Interview with Carson Gilmore | Sound Authors Radio

December 24, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! My next guest on the shot is an author named Carson Gilmore. He is a young man and he’s written a novel called Boy On Fire. It’s a powerful cover; all aflame the book. This book is acclaimed as a 21st Century Catcher in the Rye. Very critical of the no child left behind act and the school system in the United States. Welcome to the show Carson Gilmore.

Carson Gilmore: Hello, hello, thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the impetus behind the book Boy on Fire.

Carson Gilmore: Oh well the book was originally about left behind exclusively; I was always a tortured student and I was in high school and I just started some journaling in character. I don’t know why I started doing that but I had been journaling in character while I was in high school. When I was there, you know I wasn’t a gifted student and I noticed that I wasn’t the only one who was having all sorts of trouble keeping up and being able to do all the assignments and everything.

There were a lot of students who were somehow getting more dissatisfied with the sort of established quo of education. I mean there a lot of arts programs that were being cut every year, the nature of the way things were being taught were changing even and I soon realized I got bad eventually. I realized that I had a sort of unique condition; having dropped out and having all these sorts of journals about the torture system and I just figured well why not put it in the form of art?

Dr. Kent: My last guest on the show Amiri Baraka was quite critical of the Bush Administration as a lot of people are but now talk about the policies of the government that’s leaving power? And they have this policy No Child Left Behind, which I believe Obama will now continue but maybe he’ll actually live up to the name.

Carson Gilmore: Yeah it would be nice if somebody finally committed to what they projected. No child left behinds been around I think since 2002 and its sort of a continuation of the ESEA, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act signed by Lyndon Johnson and the whole point of it is to bring all of the nations schools up to snuff. They claim, the agency that got to back up this claim, that everyone who was behind, and the schools were not giving education to the children. The way they determined this was by a series of standardized tests and what no child left behind is supposed to do is bring everyone up to the place where they should be to bring students and teachers to the same level of achievement all the time.

The great fallacy of this is that no group of students across the board is ever going to do, are not going to score exactly the same way. So the program, which basically is just a series of tests to being instituted, government mandated tests, it is an attempt to as they claim bring everybody up to capacity but because not everyone can score the same way, what ends up happening is these tests have to be dumbed down sequentially every year to the point where everyone can take them and score the same way, which never really works.

Dr. Kent: The book itself; now you had the idea of writing a novel based on your own experiences? Or when did you get that idea?

Carson Gilmore: Well yeah. The hero of the book is this sort of tortured musician. He falls in love with this senior girl who is ridiculously out of his league and those sort of came from my own experiences. I was pretty isolated all through school and had a strange group of friends and I was always yearning for more. Part of me was always yearning to be in the accepted set and that’s one of the things I explore in the book that certain people can’t ever really be accepted and they should just embrace the fact that they are on the outside. There are a lot of strange people I mean we hear it every time. He meets the brother of the girl he’s obsessed with who is totally burning pyres of hate for those left behind and he gets involved with him. But a great deal of the book comes from as I said my own sort of torture among the social set in high school.

Dr. Kent: So your whole book starts out with a quote from John Jacque Rousseau.

Carson Gilmore: Oh yes I do, yes. The book starts out with a quote from Rousseau. That was something that seemed appropriate. I have it here. I hear from afar the shouts of the false wisdom, which is ever dragging us onward, tempting the present of nothing and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other. What that means to me or at least applies to what I was writing about is the whole thing about no child left behind, the false wisdom, basically these corporate powers.

I mean the government and everyone has sort of sold American education out to corporate people for power. This so called false wisdom which the government is dragging us forward, dragging us into this empty future created not by no child left behind but created by government interference in education. It brings everyone to a place where in the future we really won’t have any leaders because this generation is being deprived of real education.

Dr. Kent: Now your book starts in sort of a sensational spot. You’re on your back in the middle of the dance floor in a tuxedo with a girl’s stiletto heel going towards your head. Talk about, I mean obviously this is a very male book, in a lot like something like John Irving or Catcher in the Rye Salinger would write. So what inspired you to write a book with this kind of you know, the drinking and the sort of sexual stuff? What pulled all of that into your novel?

Carson Gilmore: A lot of this was extensions of how I had been feeling for a really long time. I never really got too involved in drinking or drugs or any of the wild sex in high school but I saw it around me and I mean my art personally, the writing is the only way I’ve been able to purge my not fitting into things. I included all of these aspects in my novel but I didn’t really include them, they came out on their own as I realized that the people I was writing about were being tortured by both their own issues and by the system in which they were placed and it seemed in so many ways that the only way these kind of people can deal with it, since the system isn’t giving them what they need, the only way they can deal with it is by doing some substance abuse and the social abuse and whatnot.

Its part of the ugly part of our generation. My next book which I’m writing about is the sub-prime mortgage crisis and college students and things like that. My generation isn’t really given much. We’re told so much, we are the ones that are really going to matter, we’re the future and we have to take care of ourselves, and everyone is special and the world the way it’s going it’s just for profit. Everything’s been turned into just a profit machine. We aren’t given what we need and this is the only way to deal with it sometimes so you don’t end up losing yourself that way. At least so I’ve perceived.

Dr. Kent: It really is and I remember my time from both high school and college I never really fit in because I didn’t want to I guess abuse myself like the other kids did. Its fascinating sort of extremes and my time in Europe although we sort of make fun of them for having early drinking age and all of that; they’re much more mature by similar ages by the time they hit 18-20 they’ve got it out of their system, they’re not into all of the splurging and all of that. What do you foresee in the future of education in this country and is there any way to make No Child Left Behind work?

Carson Gilmore: What I believe is that the people who created no child left behind weren’t being honest with anyone. I think they knew to begin with. Any agency studying this knows that people are never going to score the same way on tests. The whole thing is for profit, I believe it’s for profit. One of the provisions of no child left behind is that if the individual schools don’t meet what they call the yearly average progress for six years in a row then after a series of infiltrations, the government bringing in their own teachers and things, they can shut the school down eventually and the way I foresee this, and this is kind of what I’ve gathered from people I’ve talked to.

It’s a radical viewpoint about it but I believe that’s what they want to do and privatize education and make it private the same way that the whole medical world is private. Something with the national work out because to have certain publishing companies who publish the educational material have their specific companies declared as the only ones who are actually viable, the only ones who can actually teach people. McGraw-Hill, which is working very deeply by the government, I see it as everything will be private. All these certain test materials will be able to be used and very few people will be able to afford private education.

There are so many multitudes that can’t afford it and probably by 2014 or whatever it is if no child left behind continues and public education really won’t exist. That’s how I feel it’s going to go, especially with the economy the way it’s going now and the only way to fight that is from an individual level at the schools. I kind of get into that in the book.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been an honor speaking with Carson Gilmore. His website is carsongilmore.com and his book is called Boy on Fire and its been an honor speaking with you.

Carson Gilmore: Well thank you very much Kent it’s been an honor being here on the show.

Dr. Kent: My next guest is a musician; his name is Michael Cleveland and here’s a couple of tracks. We’re going to play a couple of tracks from his album Leaving Town from his new album just released in July. So here’s a song called Around My Door.

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