Hey everyone! As promised, here is my author interview with Steve Bargdill, author of 'Wasteland' series and 'Banana Sandwich'. After the interview, (yes, you have to scroll down!) are excerpts and links to his work. Images are throughout!
Without further ado, Steve Bargdill!
- Please
tell us a little known fact about you.
When I was thirteen, I was really upset that Santa Claus was
not real. I mean, I had known for a long time he wasn’t real, but at thirteen I
thought the world was at a loss because he wasn’t real. That Christmas Eve, I
snuck out of the house at around midnight and left candy canes and tree
ornaments on people’s doorsteps and doorknobs. And I got caught. On my way
home, I heard my parents calling out my name, searching for me. I tried to
sneak back into the house without getting caught, but of course that didn’t
happen.
- What
was your favorite genre to read growing up? Is this the genre you
currently write in?
Oh most definitely fantasy. The Shannara series. Terry Brooks’ Magic
Kingdom: Sold. And okay, I hate to admit it, but I picked up my mom’s
romance books by Roseanne Bittner. I still remember the novel Wyoming Woman, which is ironic because I
grew up in Ohio, and then moved to Wyoming. And I even wrote to Roseanne
Bittner—my one and only fan letter. She wrote back and really encouraged me to
keep writing. My dad collected antique books, so I also read things like The Hardy Boys Mysteries and The Pickwick Papers and all the Tarzan novels by Burroughs when I was
like ten. Then there was some Louis Lamoure thrown in for good measure.
I read the poems of Langston Hughes in high school too, and
had no idea what he was writing about, except I knew his writing was gorgeous.
My high school English teacher introduced me to James Thurber, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Jack London.
I remember reading One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichby by Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn when I was
sixteen, seventeen years old just cause. About a guy in a Russian prison camp,
and the book was like thick. I mean in pages, but I just Googled it, and it’s
only like 182 pages in the hardback, but in my mind I remember it as being a
thousand pages all about a single day.
As a teenager though, I always came back to the fantasy
genre. The Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy,
Ender’s Game, and I remember some
weird little novella thing about a guy being sucked into another dimension
because dragons liked stories from our world and he had to go on a quest and
there was a foul-talking dwarf and a damsel in distress…I don’t know. That
could be just something I made up in my head still floating around all these
years later.
As for the genre I currently write in: I don’t know. I don’t
think I can be pigeon-holed like that. Wasteland
certainly has fantasy and dystopian elements. Banana Sandwich is about a
bi-polar pizza delivery driver. Breath:
An American Story, a piece I’m working on right now, I’d consider—if I had to
label it—American Gothic. The Yellow Mountains
of God, another in-process piece, is about a Lutheran pastor who kills a
man in Appalachia. I Want an Indian
is a collection of poetry, short stories, and personal essays in relation to
Native Americans. The I Want an Indian
writing is slow slow going though. It’s difficult to wrap my head around a
culture of people I only am aware of from an academic point of view. With the
anthology, I’m really trying to personalize my experience as an outsider
looking in
In the past, I’ve written fantasy, but nothing I would feel
comfortable putting out into the world to share. My first novel—which I will
show no one because it is that awful—was/is a fantasy novel about a world stuck
in an eternal winter, which, you know, how much more Narnia can I rip off, right?
- What
inspires you to write?
First and foremost, I want to entertain. I want to write a
damn good story and have people walk away
going, “Wow, that was an awesome story!” That’s probably egotistical.
Beyond that, writing really helps me make sense of my
personal life. Wasteland, I’d say is
ninety percent fiction. The story takes place in the Nineties, in Columbus,
Ohio, in a boarding house on Twelfth Avenue across from Ohio State University,
down the street from a bar called Street Scene, and a coffee shop called
Insomnia’s, and yeah I was in my twenties living in Columbus, Ohio in a
boarding house on Twelfth Avenue…
It was a dark, confusing time in my life. Writing Wasteland was cathartic. And fifteen
years later, I was still processing this information, this life experience that
didn’t make any sense to me, but yet there it was smack in the middle of my
life.
I mean, I never drove a cab, I never had stigmata, I never
worked on a nuclear reactor, I never had a woman I loved die on me, I was never
on mind-altering drugs, and all of that’s in Wasteland. I was just really lonely and really lost, and I think
that is the ten percent of the book that is true, that inspired me to write the
thing.
Banana Sandwich
came out of a fifteen year off and on career delivering pizzas. In addition,
I’ve known people that have really struggled with bipolarism, and I wanted to
know more about how they dealt living with that particular disorder. The
purpose of the book is mainly to bring awareness to that disorder.
Breath: An American
Story comes out of dealing with my grandmother’s death and a conversation I
had with a young college senior, and how she was considering a graduate degree,
but her parents weren’t going to support her, and lots of personal questions
with my wife about today’s economy, the demise of the American small town—how the so-called
American Dream is playing out in today’s world. Stuff that just doesn’t make sense for me, stuff that I think
doesn’t make sense for a lot of people. And I really want to speak to that. I
don’t think I answered any profound questions, but the people who have read
early drafts, they’ve asked me, “How did you get my town so right?” Well, I
didn’t get their town right, I got my hometown right, but what’s going on
there, the lack of jobs, the take over of Main Street by large corporations, the minimum wage paying part-time employment
opportunities, the dearth of higher education, the idea that we can still pull
ourselves up by our bootstraps and everything will be okay—that stuff is going
on everywhere. I wanted to address it.
- What
sort of atmosphere do you need to write?
Authors all the time talk about their writing caves. What
the hell is that? Seriously, I have two kids, a wife, a small three bedroom
where you can hear everything, two part-time jobs, my home office is in a dank
basement shared with the cat litter box.
The ideal atmosphere to write is when I have a pen and a
piece of paper and five minutes. And my
six-year-old can be screaming, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” and my fourteen-year-old
can be telling some crazy story that happened at school, and “Dad! Can I stay
over at so-and-so’s house?” And trips to dance rehearsal and orchestra recitals
and let’s go to Wal-Mart one more time,
please because we need toilet paper—AGAIN.
When everyone is out of the house and it’s quiet, you bet
your little butt I’m taking a nap.
My wife is incredibly supportive. Never mind she’s in school
full-time as well, and oh yeah, did I mention she writes too?
When I was in graduate school, the University of Wyoming
gave me a really nice office on the fourth floor of Hoyt Hall. It had a window
that overlooked Prexy’s Pasture, and I could look out and watch the students
rush from class to class. And I could go down the hall a ways and talk to Brad
Watson who has written some awesome stories himself, or my next door office
neighbor was poet and essayist David Romtvedt, and I was just surrounded by
these amazing people.
I often imagine myself in that office writing. It’d be the
perfect absolute perfect writing cave. I’d have some coffee going, a bit of
music, I’d chat a bit with the other writers’ that reside in the building, and I’d compose the
all-time great American novel, bigger and better than The Great Gatsby.
This, of course, never happened. I did a lot of homework. Finished off reading
an entire book on spatial theory, and read The
Rape of the Lock, and lots of pedagogy stuff too. And this kind of work,
it’s enjoyable and good for me. But perfect writing environment? Doesn’t exist.
It’s work, and it’s passion, and if you don’t have either, you’re not going to
write.
- What
is your all time favorite book?
This is an unfair question and I refuse to answer directly.
It’s like asking a coffee addict what their favorite coffee is. Sure as hell
isn’t Sanka Instant—but, you know, some days…Sanka Instant, I have that memory
of dating my wife and meeting her parents, and that’s what they had in the
house, and that instant coffee taste brings back that exact memory. How can I
give up Sanka?
Can’t. Won’t do it.
I’ve read those crappy ten cent paperback books you get at
library book sales because not a single patron is reading them, and you wonder
how in the hell they even got published, yet here I am reading them. So obviously I’m not the only one enjoying
them.
So my favorite book? Right now? This instant? Moby Dick, because that’s what I’m
reading right now.
- Who is
your all time favorite character that is not your own.
This is just as an unfair question as the one that preceded
it. Who is my all-time favorite character?
Geesh.
I’ll be honest, I don’t have one.
Archie in Zadie Smith’s White
Teeth—I like him because he just bumbles along. Things happen to him; he does not happen to things. The
unnamed narrator in Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow
Lines because though I’ve never been to India or London, the character
thinks like me. Or, I think like him? Oscar Wao in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because he is pathetic and
the antithesis to The Heart of Darkness—“beautiful”
is the last word of the novel instead of “the horror.”
You know, seriously, I could keep going. How about Rose of
Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath? That
last scene, her husband left her, her baby died, and she finds a homeless man
near death of starvation, and she literally nurses him back to life.
Or you know, Frodo who is confronted with an adventure so
much bigger than himself, yet he goes forward. Dresden, because he’s fun. Harry
Potter. Miss Havisham, Anne of Green Gables, Antonia, The Cat in the Hat,
Leopold Bloom, Paddington Bear, Hamlet.
- Who is
your favorite character of your own creation?
This question is by far easier! Sometime ago, I wrote a
short story by the name of, “Neighborhood Mums,” and it was the first story I
ever published. And the narrator, nameless, steps outside to walk his dog, and
he notices the mums from his front flowerbed have been stolen. So, he goes through the neighborhood searching
for these stolen flowers. And he’s this incredibly racist person. Hates
everyone. Yet, and I can’t tell you anymore because then I give away the entire
story.
But I like him because readers have either one of two
reactions toward him. Either visceral hatred or complete utter love. But then
too, the ones who hate him admit, reluctantly, that you have to like the guy.
And the ones who love him admit, reluctantly, that he’s kind of an ass.
As a writer, if you can illicit that kind of reaction from
your readers, one of hate and love at the same
time, that’s an incredible feeling. I’ve had moments when I’ve made people literally
cry after they’ve read something
I’ve written, I’ve had people laugh out loud, and I’ve had people walk away shaking their heads. And those are
all very good indicators that I’ve done my job as entertainer. But to illicit
two opposite emotions in the same person at the same time about the same piece
of writing—that’s pro-writer stuff.
But, if you asked me
how I managed that, how I created that on the page, I couldn’t tell you. Luck?
Probably luck. I’d like to be able to do it again, for sure though.
- When
did you decide to become a writer?
I have no idea. I have always written stories. I can’t
remember a time I didn’t write. My wife tells this story about me, about us in
Nebraska. We were living in a really crappy apartment. It was always cold, we
were so incredibly poor, had a baby that was just a few months old, and we had
the computer in the basement, and my wife tells me she remembers me down there
typing away wearing a coat and fingerless gloves. I don’t remember that.
I mean, I remember splitting a McDonald’s Big Breakfast
between the three of us, my wife selling blood for money, pawning our wedding
rings almost on a weekly basis, freelancing for three newspapers, working all
the time. There was a meat packing place I worked at; I’d push the cow carcasses off the trucks and
into a refrigerated warehouse for processing. I mean, that stuff I remember,
like dragging my daughter to an interview for a piece I was doing for one of
the newspapers, and I had to take her ‘cause my wife was at work and I couldn’t
afford a babysitter.
But writing in the basement with fingerless gloves? Yeah, no
recollection, but that’s because writing is just something I’ve always done. No
matter what.
- Where
are you from?
Originally, this little town: New Knoxville, Ohio. No one
knows where it is at. Because, you
know, I mean small. My graduating class was eighteen people, and one was an
exchange student. The next
biggest town was St. Marys, and that town you may have actually heard of
because it made NPR news a few summers back. Pollution problem with the lake.
The lake has killed dogs and sent people, who thought it was okay to go
swimming, to the hospital. I mean, back in the day, I’d start a fire in one of
the shelter houses out by the lake, and sit there through the night listening
to the water against the rocks, the crackle of the driftwood I had gathered for
the fire—I mean, we’d all do that.
We moved back to St. Marys for a while about five years ago.
My daughter had this white bathing suit and we took her to the lake beach. It
was the last time we went. She came out of the water, and her bathing suit had
turned brown, and we could never get it cleaned. It was shortly after that that
they put up no swimming notices, then no fishing notices. I worked at this small gas station
convenient store third trick, and fishermen would come in and tell stories of
catching fish with their organs on the outside of their bodies, or fish with a
random third eyeball. I don’t know if those tales are true or not; they never
made the news.
Now, when we go home to visit family, we drive past the lake
to look at it, and those drives feel like funeral dirges.
- Why
do you write?
I don’t know.
I mean, this is fundamentally a very different question than
“What inspires me to write?” Lot’s of stuff inspires me. But I’m not sure why I
write.
I know that when I don’t write, I get cranky. Like a smoker
who doesn’t have his cigarette. The coffee
addict who decides one day just to quit caffeine.
If I had to give up writing, what would I do? Devote myself
to Facebook, TV? I already do enough of that. Writing is what I do. Who I am.
- What’s
the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?
Go back to school; go to the
University of Iowa. Got that advice from Patricia Wrede.
- What’s
the worst thing someone has ever said about your work?
I got a two star review for one of
the short stories included in Wasteland.
The short story in question is Pills and Cigarettes, and it’s about a guy who
is coming to terms with his sexuality, and if you read T.S. Eliot’s poem Wasteland, well a lot of that poem is
about sex too. The headline on the comment is “when vanity publishing goes
wrong.”
And the Amazon reviewer also
wrote, “Bargdill did a serious disservice to Eliot with this title.”
I’m not sure why the person wrote
what they did. It felt like they had an ulterior motive because in the review,
the person says they read through the available free pages and didn’t like what
they read, but bought it anyway, and the story only got worse from there. When
I read that, I thought, well, if you didn’t like the first few pages, why did
you even bother to buy the rest of it?
I was really angry after initially
reading the review. I can take criticism, but I really wondered why they wrote
what they wrote; it felt like a personal attack.
I had another Wasteland reader email me and tell me I needed Jesus in my life,
and that if I wanted, they could help me with that. And I thought, did you read
the book, because the whole thing is about redemption in a hopeless world.
- Has your writing ever been compared to another,
famous author? If so, who?
Cormac McCarthy. I’ve read The Road and No Country for Old Men, and I don’t really see the comparison. Banana Sandwich, I was told, reads like
the book Go Ask Alice, and I didn’t
even know what that book was, but was written in the 1970s by Beatrice Sparks
in the form of a diary of an anonymous teenage girl who gets caught up in
drugs.
I find the comparisons ultimately
humbling.
- What inspires you to write when you hit a block?
I don’t hit blocks. Authors all
the time talk about writer’s block, and how it’s messing with their lives. The
thing is, I teach writing and writer’s block doesn’t exist. It’s an excuse. I
don’t remember who said it, but when you can’t create, you should simply then
work.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. There
are times when I stare at the blank page for hours, but I also know that is my
subconscious working out problems. There are also periods of time, long
stretches of not writing, but then that’s when I’m thinking about my next
project, mulling it over. And I have my problem children. Yellow Mountains of God keeps stalling out, but only because the
story keeps getting more complicated, and I keep struggling with it, keep
working at it. The plot is there, and I could write it straight through, but if
I didn’t allow myself to struggle with the writing, the story wouldn’t be any
good. It’d be just okay. And I’m not about being just okay.
- What advice would you pass on to new authors/young
authors?
The industry has really changed. I
sent out my first pieces of writing when I was sixteen. At that time, you sent
stuff out directly to publishers and or agents and hoped. There were official
gate keepers back then. Now, publishing is in free-fall. Independent authors
all over were making lots of money with Amazon, until recently when Amazon
decided to change how it paid out royalties, and now these people have to find
real 9 to 5 jobs. Writing is a penniless, thankless job. It’s difficult to get noticed,
to gain an audience for your work. Don’t let Amazon or any publisher be your
single point end game. Figure out who you are as a person. Don’t give up your
day job. Don’t stop writing. Love what you do. Struggle willingly; it’s where
inspiration comes from. Be thankful for every opportunity. Live passionately.
- What is the best thing someone has said about your
work?
- And last, but not least, something really random:
~ What is your dream vacation?
To have one.
~ What’s your favorite alcoholic drink?
Martini.
~ What is your favorite meal?
Pizza.
~ Motorcycle or SUV?
My wife won’t let me have a motorcycle.
~ Real books or eReader?
Yes.
Steve, you're awesome! Thanks for such an engaging interview! As promised, links and excerpts below:
About Steve Bargdill
Steve Bargdill received his bachelor's
in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University
of Iowa December 2012. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Dayton,
Columbus, Troy, St. Marys, and New Knoxville as well as West Branch
Iowa, Lincoln Nebraska, Muncie Indiana, and currently lives in
Laramie Wyoming with his wife and two children.
Since 1998, Steve has mainly worked in
the pizza industry. However, he has also worked as a day laborer, a
truck driver, and a beat reporter for a couple of newspapers. He has
worked at grocery stores, gas stations, and convenient stores. As a
teenager, his dad forced him to stack lumber, which built character.
He recently earned his Master of Arts in English from the University
of Wyoming in May 2015. Currently he teaches developmental writing at
Great Bay Community College in New Hampshire.
He believes literature weaves through
our everyday lives and that stories explain who we are as a society.
Links for Steve Bargdill:
Twitter: @stevebargdill
WASTELAND SUMMARY:
Jack had the
perfect life until his wife died of brain cancer. Confused and lost,
alone, Jack found himself living in a boarding house in Columbus,
Ohio not knowing why or how he got there.
Told through six inter-related short
stories, the reader is confronted with plagues, aliens, serial
killers, and ageless fortune tellers. Cab drives through the middle
of the night, burying the dead on Highway Eighty, hearing the voice
of God in a foxhole, demons emerging from mirrors, and mysterious
angels strung out on heroin.
Filled with
drugs, sex, and cigarettes, Wasteland is loosely based off T.S.
Eliot’s poem of the same name and takes you through the night
streets of 1990s Columbus.
BLURB:
They whispered to each other,
“Beautiful.”
ABOUT BANANA SANDWICH
Christmas Carol Madison lives in a van
and is bipolar schizophrenic. She’s in love with her coworker and
decides maybe he’s worth getting her life together. She takes her
medication. She visits regularly with her probation officer and
therapist alike. Carol’s new path suggests normality and hope, a
college degree, a career, a family. But when she decides to be
better, it is the city that goes insane: her ex-boyfriend murders her
roommate. To fight back, she must decide how she to live her life.
---
“These nights are very dark. I hear
all the sounds. My heart beat, the blood pulsing through my wrists,
it is like the hollow echo broadcast from the rings of Saturn, empty
and surging and crying out for someone to listen.”
Excerpt:
CHAPTER
ONE
You
can't order a pizza by banana phone. It can't be done. Pick up any
banana and put it to your ear and you get dial tone. Simple as that.
Just doesn't work. Now if you want to call Jupiter, a banana phone is
your ticket. I knew a guy once who lined his hat with aluminum foil
to stop the outer space transmissions from reaching his brain. Which
is just crap. Everyone knows aluminum foil isn't going to do the
trick. You got to use something like Adamantium, which you can't use
anyway because it's a made-up comic book metal bonded to Wolverine's
skeleton. Which brings me back to the banana phone, because Wolverine
kind of looks like a banana if you think about it. I mean, his
costume is yellow, right? And bananas are yellow, except for when
they over-ripen. Then, they are black. And the only thing aluminum
foil is going to block are the government transmissions—and those
are boring anyway. They tell you to do stuff like mow the lawn, wash
dishes, buy more stuff, rinse your mouth with fluoride fortified
mouthwash. It's the outer space transmissions that are interesting.
Once, I received instructions on how to build a warp drive for my
van. And the line of work I'm in, that comes in real handy.
I used to work for
this upscale pizza shop. They tried to be all fancy with artichoke
and broccoli toppings. Those whole wheat and gluten free crusts. I
quit because they always gave me crap about my piercings. Or maybe I
was fired. Yeah, that's how it really went down. I was fired. So I
went to work for this other pizza shop, but we don't do much except
sit on the store steps smoking blunts and ordering delivery from
Domino's. Jordan brought in a bunch of bananas one night too. He
picked one up and put it to his ear and tried to order Domino's. But
like I said, it can't be done because all you get is dial tone. What
is truly annoying is when you go to the Wal-Mart in the middle of the
night, and you're going through the produce section. Inevitably,
there is that person wearing a bath towel as a dress and still in
hair curlers, his butt crack hanging out like clothes on a line. They
have that whole display stand of bananas. Normally, the bananas are
still green. Those don't work. The yellow ones work fine, and when
five or six bunches of yellow bananas all start ringing at the same
time, you don't know which one to answer first. Sometimes, I put a
banana to each ear and carry on a couple of conversations at one
time, which is easier to do than you might think.
This is how it all
started too. I was in the Wal-Mart examining cumquats because who the
heck buys cumquats? Why does the Wal-Mart even have cumquats? It's
the Nineties, and I don't know anyone who eats cumquats except total
health nut freaks. I'm certainly not a health nut freak. Give me a
good juicy medium rare steak any day. Baked potato with cheddar
cheese, chives, and tons of sour cream: that is a meal. Not some
deformed looking orange. I'm standing in the middle of the Wal-Mart
produce section examining the cumquats, but in actual reality, I
avoid as much eye contact with the guy wearing the towel. Then the
bananas started ringing. I looked around searching for a hidden
camera. I remember that show by Peter Funt in the Eighties, Candid
Camera. I asked the towel-dress guy if he heard the bananas ringing.
He didn't say anything to me. I asked again and he said ‘No.’
I heard them. All
of them. I didn't know which one to pick up. I answered one, because
what are you going to do, right? ‘Hello,’ I said, and they all
stopped ringing.
‘Carol? This is
Jupiter.’
I think maybe
Jordan was teasing me when he tried to order Domino's from a banana
phone. I like Jordan like chocolate syrup on vanilla ice cream, but
sometimes, he can be an ass.
