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The Alternative Library

The Kip Tobin Interview

Author of "The Oiler"

Time allowing and authors willing, JJ and I will continue to publish a new author interview in each issue of the Midnight Times. For this issue we interviewed Kip Tobin who is from Ohio, but currently resides in Madrid, Spain. Along with discovering a passion for olive oil, Kip told us about finding the confidence to move to a new country and the inspiration to become a writer. Kip's story, "The Oiler," represents his first fiction publication credit. I personally have found myself using olive oil more often for cooking, and I can't help reflecting on "The Oiler" every time I unscrew the cap.  ;-)  -- Jay Manning, MT Editor

THE INTERVIEW

Jay Manning: Hello, Kip!

Kip Tobin: Hello!

JJ Collins: Hola todos!

Jay: I guess we are all here now. It's 8:30 there, right?

Kip: Almost. 8:24 pm. "But let's not split hairs here dude."

Jay: Hahaha. Right.

Kip: I am a huge Big Lebowski fan and find myself quoting it way too often.

Jay: No problem.

Kip: Jay, do you live in Missouri?

Jay: Yes. St. Louis, specifically.

Kip: Ahh, the sweet mid-west. Nice place.

Jay: I like it.

JJ: Kip, please state your name for the record.

Kip: Stephen Christopher Tobin. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and lived in Columbus for a while.

JJ: What do you prefer to go by?

Kip: Kip, which has been my nickname since birth. It's not self-applied.

JJ: Okay, Kip. First let's begin with where you are?

Kip: I currently reside in Madrid, the capital of Spain.

JJ: What brought you to Spain?

Kip: About 10 reasons (really).

JJ: You can tell us all 10 or whichever were the most pressing.

Kip: Some of the more important reasons were that, for one, I wanted to live outside the American cultural "bubble" for a while and see how the rest of the world views the US. Also, I wanted to become a writer, I wanted to speak Spanish, and I wanted some adventure in my life. Those are probably the biggest reasons. But the true kicker was the morbid thought I had that if I were on my deathbed, and reflected upon my life, I want to be able to know that I lived life and had no regrets. And that led me to realizing, without a doubt, that I wanted to live somewhere else. I chose Spain because the quality of life here is fantastic.

JJ: That is really awesome.

Jay: Sounds like something a lot of people say they would like to do, but never actually follow through with. I'm too much of a homeboy to even leave St. Louis, much less the country.

Kip: Yeah, I hear it a lot--especially from friends in the states who seem to admire what I am doing. I wish they would do it too. It's not easy. And again, I am not married and don't have kids. It made it a lot easier for me to do it.

Jay: I think that's great you took the initiative.

Kip: Thank you! Oh! I almost forgot. Spanish women are, by far, (to me), the most beautiful women on the planet. So, everyday I am in a sort of earthly heaven. In my more timid days--in the beginning--it was also a real hell because I didn't have any confidence to talk with them. But that's no longer an issue.

JJ: What was the biggest surprise after you got to Madrid? Had you even been to Spain before you moved there?

Kip: Yes (question two answered first). My story is quite typical. I studied in Segovia before moving here. Oddly enough, I studied in Segovia 10 years almost to the day before I returned. My goal was to get here before I turned 30. I arrived 6 days before turning 30. Question one: the biggest surprise was the pace of life here.

JJ: Sounds like how I was about buying a house. We all have those age related milestones we try to make by self-imposed deadlines. What's the pace like?

Kip: Extremely laid-back. Even to the point of frustration. Most people work from 8 or 9 until 2 pm and then from 4 or 5 until 7 or 8. So, in some ways it makes for a very long, relaxing day. And in others it makes for a difficult time to buy groceries, pay bills and or whatever you have to do with businesses here. Weekends are the worst. Sundays are pretty much shutdown across the board. So if you don't buy groceries on Saturday morning, you have to wait until Monday morning.

JJ: The pace of life sounds like an ideal environment for writing. It reminds me of Under The Tuscan Sun--the way you describe it.

Kip: I am not familiar with that. Can you give me little background on it?

JJ: It's a movie with Diane Lane--she moves to Italy after a bitter divorce. Life slows down, she makes some awesome friends, and buys a home there.

Kip: Ahhh! That explains it. We get about 1/100 of the movies here that come out in the states. I would recommend this to anyone who wants a slower pace of life.

JJ: How does it accommodate your writing?

Kip: Well, so far I have to make a full-on strict schedule, because I teach English. And that is a story in and of itself. Businesses employ teachers in the lunch hours.

JJ: Wouldn't that mean all your time outside of the lunch hour is free? What's your writing schedule like?

Kip: Sporadic at best. I'm trying to get it off the ground by writing articles for magazines, etc.

JJ: Are you writing in Spanish or English?

Kip: I write only in English. My Spanish is pretty good, but writing in another language requires more than just two and a half years. Well, creatively at least.

JJ: So tell us about your writing history. When did you start?

Kip: Honestly, there isn't much of one. I started one bitter summer my freshman year in college when a girl I thought I was in love with broke up with me. I filled two notebooks with sappy, self-indulgent poetry, and decided I would be a writer. I majored in creative writing at Otterbein in Ohio.

JJ: Nice. What genres do you prefer to write in?

Kip: Well, I really like "literature"--whatever that is. I don't necessarily steer clear from sci-fi, horror or anything else. Everytime I think I have my style nailed down, I find I want to try something else.

Jay: I would describe "The Oiler" as more literary, but it has a kind of twist to it, which of course is what appealed to me.

SPOILER WARNING: A discussion of Kip's story, "The Oiler," follows. Elements of the story are discussed that reveal the plot and characteristics of the story's ending.

Kip: "The Oiler" and its ending was simply a matter of an easy way to end it. To be honest, it was only the second short story I had written in my life. I toiled with ending it in a nicer way. But since it was the second one, and due to what a friend suggested I do with it, I decided to leave it. I think ending a short story with death is too easy much of the time. But it seemed to fit with the (absurdist) addiction theme.

Jay: With the setting and characters, I take it your own move to Spain and living there lent itself to coming up with the idea?

Kip: Yes. I had the idea about a month after being here and why? Well, I find myself using olive oil more and more. The first page in the story is pretty much straight from my first months here--up until the, "Then it went too far."

Jay: I figured that had something to do with it.

Kip: That and a teacher in my TEFL course told me that they use olive oil all the time with everything here. From there, it was simply a matter of taking the theme/idea as far as I could go with it.

Jay: It exemplifies how it is possible to come up with extraordinary story ideas from even the most ordinary objects.

Kip: Yeah. It's quite absurd, yet not altogether beyond reasoning. I've had friends tell me that they haven't been able to look at olive oil the same way since they read it. What I guess is a good thing. Or it at least means that what I wrote affected them enough that it stayed with them. I've also had people say, "You are a sick and twisted bastard." But you have to take the good with the bad.

Jay: I can totally see that. It really does have an affect on one. I mean, the whole concept of being obsessed with olive oil. It's like absurd, but you can totally see it happening.

JJ: I love cooking with olive oil and have been using it more and more lately. So it made the story very plausible in a weird way for me.

Kip: Yeah, if you lived here you would probably go through a period of off-the-deep-end like me. I've recently found a new addiction, which is Yerba Maté. I was able to quit drinking coffee successfully.

JJ: What's that?

Kip: It's from Argentina and is kind of like something between coffee and tea. It has about 20 positive health properties and none of the bad stuff with coffee. But again, when I started drinking it, I went off the deep end. So I think that, with anything, you find that balance after a short period of abuse. Hopefully you find that, anyway.

Jay: I think a lot of people are obsessed with coffee. In regard to the story, the common theme would be obsessive-compulsive behavior.

JJ: Did you have a message, Kip? Or was it primarily for entertainment?

Kip: Ahh, I see. There was no real message per se, but if someone got one, then it's all the better.

JJ: Okay, good, because I actually started thinking it was going that way, but by the end, I didn't get a specific message. I was thoroughly entertained, but I didn't want to admit that in case there was a message, and I just missed it.

Kip: I am smiling right now, knowing that. Thanks.

JJ: Sometimes you can sense that the writer is just having fun doing something he or she enjoys. That's what I got from "The Oiler." You were flying, and I was along for the journey. I loved the characterizations, especially that of the "protagonist." Masturbating with the olive oil was such a logical progression for someone obsessed. The damage to his relationship with his girlfriend--that's when you know you're addicted or having a problem, when it starts affecting your other relationships.

Jay: He's figuring out how much money he's spending on his habit: his "oil fund."

JJ: Yeah. The oil fund.

Jay: Quote: "How stupid can I be - choosing oil over a woman?"

Kip: Yeah, it was at that point, when I came up the idea, that I started thinking, this guy would actually drain his car (if he had one) and put extra virgin in it, thinking it was such a miraculous thing.

Jay: It's classic obsessive-compulsive behavior. The guy really needs professional help, but he's too much in denial. That's such a universal problem.

Kip: It's quite typical in many people, obviously not with olive oil, but with many other things.

Jay: Absolutely. That's my point.

JJ: Oh most definitely.

Kip: I think we are the generation of obsessive compulsives.

Jay: And the irony of how it ultimately leads to ruin for him--totally dark. I actually find myself reading far into the story, going, what's so dark about this? But then it really hits you once he takes his compulsion to the extreme.

Kip: I think that's why it fit well with Midnight Times. I am not necessarily a huge fan of all things dark and sundry, but this certainly has a seamy underbelly to it. And well, as a writer, what comes out just comes out.

JJ: The guy struck me as being isolated even before the damage. That made me feel "gray" or dark, if you will, pretty early on. Not that I had any idea where it was going to end up, but the guy himself seemed lonely. The darkness was there for me early on. And then the one ray of light gets muted by his obsession.

Kip: It seems that he has no life, other than with the oil. That is, until Olivia comes along.

Jay: Early on you do get the feeling something bad is eventually going to come of the obsession.

Kip: Doesn't something bad usually come from obsession?

JJ: Heck, when does it not?

Jay: I didn't think it would be so extreme, though.

Kip: I also liked the idea of him bathing in it and how slippery it was, and the obvious metaphor in that, which could probably be relegated to all addictions.

Jay: Yeah. That was great.

Kip: I had a director friend suggest that I change the ending completely: Olivia comes back, finds him just in time to save him, and he wakes up in the hospital, they mend their issues, he "gets off the oil," and they start a bar that serves olive oil. Everyone loves the idea of olive oil drinks. It's a huge hit and la-dee-dah--a perfect world ensues.

JJ: LOL! While that would have been great, we probably wouldn't have selected it for publication.

Jay: JJ is right about that.

Kip: Needless to say, I didn't agree with him, but then again, he was a director semi-interested in the story as a short film.

JJ: I'm glad you didn't change it. Tell us about any other projects you're working on that you'd like to get the word out on. Also, do you have a web site or any online presence you'd like your fans to check out?

Kip: Not yet, but I will have one within the next month. The problem is, I don't know what it will be called. I'm knee-deep in another short story, semi-dark in a way, and it's about traveling underground. Do either of you have a subway where you live?

JJ: Not in New Orleans, no. We barely have a city right now.

Kip: Yeah, I thought "Duh, Kip!" after I asked that one.

Jay: No subway. We have a lot of buses and a commuter train.

Kip: I'm working on a story called "The Subterranean Messiah," and I've been in it for over a year now, as long as it took me to write "The Oiler". It's about a guy who goes crazy in a subway after about a year after to moving to a city that has one. His reasons for going crazy are related to why it seems that commuters on public transit spend a good portion of their lives in the presence of other people without saying a word. Many times they are crushed up against other people at rush hour—-touching them even-—and yet the social rule is that they should not speak to one another. He views all of the people as friends, or at least potential ones, and grows a deep resentment to the fact that other people don't want to communicate with him or anyone else why commuting. He believes that since every moment of our lives are precious then why don't communicate when we are in these "waiting" conduits passing time together on our ways to our destinations. It's a problem I've had since I moved here and started travelling on mass transit. I don't imagine that I would want to talk to anyone more than anyone else, but it seems really strange to me that people sit, stand and nearly straddle each other while they never say a word. I'm also trying to write the structure of a short story every two weeks (about 10 pages) so that I can have a book of short stories—-all related to Madrid—-by the time I leave. I feel like when I finish it, I think I will be ready to go.

JJ: You need to get your web site up so you can put an excerpt of your story online.

Kip: I will--soon enough. If I could guess, I would say it would be www.kiptobin.com.

Jay: Have you already reserved that domain name?

JJ: Tell you what, if you notify us of what it is when it's up, we can mention it in a future issue.

Kip: Will do, for sure. I was working on what I thought would be a novel, but I have pretty much given up on that idea. I wrote a book, a really shitty one, called "Ankle Tales from Mayrit" via www.nanowrimo.org. Have you heard about this site?

JJ: Actually no. We'll have to check it out.

Kip: National Novel Writing Month is the acronym. The idea is that for the month of November, you write every day, about 1600 words. By the end of the month, you have a 200 page novel.

JJ: Oh, I have heard of this. Not necessarily this site, but doing that. It might even have been that site.

Kip: Obviously you have to go into the month with an outline, characters and plot.

Jay: One of the other MT contributing authors, Lana Gjovig, mentioned it before.

JJ: Some of my friends did that.

Kip: Yeah, it's an excellent exercise, more than anything, in what it's like to be a writer. Having to put yourself in front of the keyboard day after day for months.

JJ: As we come toward the end of our visit with Madrid based writer Kip Tobin, I'd like to know if there are any last words of advice or wisdom you'd like to share? On writing or on life, as you seem to be in a very good place right now?

Kip: Well, given that this was my first published short story, I feel that words of wisdom are a bit premature. I would say three things. First, try to find something original—-which is very hard in this era of sequels and remakes and homages and interpretations—-and run with it. Two, never assume your reader understands what you are saying. Sometimes, too much detail is still not enough. And finally, sweating makes sweetness. That is, writing consistently is essential.

Jay: Good advice. "The Oiler" was very original.

JJ: You've made a great accomplishment with the story, so I'd say you have something to offer. When you have your site ready, we can reference it on Midnight Times, so definitely notify us when you have something ready.

Jay: Absolutely.

JJ: We've really enjoyed talking with you and we loved your story. You're a great writer.

Kip: I will certainly send it to you. Thanks a boatload for the opportunity to be interviewed.

Jay: I'm thrilled to have provided you with your first fiction publication.

Kip: Thanks again. Your site is fantastic. Keep up the good work.

Jay: Thanks, Kip! Well, that's a wrap.

JJ: Adios, amigos.