Michael talks with Bud Smith about heavy construction, making time to write, a new revision process involving a typewriter, his upcoming "major label debut," the social aspect of being a writer, Kurt Vonnegut, new projects, and more!
Michael talks with Bud Smith about heavy construction, making time to write, a new revision process involving a typewriter, his upcoming "major label debut," the social aspect of being a writer, Kurt Vonnegut, new projects, and more!
Bud Smith works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is the author of Teenager (forthcoming from Vintage in spring of ’22), Double Bird (Maudlin House, 2018), Dust Bunny City (Disorder Press, 2017), among others. His fiction has been published in The Paris Review, and The Nervous Breakdown. He is also a creative writing teacher and editor.
Podcast theme: DJ Garlik & Bertholet's "Special Sause" used with permission from Bertholet.
Michael Wheaton 00:06
Welcome back to The Lives of Writers, a podcast presented by Autofocus, an online lit mag dedicated to artful autobiographical writing, which you can read today at autofocuslit.com and follow on Twitter and Instagram: @autofocuslit. I'm the publisher and editor of Autofocus, Michael Wheaton. Today on the show, I talk with Bud Smith. Bud Smith works heavy construction and lives in Jersey City. He's the author of several books, including Dust Bunny City, Double Bird, and coming out next year from Vintage the novel, Teenager. His fiction has been published in the Paris Review, The Nervous Breakdown, and a bunch of other places. Alright, let's get to it. This is my conversation with Bud Smith.
Bud Smith 00:55
About five years ago, I was still living in New York City. I was living on 170/3 Street. And I was commuting out of the city every morning, going across the George Washington Bridge, going down to an oil refinery in New Jersey most of the time. It has other plants inside it, like a plastic plant, an acid plant. And just doing various jobs in there, welding, rigging, and working with a crew of guys to build new units, maintain units, demolish units that just need to get torn down. And they pretty much had steady work for us, you know, 40 hours a week for the year, and you'd pretty much get... you have steady work, which is kind of odd for working a union construction job. Typically it's you'll work a job six weeks, eight weeks, and then you might be off work for a month or two. And so you scramble around and you do all kinds of different things. So when I got into doing construction, I always figured, well, this will be cool, built into it, I'll have time to write. And I'll have time to have my job where I make my money. And then I'll have downtime, relaxed downtime, to work on my novels and stuff. And that was a little true in the very beginning. But then I found steady work. And it was great for one reason, but I had to kind of figure out how to do what I wanted it to do and also work this demanding job, physically demanding job.
Michael Wheaton 02:31
So from reading your memoir Work, it was like you got out of high school and you knew you were gonna get into something with your hands and into construction. And so, back then, you knew that you wanted to write even, so you must have been 18, 19, 20.
Bud Smith 02:51
Yeah, I've always loved to read and played in bands when I was younger. And that was very... it was cool to play in bands, good creative outlet, but, as I got a little older, I wanted to do something just on my own, and something that didn't cost any money. Because, you know, you play in bands, and all sudden you're... it just never ends. It's like, Oh, if only I had this amplifier and all this. . . I need a different guitar, and then you're gonna travel to go play music, and you're gonna do this, and it becomes like a money sink. And I thought well, I love reading and I love writing and maybe if I just focus all my creative energy on writing that I might enjoy it more, and I might get more out of it. So so that's what happened.
Michael Wheaton 03:41
Yeah, and I can relate to that. I actually used to play in a band years and years ago, and then I was interested in writing before I was doing that, but kind of toward the end of it when it all started falling apart, that's when I really got into writing and liked that I could be by myself and it could just be kinda mine in a way.
Bud Smith 04:01
Yeah, that's how I felt with writing and was like, Well, this is something I can do alone. I don't need any money to do this. It's something that I can do with just a piece of paper. And if I do great with it, it's just because I put the time in and had the joy to do it.
Michael Wheaton 04:18
And yeah, I know you started writing on your phone a lot, kind of on the job site and just whenever you could get it in.
Bud Smith 04:28
Yeah, I mean that's how it is there on this job site. It's basically I'd have a pickup truck that I would drive around the whole plant and we'd work different jobs in different places. But when it would be break time, I'd go back for coffee break or lunch break and it's just the most raucous place to sit and eat lunch, and everybody's the funniest person you've ever met, and they tell the best stories I've ever heard. And it's just like being around those kind of people, it just fills you with energy and... I really grew to appreciate what a good story is and how it's told by being around guys like that. And they just, they're masters of it, but the thing is it's impossible for me to bring in a laptop. It's impossible for me to bring in a notebook. If I bring in a laptop, all of a sudden, you know, somebody has it, and they've drawn dicks all over it with a Sharpie, or they've... "What's this your diary?" And they've ripped up my notebook and all that so...
Michael Wheaton 05:34
It's kinda like middle school in that way.
Bud Smith 05:36
Yeah, it's middle school, and I love it for that. But I have this supercomputer in my pocket, you know. So just out of necessity I started writing myself long emails of... I would write on my phone... and send it as an email, and just got in the habit of doing that every day, and it was a little hard to do it in the trailer with everybody else, so some some lunches, you go, you sit in the truck by yourself, or go away to the machine shop for a little bit and write by yourself. And yeah it's a little isolating, and you try not to do it too often because you want to be social and not be a punk just getting away from everybody. And you know, my co-workers would see me all the time on my phone and they thought I was like a 12 year old girl texting the entire time..."Who you texting?" I'm like, No, I'm working on a novel right now. And I don't know if it's good, but I'm doing it.
Michael Wheaton 06:32
That's one of the main things about writing on the phone. It's so covert. Like you can just blend in with anyone. Who knows what you're doing? And you kind of feel protected in a way.
Bud Smith 06:46
Well, you're not you're not interfering with anybody if all of a sudden you're sitting there, or God forbid, you had a typewriter or something. Imagine showing up to my job site with a typewriter. But I'm saying like a laptop, even just writing longhand in a notebook. It's just you're intruding on this comfortable space. You're like, Who is this guy? What is it? What are you writing in your little in your diary there, you know. And I know at the end of the day, everybody would get on the line at the turnstiles. And they'd stand on that line, wait to punch out, and then they would get in their cars. And they would try to get out of that parking lot. But they're stuck in there for like another 10 minutes in this line of cars. And I just said like 10 years ago, I just said, I'm not going to do any of that. I'm going to just sit in the trailer. And I'm going to write for 25 minutes, right there. And that's where probably most of my creative work has happened.
Michael Wheaton 07:39
Do you find sometimes when you're really entranced in a project that you have trouble focusing on your actual work, or it's like your physical work is so intense that you kind of have to be present?
Bud Smith 07:48
You have to be present for it. And one of the only things I'm good at is getting in a flow state. I can get lost in what I'm doing. And I don't think or worry about anything else. And it's that way with construction, it's that way with doing creative work. And it's not so much that I think... I don't think my work is exceptional, or there's nothing special about it, but I do have a little pride in the fact that when I'm doing it I can become completely focused really quickly. And so that helps me a lot. It takes me a lot of drafts and editing and rethinking about something again and again and again, until I finally happily land on a good spot with it. But it's just being... it's finding a way to sit down and get lost in it completely again and again.
Michael Wheaton 08:42
And I guess probably the pandemic complicated... you probably weren't able to work for a little while.
Bud Smith 08:47
Well when the pandemic hit March of last year, I was out of work for, I guess, five months or so. And then I wound up going back early September, I think. I was back on the job site and just picked right back up where it was. And that was pretty cool just to be back among people again, because I was just home everyday writing. I retyped my novel Teenager a couple times. And that was really helpful just to have that time to do that. That time though, it was just such a burn-down kind of feeling, you know, so to actually do any kind of really remarkable creative work during that year was... it was doable, but I don't really know too many people who did their best work last year, you know... I kind of like limped through it. But for me, it's kind of like it feels like you're doing shit work and everything's going wrong. But when you look back at something after a month of just, okay, you worked on this for a month with everything you could give to it, it's not as bad as it should be, or it feels like you're not making any progress, but it's all just about coming back to it every day for even just 20 minutes. I found that really helpful. My wife and I, we knew this book was coming out, we knew Teenager was coming out, and that it was pretty much, you know, it had already been bought and it was ready to go. I was just going to kind of be maybe copy-edit a little more. We had all this time. And she said, Well, why don't you read it all to me, because she just wanted something to do every night. So I said, All right. So I started reading. She asked to me read 20 pages of it a night to her. So I was gonna read the whole book to her. And the first night we did it, she said, Oh, that was really good. But what about this, this, this and this, and she kind of gave me some critiques. She had been in the apartment a couple times when I had creative writing workshops here that I do. So she sat in on them. And she heard how all the people talk to each other about the stories. So all of a sudden, she's giving me, Well the things I really liked were this, this and this. She's like, I didn't like this. I didn't like that. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty wild. She's giving me a really good workshop on the opening 20 pages of the novel. So the next day, middle of the pandemic, I mean, this is probably May. I think it was May of that year I decided, well, I take that 20 pages with the notes she gave me and retype it on the typewriter. So that's what I did. And I like to do that because I had turned it from a laptop thing that I just printed out and it feels close to done, then into a typewritten page that you had to do something else to it to get it back, you had to retype it again back into the computer. And I liked making that labor for it. And it really helped me. So we did that every night for I think it was like 14 nights. Read it, she gave notes, I retype the whole thing. And then I had just like 260 pages of typewritten Teenager novel, and then take a break, rest my hands and do it all again back into the laptop. But as I went along, improvising and just really dreaming into it, and trying to still be radical with what it was and not just going through the motions of typing it, like be a little bold with the choices because I always figured it would be pretty easy for the editor just to highlight a paragraph and hit Delete. And then I see the track changes. But when I'm looking at it like something typed on a typewriter versus putting it back into the laptop, it was that whole, like... the whole thing was if it wasn't exciting, or if it wasn't something I wanted to go through that labor of retyping I wouldn't even bother. And that was a really helpful way to edit, re-edit that book in a radical way for myself. I always looked around my apartment, and so many books on my shelves here are all just written so long ago, and they were all written this way. And I wondered what would happen if I did it. And I liked it a lot. But also, I had the time.
Michael Wheaton 13:18
Yeah, so you hadn't done it before really, and I guess time will tell if you tend to do it again with the process, but...
Bud Smith 13:27
I've continued to do it since... that story Violets that The Paris Review took. I did it this way, retyped it a few times on the typewriter, back into the laptop, and I'm doing my new novel this way too. It doesn't help me do anything quicker. But it seems like the work resonates a lot more with me and other people for some reason. It's just that extra time spent with it, I guess. I used to be in a bigger rush with everything when I was younger. But now it's kind of like I realized that I'm just really lucky to be able to have this thing I can go and do and it brings me a lot of joy.
Michael Wheaton 14:09
And so Teenager's coming out next year, right, and that's with Vintage, is it, right?
Bud Smith 14:14
Yeah, it's coming from Vintage.
Michael Wheaton 14:16
So this is like your major label debut.
Bud Smith 14:18
Yeah.
Michael Wheaton 14:20
I mean, you seem to have had a really kind of prolific output with indie presses over the last bunch of years and it seems like, you know, the time's right.
Bud Smith 14:34
I love working with the right editors, whoever they are and usually all the editors I've ever worked with in indie publishing are just the shit. They were great. Just punk rock. Let's do this. They taught me how to write. They taught me the possibilities of how to shape a book and make it what it is. My first publishers were these guys going to an MFA program and they just had gotten drunk and decided, Oh we're gonna... we want to put out someone's book. So I met them just through a funny set of circumstances in New Jersey, and they were going to put the novel out. I was just like, Alright, well let's do this, and I wound up getting an audio recording of them having just a drunken argument about the book for like an hour. And take that and then listen to it and take it to heart and try to make this thing into something. And then learning what sentences can be from these guys who... they were the ones spending the money to go study this stuff, I was just digging a hole with a shovel or something. But I felt so lucky to be able to learn from people who were studying the real shit. I was like, wow, this is... and I still feel incredibly lucky. I tried to really take it seriously and try to learn from people because I just want have maximum fun with this shit. And I think if you learn how to... if you can learn how to do it the way other people... what they've mastered and you can take a little bit from them, then you do yourself a favor I think. You find yourself through studying what's possible. Otherwise it would just be me writing the same stuff over and over again in the same style.
Michael Wheaton 16:25
It's almost impossible to do this racket without other people.
Bud Smith 16:29
It's impossible.
Michael Wheaton 16:31
And you know, as lonely as it can be sometimes on the page--I don't even find it lonely. I don't... it's fun.
Bud Smith 16:39
For me it's a very social act. It's getting my friends together. And my friends in the city, when we get together, and it's just everybody talking about books and movies. And I leave a hangout with these guys witha list of incredible things to go check out, and I feel very lucky. But yeah, I don't know. So the book's coming out with Vintage. I'm working with this really incredible editor. His name is Todd Portnowitz. And he's just, he's incredible. It's been a wild time. I was really surprised to see the... I always was a little worried about, you know... small press where it feels like you can write anything and the content can be as strange and slippery and dark or whatever, that I'd have to like... it becomes Walt Disney or something when it's coming out with a bigger press, but my experience was the opposite of that, actually. Which was surprising.
Michael Wheaton 17:46
Yeah. And so the timing of you finding out about the book being picked up, kind of coincided pretty closely with Violets coming out in The Paris Review. Right?
Bud Smith 18:02
Yeah, it certainly had... the book picked up by Vintage, you know, just happened to... I'm sure that was a big thing, just like oh, this is weird. This guy who works at the trash burning power plant has this story out. So that was a good thing. And I still feel like it all didn't happen. You know?
Michael Wheaton 18:29
It's a big deal, right? That's like something that most people when they start out, they dream of getting something in The Paris Review, right?
Bud Smith 18:36
Yeah, I never did. I thought it was just like ludicrous. Like getting something in there, or like the New Yorker or something. That was never one of my goals or anything. I had read that story at a bar and my friend, he was just like, Hey, do you mind if I send that out to The Paris Review or send it out to this? I was like, Alright, well, go ahead. So he took the story and submitted it.
Michael Wheaton 19:00
Who's this friend? Does he do this a lot?
Bud Smith 19:03
He was working as... editing for a literary agent. And I had an agent at the time who was really cool. She was really wonderful. And this friend of mine, who I'd see like once a week, would go to the movies, go to operas and stuff, real geeky, you know, New York City people stuff, we would go do that. And so he was working as an editor for this literary agent and he saw me read the story. his name is Michael Mungiello. And he said, Hey, listen, I want to send this out for you. Will you let me? And I said, Sure. So you know, I had to kind of make a decision, like well do I stay with with the agent I have now who's really good, really cool, but who maybe would have no interest in ridiculous things like that. I've always kind of like... my friends are all ridiculous, my family's ridiculous. And this is such a good friend of mine, I was like, Wow, it's gonna kind of be like working with my little brother, what's the worst that could happen? So he sent it out and to my surprise, I got off a plane in California about two weeks before the pandemic hit, I got off a plane in San Diego, and there was the email. Oh, they want to publish the story. Get the hell out of here. So that was strange. But yeah you just keep writing and keep writing stories and doesn't matter who publishes the work. It's just this thing you do to keep yourself happy and occupied.
Michael Wheaton 20:47
Yeah, but you know, go back to what we were saying about it being such a social thing. Under the guise of writing being a private thing, it really is a social thing, because you go out and you read, and it connected, and someone wanted to work with you. You know, like, that's how it happened.
Bud Smith 21:05
Well that's how I always edited my stories. And one of the things I really loved about New York City, living there, it was just getting yourself on the hook somehow for these kinds of things. Like they would be literary readings at this bar maybe like 20 minutes north of my house in the Bronx, and kind of get myself on the hook of saying, alright, I’m writing a story that I can read at this bar this Thursday night, and I'm going to write it for the crowd. And I'm going to write it so I can entertain these people who've been drinking and not lose their attention, try to keep it swift and have the content be something that really entertains them and captures their attention. And then it would be this thing where I wrote it, and then you know, you go and read it and you figure out what kind of responses you get. And that's how I would write my stories and my poetry, just with the people in mind. I talked to my friend Michael Bible about this recently, where he was saying there's different kinds of writing, and he thinks his writing and my writing are a little bit similar in just that we're writing down, like, the stories you would tell at the bar, you know, and maybe the content's not all just bar stories, but I'm saying like anecdotes that maybe have some resonance beyond... it's not this thing you take into just a classroom or a museum. It's this thing that's more suited for the family barbecue, or the bar or something where it's just got a little bit of a blurry edge to it, and hopefully you make somebody laugh, or you upset them, but it's not completely refined. But maybe it will become that way.
Michael Wheaton 23:01
Well it kind of reminds me, you know, I mentioned earlier that we would talk about Vonnegut later. As I mentioned to you in that email, I said that I had... reading Work, you know, on page one and two, there's not like Vonnegut all over it, but I felt like when I was reading it, I was like, something about this kind of reminds me of Vonnegut, and then middle of the book you bring up Vonnegut like three pages in a row, kind of like three different mentions, and I was like I knew it. And so I was excited to tell you that I kind of sniffed that out.
Bud Smith 23:39
Yeah, well, the thing I always liked about him, he just reminds me of my relatives who were great storytellers, just great, you know, they could talk about anything and you think about afterwards, and you'd be like, that wasn't even a good story, but it was so good when they told it. And what I always liked about... what I like about his writing, what I like about a lot of people who tell good stories is maybe they don't really have the biggest thing to say, but they know how to balance it in a way. Like if they're going to talk about something that's really heartbreaking, they're also going to make you laugh during it too, because they have to. It's like there has to be that balance or otherwise you're gonna lose them. And that's what I like about about him and people like him, like Scott McClanahan, they do that so well, that oral storytelling thing, but you look back at it later, and you're like, what is that story... what was the point of that, but it it all adds up to something you can't quite put your hands on.
Michael Wheaton 24:45
That's kind of how I feel about a lot of his books where it's like, after I'm done reading it, I can't even tell you what some of it was about, not because it's confusing, but it's because I'm so kind of into the tone and the voice that it's like I would just read him talk about anything.
Bud Smith 25:05
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Michael Wheaton 25:07
I guess that's why some of my favorite things of his are in a way non-literary things like letters and, you know, we both kinda mentioned in the email the prologue to Slaughterhouse Five, where it's just like him kind of taking the barrier of fiction down, and he's just talking to you on the page.
Bud Smith 25:29
He's got this thing in that prologue where it's like, okay, here's page one of my masterpiece, and I didn't know how to do it. And it was really hard, and I've torn this up... 1000s of pages of this, and it's caused me all this anxiety, and I didn't know how to write this book. And so it's just him talking at you about calling people drunk on the telephone, and you start to realize it's like you're getting a call from him late at night, late in the middle of the night, he's drunk on the telephone, and you're reading it, and you keep falling farther into it. And it's like what I just said, He's writing about the atrocity of a massacre and he's writing about how hard it is to write this book about people being firebombed. And before he even gets to the content of the book, where he has a different way, he does that balancing act of like, in Slaughterhouse Five, you're just writing about World War Two people just getting burnt alive. So you have to balance... you have to have these aliens show up who are like shaped like Plumber's Helpers, you have to have this like wacky thing to take the air out of it. Otherwise, it's just going to be so overwhelming. And maybe some other writers can just look that right in the eye. And they'll just say, no, this miserable thing, I'm gonna force you to reckon with it, and we're not going to look away. But a guy like Vonnegut, he just wants the reader to be comfortable, and he wants to be their friend. And he's like, this is hard, what we're going to talk about. So I mean, I'm going to have to make you laugh about something different. I'm going to have to give you something different the laugh about so you can just settle in and relax. Because otherwise, it's just gonna be really painful. And then, of course, there's some writers who I think, when they look that stuff in the eye, they're just incredible in a different way.
Michael Wheaton 27:26
Tell me a bit more about your everyday life now. So you're not in the city anymore, right, or New York City. You're in Jersey now, that's where you're living?
Bud Smith 27:37
Yeah, it's just waking up, maybe like five o'clock in the morning. And just get out the door, get on the road, get to work. And if I'm there a little early, do some reading, do some writing. Everybody shows up. We laugh, try to have fun for a little while, we go out, we work, it's coffee break, back to work, lunchtime. Back to work.
Michael Wheaton 28:02
Somewhere in there, you try to write if you can.
Bud Smith 28:05
If I can. I only do it if I'm really into it. I'm not like one of these religious people with "I have to do it every day." I get obsessed with working on a project and I will work almost all I can on something. And that's what I said with like, I feel very privileged that I'm able, when I'm obsessed with something, to slip into it. And if I have 10 minutes to steal, I can just have 10 minutes and just write something and I'll figure it out later and make it better. But that's how I make it work for myself, just having a day job like I do where I have to do this work. And in the evenings I come home and maybe take a nap honestly, go sleep for a while. Wake up and if I'm lucky, I can write and edit for a couple hours in the evening or teach. I've been teaching creative writing for two years now. So I do that. And then most of the time, it's just a few nights a week sitting in front of the stereo laughing and drinking beer with my wife.
Michael Wheaton 29:11
Hey that sounds good.
Bud Smith 29:12
She's amazing. And just, she makes me laugh. She's the funniest person I know. So it's like, I don't know, it sounds very selfish, but just doing everything I want to do.
Michael Wheaton 29:26
That sounds pretty good and enviable.
Bud Smith 29:31
It's all simple shit, though, you know. It's kind of realizing that there's only so much money, there's only so much time, and just kind of be happy with less. Be happy with what you have and try to really make it count because otherwise you're just going to be miserable. It's like that whole thing you were saying before about like, yeah, it's crazy The Paris Review took my stupid story, but it's never something that was bothering me and like I need this to prove... I don't care about any of that stuff. If it happens organically, that's nice. But if it's something... you can work towards a lot of things in life, but the truth is making art and making time for art is usually the thing that goes first, and it's fucked up to feel like your happiness has to hinge on your... I mean, the success of it is tough, but it's just all got to be about how it feels to have self expression, and how it maybe feels to, for me, become social with it with other people and to... I hate to say it sounds corny as hell... but like delight in their work, talk about their work with them, share my work with them. And doing these things, like when me and my friends get together once a month, and we've read our stories for the month and when we sit around and we talk for three hours about what we hated in their stories and what we loved, and I know those guys are gonna take that to heart, and they're gonna go and try as hard as they can to make it better. And I'm gonna do the same thing with my story too. But I think a lot of times, what happens with art is it's really hard to figure out where you end and where other people begin with like, what is the point of it all? And does it matter if people like it or not? It really doesn't. But I'm just always like, shit I know I can do a better draft of this thing. Let me try it again. It only takes me six hours to re-type this stupid thing.
Michael Wheaton 31:47
Just a nice weekend day, you know?
Bud Smith 31:50
Yeah. But I don't have kids or pets or anything. And if I did have kids or pets, then I wouldn't. It's okay. The writing thing is just what I do now. And I'm always waiting for it to go away. I'll be fine with that, too.
Michael Wheaton 32:06
What do you mean by that?
Bud Smith 32:08
Well, it's like when I was younger, I had other things I was really into doing. And then one day, you just realize, Oh, shit I used to draw all the time. And I was so into that. And then one day, it was just like, Oh, fuck, I haven't drawn anything in so long, or I used to just obsessively play the guitar and write songs on a guitar and it was all I cared about.
Michael Wheaton 32:30
Man I can really relate to that.
Bud Smith 32:32
It's like Chris Cooper in Adaptation. He's just like, one day I just turned my back on the ocean, I said, fuck fish. And I never set foot in the ocean ever again. So like, the thing with like creativity is you just do it for yourself. And if it's something that... if you find yourself on the right path with what you like to do with your creativity, it’s its own reward, which is the corniest thing ever anyone has ever said, but I do believe that.
Michael Wheaton 33:01
It's true. I mean, if you don't believe that, then you probably haven't been trying to do it for that long, because, you know, you would have just stopped. A lot of people do, maybe saner people.
Bud Smith 33:13
I love to quit things. I love it. Quitting things is one of my favorite things to do. And if didn't like to do it, I would quit. Yeah, but I am waiting just for the day when it's just like you get into bands and you wonder why all of a sudden like album six sucks so much. Like damn these guys are so good, but you realize like, Oh, yeah, oh, Eddie Vetter didn't have anything to say. He had nothing to say, he maybe had like half of something to say and he ran out of juice, you know, three quarters away through the first album. And you kind of realize that at a time.. well that's just how it goes sometimes. But I'm always... I've been inspired by people like the writer Steven Dixon who has become a new kind of hero of mine in the last few years. One of my friends is just a Steven Dixon fanatic. So he was always talking about him and I started reading his books.
Michael Wheaton 34:12
Is that Joseph Grantham? I listened to his interview with him actually.
Bud Smith 34:16
Yeah, Joey Grantham, who's one of the most well read people I know and one of the most thoughtful guys I know. But the thing with Steven Dixon is he would write about his own life in a way that feels really reckless. Like he writes about the people around him with a lot of care, but he doesn't... he'll talk about things where you're like, I can't believe he's going there with this.
Michael Wheaton 34:48
Candidness and confession, kinda?
Bud Smith 34:49
Confessional kind of stuff where you're like, this is so wild to go there and you realize, shit, I mean if you're going to write about your life, you gotta at least try to go there. And I'm hoping if I get a little older, I grow the intestinal fortitude to go more in that direction, because I think some of my writing now is still younger than I am, some of the work I'm doing now is still younger than I am.
Michael Wheaton 35:21
That's interesting. What do you mean by that as well?
Bud Smith 35:26
I think you catch up to yourself a little bit with... I always seem to be writing about how I felt five years ago. Because I have the distance from it and I can look back at what the experience was and how it felt, and writing about myself five years ago, I'm like, I'm still like, I was still a cartoon character. But I think when, probably when I'm 45, and I'm writing about myself now at 39, I'll still be saying that goddamn cartoon character, when's he going to become human? At like 60 or something? I don't know.
Michael Wheaton 36:08
I don't think I've ever been satisfied looking back at an age I was. I always feel like I'm okay at the time and then five years back, I'll look back at myself be like, What a fucking goon. Like who was I and what was I doing?
Bud Smith 36:24
Yeah. I think it's really good to have that view of yourself, if you can laugh at yourself. And I mean, sometimes you got to have a little bit of self respect.
Michael Wheaton 36:39
I respect myself in the moment, but I don't afterward.
Bud Smith 36:42
Yeah, my Amazon review of myself, one star. Give myself one star. I'm trying to get my money back for everything I ever did to myself, for myself.
Michael Wheaton 36:56
So what are you working on now? How many things? Any more memoir? Or are you still kind of in fiction? Actually, I think I heard you read poetry before.
Bud Smith 37:10
Yeah, I kind of started out with poetry, with short stories. And I've just continued to do that, continue to write poetry, continue to write short stories. I haven't been in a big rush to put out another book of poems. I just love to write them. They're some of my favorite things to write and some of my favorite things to read. If there's a reading and I can, I'll read poems over anything, I think. And some of my short stories are really a little bit more lyrical, have like a poetic logic to it rather than like a narrative logic. The ones I like to read out at bars or whatever. But yeah, so I have a book of poetry done. I don't know what I'm gonna do, if I'm going to send it around or anything. I'm just kind of... I've kind of decided this year, and next year, they're going to be years of novels. I have a novel I'm working on now, which is, it pretty much picks up where Work ends, the memoir, and it's still all about my family. It's about my wife, it's about me, where we live, my job, how it intersects with creativity that I do. So it is very autobiographical, but it's kind of taking everything that happens in real life and writing about the feeling in an abstracted way rather than complete reality. So there's a lot of... it's plausibly rooted in a realist fiction, but it's absurdist, too. So I've been working on that. I've been having a really good time doing that. And short story collection, there's, I think last year, I wrote 12 long stories like Violets. Violets is I think maybe 4500 words or something, but I wrote a story every month last year, that's like 4, 5, 6, 7, 8000 words. And they're all in that same mode, where they're pretty rooted in a realism kind of thing and they're love stories, most of them, and they have to do with people kind of breaking away from society in one way or another. And I don't know. But every once in a while, somebody says to me something about like, man, I love your crime fiction. And I'm like, Oh, I love I love any genre stuff. But I'm always like, yeah, you know, that's true. Like, I guess if you're writing these stories about people burning their house down or shooting their do mom and dad's parents or whatever it is, it all becomes...
Michael Wheaton 40:06
I feel like there's a difference between crime fiction and fiction with crime in it, right?
Bud Smith 40:10
Yeah, I think probably the stuff where it's more rooted in the genre is stuff that interests me when it's done, like, really cool, like I'm just a big Faulkner fan anymore, like the way you'll be reading one of his books and all sudden there's a car chase. You're like, why is there... oh my god? yeah, it was getting boring. That's cool. You put a car chase in this. It's like, Oh, shit, this house is haunted. You know, whatever it is, the guy was like, he just wanted... whatever his deal was, but he wanted you to be entertained. I think some, I think some literary fiction, I'm guilty writing some of myself too... it's like I don't care if you're having an experience here. You're just supposed to kind of like... it's all about this character undergoing this change. Like I don't know, man.
Michael Wheaton 41:13
Yeah, can you do it faster?
Bud Smith 41:16
Yeah, can we change in the middle of a car chase? Something like that.
Michael Wheaton 41:23
Alright, that's my conversation with Bud Smith. You can check out more about him and his work at his website: coolgoodluck.com. And that's it. All right. Till next time.