Revenge as Creative Engine Fight Club emerged from deliberate rebellion, built to be unforgettable even if no one would buy it. After publishers rejected Invisible Monsters, the goal shifted from selling to making a mark that could not be ignored. Anger, not market logic, powered the work.
Desert Roots and a Town of Kin Childhood unfolded along the Snake River in Eastern Washington, amid sagebrush and vast desert. Dust Bowl relatives, lured by Hanford nuclear jobs, clustered in tiny Burbank until half the town felt like family. Those were joyous years, later shadowed by regret for not asking elders what brought them there.
The Hidden Murder-Suicide The family long claimed diphtheria killed his grandparents, but the truth was a murder-suicide. A grandfather, changed after wartime shipyard work, shot his wife and a child, then hunted the three‑year‑old boy with a shotgun before killing himself. Decades later, learning the truth made sense of the windowless yellow bedroom where the children slept on visits—the very room where the grandmother died and under whose rollaway the boy once hid. The revelation brought relief and revulsion, realizing how little the house had changed.
An Orphaned Boy’s Flight With 16 siblings and an enraged older brother suddenly in charge, beatings drove the boy from home at eight or nine. A farmer in remote Moxee briefly took him in before a nighttime escape from an unnamed incident. Arrested for vagrancy, he endured a cell in Walla Walla, staring at a clock tower and describing it as the worst time of his life. A married sister, Aunt Mary, finally rescued him and raised him.
Showman, Stunts, and Inventions The father became a striking, dark‑skinned, charismatic showman often mistaken for mixed race. He staged grand gestures, including a desert dawn wedding atop a halted train with bagpipes, later discovered to have been decorated by a future friend as a child. He also chased salvation through garage inventions, citing the bread tab as a ticket out of work, though many contraptions proved bizarre and dangerous.
Kismet and a Death Repeating Itself A personals ad titled Kismet drew him into a relationship shadowed by a vengeful ex‑husband who had vowed to kill. The couple was ambushed at a construction site, shot, and the house set ablaze; forensic details showed a diaphragm‑piercing wound that slowly suffocated him while a fallen bed shielded his body from the fire, echoing the childhood bed that once hid him. Earlier that day he cleared a boulder from his drive and christened it Kismet Rock for his new love—an emblem she never saw. The symmetry between beginnings and end brought a strange comfort.
A Visit in a Dream and Proof in a Hallway While a remodel was being staged, a dream brought the father back, saying he had wandered unaware for ten years until the mother told him he was dead. In the dream he toured the new house, pausing by vivid striped prints, and radiated a happiness beyond anything earthly. The next day, the real walkthrough revealed the exact same prints in an interior hall he could not have seen, leaving him speechless and insisting they be removed. Such impossibilities became cherished, collected stories of contact with the dead.
Life Is Wilder Than Allowed Life feels more extreme than culture permits, full of stories that rarely get recorded. As a toddler he died during surgery and revived minutes later, and years later a runaway trailer crushed his car while an agent calmly phoned with movie news—yet a quiet certainty said, this isn’t it. A grandmother’s hoarded lace, unused until death, became a lesson to spend creative capital now: never save ideas, publish them or risk stifling the flow. Make work to be remembered so culture can catch up and embrace it.
Consolation Prizes and Permission After the father died, years of small winnings he had entered for his family arrived as consolation prizes—soup mugs, golf towels, sweet reminders. Others recognized the pattern in their own lives, finding comfort in the coincidence. Sharing such specifics gives people permission and authority to voice their private experiences. In classrooms, saying something bold and even foolish draws the first fire, liberating others to speak honestly.
From Newsrooms to Factory Floors Writing first beckoned because it led to a beautiful camp by the ocean, not a career plan. Journalism soured when fabricating conflict was encouraged, prompting an exit to Freightliner’s assembly line. Years in the R&M center testing failures, writing recall and service bulletins, and training dealerships built technical clarity. The shop floor became a long apprenticeship in how things break and how to explain repairs.
Minimalism, Music, and Performance Training with Tom Spanbauer introduced minimalism—prose closer to song lyrics than conventional fiction. Stories were paced and read aloud like performances, built from verses, bridges, and choruses that cut cleanly. The collage method shaped Fight Club in 1994, sold in 1995, published in 1996, with the film in 1999 and the day job quit in 1998. Sound and structure became as crucial as plot.
Failures That Fed the Breakthrough A first 800‑page novel failed, yielding only two salvageable scenes. Invisible Monsters sprang from the chaotic overload of Vogue in a laundromat—unnumbered pages, perfume cards, dense adjectives ending in a single noun. Agents loved it, but publishers wouldn’t buy what they couldn’t shelve. Revenge sharpened into Fight Club, aiming to be unforgettable rather than marketable.
High‑Octane Emotions Anger and shame make potent creative fuel when channeled into work. Even when one battery drains, another hurt or loss waits behind it. Guiding readers into cringe can be a service, especially for the young who need a coach for hard places.
A Generation Without Trials Thirty‑one felt like the end of a script dutifully followed to no reward. The choice was to keep performing inauthentic success or invent a different life. Fight Club framed a trial men could choose, resonating with those who lacked defining hardships like war or depression.
Structured Chaos as Inspiration Participatory mischief from the Cacophony Society—like a one‑night gallery of deliberately awful art, Santa Rampage, Burning Man, and potluck Apocalypse Café—offered consensual chaos. The thrill fit into a weekend and returned to normal on Monday. Fight Club began as a short story written in one sitting, much like songs that arrive whole, such as John Denver composing Annie’s Song on a single ski‑lift ride. The best ideas tend to strike fast and complete.
When Stories Channel Culture The most powerful writing often feels channeled rather than engineered. Rosemary’s Baby likely offered catharsis for a culture haunted by thalidomide, letting readers confront unspeakable fears through a devil’s baby. Not knowing exactly what one is really writing about helps a writer go all the way.
Lines You Cross and Lines You Don’t Self‑censorship sometimes serves the audience, as when a crude riff on a podcast was withheld. Fight Club’s film swapped “I want to have your abortion” for an even more explosive line that the director insisted on keeping. Platforms and workshops police language differently: graphic torture passed while a homophobic slur shattered a writers’ group. The friction over forbidden words ended a long‑running workshop.
Backlash and Fainting Spells A Barnes & Noble event erupted over a story about HIV panic and a pug, leading to an editor’s scolding and a ban on telling it. Public readings of Guts triggered fainting, including one night where an elegant grandmother mortified her grandson with a blunt anatomical warning. Such scenes show transgressive stories can horrify, relieve, and connect people at once.
Turning Shame Into Liberation A woman’s second‑grade discovery of a warm vibrating heating pad briefly made her the most popular Brownie until her mother beat her while spewing insults. Hearing Guts let her reframe the memory with laughter, hope to someday orgasm again, and a plan to address the past with her mother. Jettisoning dignity in a story can explode the smallness of always “looking good,” returning both writer and audience to life.
Choosing Joy, Making Fun, and New Work Pride centers on a 30‑year partnership that survived the shock of sudden literary success. Free time reshaped the weather itself, because now the sun can be met whenever it appears. Current work includes a reinvented science‑fiction novel and a minimalist play commissioned by Steppenwolf. In any job, joy is a choice: grease‑filled doughnuts and hidden plush “rats” turned factory fear into laughter and gifts.