On campus, amidst the hustle and bustle of an average Sacramento State spring afternoon, Professor Doug Rice sits tucked away, almost hidden, inside his tiny office with just a computer and a horde of books to keep him company. After ending a quick phone conversation, he rushes to type something and compose himself for an impending meeting.

“We’ll have to make this quick,” he says. “I have to go in 20 minutes.”

Rice is a busy man who teaches both an undergraduate and a graduate level fiction writing class, on top of other faculty duties. He looks comfortable wearing a buttoned shirt, unassuming spectacles and a pair of jeans. Whether or not he’s comfortable in his own flesh, however, is another story.

By day, mild-mannered English teacher Doug Rice helps students express themselves through prose and poetry. During his off-hours, he’s a controversial novelist who bleeds his soul onto the written page; and more often than not, what he has to say is more than some can handle. With novels like “Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest,” “Skin Prayer,” and “A Good Cunt Boy is Hard to Find,” the author sheds his inhibitions and unleashes feelings that stem from the deepest, darkest places of the human psyche.

In Rice’s fiction, graphic violence, sexuality and profanity runs rampant, linear narrative is often abandoned, characters switch genders and religion is often an ambivalent or malevolent force. At first glance, this may seem depressing and vulgar, but a deeper understanding of the literature reveals a sense of despair at the hands of social injustice.

“I want to change the entire world,” he says. “I want the world to be a safer place for my daughters and for my son. I want them to grow up in a world that’s different from the one I grew up in. And I know I can’t do that with my writing. I write because I don’t have much of a choice. I write in order to survive, kind of. These aren’t the only stories I know how to tell, but ideally, if anything could happen, I would want my daughters to be in a safer world than the one that I grew up in and the one that women are growing up in right now. If there’s a way that that can be transformed, I would like to do it in writing. And in teaching.”

Rice wants to inform readers that his unrestrained prose and dialogue merely serve to make them aware of how unjust and cruel the world can be.

“I think that sugarcoating [things] is a form of looking away,” Rice muses. “It’s not taking it seriously, it’s not confronting. You’re not confronting it in a way that’s direct and immediate. And that matters, mostly. I think that there are a lot of really bad books and really bad movies that fall into that. They sugarcoat because they want to have a happy ending, and certainly my writing doesn’t do that.”

Needless to say, conservative figures aplenty have had problems with such unorthodox subject matter, and spoke out accordingly. When “Blood of Mugwump” was published in 1996 and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), several people, including John Ashcroft and Senator Jesse Helms, were in an uproar.

Like many writers who have delved into the realm of the taboo, Rice has indeed suffered for his art. “I’ve been attacked by the organized religion,” he says. “The Christian Right, the Christian Coalition. They’ve attacked me pretty rigorously. One group set up some type of Web site attacking me for a while, that was up until they had to take it down because [of slander].”

Q: There’s that famous saying, “any publicity is good publicity.” Do you think the NEA controversy might have helped your books or your profile as an author?

A: No, I didn’t use it. I refuse to use it. My publishers wanted to use it and my agent wanted me to use it, and I refused to use it because I didn’t want my book to be read that way. I’ve written a couple of responses to [Ashcroft] because I think he really misreads, but of course he misreads. He’s just looking for a word or two that will trigger a reaction. So I think any type of reactionary stuff is totally insane. And I think it’s also insane as a writer. The only thing that bothered me about it was, Ashcroft attacked me as a person. He attacked me as a father. And Helms clearly didn’t read the book, and I think that that’s a problem, so my only response to that was to say, “Look. Read the book more carefully and try to understand what I’m trying to do as a writer instead of coming to it with already having negative decisions, or put [the book] down.” I didn’t do anything with the NEA. The publisher did the stuff with the NEA. It wasn’t me. The publisher got the money, I didn’t get the money. They wanted to put a sticker on my book, a “Banned by the NEA” kind of thing because they thought that would help sales. I refused to let them do that, and I refused to take it into much of a national debate, [although] I did a lot of things behind the scenes to Helms and Ashcroft by writing them personal letters. I think that any writer who writes with the intention of shocking somebody is a bad writer. I think that it would be really hard to shock anybody with writing anyway. I mean, there’s all this stuff out there, [so it’s] just impossible to shock people. I’m writing with an intention of trying to discover some type of truth, and they accuse me of writing with the intention of shocking just for the sake of shock value. And that offended me. And if I had used it for publicity, then I would have been falling into that category of just wanting to shock people.

Q: Why do you write about such disturbing topics in your novels?

A: I don’t choose them. I think they more or less choose me, so I write whatever needs to be written. I write more like writing rather than with intention, and some of the language comes out in a way that it comes out without intention. I think part of it has to do with the tradition I write from. The kind of genealogy that I have. The writers I’ve read that have influenced me. I think it’s connected to that. And I think a writer doesn’t choose a lot of those things. I think that that happens to him.

Q: Do you worry about faculty members or students having a problem with you teaching here because of the nature of your writing?

A: I think everybody has the freedom not to read me. So I think if they’ve read me, they’ve made a conscious choice to read me, and if they become bothered by it, they can stop. I don’t teach my work, so I don’t teach my own books. I would never teach my own books. Some of the books I do teach in other classes are troublesome. In upper division lit classes and in graduate classes, some of them, I think, are disturbing and bother people. People have written me letters saying that they’ve tried to read my books and that the reason that they put them down isn’t that they’re so much offended, it’s just that they’ve discovered stuff about themselves that they don’t want to think about. But if you’re reading something, and you don’t like to read certain kind of language, then don’t read it. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t read because I find it offensive. I think going to the mall is offensive. I think it’s sexist, and I think it’s misogynist, and I think it’s racist. I think every trip to the mall is something that deeply offends me, so I never go anymore.

Q: Do you worry that your relatives or friends might have a problem with your writing?

A: They all do. I think you can’t worry. I think you just have to write. I think it’s really courageous to write. I don’t care what you write, I think it’s courageous. My mother tells me again and again, “Write beautiful stories. Write love stories.” But I live a really wonderful life. I have incredible children and the woman I’m with is amazing and loving and caring, and I love and care for her. And because I have it in my life, I don’t need to write [about it], and so my imagination goes somewhere else. I don’t think it’s a good idea to contain your imagination. But people have attacked me [for my work]. Jesse Helms and John Ashcroft have attacked me. Other people have attacked me. My mother just doesn’t understand it. I mean, she’s reading my new book. I talked to her the other day on the phone, and she said, “A lot of [the content] is really hard,” because it’s about my father and my relationship with my father. I don’t want to bring that pain to anybody, but you’re going to do it if you write, I think, accidentally.

Q: You often venture outside the boundaries of linear narrative. Do you prefer to write like that?

A: No. I would like to write a really straightforward book that everyone would understand and everyone would buy and then I would be very rich and I would be even happier than I am [now]. I don’t think linear narrative can contain the kind of world that we live in, so I think that part of it is that the stuff just can’t fit into linear narrative. I don’t know how anyone can write that anymore. I think it’s an outmoded form of writing, of storytelling. I’m writing a linear narrative now. One of my new books is a [so-called] normal book, but I’m having a hard time with it. I haven’t been able to fit any of the experiences I write about inside the linear narrative yet.

Q: There’s also a lot of gender bending in your work.

A: I don’t know how anybody can be so sure that they are what they are. So, I bend gender [because] I think a lot of things are indeterminate and I think a lot of things are confusing. So I think people who are really absolutely sure about everything, [that’s] kind of boring. Part of gender bending occurs because I don’t think there is that stable gendered identity that people claim there is. I think, because of social politics, because of desire, because of sexuality, because of all those things collapse together, there should be more openness.

Q: In “Skin Prayer,” as in your other novels, God sometimes seems like an antagonist or a mysterious figure. Is that an expression of your feelings towards God or religion in general?

A: God and I battle a lot. I never forgave God for my grandmother dying. That’s my psychological reason. That’s a deep trauma and scar in my life. My grandmother dying, I couldn’t figure it out. And I’ve never forgiven God for Vietnam either. I think it has something to do with the way I understand the Bible. And the way I understand his relationship with people in the world. I’m still pretty deeply Catholic and very much deeply influenced by my Catholicism. But I question God all the time. I question the Bible all the time, and I think it gives me a deeper faith and a deeper belief.

Q: Did you always want to be a writer?

A: I’m only a writer when I’m writing. When I was young, I think I did [want to become one]. I wrote when I was very young. I wrote and read all the time, so I wanted to be a reader. But what happened was, no one was writing the books that I wanted to really read. There were a lot of books that I loved, but there’s stuff that my experiences and my knowledge were being eliminated from. One of the reasons I write is to fill in that gap. I love writing, so I guess I’ve always wanted to be a writer in that way.

Q: How’d you end up teaching at Sac State?

A: I had a couple of other job offers, and then Sac State interviewed me in January, and then they were going to fly me out to California in February. And I was convinced that I was going to take another job back east, but I wasn’t going to turn down a free trip to California in February because I’m not stupid. So I took a free trip out here thinking, “There’s no way I’m going to take the job.” I never thought that Sac State would offer a job because I thought the school would maybe be too conservative for me because I’m a theorist as well as a fiction writer, and that’s a weird blend. Then I met the department. I met the people in the faculty and I’m just blown away by the people I work with. I took the job here because there [are] some incredible professors in our department. I just think the people I work with are really good people, and the students, for the most part, are open to me.

Q: What do you have planned for your next book?

A: I’m writing two books now. One book is about a direct descendant of Jesus Christ who comes back to find out that he is Jesus Christ. He’s another coming of Jesus, but he doesn’t want to be. And I’m working on another book that’s about – I’m not sure what it’s about, but it’s a story that has a variety of different layers in it. I don’t know what it’s about, I’m just writing.