“To take the big swings” — An Interview with Craig Davidson, Author of Cataract City

Professional Wrestling Studies Association

“To take the big swings” — An Interview with Craig Davidson, Author of Cataract City

Craig Davidson is a Canadian author of short stories and novels. His first short story collection, Rust and Bone, was published in September 2005 by Penguin Books Canada, and was a finalist for the 2006 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Stories in Rust and Bone have also been adapted into a play by Australian playwright Caleb Lewis and a Golden Globe-nominated film by French director Jacques Audiard.

Davidson also released a novel in 2007 named The Fighter. During the course of his research of the novel, Davidson went on a 16-week steroid cycle. To promote the release of the novel, Davidson participated in a fully sanctioned boxing match against Toronto poet Michael Knox at Florida Jack’s Boxing Gym; for the novel’s subsequent release in the United States, his publisher organized a similar promotional boxing match against Jonathan Ames. Davidson lost both matches.

His 2013 novel Cataract City was named as a shortlisted nominee for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2018, his memoir, Precious Cargo, about a year spent driving a bus for disabled children in Calgary, was a finalist for Canada Reads. His 2018 novel The Saturday Night Ghost Club was a shortlisted finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In addition to his literary fiction, Davidson has also published several works of horror literature using the pseudonyms Patrick Lestewka and Nick Cutter.

What is your story with wrestling?

I had a pretty standard, for the era, introduction into wrestling. When I was in junior high, sleepovers at my friend’s house, we’d stay up to watch Saturday Night’s Main Event and when it was over, the rest of the house asleep, would bodyslam and clothesline each other all over the basement. Good fun.

Later I’d go to the old Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and watch untelevised showcases featuring a cavalcade of ’80s and ’90s stars. Hacksaw Jim, Jake the Snake, Koko B Ware, all of them. As a teenager in highschool, my friend had the only satellite dish in town. His father was a long-haul trucker and would pick up some kind of one-time-use-only chip for the huge dish in his backyard that would let us watch Wrestlemania, Survivor Series, the big quarterly pay-TV extravaganzas. He started to host parties where dozens of us would dress up as WWF superstars.

Past high school I kept watching into the Attitude era—I had a few college buddies who were into it, and the bars would often broadcast the big shows, same as they would big boxing matches—but at some point around the early 2000s my interest waned. Boxing and UFC filled that gap for the next decade, and then I just sort of faded generally on that kind of entertainment.

I still keep an eye on things—Danhausen took my attention recently, and when an older wrestler of note passes (often tragically), that stirs those nostalgic feelings of Saturday Night wrestling, too. But yes, to claim I’m as devoted as I once was would be untrue. Still, when I was into wrestling, I was all in. And that’s where the notion to write the book sprung from.

You mean Cataract City.

The book has four sections and the first involves these two boys who are enamored with a wrestler, Bruiser Mahoney, their idol. They go and watch him at the local arena and afterwards, their fathers get in a big donnybrook with some other locals and in the midst of this Mahoney appears to abscond with them. He doesn’t kidnap them, exactly. He’s their hero. They go with them willingly. He means them no harm but he’s a loose cannon. He’s drinking, driving them around in his old van. He stops to visit a 20-something woman we as readers understand to be his daughter, who he is no longer on good terms with. He’s missed his chance with her. After this setback, maudlin and drunk, Bruiser decides to take the boys camping. Make them men. They go off to the woods, he gets increasingly drunk and unstable and ends up dying in his tent, leaving the boys to find their way home alone through the woods. They do, barely. Bruiser is a tragic figure, as unfortunately are a lot of professional wrestlers of the eighties and nineties, the time at which I was big into it.

Wrestling has been called the “most popular form of American theater.” Wrestling is storytelling, in many ways, within and across the individual matches. How might wrestling, as a storytelling art, have impacted your own work as a storyteller?

For sure, it’s had an impact. I think wrestling tells stories that are big, messy, and have operatic overtones. They’re melodramatic in a good way. I think a lot of writing is meant to be smaller: the emotions more obscured, the motivations unstated, etc. Which is fine for a lot of writing. But I like my own writing to be big, messy, operatic. To take the big swings, I guess, and sometimes in taking a big swing you’re gonna fail (Gobble-de-Gooker). But if you don’t take those big swings, really going for those big emotional hits, well, you’re never gonna hit one really solidly.

Tell me about your genres and media in this book and other work you’ve done — how you developed your strengths in these genres (and what, if any, connection your strengths in genres may have with wrestling).

Well, although wrestling was a fundamental aspect of my upbringing and I still like to watch media having to do with my personal favorite era of wrestling (the recent doc Mr McMahon being an example, some of the Dark Side of the Ring episodes), I think my own major influences are more from the book and film world. Stephen King, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Clive Barker. I used to write about boxing, too, which has a corollary to wrestling, but since my mid-thirties I’ve generally written stuff that doesn’t stray in that direction. The odd fistfight, maybe (I still like writing action), but that’s about it. I view Cataract City as my attempt to explore my love of wrestling, especially as it related to childhood.

Tell us about what came next, after this project, and what will be next for you.

Well, I just kept on a-plugging! Different books, different preoccupations. Life is big, there’s lots to explore. I would love to write another wrestler character, though. There’s a wounded, savage tragedy to a lot of wrestler’s lives, I think.

For more information about Craig Davidson, visit https://www.craigdavidson.net/.

“To take the big swings” — An Interview with Craig Davidson, Author of Cataract City

License

Share This Book