Ryan W. Bradley is prolific. He’s a publisher, writer, editor, columnist husband and father. Not an easy combination to pull off in the creative world. He has a novel, Code for Failure coming out in 2012 from Black Coffee Press and a slew of prose and poetry all over the interweb. Oh, and he’s Alaskan.
We sat down with Ryan to talk about life, writing and his story, Clean Baby Girl published on metazen today. The story can be found here.
Metazen: Just to get a little context, where are you write now as you write this? What was the last thing you ate? What will you do right after this interview?
Ryan: I am sitting on my couch. My family and I just got back from dinner at my folks’ house, where we had a spaghetti dinner followed by some delicious strawberries and whipped cream. After this interview is over I will be watching our nearly two year old while my wife reads to our eleven year old before bed. Then we will sit down and watch TV for a couple hours. Then my wife and the two year old will go to bed and I will stay up to 1) finish putting together a proposal for my full-length poetry collection that a publisher recently requested, 2) read more in Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, and 3) if I can still keep my eyes open maybe get a bit of writing done.
Metazen: Your new story on Metazen Clean Baby Girl is about a bad boyfriend purchase. How true is this story? Can you tell us about how this story was written and came to be?
Ryan: This story isn’t even close to true. I’m a thoughtful gift purchaser, and I can’t remember ever giving someone a gift that they had a negative reaction to. And I’m also married to a woman who would never react with such unfounded anger, but that’s probably because we don’t have any latent issues with one another like Beth and the narrator. This story actually came about because of an article written by my good friend, and fantastic writer, Paula Bomer. She wrote something (I can’t even remember the exact details any longer) about the names of perfumes. I was at work at the time and it was slow. I found a very long list of perfume names and stumbled on a perfume called “Clean Baby Girl.” From there the story really wrote itself. Part of the impetus, for me, was certainly the chance to write a sentences like, “Now there’s Clean Baby Girl all over the wall,” without it being something as disturbing as it might imply.
Metazen: You’ve spent a lot of time around a children’s bookstore. How does that kind of job impact your writing?
Ryan: Yes, I was recently laid off because the owner retired and sold the store, but I’d managed a children’s bookstore for two years. For me it was a chance to stop taking myself so seriously. It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn and re-learn a lot in my life. But the frustrations, or sometimes boredom of working in a small retail situation in a town with a slow off-season from a hectic summer tourist season, encouraged me to write with humor, if for no other reason than to entertain myself. It also, along with being a father, taught me it’s okay to write for children, and in fact has resulted in a middle grade novel that I wrote for my older boy and am now shopping around, as well as some thoughts for possible picture books.
Oh, it also taught me that illustrations are awesome, and that it’s a shame more “grown-up” books don’t have them.
Metazen: Talk a bit about yourself as a writer.
Ryan: This is a dangerous question to ask. What I know is this: more than anything I care about the exploration of how we, as people, manage to relate to one another. How we generate bonds and communicate, despite everything that works against such a possibility. To speak slightly less generally, I am really inspired by blue collar jobs and workers. Having pumped gas, painted houses, and worked on a construction crew, I am compelled to tell stories that show the struggle of maintaining human relationships amid the stresses of such jobs/economic positions. I firmly believe the best stories I’ve written to this point are those in the story collection I recently finished putting together. They are all stories that take place in Alaska, the state where I was born and raised, and one of my primary muses. And they all revolve around these sorts of situations and characters. I think you can see reflections of these concerns in “Clean Baby Girl” in that it’s not a situation you would find between two wealthy people, or even two middle-class WASP’s. I think it’s clear that these people are low-middle class economically, at the most, and that they feel the stress of their position every day. I don’t want to call them white trash, but I think it’s not far off.
Metazen: Can you tell us a bit about Sententia?
Ryan: Broadly speaking, Sententia is the new literary journal of Artistically Declined Press, the small literary adventure I co-founded with the aforementioned Paula Bomer. We put out a first issue that I couldn’t be more proud of (in truth it’s one of the proudest achievements of my writing life) and are looking forward to an equally exciting second issue due in the second half of 2010.
We’re open for submissions until June 1, so check out the guidelines and send us something awesome:
http://www.artisticallydeclined.net/guidelines/
Metazen: You were “shamed” earlier this year on HTML Giant for your book collection. Can you redeem yourself here? What are you reading now?
Ryan: It took me a minute to remember what you were referring to, haha. I went in knowing full-well that I would be “shamed.” But I’m a fairly traditional writer and reader of literary fiction and realism, which really isn’t the backbone of the HTML Giant crowd. That said, there were several small press books in the picture, they are often so small that they get lost amid the other books. But, like I said, I knew what I was in for. I’m not afraid to say who my favorite writers are (Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Pete Fromm, Jack Driscoll, Bonnie Jo Campbell, TC Boyle, Ken Sparling, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, etc.) because there are plenty of other voices that I find exciting. But it is generally traditional realism that speaks to me most as a person and as a writer, which doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy small press writers, books, or experimental dealings with language, etc. In fact, I think anyone who has gotten to know me through my writing or my dealings in the “indie” scene would know how supportive I am of anyone who’s in it for the art of writing.
As I mentioned before I am currently reading The Lonely Polygamist. I had the good fortune to work with Udall during my MFA and have been looking forward to this book since he first told me about it a couple years ago. And after that I’ll be reading The Awful Possibilities by Christian TeBordo, whose We Go Liquid I loved.
Metazen: You have a book coming out Code For Failure. It’s a while from publishing, but can you tell us a bit about it?
Ryan: Code for Failure is what I like to call my “gas station” novel. It is loosely based on when I was kicked out of college after my sophomore year. The only job I could get was pumping gas, which is what I did for the next eight months before convincing the university that had booted me to give me another chance. It’s a factotum novel, and somewhat akin to early Bukowski and Kerouac. When I sat down to write the book the device I used to turn that time of my life into an interesting novel was “what if I had done the things that I decided not to do.” So, for example, instead of turning down the opportunity to have sex for money, the narrator in the novel decides to do it. That said, some of the stupid decisions the narrator makes are 100% truthful to stupid stuff I did. I’d say it’s about 50/50 in terms of truth versus fiction, but some of the the things you’d think are made up aren’t and vice versa.
It’s definitely a bit of time (2012) until the book comes out. I’m trying not to get too excited because of that, but I’m also trying to find ways to keep the excitement up!
Metazen: What’s next for Ryan Bradley?
Ryan: This is another question with so many possibilities. In real life my family and I are getting ready to move, and I’m preparing to start a new job. Writing-wise I’ve been focused on finishing projects and really pushing to get them out there. I recently found out I’ll be having a poetry chapbook come out, sometime this summer I believe. It’s called Aquarium. And I’m pushing hard to find a publisher for Glaciers, my Alaskan story collection, which I feel is the book, the first big milestone of what I hope will be a long writing career. Beyond that I’m just going to keep writing and see what happens, and of course keep putting out great books and issues of Sententia through Artistically Declined Press for what I hope will be an equally long time.
Big thanks to Ryan W. Bradley. For more, he blogs here.
