This interview marks the first birthday of Firestation Book Swap, Beat has carried an interview every month.
To celebrate the occasion we thought we would invite a Book Swap Guest Author to be a guest interviewer.
Over to Aliya Whiteley:
What made you realise you are a writer?
With every bookstore I enter, I have the unfortunate habit of checking to see whether they’re carrying my books. I don’t know why I can’t let this go, I just can’t, but one day I was in Bookcity in downtown Toronto and I was in between Kafka and Kerouac. That was pretty much the moment.
Which book are you currently reading
Right now I’m finishing Cloud Atlas for the second time. So good! So very, very, devastatingly, good.
Who are your greatest influences?
I have two sets of greatest influences. There are the cool ones; J.D Salinger, Nicholson Baker, Kafka, and Aimee Bender. And then there’s the set best known as the Holy Trinity of Geek – Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut. I can instantly tell the type of party I’m at by measuring which set gets approval.
What achievement in your life are you most proud of?
My son is four and he won’t listen to children’s music, but he loves the Ramones and the Pixies. I’m completely responsible for this and even though I’m pretty certain this makes me a horrible father, I’m strangely proud of it.
If you were stranded on a desert island with three fictional characters, who would you like to be there with and why?
I don’t need three: I just need Queequeg!
What was the first book you ever bought with your own money?
How badly do I want to say On the Road or Tropic of Cancer or Catcher in the Rye? The sad reality is that it was One by Richard Bach, his follow up to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
What phrase do you find is the most played in your head?
“Does this really work?” and I always hear it in the voice of Alana Wilcox, who edited All My Friends Are Superheroes.
The short fiction pieces on your website, Several Moments Later, are brilliant snippets of weirdness that make perfect sense. I particularly enjoyed 98 Mothers. If you suddenly split into 98 tiny versions of yourself, what mischief would you get up to?
It would be so easy to invade people’s privacy that, I think, it’d be completely irresistible. I mean, maybe there are better people out there than me who could resist it. But then again, maybe there aren’t …
Have you ever been to Aberystwyth? The place pops up a few times in your short film, Aberystwyth, and as a character name in your novel, The Waterproof Bible.
I haven’t even been to Wales! The name comes from a cat I had when I was growing up. My parents went to Wales and it was during this time that my sister found a stray in the backyard. When my parents called and Liz asked if she could keep it, they were in Aberystwyth – so that’s what the cat got named. Explaining how it came to be the name of that character is not quite so simple …
In the event of becoming a frog-like creature and having to live underwater for the rest of your life, which book would you like to have a waterproof copy of?
I have lost track of how many times I’ve read Franny and Zooey and each time I do, I still find something new. Let’s go with that – unless Salinger’s file cabinet turns out to be real and they published the unpublished works in one volume. That, a desert island, and the rest of my life would be the best retirement I could think of. Can I have Queequeg too?
Which comes more naturally to you – writing novels, screenwriting, or directing?
I feel like there’s a slim possibility that I may be a natural storyteller, but I’m definitely not a natural writer, screenwriter, or director. I always feel like the story exists on its own, and then I clumsily cram it inside the format. So for me it’s a bit like asking, which feels more natural? flip-flops, loafers, or work-boots? None of them feel like bare-feet.
In your novel All My Friends Are Superheroes, your protagonist has the length of a flight to Vancouver to make his wife, The Perfectionist, realise that he’s not invisible. How would you convince other people that you exist?
I have two very beautiful, but very loud children. So there’s never really any difficulty convincing other people that I exist. The hard part is trying to convince them to ignore us.
If you had to put one emotion into a shoebox and seal it up tight forever more, which one do you think you could do without?
Envy.
A sense of place is really important in your novels. You grew up in Wingham, Ontario – can you tell us something about it? Was it a good place to grow up?
The Wingham I grew up was amazing but it really doesn’t exist anymore. When I was growing up, in the early-eighties, there was no Internet or cable or down-loadable music. There were only three TV stations and one movie theatre and you had to drive two and a half hours to get records that weren’t on the top forty. We were really isolated from a lot of media, so the youth culture I grew up in was almost exclusively homemade. There are phrases like the end of the twelfth, or gravel running or no pun intended that refer to very specific activities during my teenage years, but only those who went to F.E. Madill Secondary High School would know what they were. Being imaginative wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity and I think that’s really served me well as a writer. That being said, most of what we ended up doing consisted of two basic activities, both of which we did in cars.
How did you get involved in Book Swap night?
Scott Pack plucked me from obscurity and threw me on the stage.
What do you hope to achieve with the evening?
Global domination.
Can you give one good reason to come along?
As a Canadian I’m genetically preordained against self-promotion, but I can tell you this – everyone else on stage is a complete genius. Plus, I’m bringing a paperback, pocket-sized copy of The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1982, which sports a cover you’re just not going to believe! Whoever gets to take this one home is going to have to have something awesome to trade…
Andrew Kaufman will be at the Firestation Book Swap on Thursday 19th August 2010
The Book Swap is every third Thursday of the month
- at the Firestation Arts Centre, 7.30pm onwards.
- There is a bar and chatting afterwards is encouraged.
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ANDREW KAUFMAN’s critically acclaimed first book, All My Friends Are Superheroes, was a cult hit and has been translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Waterproof Bible, was recently published in the UK by Telegram Books.
Kaufman is also an accomplished screenwriter and has completed a Director’s Residency at the Canadian Film Centre. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their two children. He has a website at http://severalmomentslater.com .
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