Warren Stucki
by
Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Interview Conducted
March 2003

     Of course, in other ways his lifestyle is much like any other author’s.  He finds he must rise to begin writing at 4 a.m. so that he will have time for that and for his “day job.”  He wears his robe during these ungodly hours and on holidays and weekends he may never find the time to dress.

     Warren’s office is also a reflection of his lifestyle. It looks out over land that pastures his beloved horses; these horses appear in his work often.  His desk is a mess.  A quick inventory of his bookcase reveals an odd collection: medical books, poetry, the classics and commercial fiction.  He has an agreement with his fastidious wife, Linda.  She can do as she wishes with the rest of the house, but she leaves his office alone.

     I hope you have as much fun reading this interview as I did reading Warren’s first book, Boy’s Pond, and as I did interviewing him:

Carolyn:  Warren, you have written a book based on your youth. How did being raised in southern Utah shape you as an author?

Warren:  Everyone is a product of his childhood.  Authors just talk about it more.  Like the bonds of gravity, few of us escape very far.  That's why psychiatry is such a growth industry.  The strongest forces at play in the 50's in southern Utah were religion, family dynamics and regional politics.  The Mormon religion was ubiquitous, or so it seemed, and we were force-fed.  My mother died when I was two and my father was gone a lot.  Subsequently I grew up fairly independent and, in a way, a free spirit.

The most dominant political force at the time was the cold war.  The nuclear test site at Yucca Flats, Nevada, was just over a hundred miles away and St. George was directly downwind.  Approximately one hundred and twenty shots where fired there in the 50's and early 60's bathing the area in an inordinate amount of radiation.  Somehow, I find it difficult to not include at least one of these early childhood forces in my writing.

Carolyn:  In Boy's Pond you write very effectively of young people caught in a storm of radiation after the US government set off one of those nuclear tests. I consider them not only potent descriptions of what happened then but also of what our government and others might be doing now without our knowledge.  Did you actually experience that?

Warren: In southern Utah, viewing the tests was actually considered recreation.  As a young boy, I remember motoring to Utah Hill (the highest point between St. George and Yucca Flats) to observe the shots.  It was a family outing with a Dutch oven breakfast and hot chocolate.  Usually the bombs were detonated just before dawn.  From Utah Hill we could not see the mushroom cloud, but we could see the flash, like a sudden cosmic event.  A few seconds later the ground would shake and shock wave would arrive, ricocheting off canyon walls like salvos of cannon fire.  Four or five hours later, the vestigial clouds would drift over, usually an ominous gray.  With the test named Shot Harry, the clouds glowed an iridescent pink.

Personally, I was never caught in ash storm that rained burning particles, but I have talked to old-timers who were.  Right after Shot Harry, my stepmother was in a convoy that was stopped by the Atomic Energy Commission.  They were required to wash their cars before entering St. George.  Almost weekly, the AEC officials came to our school and pinned radiation detection badges on us.  They would return about a week later and exchange the old badges for new ones.  Of course, we never received any feedback on how much radiation we were exposed to.

Carolyn: The scenes in Boy's Pond that occur in a hospital are very realistic.   I happen to know you are a physician. Did what you experienced as a youngster--this exposure of your entire area to radiation-- influence you to study medicine?

Warren:  No.  I would like to say that I entered medicine as a crusader with drawn sword.  However, the truth is I didn’t fully realize the danger that radiation posed until 1979.  That was the year of the landmark trial, Irene Allen vs. United States of America.  Twenty downwind plaintiffs sued the U.S. for radiation damages.  The trial received national coverage, even in Texas.  At the time I was already a resident in training but planning to return to St. George to set up practice.   Knowing this, one of my fellow residents quipped, "You going to wear lead suits to work?"

I actually backed into medicine.  As a senior in college I went to the dean's office, lamenting my lack of direction in life.  He asked me if I had ever considered medical school.  I hadn't.  We thumbed through several medical school catalogues.  Unfortunately, the deadline for receiving applications for the next year had already past.  Nevertheless, Dean Larsen got on the phone and talked the schools in to accepting my application late and giving me full consideration.

Carolyn:  Religion is definitely present in your book; the protagonist and his friends struggle against it and take succor from it.  Do you consider this one of the major themes of Boy's Pond?

Warren:  Absolutely.  The struggle with religion has been a major theme in my life.  In my book, the two leading characters have opposite points of view on religion: one an ardent believer, the other an agnostic.  It is, of course, by design that by the end of the book, through fate and forces beyond their control, the two major characters have now experienced a complete role reversal, the believer is now the agnostic and the agnostic is now the believer.

Carolyn:  What other themes or threads do you consider important in your book?

Warren:  Obviously, the umbrella theme is the devastating effects nuclear testing had on the lives and health of the citizens of southern Utah.  Cancer rates more than doubled in the decade of the 1950's.  In my opinion, this sad chapter in our nation's history has never been fully appreciated, addressed or redressed.  Also Boy's Pond explores attitudes and prejudices that Native Americans endured during this period of time and to a large extent, still do.  The protagonist's mother was Navajo and, as the readers of Boy's Pond might suspect, I'm also part Native American.

Carolyn: What do your patients and other people in your small town of St. George, Utah, think of your book?

Warren: In order to answer this question, I think a bit of background is needed.  St. George, Utah is a small, very conservative and fiercely patriotic town in Southern Utah.  Ninety percent of the population is Mormon and ninety percent are Republicans.  Other than a few Native Americans, there is almost no minority population.  Premarital sex, R-rated movies and drinking are still generally considered sins.  Now back to the question.  In general Boy’s Pond has sold well in southern Utah and I have received compliments even from Mormon Church leaders.  That doesn't mean there have been no detractors.  Boy's Pond contains several passages of colorful language and one passage of graphic sex.  One bookstore pulled the books from their shelves after patrons complained of the language.  Also, I have had several phone calls from people who knew me as a boy, chastising me for these sequences and my own stepmother was quite miffed.  She called me and said, "I don't know why you had to include language like that in your book.  You never talked like that."  I answered, "You're absolutely right, mother, but my friends did!"

Carolyn:  I think that your dialogue might not have sounded like the speech of real teen-age boys if you had left out that language.  Because it was natural, I didn’t notice.  When you wrote Boy's Pond, did you have a political or personal reason for doing so?

Warren: One of the main characters, Mick, is loosely fashioned from a childhood friend and schoolmate, Sheldon Nisson.  Unfortunately, when we were in Junior High School, Sheldon contracted leukemia and was dead six months later.  Over the years, I have literally seen scores of southern Utah natives develop cancer.  Some are friends, some are family, some are patients and some are all three.  In 1990 the U.S. Congress, in what must have been a rare show of conscience, passed the Radiation Exposure Act.  This legislation does provide compensation for the downwind victims but strangely and inexplicably, this was a full thirteen years after the Marshall Islands Compensation Act which compensated the islanders for the very same tragedy.  We are, however, constantly reminded that this is an ongoing tragedy, as new cancers are diagnosed almost daily in heretofore unscathed downwinder veterans.

Carolyn:  What I am after here is a take on how this horrible event shaped you and your choices.  How did it affect your willingness to trust in general and your government in particular, as an example?

Warren:  This event, plus the Vietnam War, had an indelible affect on me.  Though I am not a conspiracist, I must confess, I am an incorrigible skeptic and a dedicated cynic.  Almost everything offered me by way of authorities, from government, religion, science, pseudo-science or the media, I view with a jaundiced eye.  Sometimes it drives my wife crazy.

Carolyn:  Do you find that this nuclear event and your attitude about religion are connected in any way?

Warren:  Probably.  In the past, I think I have been guilty of blind mistrust, now I suppose I have a basic distrust of both.  Culturally I am a Mormon and always will be.  Intellectually, I'm probably an agnostic.

Carolyn:  I know you just finished another, quite different book from Boy's Pond.  Would you like to tell us a bit about it?

Warren:  Hunting For Hippocrates is my foray into commercial fiction and is scheduled for release early summer, 2003.  This novel is a radical departure from Boy's Pond  It is a classical medical mystery/thriller of the genre made famous by Robin Cook, Michael Creighton and Michael Palmer.  It spotlights how very dependent we are, as healthcare consumers, on the voracity of our health care professionals.  Just as most of us have to take the word of our mechanic that the master seal really does need to be replaced, so we have to take the word of our doctors.  Is fraud, dishonesty and incompetence really only limited to the world of auto mechanics?  Kind of scary, huh

Book Review
BOY'S POND
A Novel
By Warren Stucki, M.D.
Sunstone Press, Santa Fe, NM 2002
ISBN: 0865343284
Fiction
Explicit Sex, Language
Reviewed: 2003

Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, MyShelf.Com
Buy it at Amazon

A Small-Town Doctor's View on Life and Politics

Sunstone Press Brings 50s Politics
In the Southwest Into Vivid Focus

      A toadstool cloud rises from the Nevada desert sand like an iniquitous Phoenix shaped from flame and ashes. It imprints radioactive memories in the mind of a young boy who would become a doctor and later an author.

     These recollections are the basis of a new novel from Warren Stucki called Boy's Pond. In turn, the story he wrote is a reminder in today's turmoil that-in spite of what we think we remember-life has not always been simple.

     This novel reminds us that trust can be lamentable rather than laudable. That faith untempered by reason may very well be improvident.

     Set in St. George Utah in the 50s , it is a coming-of-age story that explores innocence in the literal shadow of a nuclear holocaust of our own making. A group of boys' youthful imprudence parallels the Machiavellian tactics of the Atomic Energy Commission as they participate in a cover-up never since equaled (to our knowledge) by any government agency. While ignorance and gullibility were their tools of trade, exuberance, shame and hormones-a-plenty discredit and decimate the young men.

     As an M.D. caring for the population in this isolated corner of Utah, the author has seen the malignant results of politics fueled by fear -26 nuclear devices set off above ground over a period of twelve years. Test times were carefully selected so that the large populations of Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City would not be downwind. During that time and since, the malignant death rate in the tiny red-rock communities that breathed the easterly winds has doubled. Leukemia, lymphoma, breast, pancreatic, lung, gastric and thyroid cancers continue to stalk the residents to this day. The folk living in this tiny red-rock community were, it seems, considered dispensable.

      Sunstone Press specializes in publishing books about the Southwest; they deserve applause for bringing Warren Stucki's first book to the public.Boy's Pond is a book for its time. It examines issues other than 9/11 that we should never forget.

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