You have to hear his voice to fully understand, I think. I was scrubbing the scum off of a toilet (yellow gloves, bristly scrubbing device in hand) and listening to a podcast when Bradley Sands came on. At first he seemed timid; worried that any sound was coming from his lips at all. Then he builds. There was a weight he gave certain words, certain phrases. There was a sudden momentum. Every sentence came out like a story unto itself. I was pulled into something of a hypnosis. The pain of toilet scrubbing diminished.
Sand’s stories are like hard candies. There is a nostalgia about them, a feeling that needs to be sucked out slowly. As you read you’re taken to a place unreal; always a place you want to stay and look around. He writes both of wonder and atrocity. His metaphors are the “Oh my God” kind.
We sat down with Bradley to talk about writing, his story The Wonders of the Human Body (up at Metazen today) and his latest book of fiction My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew said Yes! published by Raw Dog Screaming Press.
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Metazen: Just to get a little context can you tell us where you are? What are you doing right after this interview? What’s the last thing you ate?
Bradley: I’m in the computer lab at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. This is where I attend grad school. I work here a few hours a week, so after this interview, I will be sitting in this chair some more. I also plan to reread a book I’m writing that I haven’t worked on in a long time. The semester is over, so I finally have time to get back into it. Also, the last thing I ate was a bagel with cream cheese.
Metazen: You’re considered an absurdist, a surrealist and irrealist and a bizarro writer. Which of these do you identify with most? Is it a good thing that they are so often lumped together as literary terms?
Bradley: I identify most with absurdism. My work may often be “surreal,” but it has little to do with the Surrealist movement from the 1920s. Although the work that I most enjoy can usually be classified under absurd and surreal, which is what I publish in my lit journal, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. Also, most people won’t know what I mean if I mention irrealism or bizarro, although I enjoy being involved with the bizarro fiction scene. It’s a good time. And yes, I think the lumping is a good thing. A lot of authors have an aversion to it, but it makes it easier for me to describe my writing. And I don’t specifically aim for any of these categories when I write. I just do whatever I want, and if the a category fits, then it fits.
Metazen: You’ve said that some of your first characters were sentient coffee stains on your teacher’s shirts. Why did you decide to go the route of absurdist? When did you figure out that’s what you were?
Bradley: I don’t think I chose it. More like it chose me. And my memory is really foggy about when I realized I wrote absurdism. Maybe when I stumbled across The New Absurdist website back when it was thriving and found other like-minded authors?
Metazen: When is the last time you had a dream about roller skating? We know you’ve had them before. Do you pin any significance to your dreams?
Bradley: I think it’s been a while, unless it happened recently and I didn’t remember upon waking. I’m not fond of dreams. I seem to have a lot of nightmares, which cause me to clench my jaw and wake up with a bad headache that lasts for the rest of the day. I used to punch things in my sleep, now I take it out on my teeth. I liked it better when I punched. Back in high school, I had lucid dreams every night. That was nice. It rarely happens now.
Metazen: Can you tell us about My Heart Said No, but the Camera Crew Said Yes! ?
Bradley: It’s a story collection of humorous absurd/surreal fiction. The stories are set in worlds that follow dream logic, but don’t exist in dreams. Because other people’s dreams are boring. I like to think the stories occur in alternate realities that do not follow the laws of physics. Instead, reality is only restricted by the rules of grammar.
The book came to be when I realized it had been a while since my first novel, It Came from Below the Belt, had been published. So acting upon the urge to publish a new book, I chose the best short stories written prior to my current minimalist phase, pasted them into a Microsoft Word document, and queried Raw Dog Screaming Press about the possibility of publishing the collection.
Metazen: You said a few years ago that you had moved into a new phase of writing; a more plot driven style. Are you still in that phase with My Heart Said No?
Bradley: No, My Heart Said No consists of my earlier work. I’ll talk a little about that: With these stories, I wanted readers to be able to pick any random sentence and be delighted by it, even if they don’t know its context. I don’t like to waste a word, so the sentences are condensed and crammed with gags and word play and absurd situations. It was tough to do it this way because I would rewrite each sentence until it was nearly perfect, and I often spent an entire hour on one sentence. Plus it makes focusing on plot and character development almost impossible.
So sometime later, author Carlton Mellick III mentored me through the process of writing a novella called Cheesequake Smash-up, which appeared in the second (or blue) edition of The Bizarro Starter Kit. He forced me to focus on plot and character development, and I had to radically change my writing style, making my writing process a lot less obsessive and a lot more pleasurable. It was a great experience. Soon after, I discovered the writing of Tao Lin, and his work affected me like a virus. My prose became more minimalistic. I was afraid my writing was too similar to his. But eventually, I think I shrugged off the resemblance and found my second “voice.”
Metazen: A lot of people are talking about rhythm in the new book. What is that rhythm?
Bradley: I focus a great deal on the musicality of my prose, so I suppose they’re talking about that. I like my sentences to “sing.”
Metazen: Last August, on Twitter you said “Almost finished writing the dumbest scene that I have ever written. It is brilliant. May be the dumbest scene anyone has ever written.” How do you deal with the aesthetics of your writing? How do you draw lines between what you see as literary and what is not when it comes to absurdism?
Bradley: I think it only really matters as far as determining where to send a piece, otherwise its totally inconsequential. Like my prose poems are “literary,” because poetry is more weird-friendly, while my longer work is “genre,” because literary fiction journals and publishers are not weird-friendly. But then most genre mags are pretty conventional, so I’m always stumped as far as where to send my stories, which is a problem I don’t really have as far as full length books. Also, I occasionally write things that I would consider incredibly long prose poems, which other people would probably consider stories.
Metazen: According to Urban Dictionary the name Bradley Sands is “a substitution for the phrase “your dick” in the phrase “I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick”. Are you aware of this euphemism?
Bradley: It’s fallout from the online anthology, Bradley Sands is a Dick, which I co-edited with Andersen Prunty, although he did most of the work. We came up with the idea when we were drunk. At least I know I was. The idea was for every story in the anthology to be called “Bradley Sands is a Dick.” The Urban Dictionary definition was from a story submission. It was a good story, but Andersen rejected it because it also “defined” other authors from the bizarro fiction scene and he didn’t want to risk anyone getting offended.
Metazen: You’ve said before that you’re a fan of disturbing movies. Is there a most disturbing film in your opinion? Did you have a tipping point?
Bradley: That sounds like something I would have said like a decade ago. I can’t recall saying it recently, although maybe I’m totally wrong. I sought out disturbing movies when I was younger, maybe because I lived a sheltered lifestyle and wanted to escape. But now that I’ve experienced the “real world,” they don’t appeal to me as much. Although I’m really interested in black humor and cult film, so “disturbing” often goes hand in hand with “interesting.” I wish it wasn’t like that for me. Usually I just want to watch something that will make me happy. There are some movies I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time, but haven’t gotten around to it yet because I don’t feel like getting depressed. Like Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist for example. Most disturbing film? Errr…maybe Salo? That’s pretty much everyone’s stock response. There are probably movies that are a lot more disturbing that I’m forgetting. And maybe either Irreversible or I Stand Alone by Gaspar Noe? I think it’s also important that a disturbing movie is actually “good.” I don’t think I really have a tipping point. I can watch anything as long as I get something out of it. I guess boredom is my tipping point.
Metazten: Aside from writing and editing you also teach. What’s the pedagogy to being a writing teacher?
Bradley: Well, I consider myself a “student teacher” because I’m still learning. I feel like I’m making it up as I go along and I received very little training from my school. Last semester, I taught writing at a rehab center. Right now, I’m teaching a weekly class at a high school. It’s on reading and writing absurdist fiction. I only have two more sessions left. Next month, I’m teaching a similar class for undergraduates during Naropa’s summer writing program. I’m trying to teach my students everything I know about writing in a short span of time. So they’ll get a jump-start on things it took me years to learn. I mostly do in-class writing exercises and assign reading and writing assignments for workshopping. I find it extremely difficult to engage high school students in class discussion since they’re so used getting lectured to, so I’m looking forward to teaching college students.
Metazen: What else do you have going on? What’s next for Bradley Sands?
Bradley: I have three other books that should be coming out this year: Disappointing Sophomoric Effort (novella collection featuring the same character in each novella) through Afterbirth Books, TV Snorted My Brain (novel) through Evil Nerd Empire, and Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy (prose poetry and short-short story collection) through a new publisher called Lazy Fascist Press. As I mentioned earlier, I’m currently working on a new book and hoping to finish it before the summer writing program begins. It’s about an action star who goes insane after he starts to believe he’s the character who he portrays in his movies.
