My 'Fresh Air' Interview
Larry F. Slonaker
Writer of fiction and nonfiction; author of the novel Nothing Got Broke
Buy Nothing Got Broke on...
Also by Larry F. Slonaker...
--Reclaiming the flag: Patriotism belongs to no party (The Hill)
--The "Me" in Dementia (The Guardian)
--And various other stuff...
Larry F. Slonaker...
... worked as a writer and editor at the San Jose Mercury News, and as a writer at Stanford University.
Nothing Got Broke is a novel of the American West, specifically Montana, and its people and its myths. It’s also a story about how, even though people sometimes go there to get lost, they can be found…and found out.
Read more about the novel in the blog (people still blog, right?) titled "My 'Fresh Air' Interview.
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"You've received great reviews...My bibliophile friend loved it."
--Anne Caetano, Mission Village Voice
Read my QA with Anne
from Nothing Got Broke
The Man in the Moon on the Man
August 1985
Here’s what I can tell you about Rossiter at that time: He could report and write, seemingly with little effort, and always by deadline, just about any assignment at the paper—from a teenager’s slaughter of his aged foster parents, to the rescue of a kitten stranded in a tree.
But when it came to a domestic activity, he had a perverse compulsion to contort it…as one might twist apart and reshape a perfectly functional wire hanger into a makeshift snare, with the aim of retrieving some fumbled-away object behind the sofa or under the stove. The end result being something pretty much unrecognizable, as well as useless.
For example, there was this one lovely August day— which for a normal person might have been near-perfect—that preceded a sequence of events ending with him tangled in brush at the bottom of a ravine, hopelessly engrossed in the moon....
"In Nothing Got Broke, Larry Slonaker does a remarkable thing: He puts you firmly on the Hi-Line of Montana, sends the ceaseless wind swirling around you, gives you a taste of the beer, and sets you up with a view down Main Street and into the hearts, hopes, and broken dreams of the people in that place. That he gets Montana comes shimmering off these pages—what it is, what it was, what it might still become. It's a place unlike anywhere else, and Slonaker reveals it with appropriate measures of reverence and unflinching candor."
—Craig Lancaster, author of And It Will Be a Beautiful Life and 600 Hours of Edward
"No More, Ever"
An excerpt from Nothing Got Broke, which appeared in Cirque Literary Journal
Harold and Joe pulled into the parking lot at the battlefield just before 9:30 in a GMC pickup whose various sections—hood, driver’s side door, roof—were painted in shades of black and primer gray. Except for the tailgate, which was yellow. A gun rack was visible in the back window.