The Writing Loft

Theroux Visits Campus
'Mosquito Coast' author speaks

                                                    By Nora Profit

            He calls himself “a bespectacled middle-aged writer” who is “just a simple fellow, walking around the world, grinning like a dog, collecting fatuous details to amuse myself.”

                This not-so-simple fellow, a native New Englander, is the renowned novelist and world traveler Paul Theroux, the author of “The Mosquito Coast,” “0-Zone,” “Milroy the Magician,” “The Great Railway Bazaar,” and 24 other books covering the genres of travel writing, novels, short stories and children’s books.

               The Center for Literary Arts 1994-95 Major Authors Series moderated by Alan Soldofsky, the center’s director, ended the series with a “Conversation with Paul Theroux.”

               Wearing dark horned-rimmed glasses, a heather-green tweed jacket, and a pair of sturdy black walking shoes with thick black rubber soles, Theroux spoke to a crowd of a hundred. He talked about his books, his travel experiences, and his views of life as a writer.

               Theroux, who said he’s been Just about everywhere on the globe, has traveled to countries such as Angola, Vietnam, Bora Bora, Albania, Mongolia, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea and Mozambique.
He has traveled more widely than any other writer of his generation, Soldofsky said.

               “I started traveling because I wanted to get away from home. I thought it would be good for my growth,” Theroux said. “I prefer to go to places I know nothing about and wanted to live my life without anyone breathing down my neck or asking what I am doing.

               “What are you doing, is the most difficult question to answer in life,” he said. “The answer is never what we are doing, because what we say we’re doing isn’t actually what we’re doing. What we are doing is worrying or thinking about what we want to do, hoping something good will happen. So what people should really be asking is, ‘What are you secretly thinking and what do you want to do?’ And that’s a question you don’t know how to answer because you haven’t got a clue.”

               When asked what advice he would give an aspiring writer, Theroux said it is important to go it alone, be in a place where your process of
creativity won’t meet with negativity, and do things that will dislodge something in your imagination.

               “You don’t know the contents of your creativity,” he said. “You only know there is something interesting there (in your mind) that you want to express, but don’t know what it is. It’s important to write many things,” he continued, “because you are walking toward a conclusion you are unaware of.”

               Theroux, who graduated from the University of Massachusetts
and did his graduate work at Syracuse University, was born in Medford, Mass., on April 10, 1941. His novels feature exotic locales he came to know as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa and as an English teacher in Malawi, Uganda and Singapore. Theroux has worked exclusively as a writer since
1971.

                His new book, “The Pillars of Hercules,” is a travel study through the isles of the Mediterranean and will be released in September.

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