NL: First of all, thank you for
taking the time to chat with me. As a longtime fan of your work, it’s an
honor and privilege. When I think of your fiction I think, first and
foremost, of characterization. You have created so many different and
interesting characters. I’d be curious to hear about the process by which
you arrive at the characters for your stories.
RB: Thank you for your kind words. The process by which one creates
characters is as mysterious as the process by which one chooses friends,
lovers, or people one is interested in in general. In my case, sometimes
people I meet in my life become the models, or point of origin for my
characters, whereas other times they appear to me to be wholly imagined. Of
course (as they say in football) upon further review all characters are
projections from their author’s psyche and contain in part their creator’s
tendencies and contradictions, however well hidden and removed from the
world of objective action those contradictions may be. Dostoyevsky, for
example, could create a believable murderer not because he himself ever
committed a murder but because he felt similar impulses or at least enough
hostility to imagine the leap to murder which he mercifully allowed
Raskolnikov (and not himself) to commit.
NL: Some critics have focused on the theme of isolation in your work.
What do you make of this? Do you think this description is warranted or that
you have been "typecast" as a certain brand of writer?
RB: I think it’s partially warranted as long as they also mention that I
often write about it with humor. I do write about loneliness, isolation and
fear—which I think are underrepresented emotions in literature—but that’s
hardly all I write about. For example, I also write about love and family
and ambition and a fair amount of social satire and think some of my best
writing involves groups of people, such as in my novel Ghost Quartet, and my
stories "Mercury" in Fear of Blue Skies, "The Horror Conference" and the
title story of Identity Club, "Jonathan and Lillian," and the title story of
The Conference on Beautiful Moments. Let’s also remember that one can be
lonely or feel isolated in a marriage, a family or especially at a party.
Since I write about people, I feel I must write about loneliness because
there’s so much of it in the world. As McCartney says, "All the lonely
people, where do they all come from?"
NL: You also have an obvious interest in the possibilities of point of view.
I’d love to hear more about your approach to point of view in short fiction.
RB: There is a belief held by many aficionados of the short story that the
point of view in a story should never change, and indeed, in the
overwhelming number of stories it never does. To these writers and readers
it is accepted as a "law" of writing as unquestionable as the law of
gravity. I have never accepted that law, never understood why a story can’t
use to its advantage the technique of multiple points of view that adds such
richness to the novels of writers like Joyce and Faulkner, as well as to
many films we admire from Kurosawa’s to Welles’. To the proponents of the
single point of view law we must know whose story it is—as if the story
should be regarded as the protagonist’s private property. But from my point
of view, some situations equally involve more than one person and it gives
the reader a different vision of life to read about an experience from
different points of view. Isn’t that why we have political debates or the
chance to read more than one newspaper? I do want to add that I have never
used this technique (or any other) gratuitously just to appear "original,"
but only when it seemed the best way to tell a particular story. For
example, in my story "Vivian and Sid Break Up," one of my more comedic
stories from my current collection The Conference on Beautiful Moments, the
temporary break up in their relationship affects both Vivian and Sid equally
and also the unsuspecting woman whom Sid next goes out with. Finally, I’d
like to mention that though I’ve published four story collections that
contain multiple point of view stories, beginning with Fear of Blue Skies in
1998, reviewers have almost never commented on it one way or another. This
strikes me as odd since I believe I have published more stories that use
this technique than any other writer I know of; in fact, the only other
story I know of that’s written from multiple points of view is Robert
Coover’s wonderful "The Babysitter."
NL: You have a new book of stories, The Conference on Beautiful Moments,
just out from Johns Hopkins University Press. How do you think these stories
are different from those in your previous collections? How has your approach
to fiction grown or changed over the years?
RB: My first collection of stories, Man without Memory, consisted of eight
first-person monologues and one story in the third person. In my current
collection, The Conference on Beautiful Moments, there is one first-person
story, three third-person stories and six from multiple points of view—so
obviously over the years I’ve moved away from the single ego story. My
stories now also feature more dialogue than my earlier stories. Dialogue, of
course, is yet another way of giving the character a sense of independence
where he or she seems less author controlled. In general, my stories since
Fear of Blue Skies have become more dramatic, funnier, and, I think, better.
NL: Your collection The Identity Club (Ontario Review Press) is
particularly impressive. Not only does it include twenty stories, but also a
compact disk of your compositions. Can you talk a bit about the genesis of
this collection?
RB: For a number of years I’d been sending Joyce Carol Oates and her
husband, the editor Raymond Smith, tapes of me playing some of my piano
pieces (I’d previously published a number of stories in their magazine,
Ontario Review, and had seen Joyce and Ray a number of times before I left
Philadelphia for St. Louis). I continued sending them tapes and then when I
began writing songs, sent them my first three self-produced CDs—In All of
the World, House of Sun and Cold Ocean. They always wrote me warm and
enthusiastic letters about my music, which was extremely gratifying to me.
Then one day in September 2004, I believe, Joyce wrote me a letter saying
that Ontario Review Press would like to publish my new and selected stories
and to include, as part of the book, a CD of the best of my songs and
pieces. Naturally I was thrilled. In preparation for the book, they read
through all my stories, which was an honor in itself, and together the three
of us selected the stories and the music to be included in the book which
was titled The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Songs. Along with
my novel, Ghost Quartet, it’s the book I am most proud of.
NL: You had a chance to interview both Jorge Borges and Isaac Bashevis
Singer extensively. How have these experiences influenced your own writing
and/or your editorial career?
RB: My tape-recorded interviews with Borges and Singer resulted in somewhat
similar books—Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges and Conversations with
Isaac Bashevis Singer—but the experiences of doing the books differed
greatly. With Borges I was only twenty years old but he entrusted me with
the entire project. I also had only 6 ˝ hours of total time interviewing
him, so every word had to count (that’s why it’s much shorter than the
Singer book). Yet the experience and the success of the book were almost
magically easy and pleasant, or so it seems looking back on it. The Borges
book was done in about a half a year, the Singer book took over seven years.
Singer was totally involved in the book and proved to be quite the
perfectionist. He had some wonderful qualities, but he could also be a
difficult and temperamental person (in contrast, Borges was not only the
most intelligent person I’ve ever known, but also one of the most gracious).
Though it took a lot out of me emotionally, I will say that the Singer book
is not only longer but better in almost every way. As far as my being
influenced as a writer, that happened by reading them without "knowing"
them, although I learned a certain perfectionism and devotion to clarity
from my collaboration with Singer (not to mention the need for patience and
diplomacy) that proved to be even more valuable as a life experience than as
a literary one.
NL: You also edit Boulevard, a topnotch literary magazine. How has
editing Boulevard affected your own writing?
RB: As far as affecting my own writing, Boulevard has been a mixed blessing.
On the negative side, it takes away time and energy from my own writing. It
may also have fed into the (I believe) misguided feeling that if you’re a
good writer why are you an editor as well, although almost every literary
magazine editor is also a writer or poet. In our society of specialists,
people have trouble believing someone can be good at more than one thing. On
the positive side, Boulevard has opened some doors for me professionally and
I’ve never regretted doing it.
NL: As someone who has devoted much of his writing career to the short
story, I’d be curious to hear your take on the contemporary state of short
fiction.
RB: Like most things, the state of the contemporary short story is a mixed
bag. With the explosion of MFA programs, there are certainly more people
teaching and studying the short story than ever before. There are probably
also more print (and now online) magazines and small presses publishing
them, as well. On the other hand, there are fewer big circulation magazines
publishing short fiction, and fewer story collections coming out from
commercial publishers than ever before. When I investigated the situation a
few years ago, I was astonished to discover that only four literary agents
in America even wanted to consider representing short story collections.
This coexistence of two different literary worlds—especially with respect to
the "serious" short story—is one of the unique cultural phenomena of our
time. As far as the quality of the work being produced—a good short story is
about as rare as it ever was.
NL: You are also a composer and musician with several CDs. You are also
clearly interested in music as a theme in your own work (especially in
stories such as "The Identity Club" and "My Black Rachmaninoff"). How do you
think your work as a musician has grown and developed over the years?
RB: For most of my life I’ve composed and/or improvised piano music which I
tape-recorded in a very crude manner. Then about eight years ago when I was
out walking with my then two year old son Ricky, I began singing a song to
him that I made up as we walked along called "You’re My Eye," which became
the first song I ever wrote. Since then the majority of what I’ve written
and recorded has been songs. I think my music has continued to improve and
the most recent of my five CDs, Cold Ocean, a mostly jazz CD, is my best.
Incidentally, I’ve discovered an immensely talented musician in California
named Chris Cefalu and via the internet (we’ve never met) we’re
collaborating on my new CD. He is the singer I’ve been searching for for
eight years and I’m very excited to be working with him. I think he’s going
to take my music in a new direction and to a higher level as well (if anyone
is interested in my music, by the way, please visit my website
www.richardburgin.net).
NL: Your work is quite dialogue-driven. Has your musical ear allowed you
to better create dialogue that "rings true?"
RB: Faulkner said, "Every novelist is a failed poet." I think there’s a lot
of truth in that aphorism—it’s true of me at least, and might partially
explain why I eventually tried to wed lyrics to music. I think I have a
pretty good ear for language—at least I’m very aware of the sounds of words
in my prose though I never thought of it in terms of my dialogue per se,
which, if it’s realistic dialogue, would be the least musical part of one’s
fiction, I would think.
NL: Many of your stories revolve around couples—particularly men and
women at odds with each other—and of course, you give your own individual
Burgin-esque spin on relationships. What drives your curiosity in this
particular subject matter?
RB: Every writer is after reality or at least tries to illuminate a part of
it, they just do it in different ways. If I write a fair amount about the
tensions between men and women—the so-called battle of the sexes—it’s
because that’s a war that’s been going on all over the world since the dawn
of time and it’s touched my own life as it has virtually everyone else’s. Is
there a more universal subject than our quest for love and all the obstacles
one encounters during that quest?
NL: Finally, I know you are working on a new novel. What can you tell me
about it?
RB: I’m pretty inarticulate when it comes to describing something as big as
a novel. I can say it’s a love story—not only between a man and a woman—but
examines other kinds of love as well. That it involves a murder and so is a
suspense story, in that sense. That most of it takes place in New York and
Philadelphia and that there’s a good deal of comedy and social satire
particularly about the art and literary world and the world of movie stars,
as well. I don’t have a title yet, so I’m using the working title Barry and
Elliot because it centers on these two very different men who are lifelong
friends and who reunite after a six year break in their relationship.
NL: Thanks for talking with me today, Richard.
RB: Thanks for your kind interest in my work, Nathan. I appreciate it.
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