He's Just Writing, Writing, Writing: An Interview with Mykel Board
By James Norton

What do you get when you take a sexually omnivorous columnist for a punk rock magazine and parachute him into the world's most remote and unspoiled former Communist outpost?

You get "Even a Daughter is Better Than Nothing." This Mongolian rock-n-roll travelogue is the latest literary salvo from Garrett County Press, the publishers of "Russia through a Shot Glass" and "Letters From New Orleans."

Calling either "Even a Daughter" or its kin a "travel book" isn't right. They're travel books in the same way Dante's "Inferno" is religious fiction. They're so voraciously expansive that they defy the little "t" travel section and stroll casually into the hall of big "T" Travel books, like the ones written by badasses with names like Naipaul, Theroux and Steinbeck.

"Even a Daughter" is author Mykel Board's homage to a land of desert, bones, mutton fat and unreliable transportation. But for all the love he pours out onto the page about his otherworldly nirvana in the North, he doesn't recommend the trip to everyone.

"I'm kind of anti-American," said Board in a recent phone interview. "So I don't like Western culture very much, and I feel better when I'm away from home. So for people who are like that, and want to go as far away as possible, Mongolia is perfect." He pauses for a moment.

"Actually, I chose Mongolia because I felt it was the farthest away I could get."

I asked him if he could put his finger on exactly what it was about the Western world he was trying to escape.

"Sure, it's easy," he said. "McDonald's. Starbucks. Staples. Barnes and Noble. The Puritan ethic. Prudism. For starters."

Though recently published, "Even a Daughter" details a trip that Board took to Mongolia in the mid-'90s.

"One of the reasons I haven't been back [to Mongolia] is because I'm afraid I will find McDonald's there now, or some church with a steeple, or something like that. Up till now, Mongolia was protected from the West for two reasons. First, nobody wanted to go there. And the second reason is it's isolated. It's not easy to get to. And once you get there, it's not easy to get around."

Board's love affair with the wildness of Mongolia is the throughline that holds "Even a Daughter" together. During his sometimes scattered tale of wild parties, Mongolian heavy metal, and ill-advised treks into the vast Gobi desert, Board revels in the constant chaos that marks his year-long stay in the country as an English teacher at the National University in Ulaanbaatar. The delays, impositions, and sometimes physically dangerous situations that would make most travelers pack up and head directly for Epcot Center, are, for Board, the catnip that make the journey worth talking about.

He also chases tail, of both genders, with limited success. Board said that including his often frustrated sexual escapades in the book was a natural extension of his persona as a columnist.

"Some people use baseball always as a metaphor for the world, and for politics, and for how things go," Board said. "For me, sex is a great metaphor — sometimes it's a struggle, sometimes it brings happiness. It's almost always an adventure."

Board added that the current cultural climate in America was also a major factor for the book's sometimes explicit perspective.

"People say that society is oversexualized, but it's done in a teasing, dishonest way. One of the many things I dislike about American society is its prudism. Can you imagine Congress debating over someone showing a breast on television? That's like Victorian England, maybe. Because of that, I intentionally take the opposite side, and make it very un-American in the best sense of the word."

"Even a Daughter" is, despite its typically freespirited attitude, more than just vokda, hot Mongol chicks, adapted speed metal, and poor navigation. It's also an exploration of the people — foreign teachers, like himself, and native Mongols — who Board trips across and adds to his collection. When Board writes about Bishbataar, his trickster guide for a comic-epic expedition into the Gobi, you can feel his frustration, anger, amusement and awe come crackling off the page. The portrait is vivid and nuanced. And, for the most part, Board manages to avoid putting "Mongols" into any kind of a box. They're interesting individual people, from a remarkable and ancient culture.

"My goal wasn't to make the Mongols look bad," said Board. "I don't want to be condescending toward the Mongolians. They're a great people, an independent people, a really tough people. If I were in trouble, if I could pick an ethnicity to be around me, I would want them to be Mongolian. The bad guy, or the funny guy, or the fuck-up, or the goof-off in the book was me, not the Mongolian people."

The ruggedness of the terrain and borderline insanity of getting around a country as vast, empty and undeveloped as Mongolia comes through in most of the book's chapters — "Even a Daughter" is unlikely to spur a tourist boom. And that's the way Board likes it.

"It's like, raving about some little restaurant that you've found," Board said. "And then you can never go back there —if it gets a good review in the Times, and the prices go up, and it's too popular, and their service gets lousy... it is a question. If [the book] inspires, I'd rather it inspires people to throw themselves in strange situations and look at the world in new ways rather than specifically go to Mongolia."

"For me, Mongolia was my ideal and my dream for a long time, but people can have a dream of Kansas and if you can learn to experience it in a new way, and throw yourself into situations that you don't know how to deal with, I think that's a much better victory."

Regardless of the book's eventual impact, it's a step forward for Board as a writer. Though the author of numerous books before "Even a Daughter," it's the first one that actually has his name on the cover.

"I lived for maybe two, two-and-a-half years by writing porno novels," he said. "And so every week I'd go in, and get an assignment, and I'd write a book a week for $235. My favorite title is 'Hot Firemen in Drag.' I appear in all my books, sort of like Alfred Hitchcock walks through his films — I make a small appearance in all my books, and that's the only way you know they're mine."

Board's on a roll — the second book with his name on the cover, "I, A Me-ist," has also recently appeared in print. A collection of columns from Maximum Rock'n'Roll, it hits disparate topics such as sex, politics, AIDS and travel, sometimes from an angle calculated to be provocative to younger, "politically correct" readership.

"My point of view is kind of contrarian," Board said. "So being an old guy, and being slightly politically incorrect ... I don't even know what being a Lefty is anymore, so I can't tell you about that ... I try and take the other side."

Regardless of his next stop — Senegal seems to be under consideration — it seems likely that Board will travel with notebook in hand. According to Board, traveling openly as a writer in the packed vans and pickups that constitute intercity travel in Mongolia actually opened more doors than it shut.

"So there I am, completely cramped up with people who didn't speak English, and I was writing all the time," Board said. "What this did was create a kind of aura — 'Oh, look at this guy, what a weird guy, he's just writing, writing, writing.' And somehow they would communicate to me that they wanted to know what I'm writing about. And somehow I would communicate to them that I was writing about them. And so quite often this relationship was built just on the basis of my pen and notebook.

"You always hear photographers say the camera gets in the way of the actual experience. But my pen and notebook helped attract the actual experience."

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.