How
long have you been writing?
I wrote my first poem when I was
five.
Is
that "A Dream," the poem that you mentioned in your website? In the back of the Pontiac?
Yeah, that's it. And it, indeed, does have rhyming meter.
(laughs)
Are
you the only writer in your family?
No, my dad is a poet and a published
historical writer. He came from a very
interesting and historically significant mining area in northern California and
has since published a couple of books about the history on the places of that
area. He's also a retired union member
of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), and he's
working on a couple of profiles of early union leaders from the 20s and 30s. That's what he has done. My stepmother is not a formal writer, but
someone who's been encouraged to write for many years because of her life story
being so fascinating, having grown up in Nazi Germany as a young girl. So she finally gets down to do it and I wish
she would have asked for my help, but she didn't. (laughs) But I did listen to
her memoir, and it's pretty fascinating.
So
she was supportive of your writing, or you were supportive of hers?
If she would have worked with me, I
guarantee we would have won a national or international award, just because of
the incredible background story she had.
That was not her goal. All she
wanted to do was get her story down for her family, for her kids, for her
grandkids, for their kids. Ultimately, I
had to respect that.
I said, 'Lydia, if you and I write
this together, we will win a national book award, okay? (laughs) This is the
most incredible story in the world.’ But
you can't force someone to do something they don't want to do. And my goal is publish publish publish. I'll try to publish anything I possibly can;
that's not other people's goal, and I have to appreciate that.
You
come from a primarily Italian-American background, and I've seen you explore
that in some of your recent work. Is
that something you've always explored, or is it something you've come into with
age?
No, it's odd. I'm half Irish, except that the Irish part
was never really a factor because I grew up around two dozen Italians. It's just the fact that my name was Brady,
and not Falsetta, which was the arm's length portion of how I was related. Let me put it this way: my mom died when I was ten, and she was
Italian. I grew up around my Italian
family who all lived within ten minutes of each other. Again, we're talking about a bunch of first
cousins and uncles and aunts and another dozen second cousins. I won't call it cultural, but that was the
atmosphere I related to. The only people
who were Brady were me and my dad.
Because my mom died when I was so young that always was a draw of identity. I think that's why, at least in my first
book, I chose to create those characters of ancestry because those are the
people I grew up around. Those are the
people whose characters I could create who were real to me.
Who
would you say has been your biggest influence in terms of prose writing?
Interesting question. I think about that question a lot. I talk to my students about that a lot and
encourage them to broaden their base of reading. That's a tough one, and I'll tell you
why. Early on when I was a very young
man, I was a big Ernest Hemingway fan, so I wrote lots of declarative
sentences, very clear and short, and settings that were cool and clean, and men
who were true and strong, and women who didn't say much. (laughter) And then I read
a lot of William Faulkner, and my sentences became half pages long. Then I got into Mark Twain... All I'm saying is that I think there's sort
of a layering process. The writer, in my
experience, gleans a little bit from a lot of disparate sources. I've read a lot of John Cheever. I don't think I write like John Cheever, but
one of my very favorite stories is 'The Swimmer.' Fabulous story. I read a lot of Cormac McCarthy. I don't think I write like Cormac McCarthy,
but I appreciate the rhythm of his prose.
Some of the only things I've memorized are Robert Frost's 'Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening' and the first page of Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood
Meridian.' They're both written in
verse. Obviously the Frost is, but I
didn't understand why I was so drawn to the Cormac McCarthy until I really
analyzed that passage, and I realized it's all almost written in iambic
pentameter. I thought, 'Oh, maybe I'm
just making this up.' So I went and I
grabbed 'The Road,' and I read the first couple of pages of it. It's not perfect by any stretch of the
imagination, but it is also very deliberately rhythmic.
And so I think -- in a very
roundabout way -- clarity, precision, and rhythm are what I've tried to take
from all of those folks I've mentioned:
the Hemingway, the Faulkner, the McCarthy. There are other writers who I love: Toni Morrison. I think I'd jump off a cliff if I tried to
write like her.
But it's like I tell my kids: it's not stealing. It's gleaning that which you can from their
style; it's being able to recognize what that is. It's like when I tell them that this class
isn't about why this is significant
writing, but it's about how does it work for you. Or how does it not work. And so I like reading things that really work
for me. Whether or not I'm directly
getting anything, or whether I can point to something and say, 'Here's a
stylistic element that I could use.'
Whether or not I can do that.
Even if not, I can still absorb the rhythm and the style of what I'm
subconsciously taking in.
Right now I'm rereading 'The Great
Gatsby' because I bought Maureen Corrigan's book that's all about 'The Great
Gatsby' and why it's great. And I
thought, 'Well, if I'm going to read that, I might as well read "The Great
Gatsby" with it.' It's pretty short
anyway. And I find wonderful
sections. When I read them out loud, I
find that there's a rhythm. It's almost
as if they're little works of their own.
I think the more you read, the more it becomes apparent when it's going
well.
Could
you describe your work ethic as a writer?
Poor. (laughs) No, my work ethic is great, but my work frequency is not as well as I would like
it. I used to like to write in the
morning. I still do sometimes. I find often that if I do a couple of hours
in the afternoon that suffices. I find
consistency only to be consistency of habit.
Just doing it as frequently as I can.
I don't know how you feel about it,
but every time I finish something, it scares the shit out of me that I'll never
finish anything again. I don't know why,
but it's the most daunting thing. I just
recently finished the draft of something I probably started five years
ago. I'd just published that little
story that I'd finished a year ago, and I was like, 'Oh boy, it's time to begin
something new.' Or at least something
different. I dragged this one up. I really liked the beginning, and I wasn't
quite sure where it was going. What I
found was that even though I hadn't worked on it in a very long time, it came
back and it wasn't as scary as I thought it was going to be.
But when it comes to the big stuff,
the novels, my best routine, get up at 5, write from 5:30 to 7:30 and go to
work. It becomes a natural routine, and
I've found a lot of stuff coming out of that time period. I like it because it's cool and it's quiet
before the rest of the world takes my life over.
What
is your method toward publishing and seeking publication?
As far as my short stories go,
blanketing as many small press journals and magazines as I can, using the shotgun
approach because I think they're so subjective.
The faculty changes; the students change. They're mostly university based so who knows
what they'll take.
The longer stuff, I'm still slogging
through the process of perfecting a query letter for my first novel, trying to
target agents whom I think would be appropriate for it. So there's a lot of research involved. It's kind of drudgery and work that you wish
you didn't have to do, but you have to do it.
There's no one else gonna do it for you.
The most frustrating part for me is
that I'll read one agent's recipe for how you do it. This is it, this is the 'perfect form,' and
then I'll read another one, and they're in conflict with one another.
Whereas I've read that with the
short story market and the literary journals, if you don't throw as much stuff
out there as you can, you’ll never get published, I think that it really
behooves one to target the most appropriate agent. I'll give you an example. One of my most prized possessions is framed
on my wall next to my MFA diploma. It's
my very first personal rejection from an agent.
Addressed to me, by name. It was obvious
that the person had read my query letter and really considered it and it took
them however long it took them [to reply].
I sent one in on a Saturday morning once at, say 11 o'clock, and I
received the rejection at 2:45 that afternoon. (laughs) I might as well have
not even bothered. Perhaps I should have
spent that time somewhere more appropriate.
Have
you considered going to smaller presses where you don't necessarily need an
agent for books?
Yeah, I guess eventually. While I still consider myself relatively
young and relatively healthy and have a good amount of free time, I'd really
like to nail it the old fashioned way.
Which is the same way that I'd like all of my stuff to be in physical
print. Online publications are becoming
more and more prodigious and more and more legitimate.
That
actually ties into the next question. We
had talked about not wanting to waste your writing on "lesser"
publications. I remember that
conversation about not wanting to submit to an online-only magazine. Where will you submit work to? Where do you draw the line between where
you'll submit and where you won't?
The issue for me is that online
publication is fleeting and short of screen-shotting where my work has been, I
don't know of any other way of saving it when they purge their servers or their
hard drive crashes.
I'll give you an example. I published a piece in a fairly well known
lifestyle magazine about 20 years ago.
It had a big color picture of me, and I could always go back to the link
and revisit it. I wish that I'd just printed
it because it's gone now and it'll never come back. A lot of the smaller journals tend to go away,
which is sad. It's not like a larger
magazine doing server maintenance; the whole thing might fold. It's not to say that I couldn't print the story
somewhere else anyway; there's just something about a printed piece that I can
hold in my hand that's just very satisfying.
What
is your attitude toward platform, building your presence, and networking? How do you make use of your connections as a
writer?
Frankly, poorly. I have a lot of conflict because my regular
job which lets me pay my rent and buy food takes up 50-60 hours a week.
It's something that's not natural to
me, but it's something that I need to spend some regular time on. I tend to cloister. I tend to hermit and work on stuff. It's not the most satisfying thing for me to
reach out to colleagues, even though I've found that when I do they're very
accommodating and very gracious. It's an
important part of the whole process, and it's not my strong suit. It's something I'm working on.
I
know that you've gone into teaching, but have you done any work in editing and
publishing?
Only informally. Only with a couple of friends who were
working on memoir type manuscripts, and with a couple of my students who were
producing pretty high-quality, publishable work. After I left the Art Institute, I worked with
them.
Again, that's another aspect of
trying to gain a little bit of traction with those students and letting them
know that I'm available for their service.
I really enjoy it. I love it,
getting in and working on a manuscript and making it the best that we can.
How
long have you been teaching now?
I started in 2013. Unfortunately the campus where I was teaching
closed. The Art Institute, they had a
lot of issues, and they closed about a dozen campuses nationwide, ours being
one of them. But I taught all the way
through last summer. Very rewarding,
very much a lot of work. I was pretty
much burnt out by the time I quit.
Did
you teach as a grad student?
Yeah, I was a teaching assistant, and
I co-taught a class in a support role and in a co-teaching role.
What
was your first day of teaching like?
It was great. I knew that I should have been doing this 20
years ago within the first ten minutes that I was up in front of the
class. I was having a good time. They weren't terribly bored or completely
stifled. I made them do things that
didn't involve their little electronic devices, and then I made them perform
those things if they wanted to. It was
all voluntary.
It's a lot of work, and now I know why
I only see my full time teaching friends. in the summer. They have no time whatsoever during the school
year. In the beginning it was 12-15
hours per week for me to prepare for one class, and that probably paired
down. But to one class? Tacked onto my other job? And they [other teachers] have four to five
classes.
Don't get me wrong, it's great. It's wonderful work. It's sitting there and devising new ways to
reach them, reading material to give them new techniques and new ideas and new
contexts and new elements of approaching writing. It just takes a shitload of time. I didn't mind it at all, except that the
situation when they were closing the Art Institute was that they were trying to
push through as many students as possible.
So my 25 student creative writing seminar went to 38. It wasn't fair to them, and it wasn't fair to
me. It's really hard to rein in that
many kids and really keep them focused.
If
you could go back to yourself in your 20s, what advice would you give yourself
as a young writer?
Write every day. Write what you know, but don't be afraid. Try to write what you don't know. Write what you want to know. And don't listen to your parents. Don't listen to your senior year advisor.
(laughs). Do what your heart feels like
it wants to do.
What
are you working on now?
I just finished the one draft of
that short story. I'm letting it rest
for a little bit until I'm sure what it's about. I think it's a little trite toward the
end. It's way too long. It's over 10,000 words. I've got to figure something out.
And then I've got the sequel to the
book you read [The Transformation of
Nicky Lucera]. The boy is about to
go to college. He's in the interesting
phase of life; he's in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll now. And it's back in the 80s. Poverty and wealth and that whole shitstorm
that happened back then. Also, he goes
up to San Fransisco and meets some gay guys.
It's the very early of the whole AIDS crisis; that's a subtheme that's
going on there. It's a young man that's
seeing and hearing and feeling things he's never considered in his life.
Where do you see yourself
going?
Here's my five year plan: secure an
agent, get a book published, transition away from my current profession into a
profession that has more to do with my love of the written word. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a full time
teaching position, although that would be nice.
It might be a combination teaching and professional editing. I’m at a stage in my life and in a position
where I have the ability to do a big change, and I’d kind of like to do that.
When you asked me what I would have
done 20 years ago, I don’t regret what I’ve done in the last 30 years, I
think. I know how to do things that a
lot of people don’t know how to do. If
you were to have asked me if I could have done them, I would have told you no
way in hell.
I just applied to a full time
instructional position at a local community college, and in my letter to them,
I let them know that I think I’m a good candidate. I’ve been a manager, I’ve been a business
professional, and I can give a more rounded perspective on what they want in
this combination of what I want to bring to them, which is high angled
precision and clarity, which will help them in what they want to do. And I believe that. That’s my goal, and I’m sticking to it.
A local of Santa Cruz, California, Les Brady has found a home for his short fiction in Blue Earth Review, Reed Magazine, and Gold Man Review, and for his nonfiction in Cigar Aficionado On-Line, Good Times, and Procomm Magazine. A graduate of the University of California with a B.A. in English Literature, he later received his MFA in Creative Writing from San José State University in the spring of 2010. He's taught Creative Writing at the Art Institute of California–Silicon Valley and is currently seeking an agent for his book, The Transformation of Nicky Lucera. He can be found online at http://lesbrady.com/
