Andre Dubus, fresh off the release of his nationally acclaimed new memoir, “Townie,” describes how growing up poor and street-tough in the Merrimack Valley helped shape him as a writer.

You might not think it, but writing is a lot like fighting. At least, Andre Dubus III thinks so. 

In his new memoir, “Townie,” Dubus recalls fist-fighting his way through his teen years in the ramshackle mill towns of the Merrimack Valley. Punching someone, he explains, requires smashing through two invisible barriers, one that surrounds you and another that surrounds your opponent. It’s a violent but distinctly intimate act.

Writing is like that, too. First, you must break through your own personal barrier to get the words out of you and onto the page. Then, those words must penetrate a reader’s protective exterior to enter his or her private world. 

“While it is a peaceful act to become another person and write, you still have to enter the private space and actually get behind the private skin of another human being,” Dubus said. “I’m just happy I found a way to do that that’s no longer violent.”

“Townie” tells the story of how Dubus overcame a turbulent upbringing on the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, filled with daily brutality that easily could have landed him in prison or a casket, to become a celebrated author of national stature. In the process, readers learn how the hardscrabble New England suburbs where Dubus came of age helped shape him as a fiction writer.

“I think my vision of the world kind of got cauterized in 1970s mill town America,” Dubus said. “I think where you’re from has a long-lasting effect on your artistic vision.”

Dubus spoke to The Wire by phone as he drove through Mississippi on his book tour. That tour will bring him to a brand new venue in downtown Portsmouth on Wednesday, April 13, when he’ll read at The Music Hall Loft. He’ll also be a featured writer at the Newburyport Literary Festival, April 29 and 30.

A faculty member at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, Dubus now resides in Newburyport, Mass. Prior to “Townie,” he had published three novels and a book of short stories. His 1999 novel “House of Sand and Fog” was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into a movie starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His 2008 book “The Garden of Last Days” also is in development for a feature film. 

But it took Dubus many years to break through those invisible barriers and become a successful writer. Although his late father, Andre Dubus II, was a literary titan of the short story, his son did not develop an interest in writing until he was in his 20s. Before that, he was too preoccupied with mere survival to think about much else. 

Dubus spent his early childhood in southern New Hampshire with his two sisters and one brother. His parents divorced when he was young, and he and his siblings were raised by their single mother in several impoverished, crime-ridden mill towns in northern Massachusetts, mainly Haverhill. His father was already a famous author by then and was teaching at Bradford College, but he was only peripherally involved in his children’s lives. Dubus never gave much thought to his dad’s writing career.

“I didn’t think about it at all, and I think in the sense that most kids don’t really know or care what their fathers do for work. They really just want them to be their dads,” Dubus said. “I just wanted my father to be more in my life at the time, and I really didn’t think much about what he did.”

In his early teens, Dubus was routinely beaten up, and he accepted each blow with apathetic resignation. That changed, though, after his younger brother Jeb absorbed a particularly vicious beating from a much older man. Dubus started lifting weights and boxing at a nearby gym. Soon he was picking his own fights and knocking people out cold with his hard right cross.

“I really went out of my way to find guys who I could justify fighting,” he said. “I would look for guys who were being cruel or mean to someone smaller or weaker.”

But there was an element of boyish narcissism to Dubus’s fighting habits, a selfish need to prove he was no longer weak and cowardly. As he grew stronger and more dangerous, that narcissism threatened to destroy his life. 

“I was just on a road where I was going to get killed by somebody. I was going to take on someone way too crazy and I was going to get beaten to death, or I was going to accidentally kill someone and be in prison myself. That’s where I was headed.”

Dubus was preparing for a boxing tournament at age 22 when he experienced an epiphany, of sorts. Instead of leaving his apartment to go train, he sat down and wrote his first short story from start to finish. To this day, Dubus struggles to explain what drove him to pick up his pencil at that moment. 

“The truth is I still don’t understand how that came to be,” he said. “But, man, after that first session, I just felt so much more like myself than I’d ever felt, and my writing life began that very night.”

It’s a powerful moment in the book, one that triggers Dubus’s transition away from fighting and toward writing. He gradually realized the bitter young men he’d been fighting on the worn streets of Haverhill and Salisbury and Newburyport weren’t much different than himself. He discovered that, using words, he could appeal to a shared sense of what’s right and avoid throwing a punch.

Ever since then, Dubus has striven to let go of his ego and surrender himself to his characters. He quoted poet William Stafford, who said writers must put themselves in a state of openness and receptivity to whatever comes along.

“Why do this? Because the imagination is bottomless, because the imagination is larger than the imaginer, because the writing is smarter than the writer,” he said. “I’ve found that what can be taught in writing classes are the tools of writing—you know, concrete, specific, simple language, active verbs—all that stuff can be taught. But what cannot be taught is the ability to be open and receptive. That just has to be encouraged.” 

Reflecting on his volume of work, Dubus thinks his upbringing had a subconscious but profound impact on his writing. Reviewers often point to his penchant for characters who are marginalized, like the struggling Iranian father in “House of Sand and Fog,” or the stripping single mother in “The Garden of Last Days.” 

“I think that’s how it’s affected me, that I tend to write about people who are on the edge of things in some way,” he said. 

Northern New England has been home to authors of similar temperament, such as Russell Banks and Ernest Hebert, but also authors as varied in style and content as Sarah Orne Jewett, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King and Dan Brown. Despite their shared roots, it’s tough to draw many parallels between their work. To Dubus, the old adage “write what you know” has more to do with emotional experience than with physical people or places.

“You can go far afield of your personal experience, of course, when you’re writing fiction. You can be all kinds of people. But I think, in large measure, we still write emotionally what we know,” he said. “For me, I’ve always kind of written from the point of view of scarcity. Scarcity and danger, I think.”

Although he was born in Louisiana, Andre Dubus II also did much of his writing in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. “Townie” provides a candid look at the unique relationship between Dubus and his father, depicted as an affable man with enormous literary gifts and an insatiable appetite for life, but who largely neglected his duties as a father and a husband (the senior Dubus went through three divorces).

As Dubus III gained attention for his writing, he drew inevitable comparisons to his prolific father. But he rarely discussed writing with his dad. They drank together at bars, exchanged dirty jokes and watched boxing matches on TV, interacting more like old drinking buddies than father and son. 

Dubus said he never resented being in his father’s shadow. But he did resent the perception that being the son of a literary giant helped him get his foot in the publisher’s door. On the contrary, editors and publishers long ignored the younger Dubus. For every short story he got published in a magazine, he received hundreds of rejections. Even “House of Sand and Fog” went to 24 publishers before it found a home, he said.

Dubus also resents that reviewers and journalists invariably focus on his relationship with his father while ignoring his more substantial relationship with his mother, who almost single-handedly raised him and his three siblings.

Dubus II died at age 62 in 1999, the same year his son’s most successful novel was published. 

Dubus III is now 51 and lives in Newburyport with his wife and three teenage children. The town has changed and gentrified since the ’70s, much in the same way Portsmouth has transformed.

“It’s a very safe, physically beautiful, quaint, lovely town, and I know my kids are going to have nothing but sweet memories of that place once they grow up and maybe move away, and I’m grateful for that,” Dubus said. 

And yet, he feels some nostalgia for the tough, seedy neighborhoods he knew as a teenager. “Something happens to the soul of a place when you sanitize it too much,” he said.

Dubus also worries about the effect new Internet platforms might have on the soul of storytelling. He calls himself a “social media hater” and insists he will never subscribe to Facebook or Twitter.

“My theory is it’s really damaging people’s attention span, and I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of shorter chapters, shorter sentences, maybe a less complicated, less patient rendering of human life,” he said. “I like big fat novels that take a long time to get started, and character-driven stories are still what turn me on.” 

But Dubus believes printed books still have a long future in our culture. He noted that e-book sales currently account for roughly 8 percent of all book sales. And even as that number rises, he’s confident people will continue reading stories, whether they’re on paper or a digital screen. 

“I hold out hope that the book doesn’t have to die just because there are other technologies coming along through which to experience literature,” he said. “That’s my two cents on a hopeful day.”