12 Questions with a Writer: William Bolyard

Take a little Kerouac, a little Krakauer, and a little Thompson. Add war, love, psychedelics, freedom, and art. Shake, stir, pour. Call it a William Bolyard.

1.      Who are you, what have you written, and why?               

Hey, I’m William Bolyard, dirtbag writer and amateur adventurer. I am the author of Sober Man’s Thoughts, Demons in the Taillights, and a couple dozen articles nobody has read.

2.     What is it that draws you to writing, poetry in particular?            

Over a decade ago I was in a band and did all the songwriting. I've always enjoyed the process of telling a story through rhymes and verse and its simplistic form. Honestly, I can’t say I was ever drawn to it, it mostly was what was just coming out of me at the time.

3.      Tell us about the process you undertook to write this book.         

Two bad breakups and about 60 grams of mushrooms. This book took so many left and right turns that I had no idea what it was till it was finished. It was originally conceived as a fictional journal of a character I had created for a rock and roll novel. It was supposed to be a sort of prequel and the character’s album was going to be called, Demons in the Taillights. I liked the title and kept it.

4.     What did you learn in the process and what surprised you?         

I learned a metric ton of patience. The editing process from first draft to book on shelves is what really makes you a writer. Any idiot can put words on a page but the rubber meets the road in the editorial phase. The team at Dead Reckoning Collective kept me from deleting this book probably about a dozen times.

5.      Would you do it again?        

Absolutely not. I’m on sabbatical from writing at the moment and will probably never write another poem again. I enjoy creating stories too much and personally, I don’t think I could if I wanted to. These two poetry collections were just something I needed to do at that time in my life.

6.     What do you want people to take away from this book?

A good review hopefully. I think, this book, people are either going to love it or hate it. At the end of the day if it resonated with you then it was written for you.  If you hate it I frankly don’t care.

7.      What is your favorite book and why?    

Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley. Mostly because I feel like that book was just light years ahead of its time. Its about a WW1 pilot from this well-endowed family meeting some free-spirited girl right after the war and going on a drug-fueled bender for their honeymoon. It sound like a Hunter S Thompson script but it was published in 1922. Plus Crowley was just a wildly interesting man.

8.     This is your second book of poetry. What advice do you have for aspiring authors?                   

Write the most complex emotion you can in the simplest way. You're not going to excite anyone using five-dollar words. Also write a story you can tell. A grand adventure is an excitable read but if you haven’t experienced one yourself you might be fighting an uphill battle. If you’re a good writer anything can be entertaining.

9.     In the introduction you ask, “How is it that in the most connected world humanity has ever resided in, people feel less and less? This book has an undercurrent of self-loathing. Is that you? Or is that you getting that out on the page, so it doesn’t become you?     

I wouldn’t say self-loathing. I think there is a consistent undercurrent of, melancholy or desperation in the book. Kind of like the end of, “The Stranger” by Albert Campus.

10.   Again in the introduction you wrote, “After a full year with the shrink, she revealed to me that I was, in fact, ‘Just feeling the same as every other late twenty-year-old...’ What a bummer. After that, a book seemed like a pretty good idea.“ Why is that a bummer?

I see a double-edged sword, each of us wants to be unique and special and our problems to be the same, but at the same time, is there no relief in realizing that a lot of other people are experiencing the same anger or confusion or ennui?

I just thought it was a wildly depressing statistic that everyone in my age group feels exactly the way I feel. We have multiple generations of youth who can’t afford a home, live paycheck to paycheck, can’t maintain a relationship because the digital world has ripped any form of connection they hoped to gain from people, all while they grew up with a war as consistent white noise playing on the living room TV and then wonder why hundreds of them are killing themselves. I just thought that was an absolute fucking bummer.

11.    You served multiple enlistments in the Army. Why?

The friends, the adventure, and the money. Reenlistment bonuses can fund a lot of cool trips.  

12.    You clearly crave experience over finances. What drives that?

I think I just read too many adventure books when I was a kid. For me it seems strange to not want to go out and chase life down. I never wanted to be an old man in a bed wishing I would have talked to that girl or bought that plane ticket.

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You can buy William Bolyard’s Demons in the Taillights and A Sober Man’s Thoughts from our friends at Dead Reckoning Collective, and you should.