Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation, interviewed one of her favorite authors, Stanley Crawford, about the reissue this fall of his novel, Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine.

September 9, 2008:
Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine

Deb Olin Unferth: How did Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine come about? What was going on in your life? What was going on in the world?

Stanley Crawford: "Nineteen Sixty-Eight" probably would say it all. Except I should add that I was writing novels on Lesbos and Crete, and in Paris and Dublin between the two Kennedy assassinations, with only occasional visits back to the States. I missed much of the ferment leading up to '68, so that when I finally returned to the States in December of that year, it was to a strange and troubling foreign country. Some of that foreignness may have had to do with the fact that I was newly married and a new father. RoseMary and young Adam and I settled in San Francisco, which I knew from my Berkeley student days. But the shock of it all — the Vietnam war protests, the violence in Berkeley (where I still had friends), the drug scene — was such that I stopped writing for six months. Log emerged out of that turbulent void with inexplicable suddenness and coherence. In retrospect, it became clear that I was giving voice to my apprehensive fantasies about my as yet unmet Australian mother-in-law, the remarkable Alice Klaphake, who had been widowed about the time RoseMary and I met on Crete; and to then-recent memories of our Dublin landlords, who lived in a greenhouse behind the main house, which they had carved into two apartments to rent out. Nor did I know that Log would become a sort of imaginative blueprint to the next phase of our lives in Northern New Mexico as back-to-the-landers. I finished Log in a rented house in Dixon in 1970, and the following year we began building our own house on two acres. It might be useful to add that a lot of us back in the early 1970s thought that the world was on the brink, the government out of control, the then-war pointless, and that the best bet was to learn how to grow your own food. Then as now.

"How'd you get away?"

"Jedi mind trick."

"Shut up. What happened with you and Bandit and the angry Doberman?"

"The Doberman was maybe ten feet away. He looked at Bandit and me, and he looked beyond us to the fence that Fup had just jumped. He looked back at Bandit, and at me, and then at Bandit again."

"Action-packed, this is."

"Don't interrupt."

"He looked at—"

"Enough with 'he looked at.' What did he do?"

"Let Bear finish."

"Did the vicious Doberman challenge you to a staring contest? Is that where this is going? A staring contest, to the death?"

"Oreo, enough!"

"The Doberman looked at Bandit and said, 'Dumped one cat for the other, huh?'"

"Oh, my."

The room goes quiet.

Finally Zooey speaks up. "Crap way to find out," he says.