The novelist talks childhood demons, teaching prisoners, and writing in his sleep.
I met Paul Cody in 2013 when he was teaching at the Colgate Writers Conference. I knew immediately that he was an empath and a generous human being. Then I binge-read his books and realized he’s that rare author who writes with economy and clarity while simultaneously ripping your heart out with emotional truths. His latest, Walk the Dark, fits this pattern, exploring the life of Oliver, serving a long prison sentence for murder. The novel’s two settings — in prison and in Ollie’s bleak childhood — create as compelling a background as I’ve read. In this brief, trenchant story, Cody delves into mother love and mother absence, epic loneliness, compassion, grief, and life on the inside. It is well worth a read.
Can you talk about your topic for this book?
I grew up in a working-class section of Newton, a wealthy suburb of Boston. My parents had been in the Catholic Worker movement in the 40s. They were deeply committed to social justice way before, say, the Civil Rights Movement. They had five kids in six years, no money, no car or television, and they both worked all the time to support us. We always had books and music, and they took us to museums and Boston Pops concerts on the Esplanade. But then the 60s hit, and I went crazy. I was an alcoholic and drug addict by age 15, and I took two senior years to graduate high school.
At 22, I was taken to the local ER by the cops because I was literally out of my mind from drugs and booze. In the ER, I foolishly punched a doctor and was taken in a straitjacket — on a 30-day commitment paper — to Medfield State Hospital, to a locked ward. Medfield was the mental hospital where “Shutter Island” was filmed. That experience informs everything I’ve done, everything I’ve written, for half a century. I got clean and sober, and six months later, started college at UMass Boston, this big, gritty university situated next to a collection of 20-story buildings that were the Columbia Point Housing Projects, one of the most dangerous projects in Boston.
Have you taught in prisons?
In the late 90s, when I was teaching college, had a book or two published, was happily married, and had two gorgeous boys, I thought I should give back. I started teaching at Auburn Prison, a maximum-security prison built in 1824. Two other English professors and I went up every Tuesday night. We went through about eight sets of steel doors, upstairs, downstairs, in steel boxes, then finally into the yard, the size of two basketball courts, with cell blocks looming on each side, 40-foot walls, and gunmen in the towers. As we walked through, guarded by four corrections officers, we’d hear hoots from the cells blocks. Fresh meat. Bend over. There’s my bitch.
At the back of the prison, we had two crude classrooms. Big, ripped, scarred guys came in. They were starving for art, literature, and writing. They were mostly Black, Hispanic, and were doing long sentences for murder, rape, armed robberies; gang-bangers from NYC, Rochester, Buffalo, Albany. They were tough but incredibly gentle and grateful to us for bringing them reading and writing. With a tick or two of the dial, I could have ended up in the same kind of prison as in Walk the Dark. I came so close, so many times, to checking out entirely. I wasn’t especially smart or virtuous, but I was a white boy and I had books, and I was very, very lucky.
How did you come to writing?
I always loved reading and writing. I was a voracious reader, and even when I was drinking and drugging, I read voraciously. When I was around 10, my mom gave me Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown and A Choice of Weapons by Gordon Parks — by Black guys who had overcome staggering odds to become writers…Their stories, their struggles were imprinted on my soul.
How about your publishing history?
I was writing stories and articles by 16 or 17. By 22, the Boston Globe would occasionally publish my stuff, which was huge for me. I kept writing and writing — short stories, articles. After college, I kept writing, worked at the Perkins School for the Blind for three years, writing all this time, then was accepted into Cornell’s MFA program in 1985. That was life-changing. I published my first novel, The Stolen Child, in my late 30s.
What kind of a reader are you now?
Great books help you see the face of God, I think, and I don’t even really believe in a regular God. Reading and writing saved my life. It still does. Fiction is my first love. But I also love biographies and history. Robert Caro, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Anne Applebaum. I love noir, Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen.
How does your teaching impact your writing?
I’ve always loved teaching. The energy and inventiveness of the students. They’re amazing. But it draws on some of the same energy as writing, and as much as I loved teaching, I always chose writing. That was the thing that most deeply stirred my soul.
Can you talk about your writing process?
I never do outlines or take many notes. I sit alone in a quiet room, usually very early in the morning. And I try to do, say, 500 or 1,000 words each writing session. I never write two days in a row because the in-between days are for staring out the window, and sleeping and dreaming two straight nights between sessions. Some of the writing gets done in my head while I sleep. We all write dreams every night, whether we’re aware of it or not.
What writers do you admire?
I love Shakespeare, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, the Russians. Among contemporary writers, I’m crazy for Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Rachel Kushner, Lucia Berlin. I love a novel nobody’s heard of — One Pill Makes You Smaller by Lisa Dierbeck. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart made me sob convulsively.
Advice for new writers?
Read and write. If you can’t quit, don’t quit.
[Photo by Patricia Donahue.]
Martha Anne Toll is a DC-based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One, is due out in May 2025.
