Wayne Harrison went from auto mechanic to novelist

Wayne Harrison

Wayne Harrison

Wayne Harrison is what Bruce Springsteen used to call a "car boy," a kid who lived for the sound of an engine in tune and the feel of tires holding a tight turn on a summer evening. Harrison worked as a mechanic for six years and went to college with the idea of becoming a cop before a creative writing class and a chance encounter with Richard Ford's "Rock Springs" changed his life.

Now Harrison teaches writing at Oregon State University and his first novel "The Spark and the Drive," published with an assist from Richard Russo, is being praised for its authenticity about what it's like to work under a hood. Harrison answered a few questions about his journey from mechanic to novelist and from '71 SS Chevelle to minivan.

What is your background? Where are you from?

Like Justin in "The Spark and the Drive," I'm from Connecticut -- Milford, most recently, but all over -- and I graduated from a vocational high school. College was a tough decision for me; I was the first in my immediate and extended family to seriously consider it. At the time I was 23 and had been living on my own and making decent money as a repair mechanic for six years. But I was spending far too much of my free time drinking, racing my Chevelle and getting in various kinds of trouble in Waterbury. A close friend of mine had just gone back to jail, after a night partying on a beach with my handgun in his waistband. Another close friend passed out drunk on his sofa and died in an apartment fire. I felt like I needed extreme measures to avoid a similar fate, and so I decided to go to start college in Criminal Justice and become a cop.

How did you end up at Oregon State? What classes do you teach?

I moved to Oregon after finishing my MFA, having visited Eugene in the summer, when every day is a postcard, especially if you've lived where it's humid and buggy. I taught at Lane Community College and worked as a youth director for a Methodist Church, and squirreled away a little time here and there for short stories. In 2008 my good friend Paul Martone recommended me to the director of the English Department at OSU, and I've been teaching writing there ever since. Classes I teach include Composition, Introduction to literature, Introduction to Creative Writing, Short Story Writing and Advanced Fiction Writing. I love talking about all forms of writing, and if I have a unique strength an instructor, it may be that I remember vividly sitting in the back of a classroom with grease under my nails, struggling to write down and absorb every word my professor spoke, as I gave college my best shot. I'm empathetic to those students brand new to college writing who are similarly insecure, as well as to those who are more comfortable in the classroom. At least, I sure hope that's the case.

When did you become interested in writing fiction? Was there an author or book that first sparked your interest?

At the University of New Haven, I stuck with my plan to become a cop until Junior year, when I took my first Creative Writing class. (I was thinking only that it might be an easy A; how hard could making up stories be?) But after a few short weeks, I was astonished to find that it was the only class I truly cared about.

Then one afternoon I wandered into a small independent bookstore near Yale, thinking that I might look at fiction books to read for pleasure. Quite randomly I picked up a soft-cover of Richard Ford's "Rock Springs." The first sentences spoke to me deeply, in a voice that was as personal as my own thoughts, and I read the title story right there in the aisle. With a thrill equal to that of receiving positive comments on a workshop story, I bought a book of fiction that I hadn't been assigned. I was 26, and it was the first time in my life I'd done that. I read it through that night (I'm a slow reader, and this was really a marvel for me) and then saw the world differently, with Ford's fearlessly honest voice in my head.  Two years later I was loading up a U-Haul and driving west to the Writers' Workshop at Iowa.

As long as we're describing routes, drive us through the route that "The Spark and the Drive" took to publication. It started as a short story, didn't it, and Richard Russo helped it to publication?

Six or seven years ago, I found myself returning to the carbon-choked bays of Waterbury again and again in my stories. Part of me missed that world, which seemed so simple and genuine. "Least Resistance" was one of the stories I wrote in that cycle. Like most of my fiction, some elements were autobiographical and some were invented. I liked the idea of a celebrity mechanic, Nick Campbell, whose technical genius and capacity for imagination transcended his work and gave him a mythic reputation around town. Justin, the narrator of both the story and the novel, is Nick's perfect witness, young and idealistic, and when Nick's talent starts to wane, when he and his wife suffer the tragedy of losing their baby to SIDS, Justin steps in to try and help but ends up, both intentionally and unintentionally, causing havoc.

At the time, I didn't have an agent, and I liked the story so I did what I do when that happens. I sent it to seven or eight top-tier magazines and then forgot about it.  A few months later, I received an email from Michael Curtis saying he loved the story and wanted to publish it in the yearly fiction issue of The Atlantic. The next year Richard Russo not only picked it for the Best American series, but he also picked it as one of three from the anthology to be read on NPR's "All Things Considered." For a week or so, it was all a little surreal.

By then I had an agent, and my short story collection "Wrench" was a finalist for a number of book contests. My agent wanted me to pull from the contests and come up with a novel outline and 100 pages or so to pair up with the collection, which we would try to sell to a big house. I knew next to nothing about writing a novel, and worked on the book for almost a year before I gave up. I went back to stories for a month or so, but "Least Resistance" kept calling to me. Finally I jumped back in -- it was like a homecoming -- and expanded one scene and then another. The writing came pretty quickly once the love affair began and the betrayals started piling up, and the storyline became one of those wonderful obsessions writers sometimes discover. I couldn't stop thinking about it when I wasn't writing.

Where did your interest in cars and mechanics come from? What's your favorite car that you've owned, and what do you drive now?

My parents divorced when I was young, and while my mother worked fulltime I ran around the neighborhood with a guy whose older brothers had collected a small junk yard of old cars behind the house. We'd strip them down, put them back together, and if we got them running we'd sneak out on the street late at night. In high school, I read Hotrod and Muscle Car Magazine and excelled almost exclusively in Auto Shop. I couldn't wait to get out of school and land a mechanic job in Waterbury. I started in the oil change bay when I was 17, and immediately it felt right. The sharp, invigorating smell of gasoline, the thunder of engines on the dynomometer, the diamond hard steel of a Snap-on wrench in your palm. In the novel, Justin is seduced by "the unfathomable timing of spark and valves, the constant grip of vacuum, all of it contained in a seven-hundred pound box whose sole function was to convert fuel and air into speed." I felt that then and still do, to a degree, especially in the summer, when we take our girls to the local fairs and I find myself in-between chrome and lacquer fenders at a muscle car show.

I've had lots of cars in my life, but I'm most proud of the '71 SS Chevelle I owned for three years before I started college. Under the hood was a four-bolt, small block torque monster, with a big cam inside and a big Holley on top. It put out about 450 horsepower, plugged into Muncie 4 speed and shafted to a 12-bolt posi 4:11 rear end. Tuned up it ran low 12-second quarter miles and was all I could handle. The last two years I owned it, I had to get insurance in Vermont because I had so many points racked up I couldn't afford Connecticut liability insurance.

And these days? Sad to say, but I drive a minivan. We've got a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, and it's all about safety and convenience. But, fingers crossed, if my novel ever gets turned into a movie, high on the wish list is a late-sixties Corvette or Camaro. I'm partial to Chevys.

Reviewers have praised your descriptions of work and what really goes on in a repair shop. Do you agree with the view that physical work is a subject that isn't written about often or well in modern fiction. If so, why do you think that is?

One reason may be that it's very easy to bore a reader with details -- not just of physical work, but, say, the case research of a tax lawyer, or the daily routine of a real estate agent. In "The Spark and the Drive," I hope that I've successfully converted the work into a fiery passion, and that I've infused it with the old excitement I felt taking apart high-horsepower engines, fully believing that I was doing the greatest work in the world. At the time, I probably didn't know what a metaphor was, but I knew how it felt to seat main bearings and hone a cylinder, imagining the pitons punching up that awesome compression. I know I lived much more in the moment back then, and I hope I've kept those scenes exact and in the moment as well. It was important that I did this work before I had any intention of going to school. When I think of the guys I used to know, the sincere friendships, and the work, it's not clouded by abstraction. I was just working on engines for a living.

I also wonder if some writers may not have the backgrounds to write working class scenes convincingly. I remember being told in workshop that I didn't "understand" my protagonist, who was a pharmacist. The comment was right on -- it hurt and cured me of a measure of laziness -- and I remember reading a workshop story about lumberjacks in the 90s, written by an author who had obviously never notched a tree with a chainsaw or known the weight of dead-end work. The inaccuracy was stark and undermined the other brilliant aspects of the story, and I'm sure some of the comments left him smarting.

I love blue collar fiction -- Russo, of course, and Ray Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Louise Erdrich, as well as poets like Phillip Levine, Richard Hugo -- and I think that to write the physicality of work with sincerity, an author needs to have been around it. There are wonderful writers like Donald Ray Pollock and the late William Gay who were manual workers supporting themselves and their families for decades before they got into writing, and their intimacy with the work and the people is distinct in the prose. To get that kind of detail and make it feel visceral rather than some abstract thing, and important to the book -- the way William Kittredge or Kent Haruf can with the manual work of ranching -- I think takes more than research. You need to have had the work in your life in a way that's more essential than a summer job, or an interview you did with a welder or a roofer. That research might carry a convincing secondary character, but to center a book around physical work, I think, an author needs a very intimate knowledge of what it feels like. What the stakes are, where the pride is, etc.

My guess would be that there isn't as much new literature about physical work in part because the numbers are greatly skewed against authors having full-time manual jobs in their background. I think some careers and settings are more imaginable to a typical author -- by typical, I mean the MFAer who, along with friends and family, went into college after high school, and who will probably adjunct somewhere until the book comes out. For that author, most college-degree jobs for their characters can probably be pulled off with a certain amount of research. After all, they have in common with their characters a rounding-off by education and the desire to work at a white-collar career. Of course, I might be way off base, but I think writers tend to stick with what they know best, and if there's a lack of physical work in our literature, it seems possible that it reflects the background of our contemporary writers.

-- Jeff Baker

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