A Conversation with Bryan Charles
“Galesburg wasn’t suburban . . . more of a country scene with a lot of woods and the houses far apart and no brothers or sisters—it was a lonely only-child kind of existence.
We’ll begin by pulling an abrupt Booknotes stunt: Where was Bryan Charles born?
I was born in Troy, Michigan, in 1974.
Where were you raised? What events from your childhood stand out?
I lived in Kalamazoo until I was nine, then moved to a very small town about twenty minutes away called Galesburg. It wasn’t suburban . . . more ofa country scene with a lot of woods and the houses far apart and no brothers or sisters—it was a lonely only-child kind of existence. My memories of childhood involve hanging out either by myself or with this neighbor kid who lived across the street. Eventually he started going to a Christian school and we lost touch. There was a lot of bike riding and exploring, and early on I got heavily into music. I remember going to Meijer’s, this big regional superstore before such things were so pervasive, and spending my allowance on tapes; I think the first few I bought were the Footloose soundtrack, Strip by Adam Ant, and Thriller—that kind of stuff. We got cable, and like a lot of people my age I spent a lot of time watching early MTV. I was really enthralled with all the imagery from those videos cycling around in my head. When I think back there were no big events . . . more like a series of moments that ended up being life-altering in little ways: waiting for songs like “Our House” to come on the radio so I could tape them; going to the Richland Roller Rink—fairly typical mid-eighties childhood stuff that now seems like something from the fifties to me, a bygone era, a totally different, more innocent age.
What did your parents do?
My stepfather, now retired, worked in a paper mill all his life. The paper industry was big in southwest Michigan, and there were several large paper mills, all closed now. Like a lot of the manufacturing jobs, they disappeared. My mom started out as a journalist working around the Detroit area, then got into communications as an editor for a hospital newsletter, and later started her own business.
When and how did you first take to writing?
The first thing I wrote was a poem in fourth grade called “Underneath.” It was a grim piece of verse about how the world was being overrun with wars and dying. My mom still has a photocopy. I kept writing poems and started reading books way beyond my comprehension—A Clockwork Orange, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Sun Also Rises— just because they were around, downstairs on the bookshelf. My first real experiments with prose came in seventh grade. Since Less Than Zero had come out as a movie and I’d read the book they were grim Bret Easton Ellis imitation pieces, stark and with a lot of drugs, which of course I hadn’t done and knew nothing about. And then I guess it was just an evolution from there, throughout high school and college and beyond, always reading, writing, and imitating. But it started with poetry, which now that I really think about it, strikes me as meaningful—always going for the beautiful line, the stunner, fucking around with context and associations.
Have you any unusual or otherwise compelling anecdotes about your collegiate experience?
During college (I went to Western Michigan University) I lived in this big house with a bunch of other like-minded weirdos. We had two three-bedroom apartments but it was really like one big house, a communal thing. There were instruments everywhere and people were always playing or listening to music. In my apartment there was a typewriter on the table and so there was always writing too, the whole table covered with pages of free associations and poetry and little prose pieces and humor pieces. It was the most unself-consciously creative time of my life: just writing for the sheer joy, playing music for the sheer joy, no competition, no real knowledge of or interest in the big business creative arts industries or what was happening on the coasts, just holed away in Kalamazoo doing my thing. I didn’t know it then but it’s what they call “finding your ” voice.” I took all the writing workshops, had a lot of dysfunctional make-out sessions, and did tiny tours with my band. I don’t know how compelling this is but I really do long for that old mind-set, wish I could unlearn certain things. Raymond Chandler said everything a writer learns about the craft of fiction takes just a little bit away from his need to write at all, and I agree with that to an extent. I don’t want to sound like a washed-up football player whose glory days were when he was nineteen, but the hardest thing for me as I go along and learn more about how to write and what it really takes to be good is holding on to that sense of fun and wonder that I had sitting at the table at 909 Walwood and just putting a piece of paper in the typewriter and letting it fly.
“My first real experiments with prose came in seventh grade—grim Bret Easton Ellis imitation pieces, stark and with a lot of drugs.
Name some peculiar jobs you’ve had.
Summers during college I worked in the same paper mill as my stepdad. I worked the swing shift, which meant that a few weeks into the summer I didn’t know if I was awake or asleep. I was what they call a sixth hand on the paper machine. It was a lot of grunt work, spraying ankle-deep paper pulp off the basement floor with rats and roaches everywhere at three in the morning, and crawling into the machine on “down days” with a metal scraper and scraping crust off the conveyor. The good thing was, when the machine was running well I was on my own and I’d usually have a book with me or go and bury myself in a “broke box,” a big wooden bin filled with paper scraps, and take a fifteen-or twenty minute nap. By the end of the summer I looked like I’d aged five years from lack of sleep and eating Hostess fruit pies, again at three or four in the morning. Just after college, the year before I moved to New York, I worked as a substitute teacher. I taught all grades at first and then took over a high school sociology class. It was only supposed to be for six weeks but it ended up being an entire semester. I was twenty-three, didn’t know how to write a lesson plan, didn’t know anything, and I was on my own. It was more exhausting than the paper mill and gave me a whole new respect for teachers. It’s really hard work with little reward. Most of my students were juniors and seniors, which meant they weren’t much younger than me, so there was some strange tension there: do I talk to these kids like we’re all just hanging out, do I try to be stern, or what? I even did parent-teacher conferences—flannel shirt untucked, Beatle haircut—though I don’t think I was very reassuring to the parents. I was so filled with anxiety about my own future that I think it translated to a lot of weirdness trying to help other young people define theirs. After I moved to New York it was all just office jobs and things were very, very dull until 9/11; then there were a couple of years of frantic life-living and now a dull office again.
“I took all the writing workshops, had a lot of dysfunctional make-out sessions, and did tiny tours with my band.”
What is your earliest memory of reading and being influenced by a book?
I have a couple early memories of reading. I remember Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which was my favorite book when I was a kid, and also Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, which I read over and over. My first real immersion in a book that just had a huge influence on me (notwithstanding my Ellis imitations) was Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. I had a fiction workshop in the fall of 1993 and the book was just out in paperback. My teacher brought it to class and read a couple of the shorter stories aloud. Afterward I asked to look at it and I just felt this strange pull. I bought a copy and went totally nuts for those stories. I loved the poetry—it was exactly the kind of thing I was (and am) going for in my writing. When I found out Johnson is also a poet I got the book with his collected poems and read everything else by him. I bought Already Dead the day it came out, the same with The Name of the World. I can still quote long passages from Jesus’ Son, and I told my editor John Williams that signing on with Harper was like a guy who really worships Nirvana getting signed to Geffen (Records), on account of the Denis Johnson connection.
“Summers during college I worked the swing shift in a paper mill. By the end of the summer I looked like I’d aged five years from lack of sleep and eating Hostess fruit pies.”
Do you have any writerly quirks? When and where do you write? PC or pen?
I don’t have too many writerly quirks. I live in a railroad apartment and the back room is my writing room. When I was working on my book I got up every day at seven and started “preparing”: getting into the mind-set, pacing, turning off Howard Stern and then turning it on again. I have an old G3 PowerBook, but I’m looking to eliminate the distractions that go with a computer e-mail, Internet, etc. I bought an old IBM Selectric, which is also useful because it renders immediate rewriting impossible (or at least more cumbersome). I guess a quirk of mine would be constant and immediate rewriting, writing a sentence then instantly reworking it. I don’t think that’s healthy. I have a whole folder full of handwritten notes for my next book, enough material at this point for at least the first quarter, so that’s different. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty burned out on hypermodern methods of composition and communication.
“My first real immersion in a book that just had a huge influence on me was Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson.”
What do you rely upon for stimulation? Do you observe any particular beverage ritual?
Coffee is the big stimulant. Over the years, especially the jobless book-writing years, I’ve eaten obscene amounts of peanut butter. I’m sure that if all the peanut butter I’ve eaten appeared before me in mountain form I’d be really disgusted with myself. I’ve cut back, though. A peanut butter and banana sandwich, the old standby, has little appeal these days.
What interests or enthusiasms do you have (e.g., hobbies, outdoor pursuits)?
The only things besides writing that I really love to do are listening to and playing music. I still have a big vinyl collection and lots of CDs, and I spend a lot of time just sitting on the floor listening to records. I used to buy new music all the time, new seven-inches by bands I didn’t know, scour the used bins for gems. I don’t really have the energy for that anymore but once in a while I still get obsessed with a new band. I also like to walk a lot. I take long walks every day, partly out of necessity since I live roughly a mile from the most convenient subway, but taking the train into Manhattan for a Whitman-style perambulation is still one of my favorite things to do.
“I bought an old IBM Selectric, which is also useful because it renders immediate rewriting impossible (or at least more cumbersome).”
Wife, partner, children, pet(s)?
No wife, no pets. But a lot of my friends are living that dream: marriage with a couple of dogs, home ownership, even a baby or two here and there. I’m content to view that scene from a distance at this point. Then again, I don’t want to be a forty-four-year-old urban bachelor dude hitting on young chicks in a workshop or something, telling them they really should read Don DeLillo.”
“I don’t want to be a forty-four-year-old urban bachelor dude hitting on young chicks in a workshop or something, telling them they really should read Don DeLillo.
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