"I started very late," says Peter Weltner about his fiction writing. "I started in 1977-78 and I was already 35-36 years old. I decided the academic stuff I was supposed to produce didn't have anything to do with what I wanted to do and I decided to work at writing fiction for ten years without trying to publish—at least ten years—and that's roughly what passed. But it was quite deliberate. I didn't want to have to think about publishing while I was writing stories."

With the publication of his first novel, Identity & Difference, Weltner joins the ranks of fellow San Franciscans Steve Abbott, Kevin Killian, and Sam D'Allesandro in helping to create Crossing Press' gay male fiction line. His startling and moving collection of stories, Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts, appeared last year from Five Fingers Press.

Weltner says there are "14 or 15 long stories or short novels" that he produced during his self-imposed apprenticeship and though "less than a third"' of them have appeared in print, he says there will he more published in the near future. Currently, Weltner is on a year's leave from his professorship in literature at San Francisco State University. I chatted with him in the book- and CD-lined house he shares with his partner Atticus in Noe Valley.

How does a story start for you? Is it with a character, an image?

First, I start with a mood or something like a mood, because mood is an inadequate word. It's more like an odd sensation that emotion is trying to say something. And that usually leads me, more or less accidentally to seize on something like an image.

But when I say an image, it's not an image that is like an object or a thing—it's a scene, it's an evocation of a moment, someone waving goodbye to someone, an environment that seems to have a particular clarity—but not a plot. Certainly not character. Or only in the loosest sort of way.

What happens thereafter is a working out of something like plot in the process of discovering what this mood is about as it sustains itself over a period of time. And if it goes, the writing goes and then it has to be gathered back.

Your novel Identity & Difference tells two parallel stories featuring very different protagonists whose lives never intersect. What made you choose to structure the book this way? Were you ever tempted to tie everything together in the end?

When I was thinking about the book, there were these two stories. And the two stories, in some sense, spoke to one another. There were resonances. To bring them together was to unite them in a way I wasn't really interested in.

And I think (telling the story in this way) wasn't even a deliberate choice initially. It was something that emerged in the process of making this book. These two stories were bound together in ways I wasn't even certain of myself. It was an act of discovery.

One of the things that intrigued me is the way there are at times parallel lives that more or less exist out there rhyming with one another in ways one doesn't even know about. One of the things I noticed when I started going to gay bars was the way in which everyone was always telling each other stories.

I think we were trying to find ways in which our stories overlapped, however different our lives might have been. There was something implicitly there that kept a sense of...not community, because there wasn't any there yet...but of communion.

And that's the thing that interested me about telling stories—that there is, in these juxtapositions, a way in which the sense of meaning emerges only when lives are placed next to one another, not when they're seen directly.

If you're just telling one story, it has a kind of linear authority that I'm suspicious of. Not for theoretical reasons, but because it's too much, it doesn't give you enough sense of possibilities.

That's one of the reasons why in this particular book—although this wasn't a choice, it was something that happened in the process of writing—the two principal characters, Preston and Darryl, are in some ways quite different. One is a self-indulgent, overly self-conscious, anxiety-ridden guy who should be emotionally older than he is and the other a working-class kid who is not those things at all. And yet in some sort of way they illuminate each others lives.

I'm interested in your use of Mary Wilkins Freeman's ghost stories as a point of departure in the second half of Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts. What attracted you to her and to the genre?

It was clear to me that Mary Wilkins Freeman didn't believe in ghosts but she was using the form as a way of writing about something else. I've been reading ghost stories for quite a long time—M.R. James is one of my favorites—and the ones that are the most impressive to me are about physical memory.

It's a way of writing about the incarnation of other people in your own or someone's body. The way in which memory and the body are bound together. I don't think some of the ghost stories are exactly that but they speak to or from that. It gives you a language. There isn't a language for physical memory or an incarnation. There certainly isn't a language for an incarnation that somehow or other lingers after somebody's death.

And yet my experience of the memory of friends who have died is a bodily memory. I was trying to find a way of writing about it that wouldn't be so strained that it somehow violated the simplicity of those feelings. That's why the ghost story emerged. I didn't use any of Freeman's stories exactly.

Basically, I either picked up just an image or an evocation of the moment of shock. And yet my stories wouldn't have been possible without Freeman's. I certainly don't have the expectation that you need her stories to understand mine or to respond to any ironies of the work, because there really aren't any ironies. I don't work in that way. I'm really trying to find a way of writing about people's vanishing.

As a fiction writer, what do you think is the place of literary theory?

I think theory is useful for me. For different people it has all sorts of different places. For me theory is valuable only to the degree that it helps me explain to other people or to myself what it is that I've done.

Valuable as a way into the work?

As a way out. As a way of saying, "Yes, this does do what it meant to do. Not so much what I mean it to do but what it meant to do."

I don't feel it has any value in the actual making of the work. I never think theoretically during that process. We're in great danger of becoming a wildly—and I mean this in all sorts of ways, ideologically, politically, and so forth—over-theorized period, entering into ways in which theory is no longer valuable. It becomes a kind of flight from your work.

I was reading an article recently about a New York editor who rejected an essay by a gay writer because it was "under-theorized" ... "untheorized" ... as if the only way to write was to begin in theory. For some people that may be extraordinarily valuable. It is not for me nor is it for the most part for the writing I respond to most strongly.

Do you feel any particular attachment to gay writers?

The writer I go back to most often is Hart Crane. The miracle of what he made is absolutely astonishing. The problem I have with Crane, except in "Voyages" and one or two other poems, is his writing is coded.

That allows for a lot of very interesting work, but I think the responsibility, the challenge of gay writing amongst ourselves is to write in an uncoded way and still mean something important without being sociology or journalism. The coding allowed for an extraordinary development of metaphor, which we can now abandon but now we need other kinds of metaphor.

You're from the South, correct?

From North Carolina.

Are you at all attracted to writing about the South?

I'd say a third or my writing is about the South or has to do with Southern characters. I think that the attraction is really about where you grow up.

However much you leave it, especially if you spent your childhood and adolescence more or less in one place, thereafter that landscape is bound to those initial, extraordinarily powerful experiences and to a development of a certain kind of consciousness of your own sexuality. So, in a strange sort or way, the landscape is eroticized and your sexuality has a kind of geography to it.

I think the danger is nostalgia, an over reliance on a single place, and I try to avoid that. I remember hearing about one New York editor who said the one thing he always refused to read was Southern novels by gay writers. He said they're hopeless.