The following interview with Tony Vigorito was derived from questions submitted by readers. If you have an interesting question you would like to be considered for inclusion here, you may send it via the contact form on this website.

What event in your life influenced you the most?

This is the second most influential event in my life:

On a perfect morning some years ago, exactly just a couple of days before my first novel, Just a Couple of Days, was to be released, I was preparing to ride my bicycle. On my way out the door—and as I had no consistent habit around wearing my helmet—I thought it might be nice to ride without it that fine day, to feel the wind in my hair, to whiz unencumbered through the atmosphere. I paused at my door for tangible seconds, considering, before deciding that I ought to wear my helmet. Minutes later I collided head first into a car at an intersection.
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I am a poacher in the great state of Texas. I own no gun, and I have never killed an animal, but I am on the record nonetheless, as if I’m some fiercely independent scofflaw determined to feed my family meat through the mean winter and no gawdamn guvmint is gonna tell me otherwise.

 
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Several years ago, I had a wisdom tooth extracted, though that clinical assessment does little to capture the lived experience. Properly stated, I was mugged by an oral surgeon who kicked me in the face, knocked one of my teeth out, and shook a few hundred dollars out of my pockets. Poor Tony, I invite you to croon along with me, as this tale of wisdom and woe I commence.

 
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On a recent flight home to San Francisco, circumstances conspired to inspire me to contemplate the meaning of a phrase that has lingered throughout my writing: Argue Naked. In order for inspiration to possess me, however, I first had to experience what the history of all human dignity must surely deem the supreme superlative of airplane discomfort. I’ve relegated the earlier details of that airborne nightmare to another essay, so this essay begins near the end of that ghastly flight, after I’d finally won some comfort, and upon awakening from a desiccant nap.

 
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The road trip between San Francisco and Austin is much longer than you might imagine and, if you dare to steer clear of the monocultural interstates, harrowing as well. Somewhere East of Taos, New Mexico, the cutting edges of visionary culture blunt into a rusting wasteland of stagnant Americana that relents no reprieve until you roll into Austin, Texas – though even that cultural outpost has lately become a mecca for dude-bros and overdevelopment. Somewhere along the way, for example, a Chase Bank billboard encouraged—without a smirk of irony—to Chase Freedom with their new MasterCard, like some jackass after a PVC carrot under the yoke of high-interest consumer credit, even going so far as to evoke Henry David Thoreau’s transcendental masterpiece Walden.

 
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(A version of the following essay was published in the book, Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness.)

From imploding economies to hurricanes and tsunamis, from astounding corruption to war and terrorism, from catastrophic climate change to thermonuclear weapons in the Middle East, the clichés of doom that lately populate the course of human events is more than enough to tilt a sane citizen into apocalyptic anxiety. Perhaps I paint too broad a stroke on it, but I’m nonetheless going to venture to say that worrying about civilizational collapse is like worrying about whether or not one’s relationship will end in a painful breakup. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve spent some time worrying about both of these things—one of them even came to pass—and I can testify that no amount of worry could have prepared me for the agony, and the ecstasy, that eventually came of it.

 
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(The following essay was excerpted in the book, The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.)

This is not a story about the wow and holy cow of seeing your initials on someone’s license plate, or hearing a word you just learned on the radio, or running into a friend at the grocery store. Without offending the marvel of others, these do not entirely impress me, and seem more like artifacts of attention than bona fide synchronicities. (Although, it did give me pause when one reader wrote me amazed to report that when she was reading my first novel, Just a Couple of Days, just as the main character looked at his watch and saw that it was 5:55 and wished for peace on Earth, she glanced at her bedside alarm clock and saw that it was, yes indeed, 5:55. So perhaps it counts if peace on Earth is at stake…)

 
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During my eight-year stint as a Catholic schoolboy, I had occasion to read some of the books and pamphlets that littered the vestibule of the Church. One of them, in particular, captured my childhood imagination. It was a volume that dealt with a class of saints termed the incorruptibles, saints that were apparently so holy that their bodies did not decay after their death. Remarkable, I know, and even more so when it was revealed that some of their corpses give off an odor of sanctity, a floral sort of jitterbug perfume, presumably, rather than the typical bile-gargling retch of bodily decay.

 
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