This month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page I interview Tony D’Souza, author of the novel Whiteman (Harcourt, 2006), which draws on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cote d’Ivoire. Here are some of the highlights from our Q&A:

• “In my MFA, the first question one of the fellow students asked the teacher was, “How do I get an agent?” None of us had books to sell. Not even her. Forget about all of it, the writing is and always will be the hard part.”
• “My early fiction was really dark. Then the war in Cote d’Ivoire introduced me to truly dark things, and it became too much. I’ve sought out humor and lightened my palette since. It’s a better balance for me.”
• “My biggest challenge is finding a place to write. Lots of times I’m in the non-literate world and people get weirded out when you sit in your hut or house all day. They think you’re up to something, witchcraft (and I think that, pretty much, that’s what it in fact is). It was the most difficult thing I faced in my years in that village in Africa. People were always sitting in my doorway, watching me write.”
• “You need not wonder if you are a writer or not. Writing will come and get you. Writing will touch you with its black finger and you’ll carry its curse like the bells the lepers in Medieval Europe wore around their necks so that they might never again enjoy the warm touch of human contact. Then it will be years or decades or a whole lifetime of hard labor filled with constant rejection and sometimes open ridicule from your closest friends, your parents, partners will leave you for richer partners, a girl will say to you, “I don’t want to live on faculty row,” and in a fight another girl will say, “You’re not a real writer,” and then all the morons you grew up with will be millionaires and you’ll finally have a short story accepted in a literary journal that will then immediately go out of business. Meanwhile, The Da Vinci Code will sell 40 million copies.”

Full Tony D’Souza interview online here.