Siolo Thompson

About Me

Things that interest me:

Performing acts of super-human strength, roasting beasts and beets, crossing waters and pages, petting sitting bears, hosting sloth races, building sand castles out of broken glass, clubbing seals, finding regular oddities, taking naps in public places.

I love to read, write and meet interesting people that are both intellectual and artistic. I like thinking artists, people with a sense of humor, those that shun indifference.

Why do you write?

I am not a particularly gifted writer or artist. I don't write because I'm good at it or because I hope people will notice and think I'm clever or because I want to be famous or loved or recognized or anything else. I write because I have to, because I walk down the street and the stories pour in, they come from every side, like hearing voices, like being crazy.

I write about the lady in front of me in the grocery line buying tampons and canned cat food and original coke (in those cute little bottles) and in my mind (and sometimes in real life because I'm weird like that) I follow her home. I think about what she looks like when she leans in close to the bathroom mirror inspecting the crows feet, cursing the disappointments that have left their trace on her once attractive if not beautiful face. I write about the weight of her breasts the stubble on her legs, the way she looks younger when she is lying flat.

I write about the guy on the bus sitting across from me reading Scientific American and wearing mismatched (but almost the same shade of navy blue) socks. I think of him sitting on his couch watching the history channel (he likes WWII history) tugging absently on his flaccid penis, socks on the floor next to an empty bowl of instant noodles.

I write about the old man who sits so straight in the back left booth of the Rusty Pelican where he orders the same meal (fish'n chips and a side of plain white toast) everyday. I think of his losses and the things he's seen, I write stories about his youth as I imagine it.

These are the things that inspire me, the miraculous moments of connection in the muddle of the everyday. Sometimes I have to paint the faces I see, try to lay down the particular quality of another human being, draw their picture in charcoal or ink or words.

The dry smoothness of a pretty girls hand that brushes mine as I reach for my coffee, the sound of someone laughing in a German accent on the other side of the bookstore. I write because I can't not write. I write because I have a kind of sickness that turns everything into words and fills up my head and has to eventually be said. I write because I'm lonely and it is my way of reaching into the lives of others and hoping to find, for a moment or two, the warmth of being part of something.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Saul Bellow and Philip Roth - I love my aging Jewish male voices. Cootzee, Nabakov, Murakami. Of the Brits - Angela Carter, Philip Larkin, Orwell (of course!), Golding, John Fowles (yes, and willing to defend this choice), Philip Pullman (no really!), Hughes (read The Hawk in the Rain).

I grew up abroad and sometimes fall into that anti-american thing but damn it we have and have had some of the best writers of all time - Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Whittier, Beecher, Eliot and Auden and Williams and all those wonderful modernists. And what of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Faulkner? His titles alone merit a mention 'The Sound and the Fury" "The Unvanquished". Miller and Mailer and Morrison and Auster and DeLillo and Carver and Oates and David Foster Wallace (whose death my dear boyfriend is mourning which makes me like him so much more {boyfriend and Wallace}).

And Heather Fowler! Of course, whose work you can read on this page!

Sigh, this list could go on and on...