Earlier this week we featured the first part of an interview with author Russell Bittner. Bittner’s novella, Something Special, is being serialized on www.FarawayJournal.com throughout the month of August. In this second part of the interview, Russell talks more specifically about his own work–the themes that appear, his settings, and the publishing process for his first book, Stories in the Key of C. Minor.
FARAWAY: What are some common themes that appear in your work?
Love. Loss. Loneliness. The three L’s. There’s no school I know of that teaches us how to acquire, keep or divest ourselves of any of them.
FARAWAY: How did you become interested in or why did you choose these themes?
Experience—the famous school of experience.
FARAWAY: Many of your stories take place in or around New York. Can you describe using New York as a setting?
I don’t have any special feeling about NYC. I’m not particularly fond of Manhattan, but it’s where I went to school, it’s where I worked for many years, it’s where I still sometimes play. My girl still attends the LaGuardia School of Music & Art, and my boy just finished up at Beacon and is now off to Wheaton College in Massachusetts next fall.
Subway Trestle by Russell Bittner
Unfortunately, the moment I come up from the subway tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, I always first hear—and then feel—this great sucking sound, and it’s always going straight for the greatly diminished contents of my wallet. Manhattan is all about money. Without great gobs of it, life in Manhattan ain’t much fun.
Brooklyn is another story. If I had to pick one place in these United States to raise a family (the caveat being that this statement does not apply to all sections of this borough), it would be Brooklyn. Three of my stories have a Brooklyn setting. A fourth takes place at a midpoint between Manhattan and Brooklyn—namely, “Waltzing Matilda.” “The Poet & the President” takes place in Manhattan, albeit involves a fictional Brooklyn resident. Only my novella, “Something Special,” has no mention of Brooklyn whatsoever. It starts and ends in Manhattan, though takes place principally in Yosemite National Park.
Brooklyn is small town writ large. It has something of everything—and maybe more of it than anyplace else—including an enormous desire and energy to get off it and move into Manhattan. It probably also has more aspiring artists (both fine and con) than any other place in the known universe. Writers here are more plentiful—and cutthroat—than gangsters.
But as a place for kids, it just doesn’t get any better. We all wear our 718 (area code) T-shirts with a kind of “Up yours!” pride—although the underlying sentiment is more of “I’d really rather be up yours than up mine.”
FARAWAY: Out of all of the stories in this collection, In the Animal Kingdom seems the most personal, the most laden with emotion. It deals with a son grappling with his parents’ separation. Was this a personal theme for you?
You’ve “outed” me, Daniel. “In the Animal Kingdom” is—with a heady dose of imagination—virtually autobiographical.
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday—largely, I think, because it’s about family reunions. I grew up in a large family (the fifth of six children), and people were always drifting off to college. However, Thanksgiving always brought them back—and least for a dinner.
When I realized I’d lost my own newer family and that I’d never have the privilege of a reunion with them again, I wrote this story. It was a purgative of sorts. It remains just that.
Garden in Winter by Russell Bittner
FARAWAY: Can you describe how writing a novella differs from the process of writing a short story or novel?
It’s longer. Other than that, I don’t see any difference. A novella is not an excuse to get slipshod with language any more than a poem is. The last thing you as a writer want is to lose your reader’s attention. Do that, and you might as well go fishing. (Fishing, at least, has a better chance of putting something on the table.)
FARAWAY: What advice would you give to our readers about getting published?
Make friends with Daniel Sawyer—or with someone like him. Publishing is a risky business. There are, happily (for writers), a number of people in it who aren’t in it for the money. If they all were, most of what passes for “literary fiction” would never get published—or if it did, only after a writer’s death.
There’s a great line in the script of “Shakespeare in Love,” and I firmly believe Tom Stoppard was having a private little giggle when he wrote it. The producer of “Romeo and Juliet” says at one point in answer to the question “Who’s he?” (with an accusatory finger pointing directly at Shakespeare): “Oh, he’s nobody. He’s the writer.”
The fact of the matter is just that. The writer is nobody…until he’s somebody—and those somebodies are rarer than water skies on ducks’ feet.
FARAWAY: We have gone about publishing Stories in a way that differs radically from traditional publication. It is technically self-published. What are your thoughts on the moniker “self-publication”?
It’s like kissing your sister. I’m quite fond of my sisters—well, at least of one of them—but kissing her is not my idea of a Saturday night spectacle.
Do I really think anyone gives a hoot about a collection of short stories by an unknown writer? No. Everything I’ve ever heard or read speaks against it. But here we are—and there’s no turning off the spigot.
FARAWAY: In my opinion self-publication represents a large part of the future of publication. With the decline of printed newspapers and the popularity of blogs and websites that offer do-it-yourself services, more people than ever will be able to publish their work, although they might not be able to secure the audience that a traditional publisher could get for their work. What do you think of this trend?
For both our sakes, Daniel, I hope you’re right. I’ll certainly do my bit to move this book even though the idea of self-promotion would be preferable only to having my teeth drilled without benefit of Novocain.
FARAWAY: What are your thoughts on the process that we have gone through to make Stories available to the public?
I couldn’t be more grateful. You, personally, have done far more than I could ever have expected or even desired of a publisher. Do I wish you were independently wealthy and could be both publisher and benefactor? Of course. But wishes are born in heaven, lived on earth, die in hell. I’ll be quite content to see these stories between two covers and out of my notebooks—where, but for a few publications here and there—they might otherwise have died.
Green-Wood Cemetery by Russell Bittner
