An Interview with Craig Buchner

Born and raised in the Adirondack Mountains in New York, Craig has lived in Idaho, Oregon, Tokyo, and today he calls Charlotte, North Carolina, his home. All of these places have greatly influenced his work. He is the author of the short story collection Brutal Beasts and the novel Fish Cough.

Craig is also the recipient of the AWP Intro Journals Award, and his fiction and poetry have appeared in Tin House, Baltimore Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

What do Dave Eggers and Cormac McCarthy have in common? This seemingly unlikely duo were early inspirations, and in my twenties, what stood out to me in both were their distinctive writing styles and how they explored the depths of the human condition, mostly in its rawest form. The way that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Blood Meridian hit that same emotional chord, dispelling the illusion that life is easy or comfortable or just. It opened an entirely new way of thinking about and seeing the world. While both works burst with pain and cruelty, it wasn’t lost on me that beauty was never forsaken to those authors. Amidst all the agony, charged poetic moments appeared and blazed ever so brightly. I still can’t shake the image in Blood Meridian of the judge, after committing heinous cruelty against the character known only as the kid, as he dances and fiddles, naked – like an enormous baby – bowing and laughing and sashaying. The moment grabs hold of the reader and asks them to consider this: there is a warlike, violent nature present in everyone, rationalized in some form or another to become acceptable enough. It’s that wonderful balancing act that I hope to capture in my own work.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

Like most writers I know, I made a living for nearly a decade as a college professor. But for financial reasons – sadly – I shifted gears. Why sadly? I loved teaching. I loved wanting to be a teacher. I still have these technicolor memories of reading McSweeney’s in the early aughts and wearing my corduroy blazer with elbow patches imagining how extraordinary it would be to teach a creative writing course at a university. But the reality was not as cool, and even when I left teaching, about a decade ago, the writing was on the wall that it was going to get harder and harder to make ends meet. I never wanted to get rich, but I did want to maybe buy a newer used car that wasn’t prone to breaking down or afford a small home. At that time, more and more fiction writers were leaving academia and moving into corporate copywriting, which I dabbled in, but where I found my footing was in technical writing and proposal writing. These jobs weren’t and still aren’t hip, which meant they were far less competitive and often paid better than creative copywriting. It felt like a life hack no one else knew about, and surprisingly, this type of writing introduced me to new forms that I could deconstruct for my fiction. I learned the mechanics of list-writing and creating instruction manuals, and I’d pull elements of these out and include them in my fiction, which gave my stories an experimental edge. You can see these writing techniques throughout my work, but most strikingly in my short stories.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

Brutal Beasts is the name of my short story collection, and Fish Cough is the title of my novel. Brutal Beasts is a strange collection that marries rural, working-class hardships with the occasional otherworldly phenomenon – like zombie babies or the appearance of giant, killer insects. The name of the book was taken from the title story, “Made by Brutal Beasts,” in which one of the main characters is slowly transforming into a beast during her pregnancy. This idea of our own beastliness is interesting to me. I think we are all shaped by traditional, old-fashioned, sometimes archaic ways of thinking. Was I raised by wolves? Not technically, but if you look at parenting in the 1980s versus today, it’s vastly different. And honestly, the way I’m raising my daughter, as progressive as it seems, will boggle her and her peers when they are my age. Because we’re all – including my characters – just products of our environment and our biology, struggling to survive, Brutal Beasts seemed an appropriate title for the collection. Fish Cough, on the other hand, was part ode to the famous William Faulkner chapter in As I Lay Dying, where he writes, “My mother is a fish,” and a Snapple cap fact that plays an important part in my novel. Both titles, though, came relatively quickly.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

Holding Brutal Beasts for the first time was absolutely amazing. Decades of work brought together. But then there was this wholly unexpected response of relief and liberation. Like I’d been chained to it. To unpack that, I began writing the stories that would comprise Brutal Beasts in 2005, nearly seventeen years before the collection would be published. Prior to publication, the collection underwent over a year of formal editing. When it was finally out in the world, it felt like a burden had been lifted, and I was free of this project. Honestly, I was shocked to feel that way. I love the stories in Brutal Beasts dearly, but I had been sitting with them for years and years and years. Each story was a timestamp of a different version of me and where I was mentally at that point in my life. By the time Brutal Beasts was published, I was thoroughly ready for a new project, the next adventure.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

I’m a big fan of the books and music blog Largehearted Boy, and I love reading the author playlists – this goes back two decades – so funny enough, I had created a playlist on Spotify for Brutal Beasts when it was published. These are a few songs from that list with some additions.

Modest Mouse – “Wild Pack of Family Dogs”

Sturgill Simpson – “Turtles All the Way Down”

Guided by Voices – “My Valuable Hunting Knife”

Two Handed Engine – “No Destination”

Wednesday – “Chosen to Deserve”

Purple Mountains – “That’s Just the Way That I Feel”

Smog – “Let’s Move to the Country”

Flaming Lips – “Buggin’”

Fiona Apple – “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

Brutal Beasts examines working-class and marginalized rural communities and delves deeply into the lives of down-and-out characters, so I guess my ideal reader would appreciate stories that portray the gritty realities of life, exploring themes of poverty, substance abuse, and redemption (or rather efforts towards redemption). While reading these themes doesn’t always sound like a light-hearted way to spend a chill Saturday evening, I try to write in a poetic style with some degree of urgency, like Toni Morrison and William Kennedy, to keep the stories engaging and beautiful. There’s also an unexpectedness to the stories, something I learned from reading George Saunders, mostly with the strange and supernatural elements that make my stories fun, I think.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Personally, I view writers as the most important minds of our collective culture. Who is more influential than Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickinson, Orwell, Austen, and on and on and on? I recognized this early in my life, and I wanted to be a part of it in some small way – if I could. I’ve spent the last two decades working towards this goal. From my MFA at the University of Idaho to editing the literary journal Fugue, to being a reader at Tin House, to publishing my own stories and poems, to teaching fiction at the collegiate level, and ushering two of my own books into the world. For me, to have contributed to this literary ecosystem was a dream come true. When Kirkus Reviews called Brutal Beasts one of the best indie books of the year, I mean, that type of recognition was, and honestly still is, unfathomable to me. I’m a kid from a no-name town of 3,600 people in rural upstate New York where the current per-capita income is $33,000 per person (up from $16,000 when I left). I was never supposed to write a book. I was never supposed to make it. In communities like the one I was raised in the deck is stacked against you. But here we are. I guess knowing that it can be done, growing beyond what was visible to me, is something I’m really proud of.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

There are moments in your life when you hit pause and reevaluate literally everything. Last year, my mother rather suddenly died. It knocked me sideways. Up until that point, I’d been working on a novel, but when she passed, I couldn’t sit down for the long stretches of aloneness that were required for a novel. Being inside my own head was the last place I wanted to be. But at my core, I knew I still had to write something to convey what I was feeling, what I was learning through this grief. Since sitting still for long wasn’t an option, I committed to poetry. Almost every day for a few months I wrote a poem. Soon I had sixty or so poems that reflected this newly molten version of myself. I took those poems, and I compared them to ones I’d written a decade prior to her death. I was a reckless version of myself, one who seemed to be hellbent on self-destruction. Together, these two groups of poems reflect two entirely different versions of the same person, but I love the way they talk to one another – how we can all hold balance between chaos and clarity. I’m currently finalizing this poetry manuscript and will be shopping it around to publishers soon. After that, I have every intention of returning to the novel I’d alluded to earlier. Like most of my fiction it’s place-specific, and a post-apocalyptic Charlotte, North Carolina, will be the focus.

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