Bill Smoot is the author of the new novel San Quentin Exodus. He is also an educator, and he has taught college courses at Mount Tamalpais College in San Quentin Prison for 14 years. He lives in Berkeley, California.
Q: How much did your own experiences teaching at San Quentin Prison influence the writing of your new novel?
A: Very much. The setting, the daily realities, the experience of incarcerated people—all of these became raw material for my novel. However, the characters are completely fictional. None of them are based on real people.
Q: How did you create your characters James and Allison?
A: Over the years, when I entered the prison, I found myself gazing up at the imposing walls and wondering how one might escape. The character of Allison grew out of that wondering. She was a mystery solver in the vein of Nancy Drew, her childhood hero, and she wondered how one could fashion a key for this most formidable of locks.
As for James, he came out of my realization that one could be an archetypal “good boy” and still stumble into committing a serious crime. That’s the contradiction he lives—a good boy who did a bad thing.
I know this may sound strange, but I developed these characters by putting myself in a receptive state of mind and letting them come to me. They felt more dreamed than rationally constructed. I felt like I watched them live and then wrote down what I saw.
Q: The author Lori Ostlund said of the book, “Like all good literature, San Quentin Exodus ultimately asks us to reconsider everything we believe—or think we believe.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think it’s an accurate assessment. Of course, this will vary from reader to reader, but I think most people have a brutal and dehumanized image of incarcerated individuals that they have formed from TV, film, and works of fiction.
I believe my novel challenges that view and reveals the hearts and souls of people in prison. Teaching there for 14 years allowed me to appreciate their fierce humanity. As absurd as this might sound coming from a middle-class man with a Ph.D., I realized that in some deep way, we are all the same person.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: First, I hope they will be caught up in the journey of some very interesting and very likeable—even loveable—characters. Beyond that, I want them to feel the souls and hearts of those who are incarcerated. It’s often said that fiction can develop empathy in readers. I hope that’s what San Quentin Exodus will do.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have recently finished a new novel, tentatively called Looking to Eleusis, about a classics professor obsessed with the Eleusinian mystery religion of ancient Greece. In 1968, He goes to Greece to work on the excavation at Eleusis during the reign of the military junta and gets caught up in the resistance movement.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: To my great distress, someone in the California prison bureaucracy heard about my novel and raised a stink—without having read it, of course. The college program in which I have taught for 14 years responded by throwing me under the bus, and I was fired (if “fired” is the right word for losing an unpaid job).
This is an act of violence—against the new California Model of prison as rehabilitative, against the ideals of freedom of expression, and against the students, who deserve professors who have the guarantee of freedom that all professors do—or should—enjoy.
I still hope this ham-fisted response will be reversed.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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