with people quoting books, talking about stories they had read, screaming with ecstasy and joy over books. Come hell or high water this is what he wanted to do.

For all the fun and excitement that writing brought into his life, there were challenges as well. Namely, a lack of money. From the time he graduated from Yale in 1970 until he was accepted into the M.F.A program, Di Salvatore cooked at Denny’s, at a steakhouse, bussed tables, worked as an exterminator and hauled wheat on the Highline. After graduating from the M.F.A. program, he taught in Guam for a couple of years. In need of beer money, he hooked onto the local paper and realized he had an affinity for non-fiction. His first published piece came in 1977. He also wrote for travel and airline magazines.

The next three years of his life greatly contributed to the novel he is currently trying to sell. A gifted surfer moves from Idaho to California and falls in love. His new marriage falls apart though, because he’s obsessed with surfing. According to Di Salvatore, it’s a very sophisticated version of half the comedy shows and commercials on TV where the guy wants to be sitting there playing golf and his wife wants him to paint the house.

Where does his inspiration come from? In this case it was a 36-month surfing trip around the world with his friend, Finnegan, whom he met in Maui after college.
I was looking for a straight older man, Ivy-educated, surf-enabled, independently wealthy, passionate about literature, opera, the arts, but also willing to spend evenings by the campfire pounding moonshine Bryan fulfilled a couple of these requirements.

–Bill Finnegan on DiSalvatore

Their journey began in Guam in 1977 and continued to Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Australia for 6 months (during which time they wrote numerous articles for Australian surfing magazines) Bali, Java, and Sumatra. There they parted ways and Di Salvatore continued on to Spain, Portugal, France, England and home.

Inspiration doesn’t always come from going halfway around the world though. Not too long ago it was a sign in a small town around Malta that read “Guns, Beer, and Moccasins.” It’s hard to say where that line will lead.

He likes to drive, hop in the car on a whim and drive to Miles City and play golf. He golfs a lot now, badly, passionately. It’s what adult men do to keep the competitive juices flowing. But golf doesn’t contribute to his writing; driving does. When he drives he gets lots of ideas, he’ll write down shards of things he sees or hears in a little notebook he carries. Missoula author and longtime friend Neil McMahon’s fondest memories with Di Salvatore happened on the road.

“He and I and Jim Crumley (another Missoula area author) went over to Helena for a reading. Afterwards we hooked up with Ralph Beer (a Helena area rancher and author) and ended up closing down a bar. The next morning we got up, uh, fairly damaged and started out at King’s Bar in Jefferson City (15 minutes out of Helena) at 10 a.m. We had one hell of a trip.”

Perhaps the greatest epiphany in Di Salvatore’s writing career happened in the fall of 1985. He had been working multiple jobs for the past five years just to get by, grading papers at Hellgate, moonlighting at Tidyman’s Market stocking shelves, doing a census, substitute teaching, kind of going backwards.

He played on a local softball team, The Montana Review of Books. During the World Series he had everyone over and they roasted a huge buffalo hump. It was Kansas City against St. Louis.

I’d broken up with my girlfriend, now my wife; it was just a horrible fall, gray, dismal day. Winter was coming, I didn’t have the rent, baseball season was over, and I was standing there doing the dishes . . . I literally left the damn dishes in the sink and I went down and typed up a little story, a mock-heroic story about our softball team rooting for Kansas City because we’d had a bad year and they were the underdogs. I sent it to Mr. Shawn (William Shawn, former editor of “The New Yorker”). And he called and said, “I’d like to run this, and I’d like you to come out to New York and be our guest.

–Di Salvatore on his “big break”: (from an interview with Powell Books)

That day and its $1,300 paycheck began a long relationship with the prestigious magazine. Di Salvatore went on to write many pieces for “The New Yorker,” half a dozen long non-fiction pieces and about twenty small pieces at the front of the magazine called “Talks of the Town.” The topics range from two-part stories about a dynamite factory and a long-haul trucker from Stevensville, to a story about the old TV show “Northern Exposure.”

Not too bad for a guy who was told by Bill Kittredge (a UM professor at the time) when he was going through the M.F.A. program that he would never publish. Perhaps Di Salvatore’s favorite piece though, is a long profile he wrote on Merle Haggard, the legendary country western singer, after spending eight weeks on the road with him.

He was two things that most everyone else isn’t in the world—a supreme and talented artist, something of a savant, and seemingly without any pangs about the need to tell little lies and obey social conventions. He said what he wanted to when he wanted to … In a way I half admired and was half envious and a third-half of me appalled at his disregard for social lubrication. He was like a cat in that sense. Without manners, without conscience, and without venality. He just…is.

–Di Salvatore on Merle Haggard: (from an interview with Robert Stubblefield)

Di Salvatore has also written a piece about golfing in Montana for Sports Illustrated and numerous other articles for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, Men’s Journal, Islands, and Outside. One of those stories, for Outside, was about a young women in Lander, Wyo., a marathon runner named Amy Bechtel, who disappeared one day on a run. A unique article for one big reason, he wrote it with his wife.

Di Salvatore is married to Deirdre McNamer, 20 years this July. The Cut Bank native is the author of four novels. Before that, she wrote for the Associated Press and various newspapers, including the Missoulian. Now she teaches fiction writing at UM. Sometimes it can be tough for two writers in a relationship. Di Salvatore hasn’t been able to sell anything lately, McNamer has. She feels bad for him. He feels good for her. She says they both would have been better off financially to marry neurosurgeons or tax lawyers. But they love each other dearly and wouldn’t have it any other way.

When it comes to reviewing each other’s work she has always reined in his excesses and he pushes her to be a little less terse, tight and telegraphic. It’s a mutual carving and plumping up of each other’s work. The story for Outside is a great example. In his draft of the story, Di Salvatore talked about clouds for 150 words, she summed them up in three. They ended up with about twenty.

Di Salvatore loves the English language, is endlessly fascinated with it. In this fascination lies his biggest weakness as a writer. He has a lack of interest in plot; gets high-centered on details of alliteration. To quote Joyce, “The swerve of shore and bend of bay.” His love of beautiful sentences doesn’t translate into page-turning novels.

Ward’s light-colored jacket has those familiar immense lapels. The jacket fits him like a question: Whose was it originally? It drapes around his shoulders as if he were an amputee; it rides over his wrists as if he were trying to keep his hands warm. Like Orvis’s, Ward’s legs are crossed, but his hands, instead of resting on his thighs, grip them like talons. Ward’s head is enormous, so disproportionate to the rest of his reedy self that we can’t but wonder if the boy suffered from a terrible malady. He did not.

–A description of John Ward, from Di Salvatore’s non-fiction biography “The Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward”

Di Salvatore speculates that the demand his writing puts on readers may contribute to the fact that his surfing novel has been looked at by 23 different publishers and still remains unsold. Nevertheless he doesn’t quite understand and it hurts. It’s one reason he’s teaching.

Writing and publishing a novel takes a lot of time and there’s no guarantee for money.

That’s the beauty of magazine writing, but no one wants his ideas. He wrote a piece not too long ago on the controversy over the use of aluminum bats in high schools after a pitcher in Miles City, Brandon Patch, died after being struck with a ball. It was like trying to sell icicles to Eskimos. Overall, he’s disenchanted with the magazine business and its move toward packaging. For example, if Outside has an adventure issue or a green issue, if your story doesn’t fit, you’re out of luck.

He also teaches out of circumstance. A friend needed someone to teach in Louisiana for a few semesters. He’s taught in Tennessee. Non-fiction teachers at UM will leave for a semester or two and he fills in. Circumstances aside, he likes it, plain and simple. If “The New Yorker” would have paid him $25 to $30 thousand for his aluminum bat article he’d still be teaching. He’s good at it. Brian Thompson, an Englishmajor at University of Louisiana at Monroe, says, “I want the kind of laser-precise critical eye that Bryan Di Salvatore brings to every writing class, and I’m willing to cross any moral boundary to attain it.” He has a reputation.

Robert Stubblefield, colleague and friend in the creative writing department at UM, talked about his genuine curiosity for people, the way he really cares. How he’s retained the joy for reading and writing that people too often lose. About his genuine passion for the things he writes about, it doesn’t seem like they’re manufactured or invented for the subject. “He has a real ability to connect to a student based on their interest, a variety of students. I think he tries to enter into it from their perspective,” said Stubblefield.

In his Introduction to Creative Writing Non-Fiction class, he doesn’t lead workshops to review students’ writing. Instead he just reads the papers himself and hands them back with a page of responses. Zach Wheeler, a junior in one of his classes at UM agrees with Stubblefield.
“He’s really down to earth, has a lot of experience, a lot you can relate to. He has a connection with everyone in the room. He’s gotten down to the essence of every person. You go to class and laugh a lot, he’s funny. The mood is real light, but at the same time everything’s real informative and instructive. He seems authentic, while helping you improve your writing he’s enjoying it.”

Di Salvatore enjoys life. He has a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. It’s kind of hard to tell what it is at a glance, kinda looks like Hello Kitty. If you ask him about it he’ll laugh. He says it came in a hip non-fiction magazine and it’s only supposed to last about five days. He rubs it for a couple seconds just to make sure. Actually there’s another one, a heart with a little ribbon underneath, like an old sailor’s tattoo. He’d put it on right before his wife gets home from Alabama and when she freaks he’ll tell her that he’s going to get her name put on it but they have to do it in two parts. No, he says with a chuckle, that would probably be too mean.

So he has kids, right? No, he likes cats.

“They’re amoral; they will take whatever you can give them and they never really say thanks. Dogs are so damn needy; you break their heart every time you leave the house. Cats could really give a shit. Being a man who is always aware of others feelings and tries to be a nice guy. I envy those cats.”

As much as he would like to think like one of his cats, it just isn’t so, just ask his friends. McMahon says he’s one of the most honest people he’s ever known, in all the ways. He’d never lie to you about anything, very trustworthy. He’s big and gruff but warm at the same time. Finnegan says he’s loyal to a fault, always had his back, and generally hilarious. He’s shockingly well-read, appropriately skeptical in most matters, and has a big, big heart.

I was once living in Cape Town, South Africa, teaching high school, scraping by. My longtime American girlfriend left me in the lurch, and I fell into despair. Bryan was living in Missoula, writing, scraping by. When he heard that I was at the end of my rope, he offered to come to Cape Town to help. Such a trip would have been financially and logistically impossible for him to make at the time, and yet I knew he would somehow make it, if I said the word. I didn’t, but the offer was there.

–Bill Finnegan on why Bryan is his friend

Stubblefield (or Stubbs as Di Salvatore calls him), was happy for his brother to meet Di Salvatore when he came through Oregon on his way to California. He has a way of smashing assumptions and stereotypes that are placed on writers. Meeting him makes an average guy realize that some authors are just as normal as the day is long. They’re interested in the same things you are, they just write about them. But nothing can explain the shocked faces when he arrived in Monument, Ore.

“He showed up in the middle of a snowstorm in February in the high desert (of eastern Oregon) in a Four-Runner with Montana plates, a surf board on top and golf clubs in the back. And a big box of books,” said Robert, “I’d say that kinda sums Bryan up.”