FARAWAY: Describe your writing process.  Where and when do you write best?

At night.  Because my job often requires that I rise early in the morning to answer e-mails or telephone calls (the entire world, literally, is my market for the satellite services we provide), I try to reserve my late-evening hours to my key-stroking.  By the way—and for whatever it’s worth—I rarely write long-hand any longer.

FARAWAY: Who are some of your favorite authors?  To what extent do you feel influenced by other writers?

My favorite book of all time is Call It Sleep.  However, I’m frankly less enamored of Henry Roth’s other works.

Among more contemporary writers, I suppose T. C. Boyle would have to be at the top of the list—though more for his short stories than for his novels.  Among novelists, I think William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is the best novel I’ve read in the past decade.  And, in non-fiction, I’d have to give the #1 spot to Bill Bryson.

I read as much non-fiction as fiction or poetry these days, and a lot of it is every bit as frightening as the most macabre piece of imaginative writing I’ve ever read.  Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything is the only book I will not allow my children to read.  (To put things in perspective, I gave my son the illustrated Kama Sutra when he turned sixteen.  His mother promptly took it away.  Prudery is not the issue; a desire to shield my children from the utter precariousness—not to say absurdity—of life on this planet is.)

 FARAWAY: What advice would you give to young writers about the craft of writing?

The same they give anyone trying to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.  (However, my lawyer-lover also recently educated me on what may well be a well-known fact except to me up until she explained it—viz., any schmuck can rent Carnegie Hall for a night.)

FARAWAY: You mentioned writing in multiple languages, and I’ve noticed that in the stories in this collection, you have a meticulous eye for word choice and phrasing.  How important is that–language, word choice–over and above the plot of the story?  And how has working in other languages shaped your work?

Brooklyn Bridge by Russell Bittner

You’re very kind, Daniel.  I don’t deserve your praise – not by a long shot.

My sweetie (I hesitate to call her my “fiancée,” because we’re not engaged, and I can’t exactly call her my “girlfriend,” since we’re both too old) rants at me all the time for being too “writerly.”  (She also rants at me for not writing something more commercial, but that’s quite beside the point.)  Her idea of a writer is Henry James.  My idea of a fate worse than boiling in hot oil while waiting at the check-out counter of Duane Reade or on hold with Verizon’s Customer Service is reading any further ten pages of Henry James.  I’d rather buzzards pecked my eyes out and voles gnawed my fingertips off so that I could never again be dragged into reading or feeling the prose of Henry James.

That said, I think language is everything – and I’m sure James did, too.  It’s just that we don’t speak the same language.  You’ve heard, no doubt, George Bernard Shaw’s quip about “two countries separated by a common language”?  If James and I were contemporaries and engaged in a battle of words, we’d still be firing at each other under bubbles at the bottom of the sea.

Yes, I agree with my sweetie:  namely, that everything should serve plot.  Words without plot are a bit like masturbation – whether in prose or in poetry – and better kept between the sheets or between the covers of a diary (hold the hanky).  But plot – or “action,” as I’m fond of reminding her – is not literature.  If plot/action were what defined literature, things like monologues and reveries would have no purpose and no purchase.  But they do.  Yes, by God, they do!  Hallo, Hamlet?

Now, I’m not saying that my sweetie is an action-girl only.  The action in Henry James is slower than any chess game I’ve ever played – and yet, she thinks James walks on a cushion of air two inches above the surface of the water.  But I’m rambling.  It must be the contagion of James.

Throwing myself head over heels (over a period of ten years) into other languages and cultures may or may not have influenced how I write.  I frankly have no idea. I know that when I came back to the U. S., I had to wage an uphill battle.  My spoken language was a kind of mid-Atlantic, where I should’ve better left it.  To sink.  My written language was stilted, to say the least, the result (perhaps) of having immersed myself in the minutiae of grammars, syntaxes, etymologies and sexy little accents.  It was thrilling at the time – a bit like hand-to-hand combat, no doubt – but better left behind in my very minor theater of war and not dragged back home.

I owe my present job, in part, to the fact that I can still speak some of those languages.  I use them from time to time in my writing when I think it serves a point.  I wrote a whole novella from the POV of a young Parisian girl.  Needless to say, there’s a lot of French in it.  I wrote a short story a few years back from the POV of an older woman who was something of a linguist.  She used her languages to compose scurrilous Valentine’s Day ditties to herself.  The story wound up among the “Best of the Web” for that year.  It didn’t go any further.  My novel has dialogue in eleven languages, only because the heroine is a polyglot.  My novel sits on my shelf and talks, if at all, to itself.

So there you have it.  I frequently see other people, in a piece they’ve written, using a foreign word or phrase here or there – and the word or phrase is just wrong.  I once sent a kind word to a world-class writer with whom I occasionally communicate by e-mail that his use of “¡Buena suerte!” was wrong – that the Spanish for “Good luck!” is “¡Suerte!” – nada más.  He wrote back to thank me in a tone that sounded distinctly like “Fuck off.”

Two weeks later, I’m sitting in a Spanish pizzeria (sic), and I hear behind me from a Spanish-language newscaster “¡Buena suerte!”  What can I tell you, Daniel.  I give up.

I write a lot of poetry – another no-pay sideshow.  In some of it, I use foreign words if they seem to fit, and if I don’t think I’m going to lose my reader if he or she doesn’t know the language.  But it’s always a crapshoot.

FARAWAY: You are also a photographer and a poet.  Do these different mediums inform each other and are there commonalities in what you hope to express and how you express yourself?

I really don’t think there are any commonalities – but maybe that’s just me.  For the longest time, I hated cameras and wouldn’t even think of buying one.  I had this hidebound belief that if a thing was worth capturing, it was worth capturing with the mind’s eye and with the mind’s eye only – that one had to take the time to look at something and study it.

All of that changed when my kids came along.  (No, on second thought, it actually all changed when my in-laws gave us a camera for our honeymoon.  My wife and I went to Venice, and I shot a whole roll of film – most of it of her.  One of us opened the camera at the wrong moment and exposed the film.  We lost it all.)  When my kids came along, things began to move rather quickly.  I was lucky:  I had a couple of rather photogenic kids.  They made excellent subjects, and my life at that point allowed us to include some exceptional backgrounds:  columns in Rome; towers in Paris; parks and statues in Oslo; bridges in Somerset.  I still have them all – somewhere.

Empire by Early Evening Light by Russell Bittner

We came back to New York and moved to Brooklyn.  I had Prospect Park – and my own gardens (a habit I’d discovered in England).  My kids remained good subjects throughout the years, and I’d recruit them for something that would end up on the annual family (long since dissolved) Christmas card.  This year may well be the last, as my boy goes off to college in the fall.

But the habit had taken hold.  I’d long since begun to look for things I thought might be visually interesting – at least to me.  To this day, I look.

Since I shoot only on film and can’t imagine converting to digital, I limit myself to a small periphery.  I can’t afford the costs of development or of traveling much beyond Brooklyn – or at least beyond the route of the MTA.

My photography – much like my prose – is circumscribed by circumstances.  I look for a picture (or a story) in a dewdrop, in a teardrop, in a leaky faucet.

Riverside Park by Russell Bittner

There’s my “career,” Daniel, and then there’s my career.  The first is what enables me to do the second.  It allows me to pay the rent, keep the fridge half-full, raise my kids in something other than poverty and, when I’m not overwhelmed by these day-to-day challenges, to write.

Writing is a privilege.  I don’t for an instant believe that anything I write will make one gnat’s breath worth of difference in the world, and I occasionally regret the expenditure of paper and ink (or at least digits) in exercising this privilege.

But I’m thoroughly convinced that all of us have a need to do something more than survive.  When I was still a young student (in Vienna, Austria at the time), a professor asked me whether I was going in search of fame and fortune.  I told him no, I had no desire for fame and fortune; what I wanted—I modestly appended—was immortality.

Many of us achieve a brush with immortality in our children.  If I accomplish nothing else in my own life, I can honestly say that I’ve had a small part in raising two of the most extraordinary people I know: a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Alexandra.  The first is an aspiring writer; the second is an aspiring dancer.  Their talents and aspirations aside, they’re both genuinely considerate, loving, sensitive and likable individuals.  That I, as a parent, love them is a given; that I also like them is not.

I like them.

FARAWAY: How did you first know that you wanted to write?

I’ve known since I first entered college as a pre-med major (Davidson College, in Davidson, NC) in 1969 that I wanted to write.  I puttered around with some poetry at the time, the object of which was some poor girl up the way and over the mountain in Bristol, TN.  Mostly, however, I read.

1968 – 1969, however, was a troubled and troubling time.  I left Davidson after a year, moved around a bit for almost two years trying to make some sense of my life, then went to Europe with the idea of getting an education on my own terms.  The eight-year plan was both straightforward and naïve:  I’d live in four countries for two years each, learn the language, the culture and the literature of each.  I ended up living in five, including a summer in the then-Soviet Union, and learned five languages.

By the time I returned to the U.S., I’d learned at least enough to know I’d have to get a college degree—and so, I enrolled in Columbia University here in NYC.  One of the things I obviously hadn’t acquired in Europe was wisdom; I enrolled as a philosophy major.  However, I also knew I’d have to work one day to support my habit.  I minored in Russian and studied a sixth language, Swedish.

I graduated from Columbia in three years as clueless as I’d gone in—which is a pretty dangerous state to be in at the age of 33.  I stumbled into a secretarial job with a high tech company because, thank God, I’d learned how to type 65 wpm in high school.  Some of my jobbing in Europe had included teaching English as a second language—and so, I also had a pretty good idea of grammar, syntax and spelling.

It wasn’t long before I realized that most of the glory and money in the business world nested in sales.  I had debts that would’ve tried Job.  I consequently moved into sales, where I’ve been ever since.

As my eldest sister has never tired of telling me, she knows no one less disposed to the sales profession than I am.  She’s right.  But I had some luck, and it was pretty damned easy to be successful at sales in the nineties.

Then, of course, came the dot.com bust.  At 50, and with a base salary that would’ve made a commander blush, I was suddenly out of a job—and without prospects for getting another one.  I turned, in 2002, to the only other thing I knew how to do—and yes, to the only thing I’d ever really wanted to do.

I got my first poem published in The American Dissident, and I thought I was on my way.  If not exactly to fame and fortune, at least to a way to make a living.  I continued to write poetry, most of which has been published either on the ‘Net or in print, including one Pushcart Prize nomination.

I wrote a four-act play that went nowhere.  To purge myself of the failure (in all respects of that little oeuvre) I started to write short stories.  I wrote the first one in seventy-two hours without a dictionary or reference book of any kind.  It eventually ended up in an anthology titled Next Stop Hollywood: Short Stories Bound for the Screen.  (They may’ve been bound, but only in the editor’s head.)  That story, “Waltzing Matilda,” appears in the anthology you have kindly agreed to publish.

I wrote a second, “In the Animal Kingdom,” which also eventually earned a Pushcart Prize nomination.  It, too, appears in this anthology, Stories.

I eventually went on to write a novel, Trompe-l’œil, which, with an unhappy ending at 162K words and using eleven languages (in dialogue), understandably remains in neglected manuscript form—although the first chapter of it has been published once in print and once on the ‘Net.  Some other excerpts have also been published on the ‘Net.

Speaking of which, Internet publishing has been quite kind to me.  It hasn’t paid my rent—not by a long shot—but Googling to my name would suggest that I’ve done reasonably well in cyberspace.

If success is measured in more than coffee spoons, however, I frankly haven’t done well.  If I’m still alive today, it’s thanks to a woman who has, for all intents and purposes, kept me financially afloat for a couple of years now—and also to a supreme bit of serendipity in finding a job in the industry in which I’d worked for eighteen years, and which I began last December.  The man who hired me chose to overlook what most would not: my age (not to mention my seven years’ absence from the industry, during which it had evolved almost beyond recognition).  I intend not to let him down.  If this means that I spend less time writing, so be it.  Let others have their shot at grinding trees into pulp or the ether into digits.  I will—only because it’s the one writing thing I can do that doesn’t require long hours at a single sitting—continue to dabble in poetry.

To read samples of Russell’s poetry click here.  Be sure to return tomorrow for the first chapter of Something Special.

In the near future, we will also have a new issue of Faraway available, featuring a LOT of writers new to our site.

Click here to download the novella in its entirety.

For interviews with the author and more, click here.

And to purchase a print edition, click here: