In Person

Thom Jones has a past as a boxer, an alcoholic, a Recon Marine, and a janitor, which has brought him to his present state as an epileptic (a military brawl began the epileptic fits for which he was discharged, and years of boxing worsened the condition) and one of the finest short-story craftsman writing today, as evidenced by his recent collection of stories, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. But Jones is not the pent-up hellraiser one might expect from reading that brief biographical sketch of him. He is passionate, unassuming, and truthful about his life.

"I found in the gym a sanctuary, a place to hide from the reality of the world," Jones said during a recent visit to the University of Texas (he read at Southwest Texas State the day before). "And through boxing, I discovered a lot about myself. But you discover things that you really don't want to know. You discover that, underneath, you are a timid and fearful person. You get familiar with patterns in your life, even if they're bad ones. You persist in your stupid, uncomfortable life only because it's what you know. When you break that pattern, there is a voice that tells you to cut it out, you'll never make it. And you knock yourself back down. You have to find a way to circumvent that."

Many of Jones' stories focus on military life and Vietnam, even though Jones was discharged just before being sent overseas. Of the 20 specialized Recon Marines Jones trained with, only one survived Vietnam. Jones later married his deceased best friend's girlfriend, who one day mentioned that it was the friend's birthday.

"And I started thinking about that," said Jones. "I had never written about Vietnam because I didn't feel like I had the right. And there has been a large body of great literature written about that war. But, I started getting angry that my friend had been cheated out of his life. He had been cheated. So, I decided to write a story for my friend.

"What I wrote was in my heart. It was very close to me. I write the kinds of things that I want to read. I was tired of reading about people in Nantucket in Volvos. I wanted to write about the nuthouses, the drunk, the desperate, the deranged. I wanted to squeeze these characters into situations and see what they would do." -- Tyler D. Johnson