Remembering ‘Dangerous Writing’ author and teacher Tom Spanbauer

Portland writer Tom Spanbauer is being remembered — on social media, in articles and in countless conversations with those who knew and loved him, were taught by him or simply loved his books. He died of heart failure on Saturday, Sept. 21 at age 78, after living with Parkinson’s for the last eight years, according to his husband, Michael Sage Ricci.

Spanbauer was born in Idaho. He moved around the country in his 20s and 30s, but settled in Portland in 1991. Since that time he taught and influenced a whole generation of Portland writers through an approach he invented called “Dangerous Writing.”

We broadcast this interview live in April 2014, after his latest novel, “I Loved You More,” was published. It’s a love triangle among a gay man, a straight man and a straight woman who push toward and pull away from each other with tenderness and ferocity. The book is also a fearless exploration of mortality and loss. “I Loved You More” was to be his last published novel.

We also talked to Spanbauer about what it was like to live through the AIDS epidemic as a gay man in the 1980s, be a longtime survivor of HIV and how that influenced him personally and professionally. In 2015, he received an Oregon Book Award for lifetime achievement.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Portland writer Tom Spanbauer died on Saturday, September 21 at the age of 78. He’s being remembered on social media, in articles, and in conversations with those who knew and loved him, were taught by him, or simply loved his books. Spanbauer was born in Idaho. He moved around the country in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and settled in Portland in 1991. He ended up teaching and influencing a whole generation of Portland writers, including Chuck Palahniuk, Monica Drake, and Lidia Yuknavitch, through an approach he called “dangerous writing.”

We interviewed him in 2014 after his last novel, “I Loved You More,” was published. It’s a love triangle between a gay man, a straight man and a straight woman who push toward and pull away from each other with tenderness and ferocity. The book is also a fearless exploration of mortality and loss. We’re going to listen back to that interview right now.

I began by asking Spanbauer what his starting point was for the novel.

Tom Spanbauer: Well, like all my novels, there’s something inside of me that is troubled that won’t let go of me, that is hassling me, or there’s a fear, or a sadness, or a sore place. And essentially what happened is, I had a friend who died and I hadn’t spoken to him for seven years. And so I sat down to try and figure out what went wrong. And when I tried to do that, I kept running into things I didn’t want to remember, I wanted to forget.

So I put the fiction hat on and started writing. By stepping away through fiction and by telling a lie that … my ex-teacher always said fiction is a lie that tells the truth truer … and that by stepping back and telling this lie, I was able to get to the story. Before, I was just too close to it.

Miller: Why start with something that scares you, or makes you sad, or that you don’t want to have to grapple with? Why force yourself to do that?

Spanbauer: It’s just my nature, I think. I was raised Catholic, and had quite a bully as a father. And I was scared all the time. I was bused to Catholic school through a Mormon community, and every morning I’d be standing out there with my hair parted and my Catholic uniform on. And I’d get beat up all the way to school and back.

And there’s just a way that, when fear would get inside of me, I’d have to try and figure out what that fear was so that I could write it down. So that I could somehow deal with it. If I wrote it down and had it outside of me, I could look at it, and it wouldn’t just be something that would always overwhelm me. It could be something that I could look down on the page and it was kind of all chemical.

Miller: What were they beating you up for?

Spanbauer: Well, I was gay and …

Miller: Did they know it? Did you know it?

Spanbauer: No, no, no. It’s just … I was an exuberant boy. And also because I was in a Catholic school uniform and everybody else was in t-shirts, and I was different. I was the Roman whore, and they were all Mormons, and I was just bully bait. I mean, just look at me. I was tall and slender, and I was the guy that they could pick on.

Miller: How much of that Catholic upbringing have you held on to?

Spanbauer: I’ve pretty much rebuked most of the Catholic Church, all of it really. But psychologically … my psychology is to ask my therapist. It’s very, very Catholic. I’m very Catholic.

Miller: In what way? If you’ve rebuked the theology and you rebuked the church, you’re saying there’s still parts of it that are inside you?

Spanbauer: Yeah. It’s things like, if something goes wrong it’s my fault. And it’s, I have original sin. I was conceived in sin, and I’ve done something wrong, and there’s something wrong with me, and there’s a problem with me. And if something goes wrong then I must be the one who did it. I mean, I’m an intelligent grown-up man, but really, when I look at it very closely, that’s essentially what’s going on with the child in me.

Miller: How much of what you’ve just been talking about, that holdover of Catholic guilt, is related to being gay?

Spanbauer: It’s hard to know, because I really didn’t even know what “gay” was. You know, back in 1950, 1952, I knew that if we wore green on Thursdays, we were queer. But that’s all I really knew, that queer was really something terrible.

Miller: That’s something kids would say?

Spanbauer: Yeah, we couldn’t wear green on Thursdays in Pocatello, Idaho, because that made us a queer. But I didn’t know what queer was. I just knew it was terrible. I knew I was different. I knew I was different, and I really couldn’t come to terms with my difference until I was an adult.

Miller: Let’s turn back to the novel that you’ve written. And I said, in very broad terms, it’s about a love triangle. But it’s also about friendships of different kinds, very complicated friendships. What did you want to explore in particular about male friendships? Whether it’s romantic or platonic, among gay men or straight men, or some mixture, what did you want to look at in these relationships?

Spanbauer: Well, mostly I’m angry at the idea of men in general, how uncomplicated we are in the world. We drink beer, we watch football, we like to kill people, we have sex and then we go to sleep. It’s pretty much when you go out there, that’s what a man is. And it’s so uncomplicated, and it’s so simplistic. I just wanted to look at two men and watch them, and to go on that journey and to see how it was, and how complicated it gets, even just one opening a door for another.

Miller: Well, what happens? There are a few scenes of door opening, and people talking about it, these two men who are friends talking about it. In your experience, what happens when a door is opened?

Spanbauer: Well, as far as my characters go, the one character – the narrator, Ben – is gay, and this is his first time, really, with his friend Hank. Hank keeps stepping back and letting him go first, and then opening the door for him. And Ben, the narrator, thinks that he’s treating him like he’s a girl. Then he confronts his friend and says, “Why are you treating me like a girl?” And that starts a conversation between them. And Ben, the gay man, says, “How come you guys are this way?” And the straight man says, “What do you mean us guys? Who’s ‘us guys?’” And it’s all straight guys. So this starts a conversation between the two of them that really doesn’t ever really end.

Miller: Do you think that that uncomplicated view of men, that men just watch football, like to kill, have sex and fall asleep … that that’s still the dominant narrative of maleness in society today?

Spanbauer: No, I think it’s changed a lot. I have students, young men who are 35, 40 years old. Two of them, the other day – both straight men – were writing on their novels and they took a picture of themselves, both sitting in bed, writing in their novels and posted it on Facebook. And of course my partner, Sage, posted something that says “gay” underneath it. These two young men thought it was hilarious, thought it was lovely, you know, no problem at all. So this whole breakdown, back in the 1960s and the ‘50s, it was just so, so far away. It was so scary. And now it’s like, “So what?”

Miller: What has that been like for you, to start to live through that enormous transition – from Thursday being a day where if you wear green you’re queer, to a straight person not minding being called gay, in this case?

Spanbauer: Well, it’s like the old commercial, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” I’m so pleased with men, with the world, with how things are going, generally speaking, at least in municipal areas, how gay men, gay women or trans people are being treated. It’s like night and day, really. It’s totally different.

Miller: The friendship is one part of the book, but love happens soon after that and they’re very much entwined. What did you want to explore with love and, in a couple of different ways, what’s going to be, you know from the start, unrequited love? Whether it’s a gay man falling in love with his best friend, a straight man, or later, a straight woman falling in love with a gay man. They know on some level that they’re not going to get everything they want out of these relationships, but they fall in love anyway.

Spanbauer: Well, there’s the rub, right? How many women do I know who are totally in love with gay men? They’re just in love with them. And I don’t think that we can really often choose who we fall in love with, or how.

Miller: You don’t think that we have control over that?

Spanbauer: Well, let me see. I think that we think we do, but it always comes up to bite you in the rear end. You just never know. You just really don’t know, anything could happen. It’s whatever the gods have set for us, they’re gonna have set for us, I think.

Miller: Is there some part though, that is a self preservation part? That people do this knowingly, saving some part of themselves, knowing that you’re loving someone who is in some way unattainable, and setting yourself up in advance for the kind of hurt, but also not becoming enmeshed in a relationship that some part of you doesn’t even want?

Spanbauer: Oh, yeah, I would totally agree with that as well. We’re such complicated beings. Now, would I fall in love with this guy because I knew I couldn’t have him, or do I fall in love with this guy because he’s got this color of hair or what … ? It’s like with Hank and Ben in this book.

Miller: Ben is the gay narrator, and Hank is this wonderful Italian-American majestic straight guy.

Spanbauer: And Ben falls in love with his father, essentially. This beautiful macho guy who’s a knockout, that has all these male qualities that Ben himself thinks he doesn’t have. And that’s how that starts for Ben. But Hank … Hank hears Ben reading from his work, and the music that he hears when Ben is reading his own writing, Hank has a blow of love. He just falls in love with this gay man, and it really messes him up because, now, what do I do?

Miller: There are a number of scenes, some of the most important scenes that happen as this friendship blossoms – a friendship between these two – and they happen in front of an apartment building in New York City where the poet W.H. Auden lived for a while. And there are a number of scenes where they’re talking about some lines of a poem of Auden’s that are on a plaque there, on 77 St. Mark’s Place, I think it is, in New York City. These are the lines: “If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” What do those lines mean to you?

Spanbauer: Well, I was a young man in New York City. I had moved to the Lower East Side and I was a super of five buildings on E. 5th Street. I had just graduated from Columbia University. I owed them all this money, and here I was getting $400 a month and an apartment to sweep up the sidewalk. And things didn’t look so good for me …

Miller: Just not what you had in mind when you went to New York?

Spanbauer: It wasn’t. And what happened was, I would often go down to St. Mark’s Place. One day I just looked up and saw this quotation, and it touched me so deeply that it became Mecca for me. It became this place that I would go and I would take everybody that I knew, and we would go and we would read these lines. Then of course, I got acquainted with the larger poem. But just the fact that someone would have that large of heart that, “if equal affection cannot be, let it be me who loves more.”

There’s a way that always brings tears to my eyes and there’s a way that I just got strength from that. And in the middle of the hassle of New York City, I could find strength because I read those lines.

Miller: It strikes me as a very brave idea, but also one that could lead to a lot of pain … and maybe for that reason, all the more brave, if you’re the one who’s setting yourself up to be hurt more, if you put yourself out there more.

Spanbauer: Yeah. Well, you know, what’s your option?

Miller: The option is, I suppose, to close yourself off a little bit … and what’s wrong with that?

Spanbauer: Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just that aspiration, I think, that maybe it’s the romantic aspiration, or the poetic aspiration that, even though the stars can tell me, I can go to hell, they don’t care about me, I can love them back. And if the universe doesn’t really love me like I love it, I would rather be the one loving more.

Miller: Have you lived your life with that as a kind of guide?

Spanbauer: Oh, I never really thought about it, but I guess I have. Yeah.

Miller: So what has that meant in practice … in friendships or in love affairs, or long-term relationships, in daily life, if there’s going to be an imbalance, to be the one that loves more?

Spanbauer: Well, there was an event that happened to me when I was a young man. Not even a young man, I was 10 or 12. My father told me to take the truck up to the Mexican house. We had a small house up there, where 12 Mexican people worked for us, 12 to 14, sometimes 16 people, lived in this house. And he said, “You pick up those two boys and then you go work with them.”

So I had to go pick up these two 20-year-old men, and I was 12 years old, and I didn’t know how to do it. So I just said, “Just do it like your father wouldn’t do it.”

Miller: Like your father wouldn’t do it. Whatever he’s doing, I don’t want that to be the model for how I live my life.

Spanbauer: Yeah. So what I did was, I parked the truck – my father would just honk the horn – I introduced myself, and then when we came to a gate, I knew that this Mexican man didn’t know how to open this gate. And I said, “Well, my father would just make them go out and open up this gate, and then humiliate them because they didn’t know how to do it.” And so I stopped, and I showed him how to open the gate and how to close the gate. It just started at a very young age. If I don’t do it like my father does it, if I’m loving more than my father does, that makes me something he isn’t. Which is, in my estimation of myself, a better man.

Miller: I wonder if you can give us a reading here from the book. It’s actually a section of the book where your main character is, himself, giving a reading from one of his books.

Spanbauer [reading excerpt from “I loved You More”]: “I’ve never heard a place be so silent, the way time is not a measurement, but something you are perfectly still in. Hank puts a chocolate chip cookie in his mouth, then two more. He presses his knee into mine. That knee press means I should go ahead and do something.

“Since usually I go first, I open my book. I have to push the pages down into the light. My voice in the big dark room echoes of it. All the spirits listening. Maybe even one most miserable and particular. At first, my words tremble. Finally I hit my stride.

“Those 20 minutes I read that night in the Atlanta Club, while I’m reading, more than ever before or since, in all the world, the feeling I love the most. When I’m finished reading, nobody claps, nobody steps up, takes charge, pours wine all around. The way the faces all look at me as if I’m still reading or maybe some guy is reading now, only I can’t hear him.

“The black dark, the silence, the light of the kerosene flame, the flicker on the faces of the people in the circle. Twelve. I count them … 12 of us, sitting, including Ruben and Sal and Gary and me, Misty Rivers and the Victrola guy. I’ve never felt so listened to.”

Miller: That’s Tom Spanbauer, reading from his new novel, “I Loved You More.” What do you want from your readers?

Spanbauer: Well, I wrote this book so that I could come to an awareness.

Miller: For yourself.

Spanbauer: For myself. There was something that I needed to become aware of. And I knew this, but because this sad secret place was giving me so much trouble, I needed some awareness. So I go on this journey and come to an awareness, and I want my readers to come with me so that they can become part of this awareness, as well.

Miller: If you went on this journey to learn something that you needed to learn, what do you think you did learn?

Spanbauer: Well, when I first started out, I was a rejected lover. I was left alone in the Portland rain. My two friends had left me, I was hurt, alone. And as that hurt person, I had a very limited view of what had happened. And in order to step up and write this book, I had to step out of that role and become the writer – the one who sees all people, everybody involved, as full human complex beings. So I forgave the whole triangle, the hurt that I had over the triangle. I forgave that, in a big way. And that’s just one way.

Miller: If I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that the empathetic power … putting yourself in the heads of two other people who had hurt you, who you’d loved but who’d also hurt you … in the act of fiction writing, it made you see them differently.

Spanbauer: Absolutely. It changed everything, it changed everything. I was no longer the hurt lover. I was now the large voice who could tell the whole story, and that’s an incredible awareness.

Miller: That last line from that section where your narrator says, “I’ve never felt so listened to.” Have you felt that at a reading, or from people in response to something that you have written yourself?

Spanbauer: Yes, I often have. With all the fear that I have in standing in front of people or talking to people on live radio, there’s just a place in me that was never really listened to. And now that I’ve stepped up, I have my voice, I’m speaking and I can hear the room listening to me, it’s the best feeling I can feel.

Miller: Can you imagine your life without writing?

Spanbauer: No, I can’t.

Miller: What has writing given you?

Spanbauer: I don’t know, really, how I could even explain that. Writing has given me everything. I teach writing, so it’s given me a way of life. It’s made me my own boss. It’s allowed me to plumb my psyche in a way that I never could have before. It’s the most fun that I know how to have, really, to sit down and write a paragraph because in many ways, I treat my prose like poetry. So I can sit down and write a poem in the afternoon, and there’s just nothing better than that.

Miller:  I’m glad you use that word “fun,” I don’t think that word has come up yet, so far. We’ve been talking about some big things but not necessarily light things. What’s fun for you about writing?

Spanbauer: Well, first of all, I’m not a guy who’s got it all outlined, to know what’s gonna happen. So I’m going on this journey and I get to sit down and go, OK, I’m gonna go over here, I think. But in the middle of it, all of a sudden, it says, no, no, you’re not gonna go there. You’re gonna go over here.

Miller: “It” says?

Spanbauer: It says. And what is “it?” It is the larger part of me, my subconscious. Sometimes I think that I have poured so much energy into this book that it’s now my child. That it is a living breathing being and it’s now the one dictating me. So that’s where fun is – this creation, this miracle of creation and this surprise of creation. And also the fact that I have somebody talking back to me now.

Miller: I mentioned at the beginning that you have been seen by and named by many people as a kind of father of a whole generation, or at least mentor, teacher, advisor to a whole generation of Portland writers for more than 20 years, now, as a teacher here. What have you learned from teaching?

Spanbauer: Well, it’s the same thing as back with that Mexican boy, showing him how to open the gate. There’s a way that, being around those boys that summer … I let them in the field, I let them drive, and so they learned how to drive, which they never would have before. But one day, I remember they said, “Let’s go swimming in the ditch.” And I said, “No, no, my father wouldn’t … "  And they said, “No, no, let’s go swimming.” And I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t show my body to these beautiful men.

So what they did is, they took all their clothes off, and then stripped me of my clothes and threw me in the ditch. And then I went swimming naked with these young men. And I’ve never felt so really accepted in my life. So it’s the same with my students, that by showing them the way, by loving them through something, by dwelling in the unknown with them, and hanging out with them … then they always have a gift for me. There’s some way that it comes back, and all of a sudden I’m romping around in some wonderful way that I never knew I could before.

Miller: Have you begun the process of picking out some uncomfortable story or memory again?

Spanbauer: Yes, I have. I was in the Peace Corps in Africa, and there are two or three stories there that have never let go of me. And especially now that I’m HIV positive, now that I have AIDS, and the connection with Africa and AIDS, there’s a really a particular connection that I feel with the people there and with my time there in Kenya that I want to talk about.

Miller: Well, Tom Spanbauer, I look forward to talking with you again. Thanks very much for talking on the radio, even though as you said it’s not necessarily your favorite way to spend some time.

Spanbauer: I really enjoyed this. Thanks a lot.

Miller: That was the late Tom Spanbauer talking about his novel, “I Loved You More,” in 2014. He died of heart failure recently after living with Parkinson’s for the last eight years, according to his husband, Michael Sage Ricci. Spanbauer did join us once more on this show. He talked about what it was like to live through the AIDS epidemic and to be a longtime survivor of HIV. You can find that conversation and links to other OPB coverage at opb.org/thinkoutloud.

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