The story was that the bone went to make pizza toppings, and fat was for marshmallows. There was one box that was for bone and one was for fat and one for miscellaneous. At one point I got demoted because I was too slow and I went to this place where all the stuff that was left over at the end came by on this big belt and you had to separate it. It was like this big Rube Goldberg thing and it would go somewhere else. When that was done you just sort of heaved it across onto this conveyor belt. The cuts were very surgical, some of them. You had a hook in one hand and a knife in the other.
#Happenstance oil series
There was this complicated series of cuts. In that town if you wanted to get some money quick that’s where you went, and they would hire anybody and you could stay for as short as you wanted. I was probably twenty-four or twenty-five. I worked in a slaughterhouse for a while in Amarillo, Texas. After that was a period of just bombing around with no real sense of what was going on. This was at the height of the oil boom, so I went over to Sumatra and worked for a couple years in the oil fields. I got a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. I remember reading Johnny Tremain-that was a big watershed. It never occurred to me that I might do it. I grew up in Chicago in a pretty working-class neighborhood so writing wasn’t something…well, I didn’t really know who did it. I had such a malformed sense of the world at each point that I ended up making some stupid decisions without really realizing what the options were. When I look back I’m always a little bit embarrassed because it’s not like I had any sense. Well, it doesn’t seem like you’ve been stagnating in some university setting. One of the things that’s immediately intriguing about you as a writer is your sort of non-traditional background. He also displayed a quality one would expect to find in the author of such stories as “The 400-Pound CEO” and “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”-the uncanny ability to find humor in unlikely places.
During lunch at Erawan Restaurant and over coffee in his sunny Victorian home, he revealed two qualities that make him so popular among his students-a friendliness and a generosity one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in someone at this stage of a successful writing career. Villard will publish his modern fairy tale “for adults and future adults,” The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, in August. In May, Riverhead published his second collection, Pastoralia. His first collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books. He lives with his wife of 13 years and his two daughters, ages 9 and 12. Today Saunders teaches creative writing in the graduate program at Syracuse University. “Where does this shit come from? I don’t have an answer.” As a result his stories end up in some unexpected places: a prehistoric theme park a future world where citizens belong to two classes: “Normal” or “Flawed ” and a self-help seminar where participants learn to identify who has been “crapping in your oatmeal.” Ask him why his stories, at once hilarious and macabre, are littered with severed hands, dead aunts, see-through cows, and Civil War ghosts and he’ll share your curiosity. Saunders readily admits he didn’t chart his course, and he approaches the writing of fiction the same way-with no particular destination in mind. Fiction writer George Saunders in Syracuse, New York, in the spring of 2000.
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