Author Chat: Michael Blouin on I Am Billy the Kid
I Am Billy the Kid by Michael Blouin
Vancouver: Anvil Press (2022)
I was a bit late in reading 2022's I Am Billy the Kid by Michael Blouin, but I'm glad that I finally found this powerfully moving story of an imagined future for an aging Billy. I like the notion that characters' stories—and our own—continue to be compelling into midlife, and in this case, vital and redemptive. Check out my full review of the novel on my blog here.
I'm so pleased that Michael Blouin was kind enough to have a conversation with me about the book as a part of my Author Chat series. Our conversation is wide ranging, and I think will be fascinating to any readers of the book. If you haven't read it yet, perhaps you'll be nudged to pick up a copy.
From the blurb:
"History tells us that the short and violent life of William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, ended at the hand of Pat Garrett on the moonless night of July 14, 1881. But I Am Billy the Kid tells a different story, straight from Billy himself. This revisionist history seen through the lens of a twenty-first century sensibility features the picaresque hero we thought we knew and the unexpected one that we don’t: a fearless and determined young woman who is in no mood to be saved and would much prefer exacting her own revenge.
Billy has been in an alcoholic haze since a failed attempt to escape notoriety by faking his own death. By 1915, his fame has only increased, and when word of a possible ruse leaks out, Billy finds himself once again on the run. He agrees to follow his elder brother Joseph north from New Mexico Territory, to possible sanctuary in Canada. Billy and Joseph encounter Turner Wing, a young woman with a fierce sense of self-determination and the skills with a gun to back it up, and her father, a man with a past and a burlap sack over his head due to a significant facial disfiguration. They are in desperate search of Turner’s sister, who has been abducted by a pair of marauding thieves. Billy and Joseph know the truth about the girl’s fate and, following their own code of honour, form an uneasy alliance with the Wings to avenge her death."
Billy has been in an alcoholic haze since a failed attempt to escape notoriety by faking his own death. By 1915, his fame has only increased, and when word of a possible ruse leaks out, Billy finds himself once again on the run. He agrees to follow his elder brother Joseph north from New Mexico Territory, to possible sanctuary in Canada. Billy and Joseph encounter Turner Wing, a young woman with a fierce sense of self-determination and the skills with a gun to back it up, and her father, a man with a past and a burlap sack over his head due to a significant facial disfiguration. They are in desperate search of Turner’s sister, who has been abducted by a pair of marauding thieves. Billy and Joseph know the truth about the girl’s fate and, following their own code of honour, form an uneasy alliance with the Wings to avenge her death."
***
Trish: Welcome, Michael! Thanks for chatting with me today. It’s been a bit since the publication of your 2022 novel I Am Billy the Kid, but I’ve just read it. I enjoyed it very much. The novel takes as its subject William Bonney (aka Billy the Kid) who’s been declared dead at the hands of Lincoln County sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881. In your fictional retelling, Billy survived, and is now older, seeking a peaceful life away from rumours that he’s still alive in 1915. He and his brother Joseph set out on a trek to Canada in search of sanctuary, but get sidetracked along the way in aiding a young woman, Turner Wing, and her father.
How did Billy the Kid come into your life? At the end of the novel, you’ve included a picture of 1916 Lanark, Ontario that shows one Wilhelmina “Billy” Bonney, and the census data for the same year that includes the Bonney family. What’s the story behind how you discovered this and decided to write about it?
Michael: I can remember the starting point of most of my books and I have a vivid memory of stepping into the shower one morning and hearing a voice in my head state “I am Billy the Kid”. As is often the case there was nothing specific that prompted this, it arose from the subconscious as a fully baked phrase and as soon as it did I realized it was the title of my next book, but I had no idea yet as to the story. As a young writer I had been heavily influenced by Michael Ondaatje’s early work and by Canadian poet bpNichol, both of whom had written books about Billy the Kid, so, being the unassumingly modest author I am, I knew it was time for my own. I assumed it was to be a book of experimental poetry but as I sat down to write and got about three pages in Billy and his brother came over a rise on their horses and made it very clear to me that they would have no part in a “poem book,” that this was to be a novel, and that my job would be merely to sit and record what they did and said. Of course at that point neither they nor I anticipated the arrival of Miss Turner Wing. That, once again, changed everything. I still haven’t gotten over it. It’s interesting that you mention that photo. You’re the fourth interviewer to ask if the photo and census record prompted the book and I take this as the highest of compliments because neither are real.
Trish: Seriously? You completely had me fooled until right this minute. I suppose I should read my history more thoroughly and not be so gullible, but I feel much better knowing I’m in good company amongst other interviewers.
Billy is a character that comes alive on the page so vividly, and I think it’s because we spend so much time in his head. He’s one of the good ones, and at this point in his life he comes across as a quiet hero. Is that how you see him?
Michael: Thank you. Billy is my most personal character, which is saying something because all of my characters are personal and all based, in one form or another, on myself. At many points in the long writing and rewriting of this book we became inseparable, if not insufferable. He is very much a quiet, if largely unwilling hero. He learns to take a backseat to his female lead, definitely the smartest move of his life. I see him as someone whose life has taught, and is teaching, him that he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. In this he is not unlike any of the good ones, as you say. Very different from the historical Billy, who, as far as we can tell from the scant record, might have been a better man were he crafted from popsicle sticks and banana peels.
Trish: Billy is also a bit of a philosopher, in a down to earth, no-nonsense way. His aphorisms taken together could almost be seen as a primer on how to live. For example:
“I have found that there are no friendly strangers in the desert at night.”
“I don’t hold myself up higher than anyone else but some men are just so low that it doesn’t leave much in the way of room not to. I mean that some men just need dealing with.”
“We are always thinking that life will be better if, and when, and if only we…But life is right here and not somewhere on down the road ahead of us or behind us. It’s right here in front of us all the time and winning it is nothing. Winning is just something we make up in our heads and then we try to make fit into the real world. It does not.”
Did you set out to write “the world according to Billy,” or did it happen as you went along?
Michael: I always maintain that my characters write the book and that I’m just along for the ride, furiously trying to note everything down as we go. If they’re willing to give as much of themselves as they do it’s the very least I can do in return for that favour. As I’ve said I set out to write a book of poetry, which then became a novel, which then became “the world according to Billy,” which then became “the world according to Miss Turner Wing, thank you very much.” Of course it was hers all along, Billy and I just had to be taught that. There were things we both needed to learn. I think we see Billy learning that as I did, we both went through the same process at the same time.
Trish: It makes sense to me that this book was born as a poem that grew into a novel. The language is poetic and often hits home at the sentence level, so well composed at some points.
This was a violent time, and really awful things happen to men and women alike in the book. You have written a particularly violent villain in a man named Caleb. We have a backstory that explains a bit about why he is so awful, and I’m glad that’s there, because it lends just a bit of the why to his behaviour. Women in particular are so vulnerable in this landscape, in this time period, and both their strength and vulnerability are very present in the novel. There was one scene that depicted imagined violence against women from Caleb’s point of view that felt particularly extreme. You even warn about it in the chapters preceding using Billy’s voice, which I thought was particularly effective. Regarding stories, Billy says:
“...sometimes there is a God in it. And sometimes there is not.
Listen: this part of the story that’s coming up here next is a part where there is not; there is no God in it at all, at least as far as I can see.
So be cautioned to that.
There is nothing pretty about this part that is coming now.”
In this scene and others, how did you make the choice to write about violence in the way that you did?
Michael: This is a very important question and it is something I struggled with at length, many hours spent coming to the decisions I did. Of course we have to start with the fact that any story taking a fictionalized Billy the Kid as its premise cannot escape violence but yes, the character of Caleb and the abhorrent acts he is responsible for go far beyond gunslinging (to be clear we are talking about sexual violence and vicious murder). There are many reasons for the choices made: they point toward the climax of the book, where women finally have the agency they are cheated out of earlier on, and to me this was a crucial, perhaps the most crucial element in the book, really the book could have been titled I am Turner Wing and been much more accurate to my thinking (but I guess whoever spoke to me in that shower hadn’t thought that out yet). I also believe that our culture, through what I would term a lazy overexposure or, more accurately, a lazy reliance on graphic violence on the part of many creators, amongst whom I can now perhaps count myself, has created an environment in which it is increasingly difficult to write a convincingly scary bad guy. One that could keep you awake at night. Caleb is such a character, but it was necessary to go, and to take the reader to, some very dark places in order to achieve that. I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re going to write such material, specifically as a male author, you’d better do it really well and be very thoughtful about the process of doing so because the responsibility is an enormous one. And to the warnings you mention above, when I do any public readings of graphic (emotionally or physically) scenes–and not exclusively but particularly those I do at universities (though I would never read a Caleb scene publically anywhere)–I always provide a sensitivity warning. The challenge here, given that there are some very brutal scenes in the book, was to give that voice of warning over to Billy to announce in a manner that would be true to his character but which would be just as effective as an author’s note in brackets, which I couldn’t do because it would break the fourth wall at a crucial point in the narrative. Since Billy was breaking the fourth wall left and right anyway, I let him stand in for me. Well, he was already used to having to do just that.
There is the much larger responsibility involved in being a male writer depicting the sexual assault and attempted rape of a female character. Aside from the climax of the book this part required the most work and certainly endless revision. To step into that role is, frankly and obviously, a presumption. And one made with no small amount of peril and risk. It’s daunting enough to attempt it, but unimaginably harmful to survivors to get it even slightly wrong. Of course as writers we are in the business of taking our own individual experience and making it universal, it’s what we do, or at least I think it’s what we should be doing. And sexual assault can happen to male authors but the fictional depiction of it is an area where angels fear to tread, and rightly so. At the end of the day these scenes were necessary for the story, it wouldn’t have worked without them, and without them the resolution(s) would not have been able to resolve the wrongdoing, which I hope they do. It should be said, spoilers aside, that women prevail in this book, especially the ones wronged in the way we are discussing, and they prevail in no uncertain terms. I couldn’t have written these scenes otherwise. More accurately, I wouldn’t have.
Trish: I appreciate the time and thoughtfulness that you put into writing these scenes, and it’s clear the responsibility to honour the violence on the page–I know that may be an odd turn of phrase but it seems apt–didn’t come lightly to you. And I agree with you: taken as a whole, I Am Billy the Kid feels like a feminist novel at its core in many ways.
Ghosts and the afterlife weave in and out of the narrative. And I love the relationship that Billy has with God–including whether God even exists. He has no love for him, anyway. Do you think that in the end Billy is a believer?
Michael: I think in the end Billy is a believer in something, though I’m not certain he would describe it as God. He believes perhaps in the sunlight on a table, in crisp morning bed linens. In the arch of a back, or the eyes of a dog. I think for Billy that’s enough. Maybe it should be for anyone.
Trish: In the face of all this violent trauma and loss, you’ve written an ending that hints at peace and some solace. Billy accepts who he was, made choices to change, and is at peace with who he is at the end of the story. So does this mean you’re an optimist? Is redemption achievable for we troubled humans?
Michael: Redemption. Individually? Perhaps. Collectively? Not a chance. We have messed up. In the natural order we are quite clearly the weakest link, and to compound that and to just drive it home, we are very adept at convincing ourselves of exactly the opposite. Am I an optimist? Looking at the world currently, no, quite sadly not. Looking at my own life and the way it has turned out, given the odds, and the number of times I’ve almost died or been killed? I’d be crazy to be anything but an optimist. Is it me speaking now or Billy? It’s all quite true for the both of us.
Trish: There’s a difference, isn’t there, between the universal and the individual? And that tension between “the world”–or society as a whole–and each character as an individual is entirely apparent in the novel. Perhaps it comes back to the edge of violence we were discussing: even in such a violent world, the individual, be it Billy or Turner, can find meaning and some measure of peace.
Are there a couple of books that have inspired you over the years? What’s on your nightstand to read now?
Michael: I have read James Joyce’s Ulysses six times and Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter more than that. It was Ondaatje’s book that taught me that I could write the way I wanted to and be published in this country. So I did and I have and I owe that debt to him. I have also been greatly inspired more recently by Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, which is a phenomenal piece of work and one I think, and hope, will be well remembered a hundred years from now. Which is what all writers aspire to, I think. On my nightstand right now is Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai which I would recommend to anyone but maybe as an ebook. I bought the hardback and at well over 500 pages it keeps hitting me in the face late at night in bed.
Trish: I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo right now, and…same. 1400 pages!
Ok, and finally the question that I’m sure you’ve been asked over and over since writing this book: Do you think that Billy the Kid was killed by Pat Garrett?
Michael: I did all the research there is to do and Billy was shot dead by Pat Garrett. Few shed a tear.
This also in: we actually did land on the moon on July 20, 1969, lol!
Trish: Indeed, I suppose we must accept the facts!
Thanks so much for chatting with me today. If readers want to find out what you’ve written since I Am Billy the Kid was published, and what you’re writing next, where can they find you?
Michael: My books and I can be found at michaelblouinwriter.com and I’m on Instagram @knowwhoyouowe. I have recently left all other social media and feel much the better for it. The Billy I wrote would have hated social media.
Hard Electric, my collected poetry, came out in 2024 and my eighth book will be out next year and is the sequel to my 2020 novel Skin House, titled The Big Bad. There are three more books in various stages.
Fun facts: Both Skin House and I am Billy the Kid have successfully landed on the moon with NASA (as did Neil Armstrong!), and I can be found most days walking my dog. My dog’s name?
Billy, of course. That’s her name.
How did Billy the Kid come into your life? At the end of the novel, you’ve included a picture of 1916 Lanark, Ontario that shows one Wilhelmina “Billy” Bonney, and the census data for the same year that includes the Bonney family. What’s the story behind how you discovered this and decided to write about it?
 |
| Author Michael Blouin |
Trish: Seriously? You completely had me fooled until right this minute. I suppose I should read my history more thoroughly and not be so gullible, but I feel much better knowing I’m in good company amongst other interviewers.
Billy is a character that comes alive on the page so vividly, and I think it’s because we spend so much time in his head. He’s one of the good ones, and at this point in his life he comes across as a quiet hero. Is that how you see him?
Michael: Thank you. Billy is my most personal character, which is saying something because all of my characters are personal and all based, in one form or another, on myself. At many points in the long writing and rewriting of this book we became inseparable, if not insufferable. He is very much a quiet, if largely unwilling hero. He learns to take a backseat to his female lead, definitely the smartest move of his life. I see him as someone whose life has taught, and is teaching, him that he doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. In this he is not unlike any of the good ones, as you say. Very different from the historical Billy, who, as far as we can tell from the scant record, might have been a better man were he crafted from popsicle sticks and banana peels.
Trish: Billy is also a bit of a philosopher, in a down to earth, no-nonsense way. His aphorisms taken together could almost be seen as a primer on how to live. For example:
“I have found that there are no friendly strangers in the desert at night.”
“I don’t hold myself up higher than anyone else but some men are just so low that it doesn’t leave much in the way of room not to. I mean that some men just need dealing with.”
“We are always thinking that life will be better if, and when, and if only we…But life is right here and not somewhere on down the road ahead of us or behind us. It’s right here in front of us all the time and winning it is nothing. Winning is just something we make up in our heads and then we try to make fit into the real world. It does not.”
Did you set out to write “the world according to Billy,” or did it happen as you went along?
Michael: I always maintain that my characters write the book and that I’m just along for the ride, furiously trying to note everything down as we go. If they’re willing to give as much of themselves as they do it’s the very least I can do in return for that favour. As I’ve said I set out to write a book of poetry, which then became a novel, which then became “the world according to Billy,” which then became “the world according to Miss Turner Wing, thank you very much.” Of course it was hers all along, Billy and I just had to be taught that. There were things we both needed to learn. I think we see Billy learning that as I did, we both went through the same process at the same time.
Trish: It makes sense to me that this book was born as a poem that grew into a novel. The language is poetic and often hits home at the sentence level, so well composed at some points.
This was a violent time, and really awful things happen to men and women alike in the book. You have written a particularly violent villain in a man named Caleb. We have a backstory that explains a bit about why he is so awful, and I’m glad that’s there, because it lends just a bit of the why to his behaviour. Women in particular are so vulnerable in this landscape, in this time period, and both their strength and vulnerability are very present in the novel. There was one scene that depicted imagined violence against women from Caleb’s point of view that felt particularly extreme. You even warn about it in the chapters preceding using Billy’s voice, which I thought was particularly effective. Regarding stories, Billy says:
“...sometimes there is a God in it. And sometimes there is not.
Listen: this part of the story that’s coming up here next is a part where there is not; there is no God in it at all, at least as far as I can see.
So be cautioned to that.
There is nothing pretty about this part that is coming now.”
In this scene and others, how did you make the choice to write about violence in the way that you did?
Michael: This is a very important question and it is something I struggled with at length, many hours spent coming to the decisions I did. Of course we have to start with the fact that any story taking a fictionalized Billy the Kid as its premise cannot escape violence but yes, the character of Caleb and the abhorrent acts he is responsible for go far beyond gunslinging (to be clear we are talking about sexual violence and vicious murder). There are many reasons for the choices made: they point toward the climax of the book, where women finally have the agency they are cheated out of earlier on, and to me this was a crucial, perhaps the most crucial element in the book, really the book could have been titled I am Turner Wing and been much more accurate to my thinking (but I guess whoever spoke to me in that shower hadn’t thought that out yet). I also believe that our culture, through what I would term a lazy overexposure or, more accurately, a lazy reliance on graphic violence on the part of many creators, amongst whom I can now perhaps count myself, has created an environment in which it is increasingly difficult to write a convincingly scary bad guy. One that could keep you awake at night. Caleb is such a character, but it was necessary to go, and to take the reader to, some very dark places in order to achieve that. I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re going to write such material, specifically as a male author, you’d better do it really well and be very thoughtful about the process of doing so because the responsibility is an enormous one. And to the warnings you mention above, when I do any public readings of graphic (emotionally or physically) scenes–and not exclusively but particularly those I do at universities (though I would never read a Caleb scene publically anywhere)–I always provide a sensitivity warning. The challenge here, given that there are some very brutal scenes in the book, was to give that voice of warning over to Billy to announce in a manner that would be true to his character but which would be just as effective as an author’s note in brackets, which I couldn’t do because it would break the fourth wall at a crucial point in the narrative. Since Billy was breaking the fourth wall left and right anyway, I let him stand in for me. Well, he was already used to having to do just that.
There is the much larger responsibility involved in being a male writer depicting the sexual assault and attempted rape of a female character. Aside from the climax of the book this part required the most work and certainly endless revision. To step into that role is, frankly and obviously, a presumption. And one made with no small amount of peril and risk. It’s daunting enough to attempt it, but unimaginably harmful to survivors to get it even slightly wrong. Of course as writers we are in the business of taking our own individual experience and making it universal, it’s what we do, or at least I think it’s what we should be doing. And sexual assault can happen to male authors but the fictional depiction of it is an area where angels fear to tread, and rightly so. At the end of the day these scenes were necessary for the story, it wouldn’t have worked without them, and without them the resolution(s) would not have been able to resolve the wrongdoing, which I hope they do. It should be said, spoilers aside, that women prevail in this book, especially the ones wronged in the way we are discussing, and they prevail in no uncertain terms. I couldn’t have written these scenes otherwise. More accurately, I wouldn’t have.
Trish: I appreciate the time and thoughtfulness that you put into writing these scenes, and it’s clear the responsibility to honour the violence on the page–I know that may be an odd turn of phrase but it seems apt–didn’t come lightly to you. And I agree with you: taken as a whole, I Am Billy the Kid feels like a feminist novel at its core in many ways.
Ghosts and the afterlife weave in and out of the narrative. And I love the relationship that Billy has with God–including whether God even exists. He has no love for him, anyway. Do you think that in the end Billy is a believer?
Michael: I think in the end Billy is a believer in something, though I’m not certain he would describe it as God. He believes perhaps in the sunlight on a table, in crisp morning bed linens. In the arch of a back, or the eyes of a dog. I think for Billy that’s enough. Maybe it should be for anyone.
Trish: In the face of all this violent trauma and loss, you’ve written an ending that hints at peace and some solace. Billy accepts who he was, made choices to change, and is at peace with who he is at the end of the story. So does this mean you’re an optimist? Is redemption achievable for we troubled humans?
Michael: Redemption. Individually? Perhaps. Collectively? Not a chance. We have messed up. In the natural order we are quite clearly the weakest link, and to compound that and to just drive it home, we are very adept at convincing ourselves of exactly the opposite. Am I an optimist? Looking at the world currently, no, quite sadly not. Looking at my own life and the way it has turned out, given the odds, and the number of times I’ve almost died or been killed? I’d be crazy to be anything but an optimist. Is it me speaking now or Billy? It’s all quite true for the both of us.
Trish: There’s a difference, isn’t there, between the universal and the individual? And that tension between “the world”–or society as a whole–and each character as an individual is entirely apparent in the novel. Perhaps it comes back to the edge of violence we were discussing: even in such a violent world, the individual, be it Billy or Turner, can find meaning and some measure of peace.
Are there a couple of books that have inspired you over the years? What’s on your nightstand to read now?
Michael: I have read James Joyce’s Ulysses six times and Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter more than that. It was Ondaatje’s book that taught me that I could write the way I wanted to and be published in this country. So I did and I have and I owe that debt to him. I have also been greatly inspired more recently by Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, which is a phenomenal piece of work and one I think, and hope, will be well remembered a hundred years from now. Which is what all writers aspire to, I think. On my nightstand right now is Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai which I would recommend to anyone but maybe as an ebook. I bought the hardback and at well over 500 pages it keeps hitting me in the face late at night in bed.
Trish: I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo right now, and…same. 1400 pages!
Ok, and finally the question that I’m sure you’ve been asked over and over since writing this book: Do you think that Billy the Kid was killed by Pat Garrett?
Michael: I did all the research there is to do and Billy was shot dead by Pat Garrett. Few shed a tear.
This also in: we actually did land on the moon on July 20, 1969, lol!
Trish: Indeed, I suppose we must accept the facts!
Thanks so much for chatting with me today. If readers want to find out what you’ve written since I Am Billy the Kid was published, and what you’re writing next, where can they find you?
Michael: My books and I can be found at michaelblouinwriter.com and I’m on Instagram @knowwhoyouowe. I have recently left all other social media and feel much the better for it. The Billy I wrote would have hated social media.
Hard Electric, my collected poetry, came out in 2024 and my eighth book will be out next year and is the sequel to my 2020 novel Skin House, titled The Big Bad. There are three more books in various stages.
Fun facts: Both Skin House and I am Billy the Kid have successfully landed on the moon with NASA (as did Neil Armstrong!), and I can be found most days walking my dog. My dog’s name?
Billy, of course. That’s her name.
***
Thanks again to Michael Blouin for spending time here! I look forward to reading more from him.
***
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