The person that I've interviewed with a literary background is Fred Swan. He is a writer and artist. His books include Parenthesis: My Life, Before During and After My Death and Ashes to the Wind. He writes a variety of topics including being middle aged, what people do with ashes, and his experience with death. Fred's artistic work includes wax painting and multiple gallery showings.
J: Thank you. The date is 10/24, the interviewer is Jonas Blanchard, and the interviewee is Fred Swan. So, you are from Portland, right? You were born here?
F: No, I was born in Ohio, and I lived in Ohio until I was ten years old. Then we moved to Oregon. I lived in a lot of places as a kid.
J: Okay. What was it like when you lived in Portland as a kid?
F: I moved to Portland from a rural town next to a lake, Lake Erie, in Ohio and moved to a farm when I was little. That was in the '50s. It was agrarian in Sandy where I lived next to Mount Hood. It was incredible.
J: So a lot of farms, not a lot of this stuff [buildings and shops, pointing out window].
F: No, Portland was, going to Salem or Portland was a big deal. We didn't have highways. It was a big deal to people who were mostly farmers.
J: It was like that then. Did you notice the changes? When they were happening?
F: Absolutely. We lived on a farm. We had our own food and animals. My parents would spend all day driving me to Salem to see a space movie or something, and Portland was a place we
didn't go to much until I was a teenager and I was a little more independent. I always lived out in the country.
J: What did you do when you were a teenager?
F: When I was a teenager, in what way do you mean?
J: Did you come here to hang out, or to meet people?
F: Once I got a car I had a lot of independence. There was drive-ins were you would see Happy Days and such, and we would hang out and meet friends after school. We dragged the strip, which was Broadway. That was how you met people. You got on one end of Broadway and drove to the other end and it was busy until after midnight.
J: Was it fun?
F: It was great fun. You had lots of fun. All your friends would get in a car and parade down Broadway and to drive-ins, and it was very fun. On Sandy Boulevard you met people from other high schools.
J: That sounds fun.
F: It was fun. There was no social media, so you had to, and you were either at your house or you were at a drive-in with your friends. There weren't any malls or stuff you went to. I noticed a big change with all the places I've lived. They are very populated now around Portland, and the farms are gone. And Sandy was a ten-building town when I was a kid, and it has changed.
J: Do you like Portland how it is now?
F: I like Portland, but it is changing. It was a cool place. It was placed as a counter culture city, very creative, but lots of people moved to Portland, rent became unaffordable, for artists especially. It is hard to live here. [Fred is an artist as well as a writer] They have to rethink about their placement of galleries and such, and some have had to leave, and they live in the suburbs, and because this place is so expensive lots of artists have moved away from here. Studios and galleries have been shut down, and 150 people move here a day, and it is hurting the artistic community. And the roads are full, and what was once a cool river port city is now congested and overpopulated.
J: The reason that I interviewed you is because you wrote a book. So, could you talk about that book?
F: I've written several books: one about being middle aged and one was written under a fictitious name because I don't want it associated with the book. I currently have a book out that is serious and the other is funny and laid back. I always wrote. When I was young I wrote every day, and now I'm 75, and I have lots of things that I have written. I wrote stories about people I knew.
Several years ago I was running, I got breathless, and I went to the hospital, and they inspected me with a catheter they put in my heart, so they could see what was happening. I died during the procedure. They gave me forty minutes of CPR, which was a long time. Most people have brain damage after five minutes, and they couldn't revive me, so they did open heart massage, and told my family that I wouldn't live, or would have massive brain damage.
I did eventually wake up six days later after a coma, and it was a strange experience for people. They couldn't believe I was alive, that I could think and remember. And medical staff had the idea that I should write a book about that. And so I did, I wasn't able to walk, or see out of one eye, but I did plan to write this book.
Then I started writing, in the hospital, about waking up and people saying that you were dead. So when I got home I was thinking about how all people have stories in their hearts. I had a variety of experiences in my life. I went to thirteen different schools, had multiple different experiences, was kind of a delinquent, married young, many things in my life. I've been to Europe, and I think that if I wrote a story that had an impact on a person that would be good. It would reflect on the reader's life. If you felt depressed, or sad, or angry, you could see those things being dealt with in other people's lives. It could really help. It could give them solutions they would find within themselves. That could really do someone good if you have a problem, I had a problem with my parents, and I was able to resolve my problems with them before they died. So if the reader has a problem with their parents they can possibly read something about how I made peace with my folks, and have the resolve to talk with their parents hopefully for a good outcome.
J: So it's your goal to write books to help people?
F: That was my initial thought. It is the idea that I've been writing about in my new book, Ashes to the Wind.
J: What's this new book?
F: I've lived so long that many of my friends have died and have been cremated. Some of them have their ashes thrown to the wind. Some pasted in trees. Others launched in rockets. I've even seen some family members fight over the ashes of their loved ones. So I've used the ashes to the wind as an alternate or almost funny way to talk about life lessons. It's less about what happens to us, and more about what people's relationship to us after we die are like.
Sometimes families fight. It brings out conflict, makes arguments about where ashes are put, and it makes lots of stories. The book is thirteen chapters. Each chapter for a relationship people have with their dead loved ones.
J: That is a good Idea.
F: Actually, I think it is. There are funny things people do with ashes, dividing them up, people who don't want to share the ashes with their brothers and sisters, a head of the family who doesn't want the rest of the family to touch the ashes. It's always about unresolved relationships with each other, and the books that I've wrote have been fairly successful. It seems like a good story.
I wrote about my childhood where my grandfather babysat me in movie theaters. All week long I sat in movie theaters and watched movies, space movies. Daily serials and adventures. I used them to talk about my death. How it was like a movie plot.
J: Do you enjoy writing?
F: I do. I still write. I write every day when I get up at five, write for two hours. Those two hours are our most creative, when it is still quiet and calm. That time of day you are more honest and open. You don't have your guard up, and it is relaxing to not have the bustle of the day while you are trying to work on something.
It's wonderful to be able to look back on your life, to see what has happened to you years and years ago: when I met my wife, when I started a new job, or when I played tennis, and I was very fond of tennis. You can see back onto your life to different feelings you've had.
J: I heard you talk about comedy a while back. Do you think comedy is a way to get your point across?
F: I think comedy is a good way to think about irony and ridiculousness in life. Behind comedy there is tragedy. Turning bad thoughts and emotions into comedy is a good way to think about things and talk about the bad stuff in life. A good outlet of comedy is improv. My grandson is in improv and I encourage that type of theater, taking everyday scenarios and turning them into jokes. The person that I've been sharing my gallery with has a daughter in college who has an incredible wit, and she writes. I was talking to her the other day about joining improv. I believe that it is an incredible thing to sit with your friends and imagine crazy stories. It makes you think about the jokes themselves and how comedy is a mirror to our society, showing our feelings in a way that we can be fond of.
Writing is hard. You have to be analytical and be able to take criticism from yourself and others. When you write you can't think to be financially successful. You have stories in your heart that can impact people. What was that new superhero movie? Where everyone fought each other?
J: Captain America Civil War?
F: Yeah, that really was strange to me -- how the superheroes all fought each other instead of working together. How they didn't know the reasons behind the actions of their fellow heroes, and turned on each other. That is like the current political system here. Everyone wants control and has made enemies with each other, instead of doing their jobs to work together and solve issues. That was kinda a tangent but you get my point?
J: Yes, so to kinda wrap this up, is there anything you might want to say to people wanting to write?
F: Well, when you write books, and the one I'm writing is a memoir, it is almost like a public confession. One day you might write about Ross and Sarah [my parents] and you might choose to make them villains, and have them holding you captive from your dreams, or you could have them be characters separate from yourself, and make them have individual goals and dreams of their own. When people write about others they make some people villains, and they talk about how they've had a hard life, not getting chosen, or being left out, and in their stories they write about those things and antagonize people, and to us the readers, we don't like reading that because it sounds like whining. So when you are writing it is best to keep an open mind and craft your characters in a particular way as to make them plausible.
Other things are that some writers who want to be published or recognized don't tell good stories, that being not all of them do this, but I've known where people's stories are not particularly interesting. If you watch a movie, say, a movie that doesn't make the plot elements clear, and have the characters doing outrageous things, you leave the theater thinking about how the characters wouldn't've done that in real life, and in that way the storyteller has failed in a sense, not making the interactions plausible and instead writing things without any feedback. Writers have to be able to handle feedback that isn't praise, and if you don't you'll end up making sub-par work.
J: Thank you for doing this interview, Fred, it's been fun.