Words on a Page

Continuing on with my earlier discussion on The Toughest Indian in the World... As in the title story, the darkly comic ‘South by Southwest’ explores the idea of homosexuality between two outwardly heterosexual men. In a subversion of the outlaw narrative, the protagonist, Seymour, steals a gun and holds up the International House of Pancakes in Spokane, Washington. The narrator tells us that Seymour is a white man – adding in an aside that he is ‘therefore...allowed to be romantic’ (p. 57). He wants to be known as a ‘Gentleman Bandit’ and because these are ‘depressed times’ takes just one dollar from each of the customers in the restaurant (p. 58). Seymour is play-acting at being a tough criminal, going through the motions of intimidating his victims, while at the same time encouraging the cooks to continue cooking because ‘everybody is still going to be hungry’ when he’s finished with the robbery (p. 57).

I was not a happy reader as a child, and though my mother tried to instil in me her love of literature, it wasn’t until I was thirteen that I first read a book from cover to cover. That book was John Steinbeck’s autobiographical account of exploring the United States, Travels with Charley . From that moment, I was hooked: hooked on Steinbeck, hooked on exploring other worlds through books, and hooked on the written word. Having grown up in the United States, I was drawn to American writers like Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner, writers who interpreted the world I saw around me. Like Steinbeck, they expressed a keen awareness of landscape and an understanding of what it is to be human. Through their books I came to realise that I was not alone in the world. Through them, I discovered that there were people out there who thought as I did and felt as I did. That is the magic of books: they have the ability to reach inside us and connect with the very essence of who we are. In 1982, the year ...