Larry Baker

 

    

   

  

   

It's been a while since I've read a book that really moved me like Larry Baker's Tell it Slant. After reading the final page, all I could think about was the main character's life. Her ups, her downs, everything she had been through, from childhood to now. This novel is deep and profound. I wrote Larry after finishing and said, "All I can say is WOW... It is soooooo good! Emmy's life, her friends, her loves, her parents, everything! Well done, my friend, well done."

Obviously, I highly recommend it. 

Harry Owen, an award-winning poet and author, described Tell it Slant this way:

"Larry Baker's artfully conceived and meticulously crafted novel, with the abiding spirit of Emily Dickinson hovering tantalizingly in the background, concerns itself with whatever "truth" may be. I can tell you that I loved it. Entranced, even. It's enigmatic, quirky, idiosyncratic... as moving and honest a human story as I've read in quite a while."

First off Larry, tell us about your book.

Tell It Slant is the fictional memoir of Emmy Sterling...the daughter of poor Quakers who read Emily Dickinson poems to her even before she was born, who went away to college to fall in love with her teacher and his wife, who spends the last years of her life as an obscure novelist and writing mentor to hundreds of young women, and whose final journey is to Emily Dickinson's garden in Amherst. Slant is a story about how life eventually exists only as a memory, and memories cannot be trusted.

Now tell us about where you live and what you love about it. 

I moved to Iowa City in 1980 to go to grad school and get a PhD in English. Iowa City (IC) is probably one of the great college towns in America.

Iowa City

Most important, it is still small and compressed, with the University of Iowa literally across the street from downtown. I had come from Norman, OK, and that was a very different kind of college town. In fact, it had no “life” of its own. IC has all the benefits of good living anywhere in the world: educated population, diverse population, financial stability because of institutional support, phenomenal arts and culture, safe, very walkable, and a great place to raise kids (We raised two here). I have also been actively involved in local government all that time: two terms on the City Council, two terms on the Planning and Zoning Commission, two terms on, and Chair of, the Board of Adjustment. Obviously, nobody thought to do a background check about my porn theatre career in Oklahoma.

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

Lemme see……When I was 7, so, 71 years ago. I appreciate your confidence in my
memory. I think I was in the second grade in Spring Hill, LA. But I could be wrong.
Fond memories? No, because…no memories.

                                                

 Larry at 7 on the left. On the right: At 12, acting in role of "Honorary Mayor of Lajes" in the Azores. Had to speak in Portuguese.

                                                                                                                             

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life? 

For the old atheist that I am, the surprising answer is that the Bible did more for, and to, me than anything else I ever read. Thing is, it did not “change” how I looked at life, it “created” how I looked at life. And I read it a lot as I was growing up, until about the age of 15, when I kissed Wanda Sue Kidd and decided that God was wrong about sex and pleasure. Seriously (which I often say about many things because people tend to assume that I am ironic all the time). But the handy King James was full of wonderful and magic stories and I was hooked on reading from an early age. As I got older and went to college I read a lot more serious books, and the ones about American History made me re-evaluate all that I had learned as a kid growing up in the South in the 1950s. My Southern “identity” disappeared, except for the Southern writers I loved.

Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so? 

Thing is, my parents never read to me as a child. There were no children’s books in the house(s) where I lived. How I ended up with three college degrees in English is still a mystery, except that I learned to read very early and did it without any encouragement from my parents. But…children’s books? I discovered those when I became a parent. My wife and I were constant readers to our two children, and my favorite was an old standard…. “Goodnight Moon.”
 
It was a simple story, and universally acclaimed by millions of parents before I discovered it, but the important thing in my use of the book was that after reading it a couple of times to my daughter, I would then sing the song “Fly Me to the Moon” in front of her, almost like a Vegas lounge act. I performed it, and I would change the lyrics to include my daughter’s name at certain points. The book itself would become a prop in my delivery. My daughter is pushing forty now and she still laughs when we recall that time.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you? 

Well, since I am the only person in my family still alive, I can make up any story I wish, making myself the funniest kid in the Baker family. But you want the truth, right? Truth is, I was as serious as death most of my early life, never laughing, mostly staying in the shadows of my two older brothers. My parents were not happy people, it seemed to me.

Ah, but the embarrassing moments. Like when I was running for student body president in high school and had to give a big speech to the entire student body, along with the other candidates. I arranged to have five friends stand at the side of the auditorium with each holding a big poster board. My name. L_A_R_R_Y on one side of five boards, B_A_K_E_R on the flip side. At one point they were supposed to start chanting my name, flipping the cards back and forth. LARRY ---BAKER, LARRY---BAKER…you get the picture. But the guy with the L/B card got out of sync, so as my name was being chanted the cards were actually showing BARRY…LAKER, BARRY…LAKER. If I had not been Larry Baker, I would have done what the rest of the school was doing, laughed hysterically. (I think I turned that memory into a scene in one of my books) I lost that race, and for my senior year all I heard in the halls was “Hey, Barry, how’s it going?” Embarrassing enough?

As for funny, I was looking for a job between my freshman and sophomore years of college in San Antonio, saw an ad for an emcee job at a burlesque house called the Green Gate club, rented a tuxedo, went to apply. I lied about my age (a common pattern in my life, it seems) and the “interview” was for me to go out on stage and entertain a bunch of drunk airmen and soldiers from Lackland AFB and Fort Sam Houston. The goal? Keep them buying drinks and happy in between balloon and snake dancing stripper acts.

Snake Dancing Stripper

Keep in mind, I was still a virgin. But I started improvising a stand-up act, riffing off the jeers of the soldier guys, telling bad jokes and then making fun of myself. All I had to do was keep talking for five minutes, once every thirty minutes. The owner of the place thought I was hilariously…bad. I worked for six weeks and then went back to Texas to get my girlfriend pregnant…to have her father give her a gun as a wedding present and tell her that if I ever crossed her that she should use it, but make sure I was dead and could not talk. He was Chief-of-Police in Richland Hills at the time. “As long as he can’t talk, I’ll fix everything.” Not sure how that story fits into the funny or embarrassing categories, but I can laugh about it now. 

Wait, wait, one last story about my comedy career. I showed midnight porn movies at my theatre in Norman, and before each show I would get up on stage and do a ten-minute routine about how nobody better discover their morals or movie tastes after the movie starts because I was putting the receipts in the bank right then. No refunds. And I hoped they enjoyed the coming attractions. A full house of 600 frat and sorority types. The funniest thing was that I would stand outside the theatre as people lined up, with a mock camera crew with me, and tell people that I was from a local tv station and wanted to talk about why they were there. How many ways can a person hide their face? I found out. And, of course, a few drunks were quite happy to be “interviewed” in front of an empty camera and bright lights. For some reason, I had a reputation in that town that my future wife was told about after we seemed to get serious about each other. She just laughed.

How did you meet your beloved Ginger? How did your first date go?

Drugs, lots of drugs. I was new to the grad department at OU and went to a grad student party at a farmhouse in the country. 1978. The Sixties were just getting to Oklahoma. Future wife and I met at the bathroom door of the house, waiting to use it, but we stood there on each side of the door and started talking and kept talking and other stoners kept walking between us to use the john. We just kept talking. I thought she was a lesbian, short hair and over-sized frames and Coke-bottle thick lenses. She thought I was gay and my office-mate looked like Tiny Tim.   

                                                   

She was from Nashville and her accent proved it. I was hooked. Go figure, since I was also a divorced father with a 13 year-old son living with me. And I had sworn that I was never going to get married again. 

First date? She told me that she had been the Publicity Director for the Tennessee State Fair, so I asked her to go with me to the Johnson County Fair…you know, a fair is a fair, right? She picked me up in her car…a green convertible MG Sportster, and I thought she was rich.

By that time, she had done some research on me and knew I had a bad reputation in the Department…about my previous un-scholarly career as a movie theatre owner in town who showed porn at midnights on the weekends and old or foreign movies during the week. But, as she told me later, “You made me laugh, and I’m a sucker for funny men.” The county fair tour took about ten minutes, so I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink. As she said later, “Larry, I thought you meant a drink kind of drink.” No, I meant a root beer at the A&W. She was smitten, me too, and I knew within a few more weeks that I wanted to marry her. 

 
                                         Larry and Ginger on their wedding day, 5/16/79              On their 30th anniversary                                                                     

                                             

How are you different now than you were in your 20’s?

You mean…. fifty-plus years ago? Back in the Sixties and Seventies? Oh lord, other than a lot smarter and a lot calmer and a lot nicer now…not much. I am 40 pounds heavier, but I still have my good hair and utile teeth. I was married at 19 and divorced at 24. Married again when I was 32. Eight years of bachelor decadence. Working in movie theatres, being a TA in college. A lot of drugs. A good example of bad behavior. But I was absorbing stories to be written 25 years later. Seeing part of my past not-Hallmark life in a Hallmark movie in 2001. Meeting people who became characters in my fiction. Totally oblivious to any sort of Big Picture. I suppose I started to change in 1979, marrying for the second time, adopting children, learning to be a husband and father all over again. Not a saint versus the prior sinner I was, but at least a better person, a grandfather, an obscure writer, not on the stage I imagined myself to be on when I was in my twenties. Nope, I do a lot of cameos. Waiting for the final exit call. (Geez, shoot me now if I get any sappier)

Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?

“Have you ever murdered anybody?” No, but I have wanted to. And I do have a list of names if I ever get diagnosed with a terminal disease and have a month to live…. people who I want to see die before I do. Okay, okay….I am joking. Sorta. The thing about your question here…. if I really wanted to say something surprising about myself, I would not need a question to prompt me. All I need is close friendship. I suppose that the four people with whom I have been in love in my life, from teen years to now, know a lot of my secrets, my insecurities and aspirations. But each knows something that the others do not. You might find this hard to believe, but I am not universally loved, nor am I always likeable when you first meet me, more so back in my past. I seldom smile (self-conscious about my teeth), and I tend to be a Debbie Downer about life. My wife is just the opposite…optimistic, and loved by a lot of people. Wait, wait…. something surprising from or about me? I am a liberal in most things political, but I still cannot escape some of my past, so I keep some of my more conservative political views to myself.

We all have or can point to a certain experience where, because of this experience, it shifted our lives in a way that led to where we are today. It could be a person you encountered or you were in a certain place or you had a certain experience or all three, but it was so pivotal that you can say that because of this experience, I am where I am today as a writer or in a greater sense as the person I am now.

Is this a form of the “Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood” question? If I had gone one way versus the other, or something more traumatic? Why am I where I am today, the person I am today, versus other possible versions of me? The first turning points of my life were all my childhood illnesses, which kept me more isolated from others than my older brothers were. I spent a lot of time reading, they did not. And that reading became its own (beneficial) addiction. And without the reading, I certainly would not have been a writer. The most abrupt transition in my life was my early, unplanned and unwanted, marriage. My girlfriend got pregnant (how did THAT happen, right?), and it was 1966. I dropped out of college. I was headed for a career in journalism or the Foreign Service. In less than a month, I was looking for a job, and I saw a sign on a theatre marquee that advertised a position as assistant manager. I went in, lied about my background (well, “colored” it), and the manager was obviously desperate, so I was hired. I forgot about college, about writing, but I really loved that business. 

                                                                

                                                                                                         Larry as a theater owner

I was a natural, I was told… anal retentive about bookkeeping but personable with the public, and I became manager and then city manager, indoor and drive-in movie theatres, and then bought my own theatre, unknowingly providing myself with material for a few future novels as well as making a divorce inevitable by not being home or faithful. But no thought of being a writer (although I had published a few short stories when I was a teenager). If I had continued with the plans I had in college, I would have ended up as a sports writer or a cog in some government bureaucracy. 

My final movie job was owning a theatre in Norman, OK,

Norman, Oklahoma

where I decided to go back to college and become an English major, thinking I would be a high school teacher by the time I was 30. But a BA led to grad school and an MA, and then I realized that I might be smart enough to be a college teacher. (Still not realizing that I was unconsciously collecting material for future novels, especially in latest, Tell It Slant).  I met my future wife and that led to adopting two children and THAT became more inspiration for future fiction. I still wasn’t thinking about writing as a career. But as my grad school career advanced, I had the good fortune to have a professor who pointed out something that I had ignored. For some reason, for some course of his, I was told to do an analysis of Stephen Crane’s “Open Boat.” I had also been studying TS Eliot on my own, and his essay “Tradition and the Individual talent” rang some sort of bell for me, something about all lit being derivative, a thread in a tradition. 

My analysis of Crane turned into a piece of fiction that used his life and 19th century American lit as a source. I re-wrote “Open Boat” and threw in other American writers as characters. The prof read it and said, “This has nothing to do with my seminar, but it is brilliantly insightful and you should get it published. How about some literary quarterly?” I was clueless. But then I read some essay in the Georgia Review and said, “why not try there?” They accepted it immediately and I thought, “Hell, this publishing thing is easy.” That was in 1980. 

I wasn’t published again until 1993, again in the Georgia Review, but that led to my first novel being published. It was a short story called “The Gesture.” No big deal, but then I got a call from a NY agent who read the story and wondered if I had any long fiction that included the same main female character as the one in the story. He loved that character. I was sorta working on a novel by then, 150 pages in, about my theatre days, and this character was nowhere within a million miles of it, but I told the agent, “Absolutely, right here in front of me.” He told me to send him the book when I finished. I then added the character on page 150 in a scene that did not have her, and went back and foreshadowed her in the earlier pages…and then something strange happened. The intro of that character turned my work into a very different story. The agent was right. That book became The Flamingo Rising, my first novel and future Hallmark movie. 

So, turning points? Being sickly, reading, dropping out of college, grad school where one prof pointed how that I was a better fiction writer than scholar, a publication in a quarterly that established a relationship between me and the editor, Stan Lindberg, how I kept in touch and he published another story by me 13 years later, which an agent read, and a novel was created, and that first book made me rich and I have been able to live off that chain of events and publish seven more (obscure) novels). Now, the part about how all this made me the “person” I am now…that is more difficult to pin down.

Can you remember a particular random act of kindness from a stranger?

This sounds the set-up for a truly touching story, but the truth is….no.

Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?

I never use music to cheer me up, or even to wallow in my funk. I listen just for the
obvious reason of….the pleasure of listening. I have no guilty pleasures in music. My
taste would surprise nobody. I love a lot of classical music. Gershwin is a God. As is Beethoven.

I grew up in the Fifties, so retro stations are fine with me. A lot of music is associated with specific times and places and people in my life. And I work that music into a lot of my novels. Go read Harry and Sue and fall in love with Karen Carpenter again. 

 
I steal characters from Harry Chapin story songs.  Classic country, too. Hell, I have Carpenter and Chapin and Patsy Cline  as ghost characters in Harry and Sue, which is itself an adaptation of the Chapin song “Taxi.” My favorite personal character is Harry Forster Ducharme, in three of my books, and he is a variation/combination on a character from Chapin’s song WOLD and another from Flannery O’Connor’s story “The River.”

Flannery O'Connor

I suppose what I am saying is that music does not elevate my mood so much as it inspires my creativity. C’mon, hasn’t every novelist imagined the soundtrack to his story as he writes?

Were there parts in your book that your editor cut that you hated to see go? If so, what were they? 

A lesson for writers? Not from me. My first novel had an enthusiastic agent and the book was rejected ten times, and each rejection came with some thoughtful critiques, so my agent said, “Let’s work on these areas,” and I would revise. Ten times in small and big ways. After a while,we gave up and I sat and sulked in Iowa City, but then I remembered another agent who had read my creative dissertation from the UI in 1988. He rejected it, but said to send him my next book. Eight years later. 

Now, if you want a shortcut to this story, just know that Emmy’s publishing career in Tell It Slant is my career. Her/my agent was Nat Sobel. Her/my editor was Sonny Mehta at Knopf. Sonny sat me down for three days and went page by page and at the end the book was close to my original version, before the ten revisions. My favorite memory of that experience? There is a funeral scene near the end of that novel, The Flamingo Rising, where a character puts something in the casket of another character. The narrator sees the action, but not the object. Sonny wanted me to identify the object. He said the reader would want to know. I was intimidated by him and he had been so “right” about a lot of other suggestions he made, but I still resisted. I said, “No, I can’t tell because I don’t know. It was between those two people.” They were no longer characters in my mind. He said, “It’s your story. Let’s leave it alone.” That was about ten pages from the ending, so I thought we would keep going. But he said, “That’s it. I’ll send to my copy people. If you think I’m harsh, those guys are dictators.” I was puzzled. “Sonny, we’ve done every page, but not the ending?” He said something that will keep me warm until I die. “No, those final pages are perfect.” And the truth was that in all the prior revisions I had not touched those pages myself. By that time in the writing process, I was flying and crying. (Read it, you’ll understand.) I wrote those last ten pages in one sitting, one draft, and never revised them. 

That was the last time I had a professional editor, so in my subsequent novels I had to do a lot of self-analysis, sometimes self-censorship. Best example, in my novel Harry and Sue, all about ghosts in a movie theatre, one of the ghosts was Redd Foxx.

Redd Foxx

A great comic character in my story and I used a specific scene from when I actually met him in my theatre before a stage show he was starring in. Early 1970s. He would have been a great supporting character for the plot, but I needed that scene from my past to make him even more memorable in fiction. The problem? In reality, the scene was about “women and whiskey” and red polka-dot underwear, and me trying to procure the W and W for him because he was threatening to not go on stage. A bizarre true story, but, as I was writing it, I realized that it would only be seen as racist. Making him a racist stereotype. The scene was true, but it would have been a disaster in fiction, so I cut him out entirely. If I ever write a memoir, however, he’ll be in it.

How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?

I’m lucky to live in a town with one of the best Indies in America…Prairie Lights Bookstore, and

I’ve done readings there for all seven of my books. I’m “local” and I’ve always had a full house, but I’ve also gone to hundreds of readings of other writers in the past 30 years. Same with Books and Books in Miami.

 

(The Legendary Bookstore Owner, LBO, in Slant is obviously Mitch Kaplan.) 

My first book reading for my first novel, FLAMINGO, was at Books and Books in

1997. And I’ve done readings there for four other books of mine, with Mitch as a most gracious host. My last public appearance was at the Miami Book Fest in 2025, full circle. Back in 2009 I was fortunate to attend the conference of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance to launch my novel A Good Man, and was lucky to have been a finalist in SIBA’s “Top Ten Books” for that year. Over the years, I’ve done readings in Indie stores in Asheville, Des Moines, St. Augustine, Monterey, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Omaha, and Jacksonville, many more than once.

Final Question: IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME to any period from before recorded history to yesterday, be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice, actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all, meet  anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.  When would you go? 

Where would you go? Who would you want to meet? And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time? 

Okay, this is a two-part question and answer because I have two areas of interest. I’m a writer, so a lot will reflect my interest in other writers from the past. I also taught American History in college for thirty years, so I have specific times and people I want to meet. I want to go back and talk to Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson

Hardly a surprise, considering my last book, Tell It Slant, has her picture on the cover and the main character was named after her. I want my visit to take two forms: First, I want to be invisible for a few hours and simply watch her at her desk near her bedroom window as she writes. Too creepy? I have a PhD in English and one of the things you do in that process of certification is read a lot by and about writers. I think I know a lot about her, but I also know that books written a hundred years after a person lived never really capture that person. So, let me see her write. But then another time I want to be a version of TW Higginson and see Emily in the flesh at her Amherst home. I want to introduce myself as a visitor from the future. I would seem crazy to her, of course, as I recited some of her poems that she had hidden away and assumed were her secret, and then I would produce my well-worn hardcover copy of Thomas Johnson’s edition of her collected poems, and I think that would get her attention. I want to see her face as she turns the pages, seeing poems in print that she might not have yet written. I would want to show her the cover of Slant. Yes, I know, vanity on my part, but I could recite her poem about being a Nobody. And I think she would savor the irony. Of course, I would also need one of those devices from Men in Black, the zapper that they use to erase memories. I would not want to alter anything about her life, to alter her writing, so my visit would have to be erased.

Dickinson is just the main attraction of the “period” I want to go back to. As part of my PhD program and exams, I had to focus on three areas in literature. One of my three was “Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture.” For me, time traveling back, I would focus on the time between 1860 and 1870. I could visit Whitman, Hawthorne, and the obscure Herman Melville. I would also like to walk the streets of Washington and Richmond and listen to the talk of people living through that momentous time. And I could go to the White House and meet Lincoln. It would be a thrilling and infinitely sad moment. That trip to visit Dickinson was literary, and the trip to visit Lincoln would be political. 

But the really important trip I would like to make is to Philadelphia during the time of The Constitutional Convention. As a history teacher, I spent weeks every other semester lecturing about Constitutional history. What could be more interesting than to see it actually happen. I’ve read thousands of pages about that Convention. I don’t romanticize the past, and the “Founding Fathers” have been mythologized too much. But that was an astounding moment in American and World history. Washington, Madison, Adams, Hamilton, et al. Just listen to them talk (for hours and hours sometimes) or sit near them as they socialize away from the meeting hall. Ingratiate myself enough (dream on, Larry) to ask them questions. But the real fantasy is to be able to get some of them in a different time machine and bring them to the present day America for a week, to let them witness the future, and respond to it. But, again, they would have to have their own memories erased. They gave us an ideal (although the Constitution has its own flaws which we have not overcome.). We are the ones who have fallen short.

And finally I'd like to dedicate these two photos to my novel A GOOD MAN.

Thank you Larry, not just for your excellent book but also for your candid answers to my questions. 

Readers, order Larry's book from your local, independent bookshop.