An Interview with Darrell Spencer

by Douglas Thayer
Originally published Spring 2006 (39:01)
Douglas: What got you started writing, the original impulse? Did you always think of yourself as a writer or was it adult-onset?
Darrell: Reading. That’s the answer. Reading. Which I came to late. I didn’t really start until I went to college. You don’t count Fielder from Nowhere, Hard Court Press—the kind of books I read growing up. You hear about writers reading Moby-Dick when they were five years old, part of their journey through the local library, book by book, end to end, top to bottom. They discovered Kafka at age seven. Wrote novels before they were ten. Makes me feel stupid. I was collecting baseball cards and trying to figure out how to avoid getting spiked when some kid slid into third.
No, I did not think of myself as a writer. Me, a writer?—the thought never occurred to me. What I wanted was to be trickier than Bob Cousy and play for the Boston Celtics, but I learned early and profoundly and without question that I didn’t have the talent.
So I got to college, was thinking about law school, and then I read Faulkner…
Read the full interview