Editor’s note: The following phone conversation took place on December 28, 2022. It’s been abridged to about half its original length. To read all 20,500 words of the unabridged version, consider supporting The Collidescope on Patreon. Special thanks to Mark Moskowitz, who connected with me Dow and provided recent photos of the author, Nicole Melchionda, who wrote the first draft of this transcript, and to friend and supporter Daniel Cockrell, who offered helpful information regarding Le Beau Petard.

George Salis: Hello? Is this Dow Mossman?

Dow Mossman: Yes, it is.

GS: This is George Salis from The Collidescope. Is this a bad time to call?

DM: Oh no, I’m retired. (laughs) I’m retired. I’m just sitting here watching a billiard game on this GrandPad my neighbor got me.

GS: Oh, nice.

DM: Yeah, it’s fine. Mark [Moskowitz] called me and mentioned you might be calling me.

GS: Yeah, I wasn’t sure what time. I’m glad I didn’t interrupt you at dinner or lunch or something.

DM: Well, I’m pushing 80 and I’ve been retired for quite a while.

GS: Mark told me that you’re still shoveling snow.

DM: Oh, I have been, yeah. Every other day, I think. It got warm today. That cold snap’s finally over. It’s 30 degrees out.

GS: Damn. You must be used to that by now, right?

DM: I guess so. I’ve been living in Iowa for most of my time.

GS: Well, I wrote out some questions. I don’t know if you want to just dive in or if you have some questions for me.

DM: Well, I wrote that book getting to be about 60 years ago. (laughs)

GS: Some of them are pretty general, so I won’t quiz you too much. Don’t worry about that.

DM: Mark’s movie is what…I mean that got sprung after 35 years all of a sudden. It got some great reviews and stuff but it was…it took me about…I don’t know, I think I started it in my late teens and didn’t finish until I was about 29. I left Coe College to go down to undergraduate. I had like five semesters of undergraduate poetry, and I kinda did that on the side. They were all two-hour courses on poetry and fiction writing in the workshop. I finally got into grad school. I got lucky and got a Book-of-the-Month-Club Fellowship on it when I was a senior, mid-60s. I lived in Cedar Rapids, so I got done with two years on my MFA and had a rough draft of about 900 pages. It was really three separate novellas with the same character and it got cut down, it got edited. Because ITT Bobbs-Merrill was behind it, the original multi-national corporation. My last semester on my MFA. I don’t know, did you see Mark’s movie [Stone Reader (2002)]?

GS: Yes. I actually watched it recently, and I love it, almost as much as I love the book.

DM: Well, yeah, that was a miracle. The phone rang on that in October of ‘99. I retired from 20 years of welding; took care of my mother for three years. My dad died in ‘96. I was back in town. She died in October and in December [Mark] called. He’d already been working on [Stone Reader] for a couple of years. That was just, you know, so unbelievable. (laughs) I believed it, I think. I didn’t see how it could, you know, anyway, so he came out and met me, finished it up, and I can’t think of another….

GS: He’s the reader that any writer would ever want. Mark told me that you still read voraciously today. What are some of the books that you’ve been gravitating toward recently?

DM: I’ve got piles on my couch I sleep on, and stacks here and there. I’m finishing up…I can’t remember the girl’s name. In high school, she gave me this and she didn’t want it and somebody gave it to her. The ten-volume Washington Irving. I’ve been finishing going through it. I’ve read his three-volume George Washington and his Columbus volume, and the thing that really blew me away was his Spanish writing and his biography of Mohammed and Mohammedanism. The full title is Mahomet and His Successors.

GS: So you gravitate toward more nonfiction than fiction?

DM: Yeah, I think so. Ever since I…let me see. Oh, then I reread a book, I don’t know what you think about the de Vere/Shakespeare controversy, but then years ago this guy put me on two books on that, and I reread one, and it just knocks me out. I mean, I was always interested in  Shakespeare. I think the most profound adolescent play, I can imagine, would be Midsummer Night’s Dream, both futilistic and both fairy tale and both adolescent. It’s just total genius to write that. That’s one of them. I think he wrote early Hamlets and early Lears. Some of these longer plays that he reworked. He added to it. You tend to do that, I believe that anyway. When a writer rewrites, not an editor. It’s just, everything gets longer. I know my book did for 10 years. I don’t know what that proves. (laughs)

GS: I definitely want to talk about that, but before we get to that, I want to transition to a staple question I ask people. I have a column on my website called Invisible Books, and I shine a light on great literature that maybe most people aren’t aware of. So I’m wondering, what is a novel, that you’ve read at any time, that you think deserves more readers?

DM: At the time, I don’t know, I got this notion when I was 15 I really wanted to write, I suppose, the Great American Novel, in a way, but I started reading…I remember I read all of Steinbeck, and I read all of Hemingway, and most of Fitzgerald, just when I was in high school, which was unusual for the people I ran around with. But the reason I did that I didn’t know it. My mother took all the magazines, she took Saturday View and everything and she took Esquire, she took, oh jeez, I was thinking about that the other day—they were always around, Harper’s. Anyway, I was in and out of some of those.

My first image of her…she was a college girl from Nebraska and, I don’t know, she was a music major. My first image of her I was three, four, and five on 3^rd Avenue and, you know, it’s ‘46, ‘47, ‘48. I was trying to get it all down on paper because it was the prologue of the novel [The Stones of Summer] and I couldn’t do it because the main story, and I had called myself a Mossmanite. Because it’s a family, you know, how the Mossmans got to America, but anyway, my first image of her, she’s getting off the 3^rd Avenue bus and there isn’t much traffic. After the war there weren’t many cars around until about 1950, unless they were 30s jalopies, you know, and pickup trucks. But she’s getting off at the Carnegie Library which was only like ten blocks down 3^rd Avenue toward town over the hill, and she’s getting off with an armload of books (chuckles). You know, they’re up to her chin and I was very conscious even back then that they were all biographies. I came out with the conclusion that she probably read every biography in the Carnegie Library in Cedar Rapids after World War II. She’d take me down there sometimes when she was looking for books and I used to love that. Just look at the covers and the pictures and stuff. I was about still five years old. So anyway, I read them through and I didn’t find out until college when I met Ed Gorman, a mystery writer, we became really good friends. He got me onto Cornell Woolrich. I don’t know if I would have read Hammett and [Raymond] Chandler if I hadn’t met him. This was my early 20s, mid-20s. He put out this thing called Mystery [Scene] Magazine finally, and he wrote a lot of Westerns and slasher novels. It’s what he always wanted to do but he was drinking in his 20s. We became close and we did some stuff on film noir which was my interest in my 20s. But my writing was, you know, [The Stones of Summer is] a romantic persona novel. So he’s the other thing in my fiction, expanded me in my 20s when I was doing this. I always thought I was gonna do some noir movie script or something like that. He wound up doing a couple of series and they were published and everything.

[In my interview with Mark Moskowitz, he says, “Roger [Ebert] talked with Dow on stage and learned Dow wrote one other published thing, an intro to a collection of film noir (Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir by Barry Gifford).]

GS: Is Ed Gorman the author you would nominate who deserves more readers? Is there a specific book by him?

DM: Oh, jeez. He had some short story collections. His Westerns were probably better. We always stayed away from criticizing each other’s writing. We talked about other people’s writing a lot. You could probably find some, I don’t know. I don’t have a computer (laughs). Yeah, I’ve avoided that. I’ve realized they are great, great machines but, I don’t know. Under the Volcano was really important to my novel because I finally made the leap to Mexico. An average movie set in Mexico, it picks me up somehow (laughs). Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, they’re not the greatest….

GS: There’s one thing that was mentioned in the documentary but I wanted to ask you specifically. I remember Harper Lee who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. She said she wrote only a single novel because she said everything she wanted to say in that one book. Is that how you feel at all about The Stones of Summer?

DM: What happened to me and even at the time I knew it. If you read the book, Mark, the first thing he did was he went to the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper morgue file, where he thought he’d find three teenagers had been killed in a car crash, which was, that was a piece of fiction [from the novel]. I had those three guys based on something. I knew I wanted to flip the page and cut time out in the middle, say ten years later, that’s all I knew about part three when I wrote. I took a leap when I did that. The cherry bomb stuff happened but the car chase and the disaster…. There was a car chase too, but it didn’t end in disaster, but anyway, so they lived, but my point in saying all that is, then I went to college for nine years, tried to stay out of the war partly. I think I graduated with my BA with 180 hours instead of 140. I was taking summer school and I had to do an extra semester because I had to take Latin twice. I did that by rote and finally got an A in it, but the first time I approached Latin, Jesus. (laughs) It’s just the grammar. So I did it by rote. It’s the only course in college that bad. I used to get up at like 4:30 in the morning and translate stuff with a dictionary word by word, and it’s still a scramble in Latin, the grammar is so complex. What was the question again? I’m sorry. (laughs)

GS: Oh, I was just asking if you feel overall that The Stones of Summer has said everything you wanted to say in fiction.

DM: Oh, yeah! So anyway, I did all of that and it was nine years later. It was an absurd box, it was 900 pages. I don’t even know where I got the box, I can still kind of picture that. This editor and the guy Carl Brandt. They came through and I had no idea what was even going on. [William] Murray came up to me one day and said, “I gave your manuscript to these two people who got interested in it and they took it back to New York,” and I talked to that editor briefly and she said, “If you come to New York, come and see me.” So that was my last semester, and I graduated mid-year, it was January. So I headed for New York and I went through Indianapolis for a reason, and I stopped because the guy Dunker was in his first year playing for the ABA. He was playing for the Indiana Pacers. So I wound up staying there till the playoffs. They always made it to the playoffs. They were the best team in the ABA. I was friendly with him and I was sleeping on his couch. He had this three-level apartment. So that became a habit. I went through 10 years of his career and every time I’d always wind up over there. But anyway, by the time I went to New York, it was ‘69. I missed Woodstock only because I had this sense that I hated mobs but I had a chance to go up in a sound truck. It’s a long story I’m not gonna get into. But I messed around there and I loved New York. I used to walk up to the library every day, and on a good day, I’d walk up to about 90^th Street, you know from down in the Village there? Tenth Street and 9^th Avenue down there, which I got lucked out, I got a free apartment there. A guy I knew in Cedar Rapids was in Africa and this thing was empty and he wanted me to watch the stuff he had in his apartment. Anyway, I had a free place to flop for about all summer. God, it was great. I finally made my way up there and talked myself into going up the elevator and I opened the doors and it was just a huge typing pool that was right out of that early, what the hell’s the name of that, the film with all of the New York office pools, you know, it’s just infinity. King Vidor’s The Big Parade or The Crowd, maybe. I walked in there and she had me coming from one thing to the other in the back and she looked at the elevator which just opened up into the whole complex, and she said, “Dow where have you been?” (laughs) Just like that, “Come on in here!” We walked into her office and I talked to her for a few hours and I guess I talked her into, I got an advance. Brandt got involved and, anyway, then I went to Montreal and I knew I had to rewrite the whole thing. Richard Wright [Dow’s friend who took his author photo for the novel] went up there, he’s in that movie. It started snowing and I went home and did an 11-month rewrite and I never left my room and I finally cracked toward the end of it. It was like an hour per page. It was all I did. My mother would bring me stuff on a tray and I’d eat lunch and I had my typewriter and my window was kind of like, I could see the winking light of the Roseville Hotel about 15 blocks down. That was all I could see outside my window pretty much. I’d sleep and I’d work on that. Every three months I’d go down to Iowa City for a couple of days and I finally really, I talked to her on the phone and this was the age where they had great phone lines that were free and I’d mail her 100 pages here and 100 pages there, and I guess they were re-editing it. And IT&T told her she could have 550 pages and that’s what they were going for. They didn’t change anything but they put a lot of blue pencils here and there. I don’t even remember now what all was in it, or how valuable it was but [Betty Kelly Sargent] cut quite a bit out of it. She kept it in order, then later I found out that there were three assistant apprentices helping her. They were working on it.

GS: She had three assistant editors?

DM: Yeah, I don’t know if they were even hired. I know the name of one of them. Mary Judd. She wound up in The Metropolitan. I met her briefly about 30 years later.

GS: I remember in the documentary you said you felt the publisher basically stole the manuscript from you because you were still trying to work on it.

DM: I was conscious at the time that they took it away from me and I probably would’ve worked on it for the next 20 years probably, but, I mean, you can’t do that. I also wanted to get out of town and I was tired of being a student. If that thing would’ve made the money even comparatively to what it made the second time, I would’ve gone to Europe. If worst came to worst, I would’ve bummed around England and played some snooker. (laughs) That was my only interest. That game was alive in England and I just noticed that last night on my iPad. I sat and watched two hours of snooker matches. God, those guys could play. That’s what I would’ve done. I know that for a fact. The other thing, I drifted back to Indianapolis. In a way it was good and in a way it wasn’t. For off and on those 10 years I worked in my buddy’s…I’ve known him since 7^th grade, that’s the only person I’ve known that long in my life, actually, but he had a saloon.

GS: I remember a pretty poignant part in the documentary where Mark is talking with your former agent [Carl Brandt] and filling him in on the details that have happened since publishing The Stones of Summer and how you’re taking care of your mother and delivering newspapers or something like that, and before that, you were working as a welder, and it almost seemed like your agent was on the verge of tears, and he said, “That’s what we do to our writers.” That struck me because it does seem like American culture does not hold writers and artists in high esteem. Would you agree with that?

DM: I think I’d have to in some ways. What I was impressed with about him, for one thing, his uncle and his father were the original Brandts, and at the turn of the century, they were Dreiser’s agents and even on Sister Carrie, I think. That always impressed me because I think Dreiser was something else. You asked me about writers. I read most of his books, fiction. Sister Carrie and [An] American Tragedy. The book, I think…it’s just the most unusual book. There’s nothing quite like it. It’s called Twelve Men. It’s just incredible, the quality, or the eclectic approach to human bonding, maybe. Maybe especially between men. I don’t know. They’re autobiographical, that’s for sure, which really helps him. But they’re also fictions because they’re fragments, complete fragments. Twelve Men, write that one down. I would totally recommend that.

GS: So when was the last time you saw Stone Reader?

DM: Actually, I could’ve said like about 10 years ago except for my neighbor up the street is good at all that stuff and they were streaming it, and I don’t know how we got started but I was up there, so they just dialed it up. It’s on streaming. Oh, I was interested because [Mark Moskowitz] came back and did some more film and I thought he was gonna put an epilogue on it, but he decided not to, I guess. He didn’t change much in it. So I saw it a few weeks ago actually.

GS: Oh yeah, the remastered?

DM: But other than that, I’d have to say, I don’t know, eight, 10 years, I think.

GS: And what is the experience like watching that?

DM: We toured it and they always had neat audiences, small audiences, but always really interested audiences. I mean I saw that…he drew me out east the first time he showed it in Pleasantville, New York. Janet Maslin, she was a reviewer at the Times [She called The Stones of Summer “a luxuriantly long-winded coming-of-age story that roams from Iowa to Mexico in language ripe with early-70s eccentricity.”]. Anyway, it’s out the train line toward Long Island. So that’s the first time I saw it. He hid me behind a tree and then he stuck me in the balcony and then he said, “Oh, Dow’s here!” It was a full theater. She did the event. She did quite a bit. It had a balcony, and it was packed. I was sitting up in the balcony and so he dragged me down. I talked a little bit afterward. I was happy to let him do most of the talking. I don’t know, it was his idea. I couldn’t even imagine what was going on, in a way, after 35 years.

GS: Did you feel like someone who just turned into a celebrity overnight?

DM: Yeah, I was aware that that was a dynamic. I wish I could do it again now. I was having a…well, I’m not going to get into that, but, uh, yeah, the thing about going back through Indianapolis…I met this guy at the tracks, 10 years later I’d been reading it and I discovered Balzac. My point about my whole novel even at the time was that it was a persona novel. (sighs) Picture a blackboard and picture a circle around it, that’s the novel. The circle is a little down and there’s x’s in the circle on this whole blackboard. And so a persona novel is when an omniscient novel is written from the outside looking at the novel from that blackboard, that whole black universe of the blackboard looking in at the circle. A persona novel is written from the inside. The x’s are all the major characters in the novel, at least six characters. If you picked one of them and circled them, that’s a persona novel.

GS: You mentioned in the documentary that basically you had writer’s block for, I don’t know, 30 years or so. Did you get any writing done while you were working that job?

DM: No, I read a lot at night and I watched movies and I thought like a writer. I don’t know, I was always…(laughs) I haven’t quite finished my debut. For 10 years…so I discovered Balzac. That’s what I wanted to do. I really thought I would either write some Cornell Woolrich and so on, some kind of noir, some kind of movie. That’s what I was interested in. This is 10 years later. When [Ed] Gorman was starting to write, [indecipherable] all his life. In ‘78, when I left to go back and get a job so we could have kids, I was really conscious of Balzac. I had two novels that really would’ve worked. I should have had an ABA basketball book with my buddy. And the other guy I knew was Al Friedman. I didn’t have that many adult friends. His parents and grandparents on both sides came to Ellis Island together around 1900, and they didn’t speak any English. They were Eastern European Hebrews.

When they left New York, they said, “Where are you going?” and they picked Minneapolis for the conductor. They pinned the word “Minneapolis” on one of their lapels or something, but somehow it got mixed up and they ended up in Indianapolis. So they got off the train and wound up in Frankfurt, Indiana. That didn’t slow them down too much. They wound up with an apartment store and my buddy said he was the only Hebrew that grew up in Frankfurt, Indiana. (laughs) This guy [Al Friedman] was totally fascinated by the speedway. He started going to the speedway when he was a little kid. By the time he was middle-aged…Parnelli Jones. He was hanging around so much he was almost an arbiter of things. Some 14-year-old kid. Parnelli nicknamed him Einstein one day. (laughs) He was [A. J.] Foyt’s big rally, but anyway, by the time I got there in the 70s, we spent all day May in there. I played softball before they built the golf course in there. I was on the softball team. I knew all those drivers and mechanics in that day because when they weren’t racing and actually doing a few laps they were killing time and they couldn’t go home, so now they’ve got a golf course. They play golf when they’re not doing that. Then they played softball. They had a softball diamond in that vast infield somewhere. So anyway, my point I tell you all of this: when I left there in ‘78 I should’ve had a speedway novel and a basketball novel, so I felt pretty bad about that. The ABA was way more interesting as a narrative, way more interesting than the NBA. I mean, it was [supposed to be] a novel of the league and there were characters in it. There was also some great players.

GS: There were also some excerpts and other poems and pieces that you shared with Mark in the documentary.

DM: Yeah, I don’t know where those went. I swear to God. I’ve done 35 notebooks, but they’re all notebooks, they’re not…35 spiral notebooks I’m looking at right now. Some of them are in boxes. It’s a lot. But I’m too old to go try to make something out of them, something finished. There’s a difference between notebooks and composition, composition is really tough. That’s what I did for 11 months, although I had all the bones of it. The rewrite is where you can really apply something, but it’s killing in a way. It’s not the original invention, it’s the…the longer word for it—it’s rewrite—but it’s really recomposition. That’s what I could’ve done again, actually, with that whole thing. The one thing I don’t think I could’ve done was edit it.

GS: So, in theory, you have the pieces of a novel, at least one novel, sitting around.

DM: Uh, or at least one poem. Yeah, I consider them poetic. Yeah, they’re in lines. But that’s different stuff. One of them is a thousand, literally pushing a thousand—they’re in couplets, they’re in double couplets. Some of them are spaced, two quatrains, you know, they’re in long lines, short with slashes and things, ellipses. ‘Cause I hate to waste all that paper. I think short-form free verse is a very important thing, but it sure does leave a lot of white paper. (laughs) You almost feel guilty. Every poem has its whole entire line, you know what I mean? Anyway, it works for me. We used to call it free verse, I guess. I don’t know what they call it. I started out trying to write poetry. I consider the novel lyric, I guess. I know it was an attempt at a lyric novel.

GS: I want to get into that, the poetry of it, but before we get into that. You told me you’re retired, so wouldn’t this be the perfect time to make something connected between those notebooks?

DM: Oh, I don’t know if I got it.

GS: You want me to give you a kick in the butt?

DM: (laughs) I don’t know. I’m gonna be 80 in about three months. [Later, I watched the extra features on the special edition DVD of Stone Reader and learned that Dow had written at least 150 pages of a book titled Fossil Fuels.] If I could go back to my 20s, I’d stick with the short story real hard. At the time I was doing my novel, I thought, man, the guys that get any work done can wake up and start a story every day, you know what I mean? I mean, I’ve got the stories, but first I’ve got the language. I had to invent stories so I could write more language, and I don’t think that’s a, if there’s a horse and a cart you’d better go the other way around if you’re going to write fiction. You better start out developing your senses, getting out of bed telling a new story every day. That would be the most valuable thing that you could have. You could learn language second. Whereas with poetry, language comes first. You work with language and then you’re looking around to find a story for it, I think. I’m talking broadly, but I think there’s something in there.

GS: Yeah. Going back to the Barnes & Noble edition of The Stones of Summer, what was your experience like? How long did it take to get that reprint after the documentary came out and do you think the novel finally got the treatment it deserved, compared to the first publisher?

DM: Oh, I like the first publisher too, though. I like the print in it, and I like the pages of the parts, so I had no problem with that, and it was flawless. The funny thing about Barnes & Noble, they sent me to proofread it. God, the computer had photographed it or I don’t know what. I understand photocopying or photographing, what do you call that?

GS: Xeroxing or something?

DM: No, it’s not Xeroxing. I did it with a printer down in Muscatine. I’ll never forget it because I had mono. It was the senior workshop fiction magazine they put out that year. I wound up editing it or at least working it through the press. [It’s a 120-page book from the Iowa Writers Workshop titled Le Beau Petard: An anthology of prose and poetry from the younger writers of the Iowa Workshops (1966), and Dow Mossman is listed as an executive editor. It also features an early section of The Stones of Summer with the title “When August Came.” The excerpt includes an epigraph from Thomas Wolfe: “The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time…and he came to know the guttering candle-end of time.”] But uh, photo, photo…I don’t know, anyway. The Barnes & Noble one was just a mess, a total mess. (laughs) I read it and I did a yellow page. I got a yellow legal pad and I sent it to them. I don’t think the pattern…they had it straightened, I don’t know, that was just the way it worked. It came out good, but…and they let me add a couple…. I had [the character] Barney read his letter from Vietnam [three poems and letters from Vietnam used by permission of D. Braun Guenther]. His letter was added because I hooked up with him again about that time and I thought that, hell, I don’t know. I didn’t reread part three after.

GS: Did you go on tour for the rerelease?

DM: Yeah, that was amazing after a 20-year span in roughly the same place, even though I had my own van and two welders and was building interesting stuff. God, I didn’t get out of that for 20 years. They gave me 12 grand and a car, you know, I rented a car. I bet that went on for three or four years. I went to uh…they set it up, this writers conference in New Orleans for a week and stuff like that. I went around signing books and got out of town. It was great.

GS: The dustjacket on the Barnes & Noble edition also mentions and compares your book to three different authors, one of whom you’ve mentioned earlier: James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Salinger. Do you accept those comparisons to The Stones of Summer? Were those active influences back in the day?

DM: Faulkner was but I don’t think [the novel’s parts] were made into his form unless they took some of that out of it. I don’t know, I was very conscious about Faulkner. I was impressed about Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The idea that he could start a very modern idea, you know, the consciousness of a three, four, five-year-old. That’s like the prologue that wasn’t in there…I couldn’t…would have started there. Dawes Williams [Dawes Williams is the protagonist of The Stones of Summer, and his full name is an acronym for Dow: Dawes Oldham Williams] started when he was three, and my dad bought me a trike and turned me loose to go around the block all day. My first dichotomy was indoors and outdoors. I can almost remember me running through the porch threshold, yelling, “Outdoors!” (laughs) I mean, I was so conscious of that. I can hear my dad telling my mother, her name was Leone Wilson, just, “Let him go, it’ll be good for him, it’ll develop him!” And I’d be out on my trike every day going up and down the street all day and around the corner. That was my thing, if I could go around the corner and all the way around the block. There was enough kids that we wound up having our own society in the alley. I knew since about like…it was the end of World War II, the first thing I ever saw, the newspaper boy of the Cedar Rapids Gazette was still in the afternoon coming toward the porch. He flips it on the porch, and my mother comes out and picks it up. She’s kind of interested in it, and that had to be 1945 when I was about two, two and a half. ‘Cause she calls me over, and I think it was the first thing I ever read. It was the largest headline to this day I’ve ever seen. At the bottom of the newspaper, there were these two lines and four columns. And the rest of it was this huge thing, and her hand traced it, and it was vvvvvvvV hyphen J—it was V-J Day. That’s one of my first memories and I knew all about that because George “Chechaw” [Dow couldn’t recall how to spell his childhood friend’s surname, but one of the possibilities closest to his pronunciation is “Czechowicz”] moved in shortly after that and they were from Eastern Europe and they were from a concentration camp. He was one of my first friends. He was a little bit older. I was four and he was about seven…three and six or something. So what got me started on that? (laughs) The prologue of my novel. It would’ve been one of the most interesting parts and it would’ve overshadowed the novel. I think if I wrote that novel again, it’d be fathers and sons. It’d be my father’s novel, really, you know what I mean?

GS: Yeah. You riding around on your tricycle. Were you hanging around with Ronnie Crown too [Crown is a trouble-making character from the novel]?

DM: No, that came when I was six and we moved. After we moved. The end of this whole prologue is my dad coming home one day and saying, “Come on, old boy, we’re moving!” I lost all of that. My first girlfriend’s in there. Her name was Joanne Mahoney. And she wouldn’t talk. She was Irish. Some of the Irish little girls are the cutest things in the world, and she was. She had hair down to her butt. She was about three years old. She had a mother, but there were a lot of missing fathers. On the back side of the block was Mrs. Nicholson. I used to pull up and just stare at her with my fuckin’ nipper goin’. I was very conscious of making her nervous. And she’d start talking to me and then she’d talk some more, I still wouldn’t say anything, (laughs) and finally I’d pull away and go around the block on my trike. It was a neat trike. It was like a 1939 Big Wheel. It was too big for me. When I first got it, I had to lay back just to pedal it.

GS: I had a Big Wheel growing up as well, in the 90s. (laughs) It was a big plastic one but I pretty much owned the neighborhood road.

DM: Yeah, they were great. Those were really advanced machines. This thing was not that fast really, but it wasn’t one of the regular-sized ones, it was a big one. Anyway, Joanne Mahoney saw I’d do tricks, and I finally got her after a couple years. She’d stand on the rider’s thing and about choke me to death hangin’ on, and she still wouldn’t say anything! My dad was really good with other younger kids and shit. All the way through Cub Scouts, he was counseling all of my 10, 12-year-old friends. God…. So he was close and they were trying to get her to talk. She wouldn’t, she’d just sit there and stare. She was perfectly sentient but just wouldn’t say anything. (laughs) She’d laugh and shit, but she wouldn’t talk. I guess she finally did talk. My point was, when he says move, that’s my second life. I already had my first life. When they’re going to the farm, he’s at stage two and all those summers are supposed to be kind of blended, blended together. I almost pluralized Stones of Summers, but I didn’t like it, I don’t know. Anyway. Jesus Christ. So that was the end of her, I mean that whole tabloid scene which 20 pages would’ve covered it.

…I always considered the three parts distinct novels. They were all 250, 300-page novels. [Betty Kelly Sargent] cut a lot of the high school stuff out, all of the high school sex. There were things missing there (laughs) which I think added up to a greater understanding. If she had left most things intact, it would have been part three more than anything else, which was choppy anyway, the way I had it.

GS: Would you have wanted to publish those as separate books in a series or are you happy with the final result?

DM: My dad always said, “Why don’t you make three books out of that, old boy?” I really wanted just the whole of it, the disjointed whole of it, which [Betty Kelly Sargent] may have smoothed over some, more than anything [Dow sent Sargent roses and a thank you note after their work had been completed]. I can tell you what was invented. I mean, it doesn’t have a theme except for anti-war from a civilian point of view, in a way. And it goes back to [the character] Abigail Winas in the first part. And that’s an invention, really. I can tell you where I got it. I got that from [Truman] Capote. Capote wrote this thing called “A Christmas Story.” Did you ever read it?

GS: No, I have not.

DM: It was in a magazine. [The actual title is “A Christmas Memory” and it was originally published in Mademoiselle magazine in December 1956]. I cut it out or I saved it. I was very conscious, and the reason was it was about a near-sex encounter between a mother…not a mother but a mother figure about 30, 40 years old and a kid, you know, a 10-year-old, 11-year-old kid. It’s really not more than platonic affection. It’s pretty close. I don’t know, I thought, I needed to write that. Her experience was she lost her boyfriend in World War II, she was one of the losers. That’s where it initially started. It’s not a reason or anything but it’s a foreshadowing. And then you go through the entire…. If it’s anything thematically, it’s an anti-war thing. Did you ever hear of a book called Fire in the Lake?

GS: No, who wrote that?

DM: She was a woman named [Frances] FitzGerald and it was written right in the middle [of the Vietnam War]. It’s gonzo, or at least one definition of gonzo journalism like nobody’s business, because she wrote it in ‘65 or ’66, right when the critique started of how rotten the South Vietnamese apparatus was, wherever the communists were. The South Vietnamese army and politicians were the worst specimens of capitalism, you know? It’s called Fire in the Lake[subtitled The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, 1972] and it’s about 600 pages and it was done at the time…I don’t know how she could have researched it but she did. She put it out within a year. It was really even more influential than, say, the Watergate tapes later, maybe for a different reason, really really focused and made the anti-war movement get started as much as anything. And another book I love is called The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes. It’s the bedrock of the American wacko experience, religiously speaking.

GS: Backtracking a little bit. You said Faulkner was a conscious guiding star for you, not so much Salinger, but you also appreciated James Joyce’s first novel. I’m wondering if you’ve read Ulysses and if that had an effect on you.

DM: Later, probably.

GS: Because there’s that whole Shakespeare section [Episode Nine: “Scylla and Charybdis”] that would definitely be up your alley, I think.

DM: I’d like to think so, but (laughs). The thing about Faulkner is just that swarm, the Faulknerian swarm. I found that…you know, Light in August. I had a course at Coe [College] and read As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury about that time. Oh, another book, Sons and Lovers [by D. H. Lawrence] was in that course. That was very important to me, in a way. The idea that you could write a story, not a conscious idea but just a recognition, subconscious recognitions are even more important, that the son could write a novel about the parents. It’s through his eyes. That’s a persona novel. It’s written in his own persona about his parents, especially about his mother. That was important.

GS: What about surrealist art? Was that an influence for you?

DM: Like who?

GS: There’s this moment near the beginning of The Stones of Summer and you wrote, “He sat watching, there, in the rain dark as spies falling….” Which reminded me of René Magritte’s painting Golconda, with the people who are falling out of the sky and they look like they’re dressed as spies. Is that a complete coincidence? There’s another moment where you said Simpson’s head was glowing goldenly and his teeth were like operas or something like that. I got a sense of the surreal-pastoral combination.

DM: Yeah, I was always reaching for stuff like that. That’s what I consider a poem. Let’s call it poetry. (laughs)

GS: That’s the kind of poetry I love, where it’s a combination of these two elements that you wouldn’t expect rather than the poetry that just reads like nonfiction with line breaks.

DM: Yeah, I’d say she edited some of that stuff. It probably didn’t hurt it. I remember that stuff about my great-grandmother was just sick, you know? (laughs) They’re driving to see my great-grandmother. I’m sure she took some of that out.

DM: Somewhere in the University of Iowa Library that edited manuscript was deposited. I don’t know if they lost it or…. (laughs) I don’t know if Mark [Moskowitz] saw it or…he wasn’t that interested. He was puttin’ this [Barnes & Noble] deal together, you know? He asked me at one point, the one thing he lost. There was a lot of editing [in Stone Reader], like [Bruce] Dobler had a lot of neat things to say that he had to cut. It always comes down to length. Thomas Wolfe said there’s putter-inners and taker-outers.

GS: And you’re a putter-inner?

DM: Putter-inner. I buy a lot of remaindered movies. I haven’t lately but I did for 20 years. I really got interested in the extras on a lot of them and they talk about all these deletions they make and there’s no one deletion that I ever looked at in any of these movies that wouldn’t have been adding to the movie, at least understanding the movie.

GS: So I’m wondering, how do you view similes and metaphors in the book and in general? You mentioned you have a poetic sensibility, but I’m wondering if it’s a way to heighten the former object or person that’s being described or what’s the intention?

DM: I don’t know. If you look at it from the poem point of view, it’s what you’re always chewing on and it’s always what you’re reaching for. That’s one form of writing, though. You could make an equal case for writing narrative that’s stripped of that, pretty much stripped. Well, I was definitely in the other camp. I was definitely reaching for that. That’s what made it so hard. I said composition, that’s what I meant. Reaching for that is composing. How do you know if you’re doing a piece of music that you ever got the right piece? It’s pretty open-ended, in a way. It’s open-ended but it’s very thick. It’s a big chaos too. You can’t ever totally resolve it. Shakespeare happily resolved all of that. But he was probably still reaching at the end. He probably could’ve done other things and even more complex things.

GS: I want to talk about ambition and the urge to write, as you said, The Great American Novel. Where does that ambition come from? Is it just ego? Is it wanting to leave something behind in the culture or what?

DM: Yeah, well, I wanted to leave something behind. There was something like that in there. I don’t know. Would you settle for secondary sex characters? (laughs) I think it happened when I was about 14, 15, 16. The notion.

GS: You mentioned you could’ve worked on The Stones of Summer for decades. That’s not the kind of writer you come across too often. Some of the examples that I could think of are William H. Gass and The Tunnel which he worked on for about 30 years. I actually found out that he was composing most of it mentally for that long time until he just had a rush of putting it all down on paper the last several years of those decades. And then there’s Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. She worked on that for about 30 years as well. So you’re in that rare pantheon of very ambitious writers.

DM: Well, I was 50 years ago. (laughs) On the outskirts of it. They were in the ballpark, but I might have been in the stands somewhere.

GS: All it takes is one! All it takes is one book. The Tunnel was William Gass’ second novel and he only wrote three in his whole lifetime, and Marguerite Young only wrote the one. I mean that’s kind of the risk of spending so much time on a single novel. Did you read Moby Dick at all?

DM: Yeah, I’m finishing it finally. I read different books in different rooms. That’s what I’ve been reading. I got my copy of Moby Dick up there and I’m getting toward the last eighth of it, I’d say. I read a chapter once in a while. I’ll tell you what, though. I read most of Melville. I’ve got that biography that rose him from the dead in ‘28. I don’t know how I came across it, but his story’s great. But I read Typee and Omoo and all that stuff, which was interesting and biographically kind of profound. He’s lucky he got off the other side of that island and the cannibals didn’t eat him just for openers.

GS: (laughs) Yeah. And with Moby Dick there’s almost a parallel between the story of The Stones of Summer being rediscovered. Most people probably don’t even realize Moby Dick was a failure from a standpoint of finding readers and a financial standpoint until I don’t even know how long it was. Maybe 50 years until someone rediscovered it and wrote the review. Two great American novels being rediscovered.

DM: Probably more like 70 years. The biography I got reads like the original biography. I think it’s ‘28. That sounds a little late. I’d say ‘18. That’s why I’m not sure it’s the same biography but it’s early.

GS: There’s one thing that we haven’t touched on at all and I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk about it. I read somewhere, and it was mentioned in the documentary, about you having a nervous breakdown after working on The Stones of Summer. Could you tell me more about that if you’re comfortable with talking about it?

DM: Yeah, why not? I’ve been aware of it for about 60 years I had one so…. So I came back and I dropped Richard [Wright] off and I was sitting there. It was December of ‘69. That was a big year. I got my MFA in January ‘69 midyear because I had to take that extra semester to get my BA, for one thing. Let me see. So I got back there in late, late January and I got out of there. I remember it. I made a mental note that I’ll never forget. It was 11 months of it. It worked out an hour a page and I had a typescript and I just started. I’d work on part one, part two, part three, and part two was always a relief because I was just telling stories in it and I enjoyed it. But part one and part three were…part one and part two were in memory. I was very conscious of that. I’m starting to be 29 years old or something and I’m, uh, part two is back 10 years and part one is at least 20 years, if not 25. But part three was contemporary. That was, in a way, I don’t know if I ever solved that or not. It’s chaos. But I thought, I’ll never solve this, maybe I’d better just settle for three levels of chaos. There’s a natural narrative in there and there’s a one-act play between his parents in there. And then there’s those crazy notebooks and then he’s traveling and then the end is cribbed from…[William Cotter Murray] gave me three books. He gave me uh…one time he sat me down. His theory was not interference. He never said anything about my manuscript, he just accepted it. Said he read it and talked about it generally but he didn’t pick my text apart at all. But looking back on that, that was just wiser than shit. Some guy that would’ve got in there and tried to fiddle with me, that would’ve just really fucked me up, you know? So I bring it in there. In the end, he had the whole pile. I think when I started that about eight semesters before that or four years in undergraduate, I really started trying to assemble a manuscript and I’d been thinking about it before then for about, I don’t know, (laughs) four, six years or something. But anyway, so I finally had that at the end of it. And then in the last part, that’s from The White Goddess [by] Robert Graves, who I consider totally important. I consider I, Claudius one of the great reclamations of all the history I’ve ever known. I mean, It’s just incredible. And he got it from Tacitus and Suetonius, but, hell, that’s nothing. I mean he added this strain of Livia [Drusilla] as being the center of evil which isn’t pronounced anywhere else. He might be right. I got his two Claudius books and that series I consider…it’s on a short list of the most seriously important things of the 20^th century, the Robert Graves. The White Goddess is all that, I don’t know, even pre-Etruscan mythology. That’s where the novel ends, in the matriarchy and not the patriarchy. You know, why we were in Vietnam? We were a bunch of fuckin’ crazy fuckin’ white men. That was in the air. [Norman] Mailer did one, one of his books is called [Why Are We in Vietnam?]. The patriarchy was under assault. I mean, I didn’t invent that but it’s accurate to a degree. It’s the only thing that clenches Dawes Williams’ life, the matriarchy as opposed to the patriarchy. It’s kind of a (sighs) fundamental and idealistic view of that too, in the end, but—what the hell—you gotta do something. Oh, that’s one thing they changed. I think I changed the last line in the text. A guy called me about that a couple weeks ago. Couple three people talk to me about this. And there’s this one guy in Canada that seems to understand everything more than I do. He brings shit up, and you’re kind of doing it too. (laughs)

GS: Well, we were talking about the buildup to the nervous breakdown.

DM: Well, I gotta preface it. My mother, along with her reading…she was very social, social bridge clubs and shit like this. She had the original breakdown, I guess. (laughs) In the early 50s, this psychologist put her on sodium mannitol and Dexedrine three times a day. On the street, they’re called blue angel face, used to be called. Sodium mannitol is a narcotic and Dexedrine is an amphetamine. So she took three of those a day, so they made her function for a while but she slowly withdrew to her room where she had her shelf of books about Bloomsbury. So there was that. So I was starting to get nervous, oh…before this year, Dan Guenther [Poet and Vietnam veteran whose book about the war, China Wind, was critically acclaimed] and another guy, we rolled about 20 joints and it was going great for a couple hours and I’d been drinking and smoking. I smoked two packs of Lucky’s before I got out of high school till I was 40 years old. So, in the midst of this, I drank some and smoked cigarettes but, man, I never liked marijuana. Anyway, paranoia came out ceiling and I fought that. I wound up fighting that for about, oh, I don’t know, 10, 15 years. (laughs) When I was doing that rewrite….by that time, everything I thought about American….I was really going through the difference between Dobie Gillis and Karl Marx or something. Oh, I don’t know, I wasn’t that much of a communist just…pushing the entire social contract. Anyway, that plus the labor. I remember consciously thinking Blake, you know, heaven and hell, it really was. It was both. It was both paradise and crucifixion. I don’t know why. So I get out of bed and I hit the typewriter and I’d scribble a longhand revision of page after page. It’d take me so long to read it. I’d jiggle the dialogues and I’d brighten passages. I’d write small and have Xs and inserts and everything, and then I’d finally take it over to the typewriter at about the end of an hour, and I could type like a son of a bitch. Finally. I had a 1950s model IBM. I don’t think I could’ve done it on a manual typewriter. So then I retyped that page and keep reading another section and rewrite pages, start there and write another page, retype a page. Then I’d get about a hundred of ‘em. I’d get tired of the first part, or doing a section of the first part. In this first part, I was tying up all that stuff like…you wanna mention Faulkner. I was tying that stuff up like a Faulkner stream, or attempting it. Knitting it all together. That’s why in the end I had to go around and they always asked me to read something and it was hard because I couldn’t read those whole sections. I’d spent so much time knitting them together and I couldn’t read you the 40 pages. I got a copy of it there. I’ve written in it in every section when I was up in Rochester and Eastman. I don’t know, they’re all over the country. I wasn’t happy with any of them because they were either too long or you have to explain. Like, I’d read the hunting section when they’re out killing pheasants and you need to explain the whole novel just to set it, you know what I mean? Plus, I’m not a great reader really. I think at the time…it was 35 years removed too. Not that I didn’t remember every word, know exactly what it was but…so anyway. I figured out after 11 months, it was about an hour, an hour and a half a page, every one of those pages. Some of them were done more than once.

GS: And it was exhausting.

DM: I started seeing a shrink, I guess, a couple three times. The only reason he put me in there was to try meds on me, so it was two weeks, but I tell ya what. They slammed the door on me, my dad took me in there at the age of—what?—28, and all of a sudden I’m going. They closed that door on me and I took one look around that’s when I really went nervous. (laughs) I tell ya. I said, “My God, I’m in the fucking snake pit. (laughs) What am I doing here?” Only the laugh wasn’t there. I couldn’t laugh about it. It’s the biggest epiphany I ever had. It was sort of a phony epiphany or at least a relative epiphany. I mean, it shouldn’t have been that absolute but it was. Then they gave me this yellow pill that gave me an acute Parkinsonian reaction. It was in the middle of the night. I barely…I was all twisted up, my head, I couldn’t move. I barely crawled down to the nurse’s station in the middle of the night. I said, “I’m fucked up,” or something. I finally got her to call me a doctor and he gave me a shot which relieved it right away. Then I snuck down into the nurse’s room and got a medical book the next day and started looking through it. I found it—they called it “Alloril” or something—a little yellow pill. I found out it caused super Parkinsonian reactions and side effects in some people, and they didn’t know shit. (laughs) I wasn’t being ironic about anything at that point. I made decoupages, pretty good-looking ones, but they were work. I had the heebie-jeebies, which ain’t no fun.

It was angst. It was classic angst. It was free-floating anxiety which is anxiety about everything attached to nothing. World grief. That’s the best definition I ever found of angst. Over universal, you know, world grief. Yeah, I had that pretty good. I had that off and on. So I got home after two weeks and I wasn’t any better really, and I was finishing up the book and I wanted to go to Iowa City again and my mother said [in a demanding voice], “Here, take these.” So she gave me two of her pills, which is a hell of a climax to a mother-and-son relationship, in one sense. (laughs) Not that it didn’t ever move on to greater complicated climaxes. Two sodium mannitols and a Dexedrine. I swear to god, it works. It’s the only thing that tranquilizes. I took a lot of tranquilizers by then. That wasn’t any good. They just made me feel worse or incapable of…sort of underrated or I don’t know what I’d do. Those things never worked for me. Marijuana didn’t either.

As soon as I got that manuscript done, I took off for Minneapolis. I was glad to get out of there. I was done with it and I knew it was not done and I knew it would never be done, not really. (laughs) And I knew that nothing was ever done in fiction. Shakespeare probably rewrote those plays and could’ve rewrote them again, you know what I mean?

GS: Well, you said when the doors closed on you at the sanitorium, you had at least a relative epiphany. What exactly was the epiphany, just, “How did I end up here?”

DM: Right, you’re right. Jesus. Just, how does this happen? You know, I was just hyper and part of the tension of the whole novel, especially part three, came out of that, though. I don’t know if it’d been anything like that if I had never smoked that weed. Then right after that we took the most unbelievable spring break to Mazatlán. Guenther and I and Richard and two other guys, we drove all day and night to get down to El Paso. We got on a Mexican train and went through the desert to Chihuahua or Torreón, I guess. Yeah, Torreón, I think. Got on a bus and went over the mountains to Mazatlán. And then we thought we were gonna stay there a couple of days and come back. We wound up stretching that into 10 days, it was so cheap and we liked it. (laughs) So the other two guys went on to LA. Hell, this was a couple weeks beyond spring break, we did the whole trip in reverse. We got on a bus early one morning and got on a train. Found his car still in El Paso. (laughs) We were glad to see that. Drove back to Iowa City. It got to be quite a trek and I felt a little better then, but that was after that incident. Shit, I’d lost…. That was when I was doing the first drafts of my novel. I remember I read, uh, I took, among other books, A Burnt-Out Case [by] Graham Greene. I read that in Mazatlán. That influenced me somehow, although I never liked Greene much for some reason. Shit. There was that.

And then, when I got done with the thing towards the first of the year, I got my car. Man, I was glad to get out of town. I went back to Indiana and got back into the winters with Neto [Bob Netolicky was a 6’9” power forward/center who played professionally in the now–defunct American Basketball Association from 1967 to 1976] and Al, off and on till about ‘78, so that was six more years. In the meantime, I’d met my wife in Iowa City and we went to San Francisco for a year, 11 months again. Came back. She gave up a good job she was good at. Went back to Zionsville, Indianapolis. ‘74. But I guess I was pretty dissolute. (laughs) I was reading a lot and still thinking about Balzac. I was waiting for what was never gonna happen, you know? It was amazing how I sort of…in my deepest unconscious, I thought, you know, it was going all right. I mean, it was gonna click at some point and I knew I didn’t want it…I finally almost made the, uh, recognition, outright recognition. I was really a fool. You should just do what you could do. I thought I could, I don’t know. I knew there was a voice in Al and I knew there was enough story there. I didn’t quite know how to tell it, maybe.

GS: If we fast forward to the 21^st century, The Stones of Summer is rediscovered. Did you feel at that time that it was time to cut through the writer’s block and make something new? Strike the iron while it’s hot, as it were?

DM: Yeah, but I felt awfully hemmed in about it. When I was younger, I had a big idea. That was my whole big novel. I don’t know if I have an idea that large anymore. The biggest thing to me is I figured out…it’s hard to put it right. I got obsessed with the secret history of this country, I have to say. There’s three books, there’s Suetonius, there’s Tacitus, which is the secret history of first-century Rome, palace history, and there’s a book by Pacuvius, later, about 1,400 years later, set in Istanbul and Byzantium and Constantinople, and about the same thing. The real texture of the ruling family, you know what I mean? (laughs) So those aren’t unheard of in history, and I don’t think the secret history of this country about our lifetime may ever get written, but if it does…if they don’t start with 1914, they’re gonna have to start with the Kennedy assassination. That’s the best way I can put it.

GS: I appreciate you spending this time with me and it was a true pleasure.

DM: Well, it’s nice to talk to somebody, especially with what you had to say. (laughs) I mean just about what you’re bringing here. It was great talking to you and I appreciate it. How much time passed here? A couple weeks, in the best sense of the word. (laughs)

GS: We’ve been at it for 2 hours and 40 minutes. That’s a record for me. (laughs) But it’s a pleasure. I really appreciate it, Dow. Thank you so much for your time.

DM: Oh, my pleasure, it’s great. You’re talking to an old man, turning 80, and he appreciates the company, so thank you.

GS: Certainly. And I’ll be in touch. Until next time.

DM: All right, be good.

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Dow Mossman received his B.A. from Coe College in his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 1969, he earned his MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, only twenty miles away. After winning several awards for his fiction, including a Book-of-the-Month Club Fellowship, Mossman completed The Stones of Summer in 1972. Ten years in the writing, the novel was heralded as the debut of a major new talent, and the book’s style and content were compared by critics to James Joyce, William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry, and J.D. Salinger.

Mossman then disappeared from the publishing world entirely. As the subject of Mark Moskowitz’s Slamdance award-winning documentary, Stone Reader, The Stones of Summer was rediscovered and republished by Barnes & Noble in 2003. Mossman still lives in Cedar Rapids.

George Salis is the author of Sea Above, Sun Below. His fiction is featured in The Dark, Black Dandy, Zizzle Literary Magazine, House of Zolo, Three Crows Magazine, and elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Isacoustic, Atticus Review, and The Tishman Review, and his science article on the mechanics of natural evil was featured in Skeptic. He is currently working on an encyclopedic novel titled Morphological Echoes. He has taught in Bulgaria, China, and Poland. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. Find him on Facebook, Goodreads, Instagram, Twitter, and at www.GeorgeSalis.com.