Earthblog

A Q&A with M. John Fayhee

M. John Fayhee tells the truth: ugly, surreal, hilarious, entertaining, and heartbreaking truth. Whatever myth still survives of a West swarming with rugged individualists living by their own code, Fayhee keeps that freewheeling romanticism from flat-lining with ropey prose packed with do-your-own-thing, be-your-own-person credos. Fayhee’s latest book, Bottom's Up: M. John Fayhee's Greatest Hits From the Mountain Gazette, contains some of the author-slash-editor’s favorite pieces from the Mountain Gazette, a High Country magazine he helped re-launch in 2000. Matter Daily recently interviewed Fayhee via email about his new book, the history of the Mountain Gazette, and good beer.

Matter Daily: Tell us a little about yourself.

M. John Fayhee: After egressing the womb in a breached enough fashion that my late mother never really forgave me for my feet-first splashdown into a U.S. Military hospital in the U.K. (how’s that for an introductory dependent clause?), I lived my first 12 years in the northern Adirondacks, a great place to spend one’s nascent years. I skied a lot, hiked, rode my bike, swam and fished pretty much without adult supervision. I hated all forms of school down to my DNA from my first nanosecond of kindergarten to my last day of college, which, if you want to get technical, actually occurred while I was drinking rum on the beach at Ixtapa, finals be damned. I viewed school pretty much as incarceration with teachers often taking on the role of guards. I was not a superlative student. To this day, I heartily encourage all students to drop out of high school the moment they achieve legal age. Best to put distance between you and the brainwashing as quickly as possible. Education has very little to do with sitting in straight rows of chairs in classrooms where you have to ask permission to go take a piss.

My mother re-married a transplanted Virginian who hated the Adirondack cold and when the opportunity arose to return to Dixie, that is where I was hauled, against my will to a flat, fetid and marshy land filled with mosquitoes, poison ivy, ticks, chiggers, snakes, deer flies, heat, humidity and, perhaps worst of all, crazy as batshit Southern women. Not long after receiving my high school diploma literally by the skin of my chinny-chin-chin (I should note that, bad as my grades were, I was the president of the Student Government, the starting quarterback on the football team, the number-two singles player of the tennis team and the number-two rated competitive debater in the state my senior year), I packed up a 1967 Opel Kadet station wagon and pointed my way toward Silver City, New Mexico, where I had been offered a half tennis scholarship at Western New Mexico University, where I continued my tradition of half-hearted course work. (Sadly, the Opel died in Amarillo and I sold it for enough money to put all my gear on a bus. More sadly, I did not have enoungh money left over to also put me on a bus, so I arrived in Silver City via thumb.) But, since WNMU was about as academically lame as any accredited four-year institution of supposed higher learning can be, I managed to not flunk out, though I came close enough twice that my parents were actually sent letters of reproach by the Dean of Students. Then there was that damned trip to Ixtapa, which screwed many good things up, but was all in all worth every repercussion to what up until that point had been a fairly impressive triple major in tennis, backpacking and chasing nubile hippie women. It simply wasn’t my fault that the members of that Mexican rock-and-roll band asked me to join them on the road for the rest of their tour. Live and learn.

While attending WNMU, I somehow got exposed to a magazine called the Mountain Gazette. I do not remember exactly how that came to pass, but at the time I was hanging out with a posse of reprobate semi-students like me who spent many hours hiking to hot springs, cruising down to Palomas to buy cheap tequila and basically partying a lot more than, well, now that I think about it, we were partying exactly the right amount. I devoured every copy of MG. I can’t explain the attraction; it just pulled me in with its look, content and feel. Until I moved to New Mexico, I had never been a reader. Literally, by the time I was 20, I think the only book I had ever read cover to cover was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and that was mighty thin (and not exactly of a high enough quality to addict an aggressive non-reader to the literary life). When I moved to Silver City, I decided to become a reader, at least partially because, though they were not exactly poster children for culture and couth, most of my amigos were in fact avid readers. It wasn’t long before my illiterate self started feeling a bit on the dumb ass side whenever the conversation moved its way from alcohol and women to books and magazines. Though to this day I am not a very good reader (it’s like people who don’t learn to drive a car until later in life … they never quite catch up with people who started practicing pretty aggressively at 12, not that I know anyone who did that), the Gazette not only inspired me become a reader, but, simultaneously, helped me decide how what has ended up being a pretty meandering vocational road over the past three–plus decades would at least start. I have essentially always been a writer, though I think it’s fair to say that I never really had a career plan. I remember writing my first “book” in the second grade, though I don’t remember what it was called or what it was about. The only thing I do remember, besides having written this little “book” and how impressed my classmates were, was my feeling that a writer can easily increase the page count of a work if he just writes bigger. I now know that it is a very easy thing to increase page count: you just write more. It’s decreasing the page count that’s the problem. I had also worked for my high school paper and yearbook. I edited the student paper at WNMU and while still in college got a stringer gig with the El Paso Times, which was then owned by Gannett. Two years later, literally two weeks after a staff dinner organized to celebrate the fact that I had just won some sort of award, I got unceremoniously laid off. Gannett was then getting ready to launch USA Today and the company was sucking resources from its chain papers. I was one of the resources that got sucked, but not in a good way.

Because one of my high school chums had offered me use of his couch till I got set up, I became an economic refugee and moved to Colorado, where I was certain that, given the fact that I had just won some sort of award, which obviously, in retrospect, must not have been all that impressive, else the El Paso Times people would have punted one of my co-workers instead of me, one of the Denver dailies would hire me on in a heartbeat. My certainty was ultimately unjustified. I ended up busing tables and working part time for an alternative-alternative Denver weekly called Up the Creek. Even though I ended up getting additional freelance work from Denver Magazine and Westword, my fiscal situation grew bleaker by the minute — to the degree that I came within a whisker of taking an editor job at a daily paper in Bob Dole’s hometown in central Kansas.

I eventually got a gig at the Granby Sky-High news weekly, which was one of the few non-idiotic decisions I have ever made. It got me out of the city and up into the high mountain country where I belonged. Though I really did not ever come to like Grand County — and vice-versa — it is where I met a solid half-dozen people who to this day remain the closest of friends, including my wife, Gay, and Curtis Robinson, the person I partnered up with years later to re-launch the Mountain Gazette. By the time I arrived in Grand County, the women who would three years later cast her till-death-do-you-part lot with yours truly had lived in Grand County for six long wintry years. That was enough. She was leaving with or without me. After detouring and delaying for most of a fall in Central America, we re-located to Denver where I re-integrated with a life of freelance-writing perpetual destitution. But, I did do one serious quantity of writing. This is when I first hooked up with Backpacker, where I eventually worked as a contributing editor for a decade. This is also when I got my first and second book contracts. This is also the time when, while nosing through a dusty old used bookstore, I came upon a musty stack of … Mountain Gazettes.

The Gazette had died while I was still in Silver City. The one time I met Edward Abbey, we talked about the Gazette’s recent demise. Abbey was one of the regular MG writers during the magazine’s first incarnation 1972-79. As were Galen Rowell, Bruce Berger, William Eastlake, John Jerome, Ned Gillette and more importantly to me over the past decade, George Sibley, Dick Dorworth and photographer Bob Chamberlain.

I carried that stack of old Gazettes with me when I moved to Summit County in 1989, where, along with Curtis Robinson, I was employed to start the Summit Daily News, where I worked for the next 10 years, eventually being given my own mini-department, staff and office suite that produced a weekly newspaper, a monthly tourist magazine and a weekly publication called Summit Outdoors, which was modeled after Mountain Gazette. At one point, the most junior of my employees asked me how secure his job was. He was looking to buy a house and did not want to take on a mortgage if his employment situation was in jeopardy. The higher-ups at the Summit Daily assured me that his job was safe, and I passed that information on to the employee in question, who, along with his wife and infant daughter, indeed, bought a place of their own. A month later, those very same higher-ups looked at the books and told me that I was going to have to lay off one of my employees. I told them I understood their predicament perfectly — that they were corporate scumbags more concerned with their own personal bonus situation than they were about the health and happiness of the wage slaves whose lives were in their hands — then proceeded to, as ordered, lay off one of my employees: me.

Though the sentiment, and maybe even the karma, was good, my wife had a few pecuniary questions, which, I told her I would only be able to answer by taking two months off to hike the Colorado Trail, for the second time in eight years. When I came back, I had something of a plan: I started thinking about resurrecting the Mountain Gazette. Thing is, I did not know the legal status of the name. But I knew someone who might have some information: my old chum Curtis Robinson, who then lived in the Roaring Fork Valley, where I had heard some of the old Gazette players from the ’70s lived. Just as I was reaching my hand to the phone to call Curtis, it rang. It was Curtis. He had a quick question before leaving on a rafting trip: Had I ever heard of a magazine called The Mountain Gazette? Ends up that he had been approached by a man named George Stranahan (otherwise known in my little world as “God”), who was indeed the godfather of the Gazette. (Stranahan is known in Colorado lore for once owning the Woody Creek Tavern, for selling Hunter S. Thompson Owl Farm and for founding Flying Dog Brewery and Stranahan’s Whiskey.) Many people had apparently approached Stranahan over the years about resurrecting the MG, but it was only after meeting with Curtis and I that he seemed to find kindred spirits with enough cumulative media experience to maybe pull the deal off. That was 10 years ago. Some days it feels like only yesterday. Some days it feels like a million years. We sold the magazine in 2006, at least partially because, lamentably, Curtis’ wife passed away and he was left with a two-year-old son, a full-time job in Washington, D.C., and, thus, he did not have the time to devote to the Gazette. I was also suffering from business burnout. The people I sold the magazine to retained me as editor. In October 2008, the magazine was sold again, and the owner of that company likewise retained me as editor. I have regretted selling the MG since the moment the papers were signed.

MD: Tell us how the book came to be.

MJF: In the 1990s, I wrote and had published six books. But, with the Gazette and another business I was involved in (starting a daily paper), book writing fell by the wayside. Because I have two other pretty big book projects in the works, I started splicing together previously published essays into book form, at least partially to get my book feet back under me. At first, I had maybe 75 essays from many different publications I have worked for. As I began the culling process, I realized that the ones I liked the most had all seen first life in the Gazette. By choosing to include only stories from the MG, it also made packaging the book a bit easier. I chose 20 or so stories and with the help of an editor friend winnowed them down to 15. Then the real work began. People think the process of putting together a personal anthology consists of little more than choosing the material to include and determining the order of the chapters. Every one of these essays went through at least five more re-writes before they went to press. It was an astounding amount of work. Only when the galleys were ready did it dawn on me how many of the chapters were bar/drinking oriented. The working title had always been “I Dropped A Clif Bar on Jon Krakauer’s Head,” which is the name of one of the chapters. When I realized the role drinking and bars played in the book, we changed the name. Once this book-signing tour is concluded, I plan to seek counseling of one sort or another. Maybe I’ll end up joining Writers’ Anonymous.

MD: Who are your literary heroes?

MJF: My favorite writers (not necessarily the same thing as literary heroes) are probably Pat Conroy and John Nichols, both of whom don’t mind telling a story in complete fashion (i.e. they’re long winded). My literary heroes are people like Dick Dorworth, George Sibley and several other Mountain Gazette writers who decided at some point in their creative lives that they would rather put beans on the table via others means and remain true to their muse. It’s hard to make it as a full-time rent-paying writer without making significant compromises to one’s work. It’s easy to start thinking primarily about getting stuff published rather than writing good and important stories that might matter on some level when the mortgage is overdue. Dick and George are both astounding writers who have gone through life making very few compromises. That is something I respect, at least partially because I’ve gone through numerous compromise-based stages of my writing life.

MD: Favorite beer?

MJF: I like visiting brewpubs and tasting their products. Bigger the surprise, the better. I probably drink more Fat Tire than anything else. If I’m having a beer with a meal, I like Negra Modelo with lime. Not much on hard liquor, unless I’m traveling in the tropics. Then it’s rum all the way.

MD: Any favorite stories that didn't make it into this book?

MJF: There are a lot of stories that did not make it into “Bottoms Up.” When I state, as I do in the introduction to the book, that I am the world’s biggest screw-up, I am not being self-deprecating. Still, I have managed to have a million real adventures, to visit a lot of places, to meet beaucoup interesting people, to do a lot of cool things and, perhaps most importantly (and I believe this is the most important skill any writer needs to learn), to recognize what’s a good story and to have the ability to translate that story into words. Also: to recognize a good story that on the surface maybe does not seem like a good story because it’s NOT until some writer turns into a good tale, if that makes any sense. (It’s late, and I’m stoned, so forgive me.)

At this point in my life, I am very un-grounded, which is good, because too much groundedness works against a writer. Writers need things to be stirred up every once in a while. I call myself a geo-cultural bigamist, because I am torn equally between two amazing places: the Gila Country of New Mexico and the Colorado High Country. I own a house in Silver City and rent a place in Leadville and go back and forth, back and forth. I’ve only been doing this for a couple years and am still trying to gain my footing. I’m not sure where the Mountain Gazette, and my relationship with the MG, will be, well, at the end of this sentence. I sort of have the feeling that soon it will time to move on. I plan to really focus on book work, probably of the self-published variety, at least partially because, as dark as the book-publishing world seems these days, technology is definitely the friend of the book producer, and at least partially because I have not necessarily totally enjoyed my experiences with established book publishers.

And there it is.

M. John Fayhee will read from Bottoms Up and sign copies on Thursday, June 10th at 7:30pm at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins. Free to the first 100 people.