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Author Bud Smith\u2019s recently released novel, Teenager<\/em><\/a> (Vintage, 2022), creates its own absurd and passionate world. The book follows two teenagers in love, Kody Green and Teal Carticelli, who travel across the country to flee their violent pasts and find their own American dreams. The book is both beautiful and violent, both absurd and very real. It features passionate characters who livedifficult lives and seem to have the best view of the stars when they\u2019re knocked down by life.<\/p>\n Bud Smith\u2019s repertoire of publications is lengthy and diverse. He has published a memoir, Work<\/em> (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017), and two short story collections, Doublebird<\/em> (Maudlin House, 2018) and Or Something Like That<\/em>(Unknown Press, 2012), and a poetry collection, Everything Neon<\/em> (Marginalia, 2013), and two novels F250<\/em> (Piscataway House, 2015) and Tollbooth <\/em>(Piscataway House, 2013). His short stories have appeared in The Paris Review<\/em>, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, Wigleaf<\/em>, and other journals. He lives in Jersey City and works in heavy construction, a profession which he is quite proud to represent. He is known for his blue-collar lifestyle and writing while in the trenches, punching out incredible short stories on his phone while on his lunch break.<\/p>\n In a conversation over iced coffee and follow-up emails, we talked about how absurdity in fiction can be used to abstract our lives and help us deal with our problems, and how it\u2019s a key ingredient for imagining something better.<\/p>\n Denise Robbins for The Florida Review:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n With all the crazy shit going on right now, it\u2019s almost nostalgic to read a story about two violent teenage kids committing crimes for love. Many people think of fiction as an escape from <\/em>the absurd. But when reading your work, it\u2019s more like an escape into <\/em>the absurd. How have you used fiction to process the absurdity of life?<\/p>\n Bud Smith:<\/strong><\/p>\n Since the dawn of time, there\u2019s always been crazy shit afoot. Life is just as absurd as it\u2019s ever been. The science is correct, and the math is correct too, but people skew facts, it all gets blurred and harder to believe. If I switch on any news channel, I\u2019m being told or sold an unbelievable story. At least with straight fiction, I choose the flavor of the skew and blur what I\u2019m in the mood for. I use art to turn down the noise on everything else.<\/p>\n TFR<\/strong>:<\/strong><\/p>\n How did the story Teenager<\/em> come to you? Where did it begin?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n I was at a poetry reading and the event organizer asked me to read something. So I wrote a quick poem on a napkin. I was thinking about this boyfriend shooting his girlfriend\u2019s parents and them going on the run together. It started from there, as a poem. And I just kept thinking about it, and eventually, it became a short story, which I remember beginning after waking up on my friend\u2019s couch\u2014the kid who shot his girlfriend\u2019s parents on the lookout on top of a water tower. But for what? And it wouldn\u2019t leave me alone. To find out, for myself, it then became a novella, and then further investigation turned it into a novel.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0How did the story change in each iteration?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n It deepened every time\u2014became darker. Less hopeful. It became more realistic and more troubled in each draft. Trouble for the characters and their situation, and the gravity of their reality.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n So it made you feel less hopeful each time?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n It made me feel more balanced each time. In the initial drafts of it, there was more of a \u201clove overcomes everything\u201d attitude. I think that\u2019s still in the book, but in reality, there are many things that love cannot overcome.<\/p>\n TFR<\/strong>:<\/strong><\/p>\n Although in total, the novel was absurd, it still felt more realist than most of your short stories. I\u2019ve also noticed that your other previous novels seem more realist than absurd. Is that an accurate depiction \u2014 that your short form fiction veers more to the absurd and your long form fiction stays more grounded?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n I start somewhere absurd and surreal because that\u2019s how my imagination works. Over time and many drafts, I think out and apply logistics to my little cartoon. It has other dimensions to it. My shorter, surrealist stuff is some of my favorite work, probably closest to a dream I had. I wouldn\u2019t change it. I wouldn\u2019t develop a story called Tiger Blood<\/a> <\/em>into a 300-page book, because I said everything I meant to say in 1500 words. Magic or laws of physics, whatever works, I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Is there a physical limit to absurdity and surrealism? Is that the reason why it\u2019s strongest in your short fiction?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n When we look at our own lives, often we can\u2019t abstract our own problems. But when we can do that, something bigger than us happens and we get to laugh at it. The author Tim O\u2019Brien says, sometimes there\u2019s no way for anyone to understand how something momentous feels to an individual except through abstraction. He has a story he tells about being at a seminar and telling the audience his child\u2019s first words were quoting Macbeth<\/em>. And someone in the audience called him out on it, \u201cThere\u2019s no way his first words were \u2018a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.\u2019\u201d And he says something like, \u201cYou\u2019re right, they weren\u2019t his first words, but how can I ever explain to you how they made me feel if it wasn\u2019t something that amazing? To you, it\u2019s just a baby talking, but to me, it was doing this incredible thing that could never happen.\u201d That\u2019s how it feels sometimes to be alive, and to capture that in fiction, you don\u2019t have boundaries. It\u2019s okay if I lie, that\u2019s the point. But we\u2019re trying to convey something more than just the straight truth. I\u2019m trying to elicit a feeling. That\u2019s the goal. To elicit a feeling larger than life, and sometimes we go into the woods to get there, we\u2019ll lie in the lie of the lie.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been thinking a lot lately about how absurdity can be found in the mundane because I\u2019m reading Catch-22<\/em>, where these characters are dealing with extremely banal issues, like parade contests and mess hall seating arrangements, while they\u2019re in the middle of a war and could die any day. You also do a great job of this in your story \u201cGling, Gling, Gling,\u201d where a man gets hit by a car and, dying, wants only to go on his errands. I think often about how, even in times of crisis, we want so badly to keep things normal and to follow our little routines we\u2019ve created for ourselves. It takes a lot to shock someone out of that. Are you trying to shock people out of what they expect when they read this?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n No, not at all. This is just how my imagination works. I usually don\u2019t think about that kind of stuff when creating, I\u2019m just trying to keep myself interested. I tell a story to the best of my ability. Anything can happen in a story. If something is anarchistic in content or form, it stays recklessly interesting to me.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Everything in Teenager<\/em> certainly is interesting. Yet probable. Yet the sum of its parts \u2014 the way everything fits together \u2014 kind of brings it back to the absurdity level. Was that something conscious to you, for everything to seem realistic, or are you trying to acknowledge that the story is not real?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n I just watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre<\/em> before I came here. Everything is completely plausible in that film if you look at it in one light. And everything is a total implausible nightmare if you look at it in another light. It\u2019s how you want to interpret it and how you\u2019re feeling about it. Has a lot to do with how stories are presented. The folk tale John Henry vs. the Steam Drill. There\u2019s not a guy literally racing a railroad steam driver, but of course, there is.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n What other books or stories have influenced your attitude towards surrealism in fiction?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n Don Quixote, Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Arabian Nights, The Divine Comedy, <\/em>the <\/em>Old Testament, Hamlet, <\/em>lots of other Shakespeare plays, <\/em>Beckett\u2019s plays and the novel Molloy, <\/em>the Brothers Grimm Fairytales<\/em>, on and on. Those are some of the most influential stories ever told and to read them and study them, you can\u2019t help but see how they have been retold and reinterpreted time and time again in contemporary forms, which got compressed in the work of Donald Barthleme, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, on and on. Everyone should read the author Ben Loory, he\u2019s an incredible storyteller.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n You mentioned Bonnie and Clyde. If this story follows a Bonnie and Clyde-like structure, were you trying to turn that on its head, or did you think about that at all?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n I was a junior in high school when the Columbine school shooting happened. The copycats are still caught in that cycle of violence. I learned in that same high school that Manifest Destiny was this glorious thing. From sea to shining sea. Then I went to a different classroom where the teacher had served in Vietnam, and he told us not to believe everything our government said to us, what our school books said. Teenager<\/em> is a story about young people breaking away from their families, and from society. A very old story that becomes new again each generation, across the world.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Do you have personal experiences with violence that drew you to this story or these characters?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n Anyone paying attention knows there is brutality all around, often behind closed doors, people being abused by loved ones, assaulted physically and sexually, emotionally, and it goes on for a time, until a person pushed too far, lashes back, and is taken away by the police. If there is a gun in the home where this abuse is taking place, sometimes it is used to end the abuse one way or another. You hear about it on the news. You hear about children taking those guns into schools. People getting shot in church. A friend of mine put a shotgun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Another friend of mine was shot by a friend of his, a drunk police officer. It went unreported, and the limp has almost gone away. Another mass shooting. This one sounds similar to the previous mass shooting. Missiles fly across the TV and explode in the dark. I\u2019m not sure who is at war. Hospitals become rubble. It\u2019s all so incredibly overbearing. I am surrounded by it wherever I go, but I have to look elsewhere. I wrote about these characters because they are in love. I am looking for love. But every love story\u2014 if you are telling the whole story\u2014is a tragic story, with its own fair share of atrocity.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n The main character Kody is quite violent. He also suffers from a brain injury. Is that a signal that this is not \u2018okay\u2019? Do you worry about his violence being accepted? Or glorified?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n The violence in the book is <\/em>somewhat glorified. And I don\u2019t think that his brain damage causes him to become violent. He just never had anyone to show him the way the world could be. He\u2019s all alone, his ideas got misconstrued. He had no support system of people who love him and explained things. Teal is the first person who loves and believes in him, but she\u2019s still completely aware that he\u2019s a fool, and he thinks the same thing about her in a way. We\u2019re just dealing with average people of average means who didn\u2019t really have love in their life and got led astray.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Kody is not a sympathetic character at the beginning. You start the book on a very shocking and surprising note, and then over the course of the story, I learned to love Kody and the way he saw the world. This seems like the opposite of most \u2018unsympathetic character\u2019 stories like in Breaking Bad<\/em>, where you start out sympathizing with him and then see him descend. But here you start at the low point. Was that intentional?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n I thought of Kody as a person who didn\u2019t really have much of a chance to begin with. He doesn\u2019t have far to fall. When you don\u2019t have people who love you when you\u2019re a little boy, and the best he had is his stepmom, Rhonda, who\u2019s a slight friend but didn\u2019t love him fully. It\u2019s not far to fall when you\u2019ve not been properly loved and nurtured. Usually, people make their futures in a way, but when something\u2019s written out for you like that you have a much harder road.<\/p>\n Walter White from Breaking Bad<\/em> is a character who had a lot of things going for him, and he squandered his own life\u2014even before the cancer. He\u2019s a miserable, washed-up guy. I\u2019d rather read about somebody full of passion, even if that passion is misplaced. As an artist, it\u2019s smarter for me to have passion for the story being told. So that\u2019s why I\u2019m interested in Kody and Teal. They\u2019re two really passionate people. I don\u2019t think I could write a book about someone like Walter White, who feels robbed, who\u2019s dissatisfied, and hates his own life before he even gets cancer. He\u2019s already dead before he has it. Those kinds of characters very rarely move the needle for me. I\u2019m more interested in Levin from Anna Karenina<\/em>, this person so imbued with life. And Don Quixote, who is on this wayward mission because he wants to make a difference.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0If reading about violence can inspire violence, can reading about something better help imagine it into existence?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n An individual is just that, an individual. Free will belongs to each and every person currently drawing breath. That said, many people are trapped in invisible systems of control that takes great power to break out of. Pearl clutchers, and satanic panic Finders, and video-games-made-me-do-it, or Holden-Caulfield-loaded-my-gun theorists, are missing the point that we are in the middle of a great bubbling, melting, swamp of joy and pain, and our stories that we have been telling each other since we first created our languages have been inside us since the very beginning of our consciousness, and they aren\u2019t getting any more wicked or twisted than they ever were. All our stories have ever been is a mirror held up to our culture and our place in it. If we are frightened by the stories we are telling, it\u2019s because we are appalled by the world we\u2019ve collectively created, little village to little village, slowly netting out to be the entire surface of this earth. Yes, a person has the power to hope for something positive, and they have the power to make that tiny positive thing happen in their home. They can share it with their family. Their family can share it with their neighbors. Their neighbors can share it, and so on.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Did you start writing surrealist work when you felt stuck in life?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019ve never felt stuck in life, and I\u2019ve always told my stories with a heavy mix of surreal and real. I believe they belong together, and I don\u2019t see much of a distinction between those modes of storytelling. The object is just to convey a feeling. Storytelling is already a hallucination, is already asking someone to step inside a dream with you and accept the dream. The earliest stories I was taught as a child were fairytales. A lot of them had some kind of lesson that was supposed to help a person navigate the worst perils of life, and find the rewards of that same life. If the story had to do that with a talking wolf, then it did it with a talking wolf. If Shakespeare had to send the ghost of the father to the parapet walls to send a warning, then so be it. If a poet has to be taken on a tour of Hell to find his way back to his true love, then the whole story becomes a metaphor we can use to make sense of our problems. I want to read something that is going to elicit some strange surprise in me. When it happens through abstraction and bent reality, brushing up against the proposed real world, and its supposed laws of order. There isn\u2019t anyone to grant your magic wish at the actual supermarket, but really, there is. You\u2019ve just got to ask around, ask the right questions. The genie can be behind the deli counter or stocking the yogurt, or any of the shoppers, it could even be you.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n You are so frigging optimistic. I got this feeling also when reading your memoir, Work<\/em>.<\/u><\/em> Just seeing what writing and art has been able to do for you and your outlook on life. If people are feeling depressed about the state of the world, what can they do?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n Refuse to be idle. Even if you have to go forward in your lowest gear. Seek out people and places that do not seem ruined by impending doom. You can have fun, I\u2019m saying, I\u2019m advising, I\u2019m begging. I\u2019m begging both you and me to go have fun. It\u2019s better to go outside and find it. The sun lights it up easier than any electric lamp can. But sometimes this fun cannot be seen in ordinary moonlight, and in those cases, I recommend a bonfire.<\/p>\n TFR:<\/strong><\/p>\n Okay, I\u2019ll have a bonfire. So there\u2019s a narrator in Teenager<\/em> who\u2019s not Kody but has a lot in common with Kody. The narrator also has a lot in common with you\u2014having a sharp eye that takes in only beauty. The narration seems to get more frenetic and beautiful as the story goes on, as the end is in sight. There\u2019s a passage I want to quote:<\/p>\n That night, they closed the door and listened to the mules bray in the starlit yard. Dead Bob could be heard out in the living room, strumming a guitar, singing in a sonorous voice, evil sounding, and eerie gloom to it.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s out there singing murder ballads.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, not to us. Not about us.\u201d Teal called through the wall, \u201cBob?\u201d<\/p>\n He kept strumming. \u201cYessssss?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo you know any love songs?\u201d<\/p>\n The minor chords switched to major and the same song carried on, but right there in the middle there was a turn, a new verse, his voice changed and rose in pitch and became saccharine and the miserable characters in the song canceled revenge and made amends, the knife was pulled out of the heart and the blood was wiped off the blade, the wound closed up and the wrong itself rewound like wire on a spool so the wrong was never done and the people were kissing in the daffodils, bluebirds swooping all around them and never a better match ever made in the history of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you, Bob,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n It makes me feel like the narrator is saying to the reader, \u201cI choose to make you sympathize with my characters and agree that their lives are beautiful.\u201d Is that what you\u2019re saying here?<\/p>\n BS:<\/strong><\/p>\n When things are desperate and dark, to survive, sometimes we focus on the sublime and the beautiful. That\u2019s a lot of people\u2019s experience in life\u2014to transcend bad things that happened or are happening to them, they embrace anything that can give them a transcendent feeling. Drugs, sex, religion, music, climbing a mountain or two, whatever it is, they\u2019re trying to find some escape from the bad things happening to them. I think my characters, hopefully, will always be like that. Looking to break away from pain, and seeking a cherry on top, even if they are absolutely fucked. Life and death is unpredictable. I hope the characters I write about will always get swept away, and sweep us all away with them too.<\/p>\n https:\/\/coolgoodluck.com<\/p>\n Twitter<\/a>: \u00a0@Bud_Smith<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 Author Bud Smith\u2019s recently released novel, Teenager (Vintage, 2022), creates its own absurd and passionate world. The book follows two teenagers in love, Kody Green and Teal Carticelli, who travel across the country to flee their violent pasts and find their own American dreams. The book is both beautiful and violent, both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6972,"template":"","categories":[9,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6964","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-interview"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n