An interview with Edward Dorn.(Interview)

This interview, first published in Chicago Review 39:1 (1993), took place at Dorn's home in Boulder, Colorado, on September 4, 1990. John Wright, who spent many years in northwest Washington, begins by asking about Dorn's early years in the Skagit Valley and his novel By the Sound. Later, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn joins them and the conversation for a while.

John Wright: You found your way to the Skagit Valley early on in your career, and it was there that you wrote your novel By the Sound. Tell me about your time there.

Edward Dorn: Well, I went to the Skagit Valley before I was even married. I was working in the timber, and that was when I was still in the middle of my Black Mountain years. But before that, when I was at the University of Illinois, I had known older students who had connections for summer work in Seattle, so I worked a couple of summers at Boeing. That's when they kept records by hand. This would have been '49, '50, along in there. There were whole rooms of people just transferring parts and keeping them on 5 X 6 cards. It was all intensive hand labor entry. It was very boring and so forth, but the pay was pretty good. I made my tuition doing that, and we'd rent rooms together to keep costs down, one time on Queen Anne Hill and one time in the Ballard District.

JW: Seattle was still a pleasant, fairly funky town, even ten years ago. It's all cleaned up now.

ED: Californians always dehumanize places. They're the lemmings of the real estate group. They just rush to the next cheaper place.

JW: And it's an exchange of different kinds of dirt. The streets are cleaner, but the air's filthy because of all the cars, and people are campaigning for mayor on the traffic issue because the freeways are unbelievably gnarled up. It's becoming like L.A. in that sense, while the rest of the city still feels like what San Francisco might have felt like long ago.

ED: Well, they bring all that with them. But Seattle was a very liveable town, actually. It was human.