A Conversation with Greg Bardsley
Jedidiah Ayres and Greg Bardsley met through the interwebs after their short stories appeared together in a series of journals. Greg is the author of Cash Out and numerous short stories. Jedidiah writes fiction, keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland, and coedited the anthology Noir at the Bar. They and cohort Kieran Shea edited the anthology D*CKED: Dark Fiction Inspired by Dick Cheney, and swear never to do anything like that again.
Jedidiah: Your work tends to feature straight men surrounded, frustrated, and thwarted by a collective of cultural fun-house reflections. Where does that come from?
Greg: Good question. I do have an affinity for oddball characters. A number of friends and family (especially those who dabble in psychology) have tried to understand why—and failed.
What I do know is that I try to write stories I’d love to read, and I’ve always loved oddballs who come in and turn things upside down. I guess I like the fact that they’re defiant and transgressive in their own amusing ways. In a world of rules and convention and required behavior, these characters personify defiance and individualism. They are subversive. This may have something to do with the fact that I started out as a newspaper reporter, which was a subversive job by nature: If you had a good story, no one could stop you from writing it, even if it would piss a lot of folks off.
In terms of my fiction, I have noticed one thing. In my longer fiction, I tend to focus on reliable narrators. But the supposed straight men in my stories (as in “Upper Deck,” “Microprimus Volatitus,” or “Some Kind of Rugged Genius”) often turn out to be anything but normal as the stories unfold. Kind of the way life is, maybe? It’s like my basketball game: I’m right-handed, but I shoot left. Can’t help it.
Jedidiah: I know you covered the crime beat in the San Francisco Bay Area for a while. Is that where you got infected? Do you mine that period for fiction?
Greg: You know, I’m not sure about that. For a few years, I covered crime several nights a week in Hayward, a pretty tough city south of Oakland. The crimes I covered weren’t really funny, and I haven’t really written about them. That said, in order to cover some of these nasty stories, I sometimes had to sit through hours of arraignments or page through reams of court dockets involving smaller-time criminals who kept making really poor decisions. That could be pretty amusing, but it was usually kind of sad, too. I did develop one character based on this profile of the repeat offender, who’s certainly mischievous in a penal-code kind of way but also kind of lovable. But with Cash Out, I just let my imagination go “off-leash.”
Jedidiah: Do your family and friends recognize you in your work?
Greg: Not with the short stories, thank God. No one wants to be “recognized” in stories like those.
At work, most people know very little about my fiction. My friends and family do recognize parts of me in some of my protagonists, including Dan Jordan in Cash Out. My wife is willing to go a little further; she thinks even the kooks are a reflection of my innermost desire to be unbelievably obnoxious. Based on my childhood, my sister probably agrees with her.
Jedidiah: When did you decide you wanted to write?
Greg: I knew in high school that I wanted to write for a living. I’d never done anything else (besides making funny faces) that got the response my writing got, and that felt great. But I think I was reluctant to share that dream with people. I was afraid someone would think I wasn’t up to the challenge.
Recently, though, I discovered that I must have had this dream, in a subconscious way, a lot longer than I’d known. This past year I was helping my mom pack up her house, and we found my first-grade report card. My teacher had noted that I was working on a “book,” that I was showing a lot of interest in it, sticking with it. Reading that as an adult really blew me away. I’d completely forgotten it, and it’s still only a faint memory. It’s not like I spent my childhood writing books.
Jedidiah: What will you do when your own kids want to write for a living?
Greg: I will support my boys and their aspirations, regardless of their career goals—with the exception of “medical insurance executive” and “aggressive telemarketer.”
Jedidiah: As a satirical novelist, do you hold dear any targets in particular?
Greg: That’s interesting. I seem to write about people and issues that either amuse me or get me riled up. Lately, I’ve been thinking about selfishness in its various forms. That, and arrogance. Oh, and pedigree. And rich and out-of-touch people. Oh, and the pretentious.
Maybe a bigger theme for me as a writer is, In this modern world, how are we supposed to live the way we really should? How can we survive in a meaningful and deep way despite these modern challenges—despite ourselves? When it came to Cash Out, I was interested in that universal impulse to step back, examine your life, and then make a run for it. That was one of the ideas that drove me to write the book. That and the fun of putting all these characters together at a really important moment in someone’s life.
Jedidiah: Are there any misconceptions you’d like to dissuade readers from forming about you?
Greg: Well, I wouldn’t want readers to assume that Dan Jordan is me, or that the events in Cash Out are based on my own experiences. Truth is, it’s all fiction. I’ve never worked with people like the new guy, Stephen Fitzroy, or even Beth Gavin. I’ve never worked at a place like Flowbid; I work at a much older and larger tech company where some great folks run very large, established businesses. And I’ve never had a corporate muscleman rough me up. For me, that was the fun of writing this book: taking a character with my sensibilities and background, and putting him on a collision course with mayhem. Do you remember what you said when I showed you the first seventy-five pages of the book? You said something like, “Pile it on, Bardsley. Pile those problems onto Dan. Make him work.” That’s exactly what I tried to do.
Jedidiah: Any misconceptions you’d like to start?
Greg: Sure. That I wrote Cash Out on a whim, during an inspired three-day weekend.
Jedidiah: What’s next for you, sir?
Greg: Sleep, and then back to work.